What do you wear in paradise? How do you dress for a turquoise ocean and grass the color of katydids, for hot-pink hibiscuses that drop like drunk butterflies, and palm trees sifting breezes with the sss of soft rain? What’s proper for shopping one block from the beach, and also good for car pools, poolside, and polo in a land of loggias, striped awnings, and old clubs sprouting sun umbrellas like mushrooms in the morning? What’s the next-best thing to naked in resort towns of the rich?

Hint: Knowing the answer puts you halfway there.

Another hint: It’s a Palm Beach thing.

If you answered the Lilly, “you got it,” as Lilly herself might say.

What’s a Lilly? In short, a shift. It dropped upon the world in 1960, two side seams, two darts, and three holes (head and arms) run up in a dime-store cotton of Kool-Aid colors—the fashion equivalent of a paper parasol in a daiquiri. In 1962, Time magazine decided the Lilly was “somewhere between a chemise and a muumuu.” If the couturier Mainbocher had deigned to make a flowered housedress (which he didn’t), you’d have a Lilly. If a woman who really couldn’t sew whipped up a shift for her daughter’s Barbie doll—you got it, Lilly. In their upside-down-beach-bucket simplicity, Lillys blur the line between woman and child, mother and daughter, experience and innocence. Put on a Lilly and you’re the first girl in the garden, Paradise Found.

Indeed, the Lilly is more than sun-kissed resortwear; it is shorthand for Wasp wealth at play. The Good Life dressed in plain old, if wildly colored, cotton, the Lilly embodies Puritan ethics of balance and value. It is not about setting yourself above or apart: a bunch of women in Lillys look like eye-popping paper dolls, one and the same. Like the woman for whom it was named, the Lilly isn’t a strategy of reverse snobbery; it’s completely down to earth, unsnob. As one Lillyphile says, “Jackie Kennedy and her maid wore Lillys.” And how does one wear it? You step in (with or without undies), zip it up as far as you can (the half-zipped zipper is part of the charm), slide into your sandals (Luigis, naturally, today selling under the name Stephen Bonanno, Luigi’s nephew), and you’re out the door and into the club. Lilly’s club. That would be Lilly Pulitzer, now Lilly Pulitzer Rousseau.

‘Ohhhh,” groans Lilly on a hot Palm Beach morning in late February. “What can be interesting?” Lilly Pulitzer Rousseau does not want to do this interview. She is 71, and during the 24 years her company flourished, from 1960 to 1984, she had more than enough of the story, wonderful as it was, told and retold. In the early 90s, however, she sold the license to Sugartown Worldwide, and the Lilly—10 years gone but not forgotten, living on in vintage limbo and battled over on eBay—rose again, riding a tide of pink and green to swarm beach towns from Key West to Bar Harbor, not to mention barrier islands in between. Lilly is the conscience and consultant of the new company and, as such, must now and then step into the limelight, which she’s never liked. Lilly is private. Even her closest friends complain of how tucked away she keeps her feelings—“a sphinx,” one calls her. “Scorpio” is what she calls herself. “They do everything in excess,” Lilly explains, “but keep things very close to the chest. I’m not into horoscopes and all that, but it is telling. Scorpios hold everything in.” Just like the Lilly. When that whimsical shift is on, you can’t tell what’s happening underneath.

“Should I look at some of these questions?,” Lilly asks. She’s dressed in turquoise linen from the new Lilly Pulitzer line and matches the turquoise and white stripes on her poolside chairs and lounges. Lilly was an exotic in her younger years, a brunette with burning eyes and skin brown from the sun. Now she is pale, a blonde of old ivory, the Gauguin princess polished and bleached by wind, water, and time. Her hair is unstyled, blown about; her light-brown eyes have flecks of gold in them—and quickness. She is regal the way a lioness is regal. And she’s still padding around barefoot—a Lilly Pulitzer signature—though perhaps padding more slowly, having gone through a triple-bypass two years ago. This is the woman who used to walk shoeless down Worth Avenue, her hair in pigtails, her feet in the dirt. When Lilly extends her hand for the offending pages, there is nothing to do but give them over.

“Ooohhhh, I hate it. I can’t put into words what I think about anything.”

