Mary Huntting Rattray, 89, Bohemian

Mary Huntting Rattray, who died Monday morning at home on Old Stone Highway in Springs after a long decline precipitated by a stroke some years ago, loved nothing more than to walk the cliffs of Montauk, retracing journeys she had made as a small girl on motoring expeditions with her grandfather, in his Model T, when roads were few and wild grapes were many. Like most children of East Hampton families with roots stretching all the way back to the mid-17th century — in her case, the Edwardses and Hunttings — she had been raised with an awareness of and fascination with deep history.

One of her favorite stories to recount, in her later years, was the memory of her wizened great-grandmother, Adelia Conklin Edwards, sitting by the fire in Amagansett singing popular campaign tunes from the Civil War. She liked to describe how her great-uncle, Daniel Huntting, had decided to become a cowboy after watching Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, in their thousands, make their way on horseback down Main Street. Ms. Rattray could navigate the otherwise all-but-abandoned footpaths of Northwest Woods and Point Woods without a map, long before the arrival of hiking blazes and mountain bikes. 

She also remembered well the lost bohemia of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s.  

As a young woman at the close of World War II, she had run away from the life of a respectable young lady from “Upstreet” East Hampton, to settle in France, where she lived for 12 years. When not off on one of her frequent hitchhiking forays (some of them barefoot) to Dubrovnik or the Greek islands, she was occupied for a time collating field reports in an American intelligence-gathering agency in Paris. That employment ended, however, when she, among many other expatriate American artists and nonconformists, was expelled from France at the request of the United States during a postwar attempt to cleanse government agencies of ne’er-do-wells and security risks. Ms. Rattray’s unpardonable offense — which made her unsuitable to work in intelligence, even at a relatively lowly level — was to have been engaged in a lesbian relationship with a Frenchwoman.

Another favorite story of Ms. Rattray’s was how she waited nervously in a hallway for her fateful interview at the American Embassy in Paris, and the indelible image of the novelist James Baldwin emerging from his own interview and silently flashing her the thumbs-down sign, indicating he was also being expelled. Ms. Rattray, who had arrived in the country in a stripped-down, third-class cabin on a ship that had been used in troop-convoy and had only recently been returned to civilian service, was sent home in a first-class cabin aboard the Queen Mary, at the expense of the American government, dining in state in the grand salon, chatting with British aristocrats in the ship’s library, and relishing the irony. She made her way back to France in short order. 

In the late 1950s, Ms. Rattray worked as an abstract painter, and had a few solo shows in Paris and in New York. She also filed occasional human-interest reports from France — titled “Letter From Paris” — for this newspaper, and was a stringer for a few other New York papers. On her eventual return to the States, at the end of the 1950s, she continued to surround herself with poets, Abstract-Expressionists, jazz musicians, and assorted writers. 

She opened a clothing and repurposed-vintage-jewelry shop on St. Mark’s Place called the Queen of Diamonds, which was —as The New York Times noted in an article in 1961 —  the very first boutique on that street, then a dangerous “low rent area” outside the safe confines of Greenwich Village. In the early 1970s, she opened an outpost of the Queen of Diamonds in Provincetown, Mass., where John Waters, the movie director (a.k.a. the Pope of Trash) became her shop assistant, rooting through bales of vintage clothing for costumes worn by his band of merry moviemaking friends.

Here in East Hampton, Ms. Rattray may be best remembered for her store Promised Land, which opened in the 1970s at the Amagansett Farmers Market before moving to a storefront on Newtown Lane; for decades, it served a faithful and aging clientele, long after its Indian-cotton dresses and Art Nouveau brass earrings had stopped looking quite so radical. She ran Promised Land alongside her daughter, Cleo Kanovitz Cook, who survives her, as do two grandsons, Billy and Winston Cook, all of Southampton. Ms. Rattray’s marriage to the photo-realist artist Howard Kanovitz ended in divorce.

Mary Huntting Rattray was born to Jeannette Edwards Rattray and Arnold Rattray — who was then editor, but not yet owner-publisher, of The East Hampton Star — on Jan. 21, 1927. She left East Hampton as a teenager, when she was sent to Stuart Hall boarding school in Virginia for having been caught once too often consorting after dark with soldiers and sailors from the military base in Montauk. As a young woman, she was frequently accompanied on her adventures in bohemia by her youngest brother, David G. Rattray, the late poet, composer, and translator. Her other brother, Everett T. Rattray, also died before her.

Her closest friends, until the end of her life, were all fellow travelers in nonconformity. These included the abstract painter Robert Harms of Southampton; Marijane Meaker (a.k.a. M.E. Kerr), the novelist and short-story writer; Clarice Rivers, whose longtime husband, the late painter Larry Rivers, played saxophone in a bebop band with Mr. Kanovitz on trombone, and the late Patsy Southgate and Joe LeSueur of Springs.

In the last months of her life, Ms. Rattray looked back with retrospective delight on her many transatlantic crossings, most especially, but also on innumerable pleasure trips with her daughter to India, Yugoslavia, Italy, and, of course, France. 

Her many journeys by sea — from her grandfather’s bunker steamer at the old Promised Land fish factory on Napeague to the Cunard liners to small ferries in Istria — were frequently on her mind, as dementia took hold over the last weeks, and she drifted in time and place.

“I must get up from this chair and move myself along soon,” she told a family visitor two weeks ago. “Unless you are going to carry me out to the boat?”