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Pauline de Rothschild
Pauline, Baroness de Rothschild (née Potter; December 31, 1908 – March 8, 1976) was an American fashion designer, writer and, with her second husband, a translator of both Elizabethan poetry and the plays of Christopher Fry. She was named, with Diana Vreeland, who was added to this list in 1964, to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1969, alongside Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Dean Acheson, Angier Biddle Duke, Cary Grant, and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
She was born Pauline Potter at 10 rue Octave Feuillet in the Paris neighborhood of Passy, to wealthy expatriate American parents of Protestant background. Her mother was Gwendolen Cary, a great-grand-niece of Thomas Jefferson and a distant cousin of Britain's Lords Falkland and Cary. Her father was Francis Hunter Potter, a playboy who was a grandson of Alonzo Potter, an Episcopal Bishop of Pennsylvania, and a nephew and great-nephew of successive Episcopal bishops of New York, Horatio Potter and Henry Codman Potter.
Potter was a member of several families that were prominent in the American South since the 17th century. She was a great-great-granddaughter of Francis Scott Key and a direct descendant of Pocahontas. His wife Mary Tayloe Lloyd Key was both a Lloyd, daughter of Edward Lloyd IV of Wye House and a Tayloe of Mount Airy on her mother, Elizabeth's side, the daughter of John Tayloe II and sister to John Tayloe III of The Octagon House, arguably the wealthiest American, if not Southern planter. Her grand-aunts Jennie and Hetty Cary (wife of the Confederate general John Pegram) were well-known figures during the Civil War, known as the "Cary Invincibles" and considered heroines for sewing battle flags. It was Jennie Cary who put the words of James Ryder Randall's poem "Maryland, My Maryland" to the German folk song "Lauriger Horatius", thereby creating what would become the state song of Maryland. Her mother's cousin and sometime guardian Constance Cary Harrison was one of the United States' best-known women in the late 19th century, a prominent novelist and social reformer. Another cousin, Francis Burton Harrison, served as Governor General of the Philippines and was a Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency.
Due to her parents' frequent separations and subsequent divorce and their later marital and romantic entanglements and custody disputes, she was brought up in varying degrees of poverty and luxury in New York City, Paris, Biarritz, and Baltimore. She was educated at a private finishing school in Groslay, a town north of Paris, as well as schools and tutors elsewhere in France and Maryland, but her formal education was effectively over by the age of 16.
By her father's second marriage to Clara Waterman Knight Colford (formerly Mrs. Sidney Jones Colford), a Philadelphia sugar and utilities heiress, she had two stepsisters, Clara and Dorothy.
In 1930, in Baltimore, Maryland, she married Charles Carroll Fulton Leser (1900–1949), a descendant of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, an art restorer, who was the younger son of a prominent judge and a grandson of Felix Agnus one of the city's leading newspaper publishers. He also was an alcoholic and a homosexual. After moving to Mallorca, Spain soon after their marriage, they separated in 1934, divorced in 1939, and had no children.
After she and Leser separated, she was romantically involved with a number of prominent men, including Paul-Henri Spaak (a Prime Minister of Belgium), American diplomat Elim O'Shaughnessy (1907-1966), French horticultural heir André Levesque de Vilmorin (1907-1987), Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch Romanov of Russia (one of the assassins of Rasputin), and producer-director Jed Harris. For a period of years she also was the lover of Isabelle Kemp, an heiress to a New York drug-store and real-estate fortune.
In the early 1930s, she worked as a personal shopper in New York City, acting as a fashion advisor to wealthy socialites too busy to shop and too unsure of their personal style. Later, after moving to Europe with her first husband, she operated dress shops on Mallorca. She also worked for the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli in London and Paris and often was seen in society columns dressed in the firm's latest creations.
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Pauline de Rothschild
Pauline, Baroness de Rothschild (née Potter; December 31, 1908 – March 8, 1976) was an American fashion designer, writer and, with her second husband, a translator of both Elizabethan poetry and the plays of Christopher Fry. She was named, with Diana Vreeland, who was added to this list in 1964, to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1969, alongside Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Dean Acheson, Angier Biddle Duke, Cary Grant, and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
She was born Pauline Potter at 10 rue Octave Feuillet in the Paris neighborhood of Passy, to wealthy expatriate American parents of Protestant background. Her mother was Gwendolen Cary, a great-grand-niece of Thomas Jefferson and a distant cousin of Britain's Lords Falkland and Cary. Her father was Francis Hunter Potter, a playboy who was a grandson of Alonzo Potter, an Episcopal Bishop of Pennsylvania, and a nephew and great-nephew of successive Episcopal bishops of New York, Horatio Potter and Henry Codman Potter.
Potter was a member of several families that were prominent in the American South since the 17th century. She was a great-great-granddaughter of Francis Scott Key and a direct descendant of Pocahontas. His wife Mary Tayloe Lloyd Key was both a Lloyd, daughter of Edward Lloyd IV of Wye House and a Tayloe of Mount Airy on her mother, Elizabeth's side, the daughter of John Tayloe II and sister to John Tayloe III of The Octagon House, arguably the wealthiest American, if not Southern planter. Her grand-aunts Jennie and Hetty Cary (wife of the Confederate general John Pegram) were well-known figures during the Civil War, known as the "Cary Invincibles" and considered heroines for sewing battle flags. It was Jennie Cary who put the words of James Ryder Randall's poem "Maryland, My Maryland" to the German folk song "Lauriger Horatius", thereby creating what would become the state song of Maryland. Her mother's cousin and sometime guardian Constance Cary Harrison was one of the United States' best-known women in the late 19th century, a prominent novelist and social reformer. Another cousin, Francis Burton Harrison, served as Governor General of the Philippines and was a Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency.
Due to her parents' frequent separations and subsequent divorce and their later marital and romantic entanglements and custody disputes, she was brought up in varying degrees of poverty and luxury in New York City, Paris, Biarritz, and Baltimore. She was educated at a private finishing school in Groslay, a town north of Paris, as well as schools and tutors elsewhere in France and Maryland, but her formal education was effectively over by the age of 16.
By her father's second marriage to Clara Waterman Knight Colford (formerly Mrs. Sidney Jones Colford), a Philadelphia sugar and utilities heiress, she had two stepsisters, Clara and Dorothy.
In 1930, in Baltimore, Maryland, she married Charles Carroll Fulton Leser (1900–1949), a descendant of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, an art restorer, who was the younger son of a prominent judge and a grandson of Felix Agnus one of the city's leading newspaper publishers. He also was an alcoholic and a homosexual. After moving to Mallorca, Spain soon after their marriage, they separated in 1934, divorced in 1939, and had no children.
After she and Leser separated, she was romantically involved with a number of prominent men, including Paul-Henri Spaak (a Prime Minister of Belgium), American diplomat Elim O'Shaughnessy (1907-1966), French horticultural heir André Levesque de Vilmorin (1907-1987), Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch Romanov of Russia (one of the assassins of Rasputin), and producer-director Jed Harris. For a period of years she also was the lover of Isabelle Kemp, an heiress to a New York drug-store and real-estate fortune.
In the early 1930s, she worked as a personal shopper in New York City, acting as a fashion advisor to wealthy socialites too busy to shop and too unsure of their personal style. Later, after moving to Europe with her first husband, she operated dress shops on Mallorca. She also worked for the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli in London and Paris and often was seen in society columns dressed in the firm's latest creations.