Beverly Hills Socialite Finds a New Passion When She Takes Plunge
She never feels like she is in over her head, even when schools of barracuda sweep toward her or when sharks lunge at her in waters as deep as 150 feet.
Scuba-diving socialite Niki Dantine has spent most of her life navigating a sea of actors, lawyers and business bigwigs, after all.
“I’ve been swimming with the sharks on Rodeo Drive since I was 18,” Dantine says with a grin. “The sharks in the water have been given a bum rap, really.”
Nonetheless, jaws dropped in mansions and ballrooms around Beverly Hills when the society matron traded her gowns and gloves for a wetsuit and aqualung and headed for the high seas.
Dantine, for decades a fixture on the Westside charity party circuit, had suddenly decided to take up deep-sea diving in such faraway places as the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
Her friends figured they must have misunderstood. They could visualize Dantine relaxing on the upper deck of a luxury cruise ship. But the thought of her plodding around a bare-bones dive boat in rubber flippers, lugging 100 pounds of air tanks and breathing regulator gear, was unfathomable.
“Their idea of a dive boat was something like the Queen Elizabeth 2. But it’s not. It’s pretty rough and basically uncomfortable,” said Dantine, a slightly built redhead. “Look at me: I’m older than most people diving. The oldest people on boats with me are the guys 50 or 52. I don’t tell them how much older I am.”
The grandmother of 10, Dantine will admit only to being in her 60s. But after a decade of diving she has emerged from the water with proof that she hasn’t been spending her free time lounging in a deck chair.
While perfecting her diving technique, she taught herself underwater photography. And now a Beverly Hills art gallery is displaying 34 blowup prints of her most eye-catching pictures in an exhibit that runs through April 13.
“These are gorgeous, mysterious photographs of nature’s beauty that is hidden from us,” said Yoram Gil, owner of Galerie Yoramgil in Beverly Hills. “She doesn’t think of herself as such, but she’s an artist.”
Friends of Dantine flocked to a pair of exhibition-opening receptions last monh.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Everyone there had their eyes coming out of their heads. They were incredulous at what they were seeing,” said Jill Cartter, a longtime friend. “There wasn’t anyone there who wasn’t totally amazed.”
Dantine takes her underwater photography seriously. A waterproof Nikonos camera with a 15-millimeter wide-angle lens is used for shots of schools of colorful fish and coral reefs. An aging Canon F-1 with a macro lens inside a plastic housing uses double strobe lights for startling close-ups.
Dantine, a singer who performed on Broadway and did voice-over singing for such film stars as Grace Kelly, was married to actor Helmut Dantine until his death and later to entertainment lawyer Greg Bautzer. It was after his death in 1987 that she says a friend, actress Yvette Mimieux, and her husband, businessman Howard Ruby, invited her to go scuba diving with them.
“I didn’t know zip about diving. I had no clue. I just jumped in the water and copied what everyone else was doing,” Dantine said. “I had no trouble with buoyancy or breathing. It was fantastic.”
She later took lessons to get certified as a diver and began booking excursions on commercial dive boats. Along the way she sat in on a class taught by underwater cameraman Christopher Newbert. Soon she was hooked on fish photography.
Dantine estimates she has spent more than 1,000 hours beneath the surface. She says her current husband, Darrell Kuelpman, an aviation company executive, is tolerant of her two-week diving trips to places like the Galapagos Islands or Australia’s Great Barrier Reef that can cost up to $8,000, plus airfare.
“But we’re all very relieved to get the phone call that she’s back on dry land and that she’s OK,” said daughter Dita Dantine Keith of Bend, Ore.
No shark photos are included in the exhibition. But Dantine said she’s had a few close calls. It was off the Solomon Islands that a trio of 6-foot gray reef sharks circled her several times before one arched its back and dove at her, teeth flashing.
“I hit him on the nose with my camera and he veered off and swam away. I hotfooted it to the nearest reef. I’d been concentrating on photographing a school of fish and had lost track of where I was,” she said.
That’s not exactly the kind of table talk topic you hear at the charity fund-raisers her friends attend.
So Dantine is donating all of her proceeds from the sale of prints from her exhibit to her favorite charity, SHARE, an organization that helps developmentally disabled children and adults.
