Mona von Bismarck (born Mona Travis Strader; 5 February 1897 – 10 July 1983)

Biography

Mona Travis Strader was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on 5 February 1897, the daughter of Robert Sims Strader, a horse trainer and breeder connected to Churchill Downs and Lexington's Fairland Farm.

Her parents divorced when she was five, and Mona and her brother were raised afterward by their paternal grandmother in Lexington.

In 1917, at twenty, she married Henry "Harry" Schlesinger, a wealthy Wisconsin businessman's son eighteen years her senior, who gave her a rope of pearls as a wedding gift. 

The couple had a son, Robert Henry Schlesinger. When they divorced in 1920, Mona gave up custody of her own child to her husband in exchange for half a million dollars.

In 1921 she married the banker James Irving Bush, fourteen years older and reputed to be the handsomest man in America. The marriage foundered quickly, ending in divorce in Paris around 1924.

In 1926, back in New York, Mona opened a dress shop with her friend Laura Merriam Curtis — who was, at the time, engaged to the financier Harrison Williams. Three days after that engagement was announced, Laura broke it off to remarry her own ex-husband instead, leaving Williams unattached. 

Mona, who had actually first met him years earlier at her own second wedding, married him that same year. Williams was, by most estimates, the richest man in America, worth some $680 million.

The marriage installed Mona at the absolute center of transatlantic society. She and Williams kept homes in New York, Palm Beach, and an estate called Oak Point on Long Island, along with a villa, Il Fortino, overlooking Capri's Marina Grande — built on land that had once belonged, in turn, to the Roman emperors Augustus and Tiberius.

In 1933, a panel of Paris's leading couturiers — including Coco Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet, Jeanne Lanvin, and Lucien Lelong — named Mona Williams the first American ever declared "Best-Dressed Woman in the World." 

She won the honor again in 1934 and 1936, and became, over the following decades, one of the most photographed women alive, socializing with American presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Princess Grace of Monaco.

Once Cristóbal Balenciaga opened his Paris house in 1937, Mona became one of his most loyal clients, remaining devoted to his designs for the next three decades.

Harrison Williams died in 1953, leaving Mona roughly $90 million. 

In 1955, she married Count Albrecht Edzard Heinrich Karl von Bismarck-Schönhausen, grandson of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck — a man who had, until shortly before the wedding, served as her personal secretary and interior decorator, and was six years her junior. The marriage made her Countess von Bismarck.

In 1956, the couple bought a home in a fashionable part of Paris and had it decorated by Stéphane Boudin, the same French decorator who would go on, a few years later, to help restore the White House for Jacqueline Kennedy.

Mona split her time between an apartment at the Hôtel Lambert in Paris, a townhouse on the Avenue de New York, and Il Fortino in Capri, where she became known locally as "the Queen of Capri," tending her gardens in linen Balenciaga shorts with her dogs trotting beside her.

In 1943, Salvador Dalí painted her portrait, The Kentucky Countess — a canvas that would sell at Sotheby's, decades later, for more than two million pounds.

In 1968, word reached Capri that Balenciaga had abruptly closed his Paris house. Mona reportedly shut herself in her bedroom for three days in despair. Balenciaga, for his part, personally referred her to his protégé, Hubert de Givenchy, and she transferred her loyalty to him for the rest of her life.

Count von Bismarck died in 1970. 

The following year, Mona married again — to Count Umberto de Martini, her late husband's physician, fourteen years her junior, for whom she had arranged an aristocratic title from the former King Umberto II of Italy so that he might marry a countess as an equal. 

The marriage was not a happy one: Umberto de Martini told her he was opening a medical clinic while secretly funneling several million dollars of her fortune into a Swiss bank account and naming a string of undisclosed relatives as beneficiaries in his will. Once Mona discovered the deception, she dropped his name and resumed calling herself simply Countess Bismarck. Umberto De Martini died in a car accident in 1979.

Her old friend, the photographer Cecil Beaton, visited her in Capri in these later years and was reportedly startled to find that all trace of her famous beauty had gone. 

As her eyesight began failing, Mona spent her final years quietly distributing her papers, paintings, and collections to museums and cultural institutions, and eventually sold Il Fortino.

Mona von Bismarck died at her home in Paris on 10 July 1983, at eighty-six. She was buried, fittingly, in a Givenchy gown, at Locust Valley Cemetery on Long Island, alongside her third and fourth husbands, Harrison Williams and Albrecht von Bismarck.

Of the $90 million she had once inherited, roughly $25 million remained. She left a million dollars to her estranged son and directed the rest (along with the proceeds from Il Fortino's sale and her celebrated jewelry) toward a foundation bearing her name, headquartered in her own Paris townhouse, dedicated to Franco-American cultural exchange. 

It operated for decades as the premier showcase of American art and culture in Paris, before the property itself was eventually sold in 2022, its remaining funds passed on to the American Library in Paris.