Colette Douglas of New York City, 96, died at her home there on Saturday. Mrs. Douglas, also a longtime resident of Bridgehampton, had been in failing health for some time.
The daughter of a Parisian mother, Germaine Massabuau, and a New England father, George Harding Smith Jr., she was born in Tinchebray, France, on Nov. 19, 1926. She grew up in Greenwich Village’s historic MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens.
A devoted student of family history on both sides of the Atlantic, she visited France often throughout her life, said her family, and “lovingly cared for the ancestral home in Normandy up until her death.”
At Vassar College, she took an accelerated track of academic study and graduated in just three years, at age 19, with a degree in history. A lover of music and song, she performed with, and composed music for, the Black Garters, Vassar’s singing group in the 1940s.
World War II had just ended when she graduated, and she went to Paris to work for the American Embassy there. Tall and strikingly beautiful, she also worked briefly while in Paris as a model for Harper’s Bazaar.
Mrs. Douglas, a member of the Bridgehampton Club for over 60 years, was an excellent tennis player, having learned the game from her father. She played there regularly into her 70s, and in Manhattan as well. She was an enthusiastic downhill skier, too, on slopes in Austria, Colorado, Utah, California, Vermont, and elsewhere.
“Friends and family will never forget Colette’s original — and more than occasionally outrageous — sense of humor,” the family wrote. “There were few things she enjoyed more than making people laugh.”
She is survived by three children, Philip Le Breton Douglas of New York, Christine Sanders Douglas Tansey of Bristol, R.I., and Dr. Carolyn Jory Douglas, also of New York, and their spouses, Susan Wald Douglas, Charles Tansey, and Dr. Jonathan Jacobs. Seven grandchildren survive as well. Her husband, Paul Wolff Douglas, predeceased her, as did a son, Paul Harding Douglas.
Burial, in Bridgehampton’s Edgewood Cemetery, was private. Memorial contributions have been suggested to the Vassar College Office of Advancement, 161 College Avenue, Box 14, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 12603.
