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This Exiled Romanov Princess Fled the Bloodshed of the Russian Revolution and Reinvented Herself as a Fashion Icon
A new exhibition spotlights Natalia Pavlovna Paley, the granddaughter of a czar. She built a new life for herself in France and the U.S., appearing in films and on the pages of glossy magazines
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Around the time of her 13th birthday, Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley embarked on a dangerous journey west, from war-torn Russia to freedom in Finland. Masquerading as the daughters of a laundress, Paley and her older sister Irina traveled via tram, cattle car, horse-drawn sledge and on foot, collapsing from exhaustion at multiple points on the more than 200-mile trek in December 1918.
When the group reached a small stream, a Swedish traveling companion laid “down and made a bridge out of his body, which he kept stiff, and the women walked over on their improvised bridge,” wrote the sisters’ mother, Olga, in her memoir. “A flickering light in the distance gave them hope that they were nearly at the end of their arduous journey.”
Paley and Irina arrived in Terijoki, on the Finnish frontier, 32 hours after they had set out from Petrograd. Olga joined her daughters the following year, becoming the last member of the Paley family to escape the bloodshed of the Russian Revolution. The sisters’ father and brother were both executed by the Bolsheviks as part of the party’s purge of the Romanov dynasty. In total, at least 18 members of the royal house, including Paley’s cousins, the deposed czar Nicholas II and his daughter Anastasia, met violent ends during the conflict.
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A new exhibition at the Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington, D.C. follows Paley from her idyllic childhood in France to her dramatic escape from the Bolsheviks to her postwar career as a fashion icon and actress. Titled “From Exile to Avant-Garde: The Life of Princess Natalie Paley,” the show features photos, letters, drawings, decorative art objects, clothing, jewelry, glassware and other items that illuminate Paley’s influence on fashion, film, culture and society. Hillwood, the former home of businesswoman Marjorie Merriweather Post, acquired many of the objects on view in 2022, when it added 335 new items to its rich collection of Russian imperial artifacts.
“Paley was a creative figure with a talent for elegant reinvention—muse, model, fashion design collaborator, business director, actor, producer’s wife and confidante to writers and poets, among others,” says Kate Markert, Hillwood’s executive director, in a statement. “We are excited to bring this fascinating character to life.”
Natalia Pavlovna Paley’s path from exile to princess
Born in 1905, Paley was the youngest child of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich and his second wife, Olga. The couple’s relationship started in scandal: An uncle of Nicholas, the widowed Paul fell in love with the then-married Olga, who was far beneath his station. They began an affair, and in 1897, Olga gave birth to Paul’s son Vladimir while she was still married to her first husband. Soon after, Olga divorced her husband, freeing Paul to seek the czar’s permission to marry her. Nicholas refused. After Paul and Olga wed anyway in 1902, the czar banished them to France, where they lived in comfort with their growing family.
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Paley and her siblings, Vladimir and Irina, enjoyed “an incredibly happy childhood with all the advantages of a privileged upbringing,” noted Films of the Golden Age magazine in 2003. Their mother threw annual parties attended by Parisian and Russian cultural elites, and the family amassed an impressive collection of porcelain, silver, cut glass and other fine objects, some of which are on view in the exhibition. Paley “spent her early years in an elegant and cultivated milieu, even if they were years of exile,” wrote Thierry Coudert in Café Society: Socialites, Patrons and Artists, 1920 to 1960.
Though Nicholas had condemned Paul’s marriage to a divorced commoner as an act of “undisguised selfishness,” his anger eventually dissipated, and he pardoned his uncle in 1912. Paul and his family moved back to Russia in 1914, settling in a newly built palace at Tsarskoye Selo, outside of St. Petersburg. The children spent time with their older half-siblings from their parents’ first marriages, as well as their cousins, the five children of Nicholas and his czarina, Alexandra. In the words of her half-sister Maria, the young Paley was “gay and animated, with a turned-up nose; plump, pink cheeks; and beautiful blonde curls.” In 1915, Nicholas granted Olga and her children by Paul the titles of Princess and Prince Paley.
