By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Jeanne Begg Clagett, 94, a Maryland horsewoman and real estate executive who raised blue-blooded racing stock and specialized in high-priced Washington area properties for a blue-blooded clientele, died Nov. 5 of Alzheimer's disease at Roedown Farm, her home in Davidsonville.
As the owner and operator for more than 40 years of Begg Inc., Mrs. Clagett handled the sales of some of the most prestigious homes in the Washington area, including Hickory Hill, which she first sold to John and Jacqueline Kennedy before it became the home of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. She also sold homes to former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and former secretary of state Alexander Haig. A 1976 issue of Forbes magazine described her as "the silver-haired doyenne of Washington real estate."
Her firm also specialized in selling homes to Washington's international community, as well as many of the city's ambassadorial residences. Among her international clients was Prince Aly Aga Khan.
Mrs. Clagett, known as Janey to family and friends, bought the historic Roedown Farm in 1945 with her first husband, John Murray Begg, a State Department and U.S. Information Agency official. At Roedown, the couple raised multiple-stakes-winner Silver Tango and Royal Tango, the 1993 Maryland Horse Breeders Association yearling show grand champion. She and her husband also raced a successful string of steeplechasers abroad.
The point-to-point course at Roedown Farm is the site each April of the Marlborough Hunt Races.
She was born Jeanne Frederique van den Bosch in Baarn, the Netherlands, the daughter of a wealthy Dutch naval captain. When Mrs. Clagett was 8, an injured British pilot landed in a meadow near the Bosch family castle. Her mother nursed the pilot back to health -- and then ran away with him.
"As Janey watched her father grieve and suffer from the desertion of his wife, she never spoke to her mother again," said her husband, Hal Clagett.
Fluent in Dutch, English, Spanish, French, German and Italian, she received bachelor's and master's degrees from Oxford University in the late 1930s and accompanied her father to the United States shortly before World War II.
She worked as a feature writer and photographer for the New York Daily Mirror before doing public relations for the American Red Cross in Washington.
During World War II, Gen. William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan recruited her to join the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA, where she was assigned to the North African and Spanish desks. As a Dutch native with a facility for languages, she also was deputy liaison officer and chief of the Low Countries dissemination and research division.
In 1948, the Netherlands' Queen Wilhelmina named her a knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau for her contributions to the Netherlands resistance movement.
According to Hal Clagett, her interest in real estate evolved out of an assignment from her father, who owned a thousand-acre ranch in California and a hundred black angus cattle. After the 1929 stock market crash forced him to divest his holdings, he sent his 18-year-old daughter to the United States to complete the transaction.
She founded Begg Inc. in 1950, seeing an opportunity to serve Washington's unique real estate market. "A transient population of diplomats, politicians and military people means that upper-income homes there change hands roughly every three years -- about twice as often as in other cities," Forbes noted in the 1976 article.
Mrs. Clagett sold her firm to Long & Foster Real Estate in 1990. The company retained her property-management division and her Georgetown office, renaming the office Begg/Long & Foster and making her president of the new entity. "We think the name Begg means a lot, and we don't want to give it up," a Long & Foster vice president said at the time.
Her first husband died in 1985, and in 1994, she married prominent Maryland horse breeder Henry Contee Bowie "Hal" Clagett Jr., whose wife had recently died. The two couples had been friends and tennis partners for four decades.
Hal Clagett, who was 78 at the time, recalled that his new bride, then 82, insisted on a "proper" proposal. He complied, he said, dropping to a knee in the living room of Roedown Farm on Thanksgiving Day. She said yes, adding "with joy and thanksgiving," he recalled.
Shortly after the wedding, Clagett left Weston, his historic family home near Upper Marlboro, and moved into the circa 1740s Georgian home at Roedown. The new Mrs. Clagett installed red carpeting in a downstairs office to welcome him, and he presented her with a new brood mare barn. Until Mrs. Clagett's illness, the couple continued to breed racehorses and to follow them wherever they raced.
Survivors include her husband, of Davidsonville; two stepchildren, Henry C.B. "Hal" Clagett III of Upper Marlboro and Elizabeth Clagett of Arnold; and two step-grandchildren.