She reads aloud—“What were your mother and father like?”—then answers, “I don’t have a clue.” Which has nothing to do with Lilly’s memory, and everything to do with her highest-society upbringing.

“I don’t like my whole life dragged out,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to know about me, because I don’t think I’m very interesting.… I like my work. I like what I gave. And that was it. It was so easy.… I mean, I don’t know how to explain what it was like to run my business, the joy of every day. I got a kick every time I went into the shipping department. I had to pat [the dresses] all on the box and kiss them. I loved seeing them going out the door. I loved them selling in the shop. I liked them on the body. Everything. There’s no explaining the fun I had.”

She reads more questions, which is embarrassing when you’re the one who wrote them.

“Oh, I don’t like any of this stuff. It’s all making Lilly such a statement now, instead of just a lovely little thing that was part of everyone’s life.”

She was born Lilly Lee McKim in 1931. Her father was Robert McKim, and her mother Lillian Bostwick—both from old-line families. McKims were rich, but Bostwicks were richer: Lillian’s grandfather Jabez Bostwick helped create the Standard Oil Company. The couple had three daughters: blonde Mimsy (the beauty), brunette Lilly (lots of giggles), and redheaded Flossie (the most like Mother). The house in Roslyn, New York, was run like an English manor with a massive staff. Fresh vegetables were grown in the garden.

“Everything was very soup-to-nuts,” says Nancy Harris, one of Lilly’s best friends from childhood. “But there was no pretension about it. It was just natural.”

Lillian was tough, jolly, and generous, a woman with great style (her Vuitton luggage bore her stable’s racing stripes), but not in the kitchen. “We always said,” Flossie recalls, “‘Mother can boil an egg—wrong.’” (The eggs exploded.)

“Lilly’s mother was wonderful fun,” says Harris. Robert McKim—“Pappy”—was, too. “He was divinely attractive. A great guy.”

And yet the couple split when Lilly was six. It is said that McKim had difficulty handling the fact of his wife’s greater wealth. It is also said that Lil, having fallen in love with racing legend Ogden Phipps, paid McKim $1 million for a divorce. (One insider says, “I think it was more than that.”) Even with divorce and remarriage dropped into the script, it was a charmed childhood of horses (foxhunting with the Meadowbrook Hounds) and boarding schools (Chapin and Miss Porter’s, where Lilly was right between the Bouviers—Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill). Lilly’s memories of those years are specific and irresistible. She didn’t like cotillion because Lil made them wear bronze slippers and all the other girls were in black patent leather. She loved Jones Beach, the smell of the seaweed, the picnics of deviled eggs and melted tomato sandwiches (“the mayonnaise would goo,” she says). Unsure if she ever had a coming-out party—“I had a party every year, and one of those, I guess, was my coming-out”—Lilly warmly recalls Flossie’s debut, a costume party at which Ogden and Lil were Farmer and Mrs. McGregor, and Mimsy, Flossie, and she were rabbits (all those “y” and “ie” name endings, like cute little cottontails). Thinking back on it, Lilly says, “We just had everything.”

College should have been next, but not for Lilly. “I went for two months. I couldn’t stand it. I loved my boarding school, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t have a career.” Instead, she worked as a nurse’s aide in Kentucky and at a veterans’ hospital in the Bronx. “I liked it. Just giving time.”

In the book The Best Families, the entry on Phipps—“among the first families of Palm Beach”—is directly followed by the entry on Pulitzer, a “name celebrated in American journalism.” It was down in Palm Beach that Lilly met a young man named Peter, the brother of one of her girlfriends. That would be Herbert “Peter” Pulitzer Jr., golden-boy grandson of fabled family patriarch Joseph Pulitzer (pronounced “pullitzer,” not “pew”). In 1952, on a day when she was supposed to be having tea on Long Island with her friend Nancy Harris, Lilly was off to Maryland, eloping with Peter Pulitzer. Everyone was shocked. Family and friends were hardly aware Lilly knew Peter, let alone loved him. When Peter called Robert McKim to say, “I’ve just married your daughter,” McKim asked, “Which one?” When Peter called Lil, who was in the middle of a card game, he told her the news and then handed the phone to Lilly, who heard her mother say, “My God, Lilly Lee has just gotten married.” Lilly burst into tears.

