Some months ago, Nona Summers was invited to a charity lunch at a grand clifftop house in Malibu. The first person she met was the television producer Mark Burnett (who is behind more than 100 shows, including The Voice and The Apprentice).
On hearing his name, Nona said: “You should be ashamed of yourself. If it weren’t for you promoting and coddling a bankrupt real-estate shyster, and never admitting what he was really like, keeping quiet for your own ends, we would not have this blustering, dangerous coward in the White House.”
“If you were a man, I’d punch you,” replied Mark, an ex–British Parachute Regimenter.
To which Nona, an ex–Nepal trekker, retorted: “If I were a man, I’d have punched you already.”
They separated, and, in a while, lunch was called. Nona was, unusually, standing on her own, and Mark walked up to her.
“What do you want?,” Nona asked.
“To offer to take your arm going into lunch,” Mark replied.
“But I don’t like you,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter,” he countered. “I noticed your stick earlier, and I’ve been looking at you moving around. You’re almost blind. You were about to fall off this cliff.”
“Hello, I’m Nona”
Historically, depending on where she was, Nona usually greeted someone new with “Hello, I’m Nona,” in one of the six languages she spoke fluently. She believed in the lasting power of friendship and honesty and good times.
She’d studied to be an interpreter at the University of Geneva, having been raised as an only child in a family of two languages, English and German. Nona’s mother, Fritzi Gordon, was a world-champion bridge player, the captain of the English team. Nona said she was almost born under a card table because her mother had a very good hand and didn’t want to leave the table till she’d played it, even though her water had broken.
Nona grew up all over, brought along to bridge tournaments by her fierce but loving mother, in Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and even Lebanon. She’d sit outside the card room and make friends with other boys and girls—the “bridge orphans,” as they called themselves.
Fritzi often had as a bridge partner the movie star Omar Sharif, a bridge nut. He would sometimes join Fritzi on school visits, adding greatly to Nona’s cred with the other girls. (Nona herself was a very good card player, and a real whiz at Ping-Pong, hard and fast, till the blindness started.)
One evening, when Nona was at university, she and another student, Diane Halfin, had a fight over a boy, but then they realized they were more interesting than he was, and an unshakable, unbreakable friendship began, which lasted 60 years.
Both had strong mothers—Fritzi had gotten out of Austria just before the Anschluss, and Diane’s mother had survived Auschwitz. Neither was easily cowed. Diane and Nona shared the same wicked sense of humor and were striking in different ways, the former dark and sultry, the latter with glorious red hair and Magyar eyes. Both were interested in fashion.
On her first marriage, at the age of 20, Diane Halfin became Princess Diane von Furstenberg.
The start of the Swinging Sixties coincided with the start of Nona’s first job, as Omar’s assistant. His house, in Beverly Hills, had Elvis Presley as its neighbor. Nona and 1960s Los Angeles were made for each other—there were parties with Omar and dancing at the Daisy with a new group of friends, including flirtatious young actors such as Ryan O’Neal and producers like Robert Evans. Nona accompanied Omar to all his filming locations and did photography on set. Catherine Deneuve, Helmut Berger, Gregory Peck, and Eli Wallach all became her friends.
Then it was on to New York and Town & Country magazine, where she worked as the assistant to the great fashion photographer Norman Parkinson, from whom she learned a lot to do with faces and how the light can change them, like the butter on a piece of toast.
The late 70s and early 80s was a time of loose money in some circles, good times to be had, but now the men were wearing suits and ties and not flowered shirts. The art world, particularly, was looking to entertain international buyers, who would go to London and drop a few million dollars on an early-period Cézanne.
Nona married the handsome and successful art dealer Martin Summers in London when she was 30. Their daughter, Tara, was born two years later, the apple of both their eyes.
Many people came to Nona and Martin’s parties in their big house in Glebe Place, a lot of them front-page names. Nona was not judgmental about behavior, devoid of any prejudice, except for people who were snobbish, arrogant, or spoke French with a bad accent, the latter two often combining, she said.
Nona liked cocaine and neither called attention to it nor denied it, up until an incident with a disgruntled cook. Nona was coming to see me in New York (I was directing Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart at the Public Theater) and was stopped at the airport in London when customs found some cocaine wrapped in a screw of black tissue paper. It was later learned that the cook had planted it and told her boyfriend, who was a cop with the Chelsea Police, and he tipped off customs. Nona was arrested and grilled at the airport.
“That cocaine has nothing to do with me,” she said.
“How can you say that?” the police asked. “We found it in your luggage.”
“Simple,” she replied. “It was wrapped in black tissue paper. I only ever use white.”
New York, New York
Nona and I had met four years earlier in New York and, against our better instincts, began a relationship that lasted 12 years. Even when it ended, we remained very close, very loving, really, until the end of her life. For 44 years we knew each other.
Our friends in New York were riding high—there were late nights, cocaine and booze, plenty of laughs, secrets shared, behavior sometimes variable, and friendships reinforced, till dawn broke.
There was stress and upset, too, over her relationship with and affection for her husband and her love and guilt about being away from her young daughter. But passionate love can sometimes exact a heavy reckoning. For further proof, have a quick re-read of Anna Karenina.
