The Met Inaugurates the Condé M. Nast Galleries in the Presence of the Publisher’s Daughter Leslie Bonham Carter

Known to most as Condé, to Bonham Carter he was simply Dad. “It was a lovely relationship,” she recalls. “He was wonderful to me. And I remember he used to take me out for an ice cream soda in Madison Avenue at Schraft’s and we had great fun. . . . He was with me very gentle, very loving, very interested. And therefore I loved him very much.” The feeling was mutual; as Chase wrote, Nast’s “affection for [Leslie] was the true happiness of his last years.”

Nast, married twice, was father to three children. Coudert Nast and Natica Nast (later Warburg) were born in 1903 and 1905 respectively, during his first marriage to Clarisse Coudert. In 1928 the publisher, then 55, married the 21-year-old Leslie Foster. Their daughter, Bonham Carter, was born in 1930, and is named after her mother. The two were known as Big Leslie and Little Leslie.

“My father,” explained Bonham Carter, “justified to himself marrying somebody so very much younger because he was a millionaire. And then came the crash [in 1929], and he lost everything. … I remember the exhaustion he felt in desperately trying to piece it together.” … And it was at that point [1932] that he [practically delivered my mother] into my stepfather’s arms, because he felt so terrible, not only being unable any longer to give her all the things she loved, but also that his time was so taken up, was desperately trying to [salvage his company].”

Big Leslie’s new husband was British Lieutenant Colonel Reginald “Rex” Benson, a dashing banker, polo player, and diplomat. Little Leslie spent her summers with her mother, traveling by ship (once under the care of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy). Bonham Carter, who attended the Brearley School, lived with her father in his “wonderful apartment” until she was 11, when, with her father’s health failing, she joined her mother and stepsiblings in Washington, where Benson was a British military attaché. They later moved to England in 1943.