On the anniversary of Mary Lee Hood's death, I wanted to repost her eulogy.
Mary Lee Hood, friend to many in the E.C. family and countless artists on both coasts, died Monday, January 3, 2011. She was the quintessential supporter of the arts and one of the most enthusiastic audience members one could ever hope to find. Here, below, is the eulogy I delivered at her wake.
My dear dear friend Mary. I loved her with all my heart. She tackled everything in life—friendships, culture, food, fashion, politics, romance, gossip, flirtation, expectations, requests and resentments—all with a full passion and the precision of a skilled scientist.
I’ll give you an example. I met Mary about 16 years ago when our mutual friend Louis Ashman brought her to a house party in Boston thrown in a beautiful brownstone. The purpose of the event was to premiere my first foray into film-making. About 75 people were there for good food, smart cocktails and 3 separate screenings on my friend Willis Emmons’ wide-screen TV. Three screenings were required because his family room could only squeeze about 25 of us in at a time.
I met Mary toward the end of the evening. She introduced herself to me with an apology, which was typical of Mary’s wit and sophistication. “I have to apologize to you,” she said, “But I’m afraid I broke the rules. I attended all three screenings this evening.” And then she proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes offering a very detailed comparison of the three audiences and their varied reactions to various details found in my short film.
Well. Is it any wonder that I was smitten from the start?
That was Mary. So curious. So detail-oriented and passionate to examine, re-examine and re-examine something until many of us would find ourselves mentally exhausted. But never Mary. She had an endless passion for detail. “God is in the details!” we used to remind one another. And she would often follow it up by quizzing me. "And who coined that expression, Dear?"
“Mies van der Rohe,” I would reply for the thirtieth time.
These quizzes were Mary’s playful way of poking fun at my terrible memory. I believe she had to inform me at least six times that it was Eero Saarinen who designed both the St. Louis Arch and the famed TWA terminal at JFK.
Mary had a lot a gay male friends. This was no accident because she loved several things that we generally adore: disco dancing to all hours of the night, off-color humor, good taste in all things, and stunningly beautiful men. But Mary also loved history and politics and art. And, of course, her children.
Few people know this but during Mary’s tenure at the Gilette Company, where she worked as an Executive Secretary for 20 years, she frequently turned down offers—more like desperate pleas, in some instances—for her to enter a management-training program in order to become a senior executive herself. Her skills were formidable. She was the go-to gal for all questions of grammar and syntax and often rewrote the letters she had been asked to type for the men who ran the company. Whenever a dispute would arise between two senior executives about the English language, Mary was commandeered as the King Solomon. She was that good.
So why did she repeatedly turn down these offers for advancement up the corporate ladder? I think one key reason was her children. It always struck me as though Mary saw her job as a means to an end, in her case that of: putting food on the table and supporting the education of her three very bright children. The fact that Liz, Vic and Chris are each so accomplished in their own ways is a testament, again, to that passion, attention to detail and energy.
Those of us who carried on lengthy correspondences – first on paper, in later years, via email – know that she was unrivaled in her ability to make her point in plain, succinct and effective prose. These qualities would have been enough. But how unexpected to have found them in the same human being who also loved romance, poetry, visual art, film, and Haute Couture.
Yes. She loved to dress and look her best. The truth is, Mary was a bit vain, as she was the first to admit.
She loved to look gorgeous and reveled in the inevitable attention. I remember on more than one occasion remarking to friends in New York that in order to become the most popular man on a New York dance floor, one needed only one accessory: Mary Lee Hood. That’s how gorgeous she was. In her stilettos, her Lucite clip-on earings and her Armani print. All eyes would be glued to Mary. The truly wondrous thing about her though, was that she had style but she was of course, so much more. Enter into a conversation with this woman and you would never be the same.
If I had to choose one word to define my friend it would be: Curiosity. In this Google age where surface answers are but a click away, Mary’s penchant for digging deeper and deeper into any subject is one of the things I still find most charming and intoxicating about her.
She tackled everything as though it were a project. It was commonplace for her to arrive at a lunch or a dinner date armed with a neatly typed list of questions. She was never shy or self-conscious about this because for Mary, curiosity trumped all other considerations.
In a room of 12 or 15 people, she could be chatting in a corner with one person the entire time. Still, predictably, at the end of the evening, she’d have endless observations to share of all the various social interactions that had unfolded in every other corner of the room. That’s how keen her powers of observation were.
Naturally, it was always entertaining to be by Mary’s side as she observed people. Not so comfortable, of course, when one found oneself the Object of her discerning eye.
As is true in any close relationship, there were times when I was unkind to my friend. This most often occurred when her curiosity trumped her tact. And I regret those moments in which I may have hurt her feelings out of frustration or impatience. But I do take comfort in recalling that whenever she told me of other people in her life who had hurt her in much the same way, without exception, she always forgave them. So today I assume she must have extended the same indulgence to me.
Unfortunately, I find myself at a loss as to how to wrap up a eulogy of Mary Lee Hood. And I suspect it may have something to do with who she was. Her passion and energy for so many different things always vastly exceeded my own. In a way, it’s perhaps most fitting that our paying tribute to her should go on in much the same way. For the most fitting tribute I can think of for this unusual human being might be for us each to simply never tire of examining and re-examining and re-examining this long and remarkable life.
So that’s what I intend to do. And I hope you’ll join me. I have a hunch she’d enjoy that with the great gusto with which she drank in life itself.
