The Other Ivana

While her family fights over their fortune in British court, the latest Guinness beauty takes on New York

New York's current darling is Ivanaa Lowell, whose fans range from social doyenne Jayne Wrightsman to wickedly witty songwriter Christopher Mason. Youngest, at 26, in a line of beauties descended from the Irish Guinness brewers, she has the poise of one to a storm-struck manor bom. About a messy battle over the family fortune now in the British courts, she says casually that it's "just an interpretation of the will left by my great-grandfather. ' '

In 1948, before Ernest Guinness died, his daughter Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, signed over most of her inheritance to her three children, thereby avoiding a round of taxes; now the 86-year-old marchioness wants to give her last $20-odd million to her two granddaughters. To stop the bequest, her children initiated a lawsuit against both Maureen and the grandchildren, a situation that would seem, for starters, to pit Ivana and her sister against their mother, Lady Caroline Blackwood. Declared Maureen, "I am puzzled and completely heartbroken that my grandchildren's own mother and their two aunts are contesting my rights and insisting on there being a court case."

Ivana doesn't indulge in such Sturm und Drang. She calls her mother Caroline, talks to her daily, and insists that she and her mother are still close to Maureen. Ivana's sister Evgenia, 28, recently brought her husband, the actor Julian Sands, to Caroline's home in Sag Harbor. Everyone visited in the kitchen, where Julian baked meat pies and Caroline and Ivana tested recipes for the cookbook they are compiling, an Americanization of Caroline's British best-seller.

If Ivana seems unfazed by the drama, it may be because she's weathered so many others. She was only six when a kettle of boiling water sent her to the hospital, an accident commemorated by her stepfather, Robert Lowell, in the poem "Ivana" ("Though burned, you are hopeful, experience cannot tell you / experience is what you do not want to experience' '). She was 8 when her real father, Polish-bom composer Israel Citkowitz, died, and 10 when Robert Lowell suffered a fatal heart attack in a New York taxi. Her eldest sister died with a syringe at her side, and her uncle died of AIDS in 1988. In the late 80s, Ivana toured Britain with her own two-woman play about Sylvia Plath, That Mad Miniature Poet, a line she borrowed from her stepfather. She also adopted his surname. "I wanted to start acting because of him," she says. "We'd read to each other out loud, our voices competing."

Meanwhile, she works as a literary scout for Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films (The Crying Game, My Left Foot). "I hired her," says Weinstein, "and two months later I found out who her family was." Bob Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, introduced her to Jayne Wrightsman, whose protegee last decade was Susan Gutfreund. When a guest at one Upper East Side dinner party made a joke at Claus von Billow's expense, Ivana quickly retorted, "That was very Biilow the belt."

Ivana dismisses her social success matter-of-factly: "Really, it's just part of being a young woman in New York, I think." She is more comfortable talking about the cookbook. "Darling is the philosophy. People are meant to say at the end of the meal"—Ivana's voice frames the cookbook's title in perfect italics—" 'Darling, You Shouldn't Have Gone to So Much Trouble.'"

DEBORAH MITCHELL