OBITUARY:
Judith D. Peabody, a doyenne of New York society known equally for her philanthropy and volunteer work, especially on behalf of people with AIDS and their families, died on Sunday, July 25, 2010 +in her Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. She was 80.
The cause was a series of strokes that had kept her bedridden for the past two years, said her husband, Samuel P. Peabody.
Mrs. Peabody was a boldface name in a postwar roster of socialites that included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Babe Paley, Betsey Whitney, Nan Kempner and C Z Guest — a slender, stately woman whom designers like Bill Blass and Donald Brooks loved to dress and who came to prominence in an age when newspapers reported her comings and goings by referring to her only as Mrs. Samuel P. Peabody.
"With her beauty and charm, she epitomizes the simplicity of our type of customer," Donald Brooks told The New York Times in 1963.
But Mrs. Peabody upheld the tradition of social responsibility among the privileged as much as she did the tradition of glamour and aristocratic living. Devoted to the arts in New York City, she was a longtime board member of the New York Shakespeare Festival, a patron of and donor to the American Ballet Theater and chairwoman of the Dance Theater of Harlem.
In the mid-1960s, after reading a column in The New York Herald Tribune called "Where Are Lenny's Friends Now?," about the legal and personal tribulations of the comedian Lenny Bruce, she wrote him a check and became his part-time amanuensis, helping him with his legal research.
In 1967, Mrs. Peabody and her husband, a former teacher and principal, founded Reality House, a drug rehabilitation center in Harlem, where she also worked as a discussion leader with former heroin users confronting addiction. She spent two years at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, earning a certificate in psychological counseling.
She later worked with a group called the Renegades Housing Movement, a Hispanic youth gang that was trying to rechannel its energies into rebuilding a crumbling building in East Harlem.
"One night she invited them all for dinner to our apartment," Mr. Peabody recalled in an interview Monday. "The doormen were, well, a little surprised. It was a great night."
In the mid-1980s, after the death of a friend from AIDS, Mrs. Peabody volunteered to work for the Gay Men's Health Crisis. She became a care partner — someone who accepts responsibility for helping an AIDS patient — for dozens of men with AIDS and led support groups for patients' loved ones and caregivers, in addition to raising money for the organization and donating her own to it.
"Mrs. Peabody was someone who recognized the challenge of AIDS long before it was fashionable," Marjorie J. Hill, the chief executive of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, said in an interview on Monday. "She did everything she could, on a personal level and an institutional level, to combat the stigma of the disease among people living with H.I.V. and their caretakers. She left her mark on thousands of lives at G.M.H.C."
Judith Anne Walker was born in Richmond, Va., on May 6, 1930. Her parents divorced when she was a young girl, and her mother, Elizabeth Taylor, married Walter G. Dunnington, a New York lawyer. Young Judith attended Miss Hewitt's Classes, a girl's academy in New York City and graduated from the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Conn.
After attending Bryn Mawr for two years, she married Mr. Peabody, in 1951. He was from an illustrious New England family. His great-uncle was a founder of the investment firm Kidder, Peabody; his grandfather founded the Groton School in Massachusetts; his father, Malcolm, was a bishop in the Episcopal church; his brother, Endicott, was governor of Massachusetts in the 1960s, and his sister, Marietta Tree, was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
In addition to her husband, Mrs. Peabody is survived by a daughter, Elizabeth Taylor Peabody of Manhattan, and a half-brother, Bradford Hastings Walker of Charleston, S.C.
Mr. Peabody said that he met his wife at a dinner party when she was just 20 years old and that they were engaged a week later. She was working at a youth center for delinquents at the time, he said, and for one of their first dates he picked her up there.
"She said, ‘Please don't tell my mother,'" Mr. Peabody recalled. " ‘She thinks I'm having French lessons.'
Funeral services will be held 10:00AM, Saturday, July 31, 2010 at St. Mary, St. Jude Episcopal Church, Northeast Harbor with Reverend Patricia Robertson officiating. Interment will be at Forest Hill Cemetery, Northeast Harbor.
Arrangements by Jordan-Fernald, 1139 Main St., Mt. Desert.