Dorothy Cadwell Taylor, Countess Dentice di Frasso
- Bobby Kelley
- 1 day ago
- 17 min read
Dorothy Cadwell Taylor was born on February 13, 1888, in Watertown, Jefferson County, New York, the daughter of Bertrand LeRoy Taylor and Nellie Cadwell Taylor. At the time of her birth, her parents were living in the former home of Judge Robert Lansing, although the circumstances into which Dorothy was born would become considerably more prosperous as she grew.
Her mother came from the Cadwell and Woodruff families, while her father built substantial business interests in leather, hides and tallow, hotels, investments and the paper industry. Dorothy had one younger brother, Bertrand LeRoy Taylor Jr., and as their father's fortunes expanded, the family's world expanded with them. Watertown remained part of their lives, but New York increasingly became their center, and the Taylors eventually maintained a home at 540 Park Avenue.
Dorothy grew up as that change was taking place, and by the time she reached her teens the world available to her was considerably larger than Watertown. In New York she entered the social circle in which she would spend much of her adulthood, attending society events, traveling frequently and acquiring an independence that appeared early. In 1904, when she was only sixteen, that independence brought her briefly to the attention of the police after she was reportedly caught driving the family automobile along Fifth Avenue at approximately forty miles an hour. Dorothy admitted that she had been behind the wheel. A few years later she was appearing regularly in society photographs, including one taken while she was costumed for a society circus at Long Branch in 1909. Newspapers described her as a beauty, and her name appeared among the young women whose clothes, parties, travels and possible engagements occupied the society columns of the day.
Travel was already an ordinary part of Dorothy's life when, late in 1911, she crossed the Atlantic aboard the Olympic and met Claude Grahame-White. Claude belonged to a world even newer than the one represented by Dorothy's automobile. He was one of the most celebrated aviators of the period, an international competitor and winner of the Gordon Bennett Aviation Cup who had established an aerodrome and flying school at Hendon outside London. Flight was still sufficiently novel that aviators were treated almost as explorers, and Claude's exploits had made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic. The two became engaged within months of meeting.
Dorothy Taylor and Claude Grahame-White were married on June 27, 1912, at the parish church in Widford, Essex, in a wedding that could scarcely have belonged to anyone other than an aviator and the young woman who had agreed to marry him. Claude arrived by airplane the previous day, other aviators flew in for the festivities, flying demonstrations were given and a special train carried guests from London. Even the wedding cake carried a model airplane. After the ceremony the guests gathered at nearby Hylands House, while photographs preserved from the occasion show Dorothy and Claude sitting together in a biplane. His wedding present to her was a Belgian Métallurgique automobile, a gift that must have suited Dorothy particularly well.
For a time she entered enthusiastically into the extraordinary world surrounding her husband. Newspapers reported plans for Dorothy to fly with Claude, and her name became associated with his proposed attempt to cross the Atlantic by air. She was willing to go farther than most women of her social circle, although not quite everywhere Claude's profession might have taken her. On one occasion she prepared to accompany him across the English Channel before her nerve failed and she decided to remain behind. There was little shame in the decision. Early aviation remained perilous, and the men who flew regularly accepted dangers that were obvious to anyone standing beside an airplane preparing to leave the ground.
The excitement surrounding Claude's career could not preserve the marriage. By 1915 they were living apart, although surviving correspondence suggests that Dorothy had not yet given up hope of repairing what had gone wrong between them. In October she wrote to Claude offering to put the past behind them if he would end his attachment to another woman and return to her. Claude answered that the other woman was not responsible for their separation and that he and Dorothy were simply unsuited to one another. Early the following year Dorothy began proceedings in England for restoration of conjugal rights, then a customary preliminary step toward divorce. A decree followed during the summer, with the divorce becoming final later that year, and Claude remarried in December.
Time appears to have softened whatever bitterness remained between them. Dorothy and Claude stayed in occasional contact for the rest of her life, and nearly forty years after their elaborate wedding he was still writing to her.
