In May of 1968, the news that Cristóbal Balenciaga had closed his Paris atelier on the Avenue George V reached the island of Capri, where one of his most devoted clients was in residence. Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue, was with her when the announcement came over the radio. The Countess Mona von Bismarck did not leave her bedroom for three days. “It was the end of a certain part of her life,” Vreeland later recalled.
Balenciaga, explaining his retirement to a distraught client, reportedly said, “Why do you want me to go on? There is no one left to dress. ”
The woman who spent three days in a darkened room mourning the closure of a fashion house had been born Margaret Edmona Travis Strader in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1897, the daughter of a horse trainer of modest means. Through five marriages, three continents, and several lifetimes of haute couture, she had become the first American ever named 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 ninety-eight-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.
And she had spent her final years 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 early life offered little hint of the trajectory to come. Robert Sims Strader, her father, was a professional horse trainer and breeder who moved among the very wealthy, taught them their animals, understood their habits, and was emphatically not one of them. Her parents divorced in 1902, and she was shuffled between grandmothers in Kentucky.
The maternal side of the family was catastrophically unstable. Her grandmother was eventually declared insane and committed. One uncle shot a woman and turned the gun on himself. A second died in a hunting accident.
A third succumbed to the same institutional fate as his mother. What Mona absorbed was the conviction that beauty and control were the only reliable currencies, and that a woman with enough of both could rewrite her own origin story. The escape route presented itself through her father’s professional connections. In January of 1917, at age twenty, she married Henry James Schlesinger, the thirty-eight-year-old eldest son of Ferdinand Schlesinger, widely considered the richest man in Wisconsin.
The marriage produced one child, Robert Henry Schlesinger, and lasted almost exactly three years. In the divorce proceedings of 1920, 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.
The Schlesinger chapter established the template that would govern every subsequent marriage. She entered relationships with a clear understanding of what she needed to extract, conducted herself with sufficient charm and beauty to make the extraction feel like a partnership, and departed when the arrangement no longer served her purposes. The coldness of the child custody exchange was not aberrant behavior but foundational. It was the moment she demonstrated to herself that nothing would ever again constrain her freedom of movement.
In 1921, freshly divorced, she married James Irving Bush, a stockbroker and athlete who provided the scaffolding of a presentable husband but also, apparently, a serious drinking problem. She obtained a divorce in Paris in July of 1925, the French courts being considerably more accommodating to American women of means. Back in New York, she opened a dress shop with a close friend, Laura Merriam Curtis, who was engaged at the time to 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 the speed and precision that characterized every consequential decision of her life. On July 2, 1926, she married Harrison Williams at his apartment on Madison Avenue. He was fifty-three; she was twenty-nine. The honeymoon announced the scale of the life she had entered.
The couple sailed on Harrison’s private yacht on a year-long voyage through Asia. 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 that now bears her name in perpetuity at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Money of that magnitude expressed itself in real estate.
A neo-Georgian mansion on Long Island redesigned by Delano and Aldrich, a New York townhouse on Fifth Avenue, an all-white Palm Beach residence, a Paris apartment, and their most beloved property, a cliffside villa on Capri called Il Fortino that would later become Villa Bismarck. The crash of 1929 reduced Williams’s fortune from $680 million to approximately $5 million. The Harrison Williamses simply failed to notice. They scaled back from five homes to four, kept a domestic staff that still numbered 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 voted Mona Williams the best-dressed woman in the world, the first American ever to receive the title. She won the title again in ’34 and ’36, topped the international list in 1940, appeared on it eight more times through ’57, and was inducted into the Fashion Hall of Fame in ’58. Vogue wrote in 1936: “Her extraordinary catlike eyes and blue-gray hair are New York phenomena. Her dressing is high art.
” Cecil Beaton described her as a rock crystal goddess. Nobody ever saw Mona reading a book. Nobody ever quoted a witty remark of hers. She never learned French or Italian.
What she did, with total mastery, was curate an existence. Her houses were perfect, her clothes perfect, her gardens perfect, her dinner parties perfect. White was her signature color, particularly for evening wear, when the rest of society wore black. The calculation was precise.
Against the darkness of a room, she stood out. Against the white of a dress, her aquamarine eyes and silver hair blazed. Mona’s relationship with Cristóbal Balenciaga lasted almost thirty years and was one of the most celebrated client-couturier partnerships in the history of fashion. She was not a customer but a patron in the old sense.
She ordered everything from him, ball gowns, cocktail dresses, travel clothes, and most famously, 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. Balenciaga described her approach as audacious. Chanel called it elegant.
Givenchy rated it colorful. For all its mercenary origins, the marriage to Harrison Williams was by most accounts genuinely happy. When Williams died in 1953 at age eighty, he left Mona a fortune estimated at $90 million. In January of 1955, she married Count Albrecht Eduard “Eddie” von Bismarck-Schönhausen, the grandson of Otto von Bismarck and a Viennese interior designer who had been her long-time confidant.
The marriage was widely understood as a companionate arrangement sealed by mutual affection and practical benefit. Mona acquired the title that completed her social architecture. Eddie, who was thought to be dying of stomach cancer when they married, lived another sixteen years. In 1971, 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. She was seventy-four; he was sixty. Through her old friend, Italy’s exiled King Umberto II, she purchased the title of count for De Martini. The reality was grim.
He dismissed her long-term employees, kept a secret mistress in England, pocketed $3 million in a Swiss bank account ostensibly for a medical clinic that never materialized, and already had a wife and family of whom Mona was entirely unaware. In 1979, De Martini 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.
Of all her houses, none expressed her nature more completely than the villa on Capri. She imported flowers from Kentucky and England, shipped fresh water from the mainland for the gardens, and cultivated an environment of theatrical Mediterranean beauty. The Paris townhouse at 34 Avenue de New York occupied one of the most enviable sites in the city, facing the Eiffel Tower. Givenchy later noted that Mona had two lifts of different speeds installed, the faster one reserved for servants so they could reach the landing before her to open the door.
It was in this house that the Dalí portrait hung for decades. And it was here that Mona died on July 10, 1983, at age eighty-six. The fall of Mona von Bismarck was not a single event but a slow erosion that Cecil Beaton documented in words. Visiting her at Capri late in her life, after the De Martini marriage, after the Balenciaga closure, after the magnificent silver hair had been replaced by dyed brown, he recorded what he found: “She is now suddenly a wreck.
Her hair, once white and crisp and oiled to her aquamarine eyes, 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 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. Mona had intended her estate to fund a foundation for Franco-American cultural exchange in perpetuity.
She bequeathed the Paris property and the majority of her estate to the Mona Bismarck Foundation. But she had not adequately accounted for her son. Robert Henry Schlesinger, the child she had abandoned in 1920 for $500,000, 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 third and fourth of her five husbands, 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.
The story of those three days in a darkened bedroom on Capri mourning the closure of a fashion house is the story of Mona von Bismarck in miniature. What she lost was not a source of clothing, but the collaborator who had most completely 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.