Mrs. Xenia Leeds
Billy and Xenia Forever ♥
Billy’s widowed mother Nonie (née Nancy) wanted a royal title that would lend gravitas to her presence in European society, to which her fortune had already given her entry. She looked to Greece – a very poor country, whose royal family constantly needed influxes of foreign cash. Nonie got her title – Princess Anastasia of Greece – in 1921, when she married a brother of the King, and coincidentally became the sister-in-law of Xenia’s mother, Princess Maria.
When Xenia visited her new aunt, she met Nonie’s son Billy Leeds. He was Xenia’s age, quasi-royal, full of energy, and he exuded money the way that a blacksmith at a hot forge exudes sweat. Billy and Xenia thought they were in love. They soon wed, and five years later they had a daughter, named Nancy in honor of Princess Anastasia.
A Most Exciting Couple
In a way – as it turns out, not a good way – Billy and Xenia were complementary. She lacked money, but she respected people, had a warm heart, and she was loyal to family and friends. He had money, but he tried desperately to gain people’s respect – or at least their attention – by being a daredevil. In news stories, he seemed more cartoon than man, perhaps a slave to his impulses:
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn Times-Union, Brooklyn Citizen
Xenia, having spent her childhood missing her always-traveling father, and her adolescence mourning his imprisonment and murder, craved domestic stability and security. Instead she got cheap headlines.
One incident is especially ghastly. In 1928, rising stars Fred and Adele Astaire had just completed the smash New York run of a new Gershwin musical. Before heading to London for its premiere there, they spent a weekend at the Leeds’ home in Cold Spring Harbor. The main feature of the home was a second floor ballroom, which projected out over the water. Billy’s record-breaking but finicky speedboat would dock beneath the ballroom.
The Leeds and the Astaires decided to take the speedboat out for a run. Xenia and Fred stood waiting as Adele and Billy boarded the boat. When Leeds started the engine, flaming gasoline exploded across the boat’s deck. Billy, only too accustomed to such surprises, got Adele off the boat and into the arms of the others. He jumped out of the boat, unmoored it, and shoved it into the harbor, where it burned to the water line.
Brooklyn Times-Union, July 9, 1928
The burns to Adele’s torso were neither life-threatening nor publicly visible, but they were painful, and following plastic surgery, they needed time to heal. The press said nothing about lawsuits, but one imagines that Leeds offered financial compensation for the trauma and injuries, and also for the consequent delay of the London premiere.
One also can imagine that Xenia realized that things might easily have been much worse, perhaps even picturing little Nancy as an orphan.
