Guido Pignatelli (1900-1967)

He was born at San Paolo Bel Sito, Naples, to an Italian father and a Russian mother, both from ancient aristocratic families. He came to America in his early twenties and in 1925 married Constance Wilcox of New York and Madison, Connecticut. She was a playwright and they had one daughter together. While still married to Constance he met the widowed and very wealthy Mrs Henrietta Hartford when his firm in New York asked him to set up a meeting with her to sell her corporate bonds. He remained married to Constance up until the day before he married Mrs Hartford, divorcing her in Reno, but neglecting to actually inform her. Nonetheless, Henrietta and Guido became husband and wife in Reno on April 25, 1937. She was only two years younger than his mother and he was only two years older than her daughter.

Henrietta and Prince Guido lived between the Wando Plantation (her 32-room plantation home near Charleston until it burned down in 1942); Seaverge in Newport; and in Washington, D.C, where he was attached to the diplomatic corps. When she contracted leukemia they retired to Melody Farm in Wyckoff, New Jersey, and shortly before she died in July 1948 she bought the Joseph Manigault House in Charleston that she gifted to the Charleston Museum. Her $200-million fortune remained in the family and Guido was left with $50,000 plus a lifetime annuity of $12,000. Thoroughly dissatisfied with his lot, just four months after Henrietta died Guido married (October, 1948) Barbara Eastman, a New York socialite and this time eighteen years his junior. They had one son together.