Socialite Added Flair, Style and Humor to D.C. Events

As a young woman, she dated ballplayer Bobo Newsom, then of the Washington Senators, and cultivated a life-long enthusiasm for bawdy humor. In 1940, she married Alvin A. Kraft, who started a personal finance company and was by all accounts the center of her life.

The Krafts held parties at their three-story, 19th-century mansion on Embassy Row, sometimes renting a champagne fountain. They once took a cruise and dined with actor Clark Gable, an event they memorialized in a short family film. They spent winters together at a rented condominium in South Florida and befriended a neighbor, Henny Youngman, the relentless master of the one-liner.

The Krafts had twin Rolls-Royces. At parties long ago, they were dubbed "the duke and duchess." They also had three children -- Bayla, Yvette and Bruce -- largely looked after by nannies.

"Dad was 6 feet tall, big blue eyes and dark hair," Bayla Kraft said. "She was petite and loved his height. She dressed him."

When her husband died in 1976, Renee Kraft was 61 and largely inconsolable. She once said her brother, Sidney, a real estate developer who frequented diplomatic dinners, helped her emerge from her solitude. She also credited her chauffeur, Fayyaz Mirza, with giving her a much-needed push; he said if she kept turning down invitations, someday they would dry up entirely.

She emerged as one of the more elegantly gowned women in Washington -- in Chanel, Dior or Halston and in sables, chinchilla or lynx. Informal gatherings might call for a red velvet turban and red jersey dress from Paris. In more formal embassy settings, she carried a pearl-studded, poodle-shaped evening bag, another Parisian purchase.

"I guess you might say I'm putting on the dog," Kraft told a society reporter.

The purse "got more attention than most guests," said a friend, Evelyn Di Bona, who formerly hosted and produced the Channel 56 television program "Inside Embassy Row."

Kraft appeared at charity auctions and balls for organizations such as CARE, the Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind, the Choral Arts Society of Washington, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the National Museum of Natural History.

Her Parkinson's disease was diagnosed not long after her husband's death, but she told few people. She tried to maintain an impish sense of humor, once arriving at a full-dress party with a walker to which a grandson had attached a loud horn. It was clown-nose red, and she liked to honk it to announce her entrance.

Increasingly infirm, she withdrew again. She told friends not to visit but always embraced them when they disregarded her wishes and showed up.

She and Bayla grew closer in recent years. During a hospital visit to her mother days before her death, Bayla Kraft said she was impressed with the grace with which her mother handled the distinctly ungracious ventilator and breathing tubes.

"One day, I had on a necklace made of sterling silver circles interlinked," Bayla Kraft said. "I had on a black T-shirt, and the necklace stood out. She was not a silver person; she was a real gold person. But her eyes went directly to the necklace. She stared. She said, 'I'm hanging in there. I love you. And where did you get your necklace? I really think it's pretty.' "