Oliver Bodington - Professional Practice

Professional Practice

Oliver Eaton Bodington numbered among his clients well-known British and American expatriates living in Paris. For instance, in a celebrated law suit involving ownership of artistic works, Bodington represented the renowned artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (see "Whistler's Mother"), whose portrait of Lady Eden (Sybil Frances Grey, later Lady Eden, the mother of Anthony Eden), having been rejected by the Edens; Bodington witnessed and verified its over painting by the artist.

Bodington also conducted a successful sideline of helping monied American young ladies (those "lovely trans-Atlantic invaders" as Edith Wharton called them) find suitable titled European husbands in the pre-World War I marriage market.

Pursuant to these services, Bodington sued the American diplomat and Ambassador John George Alexander Leishman regarding unpaid fees relating to the property of his son-in-law, Louis de Gontaut-Biron. The reported fee was $6000, of which $2000 was paid before the suit was brought. Mr. Leishman insisted that Bodington was his daughter Marthe, Comtess de Gontaut-Biron’s lawyer, not his own.

Among his more celebrated cases, Bodington represented "Mrs. Marie Van Rensimer Barnes" in 1912, in the aftermath of a violent altercation in a Paris apartment that led to shots being fired by herself and her presumed lover, Walther von Mumm (AKA Walter de Mumm), of the well-known wine merchant family. Dubbed the "champagne king" of Rheims, Baron von Mumm, a pioneer aviator and future Olympic Games bobsledder (1932, Lake Placid), was wounded seriously, but refused to press charges. Immediately following the shooting, Mrs. Barnes (an alias, her real name being Mary Cleveland Rensimer) fled to London's Carlton Hotel. She claimed to be the divorced wife of a Baltimore physician, who, when contacted, revealed that he had never been married to Miss Rensimer and that she had in fact stalked him mercilessly in the year 1900. Mary Jane Cleveland Van Rensimer, (born Riegelsville, PA 30 April, 1888, died Reuil-Malmaison 12 August 1935), eventually became the second wife of Boris Aleksandrovich, Prince Golitsyn, (born 23 June 1880, Sima, Valdmiri, Russia; died 28 July 1947). They were married in Berlin on 23 Apr 1921 but divorced not long thereafter.