Rhinebeck is in fashion for Joan Juliet Buck

Since moving to Rhinebeck three years ago, Joan Juliet Buck has fallen completely in love with the Hudson Valley.

“I like the people up here, the way it feels up here,” says Buck, a writer who is best known as the only American to serve as editor of Vogue Paris.

“The Hudson Valley is so pretty,” she says. “When you’re crossing the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge and look south down the Hudson, it just fills my heart with beauty.”

“And,” she adds with a laugh,“ I like that Staples (in Kingston) is close to the bridge. I go there whenever I need to print things.”

Atria Books has just published Buck’s new book, “The Price of Illusion: A Memoir,” an enchanting account of six decades spent in Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, New York, London and Santa Fe as a journalist, actress, trend-setter and critic.

The 400-page book chronicles her quixotic hunt to figure out the difference between fantasy and reality, between illusive happiness and the real thing.

“I wrote the book to find out what my life had been,” says Buck, who is 68. “I had lived in so many different places. I had to connect the dots.”

“And I started out with an awful lot of dots” — the first draft came in at 1,050 pages — “and then had to whittle them down.”

The book is just like Buck in person – warm, funny, smart, generous, stylish and full of wonderfully detailed stories about herself and the people who have walked – and run – through her life. The writing is wise and incisive, quick-witted and intimate.

All of the bold-faced names in fashion and media are here: Anna Wintour, Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, Jil Sander, Helmut Newton, Gianni Versace, Grace Mirabella, Thierry Mugler, Jonathan and Si Newhouse.

Lots of Hollywood names and faces, too. Her father was the film producer Jules Buck, who discovered the actor Peter O’Toole on the London stage and got him the starring role in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Her mother, Joyce, was an actress whose best friend was Lauren Bacall.

Her father’s best friend was the legendary film director John Huston. They had served together in the Signal Corps during World War II. Huston was Joan’s godfather.

Buck discovered Rhinebeck in 2013 when she came up from the city to visit two old, dear friends who had moved to the village three years earlier.

“I stepped out of the car and thought, OK, we’re all set,” she remembers. “We found a little place that had a 'For Rent' sign and here I am.”

“I had long wanted to live not in New York but near New York,” she says.

“There’s something about a small village and writing that goes well together for me,” she says. But Rhinebeck presented some logistical problems – specifically, a lack of take-out.

“You get into a writing daze and you look up and it’s 9 o’clock and there’s no place open for food,” Buck says.

So she retreated back to the city to do most of the hard-core writing of her memoir. When she finished writing most of the manuscript, she sold her loft and moved back to Rhinebeck full time last spring.

Some of her favorite local haunts include the Montgomery Place estate, the Cole auction house in Red Hook, Adams Fairacre Farms in Kingston, Saugerties, Pete’s Famous Restaurant in Rhinebeck, and Bard College – “I’ve seen some extraordinary productions there.”

“I love buying my chickens and my eggs at Northwind Farms (in Tivoli),” Buck says. “The meat up here is so much better than what you can get in the city.”

“I love wandering,” she adds. “I love interesting old things and I love nature.”

These days, Buck does most of her writing in her book-lined office in the basement of the Morton Memorial Library in nearby Rhinecliff. “My dream was to make a library within a library, ” she says. The rest of her 7,000 books are in storage in Poughkeepsie.

Since 2015, she has been writing very personal essays for Harper’s Bazaar. “They let me write about whatever I want,” she says.

Much of Buck’s freelance writing dried up after she wrote an ill-timed flattering profile of Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It was published in Vogue in March 2011 just as Assad began a violent repression of his people. The Internet went on fire with withering criticism and Buck became something of a pariah. Vogue declined to renew her contract.

She says she has no interest in writing about fashion. “I won’t interview fashion designers anymore,” she says. “I haven’t been to a fashion show in years.”

“I like really practical things,” Buck says. “I’m interested in clothes that keep you warm, clothes that keep you cool – and make you look really nice when you need to.”

Buck still takes the train into New York once a week. “The city has become different for me now that I don’t live there,” she says. “I go out and meet people and do things; I use the city as a tourist.”

And then she loves coming back home on the Amtrak train. “When the train leaves Poughkeepsie, heading north, there’s a moment when we’re about two minutes out of Poughkeepsie when I just feel so happy – and it happens every time.”

More on Joan Juliet Buck

The only people with whom she shared parts of the draft of her memoir were the actress Anjelica Huston and her sister, Allegra Huston, “just because they’re like sisters to me and I wanted to get it right.”

She considers French her first language, then English. Her parents fled McCarthy-era Hollywood in the early 1950s, and Joan grew up in a pink palace outside of Paris.

As an actress, Buck landed the part of Madame Elisabeth Brassart, head of the famous Le Cordon Bleu cooking school, in Nora Ephron’s 2009 movie “Julie & Julia.” And then she wrote about what it was like to audition for Ephron after she died in 2012.

When she married the English writer John Heilpern in 1977, her friend Karl Lagerfeld made her wedding dress and Manolo Blahnik, a friend since they were teenagers, was her attendant. Buck and Heilpern divorced five years later.

The late singer/songwriter/artist and novelist Leonard Cohen was a great admirer.

As editor-in-chief of Paris Vogue from 1994 to 2001, she doubled the magazine’s circulation and became known for her single-theme issues on quantum physics, music, art, sex and theater.

Buck dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers to work as a fashion assistant and book critic for Glamour magazine.

At 22, she met Andy Warhol, and he made her the London correspondent for Interview magazine.

Buck has written fiction, too. While a contributing editor to Vogue, Vanity Fair, Traveler, and The New Yorker, she wrote two novels, “The Only Place to Be” and “Daughter of the Swan.”

Meet Joan Juliet Buck

What: Joan Juliet Buck will be reading from her memoir, “The Price of Illusion: A Memoir” at Oblong Books & Music

When: 7 p.m. April 1.

Where: The bookstore is at 6422 Montgomery St. in Rhinebeck.

RSVP: http://www.oblongbooks.com/event/joan-juliet-buck-price-illusion-memoir