News of a death in the Vanity Fair family from the coronavirus went out last Thursday at 3:32 p.m. in a one-line email from biographer Robert Caro: “I regret to have to inform you all that Patti Bosworth died this afternoon.”

Patricia Bosworth—universally known as Patti—was an actor turned journalist, a celebrated biographer, and memoirist. She was also one of the magazine’s most valued writers, steeped in Broadway and Hollywood, a woman beloved by a wide circle of friends, both from those worlds and from book publishing. She was, as her longtime V.F. editor Wayne Lawson describes her, “the ultimate benign gossip,” mischievous but never malign. Or as essayist Daphne Merkin puts it, a woman in full—and “full of beans.”

“What I find most memorable and remarkable about her was the spirit of good cheer and enthusiasm that she conveyed on every occasion,” says writer Gay Talese, a friend of more than 50 years. “I’m sure that her multitude of friends received the same affectionate greetings that came my way, and as a result, we all felt very valued and special. And now, sadly, we are less so.”

“Her life was a generous deed,” adds fellow biographer Stacy Schiff. “She was an exceptionally hard worker. Yet how lighthearted she was—the world’s best lunch date.”

“She wanted to know everything,” biographer Amanda Vaill recalls. “It’s what made her a good actress, director, writer, and wonderful friend.”

Legendary biographers Robert and Ina Caro, also friends of Bosworth for more than 50 years, sometimes sensed a sadness behind her snapping blue eyes, and admired her all the more for that. “I have watched Patti grapple with some serious personal problems in her life,” Bob Caro notes. “Not once did her chin come down or her smile fade. And not once did she stop working. Behind that bright smile was real integrity.”

The great surprise, beyond the fact of her death, was Bosworth’s age. Could she really be 86? A woman as vivacious as she? Until last month, her age would have inspired a raucous birthday gathering. Now it was the calling card for COVID-19.

In retrospect—the bare wisdom of weeks—Bosworth’s story illuminates a Manhattan subculture under siege, of artists and writers, many of them of advanced age, not yet clear on what was hitting them. Against an invisible threat, they traded jocular greetings and fist bumps at book parties. Surely the scare was overblown. And then, each day, came shocking news: stores shuttered, gatherings banned, masks donned. By the time Bosworth died on April 2, white tents were going up in Central Park to house the sick, and the worst was on its way to challenge the nation.

The sadness that friends saw in Patti Bosworth went back decades and filled two gorgeous memoirs. Her father, Bartley Crum, was a crusading West Coast lawyer who represented the Hollywood Ten and was hounded for his courage by the FBI. He drank too much, made Seconal part of the mix, and eventually succeeded in killing himself. Patti’s younger brother, Bart, shot himself to death after a scandal at Reed College that revealed his homosexuality. The coming to terms with her father filled Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story (Simon & Schuster, 1997). The saga of her brother, and everything else, became The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in l950s Manhattan (HarperCollins, 2017).

Life wasn’t all black—by a long shot. Bartley Crum had grateful actors as clients, including Montgomery Clift, who so entranced Patti with his piercing dark eyes and hooting laugh that she kept one of his cigarette butts for life.

By the time she was 18, her family had moved to New York, and Bosworth had become a model. She was discovered by two photographers, Diane Arbus and her husband, Allan, working commercially early on; they cast her in a campaign for the Greyhound bus company. Later, Bosworth would write a much-admired biography of her gifted, tortured friend Diane, herself a suicide.

Men enchanted her, and she them. But the ones Bosworth chose for much of her life were often troubled, starting with a physically abusive painter at Sarah Lawrence whom she married on a whim. When he tried to strangle her in a taxi, Bosworth managed to flee, ending up penniless in Vermont, weeping in a hotel lobby. (Her New York therapist was there on vacation but shut the door in her face.) A documentary filmmaker bailed her out and brought her with him on a shoot with Robert Frost. Between setups, Patti gabbed with the four-time Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, who heard her stories with interest but alarm. “You should take life seriously, girl,” he told her. And so she did.

