Before Countess Nubia Braschi married a San Marino count, she was a girl from Colombia who wanted to be a publicist. While visiting Rome in the ‘60s, she met a young dressmaker and brought him back to New York, where he slept on her sofa.
Every day, she washed and ironed his single shirt, then took him all around the town. His name was, and is, Valentino Garavani.
That bit of trivia was whispered at the luncheon Nubia hosted Tuesday, where her guest of honor, Jean Kennedy Smith, was a wee bit late — “My bus from the Hamptons was stuck in traffic,” she explained.
The effervescent sister of JFK, RFK and Teddy was congratulated on receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom last month for her contributions to the Northern Ireland peace process when she was U.S. Ambassador to Ireland (from 1993 to 1998).
Has she advised her niece Caroline Kennedy, the new U.S. Ambassador to Japan? “I send her e-mail reminding her to keep working for peace — and that war is ridiculous,” Smith told writer Richard Turley, as well as Nubia’s husband, Count Pier Braschi, the longtime ambassador to Colombia; their daughter Contessina Francesca Braschi; and socialites Jan Chipman and Sharon Handler Loeb.
They were celebrating at Doubles, under the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. At the next table, financial pharaoh Steve Schwarzman was having a romantic tryst with his lovely wife Christine.
Nearby, Joan Rivers was regaling writer Taki Theodoracopulos with anecdotes about her late pal Rock Hudson. Told she looks better than ever (and she does!) the bejeweled wit quipped, “It’s so cold in here, my pores have shrunk.”