On the night of November 23, 1985, 101 guests in black tie sat down to a wedding dinner on Park Avenue, moments after the electricians had finished the wiring. The bride had once held pins for Oscar de la Renta at $126 a week, and the fashion house that carried her name had been built on that work. Six years later, the Wall Street Journal would explain it away in one line: her husband had grown tired of pouring millions into his wife’s ailing business. Caroline Smith was born on May 7, 1951, in Kirksville, Missouri, a town of about 9,000 people.
She was an only child, a good student, a self-described goody-goody who spent her childhood playing dress-up, making hats and corsages out of nothing, dreaming of entering a room in a gown and having Prince Charming fall madly in love with her. Her father was a school principal; her mother, Elaine, taught special education and worked for the Red Cross. When the family moved to St. Louis, Caroline felt isolated, but she held to her precision and her refusal to be talked out of what she wanted.
In 1973 she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and arrived in New York with $600 and five suitcases. She took a job designing sportswear for a Sears supplier, earning about $13,000 a year drawing polyester dresses. She wanted the other end of fashion: the gowns, the ruffles, the evening clothes.
And there was one man above all others who made exactly those clothes: Oscar de la Renta, who had never hired a female assistant. Caroline talked her way into an appointment with him. “I want to work for Oscar de la Renta,” she remembered saying. “I really love ruffles and evening clothes.
” He warned her that she’d make more money elsewhere, but told her to call Monday. She did, and she took a cut in pay to take the job, dropping from about $13,000 a year to $126 a week. She held pins, ran errands, bought sandwiches, and asked herself how she could make herself useful. She became his fit model, then an assistant designer, given the Miss O line, which she made her own.
Fifty years later it would be forgotten that she had spent nine or ten years at his side, learning the trade from the floor up. In 1978 she married a German heir named Axel Rohan, a man she called “dashing and gorgeous,” and moved to Germany. Within the first month, she said later, “I realized I had married a lunatic. ” He took her life away, she said, by taking her career away.
The marriage ended, and she returned, going back to Oscar and then out again, before returning to the studio for good. She kept one thing from Germany: his name. For the rest of her life she would be Caroline Rohan. In 1981 she met Henry Kravis, a financier seven years her senior, co-founder of the firm KKR, which bought companies with borrowed money.
At that point, she insisted, he hadn’t yet made his fortune. They married in 1985, but she had learned the German lesson: she insisted on a written agreement that her business would survive whatever happened to the marriage. The agreement could not change who owned what. Henry Kravis held the majority interest in Caroline Herrera Incorporated; Caroline and her two partners held equal smaller shares.
The label said Caroline Herrera; the company belonged, in its larger part, to him. In April 1985 she showed her first collection. It was, in one account, an instantaneous hit. Caroline cried; so did Henry.
A week later he proposed, and she said yes. By the time of their wedding dinner, the couple had become one of the most photographed pairs in New York. Their apartment reportedly cost $5. 5 million, with nine paintings by Manet, Monet, and Renoir in the living room, a major Sargent over the dining table, walls covered in coral damask, and a table set on three services of gold-trimmed Limoges.
The money was being made at astonishing speed. Shortly after the wedding, Henry’s firm concluded the buyout of Beatrice for $6. 2 billion. She was now married to one of the most talked-about financiers in America, and every newspaper that wrote about one wrote about the other.
The business grew. By 1987 the house was producing seven collections a year, with volume in excess of $6 million, gowns selling for $2,000 to $10,000 each, shown at the Plaza Hotel. Her customers, her partners said, were women like her, who worked hard and didn’t wait for their husbands to give them anything. She said it herself: “I have an extraordinary life, but I’d give it up in a second before I’d give up my work.
” But the press could only hold one image. Women’s Wear Daily coined a phrase, “New Social,” to describe the wave of financiers and their wives buying their way into old institutions, and it held up Henry Kravis and Caroline Herrera as its most perfect embodiment. She chaired the Metropolitan Opera gala in 1987 and the New York City Ballet gala in 1986. Board seats reportedly cost $150,000 to $250,000.
She kept records so no guest was served the same menu twice. She said later that in the 80s and 90s she had no fun: “I was like the hamster in the cage. ” When the fashion editor Carrie Donovan put her finger on the tension, she said it plainly: “She doesn’t want to be Mrs. Henry Kravis.
She wants to be Caroline Herrera. ”
In 1988 Henry’s firm won the battle for RJR Nabisco at about $25 billion, the peak deal of the decade. In 1989 the story became a book, Barbarians at the Gate. In January 1989 the board of the Council of Fashion Designers of America voted Caroline president without a single dissent, a special election to finish Oscar de la Renta’s term, a vote from her own trade.
She agreed on one condition: the fashion industry would have to act on AIDS. “Talk is cheap,” she said. “It’s actions. ” The result was Seventh on Sale, a four-day sale of donated clothes at the 69th Regiment Armory, opening November 29, 1990.
