“Nobody had any better taste,” Polly Mellen, another longtime Vogue editor, who overlapped with Mrs. Simpson there, said in an interview. She wasn’t lordly or haughty, Ms. Mellen said; she didn’t name-drop or lean on her connections. “She didn’t have to,” she said. “Those things were not important to her. She just went about being Babs. She went to work — I’m not sure she had to go to work — to do a job that appealed to her.”
Mrs. Simpson lived a richly cultured life outside the magazine, though friends said she was generally private about it. “She gave me the best books, important things to know and read,” said Phyllis Posnick, her assistant for a time, who went on to become a senior fashion editor at Vogue herself. “She went to the theater all the time. She went to ballet. She’d say to me, ‘You should really see this, dear.’ ”
Mrs. Simpson never remarried (and kept her married name to the end of her life) but found a bohemian companionship with Paul Magriel, an art collector and writer. They lived in the same Manhattan apartment building, on East End Avenue, though they maintained their own apartments on different floors. He died in 1990.
In 1972, Mrs. Simpson joined House Garden magazine, where she remained until it closed in 1993. (She kept a beautiful modernist house, designed by Paul Lester Weiner, in Amagansett, on the East End of Long Island, and a garden designed by Bunny Mellon. Oscar de la Renta, a friend, credited her with a lot of his initial garden ideas, his wife, Annette de la Renta, recalled.)
“Her chic was understated and completely authoritative,” said Wendy Goodman, the design writer, who met Mrs. Simpson at House Garden. (By then the magazine’s name had been changed to HG.) She was similarly understated about her exploits.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/obituaries/babs-simpson-dead.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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