Intrigued by her father’s Hollywood connections, Bosworth auditioned for the vaunted Actors Studio. By then she had changed her surname from Crum to Bosworth, her mother’s maiden name, at her father’s suggestion—so critics couldn’t call her performances “crummy.” Anyone could audition, but only 5 out of 500 were chosen each year. Bosworth did a scene from Our Town, to be told by a voice in the darkness “Stop! Time’s Up!” She rushed offstage, devastated. Soon, a hand reached for her arm. “Stop crying! You passed!” The voice belonged to Actors Studio cofounder Elia Kazan. He would become “a huge influence on her,” says Frances, his widow. “Very encouraging about her acting and her writing. And she adored him.”

At a party for new members, as Bosworth later wrote, she witnessed “a barefoot Marilyn Monroe, in a skintight black dress, undulating across the floor opposite Paul Newman.” At the end of the evening, director Lee Strasberg offered her a ride home in his car. Bosworth slid in to find Monroe in the back, dreamily smoking a cigarette. “From outside came a voice,” she later wrote. “‘Hey Lee, going my way?’ And Harry Belafonte hopped in beside me.” The group fell silent as the ride got underway, each star daunted by the others. Finally Bosworth commented on Monroe’s gigantic pearls. “Yeah, the emperor gave them to me,” Monroe said, offhandedly. She meant Emperor Hirohito of Japan, who had presented them to her at Monroe and Joe Dimaggio’s private wedding ceremony.

Bosworth won theater roles, though not as many as her fellow students Marlon Brando, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Tennessee Williams—and Steve McQueen, the last of whom took Bosworth on his motorcycle for hot dogs in Central Park, only to break it to her gently that he had a girlfriend. For all the stagecraft she learned, her biggest role was in a splashy Hollywood movie, The Nun’s Story (1959), in which she played Audrey Hepburn’s best friend at the convent—only to be advised by the luminous star not to “act” at all.

The film was about to start shooting in Rome, but Bosworth had a distressing secret. Not long before landing the part, she had gotten pregnant. Her boyfriend at the time had no interest in starting a family, so if Bosworth wanted to play across Hepburn, she would need to get an abortion. The doctor was brusque but competent, enough to prescribe her pills afterward for hemorrhaging, a real danger on high-altitude transatlantic flights. On the Paris stopover to Rome, she managed to leave them in the ladies’ room.

Bosworth flew to Rome without incident. But soon the actors were taken to a nearby convent for “research.” Bosworth found herself interviewing a nun who looked at her sharply. “You seem unwell,” the nun remarked. Bosworth waved her off, but the sister insisted on giving Bosworth her name and phone number. An hour later, back at her hotel, Bosworth began bleeding heavily—and called her new acquaintance, who summoned an ambulance, and saved Bosworth’s life. The sister also kept the crisis from her superiors. “God has saved you for something,” she told Bosworth at her bedside. “There is a reason you are still alive. What do you want to do with yourself?”

“I want to be a writer,” Bosworth said.

The nun frowned. “Writers are dreamers.”

Bosworth disagreed, and when the filming was done—and a lifelong friendship with Hepburn begun—she took to writing for women’s magazines. That led to a friendship with Clay Felker, editor of the New York Herald Tribune magazine, which in 1968 would morph into New York magazine. “Clay called her into his office and got her talking about her gabfests with other leading ingenues,” recalls Gail Sheehy, a stalwart of New York and later Vanity Fair, and also Felker’s future wife. “Clay strongly encouraged her to give up acting: He would make her into a journalist.” The gabfest became Bosworth’s first story, molded by Felker. Others followed.