One surviving letter, dated October 1951, finds Claude discussing the troublesome business of having Dorothy's Rolls-Royce repaired and offering comments about health and osteopaths. The two people who had once been photographed together in a biplane had become older friends corresponding about an automobile. He signed the letter with the familiar name Dorothy had used for him during their marriage, “Whitey.”
After the divorce Dorothy returned to a life divided between New York and Europe, supported by the considerable wealth surrounding the Taylor family. Later accounts would repeatedly claim that she inherited ten or twelve million dollars at about this time, but the story became distorted in the telling. Her mother lived until 1923 and her father until 1934, so the frequently repeated account of Dorothy suddenly inheriting a vast fortune immediately after her 1916 divorce cannot be correct as usually presented. There was never much doubt that she had money, however, and during the years that followed she acquired the freedom to travel, entertain and pursue her interests on a scale available to very few women of her generation.
Her life became increasingly European, and it was there that another marriage took shape. On June 29, 1923, Dorothy married Count Carlo Dentice di Frasso at the Manhattan home of architect Whitney Warren at 280 Park Avenue. Nellie Taylor was ill, and the circumstances dictated a much smaller ceremony than Dorothy's first wedding. Justice J. J. Freschi married them at five o'clock in the afternoon, followed by a dinner for a small group that included Italian Ambassador Prince Gelasio Caetani, Millicent Rogers, Dorothy's brother Bertrand and Whitney Warren. Dorothy was thirty-five and Carlo forty-seven. She had been divorced from Claude for more than six years, while Carlo's first marriage to Georgine Wilde had been annulled in Rome in 1921.
Carlo belonged to an old Italian aristocratic family and had served in the Italian Parliament. His elder brother Luigi held the family's princely title, while Carlo was a count, making Dorothy Countess Dentice di Frasso.
American newspapers occasionally elevated her to princess, but countess was the title she actually held and the one by which she would be known for the remainder of her life. Marriage to Carlo also carried Dorothy more deeply into Italian society, and during the 1920s Rome gradually became as important to her as New York had been when she was young.
Nothing represented that new life more completely than Villa Madama, the great Renaissance villa overlooking Rome from the slopes of Monte Mario. Begun in the sixteenth century from designs associated with Raphael and decorated by artists including Giulio Romano and Giovanni da Udine, it had survived centuries of changing ownership and neglect before coming into the di Frassos' hands. The precise date of their acquisition is not entirely clear, with surviving accounts differing by several years, but Dorothy and Carlo were established there during the decade and poured enormous attention and money into its restoration. Dorothy was not content merely to inhabit the finished rooms. She involved herself in the work while architects and craftsmen continued the restoration of the interiors, and in 1929 the English garden designer Norah Lindsay was brought in to develop the plantings. Contemporary observers believed the di Frassos had spent a large fortune bringing the villa back to life.
As the work progressed, Villa Madama became both their home and the center of a remarkable social world. Diplomats and politicians mingled with aristocrats, artists, wealthy Americans and the stream of international visitors who passed through Rome. Dorothy hunted, rode with members of the Italian cavalry and moved comfortably between Carlo's world of old Italian families and the cosmopolitan society she had known before their marriage. American diplomat William Phillips remembered dining there and being struck by the place, while Marion Davies later recalled visiting with William Randolph Hearst and attending a dinner at which Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and foreign minister, was among Dorothy's guests. Stories eventually placed Mussolini himself at Dorothy's table with almost equal confidence, although Davies was quite clear that he was not present at the dinner she remembered.
The villa had its legends as well. Dorothy was told that one of its bedrooms was haunted by the ghost of a Medici and warned that she might encounter it. The prospect apparently interested her more than it frightened her. If the ghost appeared, she reasoned, she would finally have the opportunity to talk to a Medici.
