Racy Lacey

D.C.'s newest art dealer

No city worth its marble columns can ever have too many art galleries, and Washington adds another to its list this summer when the Neuhaus Collection opens for business in Georgetown.

"The gallery is a perfect reflection of my taste," says Lacey Neuhaus, the brainy blonde proprietress, whose first exhibition features fifteen works by American landscape artist George Inness. That show runs through early September, and will be followed by paintings of the Hudson River School. "Paintings will be shown in living spaces that look just like rooms in my clients' homes. . .The idea is uniquely mine."

And who, you ask, is Lacey Neuhaus?

"She's so smart and lovely," declares one prominent social planner. "Isn't she going with Teddy?" That's Senator Ted Kennedy, and the answer was a bipartisan "yes" until the ultradashing Senator John Warner (Liz Taylor's ex-hubby) entered the picture to become Lacey's new mandate.

Since shifting to the romantic right, the Houston heiress has been seen with Warner at a Saudi Embassy bash and a museum fund-raiser, but has usually managed to elude the paparazzi. "She's a very private person," confides a tennis pal.

"Certainly when I acted I had a public life," explains Lacey, who once starred opposite sex godlet Don Johnson in the ill-fated TV series From Here to Eternity. "But there's always been a private part of me, too," she says. "And there always will be."

Bill Thomas