She arrived in New York with $600 and five suitcases of carefully chosen clothes. She was 22 years old, the daughter of a school principal and a teacher from Kirksville, Missouri, population 9,000. And she had the sort of nerve that is sometimes mistaken for innocence. Within 11 months, she had talked her way into Oscar de la Renta’s studio, the most prestigious address in American fashion.
Within a decade and a half, she had married one of the richest men in the world, installed herself at the summit of the most gilded social hierarchy New York had seen since the Gilded Age itself, opened her own fashion house, earned the cover of GQ, and become the living embodiment of a cultural moment so dazzling and so brittle that when it shattered, the sound was heard across the entire country.
Then, her husband replaced her. Not with a younger woman, not with a more beautiful woman, but with a more intellectually credentialed one, a Canadian economist and policy adviser who served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and who would become president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art.
The replacement was not merely personal. It was a statement that the social queen who had organized his ascent through New York society was no longer the companion he required. That the flowers and the gowns and the 6,000 stems flown in from Europe for a single dinner party had served their purpose.
And that the purpose was now complete. Carolyn Roehm lost her husband, her fashion house, her social world, her credit cards, and six of the seven properties she had shared with a man whose net worth would eventually reach $8.4 billion. She kept one house in Connecticut. Then, that house burned to the ground. What she did after that, over the next 30 years, is the part of the story that nobody expected and that almost nobody tells because it does not fit the narrative of the discarded wife and because the woman who emerged from the ashes of her old life turned out to be
considerably more interesting than the woman who had built it. In today’s episode of Old Money Alure, we trace how a girl from a 9,000-person town in Missouri became the queen of 1980s New York. How a 19-year-old’s car accident on a Colorado gravel road set in motion the destruction of her marriage, and how the woman the tabloids wrote off as a cautionary tale spent the next three decades proving that the most valuable thing she owned had never been on the guest list.
Hello and welcome to today’s episode on Old Money and the history of wealthy families around the world. My name is Elizabeth and I’m your narrator for this episode. And if you’d like even more on the hidden history of wealthy families, be sure to visit the first link in the video description to get access to our free Substack newsletter where we have many years of extra videos and secret content.
That being said, thank you for your time and let us begin. Carolyn Jane Smith was born on May 7th, 1951 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, a creature set apart by her sense of aesthetics. At age five, she had, as she later recalled, definite ideas about luxury, flowers, dress-up, more flowers. At seven, she spent her 35 cents a week 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 30 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 1960s student unrest, the girl who showed up to class in matched outfits and pique 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 1973 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 11 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 $126 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.
His late first wife, Françoise de Langlade, had been the editor of French Vogue and one of the great hostesses of her era. And because Carolyn was young, beautiful, and wore the de la Renta clothes well, she was regularly invited as the extra girl, the beautiful young woman who fills a seat, makes the table look right, and absorbs everything.
This is where she learned to entertain, not from books or classes, but from watching Françoise de la Renta orchestrate ambience with the precision of a symphony conductor, understanding how flowers, linens, fragrances, and food could constitute a total experience far greater than the sum of their parts. She remained with de la Renta for the better part of 10 years, eventually rising to revamp his boutique collection and work on his signature evening dresses.
Along the way, she acquired the French lessons, the gourmet cooking courses, the equestrian instruction, the piano lessons, all the accomplishments of the woman she was determined to become. The girl from Kirksville was building herself piece by piece into someone the world she wanted to enter would recognize as belonging there. Her first detour from this trajectory was a man named Axel Roehm, the scion of a German chemical fortune, dashing, handsome, possessed of what she described as just the right amount of arrogance.
For five years, she was, by her own account, hopelessly hooked on him to the point where it compromised her professional life. When he proposed and asked her to move to Germany, she went and left Oscar de la Renta to do it. The marriage lasted less than a year. “He took my life away by taking my career away,” she said flatly.
She went back to de la Renta, then again left to try to make things work with Axel, then came back to de la Renta two months later. The marriage was over by 1981. She kept his name. It was a better name than Smith for what she planned to do next, and she had earned it through genuine suffering. The name Carolyn Roehm was, in a sense, her first professional brand, something she built from the ruins of a marriage rather than inherited from a family.
In late 1981, at a pre-Christmas party in New York, Carolyn Roehm met Henry Robert Kravis. He was 37 years old, the son of a prominent Tulsa petroleum engineer and business partner of Joseph P. Kennedy, educated at Claremont McKenna College and the Columbia Business School, and in the process of making himself one of the most consequential financiers in American history.
