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, Vogue, May 1967 — Photo © Toni Frissell

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.

Ann Bonfoey Taylor wearing a yellow goatskin coat, walking her three West Highland White Terrier dogs, Vail, Colorado, by Toni Frissell, Vogue 1967 — Photo © Toni Frissel

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.