Patricia Altschul is particular. She does not cook, does not drive and rises at 11 a.m., once her butler has brought breakfast in bed. She gets Botox “everywhere”, only drinks martinis (gin with a twist) and has been married three times (“there could have been more”).
It’s no wonder Altschul—the 84-year-old art advisor, socialite, philanthropist and reality TV star—was an inspiration for the old-money matriarch Victoria Ratliff in HBO’s third series of The White Lotus. Its creator asked the actors who played the Ratliff family to watch Southern Charm, the reality show in which Altschul stars, to prepare their accents and characters.
The internet went wild over the comparison, splicing clips of Altschul being campy and judgmental alongside clips of Victoria, played by Parker Posey, trilling along in near-on identical Carolinian accents. “Time for my medicine,” Altschul said to her butler in one clip, lounging on the piazza and waiting for her martini. “I don’t even have my lorazepam,” said her fictional version in The White Lotus. Sitting across from Altschul today, it is uncanny.
After Altschul’s various careers and marriages, in Washington, Manhattan and Charleston, she has written a memoir, published in the US this week and named after her life’s motto: Eat, Drink and Remarry: Memories from a Lifetime of Art, Class and Southern Charm.
“I love White Lotus,” says Altschul, her hair quaffing three inches upwards before it comes back down again. We are meeting at her Greek revival mansion in Charleston, South Carolina, where she sits in one of her drawing rooms, in a fuchsia-pink kaftan. Peaches, her Pomeranian, is draped across her lap. The house was designed by the late, great Mario Buatta, the “Prince of Chintz”, who renovated it at a cost of $5 million. There are chandeliers (“18th century”), a Georges Seurat post-impressionist landscape (“quite valuable”) and a corner table filled with antique china pugs. It is cartoonishly extravagant.
“I was disappointed that Victoria [in The White Lotus] wasn’t more villainous,” Altschul says with a cackle. Could she see similarities? “I did, but not for all the better qualities that one could have. I think ‘boat people’ says it all,” referring to Victoria’s snobby reference to fellow rich Americans. “It’s saying, ‘They’re not our kind,’” Altschul says. “It’s snobby. People think I’m like that, but I’m not.”
I’m too afraid to say the “people” might be right. Altschul simply needs to be placed in front of something for it to be promptly eviscerated. But she is—because of her snobbery, not despite it—a total hoot. On modern interior design? “There are a lot of hideous things nowadays,” she says. “They’re not pretty, they’re not colorful, or if they’re colorful, they’re garish.” On modern fashion? “When I was in Manhattan [in the 1990s], people dressed beautifully,” she says. “Women didn’t wear clothes that were split down to here, or crop tops. It’s vulgar.” And on modern dating? “I just don’t think that young women today are closers. They’re too obvious, too acquiescent, too accessible. What do we have here”—she breaks off as her butler, Brian, brings a silver platter of egg sandwiches, adorned with bunches of grapes.
How does she feel about dating again herself? “I’ve always liked older men,” she says. “My husbands and my boyfriends were all older. But I’d have to be with somebody 90—and they’re all dead.”
Altschul was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Her mother, a “great beauty”, studied radiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; her father was a surgeon who served as President Roosevelt’s medical adviser. He was such a cad, the tale goes, that he gave out 30 engagement rings before finally marrying. Altschul has always “identified” as Southern, her grandfather a brigadier-general in the Confederate Army.
Her childhood was charmed, riding ponies and using a helicopter “like the family car”. After boarding school, Altschul studied art history at George Washington University, later becoming an assistant professor in 19th-century American art. In the 1970s, she co-founded a private dealership with the art historian Barbara Novak. “Lots of people thought I was just a fluff bunny,” Altschul says.
At home in Georgetown, she had a young son, Whitney, with her first husband, the financier Lon Smith. “I was having such a good time, travelling and making a lot of money, I didn’t want to give up any of that to go on golfing trips with my husband and his clients,” she says. After 15 years they divorced. Her second marriage was to Edward Stitt Fleming, who was “movie-star handsome” and the founder of a lucrative chain of psychiatric hospitals. They divorced in 1995 after six years.
The following year, while living in Manhattan, she married her third husband, Arthur Altschul, 21 years her senior, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and descendant of the Lehman brothers. Altschul existed at the center of the Upper East Side set, described by New York magazine as one of the city’s Big Girls, the “keepers of the benefit circuit”.
“I was there during the Golden Age,” she says. “But everyone we knew there is dead. Or they’re in Palm Beach.”
A select few, including Altschul, were keen collectors of haute couture. She would run into Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton at ateliers. She met André Leon Talley, the late editor-at-large of Vogue, at a black-tie fashion week party in Paris. At Talley’s suggestion, Altschul later gave away her couture collection to the Savannah College of Art and Design. “You can get a million-dollar tax deduction if you donate couture,” she throws her head back laughing. “Besides, I’m not going to wear them down here.”
Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, were also on the scene, Altschul recalls seeing them at a bar on its “best banquette”, Melania admiring her new engagement ring. “It was fun to see how excited she was.”
Her path also crossed with the royals but “thankfully” never Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. “I saw Fergie [Sarah Ferguson] at a cocktail party and she was clearly looking for financial investors for something or other,” says Altschul. “I was also on the board of the New York Historical society and somebody brought her to one of our events and there she was, talking to the director about whether they could do a book party for her. She’s somebody’s guest and here she is trying to hog her book! I just have always found her most vulgar.”
The Duchess of Sussex, Altschul says, is “just West Coast psychobabble … When she named their daughter Lilibet I had to have a martini.”
Luckily Charles and Camilla get better reviews, Altschul has dined with them at Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and Highgrove since being introduced by mutual friends. “He has become much more handsome as he has gotten older,” she says. “And she is great fun.” Altschul has a slice of their wedding cake in her freezer.
In 2000, Altschul’s husband was diagnosed with polymyalgia, an autoimmune disease that causes the musculature to degenerate, and he died in 2002. “I was inconsolable,” she says. In the following years, she moved to the South. After spending time in Charleston, her son Whitney decided to create Southern Charm, in which he is a producer and a character.
And so Altschul lives her ninth life, a caricatured grand dame of etiquette and chintz and a strange sort of celebrity for it, fans waiting outside the gates of her home and stopping her in the street. Lady Gaga said that watching her on the show was “like lookin’ in the damn mirror”.
“A lot of women my age, they play golf and play bridge and their husbands die and they’re left alone,” says Altschul. “Instead I have great friends, great work, I say whatever pops into my head and I don’t edit myself. I really don’t care.”
Megan Agnew is a features writer at The Times and The Sunday Times of London