He was also, at the time, in the middle of a difficult divorce from his first wife, Heddy Schleeman. Kravis had co-founded with his cousin George Roberts and mentor Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. in 1976, and the firm had already established itself as the foremost practitioner of the leveraged buyout, a technique in which the assets of a target company serve as collateral for the debt used to acquire it.
By 1981, KKR had completed several landmark transactions, and Kravis was generating the kind of money that does not merely make a man wealthy, but transforms his entire orientation toward the world. He was 5 ft 7, compact with the disciplined energy of a man who converted every competitive impulse into forward motion.
He was also very kind in ways that she had not expected from a man of his type. Henry’s greatest talent is that he makes you feel good about yourself, she said later. Her mother came on their first two dates. For a period of 4 years, she kept him at a careful distance, dating other men, refusing to allow herself to be swept up by the combination of wealth and attention that he represented.
She was not available on demand. She had learned too much from Axel Roehm about the danger of submerging yourself in a man’s identity. The 4-year courtship was itself a kind of negotiation, conducted by a woman who understood from painful experience that the terms on which you enter a relationship determine the terms on which you exist within it, and that a woman who makes herself too easily available to a wealthy man risks being classified as an accessory rather than a partner.
By keeping Kravis waiting, by dating other men openly, by refusing to rearrange her life around his schedule, she was establishing a precedent that she was a person with her own trajectory, not a companion whose trajectory could be determined by his. Eventually, it was not money or glamour, but genuine fondness that wore down her resistance and a degree of professional desperation.
She had spent 6 months searching for backers for her own fashion house and found nothing. Then Kravis offered. She accepted, but on one condition. She insisted on a written agreement established before there was any marriage, that regardless of what happened between the two of them personally, her business would remain intact and under her control.
It was the most prescient thing she ever did and, ultimately, the most violated. On November 23rd, 1985, in the 16-room Park Avenue duplex that Kravis had purchased for a reported $5.5 million earlier that year, Carolyn Roehm became Mrs. Henry Kravis. A rabbi from Tulsa married them in front of 101 of their closest friends.
GQ magazine declared it one of the 20 weddings of the century, placing it in the company of Charles and Diana. The apartment itself became a symbol, decorated by the legendary team of Robert Denning and Vincent Fourcade. It contained nine paintings by Manet, Monet, and Renoir in the living room alone, a major Sargent in the dining room, Sisley upstairs, and a Gainsborough on its way.
The furniture was Louis the 15th to Empire period French antiques, museum-quality pieces assembled with the kind of aggressive curatorial instinct that Kravis applied to his corporate acquisitions. Careful records were kept ensuring that no dinner guest ever experienced the same menu twice under the circa 1800 crystal chandelier in the coral damask dining room.
The set designer for the 1990 film adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities reportedly used the Kravis apartment as his primary reference point for the fictional residence of Sherman McCoy, Tom Wolfe’s master of the universe. What had been assembled was not merely a home, but a stage, and the performance that took place on it was one of the defining entertainments of the decade.
The term nouvelle society was coined by Women’s Wear Daily to describe the new money class that had risen in New York during the Reagan years, the leveraged buyout kings, the real estate magnates, the corporate raiders and their wives who were replacing the old establishment on the charity boards and museum committees and ballroom floors of the Upper East Side.
Carolyn and Henry Kravis were the paradigmatic couple of this world. Their social calendar was not a calendar in any ordinary sense, but a permanent state of mobilization. Four nights a week, minimum, they attended galas, benefits, dinners, and balls. They chaired the New York City Ballet Spring Gala, the Metropolitan Opera Gala, the benefit for the New York Public Library.
They sat on boards and committees that required donations of $150,000 to $250,000 to join. They flew in 6,000 flowers from Europe for a single party. They hosted an event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art large enough to require the use of the Temple of Dendur. Their companions in this world read like a casting call for every scandal and collapse of the following decade, Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg, who had spent $3 million on a wedding and another million on Saul’s 50th birthday party before their financial empire
disintegrated, Donald and Ivana Trump, the good friends of Salomon Brothers, whose Susan would become notorious for the extravagance of her Paris townhouse. Carolyn Roehm designed clothes for these women, and they wore her clothes to the parties she threw, and the whole social ecosystem fed on itself in a way that was, in retrospect, almost perfectly self-contained.
