This is an excerpt from PALMER Vol.7. To see the full story, purchase your copy of the magazine here.

 

“It” girls tend to have short runs. Those who were in the orbit of Andy Warhol certainly did. All except Jane Holzer, the only one who managed to get out of the Factory essentially in one piece and, what’s more, continues to make a name for herself.

The very first of Andy’s superstars, she was born and raised in Palm Beach, the daughter of real estate developer Carl Brukenfeld. After flunking out of Finch Junior College in the early 1960s, Holzer moved to New York City, where she began her modeling career and married real estate heir Leonard Holzer in a ceremony at The Plaza. Along the way, a WWD columnist dubbed her “Baby Jane,” in a nod to the recently released thriller starring Bette Davis What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The sobriquet stuck.

By 1964, Holzer had exploded as a celebrity phenomenon. With her towering blonde bouffant, she appeared on the covers of Vogue and in the pages of seemingly every other publication. The New York Times called her “the most looked-at girl of ’64.” To try to explain the sensation that she had become, Jock Whitney’s New York Herald Tribune dispatched its rookie reporter, Tom Wolfe, to profile her for its Sunday supplement. His lengthy essay, “Girl of the Year,” was republished the following year in his seminal collection, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. (In its Introduction, he called Holzer “the most incredible socialite in history.”) Perceptive as he was, Wolfe labored to identify the source of Jane’s magnetism.

“Jane Holzer—well, there is no easy term available. Baby Jane has appeared constantly this year in just about every society and show business column in New York…. And yet none of them have been able to do much more than, in effect, set down her name…

“Her excitement is something else… The press watches Jane Holzer as if she were an exquisite piece of…radar…spread out as an antenna for new waves of style…suddenly here is a single flamboyant girl who sums up everything new and chic in the way of fashion in the Girl of the Year.”

In the course of his reporting, Wolfe found himself one afternoon inside the 12-room Park Avenue apartment into which Jane had moved following her wedding. In a paneled drawing room hung with Dutch Old Masters, as a maid brought in lunch on trays, the phone rang. It was yet another newspaper editor asking Holzer for an interview, telling her, “We want to do a story on you because you’re very big this year.” “That makes me mad,” she told Wolfe after she hung up the phone. “That makes me feel like, All right, Baby Jane, we’ll let you play this year so get out and dance, but next year, well, it’s all over for you next year, Baby Jane….”

Sixty years later, on an early September afternoon, Holzer agreed to do this interview, in her six-story, 15,000-square-foot townhouse on East 65th Street, which was built in 1910 for a railroad magnate’s son. (Holzer, now 84, divides her time between New York and Palm Beach.) After entering its sumptuous marble foyer, where a few pieces of her art collection are displayed—including a Fischli and Weiss car, a Les Lalanne sheep, and a Warhol Jackie—I was ushered into Holzer’s office in the rear of the building. Small, windowless, and utilitarian, it is furnished with basic steel file cabinets and a desk stacked high with serious-looking documents and papers.

“Hard work,” she answers, when I ask how her summer was. “Not fun. We have real estate things going on.”

A noted art collector, she is also a real estate mogul. Her portfolio includes a good deal of property in Palm Beach, where on December 9, Holzer will be honored at the Historical Society of Palm Beach County’s 22nd Annual Archival Evening.

“It was a happy, healthy life,” she recalls about her childhood. Her father, who began acquiring real estate in the 1920s, had extensive holdings throughout Florida, including a prime stretch of Worth Avenue in Palm Beach and eight and a half oceanfront miles on Merritt Island, part of what is now Cape Canaveral. Yet Jane faced the antisemitism then commonplace.

“If you grew up here in the ’40s and ’50s and you were Jewish, you were basically a second-class citizen, no matter how much money you had,” she recalls. “It was very, very different then.”

After helping to establish the Palm Beach Country Club for Jewish residents, Brukenfeld played at a public golf course in West Palm Beach, where he encouraged members of the Black community to play. “My father really cared about African-Americans,” Holzer says. “He provided housing for them, and he started a company to lend them money, because banks would not at the time.”

Holzer spent much of her youth at the West Palm Beach Municipal Golf Course, as it was called, because Brukenfeld built stables there for her horses. “I would go riding when he was playing golf. He’d wave to me from the seventh or eighth hole, then he’d pick me up and we’d go home,” she recalls. (Last year, thanks to substantial donations from a group that includes the PGA, Tiger Woods, Michael Bloomberg, and Holzer herself, the course was beautifully restored and reopened as The Park.) Shortly after enrolling at Finch, Holzer decided college wasn’t for her, so she set out to fail, knowing that “If you flunk out of Finch, you’re not getting in anywhere else.…That was the plan, and it worked. So then I went to work. I wanted to be a model.

“I started the hard way, traipsing all over town on go-sees to anybody who would possibly photograph me,” she continues. Eventually, she was signed by Ford. In December of 1962, she and Holzer married. Her big break came the following year. “All of a sudden, Diana Vreeland discovered me,” she recalls. “Jane Holzer is the most contemporary girl I know,” declared the legendary editor, who promptly sent Jane to London and Paris to be shot by the likes of David Bailey and Irving Penn.

“She really taught me an amazing lesson,” says Holzer about Vreeland. “After seeing a couture show, I kind of turned my nose up and said I didn’t think it was that good. She said, ‘What? It was divine! Didn’t you notice this? Didn’t you see that?’ I realized, there’s always something amazing about something. So shut the fuck up and don’t be a downer. It was a very good lesson, though I don’t always adhere to it.”

But her most pivotal encounter came one afternoon later that year when she was walking down Lexington Avenue with Bailey and Nicky Haslam, who was then art director of Huntington Hartford’s Show magazine. As Holzer recollects, Haslam spotted Warhol coming up the street. Buttonholing him, Haslam introduced Holzer. “The first thing [Andy] said to me was, ‘Do you want to be in the movies?’”

This story is an excerpt from PALMER Vol.6. To see the complete story, order your copy of the magazine, here.