SUZY
Byline: Aileen Mehle
Princess Diana and her close chum Catherine Soames are really roughing it on the Caribbean isle of St. Bart’s. They may be staying at the fine villa owned by Di’s photographer pal Patrick Demarchelier but the word is they’re actually cooking their own meals and living the simple life. Anything to keep away from England as long and as often as possible, where the simple life has gone with the wind, and scandals and troubles “come not singlefold but in legions.” As one of Diana’s countrymen so pithily remarked several centuries ago.
Love that Marylou Whitney, always up to something. Not a bit bashful when it comes to adventure, the merry widow of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Sonny) Whitney (who so kindly left her $100 million) has cruised on an aircraft carrier, dived to the depths in a submarine and has recently taken up the nippy but thrilling sport of ice fishing in Alaska. Now she’s at it again.
Marylou has fled her Kentucky horse farm and gone to the dogs in the frozen north to mush with the best of them in the Last Great Race on Earth, the Iditarod. That’s the Sled Dog Race that, beginning this weekend, covers over 1,049 miles of the roughest terrain in Alaska from Anchorage to Nome. Marylou adores this winter wonderland. Maybe it’s because she spent her honeymoon with Sonny here in 1958, dog sledding in Manitoba. Last year, while visiting Chugiak, a training ground for mushers, Marylou was offered the reins by musher Larry Williams who taught her how to drive a sled, whereupon she decided right on the spot to sponsor Larry in the 1995 race. And the Whitney racing empire has been expanded by 16 sled dogs.
The lucky dogs will be very well shod as Marylou has ordered 3,000 pairs of booties, required to protect the dogs’ footpads, in a pretty shade of Eton blue, the Whitney racing color that has won more than one Kentucky Derby and other races too numerous to go into here. If the Alaskan natives don’t know about Eton blue now, they will, they will.
As Marylou has a vested interest, she’ll be following every snowy step of the race beginning with the starting gun and visiting various check points along the way. At the finish line — let me guess — Marylou will be dressed in Eton blue as she cheers on her musher, also dressed in Eton blue with the Whitney name emblazoned on his back and the 16 doggies whose harnesses are — altogether now — Eton blue!
Although Marylou will be traveling in a single engine plane, surveying the excitement over the three-week race period, she definitely plans to do some mushing herself. Tell me you’re surprised.
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