Spain’s Duchess of Alba, noblewoman with flair, dies in Seville at 88
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Version 0 of 1. The Spanish Duchess of Alba, whose profusion of noble titles, wealth and flair made her the subject of fascination in Spain and beyond, particularly after her recent marriage to a commoner 24 years her junior, died Nov. 19 at her Duenas palace in Seville. She was 88. The cause was pneumonia, a palace spokesman told the Associated Press. Known as Cayetana — short for Maria del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva — the duchess was among the most intriguing and unorthodox members of Europe’s noble class. Her unruly hair and unusual taste in fashion made her immediately recognizable in the tabloids, which in recent years chronicled her social comings and goings and, in 2011, her nuptials with the civil servant Alfonso Diez Carabantes. On that occasion, she entertained onlookers by lifting her hemline and launching into the flamenco. Born into the centuries-old aristocratic family known as the House of Alba, she was a duchess, countess and marchioness many times over — so many times over, it was reported, that she possessed more recognized noble and hereditary titles than any other grandee. “There are so many titles — at least 57 of them, you see — so I only use Alba,” the duchess remarked to the New York Times in 1966, when former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy was preparing to pay her a visit. Among the duchess’s privileges, available to few if any others, was the right to ride a horse into Seville’s cathedral. By virtue of her rank, she was absolved of the obligation to kneel before the pope. Some technicians of court procedure questioned, hypothetically, whether she would be required to bow before Queen Elizabeth II of England, or vice versa. The family patrimony included palaces and mansions across Spain. She held a first-edition copy of Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century masterwork “Don Quixote,” relics from explorer Christopher Columbus and an art collection that included paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velazquez, Rembrandt and Francisco de Goya. Pablo Picasso, the modern Spanish master, was said to have invited the duchess to pose for him as a model, but she declined. “I think he would have worn me out,” the Daily Mail quoted her as saying. Estimates of her wealth ranged from the hundreds of millions to $5 billion. More precise figures were difficult to obtain, in part because much of her fortune existed in the illiquid form of real estate and art. “I have a lot of artworks,” she once observed, “but I can’t eat them, can I?” She was an enthusiast of bullfights and horses. In matters of fashion, she favored clothing described in the English press as “bohemian,” as well as anklets. By 2011, as she prepared to marry Diez, the duchess was 85 and had been widowed twice. Skeptics, including some of her children, questioned her fiance’s intentions. The duchess reacted with apparent indignation and remarked, according to the British press, that her children “don’t want me to marry, but they change partners more often than I do.” She noted that she had known Diez for three decades and spoke of the sincerity of their love. “Alfonso doesn’t want anything,” she said. “All he wants is me.” Diez publicly renounced any claims to her fortune, and the duchess preemptively divvied her wealth between her children and grandchildren. “I’m not a person who allows herself to get managed,” she once told an interviewer. “I’ve got my own ideas and try to turn them into reality.” The duchess, an only child, was born March 28, 1926, in the Liria palace of Madrid. She was said to have been a distant relative of former prime minister Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales. After the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, Generalissimo Francisco Franco named her father, the duke of Alba, ambassador to England. There, his daughter counted the future Queen Elizabeth II among her playmates. The duke resigned his ambassadorship in 1945, declaring that Franco was “harmful to the interests of Spain.” His daughter had made her debut in 1943, during World War II, in what the Associated Press described at the time as “the biggest social affair the European Continent has seen in many years.” Four years later, she married Luis Martinez de Irujo y Artazcoz, son of the duke of Sotomayor, in an affair so lavish that it threatened to outshine Elizabeth’s marriage the next month to Philip Mountbatten. In 1978, six years after her first husband’s death, the duchess married Jesus Aguirre y Ortiz de Zarate, a former Jesuit priest who worked with a publishing house that was credited with cultivating progressive thought during the Franco regime. That marriage, which surprised many Spaniards, ended with his death in 2001. Besides her third husband, the duchess’ survivors include six children and many grandchildren. The duchess wrote books including “Yo, Cayetana” and “What Life Has Taught Me.” “I confess I am thinking of keeping on living,” the Mail quoted her as saying last year, “although it’s only so I can enjoy the expression on people’s faces when I point at them and say, ‘I’m going to bury you all.’ ” |