“My first marriage, I mean, I don’t think anyone, at least I didn’t, thought about what marriage was,” Lilly says. “Dr. Phil says you’ve got to check out all these things. Nobody checked out anything in those days. It was just my next adventure.”

With a capital A. All you have to do is look at pictures of young Pulitzer to see the attraction—think Apollo Belvedere goes early Esquire. Enviably handsome, tall, tanned, outdoorsy, sporty, a he-man who was his own man, Pulitzer was already a successful entrepreneur, the owner of orange groves and cattle in central Florida.

“He was racy,” says bandleader Peter Duchin, a family friend. “I mean in the sense of just jumping into his plane and flying off. He eschewed the normal social crap.”

“Lilly was very young,” says Susanna Cutts, director of public relations and special events at Saks Fifth Avenue in Palm Beach, and a longtime friend of Lilly’s. “Peter was drop-dead gorgeous and very charming and a real turn-on. And she was raised in a very proper way, a very proper background, and I think it was the forbidden, the exciting (this is something I’ve carved out of my own imagination, she certainly never told me this) someone who was encouraging her to take a romantic leap of faith, to run away from it all—‘it all’ being the platinum spoon in your mouth.”

The newlyweds settled in Palm Beach, in a big house overlooking Lake Worth, and they did something decidedly not done: they chose to live there year-round, right through the horribly hot Palm Beach summers. Lilly didn’t give it a second thought. “If you had put me down in Podunk, I would have settled there for life.”

Right from the start they were a bold-faced statement, an alternative life-style, the Social Register’s Adam and Eve, Tarzan and Jane. Lilly even had a rhesus monkey, Goony.

“When I first met Lilly,” remembers Laura Clark, who would soon work with Lilly, “she and Peter were the most gorgeous couple you ever saw. Walking down Worth Avenue in their bare feet, and Lilly with her gold hoop earrings, they looked like a pair of gypsies. It was the time of the twist, and when they got up on the dance floor everybody stopped to watch.”

“They were terrific together,” says Peter Duchin. “They were very close. They were the kind of people who would do things, rather than just play golf. Peter would fly into his orange groves, and he’d work in the fields with the Seminole Indian people that were helping him. Then fly back to Palm Beach and not go to parties.” Those fancy-pants charity balls and formal dinners.

The Pulitzers threw their own parties, casual bashes in a big, bright kitchen that sat 40. They put guests to work chopping and slicing, then after dinner sloshed water on the tiled floor—for dancing.

“When we moved into the house down there,” Lilly says, “we were off and running. We did dance at home. Fill up the empty champagne bottles and drench it with water and dance the night away on the kitchen floor. We didn’t care about slipping and falling.”

And then, one day, Lilly fell quiet. She’d had three children in four years—Peter, Minnie, and Liza—and though she loved her kids “more than life,” the mix of exhaustion and boredom was just too much. Or as one friend put it, “Too many babies, one on top of another, and a whole new environment. She was a New York—Long Island girl, and suddenly she was here.” In 1957, suffering a classic nervous collapse, Lilly returned north for several months’ analysis at a hospital in West-chester, New York, a clinic her friends called Bloomingdale’s but she calls “the nuthouse.” Which is pure Lilly, sunny yet blunt. (Friends who’ve recently passed away have “popped off” or “croaked,” and when her choice of words is pointed out to Lilly, she says, “What are you going to say? Die?”)

In an interview in W magazine, Lilly told writer Lorna Koski, “I was not the most mature kid on the block.… I had never had one responsibility in my life. My pea-brain wasn’t up to it.… The doctor said, ‘There’s nothing the matter with you; you need something to do.’ My marriage was driving me crazy too, and I didn’t want to admit that, even to myself. But I followed the doctor’s advice and came out a lot stronger.”

She returned to Florida and did something so simple and unpretentious that most Palm Beach women would have fainted at the thought: she started selling oranges and grape-fruit from her husband’s groves.

“It started in the [station] wagon,” Lilly says. “Just delivering fruit to houses. Then I had the place to store the fruit and write the orders for the gift boxes. And then I went to the Via Mizner and had a little juice stand with the bags of fruit.”