The circularity was the point. The women who bought her dresses were the women who attended her parties, and the parties were the mechanism by which the dresses were displayed, and the display was the mechanism by which new clients were acquired, and the new clients attended the next party, and so on, in a loop that functioned beautifully as long as the money and the marriages and the social architecture that sustained them all remained intact.
When any one element failed, the entire system would collapse because the system had no foundation independent of the relationships that constituted it. She worked at it with a seriousness that her critics never gave her credit for. She was at her office before 8:00 every morning, working 12-hour days on her collections while also managing the social obligations of being Mrs.
Kravis, taking piano lessons and French lessons, studying gourmet cooking, learning to ride horses well enough to compete. The article in Fortune magazine that coined the term trophy wife, published on August 28th, 1989 by journalist Julie Connelly, used her as its central case study, describing her as a decade or two younger than her husband, sometimes several inches taller, beautiful, and very often accomplished, whose essential function was to certify her husband’s status.
The description was not inaccurate, but it was not complete, either. It missed the genuine ambition, the real talent, the actual longing to be something independent of the man she had married. The fashion house that Henry Kravis funded, Carolyn Roehm Incorporated, launched in 1985, was simultaneously a genuine artistic enterprise and a deeply compromised one.
He retained majority interest in the company from the beginning. She and two partners held equal smaller shares. He invested, over the course of the business, a reported $20 million. He sat in the front row of her debut show in tears, and his presence, the fact of who he was and what his backing signified, was as important to the company’s early reception as anything that appeared on the runway.
The clothes themselves were beautiful in a specific, deliberate way. She made evening gowns and cocktail dresses in sumptuous fabrics, silk taffeta, heavy crepe, duchess satin, cut close to the body and designed for women who were, as she openly acknowledged, very slim, very tall, and very rich. Ball gowns ran from $2,000 to $10,000.
Day dresses started around 500. The aesthetic was classically elegant with what one admirer described as unexpected ladylike touches, the kind of clothes an extremely sophisticated Midwestern woman might dream up if she had been educated by Oscar de la Renta and fitted by Balenciaga’s ghost. Her pieces were carried by Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and I Magnin across the country.
By 1989, the company reported retail sales of roughly $20 million. But the reviews were often more charitable than the clothes deserved. Her mentor and most loyal supporter, Oscar de la Renta, was candid in his assessment. Carolyn has not had the attention she expected or wanted. She took it hard if she got a bad review of a collection.
The deeper structural problem was economic rather than artistic. A high-end couture line requires a licensing base, fragrances, accessories, shoes, lower-priced spin-off lines to subsidize the prestige collection. And Carolyn Roehm Incorporated had almost none of this infrastructure. Donna Karan, who was solving the same economics with DKNY and her signature line, explained it bluntly.
Designer lines do not make money. It costs an enormous amount to produce a designer line. You need some other income to feed that business. Karl Lagerfeld, who met her when she accompanied de la Renta to Paris, was even more direct. A real designer would not have her husband for an investor. You can only ask others to invest in you when you believe in yourself.
The remark was cruel and more than slightly hypocritical from a man whose own career had been financed in complicated ways, but it articulated what many in the industry quietly believed, that Carolyn Roehm’s platform had been constructed partly on her husband’s money and social position, and that without those supports, the business could not sustain itself.
The Lagerfeld critique contained a specific poison that went beyond fashion industry snobbery. It implied that the money behind the label was not a sign of confidence, but of its absence. That a woman whose husband bankrolled her business was, by definition, a woman whose business could not attract investment on its own merits.
And that the entire enterprise was therefore a vanity project dressed up as a commercial one. Whether this was fair is debatable. Many fashion houses have been funded by wealthy backers with personal connections to the designer. What made Carolyn Roehm’s situation different was that her backer was also her husband. Which meant that every financial decision the company made was also implicitly a marital decision and that the boundary between the business relationship and the personal relationship was, from the beginning,
impossible to maintain. There was also the question of what she was actually selling. Her clients were women like herself, which meant the market was vanishingly small. She was fitting herself first in a size four for every piece. When the economy softened in 1989 and ’90, the thinning sliver of women who could and would pay five figures for a ball gown became even smaller.
The company was struggling well before the personal crises of 1991. Whatever the limitations of the fashion house, Carolyn Roehm’s activities as a hostess were, by the standards of the time and the circle, genuine achievements. She understood parties the way a theater director understands productions as total environments in which every sensory element contributes to a unified effect.
