Restaurateur Madeleine (Lolly) Fassett Dies

Madeleine (Lolly) Fassett, with her husband the founder and owner of Nepenthe, a landmark Big Sur restaurant, has died after cancer surgery. She was 74 and died Jan. 19, said her grandson, Kirk Gafill.

She and her husband, William, purchased a parcel of land with an adobe and log cabin on it from Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. The film celebrities first spotted what was then the headquarters for the Trails Club, predecessor to the Sierra Club, when they were driving along California 1 on their way home from their Carmel honeymoon in the mid-1940s.

The Fassetts opened a restaurant on the ocean-view site in 1949 and over the years it attracted such local luminaries as author Henry Miller and actress Kim Novak and such visiting dignitaries as Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood and Salvador Dali.

One of the main attractions was that the building had been designed by Rowan Maiden, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright.

It became familiar to moviegoers when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made “The Sandpiper” in Big Sur in 1964 and used the interior in several scenes. The restaurant was re-created in reduced scale in France for final filming when Taylor’s tax status kept her from working further in the United States that year, Gafill said.

Earlier it had been a stopping off spot for folk singers and dancers during the Flower Child era of the 1950s.

Besides her husband, Mrs. Fassett is survived by two sons, Griffis and Kaffe; three daughters, Holly, Dorcas Owens and Kim Rowe; a sister and brother, 14 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.