It was about this time that Lilly met Laura Robbins—today Laura Clark—a Candice Bergen blonde who was one of Mimsy’s great friends in New York, and herself a daughter of wealth. (Her father, Charles C. Walts, was the head of Dun & Bradstreet for South and Central America and Mexico.) Robbins had been a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, a trusted colleague of its editor Diana Vreeland. She left the job when Merrill Lynch transferred her husband to the Palm Beach area, and, at Mimsy’s urging, called Lilly—who was still a bit quiet.

“Lilly had been ill,” Clark remembers. “Those eyes. Not a pin would she miss. I saw a couple things she was doing in occupational therapy, her drawings. She could have been an artist—she had a total command of proportion and scale and color.

“The doctor said she must not just sit around. He knew Florida and what happens is you get very logy and lazy. She was selling on the road. Peter rented the shop. I called Lilly and said, ‘I’d love to meet you.’ So we had lunch and then she told me it made her nervous every night when Peter came home from the grove. He’d say, ‘Well, what have you done about the shop?’ Well, she wasn’t into it. She’d never worked in her life, and had babies in the house. I said to her—I was very full of beans—‘This is no problem. I’ll do it with you.’”

The two became friends and partners, not on paper, simply the way two women do—“foxhole buddies,” says Clark. Every day they were up to their elbows in juice and pulp, their shorts and shirts spritzed, sprayed, and—when they bent for another bunch of oranges—binding. And the heat, the oppressive summer heat. One day, each came to work wearing the same thing. Lilly, the gal who’d never cared a fig for fashion, had given her Palm Beach seamstress some patterned fabric: Make me a shift (something to hide juice stains, and also her thickish waist). Laura, who could name a designer at 20 feet, had given her Boca Raton seamstress some patterned fabric: Make me a shift (something that would be cool). It was Kismet in cotton.

Laura: “It was a surprise to both of us when we arrived this one day and we had this same idea at the same time. And I being in the fashion business for so long, I thought, My God, we’ve got something.”

Lilly: “Laura knew more than I did—that’s for sure. She had been at Harper’s for years.”

Laura: “We went over to West Palm Beach and bought some remnants and had her dressmaker and mine run a couple up. They were fine. They were amateurish. And we started selling those. We just arbitrarily sold them for $22. And there was an absolute stampede.”

“The line wasn’t very extensive,” Lilly says. “Two bodies, one was sleeveless and one had a sleeve. I mean everybody, they had to have them. Whether they fit or not, who cared? Just get one, I want it, I have to wear it to dinner.”

“At this time,” explains Polly Mellen, grande dame of fashion, and friend to both Laura and Lilly, “it only exploded with a certain crowd. We’re discussing Palm Beach. We are not discussing Miami. We are discussing the Everglades Club, the Bath & Tennis Club, Palm Beach Hobe Sound—it’s today called the Jupiter Island Club. Lilly and Laura built a total status symbol.”

“These marvelous women covered with jewels,” Laura Clark says, “coming in to buy these little rags.”

What to call the little rag? It wasn’t an issue. Except for $2,000 from Lilly, neither woman was really invested in the venture. In fact, true to form, Lilly didn’t care what it was called.

“She said, ‘I don’t want any publicity,’” Clark remembers. “I thought, Pulitzer—everybody in the world knows that name. Lilly-Laura would be stupid. I said, ‘Let’s call it Lilly Pulitzer.’”

The two set to work, Lilly the president with 75 percent of the business, Peter the vice president, Laura the secretary-treasurer with 25 percent. Still, the gals worked 50-50 on the dresses, spinning variations on the theme of that first Lilly, always coming to the same conclusions, if via different paths, and laughing all the way. Lilly was “gung ho a hundred percent,” says Clark, “400 percent. Very smart, and the stamina of 10 men.” And Clark knew the ropes, calling buddies at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, contacting buyers. The women didn’t pay themselves wages, but put profit back into the company and took bonuses. Bookkeeping was equally improvised. “If an invoice was confusing,” says Clark, “we just stuck it under the blotter.”

