By Tom Ayres , Senior Staff Writer
Lifelong friends and acquaintances describe beloved Woodstock centenarian Dorianne Guernsey as adventuresome, inquisitive, and passionate about people, the arts, and culture.
Guernsey, who turned 102 last October, is the last of what her longtime friend and caregiver, Tina Miller, calls “the grande dames of Woodstock,” a quartet that included the late Polly Billings, Jane Curtis, and Ann Debevoise, each of whom has passed away in recent times. Guernsey survives her Upper Valley friends of nearly six decades.
Dorianne Carolyn Downe and Otis Guernsey Jr. were wed in the chapel of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City on Dec. 11, 1943. Courtesy of Dorianne Guernsey
The story of Guernsey’s extraordinary life unfolds at the intersection of three quintessential and successful American families of the mid-20th Century — the Guernseys, Graffs, and Neffs. It’s also the story of nearly 60 years of connection with the arts, culture, and politics of Woodstock, Pomfret, and the surrounding communities for the engaging 102-year-old. When a visitor joined Guernsey for lunch at her Mountain Avenue home in Woodstock last Thursday, the pair pored over lovingly assembled scrapbooks and photo collections that document Guernsey’s extraordinary life, in addition to spotlighting the countless friends and admirers from the Woodstock area who’ve feted her at both her 90th birthday celebration in 2011 and a centenary gathering at the Lakota Club in October 2021. Subsequent conversations with decades-long friends and admirers of the engaging Guernsey further fleshed out her compelling biography.
Born to industrialist George Downe and his wife, Vera Strauss Downe in Bayonne, N.J., on October 15, 1921, Dorianne’s storied path took her to France between the World Wars, to London and Switzerland during her adolescent school years, and then back to the United States after World War II, where she met and married the distinguished journalist Otis Guernsey Jr., the chief theater and film critic of the long-ago citadel of New York City journalism, the Herald-Tribune. Otis also edited the celebrated “Best Plays” collection, annual tributes to the best new American plays, for nearly 40 years, and was the longtime head of the Drama Quarterly magazine.
When the Herald-Tribune ceased publication in the mid-1960s, Otis and Dorianne opted to uproot themselves from their spacious New York apartment and the abundant Manhattan cultural scene and relocate to a farmhouse in North Pomfret, where one of Otis’ Tribune colleagues, fellow arts and entertainment reporter and critic Bert McCord, had purchased a home in the late 1950s. The Guernseys soon persuaded another New York friend, Patricia “Patsy” Kassner Graff, to visit them in Vermont, setting up a sort of “blind date” between Patsy, who had tragically lost her husband at the young age of just 45, and eligible bachelor McCord. The pair hit it off famously and, within time, Patsy married McCord and moved to North Pomfret with her two sons, Wesley Jr., then 14, and Chris Graff, 12.
Dorianne’s lifelong bond with Patsy Graff McCord and another childhood friend, the late Eric Neff, goes back to those years between World Wars I and II in France when Guernsey’s father George Downe was a European representative for the American Radiator Company, Patsy’s dad Lacey Kassner was the head of distribution for Columbia Pictures in Europe, working closely with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, and Eric Neff’s father Lewis was a prominent banker and commodities broker. It was an exciting time for a trio of close friends — Dorianne, Patsy, and Eric — separated by only a few years in age and inseparable in youthful pursuits such as frolicking on the summertime beaches of Normandy and Saint-Jean-de-Luz or romping in Parc Monceau, near the Downe’s family’s apartment in Paris.
Lifelong friend, the late Eric Neff toasted his beloved childhood pal Dorianne Guernsey at a 90th birthday celebration at the Simon Pearce Restaurant in Quechee on Oct. 15, 2011. Courtesy of Dorianne Guernsey
It took the advance of World War II and the German occupation of France to separate the three friends, albeit only for the time being. The Neffs returned safely to their native New York before the war began in 1939. Dorianne’s and Patsy’s escape from the advancing Nazi forces was especially harrowing — part of the cement that bonded the two, plus Patsy’s younger sister Pammy, for a lifetime.
In the summer of 1940, Dorianne, her mother, and the Kassner’s mom Priscilla moved to Saint Jean-de-Luz and rented a big house. They stayed there for ten months, swimming in the ocean. Dorianne learned to drive there when she turned 17. With the Germans approaching Paris, 750 kilometers north of their beachside idyll, the Downes, Kassners, and several other friends and relatives opted to leave southern France. When it came time to leave, they learned that they could take only one suitcase and a limited amount of cash. Dorianne’s mother Vera and her Aunt Ethel piled into one car for the torturous escape trip into Spain, while neophyte driver Dorianne chauffeured her friends Patsy and Pammy, their mom Priscilla, and all the entourage’s worldly belongings in another vehicle. Dorianne recollected that she fretted throughout the trip, trying to avoid all the abandoned vehicles and people fleeing on foot along the road. She got in the last vehicle line out of France and crossed into Spain, where the Downes sold the car, boarded a train to Lisbon, and caught the famed S.S. Manhattan ocean liner to New York. The Kassners followed later, first to Los Angeles and then to New York.