She had learned from Françoise de la Renta that flowers, linens, fragrance, and food were a single vocabulary, not separate concerns. She applied this understanding with a precision that bordered on obsession. Her dining room was photographed for the cover of New York Times Magazine’s Home Entertaining supplement in 1986 under the headline The New Formality.
The photograph showed what she had been building since her first dinner as the extra girl at the de la Renta table. A room in which every object existed in conversation with every other object, in which the flowers complemented the China and the China complemented the linen and the linen complemented the light from the circa 1800 crystal chandelier, and in which the overall effect was not of wealth displayed, but of beauty composed with the same deliberate attention a painter brings to a canvas.
Her role as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America from 1989 was not merely honorary. During her tenure, she guided the organization through one of the most consequential moments in its history. The fashion industry was losing colleagues at a devastating rate and there was enormous pressure to maintain silence rather than acknowledge what was happening. Roehm refused the silence.
She organized the first Seventh on Sale fundraiser in November 1990. A sale of designer clothing that raised $4.7 million for medical research and established a template for future industry activism. The event itself was a logistical feat that required Roehm to coordinate the participation of dozens of designers, each of whom had to be persuaded to donate merchandise, each of whom had competitive reasons to resist cooperating with the others, and all of whom had to be managed with the same diplomatic skill that she
brought to seating arrangements at dinner parties, where the wrong placement could produce a social catastrophe. That she pulled it off and that the event raised nearly $5 million in a single evening demonstrated a capacity for organizational leadership that the fashion press had not previously associated with her.
“I shudder to think how many more we may lose,” she told People magazine. It was one of the moments when Carolyn Roehm proved that she was more than the decorative figure her critics assumed. The fundraiser required her to coordinate dozens of designers, manage the logistics of a massive public sale, >> >> negotiate with venues and press, and do all of it while running her own fashion house and maintaining the social calendar of Mrs.
Henry Kravis, a schedule that would have broken most people. And that she managed with the same organizational ferocity she brought to everything she touched. Manolo Blahnik named one of the most iconic shoes after her in 1990, the Carolyn, a slingback that became one of the house’s signatures and was later made famous by Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
The shoe outlasted the fashion house, the marriage, and the social world that had produced it, and it continues to be sold in new colorways and materials season after season, a small but permanent monument to her influence on the aesthetics of a decade. Bill Blass, who had known her since she first arrived in New York, called her the ultimate tastemaker.
The International Best Dressed List inducted her into its Hall of Fame. These were not the trinkets of a dilettante. >> >> They were the credentials of a woman who had spent 17 years building something real, even if the foundation was less solid than it appeared. The foundation was about to crack. On July 13th, 1991, Henry Kravis’s 19-year-old son, Harrison, who had just completed his first year at Brown University, was in an automobile on a gravel road near Buford, Colorado. He was driving fast.
He lost control on a curve. The car hit a ditch and flipped over. He was not wearing a seatbelt. He was gone inside the vehicle. A passenger survived with a broken arm. Harrison Kravis was 19 years old, the child of Henry’s first marriage to Hedi Shulman, a young man at the beginning of his life whose relationship with his father had been complicated by the divorce and remarriage and by the velocity of a life lived at the scale the Kravises inhabited, a life in which a 19-year-old’s needs could sometimes be obscured by the sheer volume of the
social and professional obligations that surrounded his father. Henry Kravis learned about his son at a dinner party for 40 people at designer Mark Hampton’s home in New York when he was called away from the table. The setting is a detail that belongs in the story because it captures something essential about the world the Kravises inhabited, a world in which even the worst news arrives during a dinner party because there is always a dinner party, because the social calendar that governed their lives did not pause for
contingency, and because the man who would receive the call that ended his son’s life was, at the moment the phone rang, seated at a table set with flowers and crystal and the particular care that the nouvelle society brought to every gathering, no matter how routine. Then Carolyn was called away. The other guests heard a cry from another room and it was Roehm.
The sound that came from behind the closed door was, according to those who heard it, the sound of a woman absorbing the worst possible news on behalf of a man she loved. And the fact that it was her voice the guests heard, rather than his, tells you something about who broke first and who held together, which is not always the arrangement people expect.