The short shape was a winner, but fabrics were still a problem. Fortuitously, Lilly’s friend Franci Young, an artist who made glazed porcelain, discovered a couple in Key West, Peter and Jimmy, whose Key West Fabrics specialized in hand-screened prints. Mimsy, too, with a fistful of swatches, returned from Key West, saying, “You can’t believe it.” Thus began a giddy collaboration that resulted in the famous Pulitzer prints, madcap renderings of a tropical free-for-all: monkeys drinking martinis, flowers doing the frug. The palette was clear and clean, preppy meets Peter Max. It was color you could see down the beach, across the fairway, from boat to boat. Case in point. The two housewives were flying to Key West regularly. On one trip the pilot forgot to refuel, and their cowl plane went down into shark-infested waters off Marathon. It was almost dusk, and they were stranded on a submerged plane. What to do? Clark took off her bright-orange Lilly and flagged a passing helicopter. Even bleeding from the head, Lilly saw the humor: “Tits will get ‘em every time.”

“It was the poor man’s Pucci,” says fashion historian June Weir. “Those prints were as recognizable as when you put on a Pucci, one being a geometric and the other being a flower. And you could wear those prints anyplace and feel you looked terrific.”

“In the same way that Pucci could only be Italian,” says Holly Brubach, former fashion critic for The New Yorker and The New York Times, “Lilly prints and color combinations seem to me quintessentially American. I think of Pucci prints as being more allusive to the art of the time, that Op-Pop thing that was going on. Lilly seems to me more on the level of entertainment than art.”

So it was the shape plus the color plus one thing more: a lining. Lilly had never liked wearing underwear in the Florida heat, and not only did a quality broadcloth lining keep the dress hanging right, it meant one could go au naturel underneath. This was key, the existential escape implicit in the Lilly: the release from conventional underpinnings, the freedom from being judged.

“Lilly is not the city,” says Pamela Clarke Keogh, author of Jackiestyle. “Lilly is not work or money or earning money. Lilly is essentially having a drink poolside and enjoying yourself.”

“And it goes through the family,” says Polly Mellen. “The pants for the man, the clothes for the little girls, the mothers and daughters dressing alike. It’s an ease of dressing, and yet at the same time looking crisp and safe.”

When the company’s manufacturer bought cheap broadcloth for the first order shipped to Lord & Taylor—a big break into major markets—the linings shrank. A disaster. “Here the business is just beginning,” Lilly says, “and it’s going to end the same day.” With $30,000 pulled from Lilly’s trust, the company called back the dresses, cut out the linings, dropped in new ones, and sent the dresses out again. Lord & Taylor sold thousands.

Even with people like Dina Merrill, Happy Rockefeller, and three generations of Kennedys—Rose, Jackie, Caroline—wearing Lillys (one Christmas Eve, President Kennedy nearly bought out the store), the Lilly was still just a local phenomenon. Nationally, the turning point came in February 1963, with a wow of a layout in Life, titled “A Barefoot Tycoon Makes Lillies Bloom All Over.” Sally Kirkland, one of the era’s most influential fashion editors, was in charge of the shoot. She was a good friend of Laura Clark’s. But Kirkland left Clark out and put the focus on Lilly in Lillys. “Lilly was so photogenic,” says Clark. “It was a much better story if she was the whole thing. I understood that, but it broke my heart. It was great for Lilly, and the pictures were great, and that’s when she started realizing it was her business.”

And it was a business with legs—long, bare legs that hopscotched from East Coast watering holes to landlocked upper- and upper-middle-class suburbs. Wherever Lilly had a friend who needed a business, a Lilly Pulitzer store might open, and more women might join the club.

“The idea of Lilly was to be comfortable, be pretty, and be alike,” explains Ruth Peltason, president of Bespoke Books and a specialist in fashion and design. “It was a way of belonging without having to have the same country club, the same Zip Code, the same kind of car. It’s like wearing a Brownie uniform when you’re 8 and a Girl Scout uniform when you’re 12. It says, ‘We’re a group, we belong to one another.’”

A status symbol, yes, but inexpensive, everyone invited.

