Society Writer Garnett Stackelberg

Garnett Stackelberg, 95, the Nebraska-born charmer who married a baron and became a Washington society writer, died Jan. 12 at Georgetown University Hospital. She had congestive heart failure.

Inevitably, Mrs. Stackelberg was known in print and among her friends as Baroness Stackelberg. She had married an Estonian, Baron Constantine "Steno" von Stackelberg, a cousin to Lord Louis Mountbatten and a relation of European crown heads. His father had been a counselor to Czar Nicholas II of Russia.

Before she settled with the baron in Washington in 1945, Mrs. Stackelberg was a roving raconteur and inveterate partygoer. Her views on world events, especially in Asia, were well-received. She had spent time under virtual house arrest in Shanghai during World War II and later traveled the United States speaking about her travails.

The Stackelbergs lived in refined surroundings in Adams Morgan, in a seventh-floor, rent-controlled apartment near what was then Embassy Row.

From her redoubt, surrounded by Russian art, she wrote for a succession of newspapers including those in Baltimore, Oakland and Miami, chronicling high society and state dinners and interviewing the diplomats and dignitaries she shepherded to parties and invited to her home.

By her estimate, she had visited 72 countries, most in the name of travel writing, and spent the past few decades penning a weekly society column loaded with boldfaced names for the Palm Beach Daily News, the social bible known as the "Shiny Sheet" for its slick paper.

Garnett Butler, the daughter of a building contractor and a teacher, was born Jan. 5, 1910, in Chadron, Neb. The family moved to Portland, Ore., and she attended what is now Oregon State University. When money fell short, she left school to join a friend on a trip to Shanghai in the summer of 1932.

The statuesque brunette made friends quickly. She claimed to have received six marriage offers in her first six weeks in China.

She did secretarial work for the U.S. consulate and married a Canadian, a society physician named William Gardiner. They lived in a 14-room apartment near the waterfront, a mode of living that ended when the Japanese swept into the city.

During the occupation, she survived on cracked wheat and lost 30 pounds. She said it was the most trying time of her life.

To her mother, she wrote, "The Paris of the Far East has deteriorated from a fascinating thriving city into a dreary dismal, virtual concentration camp."

The Gardiners were released in a prisoner swap between the United States and Japan. After reaching New York, she went on lecture tours and grew apart from her husband, who did not want children. She did.

At a function at the British embassy in Washington, she met the baron, a man of regal bearing who brought her to a new level of Washington society. She began her writing career, first contributing pieces for the Shanghai Evening Post, where she had old friends, and later for a small syndicate of U.S. newspapers.

Over the years, her columns appeared in the Washington Star, the Baltimore News-American, Dossier magazine, Washington Life Magazine and the North American edition of L'Officiel, an international fashion magazine.

To a friend, she once assessed herself as neither a forceful nor a probing writer but one who liked to adhere to fact and make up in enthusiasm what she might have lacked in style.

She was still filing stories for the Palm Beach Daily News when she entered the hospital in failing health. The baron died in 1989.

For her birthday this month, she was in the hospital surrounded by a few close friends -- an audience limited by necessity, not desire. She was unable to eat cake or drink a good German wine, her longtime staples. The celebrants lighted a candle and sang "Happy Birthday."

Survivors include a son from her second marriage, Charles Alexander "Sandy" von Stackelberg of Boston; and two grandsons.