Kravis flew to Colorado immediately to comfort his son’s friends and bring back the body. The funeral, at which long, loving letters to Harrison, written by both Henry and his first wife, Hedi, were read aloud, was described by those who attended it as deeply moving. “Without a doubt, the saddest day of my life was July 13th, 1991, when I lost my eldest son, Harrison, in a car accident.
Kravis wrote decades later. The loss changed something in the dynamic between Carolyn and Henry that could not be changed back. One friend observed that for Carolyn, the loss fostered that rare event, a woman falling in love with her husband again. She saw how he handled it all so well. And clearly, her priorities changed. What she did next was the decision that defined the rest of her life.
Two months after Harrison’s passing, on September 9th, 1991, Carolyn Roehm announced that she was closing her fashion house. The timing and the stated reason, in the wake of a personal family tragedy, generated immediate controversy. The Wall Street Journal reported the news first, noting that her newly appointed company president, Kitty D’Alessio, formerly of Chanel, had been seen discussing a severance agreement with Kravis.
The implicit suggestion was that Kravis had pulled his financial support. The truth was more layered. The business had been struggling for years. Kravis had, by that point, invested roughly $20 million with no clear path to profitability. The recession of 1990 and 91 had devastated the market for $5,000 evening gowns.
The company had no licensing revenue to fall back on. And there is substantial evidence that the personal crisis was genuinely transformative, that Carolyn Roehm, in the immediate aftermath of watching her husband receive the worst news of his life, made a calculation that her marriage was worth more than her career. The calculation was not made lightly.
She had spent her entire adult life preparing for exactly this career. Had left Oscar de la Renta twice to pursue relationships and returned twice when the relationships failed. Had insisted on a written agreement protecting her business before she would agree to marry Kravis, and had worked 12-hour days for 6 years building a company that bore her name and expressed her vision.
Walking away from it was not a retreat. It was a wager that the marriage, [clears throat] if given her full attention and freed from the competing demands of the fashion house, could survive the grief that was threatening to consume them both. “Something just snapped inside me,” she said later.
“I thought this business is too tough, too mean, and there is too little joy coming from all the hard work.” de la Renta, who understood both the professional and personal dimensions better than almost anyone, offered his own assessment. “I think Henry wanted her to quit so he could have more of her time.” “But he told me it was her decision.
” The ambiguity in de la Renta’s formulation is itself revealing. He thinks Henry wanted her to quit, but Henry told him it was her decision. Which means either Henry was telling the truth and Carolyn chose to close the business independently, or Henry was managing the narrative, presenting a decision he had influenced or compelled as one she had made freely.
The distinction matters because the story of a woman who voluntarily sacrifices her career for her marriage is a very different story from the story of a woman whose husband withdraws his financial support and frames the resulting closure as her choice. Designer Josie Natori quoted Roehm as having said as early as the previous winter, “Something has got to give, and I am not giving up Henry.
” The Natori quote suggests that the decision was, in fact, Carolyn’s, that she had been thinking about it for months, and that the loss of Harrison accelerated a calculation she had already been making. What is certain is that the closing of the business represented the sacrifice of a lifelong dream, and that the sacrifice did not save the marriage.
Carolyn Roehm walked away from Seventh Avenue to strengthen her relationship with her husband, and within 2 years, her husband left her for someone else. The arithmetic of this sequence is the cruelest part of the story. She gave up the thing she had spent her life building in order to save the thing she valued more, and the thing she valued more was taken away from her anyway.
In May 1993, gossip columnists Aileen Mehle and Liz Smith broke the news in their respective columns. Henry Kravis and Carolyn Roehm were separating. Roehm’s statement to Liz Smith, “I need something and he needs something that we just cannot give each other right now. We will always be very close friends.
” Had the careful quality of a prepared sentiment, the kind of thing said when the truth is too raw to be spoken. Both had reportedly been seeing others during the period when the marriage was unraveling. And there was a specific replacement waiting. Marie-Josée Drouin was born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1949, and had made herself into one of the most prominent female intellectuals in Canada.
She earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of Ottawa and spent the 1970s and ’80s as executive director of the Hudson Institute of Canada, a conservative think tank, writing columns for the Financial Post, and serving on the boards of Canada’s largest corporations. She was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 1994, and later received the Legion of Honor.
