Pauline de Rothschild
Pauline Fairfax Potter, Baroness de Rothschild ( born December 31, 1908 in Passy, near Paris, † March 8, 1976 in Santa Barbara, California, United States) was an American fashion icon, designer, writer and Grande Dame.
Origin and childhood
Pauline was Octave Feuillet # 10 in Passy, a suburb of Paris, born in the Rue. She was the daughter of Francis Hunter Potter, a playboy and grandson of the Bishop of Pennsylvania, Alonzo Potter. Her mother was Gwendolen Playford Cary, a great-niece of the third President of the United States of America Thomas Jefferson and a great-granddaughter of the poet Francis Scott Key. Pauline grew through the divorce of their parents and their subsequent connections to New York, Paris, Biarritz and Baltimore. She received her training in several private schools and by private tutors.
First Marriage
In 1930, Pauline Potter married in Baltimore the art historian Charles Carroll Fulton reader ( 1900-1949 ), grandson of the publisher of The Baltimore Sun. Her husband was an alcoholic and had homosexual relations. After they were drawn in 1934 on the Spanish island of Majorca, she separated from her husband. The divorce was pronounced in 1939 and she took her former name again.
Romances
After her divorce she went numerous relations, among others, the Belgian Prime Minister Paul -Henri Spaak (1899-1972), the American film director, screenwriter and actor John Huston (1906-1987), U.S. diplomat Elim O'Shaughnessy, the French architect André Levesque de Vilmorin, the Russian Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov (1891-1942) and the theater producer Jed Harris ( 1900-1979 ). For several years she was also the mistress of Isabelle Kemp, a New York- married heiress.
Professional career
In the early 1930s, Pauline worked as a personal purchasing agent in New York for the high society. In 1934, she opened with her first husband in Mallorca fashion stores. Incidentally, Pauline also worked for the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) in London and Paris; through their creations, it was often see in the society columns. Together with her friend Louise Macy, the former editor of the fashion magazine Harper 's Bazaar, she opened in the early 1940s, the fashion house Macy Potter in New York. The company went bankrupt, as Macy's lover, millionaire John Hay Whitney (1905-1982), the funding ceased. Despite this fiasco, it opened a new Modegeschaft in which they drove the collections of fashion designers Hattie Carnegie and Jean Louis. Her clients included the Duchess of Windsor, the heiress Thelma Chrysler Foy and the actresses Gertrude Lawrence and Ina Claire. In 1944 she designed the costumes for John Huston's Broadway production of Sartre's No Exit. The dress that she designed for actress Anna Bella is on display at the Museum of the City of New York.
Second Marriage
In 1954 Pauline married in Paris the wine pioneer Baron Philippe de Rothschild ( 1902-1988 ). The marriage remained childless. Together with her step- daughter Philippine de Rothschild Sereys (* 1935), she worked on awareness of the wine business. Thanks to the creative energy and the talent of the Baroness Pauline de Rothschild, the Château Mouton -Rothschild changed - the exceptional taste, the sense of culture, the charm and the hosts qualities of the Baroness transferred to the winery. In the early 1960s she wrote several articles for the fashion magazines Harper 's Bazaar and Vogue. Launched by the Baroness Pauline and her cousin Diana Vreeland (1906-1989), editor of Vogue, founded in 1962, Museum of Wine in Art displays an impressive collection of tapestries, decanters, glasses and frames in the context of the wine and of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and others created since 1945 labels. The museum is a magnet for tourists today.
Death and funeral
In the early 1970s featured doctors diagnosed with breast cancer, heart failure, and Marfan syndrome. Pauline de Rothschild died on March 8, 1976 of a heart attack in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara, California. Her body was on Château Mouton- Rothschild, next to her husband, buried.