The Tragic Story of The Woman Who Chose a Billionaire Over Her Fashion Empire

#wealth #dynasty #gildedage This in-depth documentary explores how Carolyn Roehm, a school principal's daughter from a nine-thousand-person town in Missouri who arrived in New York with six hundred dollars, talked her way into Oscar de la Renta's studio, married one of the richest men in the world, became the undisputed queen of nineteen-eighties New York society, launched her own fashion house, and then lost everything when her billionaire husband replaced her with a Canadian economist, stripped her of her credit cards, her homes, and her social world, and left her to rebuild a life from the ashes of a Connecticut house that burned to the ground. Carolyn Jane Smith was born on May seventh, nineteen fifty-one, in Kirksville, Missouri, a small college town in the northeast corner of the state. Her father was the high school principal. Her mother was a teacher. The family was comfortably middle-class but not wealthy, the sort of household where books were respected, appearances mattered, and ambition was quietly encouraged. The young Jane was, from the beginning, set apart by her sense of aesthetics. At age five she had definite ideas about luxury, flowers, dress-up, more flowers. At seven she spent her thirty-five-cent weekly allowance on a rhinestone-studded tiara from the Sears catalog. Her paternal grandmother, Anita Beaty, was the key figure in her early formation. The grandmother sewed beautifully, ran a successful shop, cultivated a large flower and vegetable garden, and showed the young girl that women could create worlds of beauty with their own hands. From her grandmother she absorbed the fundamentals of horticulture, planting marigolds to deter pests, growing squash and asparagus, cutting roses without damage, skills she would not need again for thirty years, when they would save her. Her mother's contribution was more philosophical, women need clothes to suit the many roles they must play, and dressing well was not vanity but preparation. At Washington University in St. Louis she was the rare fashion major during the late nineteen-sixties student unrest, the girl who showed up to class in matched outfits and piqué blouses while her contemporaries wore jeans and protested. She was not out of step with her generation from indifference but from a single-minded focus that left no room for political upheaval. I was going to be a famous designer, she said later, and they were getting in the way of my education. She graduated in nineteen seventy-three with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and left for New York the following day. The job she expected from designer Victor Costa, who had lectured at Washington University and offered her a position, had evaporated by the time she arrived. She found herself at Kellwood Company, a manufacturer of polyester women's sportswear for Sears, designing racks of sensible dresses for the mass market. For a woman who had grown up dreaming of couture, it was a useful humiliation. She wore her ambition quietly and she waited. Her strategy for entering de la Renta's studio was characteristically pragmatic, she knew the name of every major designer in New York, knew which house would teach her the most, and made herself impossible to ignore. Within eleven months of arriving in the city she had secured an appointment. She sat in front of de la Renta and, as he later recalled, the first thing that struck him was not her portfolio but her appearance, she was very beautiful, very nicely dressed and she sold herself well. He hired her not for her sketches but for her look, a casting decision that would define the next decade of her life in ways neither of them could have predicted. Her starting salary was one hundred twenty-six dollars a week. She held pins and ran errands. She taught herself to do the jobs no one else wanted, editing fabrics, managing the sample rooms, learning every aspect of how a major fashion house actually operated from the inside out. She had to talk her way into staying in the workrooms past closing time, studying the construction of high-end garments with the same obsessive patience she would later apply to flower arranging and garden design. I thought, how can I make myself useful in order to be desirable to this man, she said of de la Renta. What she received in return was an education that money could not have bought. Oscar de la Renta became not merely her employer but her mentor, her surrogate father, her introduction to a level of civilization she had glimpsed only in the pages of magazines. Subscribe to OLD MONEY LEDGER for more stories on wealthy families, billionaire dynasties, old money empires, and the hidden histories of the world's most powerful bloodlines.