She was everything that Carolyn Roehm was not. An intellectual in the traditional sense, a woman whose credentials were academic rather than aesthetic. A figure from the world of policy rather than fashion. She had been married twice before, first to a Canadian cabinet minister, a relationship that generated its own controversy when it emerged that he had given her a complimentary Air Canada on the grounds that she was his common-law wife while he was still married to someone else, and then to the conductor, Charles
Dutoit. She was attractive in a different register from Roehm, not the willowy, high-maintenance glamour of the social world, but the composed, intellectual elegance of someone comfortable in boardrooms and at international policy conferences. Henry Kravis married Marie-Josée Drouin in 1994, the year after his divorce from Roehm was finalized.
They have been together ever since, making their principal residence a Park Avenue triplex with additional homes in Southampton, Colorado, Palm Beach, and Paris. She became president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art, served on the board of LVMH, joined the International Advisory Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and continued her philanthropic and political work as the third Mrs. Kravis.
In 2019, she and Kravis were awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. Kravis’s net worth, which was roughly $330 million when he was married to Roehm, had grown to approximately 8.4 billion by the 2020s. What Carolyn Roehm discovered in the months after the separation was announced was that she had been replaced not with a younger or more beautiful woman, but with a more intellectually credentialed one.
The upgrade was not from wife to model. It was from social queen to policy intellectual. The particular cruelty of this specific replacement was that it made the previous 8 years read in retrospect as a stage in Kravis’s social education rather than a genuine partnership. If you want to know the full details of the Kravis divorce that we cannot tell on this channel, the financial terms and the social fallout, subscribe to our Substack newsletter, Old Money where we publish the stories that would never survive a content review.
Roehm’s mother, on hearing of the separation, said, “Now you will know who your friends are.” The prediction was accurate, and the knowledge was painful. In the social ecosystem of the New York nouvelle society, attachment was transitional in ways that were rarely spoken and rarely acknowledged until the transaction was over.
The couples who had dined at her apartment, who had sat in the front rows of her fashion shows, who had attended her parties at the Metropolitan Museum, had been attached not to Carolyn Roehm, but to the conjunction of Carolyn Roehm and Henry Kravis, to the social capital that the pairing represented. When the pairing ended, so did most of the friendships.
The speed with which the invitations stopped arriving, the phone calls stopped coming, and the women who had worn her clothes to her parties stopped acknowledging her existence was, even by the standards of a social world that prides itself on its ability to recalibrate loyalties in real time, breathtaking.
“There are individuals I never heard from again,” she said in 1997 at the launch party for her first book. “But those who who stayed in touch are truly wonderful. The guest list for that party, which included Gayfrd Steinberg, Anne Bass, and Blaine Trump, suggested that a small core of genuine relationships had survived, but the scale of the social life she had known was gone.
Upper East Side women who had worn her clothes and attended her parties circulated the same sharp observation that she had allowed a billionaire husband to slip away. The phrase is worth pausing over because it reveals the moral architecture of the world she had inhabited. The loss of a husband was framed not as something that happened to her, but as something she had failed to prevent.
As if maintaining a marriage to a billionaire were a professional competency and losing one were a performance failure. The loss of Kravis meant, in the social mathematics of that world, not merely the loss of a marriage, but the forfeiture of her standing in charity circles and her coveted position at high-profile events. The financial dimensions were no less stark.
Of the seven properties she and Kravis had owned together, the Park Avenue apartment, Weatherstone in Connecticut, the Southampton house, the Colorado ski lodge, the Dominican Republic retreat, and others, she emerged from the settlement with Weatherstone and Weatherstone alone. The scuttlebutt at the time held that she did not even technically own it, but held a life tenancy at Kravis’ discretion, which was, as one observer noted, very Jane Austen.
The Jane Austen comparison is precise in a way its author may not have fully intended. In Austen’s world, a woman’s financial security depended entirely on the disposition of a man. And the withdrawal of that disposition could reduce a woman of education and accomplishment to a state of genteel poverty that was, in some ways, worse than ordinary poverty because the woman in question had been trained for a life she could no longer afford and had no skills that the economy outside that life recognized as valuable. Carolyn Roehm was not
technically in genteel poverty, but the gap between what she had been and what she now possessed was wide enough to produce the same psychological effect. Her catalog business, which had shown genuine promise, surpassing projections with $3 million in sales in its first year, collapsed when Kravis’ financial support was withdrawn after the divorce.
The credit cards were canceled, the staff were let go, the dream, in its original form, was definitively over. The woman who had organized 6,000 flower dinner parties at the Metropolitan Museum was now, at 42, in possession of a single house in Connecticut, a famous name, and whatever she could build with her own hands.
