In 1985, Caroline Roehm was the center of New York’s gilded social world, a designer celebrated as one of the most elegant women in America. Her marriage to Wall Street titan Henry Kravis was named by GQ one of the 20 greatest weddings of the century, placed alongside Prince Charles and Lady Diana. She had a fashion house, a Park Avenue apartment filled with Renoirs and Louis XV antiques, four properties, and seats on the boards of the Metropolitan Opera and other cultural institutions. By 1993, nearly all of it was gone.
The divorce came, the business had already closed, the board seats evaporated—they belonged to Mrs. Kravis, not to Caroline. The possessions went to auction, and he remarried. What do you do when an entire identity collapses in months?
Caroline Roehm rebuilt herself from the ground up, and over the next three decades, she published 14 books, became a tastemaker, and built a creative life entirely on her own terms. Before there was Caroline Roehm, there was Jane Caroline Smith, born on May 7, 1951, in Kirksville, Missouri. Her father was a high school principal, her mother a school teacher, a solidly middle-class upbringing with no connection to the fashion world. She studied fashion design at Washington University in St.
Louis, graduating in 1973 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Even then, she stood apart, dressing in matched outfits and BCBG blouses while her peers wore jeans and t-shirts. In 1973, she packed five suitcases and arrived in New York City with $600 in her pocket. Within six weeks, she found herself on a date with a man who flew her around Manhattan in a helicopter before dining at the Rainbow Room, where Frank Sinatra was present.
Her promised job as an assistant to designer Victor Costa was rescinded when she arrived, so she took work at Kelwood, a polyester sportswear company that supplied Sears, Roebuck and Co. The next year, in 1974, she walked into the atelier of Oscar de la Renta and started at the very bottom. She held pins, ran errands, and served as a fitting model. De la Renta, born in Santo Domingo in 1932 and trained under Cristobal Balenciaga, became her mentor and father figure.
Over ten years, she rose to assistant designer, contributing to collections and helping develop the Miss O line. In 1978, she married Axel Röhm, a German chemical heir, and moved to Germany. The marriage lasted less than a year, with the divorce finalized by 1981. She kept the name Röhm, and to this day the reason has never been fully explained.
Jane Smith became Caroline Roehm, and that was who she would remain. Henry Roberts Kravis was born on January 6, 1944, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He attended Claremont McKenna College, earned his MBA from Columbia Business School in 1969, and began his career at Bear Stearns alongside his cousin George R. Roberts and colleague Jerome Kohlberg Jr.
In 1976, the three men left to found KKR. Within a decade, the firm had become one of the most powerful private equity companies in the world, completing the $31. 4 billion leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1989, a deal immortalized in the book Barbarians at the Gate. Caroline met Henry in the early 1980s through overlapping social worlds in New York.
Before they were married, he agreed to finance her fashion company, providing initial capital that industry reporting estimated at more than $20 million over the life of the business, and he retained majority interest in Caroline Roehm Inc. In 1985, she launched her own fashion house. That same year, she married Henry Kravis. The wedding was not a quiet affair.
GQ listed it among the 20 greatest weddings of the century, and the press called their circle the nouveau societe, a new Manhattan aristocracy built on Wall Street fortunes. They hosted lavish parties, including one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art itself, and owned four properties across the country. The first publicly visible sign of tension came in 1989, when Henry Kravis made a $10 million donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to fund a new wing. The wing bore his name, not hers.
In a world where names on buildings and boards were currency, the choice was conspicuous. The social world noticed, but neither Caroline nor Henry ever made a detailed public statement about the private dynamics of their marriage. What is known for certain is the timeline of events. Then came 1991, and it was catastrophic.
In July, Harrison Kravis, Henry’s 19-year-old son from his first marriage and a freshman at Brown University, was killed in a car accident in Colorado. In September, just two months after his death, Caroline issued a statement announcing the closure of Caroline Roehm, Inc. She described the death of her stepson as a catalyst, saying she wanted to spend more time with her husband and family during the tragedy. The fashion world was stunned.
The company had been operational since 1985, had expanded, and had added a couture line in 1988 and footwear in 1989. Weeks before the closure, she had just hired Kitty D’Alessio, the former president of Chanel, to serve as president and CEO. She was not winding down; she had been actively expanding. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that sources inside the business said Henry Kravis had grown tired of funding a company that, despite significant investment, had not reached profitability.
The reporting suggested the plug had been pulled for financial reasons, with Harrison’s death serving as the stated reason rather than the primary cause. Caroline herself has never confirmed that framing. She has said across various interviews that closing the company was like another death to her, profoundly devastating, the loss of an identity she had spent her entire adult life building. In 1993, Caroline Roehm and Henry Kravis divorced.
The details of the settlement have never been fully disclosed. The marriage lasted eight years. Henry remarried in 1994 to Marie-Josée Drouin, a prominent Canadian economist who later became president of the Museum of Modern Art’s Board of Directors. Caroline has spoken about the aftermath with striking honesty.
“I needed to get away from New York,” she said. “There were too many memories, and I didn’t have a business anymore, and I needed a change. The Metropolitan Opera no longer wanted me on their board. They wanted the new Mrs.
Kravis. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. A lot of our possessions were going to auction. Henry kept everything except this house, which I treasure so much.
