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THE IRREPRESSIBLE GRAND DAME LIVED TO BE 100 — AND WHAT A ROMP IT WAS. T o put it in her own words, Betty Blake "didn't give a hoot" w h a t a n y b o d y thought of her. She lived on her own terms, rollicking through a century of highs and lows with grace and drollery. Her mother survived the sinking of the Titanic, yet Betty's own challenges were no less epic: She weathered hurricanes, five husbands, and the death of her first son — all the while, her dry sense of humor doggedly intact. "I never saw her depressed," says close friend and interior designer Joseph Minton, who knew her for almost 50 years. "She was always laughing." Betty's blue-green eyes danced when she would recall her glamorous schooling in Paris as a child, or her opulent coming-out ball in Newport, Rhode Island, where her family summered. Her rose-petal skin made her look decades younger than her years, and her thoroughbred Philadel- phia accent — which reminded her acquain- tances of Katharine Hepburn — eventually mellowed with a slight drawl. To her friends, she was Boop, a nickname she picked up in Newport in the 1930s. It was in reference to the diminutive cartoon character Betty Boop, says 97-year-old Oatsie Charles, a Newport socialite and one of Betty's longtime friends. Decades ahead of her time, Betty introduced modern art to Texas in the 1950s with the Betty McLean Gallery — her name then. "She was a great source of support for artists and the whole Texas arts community," says Marla Price, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, where Betty sat on the acquisitions committee for 50 years. Her taste for avant-garde art was a half-century before its time — Harry Parker, former director of the Dallas Museum of Art, once declared that Betty had "the best eye for contemporary art in America." She is credited with shepherding the careers of local greats such as Vernon Fisher and David Bates, and Betty's cocktail parties in the '60s and '70s were legendary: Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, di Suvero — they all came. Vivacious with boundless energy, Betty trekked Nepal at age 88, drove her own car well into her 90s, and swam in the ocean regularly until last year. She read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal daily, resorting to a magnifying glass when her eyesight began to fail. A devout Christian Scientist, she didn't drink, smoke, or take medicine. Betty was wheelchair bound the last year of her life, but when she died unexpectedly on August 8 after complications from a fall at her Newport home, family and friends were devastated. Says Oatsie: "We thought she'd outlive us all." B orn into great wealth and pedigree, Betty Brooke Blake grew up amid extraordinary privilege and splendor. Her family home, Almondbury, was located on the prestigious Main Line, a string of leisure-class communities extending west out of Philadelphia along the Pennsylvania Railroad. A bastion of old money, the Main Line was home to sprawling estates, cricket and hunt clubs, and the occasional eccentric family. Architect Horace Trumbauer, known for designing massive palaces for the era's industrial magnates, built most of the houses there, including Almondbury. "The area was very WASP-y, very aristocratic English," says David Nelson Wren, whose book, Ardrossan: The Last Great Estate on the Philadelphia Main Line, comes out next year. "People on the Main Line still lived with the vestiges of the Gilded Age." That meant ball- rooms and a full staff of live-in servants, including lady's maids, valets, butlers, chauffeurs, and private tutors. Betty's childhood home, a rambling, ivy-covered Tudor built in 1911, was set on 30 acres and likely one of Trumbauer's more modest estates. By contrast, the Ardrossan estate next door was certainly one of the BLAKE BETTY THE UNSINKABLE BY REBECCA SHERMAN Betty Blake with Claude Venard painting, in 1955 at Donald Vogel's residence. 52