After the divorce, Carolyn Roehm did something that tells you everything you need to know about her particular combination of ambition and humility. She went to Paris and got a job in a flower shop. Not any flower shop, but Moulié Savart on the Rue des Petits-Champs, one of the most celebrated floral ateliers in Europe, the place where the greatest flowers in France were arranged with the greatest craft.
She worked there quietly as an apprentice, learning from the founder, Henri Moulié, how to think about flowers not as decoration, but as design, as the same exercise in color, texture, line, and proportion that she had applied to clothes for 20 years. It was an act of profound strategic intelligence disguised as an escape.
She was 42 or 43 years old, divorced, financially diminished, socially marginalized, stripped of the business she had built and the life she had constructed. She could have stayed in New York and attempted to reassemble the fragments. Instead, she went abroad, learned a new craft from scratch, served under someone else’s authority, absorbed a different tradition of beauty, and prepared herself, without knowing it, for the second act.
The apprenticeship in Paris echoed, in its structure, the apprenticeship she had served under Oscar de la Renta 20 years earlier. A young woman with ambition and taste working for a master, absorbing a craft through proximity and repetition rather than through formal instruction. The difference was that the first time she had been 22, an unknown, and the stakes were her own career.
This time she was 42 and famous, and the stakes were her entire identity. Because the identity she had constructed over the previous two decades, Carolyn Roehm, fashion designer, Mrs. Henry Kravis, queen of New York society, had been dismantled. And what she was building in the flower shop on the Rue des Petits-Champs was not a replacement for the old identity, but the foundation of a new one.
“Sometimes life throws you serious curveballs and forces you to change course,” she said years later. She returned to Weatherstone, the 1765 stone house on 59 acres in Sharon, Connecticut, that she had kept from the divorce settlement, and threw herself into the gardens. She began photographing the flowers she was growing, arranging them, and documenting the seasonal transformations of the 59 acres.
What began as private obsession became the material for her first book. A Passion for Flowers, published by HarperCollins in 1997 with a cover price of $45, was a hit. By 1999, it was in its sixth printing. Readers in New Jersey wrote that her book was their advisor and companion. A woman in Germany sent fan mail.
A lady in Jasper, Indiana, wrote that on sad days she put on Pavarotti and read Carolyn Roehm’s book until her mood lifted. These were not the women who had attended the galas at the Metropolitan Museum. They were a vastly larger audience, women who loved beauty in the ways that she loved beauty, who found in her writing a permission to take flowers and gardens and home arrangements seriously as art forms.
The audience she discovered in the wreckage of her old life was, in some ways, the audience she had been preparing for since childhood, since the grandmother’s garden in Kirkwood, since the rhinestone tiara from the Sears catalog, since the girl who showed up to college in pique blouses while everyone else wore jeans.
These were women who understood that the cultivation of beauty was not frivolity, but a discipline. And they had been waiting for someone to tell them so in a language they could recognize as their own. Then, in 1999, Weatherstone burned to the ground. An electrical fire destroyed the 234-year-old house completely.
With it went her collection of irreplaceable books, the photographs she had taken throughout her career, all her original fashion sketches, the fabrics and trimmings she had accumulated over 20 years as a designer. It was, in every practical sense, a loss of identity as much as a loss of property because the objects that burned were not merely possessions, but the physical evidence of the life she had lived, the sketches that proved she had been a designer, the photographs that proved she had been beautiful, the fabrics that
proved she had understood cloth with the intimacy of someone who had spent 10 years in Oscar de la Renta’s workrooms learning to read thread counts by touch. All of it was gone, and the woman who had already lost her marriage, her fashion house, her social world, and her credit cards was now standing in front of a pile of ash that had been the one thing she had kept.
“The shock was so sad, I thought about leaving it,” she said. “Then I thought, this could be a window to creating something that is truly mine. By then, I was divorced with no children, so I did not need lots of extra rooms.” The response is the most Carolyn Roehm sentence in the entire Carolyn Roehm story.
Confronted with the total destruction of her home, she saw it not as a catastrophe, but as a design opportunity. She rebuilt Weatherstone according to her own vision rather than the vision of a partnership, a neoclassical stone house wrapped in parterre gardens without an antique later than the 19th century inside, a place designed entirely around her own aesthetic rather than the aesthetic required by her marriage.
