Life Without Hal Segerstrom Jr.

Jeanette Segerstrom is reluctant to pose next to the Steinway that graces her bay-front home in Newport Beach.

“I can hardly play now,” she admits, gazing at the baby grand. “Arthritis.”

But it was her love of piano that brought her and her late husband, Hal Segerstrom Jr., together. “Yes, a piano is pretty much where it all began,” she says, flashing a small smile.

So this widow of five months, this shy patron of the arts who has taken her husband’s place beside Henry Segerstrom as a managing partner of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons (owner of South Coast Plaza) sits primly on a piano bench and smiles for the camera.

In minutes, 50 opera buffs will sweep across her gleaming marble foyer to sip Roderer Estate Champagne and dine alfresco on tenderloin of veal with Cognac sauce.

This elegant villa on two bay-front lots is at the top of the social set’s A-list for party sites.

Here lives one of Orange County’s most private and wealthy women (her share of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons is 50%), a woman whose refined taste is manifested in the matching carved jade lamps that adorn a living room table, the amethyst Baccarat candelabra that gleam in the dining room, her Chanel evening wear.

And besides the demands of the business, it is soirees such as this one for Opera Pacific that keep her going.

“Hal loved to share, and he loved people,” says Jeanette, 65, surveying the party scene. Round tables skirted in white are topped with vases of white roses. Programs inscribed with each guest’s name serve as place cards. A pianist plays “The Way You Look Tonight.”

It is seconds before party-goers will arrive.

But there is time for a quick tour of the house--time to talk about her husband of almost 44 years, what they had, her future.

He was nutty about her when she was a music student at USC all those years ago. A pretty brunette with a Pepsodent smile, she was the piano accompanist for the men’s glee club. Hal was a member. “He had the most beautiful voice,” she said.

He asked her to cut class to see “Madama Butterfly” at the Shrine Auditorium across the street. It was their first date.

Later, after they began seeing each other, he would have to excuse himself on weekends. He had to work his family’s Orange County farm that was the largest independent producer of lima beans in the nation.

“He told me I could stay in my place (on weekends) and knit,” Jeanette says. “I gave him back his rooter’s cap and told him that if he thought I was going to just sit here and knit every weekend he could just blow!

“Oh, the look look on Hal’s face! I thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m never going to see him again!’ ”

So she decided to stay put and knit, just like he said. Later, she apologized for her remarks. They became engaged.

Jeanette stops in an upstairs hallway and opens a closet door. Sitting on a countertop is the cardinal and gold rooter’s cap. “There it is,” she says. “Of course I saved it.”

There is also a stop at the billiard room Hal shared with his pals, the master bedroom suite where the couple loved to watch the boats in the bay, the hallway alcove that houses a solid silver and gold replica of a tractor. “That was Hal’s pride and joy,” she says.

In the early years of their marriage, they lived in a cottage on Martha Lane in Santa Ana. “I didn’t marry Hal for his money,” Jeanette says, laughing. “He didn’t have any.”

He loved to garden, to make hanging baskets. She loved to fuss around the house. They planted a tree. “I took a nostalgic drive over there recently, and the tree is still there,” she says.

Years and a few moves later, when the couple finally moved into the bay-front home Jeanette now occupies, Hal said, “Why did we wait so long?”

It’s a question that haunts her today. Hal died of heart failure in January. “He had a few good years here,” she says.

*

For now, Jeanette keeps busy with her four children, nine grandchildren, business tasks and charitable causes.

She has opened her doors to USC (“Now I know a marching band can fit on my staircase.”), Children’s Hospital of Orange County, UC Irvine. She also supports the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the Pacific Symphony and the Orange County Philharmonic Society.

And recently, in Hal’s name, she donated $100,000 to underwrite Opera Pacific’s fall production of “Aida.”

After all, opera is where it all really began. “Hal liked opera, but he loved the people who support it. They are the cream of the crop,” she says. “They loved Hal, and he loved them.”