Editor’s Note: Charlotte Hays, a writer living in Washington, D.C., is coauthor of Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide To Hosting the Perfect Funeral.

When I read of the death of Dorian Leigh, one of the first women in the world to be hailed as a "supermodel," I thought first of all the ladies of a certain vintage who wouldn’t have been caught dead without a tube of "Fire and Ice" – the Revlon lipstick Miss Leigh so ably represented – at the ready.

And then I felt a poignant stirring for an era when glamour was real and racy but seldom trashy. I also recalled my pursuit of several years of an interview with Miss Leigh, who was then living in Paris but who died this week in Falls Church, VA, at the age of 91, old enough to be virtually unknown to the Brittany-Paris generation.

Click here to see photographs celebrating the life and career of Dorian Leigh.

But there was a time when Dorian and her sister, the model Suzy Parker, who died in 2003, were household names. Dorian once graced all the fashionable magazines in photos by Avedon and Irving Penn. In the course of researching my book The Fortune Hunters: Dazzling Women and the Men They Married (Dorian was anything but a fortune hunter!), I learned about part of Dorian’s life that has been only lightly touched upon in her
obituaries: it was one of the most famous love triangles of the 1950s—actually, given the nature of the male member, the randy and dazzling Marquis de Portago, it might have been more of a love hexagon, or at the very least a rectangle. At any rate, revered New York socialite Carroll Petrie, widow of the philanthropist Milton Petrie, was The Wife and Dorian was The Other Woman. A child, as we shall see, was involved.

Dorian emerged in my book as the anti-fortune hunter. She was, after all, considered by many (herself foremost among them) to have been the
model for her friend Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly, the protagonist in "Breakfast at Tiffany’s." She was too much of an individual to submit herself to anybody, even to Fon Portago, the professional race-car-driving marquis. But she seems to have been the love of his life.

She was born Dorian Elizabeth Leigh Parker in San Antonio. Dorian was a model in New York by the mid-1940s and living in Paris and having an affair with Portago at least by the late 1940s.

Dorian and Fon carried on their affair before and during his marriage to Carroll Petrie, a South Carolina peach who had met Portago in Maxim’s in Paris while on a ‘round the world trip with Albergo Dodero, an Argentine shipping magnate. Portago proposed immediately and after some mild feints at protesting, they were married in 1949. But the marriage did not affect Dorian’s relationship with Fon.

Alas for Carroll, Olga, Portago’s mother and the dowager marquise, who still held the noble purse strings, doted on Dorian, whom she reportedly established in a Paris apartment not far from the ritzy 40 avenue Foch address of Portago and his wife. Carroll was jealous; Dorian decidedly was not. If Fon potted another woman he wanted to pursue when they went to the Elephant Blanc, the Paris hangout, he simply gave Dorian an agreed-upon signal and she left him to his amorous adventures. Not for nothing had Capote dubbed her "Happy Go Lucky." Dorian’s son by Fon — Kim — was born September 27, 1955—a scant year and a few months after Portago’s only legitimate son — Antonio — was born.

On the eve of his death in a tragic racing accident, Portago wrote Dorian, always in his life, that he feared his premonitions of an early death might come true. He died on May 12, 1957 in the Mille Miglia, then a famous race. Dorian’s life seems to have had many ups and downs since Fon’s death — she married four or five times, worked as a chef, sometimes lucratively sometimes, not. Kim, who oozed charm, committed suicide in his early 20s, jumping from a window on Park Avenue.

When I finally got Dorian on the phone, she understandably didn’t want to discuss any of this. But for me she will be always a figure of glamour, the reigning model back when even their love affairs, though sometimes tragic, weren’t vulgar.

I visited Kim’s grave on a hill in the cemetery of Arcangues, near Biarritz. He is buried close to his father and Olga. It is a sad and beautiful spot. I keep hoping they’ll bury Dorian there.