Katharine Mortimer


Katharine Mortimer was an American socialite who was a member of the prominent Mortimer family of New York.

Early life

Mortimer was the youngest of six children born to the stockbroker and U.S. amateur court tennis champion Stanley Grafton Mortimer and Kathleen Hunt Tilford. The other children were Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., who first married socialite Babe Paley and then Kathleen H. Harriman, the daughter of W. Averell Harriman, Henry Tilford Mortimer, Richard Mortimer, John Jay Mortimer, who married Senga; Eve Mortimer, who married Clarence Pell, Jr. and later Lewis Cass Ledyard III.
Her maternal grandfather was Henry Morgan Tilford, former president of Standard Oil Company. Her paternal grandfather was Richard Mortimer, a real estate investor and member of Ward McAllister's "Four Hundred", purported to be an index of New York's best families. Through her father and paternal grandmother, Eleanor Jay Chapman Mortimer, she was a descendant of the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay as well as the first colonial Governor of New York, Robert Livingston.
Mortimer attended the all-girls Chapin School in Manhattan. She was introduced to society in 1940 at her parents country home, Keewaydin, in Tuxedo Park.

Personal life

In her youth she was romantically linked to Joseph Kennedy Jr. but she declined to become more seriously involved with Joe Jr. because, she claimed, his family was too loud.
In 1945, she married her first husband, Oliver Cadwell Biddle, the son of Dr. and Mrs. Sydney Geoffrey Biddle of Biddle family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard in 1942 and served in the Pacific as a lieutenant in the navy during World War II. Before their divorce in 1947, they had one daughter:
In 1949, after her divorce from Biddle, she married the tennis star and socialite Francis Xavier Shields. Shields was previously married to Rebecca Tenney from 1932 until their divorce in 1940, and later to Princess Marina Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi, the daughter of Marino Torlonia, 4th prince of Civitella-Cesi and the American heiress Mary Elsie Moore. Shields had two children with Marina, Francis Alexander Shields and Marina Shields. With Shields she had:
In 1962, after her divorce from Shields, Mortimer married her third husband, Richard Gillespie Blaine, with whom she had:
Mortimer died of cancer on April 14, 2003.