In the spring of 1968, the news that Cristóbal Balenciaga had closed his Paris atelier reached the island of Capri, where one of his most devoted clients was in residence. Countess Mona von Bismarck did not leave her bedroom for three days. According to Diana Vreeland, who was with her, the editor of Vogue watched as the countess went into a complete collapse. When Balenciaga explained his retirement to a distraught client, he reportedly asked, “Why do you want me to go on?
There is no one left to dress. ” The woman mourning a fashion house as if it were a death was, in fact, mourning something far larger: the collapse of the carefully constructed identity that had defined her for six decades. She had been born Margaret Edmona Travis Strader in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1897, the daughter of a horse trainer of modest means. By the end of her life, she had ascended through five marriages, three continents, and several fortunes to become the first American ever voted the best-dressed woman in the world.
She had sold her only child for $500,000 at the age of twenty-three. She had married the richest man in America. She had acquired a 98-carat sapphire on her honeymoon that now sits in the Smithsonian. She had been painted by Salvador Dalí, photographed by Cecil Beaton, memorialized in a Cole Porter musical, and used as the model for the heroine of Truman Capote’s unfinished novel.
Her final years were spent in a cliffside villa on Capri, where Beaton, visiting late in her life, found her painting a grotesque mask over the remains of what had once been one of the most celebrated faces of the twentieth century. Her childhood offered no promise of this trajectory. Her parents divorced when she was barely five, and she was shuffled between grandmothers in Kentucky. Her maternal family was catastrophically unstable: one grandmother was committed to an asylum, one uncle shot a woman and then himself, another died in a hunting accident, and a third suffered the same institutional fate as his mother.
Her father, too often away following the horses and the money, moved among the wealthy without ever belonging to them. What Mona absorbed was a conviction that beauty and control were the only reliable currencies—and that a woman with enough of both could rewrite her own origin story. What defined her for the next eight decades was an absolute capacity for control, extending to every surface of her existence, from the arrangement of flowers to the precise angle at which a dress fell across her shoulders. It was not vanity but survival, the response of a child who had watched chaos destroy everyone around her and concluded that the only defense against an untrustworthy world was to construct a world of one’s own.
The escape route came through her father’s connections. In January 1917, at twenty years old, she married Henry James Schlesinger, the eldest son of Ferdinand Schlesinger, widely considered the richest man in Wisconsin. Ferdinand had arrived from Prussia at eighteen with nothing and had built, lost, and rebuilt several fortunes, once floating worthless iron ore vouchers across multiple Milwaukee banks before the scheme collapsed in the panic of 1893. No charges were ever brought.
He had, in his own way, done exactly what Mona was about to do: build an identity from nothing and make others believe in it absolutely. The marriage produced one son and lasted almost exactly three years. In the divorce proceedings, Mona delivered a withering account of Henry’s cruelties while he sat silent. In a deal almost certainly engineered by Ferdinand, Mona agreed to permanently abandon custody of her infant son in exchange for a lump payment of $500,000.
She was twenty-three years old. She walked out of Milwaukee and did not look back. Her son later grew up to be, by multiple accounts, a troubled and financially reckless man who was indicted on eight counts for attempting to swindle a Manhattan jeweler and fled the country. The Schlesinger chapter established the template for every subsequent marriage.
Mona entered relationships with a clear understanding of what she needed to extract, conducted herself with enough charm and beauty to make the extraction feel like partnership rather than raid, and departed when the arrangement no longer served her purposes. In 1921 she married James Irving Bush, a handsome stockbroker with a serious drinking problem, and divorced him in Paris in 1925. Back in New York, she opened a dress shop with a close friend, Laura Merriam Curtis, whose fiancé was Harrison Williams, described in the press as the richest man in America with a fortune estimated at $680 million. Three days after the engagement was announced, Curtis abandoned it and remarried her former husband.
Mona, who had first encountered Williams years earlier at her own second wedding, moved with speed and precision. On July 2, 1926, she married Harrison Williams. He was fifty-three; she was twenty-nine. The New York Times would later write that the only reason the Harrison Williamses did not live like princes was that princes could not afford to live like the Harrison Williamses.
The honeymoon announced the scale of the life she had entered. The couple sailed on Williams’s private yacht on a year-long around-the-world voyage, and during a stop in Sri Lanka, Mona acquired a 98. 57-carat cornflower blue sapphire that she would later have set by Cartier into a platinum necklace surrounded by 312 diamonds. The piece now bears her name at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
The crash of 1929 reduced Williams’s fortune from $680 million to roughly $5 million, yet the couple barely noticed. They scaled back from five homes to four, kept a domestic staff numbering around fifty at the Long Island estate alone, and Mona continued spending an estimated $50,000 a year on clothing. In 1933, the assembled couturiers of Paris—Coco Chanel, Edward Molyneux, Madeleine Vionnet, Lucien Lelong, and Jean Lanvin—voted her the best-dressed woman in the world, the first American ever to receive the title. She won again in 1934 and 1936, topped the international best-dressed list in 1940, and was inducted into the Fashion Hall of Fame in 1958.
