Pat Buckley

Condolences to the Buckley family.

“There have been weeks along New York’s charity circuit when it looked as if Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. was chairman of everything,” Charlotte Curtis once wrote in The New York Times.

Her fund-raising ability left her peers in awe. In addition to her work for the Metropolitan Museum, she raised large sums over the years for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University Medical Center and the Hospital for Special Surgery, as well as AIDS causes and Vietnam veterans.

“Get Pat on a committee, and everybody will come” was a familiar refrain in benefit circles.

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She was admired for her sense of humor, which was caustic and irreverent, and she didn’t always easily conform. She refused to give up cigarettes and puffed away even in nonsmoking areas of her favorite restaurants — when they still had them — an illicit privilege the proprietors allowed.

“Life is very difficult and everything kills you,” she once said. “The only thing you can do nowadays is sit fully clothed in the woods and eat fruit.”

She used to tend her garden in Connecticut wearing a bikini, without regard to ultraviolet rays and “those loathsome Lyme ticks.” Her husband — who, she said, “covers himself up as if he were going on a safari” — contracted Lyme disease anyway.