Eventually came a string of first-rate biographies of entertainment figures: her childhood crush Montgomery Clift, her close friend Jane Fonda, and the elusive Brando, along with her acclaimed study of Diane Arbus. All of her famous subjects had demons, as Bosworth’s father and brother had had; the demons were what drew them to her. At the same time, she wrote a glittering array of Vanity Fair profiles, from her take on Lee Strasberg and his relationship with Marilyn Monroe to the Hollywood years of novelist Norman Mailer, from actor (and eventual Tribeca movie king) Robert De Niro to Bosworth’s former boss, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. (Patti, for a time, was executive editor of the erotic women’s magazine Viva.) V.F. executive digital editor Mike Hogan, who ushered many of those pieces into print, loved nothing more than a martini-laced lunch with Bosworth in which he could just say “What was the Actors Studio really like?,” and Bosworth would be off and running.

Still enchanted by men, Bosworth made better choices but with tragic endings. Her second husband, playwright Mel Arrighi, died at 52 of a cardiac arrest. Her third was a former fashion photographer (and sometime theater director and ad-agency figure), Tom Palumbo, who had taken some of his best photographs with his then wife, model Anne St. Marie. Yet Bosworth made it her mission to promote his work, embracing his children, and nursing him through a long terminal illness.

Despite these hardships, Bosworth delighted in hosting parties, mixing the known and unknown in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment she inherited from Palumbo as her writing space. “There were people from Actors Studio, like Ellen Burstyn, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson,” recalls Jane Lahr, the sister of biographer and drama critic John Lahr and the daughter of actor Bert Lahr. André Bishop of the Lincoln Center Theater would be talking with playwright John Guare. “One night, I sat next to Dick Cavett. That never would have happened anywhere else…Marvelous.”

Last fall, at 85, Bosworth was still giving her famous parties—as usual, on another writer’s behalf. To celebrate Amanda Vaill’s new book on choreographer Jerome Robbins, the guests included Penguin Random House editor Shelley Wanger, former editor in chief of Vogue Paris Joan Juliet Buck, film critic Molly Haskell, Gail Sheehy, Bob and Ina Caro, and veteran V.F. editor Wayne Lawson. The get-together had a postwar, ’50s vibe, enhanced by the pictures by her late husband—of a young Miles Davis, and other luminaries—that covered the walls.

Bosworth knew the book she wanted to write next: a biography of Paul Robeson, the actor and civil rights activist whom her father had admired. It was a hard sell—a white biographer of Hollywood stars taking on a revered and complex black icon—and 28 publishers passed. But finally, with a new agent, former Vanity Fair editor David Kuhn, Bosworth got Farrar, Straus and Giroux to sign on. She was thrilled, the more so when she took a recent 20-day tour of the Civil Rights South. With her contract in hand, she persuaded a relative of Robeson’s to open the family archives. “I’ve got gold,” Bosworth chortled to a friend.

Back in New York, Bosworth attended a March 9 book party for her friend Honor Moore, the poet and playwright. Initially the event was to be hosted by friends in their 79th Street apartment. But there was muttering a few days before that a public space might be better than a private one, allowing guests more space to spread out (though no one had yet heard of the six-foot rule). Instead, the group gathered across the street at the New York Society Library.

“It felt like the summer of 1914, before World War I,” Moore now recalls. “It was golden. We were all together. There were people who didn’t come because they had a little sore throat. So perhaps the room was three quarters full. But of course Patti would be there. It was part of our lives that we would celebrate each other’s books.”

Afterward, Bosworth walked with her friend Daphne Merkin to the restaurant E.A.T. on Madison Avenue and the two talked about their next books. Bosworth was ebullient about the Robeson project. “This dinner was so cozy,” Merkin recalls. “Am I feeling elegiac? I was thinking that I could learn from her a kind of…what’s the word? She was very onward. She didn’t dwell. And her energy was beyond my grasp.”

Two nights later, on March 11, Bosworth attended a seated dinner for the nonprofit Bio, dedicated to biographers. She was the first to arrive, greeting her hosts with elbow bumps and her signature, beaming grin. More than one guest at the dinner wondered aloud if this might be the last public gathering any of them might attend for a while—for a few weeks, maybe a month. .

