“Charlotte is a real dynamo,” says Nina Griscom. “There are a lot of people in this town who are big talkers, but she’s a doer. You give her a project, and she runs with it. How does she do it all?”
“I don’t need a lot of sleep,” Moss says as if in answer to that question. “Five hours is good for me, and more than six is too much.”
Nowhere is Moss’s industriousness—or her insistence on good help—more apparent than at her home. Upon arrival, one is greeted by her uniformed housekeeper and her house manager, a fair-haired young man who scutters through the rooms, lighting scented candles and refreshing fragrance diffusers. Coffee is immediately served, accompanied by monogrammed linen napkins that have been ironed to a potato-chip crispness. “There’s just no excuse for bad housekeeping,” she declares. “Cleanliness is something that doesn’t cost anything. It’s about self-respect.”
The couple’s two other homes, in East Hampton and Aspen, are apparently kept to the same standard. “We sold our old house in Aspen, and I have a team out there right now, moving us into a new house,” she says. “I’ve completely delegated the installation to my staff. It makes them nervous, doing this for the boss,” she says, chuckling a little. “But I think it’s critical for their growth.”
Sitting in an upholstered chair in the corner of her book-lined study, which is crammed with photographs of her “favorite broads” like Elsie de Wolfe, Coco Chanel and Babe Paley, Moss exudes the air of one raised with such finery. But in fact she grew up in modest circumstances, the eldest of five children. The family lived in a Richmond subdivision that Moss describes as “straight out of Leave It to Beaver.” Her father was an Army colonel, and her mother stayed home with the kids. Her grandmother, who sold china at the local department store, often brought young Charlotte to work, an experience that Moss believes primed her for a career in retail.
A detail of Moss’s home
Though interior design was always a passion, she majored in English at Virginia Commonwealth University because, she says cheerfully, “I didn’t draw, and I still can’t draw.” After marrying her college boyfriend, she lived for a time in Los Angeles, but after five years, the marriage broke up, and she moved with a girlfriend to Manhattan. She got a job as a secretary at the investment firm A.G. Becker and eventually worked her way up to vice president in the tax department. “This was the early Eighties. There weren’t many women in investment banking,” she says. “I was using baskets for my in-boxes, and one day somebody told me I had to take them out because they looked too fluffy.”
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