Among the Americans who found their way into Dorothy's Roman world was Gary Cooper, who came to Europe in 1931 exhausted after several years of almost continuous filmmaking. He had lost considerable weight and was in poor health, and during his time abroad he became a guest at Villa Madama. Dorothy took an interest in his recovery, introducing him to the food, art, clothes and society she had come to know in Europe, while Cooper accompanied her riding and traveling. Their friendship gradually became a romance, and eventually the two traveled together on an extended safari in East Africa.
Adela Rogers St. Johns, who knew Dorothy during these years, remembered a woman who remained thoroughly American despite her title and European surroundings, with magnificent eyes, a wide humorous mouth and an unmistakable sense of amusement. Dorothy could wear the best clothes from Paris and move easily among the highest society in London and Rome without ever seeming to have been swallowed by it. Cooper recovered his health during his time abroad and returned to Hollywood changed in appearance and experience. The romance did not last, but their relationship became one of the best remembered of Dorothy's life, and Elsa Maxwell would later describe Cooper as one of her two great loves.
Through Cooper and the growing number of film people she knew, California became another point on a map that already stretched between New York, London and Rome. By the middle of the 1930s Dorothy was spending considerable time in Beverly Hills, where her house at 913 North Bedford Drive became a gathering place for an extraordinary mixture of Hollywood and European society. Its elaborate interiors reflected the decorative world of Elsie de Wolfe, with mirrors, gilding and chinoiserie surrounding guests who might include a movie star, an Italian aristocrat, a financier and a diplomat at the same dinner. Dorothy had no official position in Hollywood and needed none. She belonged there because people wanted to be where she was.
Marlene Dietrich became one of her closest friends. Dorothy gave her a gold locket engraved “To Marlene with love from Dorothy,” and photographs preserve the two women together at clubs, aboard yachts and in the garden of Dorothy's Beverly Hills home. Cary Grant also became a friend for more than twenty years and later remembered Dorothy particularly for her ability to laugh at herself, a quality he said could dispel even his darkest moods. Barbara Hutton moved through the same circle, and Dorothy would later play a part in bringing Hutton and Grant back into one another's company after an earlier meeting aboard the Normandie.
The parties at Bedford Drive soon became famous in their own right. For one gathering in 1935 Dorothy asked her guests to dress in white. Carole Lombard arrived in a white ambulance, wearing a white nightgown and lying on a white stretcher carried by attendants dressed as hospital interns. Clark Gable was there as well, and he and Lombard spent much of the evening dancing together. Their meeting at Dorothy's party later became part of the story of the romance that eventually led to their marriage. At a large costume party that summer, Marlene Dietrich appeared as Leda accompanied by an enormous swan, Clifton Webb dressed as a Chinese mandarin and Ruth Chatterton appeared as Josephine Baker. Dorothy chose L'Oiseau de Feu, the Firebird, for herself.
By Thanksgiving Eve she had found another way to amuse her guests, placing signs reading “FOR RENT” and “ITALIAN FOOD” outside the house before welcoming a crowd that included Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, George Cukor, David Selznick, Darryl Zanuck, Errol Flynn, Charles Boyer, David Niven, Merle Oberon, Claudette Colbert, Mary Pickford and Clifton Webb. On another occasion a brightly illuminated boxing ring appeared in the garden and professional fighters were brought in, with Hollywood actors serving as seconds. Even away from home Dorothy's preferences became familiar. At the Colony restaurant in New York, the staff knew that Countess di Frasso wanted toothpicks on her table and put them there before she had to ask.
Her travels continued with the same restless ease. She crossed the Atlantic, traveled through Europe with Kay Francis, sailed with friends and appeared at polo fields, resorts and society gatherings on both continents. Automobiles remained one of her pleasures. She owned a 1933 Rolls-Royce Phantom II and commissioned Howard “Dutch” Darrin to redesign its body, producing an elegant custom car completed later in the decade. Dorothy's life had changed enormously since the sixteen-year-old girl was stopped for speeding on Fifth Avenue, but she had never entirely lost her taste for a beautiful automobile.
