Mica Ertegun

Mica Ertegun, the New York doyenne of interior design who fled from Communism in postwar Romania, ran a chicken farm in Canada, married Ahmet Ertegun, a legend of American pop music, and for 50 years dazzled her patrons with stylish décor, died on Saturday morning December 2 2023 at her home in Southampton, N.Y., on Long Island. She was 97. Mrs. Ertegun and the socialite Chessy Rayner founded the interior design firm MAC II in 1967. Their partnership ended with Ms. Rayner’s death in 1998. After Mr. Ertegun died in 2006 of injuries suffered in a fall backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in Manhattan, his wife continued the couple’s philanthropies. Her $41 million gift for humanities scholarships at the University of Oxford in 2012 was the largest of its kind in Oxford’s 900 years. Mica Ertegun was born Ioana Maria Banu in Bucharest, Romania, on Oct. 21, 1926. In 1948 Mica and Stefan Grecianu, an aristocrat 15 years her senior whom she had married when she was 16, were put on a train to Zurich that carried the Romanian royal family into exile. She met Ahmet Ertegun, the son of Turkey’s former ambassador to Washington, in the late 1950s and they married in 1961. No immediate family members survive.