First Marriage
In France, Princess Leonida met Sumner Moore Kirby (1895–1945), a wealthy "Pennsylvanian Protestant". They were married in Nice, France, on 6 November 1934. Sumner Moore Kirby had been born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, the younger of two sons of Fred Morgan Kirby, a business partner of one of the F. W. Woolworth Company heirs and his wife Jessie Amelie Owen. Leonida was his third wife, he having been married from 1925 to 1931 to Doris Landy Wayland, with whom he had a daughter, Gloria Price Kirby (born 1928). Kirby's second marriage, to Valentine Wagner, lasted from 20 January 1932 to 19 July 1934. Valentine Wagner's mother was born Princess Elisabeth Bagration, a member of the same family as Princess Leonida. Her father was Conrad Wagner. Kirby had no children of this marriage which, like his first and third marriages, was contracted civilly in Nice and dissolved there. Leonida and Sumner Kirby had one daughter, Helen Louise Kirby, born in Geneva, Switzerland, on 26 January 1935. Their marriage was short-lived, they divorced after three years on 18 November 1937. Kirby died in a hospital at Leau, near the Buchenwald Concentration Camp to which he had been deported from France after being arrested along with other U.S. and British civilians by the Vichy regime in 1944.
As war intensified, Leonida and her daughter relocated to officially neutral Spain. In 1944, Leonida's brother, Prince Irakli, also moved to Spain.
Read more about this topic: Princess Leonida Bagration Of Mukhrani
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“The reason why women effect so little and are so shallow is because their aims are low, marriage is the prize for which they strive; if foiled in that they rarely rise above disappointment ... [ellipsis in source]”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)