Today is Daisy Fellowes birthday!

She was born on Apr 29, 1890 as Marguerite Séverine Philippine Decazes de Glücksberg. She was the heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune and a fashion icon.

Photographer Cecil Beaton once described her: “She is spoilt, capricious, and wicked.”

Another fabulously wealthy man, the son of the Earl of the Pembroke, said Daisy’s  “wickedness was on a scale that it had its own distinction.”

Lady Diana Manners called her “the very picture of fashionable depravity.”  Daisy was having an affair with Lady Diana’s husband so she was understandably angry.

 

Daisy’s mother committed suicide when she was six years old. Soon afterwards, she and her brothers were sent to live with their aunt, Winnaretta Singer, who lived a bohemian lifestyle.

In May 1910, Daisy married Jean Amédée Marie Anatole de Broglie, the Prince de Broglie. At some point, Daisy learned the prince was bisexual. This revelation seems to have touched off her own promiscuity, which was impressive in its scale.

The  couple had three daughters: Princess Emmeline Isabelle Edmée Séverine de Broglie was born in February 1911;  Princess Isabelle Marguerite Jeanne Pauline de Broglie was born in July 1912; and Princess Jacqueline Marguerite de Broglie was born in January 1918.

Her husband’s death occurred one month after their last child was born. He was serving with the French Army in Mascara, Algeria during World War One. There were rumors that the prince committed suicide but his widow was unmoved by his death, regardless of its cause.

Daisy wasn’t interested in being a mother and delegated the care of the children to servants. In one famous story, the heiress was watching a group of children playing in the park. Their nanny was standing nearby and Daisy asked idly who the children belonged to.

“Why… they’re yours, madam,” the startled nanny replied.

The girls went on to have interesting lives of their own. Their mother described them in these flattering terms: “The eldest, Emmeline, is like my first husband only a great deal more masculine; the second, Isabelle, is like me without guts; [and] the third, Jacqueline, was the result of a horrible man called Lischmann ….”

Lischmann wasn’t her only documented lover. Her most famous affair was Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich and the husband of Lady Diana Manners. She once tried to seduce Winston Churchill but when that failed, she married his cousin Reginald Fellowes. She was also rumored to be interested in Edward VIII, but didn’t attempt to detach him from Wallis Simpson.  She described the acquisition of new lovers as “a thrilling feeling, like taking absinthe for the first time”.

Daisy loved risqué love affairs but her other love was fashion. She purchased expensive jewelry from Cartier and favored the severe lines of designers like Elsa Schiaparelli.  She eventually became the Paris editor of the American Harper’s Bazaar, leading one observer to call her “a Molotov cocktail in a Mainbocher suit.”
According to Harper’s Bazaar: “One of the most striking pieces in Fellowes’ vast jewellery collection was a collier hindou, or ‘Hindu’ necklace, that Cartier made to order for her in 1936…The necklace is the most eye-catching of Cartier’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ range of 1920s and 1930s designs, all of which featured unusually cut Indian gemstones that resembled leaves, blossoms and berries.”

She frequently got face lifts but found it difficult to maintain her extremely svelte figure unassisted. She tried extreme diets and intermittent fasting with some luck. But she found something much more effective: cocaine. She called it her “naughty salt.” No matter what you think of cocaine, you must admit that is a great name for it.

Daisy was also a devotée of opium because why not? She was heroin chic before such a thing existed, leading a Vogue editor to describe Daisy as possessing “the elegance of the damned.”

She was unable to hold on to her friends because she treated them poorly, and she enjoyed anything dramatic. For instance, she loved to throw themed parties and, at one point, she threw a party with a guest list made up entirely of people she disliked.

When Reginald passed away in the mid 1950s, Daisy’s love of life began to flag, and she attempted suicide several times. When she finally died of heart trouble in her early 70s,  her remaining friends were shocked to find she had spent her entire fortune, with only about 80,000 pounds left.

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