page_title: Ray Atherton
section_title: Marriage to Constance Coolidge
hierarchical_section_title: Ray Atherton / Personal / Marriage to Constance Coolidge
caption_attribution_description: English: Constance Coolidge (1892-1973) black chalk on paper 61 x 48.3 cm signed b.c.: John S. Sargent 1915
context_page_description: Ray Atherton was a career United States diplomat, who served as Ambassador to Greece, Bulgaria and Denmark. He also served the role of Head of Mission as
  Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary. Whilst in his last post, his role was reclassified and he became the first United States Ambassador to Canada.
context_section_description: Atherton was married for a time to Constance Crowninshield Coolidge (1892-1973), a Boston Brahmin, an American expatriate. She was the niece of Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair.
  Constance had the pedigree of the most elite Boston Brahmim; she was a descendant of the  Adams, Amory, Coolidge, Copley, Crowninshield, and Peabody families.
  Life in Peking during American Prohibition in the early 1920’a proved too tantalizing. Constance began an affair Eric Brenan, a British Diplomat, as well as with an American Expat, Felix Doubleday  while in still in China as the wife of diplomat Ray Atherton. Felix Doubleday was the adoptive son of Frank Nelson Doubleday. Love letters from both Eric and Felix have been preserved.
  Constance had multiple admirers and  received regular relationship advice from her financial guardian, Uncle Charles Francis Adams III (1866-1954), written on his ‘Secretary of the US Navy’ stationery.
  Within diplomatic social circles, she was known as the “Queen of Pekin”. It was during this time that she became friends with Wallis Simpson.
  Constance dresses were flamboyant and she spared little thought of what others might say about her. She loved anything risky;  was addicted to horse racing, gambling and extramarital liaisons, which placed a great deal of a strain on their marriage. The marriage ended and Constance then lived an expat lifestyle in Paris, becoming intimately involved for a time with Harry Crosby, whose wife Caresse Crosby was the first recipient of a patent for the modern bra.
  Constance remained at the center of social events and was friends with H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway and Wallis Simpson.
  Following her divorce from Atherton, she got engaged to the reportedly handsomeformer polo player, Count Pierre de Jumilhac. They married in October and she became the Comtesse de Jumilhac. Whilst married to the Count, she became one of the most prominent racehorse owners in France, however the marriage did not last, and by 1929 they were divorced.  Constance remained in Paris. During during the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936, she invited Wallis Simpson to stay with her, and a guest at their wedding. She was married twice more, and in 1934 met the writer H.G. Wells, twenty-five years her senior, with whom she conducted a passionate affair in the last decade of his life. By the time she was forty years of age, she had been married four times.
caption: Constance Coolidge (1892-1973) by John Singer Sargent. Ray Atherton’s first wife
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