Etti Plesch

At the age of 17, she fell in love with Count Wladimir Wladschi Mittrovsky von Mitrowitz (1901-1976), but was forbidden to marry him because he had a blood disease. She journeyed to New York and met up with her mother's distant relative, Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, Prince of Ratibor and Corvey (1897-1968). While there, she met American railway heir Clendenin J. Ryan Jr. (1905–1957), grandson of Thomas Fortune Ryan, who proposed to her on their third date. Etti married him on 20 February 1935 in Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was best man. The marriage only lasted three months; they divorced in 1935 and she returned to Europe with "a settlement of only $35,000."^[6] The marriage was later annulled in 1944.^[6]

After she returned to Europe, she met another distant relative, Hungarian Count Paul Pálffy ab Erdöd (1890–1968) and became the fourth of his eight eventual wives in late 1935.^[7] They lived in Slovakia. Their life was taken up with tiger hunts in India; they both became good shots, killing stags, elephants, and antelopes. They attended the World Exposition of Shooting at Berlin, hosted by Hermann Göring. Shortly afterwards, Pálffy became smitten with siren-like writer Louise de Vilmorin in Paris, divorced Etti in December 1937, and married Louise.

On the rebound, Etti married Count Tamás Esterházy de Galántha (1901–1964), descendant of the junior comital branch of a great princely family, on 5 March 1938, and went to live in his Devecser castle, in Hungary. The two were also related, both descending from Franz Joseph I, Prince of Liechtenstein. Together, they hunted, traveled, and had one daughter:

• Marie-Anna Berta Felicie Johanna Ghislaine Theodora Huberta Georgina Helene Genoveva "Bunny" Esterházy de Galántha (1938–2021), who married the Hon. Dominic Elliot (b. 1931), a younger son of the 5th Earl of Minto, in 1962; they divorced 1972.^[8]

In 1942, she journeyed abroad alone, and her husband became involved with Vilmorin, the same woman who had married her second husband Count Pálffy of Erdöd. Count Esterházy divorced Etti in 1944 and ran away with Vilmorin, although the two never married.

Etti's next husband was another distant relative, Austrian Count Sigismund Berchtold zu Ungarschütz (1900–1979), son of Count Leopold Berchtold, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who advised the Emperor to declare war on the Serbs, starting World War I, and his wife, Countess Nandine Károlyi de Nagy-Károly (1868-1955). They wed in 1944 and divorced in 1949.^[6]

The fifth was Chicago millionaire William Deering Davis, who had been briefly married to silent film star Louise Brooks, in the 1930s; Plesch's marriage, at age 34, to Davis, aged 52, lasted from 1949 until their divorce in 1951.^[9]

In 1954, Etti married her last husband, Dr Árpád Plesch (1889–1974), a wealthy Hungarian lawyer, international financier, and collector of rare botanical books and pornographic esoterica. She met Plesch through her friends Gloria Guinness and Thomas "Loel" Guinness in Paris. The Plesches lived on the Avenue Foch in Paris, and at the Villa Leonina at Beaulieu-sur-Mer in the south of France, where he had a famous botanical garden.

After her husband's death in 1974, she took up partying,^[10] and writing her memoirs, which were almost completed at the time of her death. They were edited by Hugo Vickers and published posthumously in 2007 as Horses and Husbands.^[11] She died 29 April 2003 in Monte Carlo.^[12]

Through her daughter Bunny, she was a grandmother to two boys, Alexander Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound (1963–1985), who died unmarried, and Esmond Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound (b. 1965).^[12]

• Horses & Husbands – The Memoirs of Etti Plesch (2007) Dovecote Press ISBN 978-1-904349-54-9