Everything about Pauline De Rothschild totally explained
Pauline de Rothschild (
December 31,
1908 –
March 8,
1976) was a fashion icon and tastemaker who also was known as a writer, a fashion designer, and a translator of both Elizabethan poetry and the plays of
Christopher Fry.
Birth, family, and childhood
She was born Pauline Potter at 10 rue Octave Feuillet in the Paris neighborhood of
Passy to expatriate American parents. Her mother was
Gwendolen Playford Cary, a great-great-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.
Pauline 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. Her great-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 Hortius," thereby creating what would become the state song of
Maryland. Her mother's cousin and sometime guardian
Constance Cary Harrison was one of America's 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'd two stepsisters, Clara and Dorothy.
First marriage
In 1930, in Baltimore,
Maryland, she married
Charles Carroll Fulton Leser (1900-1949), an art restorer, who was the younger son of a prominent judge and a grandson of one of the city's leading newspaper publishers. He also was an alcoholic and a deeply conflicted homosexual. After moving to
Majorca,
Spain soon after their marriage, they separated in 1934, divorced in 1939, and had no children. In her divorce papers, she successfully petitioned the court to take back her maiden name of Pauline Fairfax Potter. Previously, however, she hadn't possessed a middle name of any kind, though she was related to the Fairfax family of Virginia fame.
Romances
After she and Leser separated, she was romantically involved with a number of prominent men, including
Paul-Henri Spaak (a Prime Minister of Belgium), film director
John Huston, American diplomat
Elim O'Shaughnessy, French horticultural heir
André Levesque de Vilmorin, 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.
Career
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 Majorca. 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.
In the early 1940s, she and a friend,
Louise Macy, a former editor of
Harper's Bazaar, opened Macy-Potter, a short-lived fashion house, in New York City. The firm was bankrolled by a monetary settlement from Macy's former lover, millionaire
John Hay Whitney, a.k.a. Jock Whitney, who had left her to marry
Betsey Cushing, a former daughter-in-law of President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Though Macy-Potter's first (and only) collection was a critical and financial disaster, Pauline Fairfax Potter was hired to direct the custom-fashion division of
Hattie Carnegie, the New York fashion company, succeeding
Jean Louis, who left in 1943 to become chief fashion designer for
Columbia Pictures.
She remained at Hattie Carnegie for nearly a decade and was known professionally as Mrs. Fairfax Potter. Among her clients was the
Duchess of Windsor, automotive heiress
Thelma Chrysler Foy, actress
Gertrude Lawrence, actress
Ina Claire, and prominent others. She also designed the women's costumes for John Huston's Broadway 1946 production of
No Exit by
Jean-Paul Sartre, starring
Ruth Ford and
Annabella. The gown she designed for Ford is in the collection of the
Museum of the City of New York.
Potter also worked briefly as an uncredited fashion model. One assignment for
Harper's Bazaar had her posing in the latest Grecian-style gowns for the photographer
Louise Dahl-Wolfe.
Second marriage
In 1954, after several years as one of his several mistresses, she became the second wife of Baron
Philippe de Rothschild, a noted playboy and poet who was the owner of the fabled French winery
Château Mouton Rothschild. His previous wife,
Elisabeth Pelletier de Chambure, had died in 1945 in
Ravensbruck concentration camp.
By this marriage, she'd one stepchild,
Philippine de Rothschild (1935-).
Literary pursuits
Though renowned as a tastemaker in the fields of fashion and interior design, Pauline de Rothschild was a passionate admirer of literature (especially the works of the Japanese novelist
Yukio Mishima and the stories of Danish writer
Isak Dinesen), and she hoped to make her mark as a writer. Her articles about fashion, travel, and other subjects were published in
Harper's Bazaar and
Vogue (the latter's editor in chief,
Diana Vreeland, was a distant cousin). In 1966, Harcourt Brace published her only book,
The Irrational Journey, a brief, atmospheric memoir of a trip she and her husband took to the Soviet Union in the dead of winter. Though it sold poorly, the book has since become a cult item.
Death
Pauline de Rothschild died of a heart attack in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, in Santa Barbara, California. She previously had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone open-heart surgery for a deteriorated valve in
1975. Rothschild's health problems were exacerbated by
Marfan's syndrome, a genetic abnormality which was the underlying cause of her heart condition and was the reason for her chronic exhaustion and her exceptionally long limbs.
Burial
She is buried on the grounds of Chateau Mouton Rothschild in
Pauillac,
Bordeaux,
France, beneath a translucent tomb made of
Lalique glass and marble. The monument also contains the remains of her second husband and his parents, Mathilde and Henri de Rothschild.
Footnotes
Further Information
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