Not everyone who entered Dorothy's Hollywood circle came from the motion-picture world. Sometime during these years she became close to Benjamin Siegel, the New York gambler and racketeer who was establishing himself on the West Coast. To most of the country he would eventually become Bugsy Siegel, but Dorothy called him Benjamin. The exact nature of their relationship was disputed even among those who knew them. Richard Gully later remembered it as a serious love affair, and Elsa Maxwell would eventually name Siegel, along with Gary Cooper, as one of Dorothy's two great loves. Dorothy herself was more guarded. After Siegel was murdered in Beverly Hills in 1947, she was reached in Italy by transatlantic telephone and acknowledged that she had been very fond of him while denying that she had been in love with him. Hedda Hopper later remembered Dorothy reacting to the name Bugsie by asking whether the caller meant “Mr. Benjamin Siegel.”
Siegel's friendship with Dorothy eventually carried him into an undertaking that had little to do with either Hollywood or organized crime. In 1938 an old seaman named Bill Bowbeer came to Dorothy with a supposed treasure map to Cocos Island, off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. The story behind it was almost too improbable to improve upon. According to a lengthy contemporary account, the original map had supposedly been tattooed on a woman's back, while the copy eventually shown to Dorothy had been drawn in lipstick across a soiled tablecloth. Somewhere on Cocos Island, the story went, lay an enormous treasure of gold, jewels and religious objects. Dorothy was sufficiently intrigued to reportedly write Bowbeer a check for $15,000.
By September she was aboard the three-masted schooner Metha Nelson. The expedition included a shifting assortment of passengers and crew, among them Richard Gully, Marino Bello, Evelyn Husby, Dr. Benjamin Blank and, for part of the voyage, Benjamin Siegel. To the outside world they were supposedly hunting sharks, but Cocos Island was their destination and treasure their purpose. Before they reached it, Marino Bello married Evelyn Husby aboard the schooner. Dorothy served as matron of honor, Richard Gully as best man and Siegel as a witness.
When the Metha Nelson finally reached Cocos Island, Costa Rican soldiers accompanied the party ashore to protect the government's share of anything they might discover. The treasure hunters followed the map and dug for five days. They found rocks. Meanwhile Dorothy was bitten by enormous ants, rats wandered through the camp, and Bello nearly became involved in a duel after a Costa Rican officer paid too much attention to his new wife. Bello challenged him, the officer chose swords, and preparations went far enough for the affair to become serious before the duel was abandoned.
The return voyage was less amusing. Arguments broke out aboard the schooner, drinking became a problem and weapons appeared. Captain Robert Hoffmann accused several men of mutiny, while two crewmen put ashore in Guatemala accused Hoffmann of mistreating them because they were Jewish. Later retellings confused the identities of some of the men involved, particularly one known as “Champ” Segal, but he and Benjamin Siegel were different people. By the time Hoffmann appeared before a federal grand jury, his account had become even more sensational. He described an armed and drunken boatswain terrorizing the ship and claimed that Dorothy had at one point asked him to shoot Siegel because she feared his intentions. Other participants disputed much of Hoffmann's story, Marino Bello publicly dismissed his account as lies, and the federal investigation produced no indictments.
The Metha Nelson itself fared little better. Storms damaged its rigging, mechanical trouble accumulated and the Italian motorship Cellina eventually came to its assistance. Dorothy and Richard Gully left the schooner at Acapulco and continued overland, while the battered vessel did not return to the Los Angeles harbor area until January 1939, where a deputy United States marshal was waiting with subpoenas. Newspapers had begun calling it the “Hell Ship,” and the following month the American Weekly devoted three illustrated pages to Dorothy's expedition under the headline “What on Earth (Or Sea) Will Dorothy Do Next?” The schooner was soon repaired and sold for use in motion pictures. Dorothy had already found something else to occupy her.
