Pauline de Rothschild

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 maternal great-grandmother, Jane Margaret Carr Cary, was a daughter of Thomas Jefferson's sister, Martha Jefferson, and Jefferson's best friend, Dabney Carr.] 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. [The descent from Key is as follows: Francis Scott Key married Mary Tayloe Lloyd = Philip Barton Key (1818-1859) married, in 1845, Ellen Swann = Alice Lloyd Key (1855-) married Francis Hunter Potter Sr = Francis Hunter Potter Jr married Gwendolen Cary = Pauline Potter Leser de Rothschild. This line of descent has been established through period newspaper articles (particularly those about the famous murder of U.S. District Attorney Philip Barton Key by Congressman Daniel Sickles in 1859, an episode that is the subject of the book "American Scoundrel" by Thomas Keneally), as well as family papers in private ownership and research conducted in the Library of Congress and the Maryland Historical Society, which have repositories of personal papers relating to Francis Scott Key and his family and their descendants. Her mother's line of descent from Pocahontas is given, as follows, in Stuart E. Brown, Lorraine F.Myers, and Eileen M.Chappel, "Pocahontas’ Descendants", The Pocahontas Foundation, 1985, reprinted 2003 by the Genealogical Publishing Co. with two volumes of corrections and additions: (1) John Rolfe (1585 - ~1622) & Pocahontas (~1595 - ~1617); (2) Thomas Rolfe (~1615 - ) & Jane Poythress; (3) Jane Rolfe (1650 - 1676) & Col. Robert Bolling (1646 - 1709); (4) John Bolling (1676 - 1729) & Mary Kennon (1679 - ); (5) Jane Bolling (1698 - 1767) & Col. Richard Randolph, (1689 - 1748); (6) Mary Randolph, (1727 - 1781) & Archibald Cary (1721 - 1787); (7) Anne Cary, (~1745 - 1789) & Thomas Mann Randolph, (1741 - 1793); (8) Virginia Randolph, (1786 - ) & Wilson Jefferson Cary (1784 - 1823); (9) Wilson Miles Cary (1806 - 1877) & Jane Margaret Carr; (10) Sydney Carr Cary (1845 - 1896) & Pauline Playford; (11) Gwendolen Playford Cary] 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 had 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 had not 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.

econd 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 had 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