Jeanne Clagett, 'doyenne' of real estate in capital
WASHINGTON - Jeanne Begg Clagett, 94, a Maryland horsewoman and real estate executive who raised blue-blooded racing stock and specialized in high-priced Washington area properties for a blue-blooded clientele, died Nov. 5 of Alzheimer's disease at Roedown Farm, her home in Davidsonville, Md.
As the owner and operator for more than 40 years of Begg Inc., Mrs. Clagett handled the sales of some of the most prestigious houses in the Washington area, including Hickory Hill, which she first sold to John and Jacqueline Kennedy before it became the home of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. A 1976 issue of Forbes magazine described her as "the silver-haired doyenne of Washington real estate."
Her firm also specialized in selling houses to Washington's international community, as well as many of the city's ambassadorial residences. Among her international clients was Prince Aly Aga Khan.
Mrs. Clagett, known as Janey to family and friends, bought the historic Roedown Farm in 1945 with her first husband, John Murray Begg, a State Department and US Information Agency official. At Roedown, the couple raised multiple-stakes-winner Silver Tango and Royal Tango, the 1993 Maryland Horse Breeders Association yearling show grand champion.
She was born Jeanne Frederique van den Bosch in Baarn, the Netherlands, the daughter of a wealthy Dutch naval captain. When Mrs. Clagett was 8, an injured British pilot landed in a meadow near the Bosch family castle. Her mother nursed the pilot back to health and then ran away with him.
"As Janey watched her father grieve and suffer from the desertion of his wife, she never spoke to her mother again," said her husband, Hal Clagett.
Fluent in Dutch, English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian, she received bachelor's and master's degrees from Oxford University in the late 1930s and accompanied her father to the United States shortly before World War II.
She worked as a feature writer and photographer for the New York Daily Mirror before doing public relations for the American Red Cross in Washington.
During World War II, General William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan recruited her to join the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA, where she was assigned to the North African and Spanish desks. As a Dutch native with a facility for languages, she also was deputy liaison officer and chief of the Low Countries dissemination and research division. In 1948, the Netherlands' Queen Wilhelmina named her a knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau for her contributions to the Netherlands resistance movement.
According to Hal Clagett, her interest in real estate evolved out of an assignment from her father, who owned a thousand-acre ranch in California and a hundred black angus cattle. After the 1929 stock market crash forced him to divest his holdings, he sent his 18-year-old daughter to the United States to complete the transaction. 