Cynthia Gibson BEERBOWER

News Death Notice

BEERBOWER, Cynthia Gibson Cynthia Gibson Beerbower passed away on July 26, 2014, in her South Kensington home in London. She was 65. Cynthia was born on June 25, 1949, in Dayton, Ohio. As a child, she lived in Europe, where her father was a military attaché, then in Washington D.C. and Abilene, Texas. She attended Fairborn High School in Fairborn, Ohio, from which she graduated in 1967. In her senior year, she was a panelist on the Dayton Daily News Youth Forum. In 1992, she was inducted into the Fairborn High School Alumni Hall of Honor. Cynthia received her BA, magna cum laude, from Mount Holyoke College in 1971, her JD from Boston University Law School in 1974 and her LLB from the University of Cambridge in 1976. At Cambridge, she was a member of Newnham College. She married John E. Beerbower in 1971. John, a 1966 graduate of Oakwood High School and also a panelist of the Dayton Daily News Youth Forum the year ahead of Cynthia, became a partner at the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City in 1980. After admission to the New York Bar, Cynthia was an associate at the New York City law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, where she was elected a partner in 1981. She specialized in tax. At the time, she was one of only a handful of women partners at Wall Street law firms. In 1993, she joined the first Clinton administration, serving first as International Tax Counsel under Secretary Lloyd Benson and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy under Secretary Robert Rubin. She left government service in late 1996. In the following years, Cynthia founded and, for four years, ran Reeve Court, an insurance company based in Bermuda. After selling Reeve Court, she joined the Quellos Group, a Seattle-based hedge fund and, after Quellos was bought by the Blackstone Group, joined XE Capital, a new hedge fund, in New York City. She retired from the financial business in 2005 and moved to France with her daughter Sarah. She and her husband acquired an olive farm in Chateauneuf de Grasse, in the south of France in 2006. She spent several years consumed with an extensive renovation of the old mas and guesthouse. She also oversaw five successful harvests producing hundreds of liters of extra virgin olive oil each year. From 2012 onward, Cynthia divided her time among residences in Toronto, New York City, the South of France and London. She had a lifelong passion for the renovation of houses and interior design. In recent years, she developed a strong interest in modern art and became an active patron of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is survived by her husband John, her son John Eliot, 30, an attorney at Hunton & Williams in Richmond, Virginia, and his wife Megan, her daughter Sarah Rittenhouse, 24, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and a sister Shelley Gibson, of Kettering, Ohio. There will be a private ceremony for the immediate family.