V.F. Diary

DEBORAH MITCHELL

Diana goes home; Hamptons Icahn-ography; Journal's Snyder snipes; Ross School sets Sale

The newest accredited school in East Hampton is the Ross School, a private experimental institution founded by Courtney Sale Ross, widow of Time Warner's Steve Ross, to educate their daughter, Nicole. The school had its beginnings in 1991, when Courtney decided to take her daughter on an educational trip to the Far East instead of enrolling her in the third grade at Spence. The entourage of 12 traveling scholars included Courtney and Nicole, a friend of Nicole's, a photographer, and two gym teachers who did double duty as massage therapists. Last year, the school was chartered by the state, and this fall ten 9to 11-year-old girls will study Greek civilization.

Ross students have been all over the United States, and to the Galapagos Islands, Berlin, and Paris, where they stayed at the Ritz and saw the Egyptian artifacts at the Louvre before a later class trip to Egypt. They've even had lunch with Jesse Jackson, who discussed his recent trip to South Africa.

Courtney is president of the school's board, and has just hired Anne-Imelda Radice, who put together an impressive program for the Ross students on Washington, D.C., to be the liaison between the board and the school. Radice is best known as the "decency czar," for her controversial stint as acting head of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992. This July, Ross's teachers, parents, and board members met for 10 days to plan the next school year's curriculum.

ICAHN OF THE HAMPTONS

Poor Carl Icahn will miss the Hamptons this August. The financier who led TWA into bankruptcy loves his East Hampton home, but he has to hand it over for the month to his estranged wife, Liba. The change in tenancy is catching neighbors by surprise. "I always thought she hated it out here," says one Icahn-ographer. Neither of the Icahns, currently embroiled in an acrimonious divorce in Westchester, would talk.

AND...

. . . After being fired as head of Simon & Schuster, Dick Snyder was not interested in being interviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But media consultant John Scanlon arranged for Snyder to go down to the Journal's Liberty Street offices to meet personally with reporters Meg Cox and Johnnie Roberts—with the condition that

an editor sit in on the interview. Scanlon won the battle but lost the war: he blasted the piece as "unbalanced, unfair, and inaccurate."

. . . Princess Diana spent quality time with British actor Jeremy Irons at the Vanity Fair benefit in London for the Serpentine Gallery, of which she is the patron. The previous week, Diana attended the dinner party that Jacob Rothschild hosted at Diana's childhood residence, Spencer House, for American financier Teddy Forstmann. Rothschild sits on the international advisory board of Forstmann's Gulfstream company.

. . . Despite reports to the contrary, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg did not go to the Gaza Strip six weeks after her mother's death. At least two wire services evidently confused Caroline with her cousin Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, who led a five-member delegation to Gaza and the West Bank in July. "I think Caroline's going to become very much like her mother, very reclusive," reports Laurence Learner, whose book The Kennedy Women (Villard) will soon be a CBS mini-series.