Baroness Stefania von Kories zu GoetzenAmerican born von Kories zu Goetzen was heavily involved in The Residents’ Society of Mayfair & St. James’s and lived in grandeur on St. James’s Square. In an article in 1982, TIME accused her of being involved in a jewellery heist at the Ritz Paris. They were later forced to issue an apology. A portrait of the Baroness by Pietro Annigoni, started in Italy in the 1960s and still incomplete at the artist’s death, was so large that she was forced to move from Eaton Square to accommodate it. “I am an artist, not an architect”, he told her, before concluding: “Buy a new house”.

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Two stories to keep beside you

Baroness Gabriella Langer von Langendorff
The same people in the Steeple archive

Baroness Gabriella Langer von Langendorff

The widow of the creator of White Shoulders perfume is well known in New York for both her “amply proportioned figure” and for being “highly made-up”. This resident of The Pierre loves bright colours and once told the New Yorker: “I never wear a watch at night. I don’t want to know what time it […]

Theresa Doyle (AKA ‘The Grim Eater’ and ‘The Phantom Mourner’) – Funeral crasher from Slough, Berkshire
From the same Steeple territory

Theresa Doyle (AKA ‘The Grim Eater’ and ‘The Phantom Mourner’)

The ultimate funeral crasher was exposed in articles in the Mail on Sunday and The Sun in September 2017. Described as “sad but clearly deranged” and a “Burial Betsie” also, Theresa Doyle, aged 65, from Slough, Berkshire supposedly attends funerals, church masses and events at Sikh temples so that she can “pounce on the spreads” […]