She lived in a converted barn called Weather Pebble during the years of reconstruction, and that period of contraction and rebuilding became the subject of more books, more photographs, more content for the audience that was gathering around her. Over the following two decades, Carolyn Roehm published 13 books on flowers, entertaining, gardening, interior design, gift wrapping, and lifestyle.
A body of work that established her as one of America’s preeminent authorities on the subject of domestic beauty, design, and style, A Constant Thread, published by Rizzoli in 2018, was the closest thing to a memoir she had produced, a richly photographed autobiography that interwove her life story with a thread of aesthetic philosophy she had developed across five decades.
She also assembled a new collection of properties that were, in aggregate, a complete statement of aesthetic philosophy. Weatherstone rebuilt on her own terms as the primary canvas, a Sutton Place duplex in Manhattan, purchased in 2004 with 18-ft coffered ceilings and 12-ft casement windows, and Chris Holm House in Charleston, South Carolina, an 1824 Greek Revival mansion with Corinthian columns modeled after the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.
Purchased in 2012 for roughly $3 million and extensively renovated, the Charleston house was listed for $12.5 million in 2025, and the Sutton Place apartment was listed for $5.49 million. The aggregate value of the properties she had assembled independently, without Kravis’s money, through her own earning from books, lectures, and design work, was considerable.
Oprah Winfrey, who encountered her during this period, declared, “She is a diva. She is the master. She is my mentor.” The woman who had been left with a single house and canceled credit cards had, over 30 years, built a new empire, smaller, quieter, less mediated by the social machinery of Manhattan’s charity circuit, but genuinely hers.
The Carolyn Roehm story is not simply a story about the 1980s and the particular brutality of a social world that celebrated women as ornaments and punished them for the aspirations it had simultaneously encouraged. It is a story about talent, genuine, serious, multi-dimensional talent that was systematically underestimated because of the circumstances in which it was expressed.
It is a story about the way wealthy men can use their financial position to shape women’s careers and then withdraw that support when the need for it has passed, as if the careers themselves were acquisitions in a portfolio to be bought and sold. And it is finally a story about the particular strength of someone who grew up in Kirksville, Missouri, with nothing but ambition and an innate sense of beauty, and who discovered, when everything else was taken away, that those two things were enough.
The trophy wife framework that Fortune magazine used to describe her in 1989 missed something essential about Carolyn Roehm, that the trophy-ing was mutual. She used his money and his social position to launch a career she could not have launched otherwise. He used her beauty, her taste, her social intelligence, and her hostessing ability to build a New York social life that amplified his professional standing and made him a figure of cultural consequence rather than merely financial consequence. The apartment designed to
make a Renoir look at home was as much a business asset as any of the companies in the KKR portfolio. The parties that required 6,000 European flowers were not extravagance for its own sake, but relationship maintenance at industrial scale. They were, in this sense, genuine partners, which made the replacement more rather than less painful.
The replacement of Carolyn Roehm by Marie-Josée Drouin followed a pattern that the Fortune article also identified. The CEO who, having consolidated his financial position, decides that his next wife should reflect not where he is in terms of social aspiration, but where he is in terms of intellectual self-image.
Kravis in 1985 needed a socially magnetic, aesthetically accomplished partner to help him establish himself in New York society. Kravis in 1993, having already conquered that world, had different needs. He needed, or believed he needed, an intellectual peer, someone whose credentials were policy and economics rather than fashion and flowers.
Marie-Josée Drouin was, in this reading, not simply a betrayal, but a statement about who Henry Kravis wanted to be in the second half of his life. The flowers, Carolyn Roehm once wrote, are impermanent, and so is the frost on the windowpane, and the silk taffeta gown. What lasts is the attention you brought to each of them while they were yours.
In 2025, at 74 years old, she was selling her Charleston mansion for $12.5 million, posting about her gardens at Weatherstone, and working on new projects. She had 13 books behind her, a Manolo Blahnik shoe that bore her name, an entry in the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame, and a reputation as what Bill Blass had called her, the ultimate tastemaker.
Henry Kravis, now in his 80s, continued to manage his philanthropic and investment activities with Marie-Josée at his side. KKR had grown into a global investment firm managing trillions of dollars in assets. The Park Avenue triplex was, by all accounts, spectacular. But the woman who had arrived in New York with $600 and five suitcases of carefully chosen clothes had, over the course of 50 years, built and lost and rebuilt a life entirely on her own terms.
And the life she built the second time, from the ashes of the first, turned out to be the one that mattered.
