| Notes |
- She was previously married to Canadian businessman James Worth Thornton. After Edmund Wilson's death she assisted in the editing of his posthumously-published journals. Her papers are at the Beinecke Library at Yale.
From her no-longer-extant Wikipedia page (thank you, Wikpedia "notability" cops):
Born Helene-Marthe Mumm von Schwarzenstein, Elena was the daughter of Peter Arnold Hermann Gottlieb Mumm von Schwarzenstein, grandson of famed champagne producer G.H. Mumm, and Olga de Struve, daughter of Karl de Struve, the Russian Ambassador to the United States [Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels, published 1958] . On her mother’s side, her aunts and uncles included Prince Peter and Princess Vera Mestchersky, Count and Countess Ellinka Orloff, and Boris and Maxine Slater de Struve. Boris de Struve was a Russian attaché to Washington. Elena's sister, Olga, managed the racing stables of Whitney heiress Dorothy Paget. The De Struve family descended from a long line of famed astronomers, the first of whom had moved to Russia during Czar Peter I the Great’s cultural and scientific revolution. By the Fifth generation, they had married into prominent Russian imperial families and European aristocracy: Most prominent of Elena's great-aunts and great-uncles were the Vicomte Eugene Melchior de Vogüé, philosopher and author, and General Michael Nicolaivitch Annenkoff, Governor General of Trans-Caspia, 'conqueror' of Bokhara, and builder of the Transcaucasia railroad. Elena's 2nd great-grandfather, General Nicholas Annenkoff, was Comptroller General of the Russian Imperial Court [See writings of Melchior, Vicomte de Vogue 1890-1900] .
On her father’s side, she was descended through a long line of ancient Prussian nobility, traceable to 1359 in Cleves, Prussia. On March 31, 1873, Kaiser Wilhelm I renewed the Mumm patent on nobility, conferring the “Mumm von Schwarzenstein.” Elena’s branch had been famed for its champagne and white wine production, with estates founded in Rheims, France, in 1827 and in Johhanisberg, Germany, in 1822; however, after World War I and World War II, the French seized the family’s French properties and retained the Mumm champagne name as war time reparations. The family no longer produces champagne under its original patent, but has produced white wines continuously on its German estates [See Mumm family citation in Almanach de Gotha: 1930-45] . On her paternal side, Elena was related to the Barons von Radowitz and the Passavant family, powerful industrialists and bankers. One of the family banks was a founding member of a banking consortium that would grow to become the Swiss Bank Corporation, now merged into UBS AG, the world's largest manager of private wealth assets [See history of Swiss Bank Corporation: www.ubs.com] . Her uncle, Baron Walther von Mumm, was a prominent sportsman, even filling in on the German bobsled team at the 1932 Olympic Games.
With such wealth and contacts, Elena enjoyed a privileged childhood: She was educated by private tutors in Switzerland and France and spoke fluent German, French, English, and Russian. She attended art school in Munich and in Paris with fellow students and friends: Henri Cartier-Bresson [Gallasi, Peter and Cartier-Bresson, Henri, (Museum of Modern Art). Henri Cartier-Bresson: The early work. Museum of Modern Art, 1987] , Simon Elwes, Guy Arnoux, and Conrad O'Brien-Ffrench. While in Paris, Elena and her mother would call on aristocratic Russian exiles of the Russian Revolution, many of whom had been forced to flee their palaces with little money. In her memoirs, Princess Tatiana Metternich recalled how Olga and Elena would drop by and bring some extravagant gift to momentarily make them forget their reduced circumstances. Later, when Tatiana married Prince Paul Metternich, the owner of Schloss Johannisberg, she often visited with the Mumm family at their villa next door . During World War II, American soldiers briefly took over and ransacked the villa while Elena’s brother, Brat, was in a POW camp in France [Metternich, Tatiana. Tatiana: Five Passports in a Shifting Europe, Heinemann, 1976] .
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Nielsen Hayden genealogy
1906 - 1979 (72 years)