Saratoga Story

"According to an old saying, a fashionable woman can get by with just her pearls." Recalling this, Marie Louise Schroeder Hosford Whitney, 41, fourth wife of Multimillionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, 68, bravely fastened on the $500,000 string of pearls that had once adorned the throat of France's Empress Eugenie and set out for her own party at the Saratoga Golf Club. Even Marylou, as she has styled herself ever since she got to like the signature on her oil paintings, admitted that the big pearls might seem "too much" for just an afternoon tea dance. But if ever a gal needed a lift last week, it was Marylou.

There she was, about to face the cream of Saratoga's August racing community. Not that they didn't all know each other; after all, it was the fifth party that Marylou had given in eight days. Nor was it because that, in honor of the Belmont Ball committee, she had invited them to, of all things, an after-the-races tea dance. "There are so many cocktail parties," Marylou said, "I wanted to do something just a little different." The reason for the apprehension was that "they"--the Wideners, the Wetherills, the Vanderbilts and the Sanfords--would all want to know about "it"--the $780,000 jewel robbery at the Whitneys' Cady Hill House just four days earlier.

Miserable on Champagne. The miracle of "it" all was that the thieves had missed the pearls, which Marylou had casually dropped into her bedroom dresser drawer. But they hadn't missed much else: her diamond engagement ring, Sonny's mother's diamond necklace, ruby and sapphire pins, even the turquoise owl pin that Marylou recalled sadly was "the first thing Sonny ever gave me." Even more maddening, there were no clues. Five of the six servants had taken off the night of the theft; the butler had locked every door but the front one. As the police pointed out, "Everyone who had access is a suspect." Marylou discovered the theft just before going out to a dinner in honor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which is playing at this year's Saratoga Performing Arts Center, one of Sonny's pet projects. She went to get her jewel box, stashed away between blankets in the linen closet ("one of my four secret places," she says), and discovered the jewels were missing. "I had to go through the whole party without anybody knowing," she recalls. "I drank lots of champagne and tried to look happy. But I felt miserable."

Demurely, but Prematurely. That the jewel theft should be discovered just before a meal fitted Marylou's pattern. "All the important events of my life," says she, "have to do with food"--beginning with her birth. Her mother was glazing a ham in the oven on Christmas Eve in Kansas City when the ham suddenly flamed up, catching her mother's dress on fire. As a result of mother's exertions, according to Marylou, "I was born demurely, but prematurely." She developed a dramatic flair at Iowa State, tried her hand at amateur theatricals, and even had her own disk-jockey show during World War II. Marrying Frank Hosford, a Greenwich, Conn., and Scottsdale, Ariz., realtor, hardly slowed her down at all; at age 31, she had had four children, had started up her own real estate business and a Phoenix TV show when one evening she casually met Sonny Whitney in a Phoenix nightclub. Sonny decided on the spot that her ash-blonde hair, grey-green eyes and size 6 figure made her the ideal heroine to play opposite Lee Marvin in The Missouri Traveler, a Hollywood production that Sonny was bankrolling.

Marylou was game to try the movies, even though, as she admits, "I am long in the face and long in the body." She celebrated her first film by putting out The Missouri Traveler Cookbook, which included recipes for such things as "FourPoster Sherbet Ring." But what really set gossip columnists on their ears was the lines she tagged onto the end of her recipe book: "The sky is blue, my heart is full, and the future looks bright and Sonny."

Xeroxed Menus. Divorces followed soon after that, and Marylou moved smoothly into the multimillionaire Whitney world, where she graciously presided as hostess at Sonny's estates in Oyster Bay, Lexington, Ky., Palm Beach, Flin Flon, Manitoba, Saranac Lake, N.Y., and in Saratoga. She and Sonny took up painting (after all, Sonny's mother, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was herself a talented sculptress and founder of Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art), and for sweet charity's sake auctioned off their works (he does landscapes, she paints children). There is now a daughter, Cornelia, 7, and there are the horses. Says Marylou: "I feel strongly about horses, maybe a little too strongly. They are like the family. Racing is a very important part of our life."

Being a Whitney also meant lots and lots of parties--Charlestoning at the "Roaring '20s" party in Palm Beach, learning enough Arabic to greet Saudi Arabia's King Saud ("Awfully nice of you," murmured Rose Kennedy), and, as she confesses, "giving 15 times more parties than my friends." As a result, Marylou feels, "I'm as organized as a career girl," what with keeping track of all the menus and guest lists, which she Xeroxes and files with comments for the following year.

Because Sonny likes to have beautiful things out and in use, Marylou uses the silver cups and platters won by the Whitney racing stable for everything from caviar to sherbet. The same goes for the jewelry that Sonny loves to collect. As a result, Marylou has been a stunning adornment to every ball she has attended. Adding a special luster is the 1,900-diamond tiara, once the property of Empress Elizabeth of Austria, which she likes to wear for specially grand occasions, such as the opening of the Metropolitan Opera.

The Empress' tiara, fortunately, was safe in the bank vault when the jewel thieves struck. But there had been an uneasy moment last year when Sonny's wife No. 3, Eleanor Searle Whitney, told a columnist that the tiara was a gift Sonny had bought for her. Marylou would have none of it. Said she: "Sonny bought it as an investment. And I must say, the pleasure of wearing it is delicious."

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