Cecil Beaton described her as a rock crystal goddess, someone whose appearance seemed less like a human achievement than an act of geology. What distinguished Mona from other wealthy women who dressed well was the totality of the commitment. She never learned French or Italian despite years spent in those countries. Nobody ever saw her reading a book or heard a witty remark from her.
What she did with total mastery was curate an existence. Her houses, clothes, gardens, and dinner parties were perfect. White was her signature color, particularly for evening wear when the rest of society wore black; against the darkness of a room she stood out, and against white her aquamarine eyes and silver hair blazed. Her relationship with Cristóbal Balenciaga lasted almost thirty years and became one of the most celebrated client-couturier partnerships in fashion history.
As the era’s dictum put it, Givenchy dressed the rich, Balenciaga dressed the very rich, and Mona was married to the richest man in the world. She ordered everything from him, including her gardening clothes. After a railroad accident destroyed a significant portion of her wardrobe, she reportedly ordered 150 dresses from Balenciaga in a single sitting. Both believed that the construction of a perfect exterior was not frivolity but discipline, and that the fall of a skirt expressed something words could not capture.
A 2023 Paris exhibition at the Balenciaga Archive brought together looks from his most prestigious clients, including Mona, testifying to how central she remained to the house’s identity long after her death. The marriage to Harrison Williams was, by most accounts, genuinely happy. When he died in 1953, he left her a fortune estimated at $90 million. The one thing her life had lacked—an aristocratic title—arrived in January 1955 with her fourth marriage.
Count Albrecht “Eddie” von Bismarck-Schönhausen was the grandson of Otto von Bismarck and a Viennese interior designer who had been Mona’s longtime confidant. The marriage was understood by most who knew them as a companionate arrangement. Mona acquired the title that completed her social architecture. Eddie received financial security and care.
Thought to be dying of stomach cancer when they married, he lived another sixteen years. In 1971, at seventy-four, Mona made the worst decision of her life. She married Umberto De Martini, the Italian physician who had cared for Count Eddie in his final years. Through her old friend, Italy’s exiled King Umberto II, she purchased the title of count for De Martini.
The reality was grim. De Martini dismissed her long-term employees, was alleged by friends to keep her lightly medicated, maintained a secret mistress in England, had pocketed $3 million in a Swiss bank account, and already had a wife and family of whom Mona was entirely unaware. In 1979 he drove his Alfa Romeo off a bridge near Naples and died. His will made clear he had fully expected to outlive Mona and inherit her fortune.
She immediately dropped his name and resumed calling herself Countess Bismarck. Cecil Beaton, with the terrible precision of a great photographer, documented what followed. Visiting her at Capri late in her life, he recorded: “She is now suddenly a wreck. Her hair, once white and crisp, is now a little dried frizz.
And she has painted a grotesque mask on the remains of what was once such a noble-hued face. The lips enlarged like a clown, the eyebrows penciled with thick black greasepaint, the flesh down to the pale lashes coated with turquoise. Oh, my heart broke for her. ” The tragedy was not the wrinkles but the terror expressed in clown white and turquoise of a woman whose entire identity had been constructed upon a face.
She had spent eighty years refusing to acknowledge any reality that did not serve her image, and she was now living inside a reality her image could no longer disguise. What Balenciaga’s retirement meant to Mona, the thing that kept her in her room for three days, was perhaps not the loss of a couturier but the loss of the collaborator who had most understood what she was doing. Without him, she was a woman in a beautiful dress with no one left who understood why the dress mattered. After the three days, she transferred her allegiance to Hubert de Givenchy, who would eventually dress her for burial.
Mona died in Paris on July 10, 1983, at eighty-six. She had intended her estate to fund a foundation for Franco-American cultural exchange in perpetuity, but she had not adequately accounted for her son. Robert Henry Schlesinger, the child she had abandoned in 1920, contested the will and demanded an inheritance substantially larger than the $1 million she had left him. The legal challenge forced the sale of the Capri villa and its contents.
The great collection was dispersed. Of the $90 million she had inherited from Harrison Williams, approximately $25 million remained at her death. She was buried in a Givenchy gown at Glen Cove on Long Island, alongside Harrison Williams and Count Eddie von Bismarck, the two who had given her, respectively, the fortune and the name that together constituted the identity she had spent her life creating.
The Bismarck sapphire had been donated to the Smithsonian in 1967 and sits today in the gem gallery, an inadvertent monument to the honeymoon of a fifty-three-year-old billionaire and his twenty-nine-year-old bride.