It starts with a photo in a LIFE magazine, July 11, 1938, with the caption saying, “Miss Lesley E. Bogert was prominent among Newport socialites at opening of the summer season June 21.”
LIFE was a family magazine, so risque comments like prominent didn’t happen often.
You see:
Lesley was born into the extremely upper-crust Newport-Palm Beach socialite world that existed in the 20th century. Her father, Beverley Bogert, was a banker:
Here’s Lesley six months later while shopping in Palm Beach:
Four years before all of this, Lesley chummed with a certain Prince George of Russia (Prince Georgy Konstantinovich of Russia)
But nothing came of the courtship, if there was had been one.
In fact, Price George never would marry. Prince George became an interior decorator in New York and died barely 7 months later.
His body is now in Nanuet, New York, in a Russian Orthodox cemetery called Novo-Diveevo.
Steering clear of the doomed Romanov, Lesley ended up in the arms of one Francis Taylor
who is described as have gone onto the Harvard Business School, but no mention of a career, at least for the moment.
Francis Taylor came from upper-crust society but was a rumble-and-tumble sort, the polar opposite of Prince George, with a resemblance to Ernest Hemingway.
In fact, Francis Taylor eventually “forsook society life in 1951,” according to his obituary, to move to Moapa, Nevada, where he planted rotation crops and raised cattle at the Warm Springs Ranch.
He had already divorced Lesley Bogert by then.
Her next marriage was to John Yocum Randolph Crawford, a professional bridge and backgammon player, which likely means that he had family money.
In 1988, Lesley Bogert Crawford would die at 71.