The Lilly Pulitzer product grew like a family. A Lillyputian version of the shift called “the Minnie,” named for Lilly’s elder daughter, was made for little girls—a great marketing move. Clothes for men took off, too: pants, swim trunks, ties, and a line of batiste nightshirts which Lilly christened “Sneaky Petes”—“it seemed fitting,” Lilly has said. Pete was sneaky, or rather, a ladies’ man, according to several members of their Palm Beach circle. As Clark says, “He was very beautiful to look at. Great personal charm, the kind of charm that you knew he was waiting all his life just to talk to you. A tricky guy.” One friend who chastened Pulitzer about a flagrant flirtation going on during his marriage, and who many years later warned against an unwise one he’d just begun (a girl named Roxanne!), recalls that Pulitzer settled the question on both occasions by saying, “It’s my life.” Not the most conciliatory attitude.

Actually, work was drawing both Peter and Lilly further into their own lives. As Eugenia Sheppard wrote of Lilly and Laura in the New York Herald Tribune, “Their husbands might have been furious, but they hardly ever saw them except to say good night and good morning.” Fact was, Pulitzer was supportive of his wife, proud of her success, and the two enjoyed a healthy competition. “Peter and I couldn’t wait to get out the door,” Lilly says. “Let’s see who can work the longest, the hardest.” Those long hours apart may have prolonged the marriage. Lilly, the Scorpio holding it in, did not discuss the sneaky-Pete problem, not a word. “She never said anything about it,” says Clark, “and never was sad or mopey.” When the couple separated, it blew everyone away—just as their elopement had.

Minnie Pulitzer McCluskey: “All our memories as kids, you never saw such hugging and kissing. Everyone wanted to be them.”

Liza Pulitzer: “It was traumatic. None of us even saw it coming. Because there was never any fighting.”

Peter Duchin: “It came as a shock to a lot of her friends, like me.”

Laura Clark: “They were sort of leaders of the young group, and nobody knew what to do. You couldn’t take sides, because they were both so charming. Everybody was terribly upset.”

The couple divorced in 1969.

And another change was afoot. Clark’s husband had suffered a heart attack, and during a recuperation in California, the couple fell in love with Santa Barbara, and decided to move there. Lilly Pulitzer bought out Clark in a settlement that satisfied both—they are friends to this day—and by the end of the 60s she was sole owner and designer of the company that wore her name. For Lilly, the best was about to begin. And that would be her second marriage, in 1969, to Enrique Rousseau.

He, too, was an exceedingly handsome man—“the handsomest person I’ve ever seen in my life,” Lilly once told her friend Nancy Kezele. He was Cuban, cultured, a marvelously funny storyteller with an old-world panache, that dashing aristocrat-of-the-world you find in Nancy Mitford novels.

“When he went into the Bay of Pigs in 1961,” says Susanna Cutts, “Enrique had a tent, his cigars, his houseboy. Bay of Pigs, O.K.? Everybody else was sleeping in the mud.”

“He had a great sense of calm about him,” says Peter Duchin. “I think Lilly confided in him a lot, which she doesn’t do to many people. He made her feel protected. He was humorous, he was attractive, and he was very solid.”

Even Lilly doesn’t hold back on the subject of Enrique. “Wonderful. Yes. Very, very wonderful guy. You would have loved Enrique. We were very Cuban. We had the entire Cuban nation in our house. We screamed Cuban, we ate Cuban, we laughed Cuban. Caca Rousseau, the Crazy Cuban. I don’t know why we started calling him Caca. But we all did. Term of endearment.”

“Of course she remembers,” says Cutts. “He was just this amazing gentleman from Cuba, who lived like an emperor there and then, when Castro came in, had to make his own way in America. You could bring up anybody’s name and he’d say, ‘Oh, yes, I knew him very well in Havana.’ And he did. ‘Oh, yes, I knew all about her. I used to date her.’ So one day somebody turned around and said, ‘You really think you’re hot shit, don’t you? You just think you are caca caliente.’ And it stuck. And then it got shortened to Caca.”

Rousseau and his second wife, Julia, who was also his first wife, because they’d divorced and remarried, had been around in Palm Beach since the early 60s. Everybody loved them. Rousseau had a sugar business, but he lost it when he couldn’t find a mill that would grind his sugar. So he took work with Peter Pulitzer, who had branched out into hotels.

