The New York Times, by Corey Kilgannon, October 21, 2008
Marie-Dennett McDill loved the Carlyle Hotel.
She stayed there whenever she was in New York, and adored the regular entertainers like Bobby Short and Eartha Kitt at the Café Carlyle, and the pianist Loston Harris in the lively Bemelmans Bar. She loved the uniformed elevator men and bellmen and the family of longtime staff. She loved that Central Park was only a short block away.
So when Mrs. McDill, who grew up in society in Washington and was enjoying an outdoors life in South Woodstock, Vt., learned she had terminal cancer this summer, her family immediately booked her a suite on the eighth floor for an open-ended stay, but one they sadly knew would not be open-ended enough.
“The family came to me and said, ‘We want to check her in till the very end,’ ” said Alexandra E. Tscherne, director of residences at the Carlyle. “It was a unique request, one I’ve never had previously. They wanted her set up in one of her favorite places, and they didn’t know how long it would last.”
It lasted 10 weeks. Mrs. McDill died in her sleep in the Carlyle last Wednesday.
Mrs. McDill was youthful and full of energy at 71 and spent her days outdoors gardening and painting, so it was shocking to her three children when she learned at the beginning of August that she had a fast-spreading cancer.
“It wasn’t a fight for life anymore, but a matter of time,” said her son Thomas Gardner.
The family hired 24-hour hospice care, but Mrs. McDill, at least until the very end, was in sufficient mental and physical shape to enjoy her final stay at the Carlyle. The hotel, at Madison Avenue and 76th Street, is one of New York’s most luxurious, with a long list of celebrities, presidents and royalty who have stayed or lived there.
Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children’s books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter.
The family hired Mr. Harris to play Mrs. McDill’s favorite songs at her memorial service at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue on Saturday. It was a sophisticated, poignant and kick-up-your-heels affair, almost like something out of a Cole Porter song. Mr. Harris played “Just One of Those Things” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
Month-to-month suites at the Carlyle are always expensive, but less so during the summer months, when they cost about $17,000 a month.
“It wasn’t a search for extravagance, but a search for comfort. It wasn’t the inexpensive option, but it was the greatest comfort we could afford, so of course we would do that for her,” said Mr. Gardner, chief executive of the Motley Fool, a financial information company he founded with his brother, David Gardner.
Staffers helped her with chores related to her impending death, said Ms. Tscherne, who agreed to sign as a witness to Mrs. McDill’s will and even ran across the street to get a notary public.
The family hired two attendants from Brooklyn to care for Mrs. McDill: Rose Marie Moore and her sister Shirley Innis. In the evenings, Ms. Moore would sing spirituals for Mrs. McDill.
“She would put her head back and close her eyes and ask me to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ She’d say, ‘Give me the long version, Rose,’ ” said Ms. Moore, who took the subway from East New York to stay in the Carlyle with Mrs. McDill.
“It was like low class to high class, going in there,” she said. “I would call her my queen, my majesty, and she called me her princess, and treated me like one.”
Ms. Moore sang “Swing Low” again at the memorial service on Saturday, and family members recalled Mrs. McDill as hardly the demure society type, but more like a Katharine Hepburn character.
After graduating from Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, she dreamed of art school, but wound up going to Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., obeying the wishes of her father, H. Gabriel Murphy, part-owner of the Washington Senators baseball team, which later moved to Minnesota and became the Twins.
Mrs. McDill’s first husband was Paul Gardner Jr., a lawyer. After a divorce, she married Jonathan McDill, formerly in charge of cataloging for the Dartmouth libraries. He died in 1998. As a gardener, she took design cues from formal French and Italian gardens and added her own resourceful touches.
She loved the paintings of Henri Matisse and the writing of Mark Twain and Robert Frost. She sold a few paintings but gave away many more. She rarely bothered with computers or cooking.
“It was not that she could not cook, but that she did not,” David Gardner said.
After the memorial service, some of her friends said they were rethinking their own send-offs.
“People came up to me and said, ‘We’re changing our plans for our funeral – we want it to be fun,” Thomas Gardner said. “The only sad thing was that Mom wanted to keep living.”