Theodora Keogh - Life

Life

Born Theodora Roosevelt in New York, she was a granddaughter of president Theodore Roosevelt and the eldest of three daughters born to Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s third son. Archie Roosevelt served in the Army in World War II and received the Silver Star. He later was chairman of Roosevelt & Cross, a Wall Street investment firm. Theodora’s mother was Grace Lockwood, daughter of Thomas Lockwood and Emmeline Stackpole of Boston. In her later life, Theodora played down her Roosevelt connections as she wanted her writings and her talents to be judged on their own merits.

Theodora was brought up on the Upper East Side of New York, near the East River, and in the country at Cold Spring Harbor, New York near Oyster Bay. She attended the Chapin School and finished her education at Countess Montgelas’s in Munich, Germany. She was briefly a debutante in New York and then began her professional life as a dancer in South America and in Canada. In 1945, she gave up dancing when she married the costumer, Thomas Keogh (1902–1980). The couple moved to Paris, France where he designed for the theater and the ballet and worked as an illustrator for Vogue magazine from 1947 to 1951. Tom Keogh designed costumes for such movies as “The Pirate” (1948) with Judy Garland and “Daddy Long Legs” (1955) with Leslie Caron. The couple eventually divorced but stayed friends until Tom Keogh’s death.

Through her friendships in Paris, Theodora Keogh became connected with writers and editors for the Paris Review, including George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, co-founders of the Review; Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi; the poet Christopher Logue; and Alabama poet and screenwriter Eugene Walter. After Paris, she lived in Rome, Italy, and New York. Influenced by the Greta Garbo film “Anna Christie,” she bought a tugboat, which she sailed in the Atlantic Ocean. Her interest in tugboats also led to her second marriage to Thomas (Tommy) O’Toole, a tugboat captain. After O’Toole left her, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where she kept a margay, a South American tiger-cat similar to an ocelot, for company. One night, after Theodora had drunk too much and was asleep, the margay chewed one of her ears. Theodora remained self-conscious of the injury, which she considered disfiguring to her face and natural beauty, and spent much time adapting her hairstyles to cover the missing ear.

In the 1970s, Theodora moved to Caldwell County, in the western mountains of North Carolina where she became friends with the wife of Arthur Alfred Rauchfuss (1921–1989), owner of a chemical plant. In 1979, after the Rauchfusses divorced, Theodora married Arthur. After his death she continued to live in North Carolina until her own death in 2008. She spent her final years in a house with 19 acres (7.7 ha) on which she kept cats and chickens, until she gave up on keeping chickens because they were being eaten by coyotes.