Thursday, June 2, 2011

CONTESSA CHRISTINA PAOLOZZI





SHAMELESS


Richard Avedon
Harper's Bazaar January 1962


Contessa Christina Paolozzi, was the daughter of Count Lorenzo Paolozzi of Rome and Alicia Spaulding, a United Fruit heiress. 




RICHARD AVEDON 
HARPER'S BAZAAR JANUARY 1962


The contessa had a gift for scandal that kept her in the news for more than a decade.






A PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDY OF THE NUDE BY RICHARD AVEDON 
HARPER'S BAZAAR JANUARY 1962



 After she appeared topless in the January 1962 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, the contessa was exiled from the Social Register.
     


RICHARD AVEDON 
HARPER'S BAZAAR JANUARY 1962

Police were summoned to a Hampton’s Fourth of July party after the contessa had written “bring your topless bathing suit” on a handful of invitations. Eight hundred guests showed up for the party.  



RICHARD AVEDON 
HARPER'S BAZAAR JANUARY 1962


At the age of twenty-four, Christina spurned a stable of European playboys and wed Howard Bellin, a plastic surgeon from New Jersey.




RICHARD AVEDON 
HARPER'S BAZAAR SEPTEMBER 1960

Their marriage was an open one.




RICHARD AVEDON 
HARPER'S BAZAAR SEPTEMBER 1960

At thirty-eight, after a face-lift and thigh reduction, Paolozzi enjoyed her disco life with an eighteen year-old boy-toy.




RICHARD AVEDON 
HARPER'S BAZAAR SEPTEMBER 1960

In 1981, and recently divorced from Bellin, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and told she had only three months to live.



 RICHARD AVEDON 
HARPER'S BAZAAR SEPTEMBER 1960

She fought a brave fight for another seven years and died in 1988 at the age of fourty-nine.


CONTESSA CHRISTINA PAOLOZZI
1937 - 1988
ONCE A GREAT BEAUTY






1 comment:

Talia Tells Tales said...

The first girl friend I lost to death was back in the late 1980s, an Italian Contessa, no less. Christina Paolozzi was a colorful and exciting friend, who lived in the USA, but I met her in Israel on one of her frequent (bi-weekly?) trips to meet a lover. I was quite younger than she, and when I arrived in NYC in 1974 she took my under her wings and introduced me to her high society friends. Since I expected nothing less, I took naturally the lunches with heiresses speaking French or dinners with foreign Ambassadors. She even gave an art show in her Park Avenue apartment for my artist mother, Reviva Yoffe.