Traveling with Nona was a delight.
Once, I was in Tokyo, and she joined me when the work I was doing there was finished. She collaborated with a Japanese designer on a new idea for her exercise-wear—Whitney Houston wore an outfit by Nona for her first music video—and soon had learned enough Japanese to give taxi drivers directions in their language, since many of them, with nationalistic pride, pretended they didn’t speak any English.
In 1984, we were in Berlin, and Lorne Michaels was producing a Neil Young concert at the Deutschlandhalle that I was directing. I had been promised a local German crew who could understand English. They turned out to be skillful cameramen, but not many of them had worked in English before and were slow to get the shots, which is not good with fast-paced music. A technician with some more English came into the control truck, but by the time the translator had requested my call for a close-up of Nils Lofgren, Nils Lofgren had disappeared.
But a solution was at hand—if only we could find her. We sent out a P.A. on a motorbike. He found Nona and Lorne’s wife, Susan, strolling along the Kurfürstendamm. Nona came to the concert hall on the back of the motorbike and, translating my English, called the entire show in fast German. “Close-up, Eine Kleine Schwarz” would be for Nils Lofgren, who is five foot three and was wearing a black T-shirt.
In Los Angeles, we’d spend time with Penny Marshall, a very funny, droll woman who had a large collection of fridge magnets in a room full of refrigerators. Nona would go over in the middle of the day, and they’d have a swim and talk into the evening. Their friendship lasted a long time, until Penny’s death in 2018.
I was in New York when Nona called from Los Angeles with a piece of bad news, although its import was not immediately apparent to me.
“I saw the eye doctor today,” she said. “I’ve got something called retinitis pigmentosa [R.P.].”
“What’s that?,” I asked.
“An eye disease.”
“Is it bad?”
“Eventually you’re supposed to go blind.”
“Blind?”
“Yes, but maybe not for years. It can be slow. Oh, hang on, there’s the doorbell. Stephen Frears is taking me out for dinner.”
R.P. was slow but determined and ruthless, capturing a little more ocular territory every year. Then, not long after, Nona decided to go to the Meadows, a place in Arizona for drug treatment. Drugs had cost her a lot, and us. Our relationship had foundered on its gray shore.
Addiction is a dishonest companion, cozying up to the person, promising, then taking away more than it gives, till there’s nothing left.
When Nona left the Meadows, after a long period of treatment, she was the same person but a new model. Her intelligence was sharpened, her joie de vivre a bit battered but very present, and she had an ambition to help people who were addicted.
Nona spoke at meetings in London and Los Angeles. She encouraged, she coaxed, she admonished, she saved. I think her recovery and the true help that she could give people who were ruining their lives was a very profound accomplishment for her. And, even more so, all her friends, the sober and the addicted, gathered around her because she was still the best company in whatever town she was in. And she became a devoted and proud mother of her daughter, now a successful actress.
But still, the disease continued to ruin her eyesight. Her best, truest friend, Diane, stood by her side, doing research and talking to doctors to see if there was any help to be had. Nona, ever resourceful, learned how to cope, carrying a strong flashlight with her, shining it by mistake on people as she’d bump into tables in restaurants. Later, she fixed up an adapted miner’s light so it would be in place on her brow and would light whichever way her head moved. Alarming anyone who saw her, she’d do her morning walk with her white stick up and down the winding road outside her house, as though the fast cars weren’t really there.
Although bright light could help, Nona was becoming increasingly blind, and her stories would include a stumble she’d had, something on the floor she hadn’t seen, or falling over the door of the oven, which had been left open, and cutting herself on the edge, but they were told as jokes. She was devoid of self-pity.
Nona aged like a fine wine, with intelligence, good humor, tenderness, and deep wisdom being the floral notes.
My wife, Lisa, and I had dinner with her in London in July. It was still bright outside at 7:30. She was beautiful, slim, elegant in summer clothes, and happy—to be in London where Tara was with her husband, Anthony, and looking forward to her new apartment, around the corner from friends.
And here we come to the end. To write about the manner of her death is a choice. But it is part of the story.
After a Sunday lunch with a couple of friends, Nona went out in the street for a smoke, one of the friends coming with her. It was a windy day. Nona had her lighter ready and brought up the hem of her long skirt to shield the flame. She lit the cigarette and dropped the skirt and went on chatting. She hadn’t realized and couldn’t see that the hem of her skirt had caught fire and had begun a slow burn of the fabric. The flames reached higher into her clothing, and quicker, gaining speed, signaling disaster, as they continued beyond her blind eyes.
She spent 11 days at the Burns Intensive Care Unit at Broomfield Hospital, Essex, with the greatest care, but, in the end, the burns were too deep and the stress on her body too extreme.
Oh, Nona, we all mourn you. You leave a sea of grief. No one could have invented you.
“And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
Nona Summers was born on March 9, 1947. She died on August 28, 2025, at age 78
Tara Summers, Nona’s daughter, is raising funds to build a garden for the burn patients at Broomfield Hospital, in memory of her mother. You can donate here
Michael Lindsay-Hogg is the director of the original Brideshead Revisited TV series as well as the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus concert film and the Beatles documentary Let It Be
