Constance Crowninshield Coolidge

Constance Crowninshield Coolidge (January 4, 1892 – April 30, 1973), was a Boston Brahmin (a member of Boston's upper society), socialite, heiress and a long-term American expatriate living in Paris. She had the pedigree of the most elite Boston Brahmin: she was a descendant of the Adams, Amory, Coolidge, Copley, Crowninshield, and Peabody families, all of them well-known in Boston's high society. She was a distant relative of Calvin Coolidge. A trust child and in adulthood a self proclaimed socialist, Constance rejected her Brahmin background early in life, replacing it with a Parisian life from 1923 onwards. Her friendships included the literati such as Harry Crosby, Hart Crane, Robert Herrick, Somerset Maugham and H. G. Wells. Early life Constance was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 4, 1892. She was a daughter of landscape architect, David Hill Coolidge and Harriet Sears ( Crowninshield) Coolidge (1869–1905). She was the granddaughter of Caspar Crowninshield, Commander of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry during the U.S. Civil War, and the niece of the music patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair. Among her many first cousins was Ben Bradlee. She was also a distant relative of former U.S. President Calvin Coolidge. Her great-aunt, Fanny Crowninshield, was the wife of John Quincy Adams II, and the mother of George Caspar Adams and Charles Francis Adams III, who were like uncles to her.