Audrey Emery

Anna Audrey Emery (January 4, 1904 – November 25, 1971) was an American heiress and socialite who was the wife of one of the last Russian grand dukes.

Early life Audrey was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on 4 January 1904. She was the youngest daughter of John Josiah Emery (1835–1908), a real-estate millionaire, and his wife, the former Lela Amelia Alexander (1867–1953), daughter of General Charles T. Alexander, of Washington. She had two sisters, Alexandra (Mrs. Benjamin Moore , then Mrs. Robert Gordon McKay) and Lela (Mrs. Alastair Mackintosh, then Duchess of Talleyrand), and two brothers, Thomas Emery and John Josiah Emery Jr. (who married Irene Gibson Post, the daughter of the artist Charles Dana Gibson and niece of Lady Astor). Anson was the seventh son of Thomas Anson, 2nd Earl of Lichfield and Lady Harriett Georgiana Louisa, daughter of James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Abercorn.

Her maternal grandparents were General Charles Tripler Alexander and Julia (née Barrett) Alexander of St. Paul, Minnesota and Bar Harbor, Maine.

Personal life Her romantic attachments, including an involvement in summer 1926 with the popular novelist Michael Arlen, attracted press attention. In November 1926, she married, morganatically, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia (1891–1942), an exile after the 1917 Russian Revolution, in Biarritz. The Grand Duke, a son of Grand Duke Paul and the late Princess Alexandra of Greece, was a grandson of both Tsar Alexander II of Russia and King George I of Greece. Dmitri's cousin, Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich of Russia, elevated Audrey to Russian rank of knyaginya (a noble, not dynastic "princess") with the usual name Romanovsky and granted her the suffix, Ilyinsky, from Dmitri's former property at Ilyinskoye in Krasnogorsky District, Moscow Oblast, Russia.

Prince Paul Romanovsky-Ilyinsky (1928–2004), who became an American citizen, served in the U.S. Marine Corps, and was a three-time mayor of Palm Beach, Florida.

After her divorce, Audrey moved to France with her son, marrying that same year to Georgian Prince Dimitri Djordjadze (1898–1985).

She died in Palm Beach on November 25, 1971.