Pauline de Rothschild

Pauline, Baroness de Rothschild (née Potter; December 31, 1908 – March 8, 1976) was a writer, a fashion designer, and, with her second husband, a translator of both Elizabethan poetry and the plays of Christopher Fry. She was the only woman named 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. Of her many accomplishments, it was her flair for entertaining and setting a table that was especially impressive, garnering both praise and a few magazine articles in such publications as Vogue (where the accompanying photos were taken by Horst) and L'ŒIL. And if you look at photos of de Rothschild's table settings, some of which are seen here, you will understand why both magazines devoted space to her myriad creations. Entertaining at Château de Mouton, the country estate of her husband, winemaker Philippe de Rothschild, was evidently an elaborate affair, thoroughly-planned and well-coordinated. As the writer Valentine Lawford rather breathlessly noted in Vogue: Menus are brought to her in bed. So is a book with photographs of the luncheon and dinner services (one hundred and seventy of them, all told), and other books with swatches of the tablecloths and napkins (an equally prodigious variety) to choose from for the day. Marie, the flower-arranger, telephones for instructions before going off on her little motor bicycle in search of moss and branches and blossoms. 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, Potter went on to design a collection for Marshall Field and later 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. Philippe de Rothschild and Joan Littlewood, Milady Vine: The Autobiography of Philippe de Rothschild (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984) Among her clients were 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. 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. 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. 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.