Early Life
Born on April 20, 1891 in New Rochelle, New York, she was nicknamed "Polly" to distinguish her from her mother. Her family was descended from a prominent New England family. She was the oldest daughter of William Hearn Jacob and Mary Phelps Jacob and had two brothers, Leonard and Walter "Bud" Phelps. Her family divided its time between estates in New York at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, Watertown, Connecticut, and New Rochelle, New York. She enjoyed the advantages of an upper-class lifestyle. She took dancing lessons at Mr. Dodsworth Dancing Class, attended Miss Chapin's School in New York City, went to school at Rosemary Hall prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut, where she played the part of Rosalind in As You Like It to critical acclaim. She attended formal balls, Ivy League school dances, and horse riding school.
In 1914 she was presented to the King of England at a garden party. Her ancestry included a knight of the Crusades and the Allardyce family in the War of the Roses. She was descended from Robert Fulton, developer of the steamboat, from the Plymouth Colony's first governor, William Bradford, and on her mother's side she was the granddaughter of General Walter Phelps, who commanded troops at the Civil War Battle of Antietam and the seventh great-granddaughter of Puritan colonist William Phelps.
Polly's family was not fabulously rich, but her father had been raised, as she put it, "to ride to hounds, sail boats, and lead cotillions," and he lived high. She grew up, she later said, "in a world where only good smells existed." "What I wanted", she said of her privileged childhood, "usually came to pass." She was a rather uninterested student. Author Geoffrey Wolff wrote that for the most part Polly "lived her life in dreams." In keeping with the American aristocratic style of the times, she was even photographed as a child by Charles Dana Gibson.
After her father's death in 1908, she lived with her mother at their home in Watertown. That same summer she met her future husband, Richard Peabody, at summer camp. Her brother Len was boarding at Westminster School and Bud was a day student at Taft School. Approaching her own debut, she danced in "one to three balls every night" and slept from four in the morning until noon. "At twelve I was called and got ready for the customary debutante luncheon."
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