World War I, the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the Russian Revolution
The Paley family arrived in Russia at a critical time for the waning empire. After 300 years of Romanov rule, the Russian people had grown tired of the autocratic monarchy. Nicholas had offered concessions to reformers, including the establishment of a legislative body called the Duma in 1906, but these half-hearted measures failed to stem the tide of revolution.
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Exacerbating the widespread unrest was the royal family’s close relationship with Grigori Rasputin, a Siberian peasant who claimed to wield control over the health of Alexei, the czar’s only son. The heir to the throne suffered from hemophilia, a rare disorder in which blood doesn’t properly clot. But his illness was a closely guarded secret, so Nicholas’ subjects were unable to understand why the czar and czarina relied so heavily on Rasputin.
The outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914, just a few months after her family’s arrival in Russia, had already brought Paley’s peaceful childhood to an abrupt end. Her father and brother both served in the Russian military, the former as the commander of an Imperial Guard corps and the latter as a soldier on the front lines.
The start of the conflict “prompted a burst of patriotism that initially reinforced the czar’s rule,” wrote historian Carolyn Harris for Smithsonian magazine in 2016. However, military failures and poor decisions by both Nicholas and Alexandra, who was overseeing domestic affairs while her husband led the war effort, ultimately doomed the Romanov dynasty. Rumors suggested that the czar’s extended family, perhaps Paul or the dowager empress, would wrest power from Nicholas. Then, on the night of December 30, 1916, two Romanov grand dukes—among them Dmitri, Paul’s son by his first wife—murdered Rasputin in a last-ditch effort to preserve the monarchy. But they were too late to make a meaningful difference. Nicholas abdicated in March 1917, triggering a series of events that would reshape Russia and throw the Romanovs into chaos.
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Despite the upheaval, Paul and Olga decided to remain in Russia after the abdication—a decision that led to their family being placed under house arrest, first by the provisional government that succeeded Nicholas and then by the Bolsheviks, who seized control of Russia during the October Revolution of 1917. The following year, the new regime ramped up its efforts to eliminate the Romanovs, calling for all male members of the house to present themselves for registration. Paul was severely ill, so he was excused from appearing, but Vladimir was taken away by the Bolsheviks after refusing to renounce his father.
Back at Tsarskoye Selo, the conditions of the Paley family’s house arrest quickly deteriorated. Unable to pay to keep their estate warm, they moved into a smaller house nearby. In July 1918, Bolsheviks killed Vladimir and several of his Romanov relatives, dumping their bodies into a mineshaft in the Ural Mountains. The day before, a separate group of Bolsheviks had murdered Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children and four of their loyal attendants in Yekaterinburg.
Paul remained under house arrest with his wife and children until mid-August, when the Bolsheviks moved him to a prison. At first, Olga was allowed to visit her husband; she told him that their daughters’ “minds had quickly matured in adversity.” Early on January 28, 1919, the Bolsheviks marched Paul and three other grand dukes out to the prison yard, where they forced them to undress, then shot them execution-style. Upon learning of her husband’s death, Olga “remained there, stupefied, understanding nothing, unable to say a word,” as she later recalled. “I remember nothing more of that day.”
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The Paley princesses in Paris
After the grand duke’s murder, Olga escaped to Finland, where she was reunited with her daughters. They settled first in Sweden and then in France, their former home. “Rumors to the contrary,” Paley told a reporter in 1935, “we did not have such a difficult time, once back to the normalcy of the French life. True, we were not rich anymore. But we still had a house in Boulogne. We sold it. I was able to finish my schooling.” In other interviews, however, she struck a more somber tone, saying, “I had faced death, so close. My father, my brother, my cousins, my uncles, executed, all Romanovs’ blood splashed on my adolescence. This gave me a taste for sad things, poetry, the icy and lightning antechamber of death.”
