Reinaldo Herrera, a dapper Venezuelan aristocrat, married to the fashion designer Carolina Herrera, whose social connections made him an indispensable story wrangler and all-around fixer for Vanity Fair magazine, where he served as a contributing editor for more than three decades, died on March 18 in Manhattan. He was 91.
His daughter Patricia Lansing confirmed the death.
Mr. Herrera was born into South American nobility and grew up between Caracas, Paris and New York. After attending Harvard and Georgetown Universities and working as a television presenter for a morning show in Venezuela, he joined Europe’s emerging jet set, mingling with Rothchilds and Agnellis, Italian nobles and British royals.
Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II’s sister, was a pal. He dated Ava Gardner and Tina Onassis, the first wife of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle, and in 1968 he married his younger sister’s best friend, Maria Carolina Josefina Pacanins.
He was old school and Old World. He wore bespoke suits with immaculate pocket squares; his jeans were always crisply pressed. His manners were impeccable. He spoke classical French without an accent. Graydon Carter, a former editor of Vanity Fair, described his voice as a combination of Charles Boyer, the suave French actor, and Count von Count, the numbers-obsessed Muppet.
By the late 1970s, the Herreras were part of the frothy mix that defined Manhattan society at the time — the socialites, financiers, walkers and rock stars, along with a smattering of politicians, authors and artists, who dined on and off Park Avenue and danced at Studio 54. (Steve Rubell, the club’s rambunctious co-owner, used to slip quaaludes into Mr. Herrera’s jacket pockets; Mr. Herrera, who loved a party but not those disco enhancements, would throw them out when he got home.) Robert Mapplethorpe photographed the couple for Interview magazine, Andy Warhol’s monthly chronicle of that world.
In the early 1980s, a few months after Tina Brown became editor of Vanity Fair, Bob Colacello, a former Interview editor who was then writing for Ms. Brown, brought Mr. Herrera into the office. He was so entertaining, as Ms. Brown wrote recently in “Fresh Hell,” her Substack newsletter, that she hired him immediately.
Ms. Brown knew the news value of a man like Mr. Herrera, the currency of his social chops. He called her “Fearless,” short for “fearless leader,” and, she wrote, “like a golden retriever in a dinner jacket,” he brought her dispatches each morning from the evening’s parties.
He was good with the wives of despots, who were among his intimates; he once wrangled Imelda Marcos, the disgraced former first lady of the Philippines who was then in exile in Hawaii, for a profile written by Dominick Dunne. (Mrs. Marcos was not pleased with the result.) He was able to nail down an interview with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat for the writer T.D. Allman on Mr. Arafat’s private jet because Mr. Herrera and Mr. Arafat shared a barber.
He performed the same service for Mr. Carter when he took over the magazine in 1992. In 1996, Mr. Carter was eager for the writer Sally Bedell Smith to pursue a piece about the Rothschilds, the European banking family, and he thought the funeral of one of its scions, who died by suicide at a hotel in Paris that July, might be the way in. But how to sneak Ms. Smith into the service? Mr. Herrera knew just what to do.
“Hire a small dark car with a driver, wear a simple black dress, a plain black hat, black gloves, all for ‘the look.’ Just walk in and be yourself,” he told Ms. Smith. It worked.
“The only time we had a tiff was when Christopher Hitchens did a story that was hard on Mother Teresa,” Mr. Carter said in an interview. (In 1995, Mr. Hitchens excoriated Mother Teresa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and would later be canonized, as a “Vatican fundamentalist,” lover of dictators and “presumable virgin,” among other things.) “Reinaldo stormed into my office and declared, ‘You’ve gone too far. I’m canceling my subscription.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that, you’re on the comp list.’”
Mr. Herrera also taught Mr. Carter how to entertain Princess Margaret (bottles of Famous Grouse whisky and barley water were important) for a dinner he persuaded Mr. Carter to hold for her at his apartment, saying she would be helpful in promoting the European edition of the magazine.
Since protocol, as Mr. Herrera had patiently explained, required that no guests could leave before the princess, and since she stayed past midnight, the evening was a bust, Mr. Carter wrote in his memoir, “When the Going Was Good” (2025). Once everyone was released, Mr. Carter added, “The relief on the faces of the other guests,” among them the entertainment mogul Barry Diller and Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist, “was the sort of look that survivors of a difficult airplane landing have when they step out onto the tarmac.”
Mr. Herrera was very good with royals. He used his title — he was a marquis — only in countries that had functioning monarchies. “We didn’t know he had a title until we launched the U.K. edition of Vanity Fair,” Mr. Colacello said.
But the Vanity Fair writer Amy Fine Collins recalled a time when he was stumped by a queen.
It was a committee meeting, sometime in the early 1990s, of the International Best Dressed List, an annual tradition created in 1940 by Eleanor Lambert, the influential fashion publicist. “I do remember there being a bit of confusion among Reinaldo and his cohort when someone mentioned Queen Latifah,” Ms. Fine Collins said. “Was it possible there was a royal they hadn’t met?”
He was good with protocol in all sorts of areas, as the Rev. Boniface Ramsey recounted at Mr. Herrera’s funeral Mass at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue. Father Ramsey recalled being corrected by Mr. Herrera, an ardent Catholic, who pointed out that the yellow and white Vatican flag outside the parish was hanging upside down.
Mr. Herrera shone at parties, and he believed that a successful evening should always include a controversial figure. He relied on friends like Claus von Bülow, who was acquitted of the attempted murder of his heiress wife, to bring the requisite chemistry. “Claus is a great catalyst,” he told The New York Times in 1987. He noted that his dream dinner party would include Ivan Boesky, the corporate raider charged with insider trading, and Jean Harris, the headmistress who murdered her ex-lover, Herman Tarnower, the inventor of the Scarsdale Diet — though both were unavailable, since they were in prison at the time.
Charlotte Curtis of The Times once described the Herreras as “hopelessly civilized.”
Reinaldo Herrera Guevera was born on July 26, 1933, in Caracas, the eldest of four children of Maria Teresa Guevera de Uslar and Reinaldo Herrera-Uslar, otherwise known as the Marques de Torre Casa. Young Reinaldo grew up in the family home, Hacienda La Vega, which was built in 1590 and is apparently the oldest continuously inhabited house in the Western Hemisphere. He graduated from the St. Mark’s School, in Southborough, Mass., and studied history at Harvard and Georgetown.
In addition to his daughter Patricia and his wife, Mr. Herrera is survived by another daughter, Carolina Herrera Jr.; his stepdaughters, Ana Luisa Bruchou and Mercedes Mendoza; a brother, Luis Felipe Herrera Guevara; 12 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
“Over the years, I came to see Reinaldo’s impeccable comportment as a moral quality,” Ms. Brown wrote in her newsletter. “He felt it was on him to elevate the room and leave people feeling better about themselves.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk. More about Penelope Green
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