The (recently added?) treasure trove of old Time magazine articles that turn up in google searches is on my unofficial list of favorite things. I was link-wandering today. I started at the Duchess of Windsor, leading me to a post devoted to an artist/designer named Drian, who painted the Duchess. The post included the following paragraph:
“For the beautiful Audrey James, a British heiress whose husbands included the American mercantile magnate Marshall Field III, Drian painted a fantastic mirrored screen depicting a band of black jazz musicians. (It was later owned by James’s friend Eleanor Lambert, the founder of the Best-Dressed List.)”
I decided Audrey James sounded interesting, and while information on her is thin on the ground (apparently she shares a name with a porn star, good thing I didn’t do an image search first), including her husband, Mr. Field III, yields a bit more.
Here’s an article that popped up in my search:
“He bought a 2,000-acre estate at Lloyd’s Neck on Long Island. There he built a magnificent Georgian mansion overlooking Long Island Sound, a Georgian stable embellished with scrollwork, numerous cottages and barns, a 20-car garage, a power plant. He collected paintings. He kept prize Guernsey cows.
…
In 1930 his first wife divorced him in Reno. He gave her a $1,000,000-a-year income and custody of their three children. Two weeks later Marshall Field married Mrs. Audrey James Coats, socialite god- daughter of King Edward VII, widow of a British Army captain. Last October she, too, flew to Reno.”
“Engagement Reported. Capt. Marshall Field III, onetime student at Eton College and Cambridge University, sportsman, head of Field, Glore & Co. (Chicago brokers), director of Guaranty Trust Co. (New York); to Audrey James Coats, London society beauty, widow of Dudley Coats, daughter of Mrs. Willie James who was an illustrious hostess in London and a close friend of Edward VII. The present Mrs. Marshall (Evelyn Marshall) Field III is in Reno, expecting a divorce early in August. Last week, Capt. Field made his first solo airplane flight, at Roosevelt Field, L. I.; flew 20 minutes, landed four times.”
(Also that week: Col. Rickenbacker receives belated Congressional Medal of Honor, Zane Grey, “Prolific author of western novels,” sued for $500,000)
“Divorced. Marshall Field III, Chicago department store scion; by Audrey James Coats Field, goddaughter of King Edward VII; in Reno. Grounds: extreme mental cruelty.”
(I don’t know about the mental cruelty, but she made out okay: according to this North Shore article, “In the divorce agreement, he agreed to pay her $400,000 in 16 equal installments of $25,000 due on the first day of each January, April, July and October every year until 1938. The settlement further specified that should he live to be 45, another $2 million were due. In the meantime, he made her the beneficiary of a £250,000 life insurance policy, and agreed to amend his will so that Audrey would inherit one fourth of his wealth.”)
If all of the above, with its shades (for my mind) of “Sabrina” and Gatsby, isn’t enough to whet your appetite, check out the parties she attended before she got hitched:
“These get-togethers, Evelyn Waugh wrote in Vile Bodies, were ‘masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as someone else and almost naked parties in St. John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and nightclubs, in windmills and swimming baths.” (courtesy same North Shore article)
That’s a lot of partying. And for extra credit, scroll down to “Caumsett’s 1932 Circus Party” (ignore the confusion over Audrey’s identity) and see how they rolled on their estate.
All this from the first page of google results. Truly, we are living in a golden age for the information wanderer.