The Neffs, back stateside for two years, stayed in touch with both the Downe and Kassner families — and subsequently the Guernseys as well. Eric Neff, like Patsy Kassner, remained a devoted, lifelong friend of Dorianne’s, visiting her frequently over nearly 70 years, wherever the Neff and Guernsey families’ travels led them. “We would see them whenever we were back here in the states,” 84-year-old Nancy Neff said in a phone call from her Burbank, Calif. home last Friday. “My husband was in the Foreign Service — the State Department, so we lived abroad. I met up with Dorianne for the first time when we were on leave and I was pregnant with Rebecca,” she added. “Over the years, we traveled a lot together — to Italy and Greece and, of course, France. I remember we celebrated my husband’s 80th birthday in Sicily.”
Rebecca Neff Short, who was born in 1972, also participated in the phone chat about Dorianne. “I was a little girl most of the time I was around Otis and Dorianne,” she offered. Short refers to the Guernseys as aunt and uncle, even though they are not blood relatives. “I always remember how much vitality Dorianne had,” Short said. “She was just a constant presence in my father’s mind. She visited us when we lived in Brussels. She’s my godmother, so we’ve always been in contact, ever since I was a little girl,” the 52-year-old added. “She’s just been this vibrant presence in my life for as long as I can remember.”
Dorianne Downe met Otis Guernsey Jr. through her Aunt Margot shortly after settling in New York. Soon they were seeing one another often, sharing evenings at such fashionable Manhattan hangouts as the famous Stork Club. Dorianne Carolyn Downe became Mrs. Otis L. Guernsey in the chapel of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue in New York City on December 11, 1943. Soon, Otis’ long tenure as the theater critic and entertainment editor for the Herald-Tribune began to blossom, while Dorianne worked as a publicist for Boeing and General Motors. The couple lived at 9 East 10th Street in Greenwich Village, where Dorianne frequently strolled through Washington Square Park with her poodle, Morgan, and miniature Schnauzer, Bingo.
Dorianne Guernsey struck a classic, fashionable pose in this undated beachside photograph from Martha’s Vineyard in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
Courtesy of Dorianne Guernsey
For the next 15 years, it was a captivating, charming life, with Dorianne serving as an engaged, insightful adviser to Otis, counseling him on his work and play selections for the “Best Plays” series. The two were central figures in the exploding arts and culture scene of postwar Manhattan. Sailing also became a constant in Dorianne’s and Otis’ lives during this period, whether it was sailing from Bridgeport, Conn., along Martha’s Vineyard, or up and down the East Coast — even traveling to Australia to watch the New York Yacht Club try to recapture the America’s Cup.
Then, in the mid-1960s, as the Herald-Tribune fell into financial turmoil, the Guernseys turned their world upside down and left their year-round environs in hyperactive New York, joining their good friend Bert McCord in pastoral North Pomfret. Otis continued to edit the annual “Best Plays” series, which he compiled for 36 years from 1964 until 2000 and carried on at the helm of Drama Quarterly, the respected television, film, and drama publication. Regular business trips back to New York were standard fare for the theater critic, while Dorianne immersed herself in the Woodstock area social and cultural scenes. She joined with Polly Billings and other community leaders, including Gennie Carouso, Patsy Niles, and Bob Belisle in helping to found Pentangle Arts, and volunteered at several Woodstock area art galleries, most notably the late Ellison Lieberman’s Gallery 2 in the 1970s and ‘80s.
An inveterate reader, Dorianne long participated in a monthly book club with her cherished friends Curtis, Debevoise, and Billings. Wesley Graff Jr., who spent his teenage years in Pomfret with his mom, Patsy Kassner Graff McCord, and then went on to head the film department at UVM and be a celebrated documentary filmmaker, remembers two things in particular about the Woodstock area “grande dames” that were especially memorable from his youth.
“Dorianne, my mother, Ann Debevoise, and Jane Curtis would all get together for what they called their ‘Frunch’ Club, because they all spoke French. They’d get together for lunch somewhere once a week and speak to each other in French,” Graff said, chuckling. The 73-year-old filmmaker, who retired from UVM in 2011, also fondly remembers how Dorianne and her friend Billings advocated for him in his “long-haired hippie days” when he had a novel idea for a Christmastime pursuit along The Green in Woodstock Village. “I wanted to roast chestnuts and just give them away on the main street there in the Village. The selectboard said that sounded crazy and they wouldn’t let me do it. But Dorianne and Polly spoke to them and they changed their minds and said I could do it. I still remember having a great time, standing there with that hibachi,” Graff enthused. “Dorianne was always there for our family gatherings,” Graff, who now lives in Fairlee, added. “There’s so much history there. She was just so much fun — and she and Otis were always family. My wife and I still get down to Woodstock four or five times a year to visit Dorianne.”
Shortly before he passed away in 2001 at the age of 82, Otis Guernsey persuaded Dorianne to leave the North Pomfret farmstead and move into a smaller, more manageable home on Mountain Avenue in Woodstock Village. The centenarian lives there to this day, cared for in recent years by her friend Miller and visited regularly by a coterie of friends and neighbors who continue to hold her dear. Mountain Avenue neighbor Linda Smiddy first met Dorianne when she settled into her new abode across the street and they’ve been fast friends ever since.
“I often go and visit Dorianne and we sit there and go through those scrapbooks and she shares her memories,” Smiddy said last weekend. “She’s just incredible, with all those stories of growing up in France and all the ballets and theater she so thoroughly enjoyed in New York. She’s just so passionate about the arts. She’s had a very sophisticated life. I remember when she and I used to look out over Faulkner Park and talk about books. I’d be out in the yard and she’d be walking her dog and we would stay there for ages, just talking about various forms of literature.”