Among her rounds those next days, Bosworth spoke with actor Alec Baldwin, Bosworth’s longtime cochair of the Actors Studio board. Baldwin adored her. “A ceaselessly warm and kind woman,” he insists, “never a whine out of her, never an unkind word or assessment of people.” They talked of what to do for the Studio’s upcoming 75th anniversary. “We were starting to get some lift under our wing,” Baldwin says. But now the wind was ebbing.

It was on March 13 that Bosworth’s support team—two relatives and two assistants who took turns attending to Patti’s needs—began to worry. Bosworth had always been a terrible patient, ignoring all symptoms and just willing her way back to health. On the phone, her assistant Jaime Lubin asked if she could come take Bosworth’s temperature. No, Bosworth said, she would be fine. Groceries, perhaps? Again, Bosworth demurred. She just wanted to work on the Robeson book in her cozy flat. Her partner, Doug Schwalbe, an agent and manager for classical musicians, was uptown at his own Upper East Side apartment. If she began to feel worse, Bosworth could go there.

One night that week, Bosworth walked into Joe Allen, the famous Theatre Row restaurant on 46th Street that she’d frequented for decades. She heard a booming, happy voice. “Patti! Patti!” It was actor Brenda Vaccaro, an old theater-world friend, sitting at dinner. “She came running, we hugged and kissed, I said come and sit. She had her martini, we talked and laughed and giggled, and reminisced. The whole table stopped because we ruled it.”

By March 21, Bosworth admitted to her team that she might be getting a cold. Still, for four days she refused to let her stepdaughter, Fia Hatsav, come over with a thermometer. Finally, Hatsav insisted. She arrived with gloves and a mask, and took Bosworth’s temperature. It was high.

The next day, Bosworth tried her doctor but couldn’t get through. Now she was experiencing shortness of breath. Hatsav put her name on an ambulance network; the first one that happened to be free was from nearby Mount Sinai West. That seemed a good sign.

Bosworth was admitted to the emergency room on March 24, but not before her team of aides and relatives was told that Bosworth, because of her age, would not qualify for a ventilator. She would be fitted instead with an oxygen mask—a large, cumbersome, and even painful, contraption called a BiPAP—that Bosworth was soon trying to pull from her face. The next day, Wednesday, March 25, Bosworth was transferred to the COVID-19 unit. That was when, as one of Bosworth’s assistants put it, the roller coaster began.

At first, Bosworth’s doctors said she might not last five days. After day three, they came back to say that Bosworth was regaining strength and staging a miraculous improvement. She was even able—briefly—to take off the BiPAP and talk on the phone. But then her breath grew short and the dreaded BiPAP came back on. At one point she asked her nurse, “Am I going to die?” The doctors told her they didn’t know.

The morning of March 28 went badly. A new doctor called and advised the family to sanction a morphine drip. It might be a good time, he said, for them to pull Bosworth’s affairs into order. Yet by the afternoon, Bosworth was once again feisty, and over the next three days, she remained stable. Thanks to a sympathetic nurse, the family managed a WhatsApp video call, using the nurse’s phone. Four visual lifelines led from the outside world to the phone the nurse held. Bosworth had to keep the hated BiPAP on, but she could see and hear what her loved ones were saying. She could also write responses on a pad. At one point, Lubin asked Bosworth how she felt about a morphine drip. Bosworth wrote “No” with three exclamation marks. To her family members, one by one, she wrote messages of love, starting with Doug Schwalbe, who had been getting daily reports from Bosworth’s team.

Unfortunately, while the video chat helped buoy Bosworth’s spirits, it did nothing to affect her underlying condition. “The infection is worsening,” one of the doctors said.

Two days later, on Thursday, April 2, Patricia Bosworth died quietly and painlessly, her fierce energy quelled by the virus at last.

One day later, at almost exactly the hour Bosworth had died, her companion, Doug Schwalbe, died too. He was 92, and passed away at home.

This story has been updated.

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