WINNARETTA SINGER, Princesse Edmond de Polignac born on this date (d: 1943), was an American-born heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. She used this to fund a wide range of causes, notably a musical salon where her protégés

included Debussy and Ravel, and numerous public health projects in Paris, where she lived most of her life. Singer entered into two marriages that were unconsummated, and openly enjoyed many high-profile relationships with women.

Winnaretta Singer was born in Yonkers, New York, the twentieth of the 24 children of Isaac Singer. Her mother was his Parisian-born second wife, Isabella Eugénie Boyer. After the American Civil War, the Singer family moved to Paris, where they remained until the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The family then settled in England, first in London, and then Paignton, Devon where they moved to Oldway Mansion a 115-room palace built by her father. After Isaac Singer’s death in 1875, Isabelle and her children moved back to Paris. In 1879 Isabella remarried, her new husband was a Belgian violinist Victor-Nicolas Reubsaet. It is believed that he abused Winnaretta, and the society ran wild with rumors about the violence in their house. As soon as she came of age, Winnaretta seized control of her $1 million inheritance and left to live on her own.

Although known within private social circles to be a lesbian, Winnaretta married at the age of 22 to Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard. The marriage was annulled in 1892 by the Catholic church, five years after a wedding night that reportedly included the bride’s climbing atop an armoire and threatening to kill the groom if he came near her.

In 1893, at the age of 28, she stepped companionably into an equally chaste marriage with the 59-year-old Prince Edmond de Polignac (see Gay Wisdom April 19), a gay amateur composer. Although it was a mariage blanc (unconsummated marriage), or indeed a lavender marriage (a union between a gay man and a lesbian), it was based on profound love, mutual respect, understanding, and artistic friendship, expressed especially through their love of music. The same year, Singer exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

She had affairs with numerous women, never making attempts to conceal them, and never going for any great length of time without a female lover. She had these affairs during her own marriages and afterwards, and often with other married women. The affronted husband of one of her lovers once stood outside the princess’s Venetian palazzo, declaring, “If you are half the man I think you are, you will come out here and fight me.”

Polignac had a relationship with painter Romaine Brooks, which had begun in 1905, and which effectively ended her affair with Olga de Meyer, who was married at the time and whose godfather (and purported biological father) was Edward VII. Composer and conductor Ethel Smyth fell deeply in love with her during their affair. In the early 1920s, Polignac became involved with pianist Renata Borgatti. From 1923 to 1933, her lover was the British socialite and novelist Violet Trefusis, with whom she had a loving but often turbulent relationship. Alvilde Chaplin, the future wife of the author James Lees-Milne, was involved with Singer from 1938 to 1943; the two women were living together in London at the time of Winnaretta’s death. In addition, she had an affair with Virginia Woolf.

In 1894, the Prince and Princesse de Polignac established a salon in Paris in the music room of their mansion on Avenue Henri-Martin (today, Avenue Georges-Mandel). The Polignac salon came to be known as a haven for avant-garde music. First performances of Chabrier, d’Indy, Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel took place in the Polignac salon. The young Ravel dedicated his piano work, Pavane pour une infante défunte, to the Princesse de Polignac. Many of Marcel Proust’s evocations of salon culture were born during his attendance at concerts in the Polignac drawing room.

After her husband’s death, Winnaretta Singer-Polignac used her fortune to benefit the arts, sciences, and letters. She decided to honor his memory by commissioning several works of the young composers of her time, amongst others Igor Stravinsky’s Renard, Erik Satie’s Socrate (by her intercession Satie was kept out of jail when he was composing this work), Darius Milhaud’s Les Malheurs d’Orphée, Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Organ Concerto, Jean Françaix’s Le Diable boîteux and Sérénade pour douze instruments, Kurt Weill’s Second Symphony, and Germaine Tailleferre’s First Piano Concerto. Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro was premiered there, with the harpsichord part performed by Wanda Landowska.

In addition to Proust and Antonio de La Gándara, the Princesse de Polignac’s salon was frequented by Isadora Duncan, Jean Cocteau, Claude Monet, Sergei Diaghilev, and Colette. She helped Diaghilev with his Ballets Russes on multiple occasions and financially supported the company. She was also patron to many others, including Nadia Boulanger, Clara Haskil, Dinu Lipatti, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Armande de Polignac, Ethel Smyth, Le Corbusier, Adela Maddison, the Ballets Russes, l’Opéra de Paris, and the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris. In addition to performing as pianist and organist in her own salon, she was an accomplished painter who exhibited in the Académie des Beaux-Arts. One canvas eventually appeared in the showcase of an art gallery, advertised as being a Manet.

Winnaretta Singer-Polignac was also an important leader in the development of public housing in Paris. Her 1911 building of a housing project for the working poor at Rue de la Colonie, in the 13th arrondissement, was considered to be a model for future projects. In the 1920s and 1930s, Singer commissioned the architect Le Corbusier to rebuild or construct several public shelters for Paris’s Salvation Army. The plans of Le Corbusier’s Salvation Army hostel in Paris show a private apartment at the top floor for “Miss Singer”. With her friend Madeleine Zillhardt, she bought the barge ‘Louise-Catherine’ named in memory of Zillhardt’s companion Louise Catherine Breslau. The boat was rehabilitated by Le Corbusier in 1929 in order to be a refuge of the Salvation Army for the homeless in winter and a summer camp for children, moored in Paris on the banks of the Seine, at the Pont des Arts and at the Pont d’Austerlitz.

During World War I, working with Marie Curie, Singer-Polignac helped convert private limousines into mobile radiology units to help wounded soldiers at the front.

During the inter-war period, Singer-Polignac worked with Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan and assisted in the construction of a 360-bed hospital destined to provide medical care to middle-class workers. The result of this effort is the Foch Hospital, located in Suresnes, a suburb of Paris, France. The hospital also includes a school of nursing and is one of the top-ranked hospitals in France, especially for renal transplants. It has remained true to its origins and stayed a private not-for-profit institution that still serves the Paris community. It is managed by the Fondation médicale Franco-américaine du Mont-Valérien, commonly called Fondation Foch.

Winnaretta Singer-Polignac was in England when World War II broke out in 1939. She never returned to Paris. She was active in England’s musical life during the war years, and organized many charitable events that included the talents of her musician friends. Although she thought about emigrating to America, she could never find the courage to get on the airplane and leave her past behind. She died in London on November 26, 1943, in the midst of a fierce bombardment of the city. On the first anniversary of her death, Le Figaro published an article written in memory of the Princess de Polignac, regretting that her death a year earlier occurred during a period in which, “the events and the subjugation of free speech in France made it impossible to speak in a manner befitting the Princesse Edmond de Polignac and the homage she deserves. It is impossible to write the chronicle of the twentieth century without including the salon on Avenue Henri-Martin and the palazzo on the Grand Canal.”