During 1939 she and Siegel became involved with Michele Bonotto, an Italian inventor developing a powerful nitroglycerin explosive. They attempted to interest others in the invention, including people in Italy, and the episode later accumulated stories involving Mussolini, senior Nazi officials and supposed assassination schemes that cannot be substantiated. Beneath the legends, however, was an unusual and very real business connection. On April 23, 1942, a United States patent application for “Nitroglycerin Explosives” was filed naming Michele Bonotto as inventor and Dorothy di Frasso as assignee. The patent was granted in January 1947.
By then the political world surrounding Dorothy's Italian life had become increasingly dangerous. Through Villa Madama she knew diplomats, aristocrats and officials connected to the Fascist government, including Galeazzo Ciano, and as Europe moved toward war those friendships began to attract a different sort of attention. American authorities became interested in Dorothy's activities and associations, and later writers turned those suspicions into claims that she had worked for Mussolini. No evidence has been found establishing that Dorothy was a Fascist agent. Her own attitude toward political intrigue appeared rather less dramatic in 1939 when German aviator Raven Freiherr von Barnekow complained that she had called him a Nazi spy. Dorothy denied saying anything of the sort and reportedly responded that she did not know what his politics were and could not have cared less.
Villa Madama was also passing out of Dorothy and Carlo's hands. The Italian government had approached Carlo by 1937 about purchasing the property, and negotiations continued until a formal deed of sale was executed on August 29, 1940. The agreement reserved a lifetime right for Carlo, or for Dorothy if she survived him, to occupy a dependency associated with the former stables. Later stories described Mussolini as simply confiscating the villa, while others said the di Frassos donated it to the government, but the surviving documents show a negotiated sale. Dorothy nevertheless appears to have resented losing control of the place into which so much of her money and attention had gone. She transformed the former stables into a residence and continued using them after the war, entertaining there as late as 1948.
The war years found Dorothy spending considerable time in Mexico, where Richard Gully later said they had gone intending to sit out the conflict. Her circle there was no less varied than it had been elsewhere. Former King Carol II of Romania and Magda Lupescu were among the exiles she knew, and stories circulated of card games and substantial sums of money changing hands. Elsa Maxwell later remembered that Dorothy had also gone looking for a gold mine. Her movements and foreign associations continued to interest American investigators, but the surviving record shows suspicion and surveillance rather than proof of the espionage later attributed to her.
Carlo died during the 1940s, leaving Dorothy a widow. Whatever distance had developed within their marriage, she continued to use the name and title that had become inseparable from her public identity, and Rome remained home. When peace returned, so did much of the life she had known before the war. Dorothy resumed traveling between Europe and the United States, attended polo matches, entertained old friends and reappeared in Roman society. In January 1949, when Tyrone Power and Linda Christian were preparing to marry in Rome, Dorothy gave one of their pre-wedding parties. Hollywood visitors mingled again with Roman aristocrats, and Dorothy was photographed covered in confetti and dancing with Count Filippo Senni.
Jewelry had always belonged naturally to Dorothy's world, and by these years her collection was considerable. She had become both a friend and an important customer of the Bulgari family in Rome. In 1939 Giorgio Bulgari had designed an extraordinary necklace for her containing thirteen large cushion-cut diamonds surrounded by hundreds of baguette and brilliant-cut stones. A red leather traveling jewelry case made for Dorothy bore a crown above her initials and carried a travel label reading “Dorothy di Frasso, Villa Madama, Rome Italy.” It survived her travels and remained with her family for decades.
The fortune behind that life was much harder to measure. Dorothy had spent lavishly for years on houses, restoration, automobiles, clothes, jewelry, travel, parties and ventures that ranged from treasure hunting to explosives, but she had also received substantial property from her family. When her father died in 1934, his will left Dorothy $50,000, an equal interest in his real estate, part of the residue outright and another portion in trust. Friends and newspapers continued to attach much larger figures to her wealth, and Elsa Maxwell later referred to a twelve-million-dollar inheritance. Dorothy may indeed have controlled wealth of that magnitude at some point, but the figure cannot be traced to a single inheritance in the way later accounts suggested.
