Gladys Eleanor Guggenheim

Gladys Eleanor Guggenheim Straus (August 15, 1895 – March 14, 1980) She had two brothers, who were both U.S. Ambassadors, Meyer Robert Guggenheim (to Portugal) and Harry Frank Guggenheim (to Cuba). Her father assumed control of the Guggenheim family enterprises after her grandfather's death in 1905.

Her paternal grandparents were Barbara (née Myers) Guggenheim and Meyer Guggenheim, the Swiss-born patriarch of the Guggenheim family. At the time of Gladys' death in 1980, she was the second last surviving grandchild of Meyer Guggenheim. The last was the Eleanor May, Dowager Countess of Castle Stewart, the widow of Arthur Stuart, 7th Earl Castle Stewart.

In her youth, her parents lived in Manhattan and bought the former Howard Gould estate in Port Washington on the Gold Coast of Long Island. She was educated at the Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut, from 1910 to 1913 and planned to attend Bryn Mawr College but married Straus instead. Straus served as president of the American Smelting and Refining Company and was the only son of Oscar Straus (the former Secretary of Commerce and Labor and Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire) and Sarah Lavanburg Straus. Roger's uncle and aunt, Isidor Straus and Ida Straus, and Gladys' uncle, Benjamin Guggenheim, perished aboard the RMS Titanic in April 1912. Together, Gladys and Roger lived at 6 East 93rd Street in Manhattan and their country home in Purchase, New York, and were the parents of two sons and one daughter:

Oscar Solomon Straus II (1914–2013), who married Marion Miller (b. 1913). They divorced and he married Joan Treble Sutton. Roger Williams Straus Jr. (1917–2004), a co-founder and chairman of book publishing company Farrar, Straus and Giroux who married Dorothea Liebmann (granddaughter of Charles Liebmann). Florence Guggenheim Straus (born 1922), who married Max A. Hart (1919–1999), of the Hart Schaffner Marx clothing family, in 1947.

Her husband suffered a heart attack while fishing near his lodge at Grahamsville and died at Liberty, New York, on July 28, 1957. Gladys died on March 14, 1980, in her Manhattan apartment.