Wendy Russell Reves

Wendy's first husband, Al Schroeder, was a West Point graduate she met when he was stationed in Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas. Wendy was barely sixteen when they discussed marriage, but was persuaded by her mother to wait until her seventeenth birthday to marry. One year later they had a son, Arnold Leon Schroeder.[3]

In 1940, she married Paul Baron (b. 1911), a pianist and conductor who was the leader of the Paul Baron Orchestra, a well-known studio band of the 1930s and 1940s. He was a vocal arranger for Fifi D'Orsay, Nanette Fabray, Jane Froman, Elvira Rios, Mildred Bailey, and Lupe Vélez and was co-writer of the popular song Rum and Coca-Cola, which was a hit song in 1945 for the Andrews Sisters. Wendy Russell dated Cary Grant, Howard Hughes, and Errol Flynn, and was seen often at the Stork Club and El Morocco.[4]

From 1948, she was the mistress of Emery Reves (né Révész Imre, 1904–1981), a Hungarian-born writer, publisher, financier, art collector, founder of the anti-fascist Cooperation Press Service, and advocate of world federalism. The couple married in 1964 in Thonex, Switzerland.[3]

A first cousin of the conductor Sir Georg Solti and a literary agent for and close friend of Winston Churchill, Emery Reves described his wife as "a woman with a brilliant mind and imagination, tempered by much common sense. She is a woman who never bored me". In 1953, the couple bought La Pausa, a villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, which had been built for Coco Chanel by the Duke of Westminster.

Winston Churchill, by then semi-retired from politics, spent much of the years from 1956 to 1959 as a guest at La Pausa. He was rarely accompanied by his wife Clementine Churchill, who did not care greatly for Emery and is said to have strongly disliked Wendy. This dislike led to a cooling in the friendship between her husband and Reves, of which there is eloquent testimony in an anguished letter from Reves to Churchill early in 1960, refusing to have him at La Pausa again. Reves shows a deep concern for Wendy's mental health in this letter, referring to her emotional fragility and battle with depression, for which he seemed to hold the Churchills at least partly responsible.[5]