Wife Mona von
Bismarck
Queer Places:
Il Fortino, Via Palazzo a Mare, 40, 80073 Capri NA
Locust Valley Cemetery
Locust Valley, Nassau County, New York, USA
Albrecht
Edzard "Eddi" von Bismarck-Schönhausen (July 6, 1903 - October 16, 1970) was
grandson of the German Chancellor. In Kaputt (1944), his other terrifying
novel/memoir of the war years,
Curzio Malaparte records a conversation over dinner in the Italian Embassy
on the Wannsee near Berlin. The assembled guests, who include both Germans and
Italians, marvel at Malaparte’s news, given him only days previously on Capri
by Axel Munthe, that Eddi Bismarck was a soldier. The object of their wonder
and mirth was the Count Albrecht Edzard von Bismarck-Schönhausen, a homosexual
man better suited to the Capri he left shortly before being called up than to
the battlefields of the north. ‘Thanks to Eddi, Germany will win the war,’
joked one very senior German. Malaparte himself was unsympathetic to poor
Eddi’s fate: ‘The thought of the blond, delicate Eddi peeling potatoes in the
Strasbourg barracks filled me with mischievous glee.’
Count Albrecht Edzard Heinrich Karl "Eddie" von Bismarck-Schönhausen
was the son of Herbert Nicolaus Heinrich Ferdinand von Bismarck (1849-1904), 2nd Prince Bismarck, and Marguerite Malvine Hoyos (1871-1945), granddaughter of Robert Whitehead, inventor of the torpedo. He married in November 1954,
Mona Strader.
Their youngest son, Count Albrecht Eduard von Bismarck-Schönhausen, known as Eddie, was the most charming of the three brothers but ran away from school three times. He became an interior decorator of derelict palaces and fell in love with Mona Strader, an American raving beauty who was already married, and voted The Best Dressed Woman in the World
in 1933. “Her hair resembledshining spun silver, her eyes the brightest turquoiseblue, her complexion dazzling and her skin glowed as if transfused by an inner light.” In 1926 she had married her third husband, Harrison Williams, said to be the richest man in America with an estimated fortune then of $600 million, made in financing public utilities. He was a widower, 24 years her senior, and for their honeymoon they went on a cruise around the world on Williams’yacht Warrior, at the time, the largest, most expensive private pleasure boat. They had luxurious homes in New York, Palm Beach, on Long Island, two houses in Paris, and an apartment in the Palazzo Borghese, Rome. Eddie decorated for her a rose-coloured villa, called Fortino, on the fashionable isle of Capri with landscaped gardens, her pride and joy, including an English lawn; furthermore he lived there. His pro-allies anti-fascist views were well known and he made no effort to conceal them. During the
WWII Eddie was arrested, taken back to Germany under armed guard, enlisted and it was rumoured that he had been killed and died on the Eastern front. In fact he had deserted, changed into civilian clothes, stolen a bicycle and pedalled into neutral Switzerland where he was granted asylum. Eddie eventually married Mona in 1955, after her husband died, but he contracted cancer. In 1970, Mona was widowed again and, in 1971, married Eddie’s doctor, “Count” Umberto Martini, newly ennobled (after Mona acquired a title for him from the exiled King of Italy), who was 14 years younger than she. It was only after his death in a sports car accident in 1979 (later referred to by socialites as “Martini on the rocks”) that Mona realized that he had married her for her money (exactly the same way she had married her first three husbands!), only Umberto Martini turned out to be already married and had been secretly milking Mona of funds for his children. So thrice she married for money, thence Mona was twice married again, albeit ironically for her money.
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