“When Enrique came here he lost a lot of money in sugar,” explains Lilly, “and then he went to work for Peter Pulitzer. He was building a Howard Johnson on a beach in Miami, and Enrique took over the building, watching it. And then he became the manager. And then he married me.”

There was talk at the time that Rousseau, single again, had moved into Pulitzer’s house and in on Pulitzer’s wife. Laura Clark, who had known Rousseau before he moved to Palm Beach—she met him in Havana when she used his brother in a Harper’s Bazaar shoot—rejects that gossip out of hand. “Enrique wouldn’t have done that. It was proper between them. Very, very proper.” And Rousseau was faithful.

Lilly’s business sailed through the 70s and into the 80s. She owned a factory in Miami and 31 stores around the country—a collection of Zip Codes that was a Who’s Who of high Wasp. In 1982 the company’s annual sales were $15 million. That same year Peter Pulitzer was making headlines: his divorce from second wife Roxanne, the kind of girl described as “tawny” (and you know that means trouble), was one of the ugliest public custody battles in recent memory. And this time people did take sides: Palm Beachers supported Pulitzer; champions of the underdog backed Roxanne. Lilly prefers not to comment on the case, except to say, “That was gross. But, anyway, who cares. The kids all survived it.”

And then business wasn’t so good. It was the earth-tone 80s, the decade of shoulder pads and power suits. Women who’d worn Minnies as kids and Lillys as teens were now in the workforce wearing Calvin Klein and Donna Karan. In 1983, Lilly Pulitzer introduced a sportswear division called New Directions. Clothes to work in. Some of them beige. From Lilly?! It was the Wrong Direction for a designer whose gift was color, whose entire ethos was delight. In early 1984, Lilly brought in a new management team and cut the number of her stores back to 26. She told California Apparel News, “It was a very unstructured company. A lot of people did their own thing. I wouldn’t say the firm suffered for it, but it could have, had we allowed things to continue as they were. I’m never going to be business oriented, but the company nevertheless has had an about-face.” There was no about-face. By the end of the year, the company was in Chapter 11. Or, as Lilly might say, it croaked.

She loved her company, but Lilly doesn’t aggrandize it or herself. She sums up simply: “I couldn’t sew, draw—I just knew what I liked.” She pooh-poohs her business sense, despite the fact that the Lilly sent waves of envy through Seventh Avenue, not only for its pre-sold clientele, but also because it transcended the spring-fall cycle (Lilly’s idea: Let’s turn ‘em out year-round). “Years ago,” Lilly recalls, “I don’t know why this is coming to mind now, I had a first cousin who worked at the Smithsonian. And one day he called me and said, ‘You know, I’d love to have a Lilly to put in the Smithsonian.’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ And I said, Send a Lilly to the Smithsonian? What would I send? So I never did.” With just such an ahistorical shrug, Lilly Pulitzer left fashion. But before she did, she quietly took care of every one of her stores, paid every creditor, every single bill.

‘My first recollection as a child is grabbing my mother, that shift, the bow on the shift.” James Bradbeer Jr. is the president of Sugartown Worldwide, and his mother wore Lilly and sold Lilly, first in a store in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, then in La Jolla, California. He’s tall and slim, a fresh-faced prep grown into an elegant man in a pin-striped suit with just the right swing, plus a pink Lilly Pulitzer tie. Bradbeer’s thrill is infectious, as if he still can’t believe it all happened this way.

“I knew Lilly had retired in 1984 and closed the business, and it was all very sad. And at a trade show in 1991 I saw a sign for Lilly Pulitzer. And you know how in life you sometimes think, God, I wish I’d thought of that. Somebody else has got this and they’re going to bring it back. And we”—“we” is Bradbeer and Sugartown chairman and C.E.O. Scott Beaumont, both Harvard M.B.A.’s, and at that time both working for the apparel company Eagle’s Eye—“we met this husband-and-wife team, a couple who kind of were Lilly-lovers. And long story short: they realized this is a cute idea, but we don’t know how to make it go. So we got a meeting with the great lady”—Lilly herself—“and it was love at first sight. We were like her lost children, you know? And we struck a deal to bring it back.”

