Adorable Story #61: The Legend of Ann Bonfoey Taylor
The Grande Dame of Vail
“I knew I liked planes”
— Ann Bonfoey Taylor
Ann Bonfoey Taylor was an American aviator, flight instructor and fashion designer.
She was one of the first women in the USA to have a pilot’s license, designed women’s ski wear, was a flight instructor for Army and Navy pilots in World War II, a member of the US Ski Olympic team and a nationally ranked tennis player.
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Early years
Ann Bonfoey was born in Quincy, Illinois on December 3, 1910, into a family that “owned quite a bit of property.”
These holdings included a pharmaceutical and a dye manufacturing company, which her grandfather had founded, and an airfield, which her father and uncle had carved out of a cornfield.
“I was quite a spoiled puppy growing up with my three brothers, and I was given everything a little girl could possibly want,” Taylor wrote in her 1999 memoir ‘Cleared for take-off’. “What made my upbringing more interesting, however, was that ... we had our own little airport which was quite exciting. At that point my father also bought his own plane and he hired a pilot to fly for us.”
When she was just 12 when her father Lawrence Bonfoey paid a flight instructor to give young Ann flight lessons because, as she would later explain it, she had flowered into a beauty and her father had “found it difficult to cope, especially when boys started coming round to the house to see me, so I’m sure he thought flying would be a useful distraction.”
It was (at least initially).
While potential suitors arrived at her house in their brand new Ford Model Ts, Ann Bonfoey spent her time piloting her father’s handmade Bellanca airplane over the skies above Quincy.
After graduating from a prestigious boarding school in upstate New York, Ann Bonfoey married a Princeton undergraduate named James Cooke in 1928, when she was 18.
She described him as “a man whom I found quite uninteresting,” noting that her father “encouraged the match because he didn’t think my local beaux were ‘quality’ enough for me.”
In the next three years the young couple had two children and settled in Vermont.
While her husband managed one of his family’s factories in Burlington, she divided her time between raising the children, modeling in New York City (posing for magazine advertisements, including for Lucky Strike cigarettes), and sports (she was nationally ranked in tennis, and would later play at Wimbledon).
Skiing
To escape an increasingly boring marriage, in the wintertime she taught herself to ski and started competing on the slopes of nearby Mount Mansfield, where she quickly mastered its most difficult run —so steep, it was named Nose Dive— and earned a place as an alternate on the US Ski Olympic Team.
Her success, coupled with her beauty and unique fashion sense, began to attract national attention.
Harper’s Bazaar published a full-page black-and-white photo shot at Stowe, with Ann wearing a plastic visor over her head, a radiant smile on her face, and one of her signature fluffy Mongolian wool coats on her back, noting:
“Mrs. James Negley Cooke, Jr., has become so closely identified with Mt. Mansfield’s crack ski trail that everyone calls her ‘Nose Dive Annie.’ She practically lives on it, and is so expert on its dizzy twists and schusses that when she enters a Nose Dive race the other entries blanch.”
WWII
But life rarely goes according to the plan.
First there was the cancellation of the 1940 Olympic Winter Games due to the onset of World War II in Europe, then with the divorce from her husband after he ran off with one of Ann’s dear friends (another member of the US women’s ski team).
Having been born into wealth, she found all of a sudden utterly alone, with two children to raise and, for the first time in her life, without money.
Aviation
“I then had to decide what on earth I was going to do with my life,” Taylor wrote in her memoir.
“My ex-husband had no intention of taking care of me properly, despite the terms of our divorce settlement. Nor was my family able to help: my father, who was a brilliant but self-destructive man, had been addicted to prescription drugs. Meanwhile, my grandfather had slowly become senile and allowed his fortune to slip through his fingers... The only thing I knew a little bit about was aviation. I knew I liked planes.”
And so in March 1941, she sold a piece of jewelry her parents had given her on her 18th birthday and enrolled as an aviation major at the University of Vermont.
She quickly earned her badge as commercial flight instructor (becoming one of just the twenty-five women so qualified in the country at the time), and she soon became one of a handful of women enlisted by the US Army to train Air Corps cadets during WWII.
She spent the war years commuting between a rented barn in Stowe (where a maid watched over her children) and the airport in Burlington six days a week, earning another full-page photo in Harper’s Bazaar in February 1943 as a “flying schoolmarm”.
The caption noted:
“The men have taken kindly to their dazzling teacher. When occasionally she gets an overly cocky student, she gives him a dose of air acrobatics—tortures which she itemizes casually as wringing out, spins, snap rolls, and chandelles.”
Fashion
After the war ended in 1945, out of her barn in Stowe she launched her own clothing label —Ann Cooke— using her name and growing fame to market a line of homemade skiwear.
She took a train to New York City, and talked her way into an audience with the editor of Harper’s Bazaar.