It raised $4. 2 million for the New York City AIDS Fund. She resigned from the presidency in December 1990, saying she had never been popular among the press because she hadn’t thought courting them was the right thing to do. In the summer of 1991 she was preparing to grow the business.
She had brought in a new chief executive from Chanel, who started July 8. Then, on the night of July 13, 1991, Henry Kravis received a phone call while dining out. Harrison, his 19-year-old son from his first marriage, a student at Brown, had been driving fast on a gravel road in Colorado. He lost control; the car flipped.
He was not wearing a seatbelt. His passenger survived with a broken arm. Harrison did not. Caroline had known Harrison since he was a child.
She said later that she was on the verge of a breakdown. “I just realized that I couldn’t do that to this human being who had gone through so much,” she said. “That’s when I shut the business down. ” She chose to focus on her grieving husband.
In September 1991, after showing her last resort collection in August, she announced that Caroline Herrera Incorporated was closing after six years, in the wake of a personal family tragedy. She was 40 years old. Within days, the city had a different explanation. The Wall Street Journal quoted unnamed people in the fashion trade saying Henry Kravis had grown tired of pouring millions into his wife’s ailing business.
The house had never turned a profit, reported the wire services; it had no licensing base, no fragrance, no cheaper line. One trade figure called it “a small business at the top of the pyramid. ” Caroline was furious. “I resent the implication that Henry is tired of pumping money into my company,” she said.
“After Harrison’s death, something just snapped in me. ” But the Cinderella story was easier to tell. Newsweek grouped her with other “Wall Street wives” of the decade. She told them, “My astrologer says the 90s are going to be my most creative period.
We may fool you all. ”
The marriage did not survive. In 1993 HBO aired Barbarians at the Gate, with Rita Wilson playing Caroline, and Time praised the actress as “quite believable in the role of a woman whose single indulgence was a daily Oreo. ” In May 1993 the couple announced a trial separation.
Caroline explained it through the society columnist Liz Smith: “I need something and he needs something that we just can’t give each other right now. ” The divorce followed that year. No settlement figure has ever been reported. She has said only what she left with: “Henry kept everything except this house, which I treasure so much.
” The Metropolitan Opera, whose gala she had chaired, no longer wanted her on its board, she said. “They wanted the new Mrs. Kravis. ”
She left New York and went to Paris to work in a flower shop, unpaid, as an intern.
“There were moments,” she wrote, “in which I genuinely believed I wouldn’t find the strength or the will to continue. ” She enrolled in a course in Shakespearean tragedy. Surrounded by people who’d never heard of her, she wrote, “I recovered my sense of perspective and humility. ” She called those years her wilderness years.
And slowly the student became a teacher. In 1997 she published her first book, A Passion for Flowers, followed by a shelf of others: seasonal notebooks, books on parties, on blue and white, on interiors, on gardens, a book called simply Flowers. She rebuilt her life in the house in Sharon, Connecticut, the one thing the marriage had left her. On January 22, 1999, the house burned down.
Weatherstone had been standing since 1765, a stone house on 59 acres, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Faulty wiring brought it down to its stone walls. What was lost, according to one account, was the record of her working life: her books, her photographs from the years with Oscar de la Renta, the original sketches, fabrics, and trimmings from nearly 20 years as a designer. She was sad, above all, to lose the tablecloth she had sewn from Macy’s fabric with the help of the ladies in Oscar’s workroom.
She thought about leaving. “Then I thought,” she said, “this could be a window to creating something that’s truly mine. ” She sold her apartment in Paris to pay for the rebuilding, worked with a classical architect and a landscape architect, and built a new house inside the old stone walls with a formal garden where the fire had torn the ground. “I wanted one cozy room,” she said.
“When you’re down or tired, you need a retreat. ”
In December 2018 an illness began that she says kept her incapacitated until the following May. “The doctors say I’m lucky to be alive,” she wrote. “One may be felled, but like a small flower, one has to try and bloom.
” She kept working, publishing more books, making jewelry for animal shelters, designing the gardens of her houses in Connecticut and Charleston. In 2026 the Charleston house sold for $10 million. Henry Kravis, meanwhile, became one of the richest men in America, worth an estimated $12 billion, with a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art bearing his name. He has written with evident sorrow about the son he lost in 1991.
He has not, in anything on the record, spoken about the house of Rohan. She said it herself years after the House of Rohan closed, a sentence that stands as the verdict on all of it: “I have worked all my life, and they think that I’m in this business because I married a rich man. ” Somewhere in Kirksville, Missouri, an only child with no neighbors her own age is making hats and corsages out of nothing, dreaming of the room she will enter and the prince who will fall in love with her. She got the room and the prince, and lost both.
What she kept through the husbands and the headlines and the fire was the thing she started with: a pair of hands that know how to make something beautiful, and the patience of a girl who once held pins.