Janet Thomas Maloney

Janet Maloney, who in the late 1970s inherited a house on Springs-Fireplace Road that had belonged to her cousin Merrill Millar Lake, died of natural causes at her Manhattan residence on Jan. 4. She was 91.

Ms. Maloney’s favorite thing to do was travel, according to her family. After she met and married her husband, William E. Maloney, in New York City in 1955, they spent about six years living in England, France, and Ireland, spending the longest chunk of time in Marbella, Spain, where, relatives said, they “became the darlings of the older . . . Europeans who made their houses in that playground of the rich.” Family lore has it that she met Mr. Maloney at a ball after pulling him out of the orchestra pit into which he had tumbled.

Before marrying, she had worked for about five years at CBS in the city, a job she found exciting and glamorous and one in which she got to meet such luminaries as Frank Sinatra and Cliff Robertson.

She was born on March 23, 1925, in Forest Hills, one of two children of Carl M. Thomas and the former Helen Young. Her brother, Robert Thomas, died before her. A nephew, Evan Thomas, lives in East Hampton.

Ms. Maloney, who graduated from the Kew-Forest School in Queens, spent happy summers with her Millar cousins, who owned Seafields on Indian Wells Highway in Amagansett, formerly the Namagansett Field Club, which was the hamlet’s first summer social club, founded in 1903, with tennis and cycling. She told her family about the “arduous trek down the road to the beach,” which seemed far away to such a young child. She remembered her older, glamorous cousins dressing up for dances at the Devon Yacht Club and also mentioned admiring the girl whose locker at Devon was next to hers, one Jacqueline Bouvier.

Bronwyn Quillen, Ms. Maloney’s daughter, said that although her mother enjoyed socializing as a young woman, she became less enthusiastic about it as she grew older. She did love gardening and also swimming at Louse Point in Springs, and after inheriting the house nearby (the Merrill Lake Sanctuary is named after her cousin), she and her husband spent weekends and summer holidays there, and, after the 1980s, more and more time. Mr. Maloney died in May 2009. Her friends and family “will remember her as radiant, kind, charming, and incredibly funny,” her daughter said.

In addition to Ms. Quillen and two nephews, Ms. Maloney is survived by a son, Gavin Young Maloney of Little Falls, N.Y., and two grandsons. Most of her friends lived in East Hampton. She was cremated; the family plans to scatter her ashes in the spring.