Money had never been the most reliable measure of Dorothy's life anyway. By the early 1950s she was still moving between Europe and America, still surrounded by friendships that had survived decades and enormous changes in circumstance. Claude Grahame-White was still writing to her. Cary Grant had known her for more than twenty years. Marlene Dietrich remained close, as did Clifton Webb. Dorothy was older now and suffering from heart trouble, but she had not withdrawn from the world that had occupied her for so long.
In late December 1953 she went to Las Vegas with Webb and their friend Tom Douglas, where Dietrich was performing. On New Year's Eve they visited Marlene backstage, but Dorothy was unusually tired and complained that she did not feel well. Dietrich massaged her neck in the dressing room, and by New Year's Day Dorothy's condition had worsened enough for Dr. Jack Cherry of Las Vegas to be called. She had been warned about her heart and understood what her symptoms could mean. According to one contemporary account, Dorothy remarked that it was too bad she might die so soon because she was having such a good time.
She nevertheless decided to return to Los Angeles by train with Webb and Douglas. Before leaving, she reportedly told the two men that she hoped she would not impose upon them because she might die on their hands. During the journey Dorothy retired to her compartment. On the morning of January 4, 1954, Webb and Douglas went to check on her and discovered that she had died. The train continued into Los Angeles, carrying Dorothy into Union Station at 800 North Alameda Avenue, where she was officially recorded as dead on arrival. She was sixty-five years old. Her death certificate identified Villa Madama in Rome as her usual residence, and no autopsy was performed. Her death was attributed to coronary disease.
Dorothy had made her last journey in characteristic fashion. Contemporary accounts described her in a black sequined evening dress beneath a full-length mink coat, with valuable jewelry among her possessions. The jewels were taken into custody after her death, and almost immediately questions arose about the estate she had left behind. A will signed in 1941 was initially filed in California and contained several individual bequests, including one to Dr. Benjamin Blank, who had known Dorothy since at least the days of the Metha Nelson, while leaving the principal portion of her estate to her niece Mary Taylor Zimbalist. Within days, attorney Sol Rosenblatt announced the discovery of a later will executed on July 6, 1951. Mary remained the principal beneficiary, while Dorothy also provided for her longtime companion Filomena Renzi and named her brother Bertrand and Rosenblatt as executors.
The settling of the estate continued long after Dorothy's death and gradually revealed how difficult it was to separate her actual wealth from the legend that had surrounded it. Dr. Blank, omitted from the later will, pursued a claim and eventually accepted a settlement of $2,500. Dorothy's jewelry generated still more attention when a collection identified with her estate was offered at Roy J. Goldenberg's Beverly Hills Galleries in February 1955. Newspapers described diamond necklaces, emeralds, pearls, rings, a star sapphire, pins and a Cartier jade clock, attaching spectacular values to some of them. Yet after claims, taxes and expenses had been considered, the estate proved far smaller than the fortune the newspapers had expected. By September 1955, Dorothy Kilgallen reported that what had once been thought an estate approaching a million dollars had been reduced to approximately $22,000 in cash and a $2,500 diamond ring. It was what remained after administration, not a measure of everything Dorothy had possessed, spent, given away, invested or lost during sixty-five years.
By then Dorothy herself had long since returned east. Her body was taken to Woodlawn Cemetery in New York and temporarily placed in the Frank W. Woolworth family mausoleum. She remained there only briefly. On January 22, 1954, eighteen days after her death, Dorothy was removed to the Taylor family plot in the Whitewood Section of Woodlawn Cemetery, where she was buried beside her family in Section 133, Lot 15105, Grave 3.
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