Katharine Mortimer

Katharine Mortimer (1923–2003) was an American socialite, a descendant of John Jay and Robert Livingston, a member of the prominent Mortimer family of New York, and the one-time wife of tennis star Francis Xavier Shields.

She was one of the six children of the stockbroker and U.S. amateur court tennis champion Stanley Grafton Mortimer (1890-1947) (a descendant of the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay and Robert Livingston, the first Governor of New York colony) and Kathleen Hunt Tilford (1890-1970). Through her mother she was the granddaughter of Henry Morgan Tilford, who was a president of Standard Oil Company and a resident of Tuxedo Park, NY.

Katharine was one of six children to Stanley and Kathleen:

• Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. (1913–1999), who first married socialite Babe Paley (1915-1978) and then Kathleen H. Harriman (1917-2011), the daughter of W. Averell Harriman.
• Henry Tilford Mortimer (1916-1993), who married Linda Metcalfe
• Richard Mortimer
• John Jay Mortimer (?-2013), married Senga M. whose son, Robert Livingston ("Topper") Mortimer (born 1975), married Tinsley Mortimer (born 1975).
• Eve Mortimer (1918-2007), who married Clarence Pell, Jr. (in 1937), and later Lewis Cass Ledyard III (1911-1990)
• Katharine Mortimer

Mortimer attended the exclusive all-girls Chapin School in Manhattan. She was introduced to society in 1940 at her parents country home, Keewaydin, in Tuxedo Park.

In her youth she was romantically linked to Joseph Kennedy Jr. (1915-1944) (the eldest brother of John F. Kennedy) but she declined to become more seriously involved with Joe Jr. because, she claimed, his family was too loud.

In 1945, she married her first husband, Oliver Cadwell Biddle, the son of Dr. and Mrs. Sydney Geoffrey Biddle of Biddle family of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard in 1942 and served in the Pacific as a Lieutenant in the Navy during World War II. Together they had one daughter:

• Christine Mortimer Biddle

In 1949, after her divorce from Biddle, she married the tennis star and socialite Francis Xavier Shields (1909-1975). Shields was previously married to Rebecca Tenney (1910–2005) from 1932 until their divorce in 1940, and later to Princess Marina Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi (1916-1960), the daughter of Marino Torlonia, 4th prince of Civitella-Cesi and the American heiress Mary Elsie Moore. Shields had two children with Marina, Francis Alexander Shields (1941-2003) (the father of actress Brooke Shields) and Marina Shields (born 1943). With Shields she had:

• Alston Shields
• William Xavier Orin Hunt Shields
• Katharine Shields

In 1962, after her divorce from Shields, Mortimer married her third husband, Richard Gillespie Blaine (?-1972), with whom she had:

• Walker Blaine

Mortimer died of cancer on April 14, 2003.