“Life. Lilly. And the Pursuit of Happiness” is the trademark slogan unveiled this year, and it neatly captures the playful, Mayflower Americanness of the Lilly. “There are classics out there,” says Bradbeer. “Ralph Lauren has obviously made a career out of that, but you don’t smile. That’s where our spot is. Our job is the fun side of it. That’s what differentiates us. We owe it to our customers and to the marketplace to do that well.” And the company is doing well, indeed, with annual sales in excess of $40 million, 51 licensed shops all over the country, and boutiques in Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s stores nationwide.

Since 1994, Bradbeer and Beaumont have grown the company slowly, carefully bringing Lillydom into the 21st century. They have added stretch to the cottons, maintain enviable workmanship, and have held the price points low enough so women can buy two Lillys at a time. They’ve introduced exquisite cashmeres, a sports line, and a home line, and are experimenting with phosphorescent dyes—lightning bugs that glow in the dark, flowers that turn yellow in the sun.

“Lilly gave us the greatest platform in the world,” says Bradbeer, “this sense of happiness and joy as a positioning. I mean, that’s endless.”

A crack, 10-person design team, coupled with an opinionated Lilly Pulitzer Advisory Committee—a group of young society women called the PINK-AND-GREEN POLICE by The New York Times—keeps a fine balance between retro and what’s next. No pattern or color flies, however, without Lilly’s O.K. If she says, “Oh jeez,” it’s out.

The book Private Palm Beach, published in 1992, begins with a chapter titled “Jungle Paradise”: the home of Lilly Pulitzer Rousseau. In a resort town where lawns are manicured to a half-inch and box hedges reach 15 feet high—a megalomaniacal Cubism—the Jungle, as Lilly’s place is called, is both wild and real. It doesn’t feel like an estate at all, but a prime piece of Eden, a tangled acre of banyan and fern fronds and God knows how many species of palm tree, with winding paths in the back, a playhouse for grandchildren, a slat house for outside parties, even a mini-riverbed, which failed, but Lilly’s going to try again.

The house is grand and comfortable and colorful—Lillyfied, yes, but warmly so, golden and shaded. When you walk in, you feel the embrace. And in the happy years of Enrique and Lilly’s life here, many, many people walked into this embrace. There are no rules but one: once you’re in the family, you remain in the family. Over and over friends speak of holidays where Peter Pulitzer and his new family sit side by side with his daughters’ ex-husbands and their new families. As with the Lilly, no one is excluded, no one is judged. Minnie Pulitzer McCluskey: “I learned how to be with my ex-husband by watching how Mom and Dad were.”

“Can’t get away from the family,” Lilly says. “You can run, but you can’t hide.” (Enrique’s ex-wife, Julia, went on to marry Peter Pulitzer’s half-brother Charles Amory.)

In the years since Enrique Rousseau’s death in 1993, after a five-year fight with prostate cancer, the Jungle has become completely matriarchal. At this home, no aproned maid answers the front door. Lilly does—very un-Palm Beach. It is Lilly’s embrace that greets you, and then she wants to feed you. If you come to fix the air conditioner or check for termites, Lilly, the girl with the platinum spoon, serves you lunch. When friends describe her, the same word keeps surfacing: “great den mother,” “everybody’s Earth Mother,” “mother of all.” At the Palm Beach store C. Orrico, preppy central and a Lilly Pulitzer flagship if ever there was one (it’s a 31 Flavors of summer clothes!), Lilly is simply “our spiritual leader,” says Kathy Orrico, oldest of the three sisters who own and run the shop. “She loves everything that her fabric designs are about—animals, flowers, children—everything that nature has provided for us to love. She gives life lessons to everyone every day.”

And that’s it. In Palm Beach, all roads lead to Lilly. Even Fortune likes to visit. Only one year after the devastating loss of Rousseau, the Lilly Pulitzer label was born anew, not like a blazing phoenix, more like a rainbow. It’s as if Lilly’s own wonky colors pulled her out of retirement and back into the world—the Lilly, once again, a lovely little thing that is part of everyone’s life.

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