Living in exile once again, Olga dedicated herself to the Russian émigré community, hosting an annual ball “patronized by American millionaires and the cream of European officialdom and the aristocracy,” wrote historian Helen Rappaport in After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris From the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War. “Each year, it raised enough money to fund Olga’s numerous good causes until the next one.” In 1924, Paley, by then a young woman, made her society debut; three years later, she married the French fashion designer Lucien Lelong, who transformed her into his muse. A bottle of N perfume, created by Lelong as a tribute to his wife, appears in the Hillwood exhibition.
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The death of Paley’s mother in 1929 marked a distinct break in her life, separating her even further from her past in Russia. Olga, who’d spent her final years fighting to reclaim her onetime possessions, which had been confiscated and sold abroad by the Soviet government, died of cancer at age 62, her spirit broken by the loss of her husband and the continued hardships she’d faced after the revolution. Her daughter, now known by the Anglicized name Natalie Paley, sought comfort outside of her marriage, first with a dancer named Serge Lifar and then with the French writer Jean Cocteau. Paley’s seeming affinity for men who were known for their relationships with other men, Cocteau and Lelong among them, led a friend to assert that “she is made to be loved and not to love.” The observer added, “She is an exotic plant that in order to thrive must have praise, flattering mirrors and chandeliers. She knows it. Here are all the men at her feet.”
Paley made a name for herself as a model, appearing on the pages of Vogue and in photographs captured by the likes of Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and André Durst. But she dreamed of a different kind of fame: stardom on the silver screen, across the Atlantic Ocean in America.
Natalie Paley’s film career and life in America
“Cousin of Late Czar Determined to Secure Success in Movieland,” a 1935 newspaper headline declared. Still, several obstacles stood in Paley’s way. Her accent was “too much … for the microphone,” so she had to practice reading out loud in English for two hours each day, as she told a reporter. Then there was the fact that she simply wasn’t a talented actress. After appearing in several poorly received French films, Paley moved to the United States in the mid-1930s. She reached the apex of her film career soon after, appearing in a bit part alongside Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the movie Sylvia Scarlett.
After living separately from Lelong for several years, Paley finally filed for divorce in 1936, the same year she appeared in her final film, the French flick Les Hommes Nouveaux. She remarried, this time to an American theater producer named John C. Wilson, in 1937. Like many of Paley’s former love interests, Wilson was gay, and he’d recently ended an affair with the playwright Noël Coward.
Though lacking in physical intimacy, Paley and Wilson “lived together in harmony for many years, living between New York (on East 57th Street and Park Avenue) and Connecticut,” wrote Coudert in Café Society. Paley continued to model and frequent the New York social scene, and in 1941, she became a naturalized American citizen. Working in public relations for the design house Mainbocher, Paley and Wilson “built a close community of fashion designers, editors, actors, photographers, writers and other talents,” which prompted “many important collaborations and cultural connections of the 20th century,” according to the Hillwood exhibition website.
Behind the scenes, however, Wilson struggled with alcohol addiction, and his career faltered. He died in 1961 at age 62, leaving Paley a widow. She withdrew from society, living as a recluse during the final decade of her life. She spent much of her time watching TV and completing crosswords, with only her pets for company. Eventually, Paley’s eyesight deteriorated due to diabetes. In December 1981, she fell in her bathroom and broke her neck. Rushed to the hospital, she underwent surgery but died soon after at age 76. Her death went largely unnoticed by the wider world.
More recently, Paley has received renewed attention as a consummate survivor, not to mention “one of the 20th century’s most stylish women,” as Frank Everett, a senior vice president at Sotheby’s, told Town & Country in 2019, when the auction house sold several items from Paley’s jewelry collection. With its new exhibition, notes Hillwood in the statement, the museum hopes to honor “Paley’s legacy of elegance, cementing her status as an important icon, tenacious survivor and fashionable influencer with a knack for reinvention.”
“From Exile to Avant-Garde: The Life of Princess Natalie Paley” is on view at the Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington, D.C. through January 4, 2026./https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/51/e5/51e593f9-94f0-44f8-9f5a-e6650dda4859/gettyimages-507602440.jpg)
