Marguerite Littman, a honey-voiced Louisianian and literary muse who taught Hollywood to speak Southern, but who left her most enduring legacy as an early force in the fight against AIDS, died on Oct. 16 at her home in London. She was 90.

...By all accounts hypnotically charming, Ms. Littman, who landed in Los Angeles at midcentury, counted among her closest friends the writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy, as well as Gore Vidal, David Hockney and, famously, Truman Capote, who is said to have distilled that charm into his most famous character, Holly Golightly of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

“She was a rarefied creature — generous, restless,” the Irish novelist and memoirist Edna O’Brien wrote in an email, adding, “She was like a character in fiction.”

An oft-told story about Ms. Littman goes like this: Mr. Capote and Ms. Littman were sitting at the pool at Cipriani’s in Venice in the late 1970s when Ms. Littman pointed out an extremely thin woman. “That is anorexia nervosa,” she declared. And Mr. Capote replied, “Oh Marguerite, you know everybody.”

... In 1986, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Ms. Littman, who was then living in London, wrote to 100 friends asking them each to contribute 100 pounds as a founding member of what would become the AIDS Charitable Trust, a powerhouse of fund-raising in Britain for more than a decade. Those famous friends all kicked in, and continued to do so.

... “Marguerite was a true vanguard in the war on H.I.V./AIDS,” Mr. John and David Furnish, the organization’s chairman, wrote in an email. “In the ’80s, people dying of AIDS were treated like lepers — shunned from society because of fear, ignorance and bigotry. With her customary wit and indefatigable life force, Marguerite steamrollered in where others feared to tread and raised millions.”

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/style/marguerite-littman-dead.html

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