As the daughter of New York society It girl C.Z. Guest and Winston Frederick Churchill Guest (a polo player and Phipps steel heir), Cornelia Guest had an unconventional childhood. “My mother was not strict, but she was a big person for discipline, so I was up at the barn every morning at 5:30 a.m., taking care of my dogs, taking care of my horses, mucking out stalls,” Guest recalls of growing up on Long Island. Of course, the family’s estate also famously hosted notable figures that ranged from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (Guest’s godparents) to author Truman Capote (the recent subject of the FX series, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, which featured Chloë Sevigny portraying Guest’s mother). “Not everyone had Andy Warhol, and Truman, and Mick Jagger, and all of these people over for dinner, but I was very lucky that my mother exposed me to that,” Guest tells Observer. “It never mattered who anyone was; she always had a lot of interesting people around, and I think I got that from her.”
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Those famous friends not only inspired Guest, but they also looked after her during her teenage years partying at New York City’s most glamorous nightclub, Studio 54. “I was so lucky to have them in my life because I was so well protected when I started spending more time in New York. It was so much fun, and the freedom and the creativity that........