From her days as San Francisco's "Golden Girl" about town, to her high-profile marriage to and divorce from Al Wilsey, to her third act as a philanthropist and peace advocate, Pat Montandon led a unique and sometimes glamorous SF life.

Pat Montandon, who was once a regular in San Francisco's society pages and who gained a certain amount of unwelcome, late-in-life notoriety as a character in her son Sean Wilsey's bestselling memoir Oh, the Glory of It All, has passed away at age 96.

Patricia Montandon was born in 1928 to an itinerant preacher in Texas, and was raised in Depression-era Oklahoma before escaping into a series of less than successful marriages, and ultimately landed in San Francisco in the tumultuous 1960s.

Back in 2012, Montandon shared some of her recollections with SFist in a memoir series, including how she became one of the city's "it" girls as a manager at I Magnin; how she inadvertantly angered a group of topless dancers in North Beach by giving some moralistic comments to a reporter who then protested outside her Lombard Street home, topless; and how she kind of missed out on the peace-and-love hippie era because she was a little old to be a hippie at that point, and already a society gal.

"To me, the city was a fairy land in every way. It was magical," Montandon said, recalling the 60s. "I loved the fog rolling in. I loved the hills, even though I had to walk a lot, which was very hard for me because I always wore high heels, like an idiot. And everywhere we'd go, we'd get dressed up. It was really a dressy city. I liked that. Hats and gloves. High-heeled shoes."

Montandon also established herself as a writer in these years, penning the 1968 bestseller How to Be a Party Girl, in which a blurb described her as "queen of California's jet set."

Montandon compiled many of her recollections in a 2007 memoir titled Oh, the Hell of It All — a direct response to her son's book, in which she was able to tell her side of the story. Married to businessman Al Wilsey in 1969 — her fourth marriage — Montandon gave birth to her only child, Sean, in 1970.

Montandon became known for her roundtable luncheons in the 1970s which featured celebrity friends including Danielle Steele and Frank Sinatra.

Wilsey would end up cheating on her with her best friend, Diane Dow Traina, aka Dede Wilsey, and Wilsey and Montandon would then divorce in 1980 — with Sean Wilsey casting all the adults in a fairly negative light in his memoir.

Chronicler of a slightly fictionalized San Francisco in Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin would satirize Montandon as the society columnist Prue Giroux (Montandon had an Examiner column as well as a morning segment on KGO), and Dede Wilsey became Dede Halcyon.

In her latter years, Montandon would leave San Francisco, move to Beverly Hills, and found her charity based on spreading messages of peace through children — known since 2018 as Peace To The Planet.

Sean Wilsey announced his mother's death on Facebook, saying she had been living for the last few months at a facility in Palm Desert. She was surrounded by family at Thanksgiving, he says, and he writes, "As we all sat together telling stories on Thanksgiving, my mother, who’d mostly been listening, suddenly spoke. 'I want you to carry on as if you weren’t afraid,' she said, and there was no arguing with that. We will."