”
Of the four properties they had shared, she retained Weatherstone, a 1765 Georgian estate on 59 acres in Sharon, Connecticut. There was scuttlebutt in social circles suggesting she did not own it outright but had been granted a life tenancy by Henry. This was never publicly confirmed or denied by either party and remains unverified social gossip. What is certain is that she has lived at Weatherstone, rebuilt it after a devastating fire, and made it the center of her creative life for more than 30 years.
The board seats she had held largely disappeared. In that world, social power attaches to the couple, and when the couple dissolves, the woman in the pair often finds that access dissolves with it. That pattern is not unique to her story. But what makes Caroline Roehm’s story different is that she did not accept that loss as a definition of who she was.
After the divorce, she went to Paris. Not to be seen, but to learn. She secured a position working at Mausi Severt, reputedly one of the most famous small flower shops in Europe. She was not a consultant or a celebrity guest; she was apprenticing, learning the vocabulary of flowers with the same intensity she had once brought to studying couture under Oscar de la Renta.
She also studied literature at Oxford during this period, according to several accounts of her life in the mid-1990s. When she returned from Paris, she threw herself into the gardens at Weatherstone. The original house dated to 1765, and the grounds spread across 59 acres of rolling Connecticut countryside. She began to understand flowers not just as decoration but as a form of expression.
In 1997, four years after the divorce, she published A Passion for Flowers through HarperCollins. The publisher later wrote that when Caroline presented the project, she arrived not with a typewritten manuscript but with a complete visual vision. She had turned her grief into art. Just when she had found her footing, disaster struck again.
On January 22, 1999, a fire broke out at Weatherstone, attributed to an electrical failure. The thick stone walls survived, but the house itself, the rooms she had decorated, the sanctuary she had described, was gone. “The shock was so sad. I thought about leaving it,” she said.
Instead, she looked at the rubble and saw possibility. “Then I thought, this could be a window to creating something that’s truly mine. ”
She hired architect Allan Greenberg and rebuilt Weatherstone from the ground up in pure Georgian form, entirely according to her own vision. “By then, I was divorced with no children, so I didn’t need lots of extra rooms.
” She devoted the square footage to what she actually wanted, including a dramatic two-story great room. She filled it with neoclassical architectural details, Gustavian furniture, and painted European pieces. When the rebuilt Weatherstone was complete, it was more beautiful than the original and more precisely hers. The gardens became both her daily life and her literary subject.
She photographed them herself. She published At Home in the Garden in 2015, taking all her own photography. Through her books, her website, and her Instagram presence, she opened the gates to her world and invited people in, not to impress them, but to share something she genuinely believed had value. Between 1997 and the present, Caroline Roehm has published 14 books.
They covered flowers, gardening and the seasons at Weatherstone, entertaining, design philosophy, and gift presentation. Her most recent major publication, Passions, a collection of three volumes, was released in 2021. She became a columnist for Veranda magazine and lectured at garden clubs, botanical gardens, and women’s organizations across the country. She built a cottage industry around beauty, craft, and intentional living, entirely without the infrastructure of a major fashion house, without a wealthy husband’s backing, and without the board seats she had lost.
She also pursued other creative forms. She is an accomplished watercolorist. She designed jewelry, collaborated with fabric and home goods companies, designed interiors, and purchased and renovated a historic home in Charleston, South Carolina. One profile called her one of America’s most important tastemakers, not because of who she was married to, but because of what she actually knew and produced.
There are complications to the reinvention narrative that deserve honest attention. When she launched Caroline Roehm Inc. in 1985, the funding came from Henry Kravis, who retained majority interest. Technically and legally, she did not own the majority of her own company.
When the marriage ended, so did that financial arrangement. How much of the business was hers, and how much was always contingent on the marriage, is unknown. What is clear is that every creative project she undertook after 1993 was funded and structured without depending on any single financial backer with personal stakes in her life. The gossip at the time of the divorce suggested she received considerably less than many expected, but neither party has ever publicly confirmed the terms.
She has spoken about the divorce with earned detachment, acknowledging the pain without apparent bitterness toward Henry personally. Whether that equanimity reflects genuine peace or a very elegant public performance of it, only she knows. It would also be dishonest to frame her post-1993 life as pure self-made independence. She came out of the marriage with Weatherstone, a significant asset, along with connections, social fluency, and the professional reputation she had built.
She was not starting from zero the way she had in 1973. But having a platform is not the same as using it. She used what she had to build something genuinely new, creative and self-authored in a way that her fashion career, tied as it was to her husband’s capital, arguably never fully was. Jane Smith from Kirksville arrived in New York City in 1973 with $600 and five suitcases.
She spent a year making polyester sportswear for Sears before getting her foot in the door at Oscar de la Renta’s studio, where she spent 10 years learning the craft from the ground up. Everything that happened between 1985 and 1993—the fashion house, the billionaire husband, the parties at the Met—was extraordinary. Yet when all of it ended, when the marriage dissolved, the social infrastructure collapsed, the house burned, and the possessions went to auction, what remained was what had been there at the beginning: the eye she had always had, the willingness to learn, and the capacity for patient, disciplined creative work that no one could give her and no one could take away. The Caroline Roehm who walked into her publisher’s office in 1997 with a fully realized vision for A Passion for Flowers was, in one sense, a different woman from the one who had stood at the center of New York’s most gilded world a decade before.
But in the most fundamental sense, she was the same woman she had always been, just more fully herself. The losses stripped away what was borrowed and revealed what was owned.