“‘I want the clothes photographed in the snow by the best photographers in New York, plus unlimited money,’ I told her,” Taylor would later recall. She was astonished at the reply: “Granted, granted.”
After a six-page fashion spread —shot on the flanks of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington— ran in Harper’s Bazaar in January 1946 (Ann herself made the cover that month), she was inundated with so many orders that she was unable to keep up with demand.
She sold distribution rights to Lord & Taylor, which featured her clothing in window displays on Fifth Avenue in New York City and in twenty other stores.
Love
That winter, Ann met the love of her life, Vernon “Moose” Taylor Jr., when the handsome young Texas oilman — who resembled Gregory Peck and was bound for a ski trip over Quebec’s Mont-Tremblant — called on her shop in Stowe to purchase a pair of ski trousers.
“I thought he was delicious,” Ann Taylor explained in Cleared for Take-Off.
With the help of two friends, she followed him to Canada.
“Of course, I feigned great surprise when we bumped into each other,” Taylor wrote in her memoir. “‘Those ski clothes of yours,’ said Moose. ‘I had to leave the restaurant after breakfast this morning with the New York Times in front of me because the zipper went on the trousers. They’re the most appalling clothes I’ve ever bought in my life!’ ‘Oh, Mr. Taylor, I do owe you an apology,’ she replied. ‘Will you have tea or a drink with me at five o’clock?’...
After their tea together, he just said: ‘I think I’d like to have a ski house and we could get married.’
By May 1947, they were.
But her fame and financial independence were decidedly at odds with Moose Taylor’s notion of the role of the proper Texas housewife.
While staying at the St. Regis and zipping through Manhattan (she had been contracted to produce clothes for Lord & Taylor’s Christmas windows), she received an ultimatum, via telegram, from San Antonio:
“Take off the golden slippers, woman. Come home to hard reality.”
She complied with her husband’s request and moved to San Antonio, Texas.
Ann Cooke abandoned the fashion world—and flying—and adopted a new life as Ann Taylor.
“I had already decided that my talent as a designer had its limits,” she wrote. “I plucked my courage and asked the top people in New York exactly how long they thought I could last. ‘Five years,’ they said, but I figured it would probably be more like three. ... I couldn’t see that all that would bring me a great deal of happiness.”
But being the wife of Vernon Taylor Jr. did. As she put it:
“I went on to lead a fascinating life with Moose, traveling all over the world and meeting dozens of remarkable personalities.”
By all accounts, Vernon Taylor spared no expense on his unconventional bride.
Denver
To be closer to the mountains she adored, in 1951 they relocated to Denver, to a sprawling English manor on 160 acres, complete with stables, horses and hounds.
It was in Denver that Ann developed a passion for horses and become an expert in dressage, hunting and jumping which she and “Moose” engaged in not only in Denver, but also in Middleburg, Virginia and Leicestershire, England, riding well into their late 80s.
No longer a designer of clothes, Ann Taylor became a collector, ultimately amassing 4,500 designer pieces, including gowns and dresses from Cristóbal Balenciaga, Mariano Fortuny, James Galanos, Madame Grès, Hubert de Givenchy, and Charles James.
Moose would later gift the whole collection to the Phoenix Art Museum in 2008, and it was exhibited in a 2011 show, Fashion Independent: The Original Style of Ann Bonfoey Taylor.
Vail
In 1963, Moose — one of the founders of Vail — finally completed the ski house in the mountains that he had promised Ann during their brief courtship.
Vernon Taylor built his wife a ski chalet at the foot of Bear Tree run, where they would winter together for more than forty years.
Starting in 1965, Ann employed a ski instructor—neighbor Ulf “Mr. Ski” Edborg—and skied most mornings and afternoons in the old-school European style, feet clamped together, carving turns in slow but graceful arcs.
She used her iconic style, and her connections in New York (she was great friends with socialite Nan Kempner, featured extensively in the Adorable Story #23), to put Vail on the map and lure the right people to town, throwing dinner parties not just for Moose’s business associates (such as IBM CEO T.J. Watson Jr.) but for movie stars (Gregory Peck), authors (Truman Capote) and budding politicians (Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger).
In addition to Vail, Ann and “Moose” had a cattle ranch in Montana where they held their annual Fourth of July get-together for family and friends from around the world for many years.
Ann Taylor skied and entertained at Vail well into her nineties, when life —and far too many cigarettes— eventually caught up with her.
Like her friend Nan Kempner, she struggled with emphysema until she decided to empty her ski chalet in 2005, locked the front door, and never returned to Vail again.
Back in Denver, her health deteriorated.
Ann Bonfoey Taylor died of complications due to emphysema in Denver, Colorado on October 28, 2007 at 96 years old.
—Alberto @
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