In 2003, two years before Christo and Jeanne-Claude put up The Gates in Central Park, I interviewed them in their home/studio on Howard Street in SoHo, where they had lived since coming to the United States in 1964. Christo slouched on the floor, Jeanne-Claude sat upright on the couch behind him, smoking tenaciously, gesticulating, and not so much answering my questions as correcting them with imperious charm and well-rehearsed patience. In case I didn’t get any facts straight, I could always refer to the fanatically precise, and fantastically dry “Common Errors” section of their Web site, which now serves as the best possible obituary for Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. Her vivid, regal voice rings out in every sentence, starting with this fundamental correction:

“The most common error is the misunderstanding that the artist is Christo. The artist is not Christo. The artists are Christo and Jeanne-Claude.”

And then this scathing bluntness:

“It is totally idiotic to call Christo and Jeanne-Claude the ‘wrapping artists.’ So many works were not about wrapping: The Iron Curtain, Paris 1962. Valley Curtain, 1970–72. Running Fence, 1972–76. Surrounded Islands, 1980–83. The Umbrellas, 1984–91, etc...”

I asked them how they had finally gotten permission to do The Gates, an idea they had conceived in 1979. As well as the decisive election of Michael Bloomberg — a friend of theirs and a collector of Christo’s drawings — as New York’s mayor, Jeanne-Claude told me that the Central Park Conservancy (CPC) had “blackmailed” them into donating $3 million. I was already thrilled to get a quote like this, but then it got better. She said that the CPC “think it’s their park. They don't want people in the park. They would like, if they could, to lock Central Park and let in only people who smell good.”

A couple of days later, Jeanne-Claude phoned and asked me to change the word “blackmailed” to “extorted.” She felt this was a bit less incendiary, and was anxious about upsetting the CPC. She was so overwhelmingly persuasive that somehow I couldn’t refuse her.

Jeanne-Claude was both a polemicist and a diplomat — probably the necessary combination to cut through the tangle of political interests that stood in the way of every one of their almost absurdly ambitious projects. She was also a sincere flatterer. In early February 2005 I was one of the 600 people she and Christo paid to install The Gates. On the first morning of work, Jeanne-Claude, her hair dyed the same saffron color as the The Gates themselves, rather than her customary red, gave a rousing speech. She thanked us profusely and forecast the great stories we would be able to tell our grandchildren about installing The Gates. “And remember,” she said, wagging her finger and speaking with all the authority of her then 69 years, as if we were naughty grandchildren, “You are our ambassadors in the park. You must be polite to everyone and maintain the park in its pristine beauty.” She continued: “People will always ask you: ‘What does it mean? What’s it for?’ Please tell them: ‘No meaning. It’s not for anything. It’s just art.’” At the end of her pedantry and pedagogical zeal, there was the liberating generosity of the artworks themselves.

On the third day of work, my group of gatekeepers prepared to raise our section’s one hundredth and final gate, next to the Sheep’s Meadow. As we posed for a group photo, sitting on a bench with our feet nonchalantly resting on the still-horizontal gate, Christo and Jeanne-Claude cruised past in the back of a big car. The team whooped like groupies. Jeanne-Claude waved graciously and called out the window, “Thank you, thank you so much.” Later, I saw her walking around the park, and I said hello, wondering if she would remember me from our interview. She clearly didn’t remember, but she did correct my pronunciation of her name: “It’s Jeanne-Claude, not John-Claude. I am not a man.”