Mary Wells
Mary Wells, legendary entrepreneur, broke the glass ceiling back in the Seventies when she founded the ad and marketing agency, Wells Rich Greene. She was so far ahead of her time that the idea of a woman succeeding in a man’s world didn’t even have a name. But Mary gave a ...
Full bioMy Recent Post
Summertime and the Architects Are Jumping
wOw’s Gypsy Mary Wells is enthralled by London’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, where a new temporary structure by a prominent builder goes up each year. This time, it’s Frank Gehry’s turn
My Recent Conversation
The Vancouver Conversations Part Two: A Few wOw Women on Losing Highly Sentimental Objects
Cynthia McFadden, Mary Wells, Lesley Stahl, Joni Evans and Liz Smith discuss how the loss of things both concrete and intangible can be so very painful
Sweet Memories:
- Homes: Especially "La Fiorentina" in France, Chesham Place in London and "The Terraces" in Mustique
- Swimming out with my daughters when they were small and my husband to our Riva in Cap Ferrat and zooming off for lunch in St. Tropez
- The saxophone player standing barefoot in wavelets during dinners at the beach restaurant close to our home in France
- The first day of my agency, Wells Rich Greene, with Charlie Moss and 35 great talents along with I Love New York, Alka Seltzer, and years of wonderful accounts
- Painting Braniff planes different colors
- When my friend, John, and I were young and New York was the world
- When "Strangelove" sailed out of Amels in Amsterdam for the Mediterranean — “That’s my boat,” I thought
- Portofino in October— it’s like an opera stage set and we are the only boat in port
- My first sight of British Columbia
- My first sight of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao
- Pasteque and Sandia, my King Charles Spaniels
Most Important to Me:
- My daughters, Katy and Pamela and their families
- My most beloved friends
My Foods:
- French fries
- Eli’s sourdough bread and Eli’s chicken pot pie and Eli’s period
- Very dry martinis on the rocks with lemon peel
- Chocolate chip mint ice cream
- My mother’s coconut cake
- A great crisp apple
- Thin crisp pizza
- Sensational red wine
- Popcorn
I Adore:
- Kissing
- Dancing
- Eye locks with witty, sexy men
- Basketball players
- Theatre — too much to choose from
- Blueberries
- Caviar — gone baby gone.
- Boat life
- Netjets
- Mustique, the Mediterranean, New York
- Hotel La Mirande in Avignon and the Splendido Mare in Portofino
- Capri convertibles and their funny drivers and the smiling life
- Radical thinking, going to the edge
- Hunger
- A really new idea…breakthroughs
- Thinking forward not backward and moving on
- Sensitivity and generosity
- A sense of spirit
- Honesty
- Epiphanies
- Art in all its many forms now
- BAM
- Chorus line and Radio City Music Hall kicks
- The new rainshowers
- Clean sheets
- Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and especially Melinda Gates making things better
- Doing my fastwalk up Madison at sundown without a credit card
- Dogs
- Spur of the moment espresso in a shop, on the street
- Kastro’s bar in Mykonos, Greece












