Charlene Wrightsman was born to a milieu of multimillionaires, multiple marriages and many mansions. Her grandfather amassed an early fortune in the Oklahoma oil fields, and was the man credited with thinking up the oil depletion allowance, for which all U.S. oilmen still revere and praise him today. Her father, Charles B. Wrightsman, 67, was once the president of Standard Oil of Kansas, has massive oil holdings in eight states, and is one of America's least known rich men.
Born in 1927 in Los Angeles, Charlene grew up to be a pretty, placid brunette. All around were the shiny, if sometimes shattering, ways of vast wealth. But there was trouble at home, and her parents were divorced when she was ten. She was sent away to the very exclusive Foxcroft and Ethel Walker Schools, alternating vacations with each parent.
The Will. Perhaps to fill the family void, Charlene became a good golfer, an excellent horsewoman and a more than passable tennis player. Her sister Irene, four years older, chose quite a different form of compensation.
At 18, Irene burst forth in the playgirl mold, married an international socialite-sportsman named Freddie McEvoy, whose outdoor sport was bobsledding, and whose indoor hobby was cavorting with the Errol Flynn crowd. Charlene watched in wide-eyed wonder, but did not join in the fun. She went to Finch College in New York, where she won glowing good grades. At about the same time, her father was winning as a bride a California model named Jayne Larkinonly a few years older than Charlene.
In 1947, at 20, Charlene joined the parade and married Actor Helmut Dantine, who had made a career out of playing the more-or-less nice Nazis of World War II movies. She and Helmut had a son, but they wound up in an angry divorce in 1950. He married her, said Charlene, "only for the money that I expected to receive from my father." So bitter had Charlene become that years later, when she drew up a will, she inserted the explicit provision that Dantine "should not at any time" be given custody of their son, Dana, now 14.
The Jet Set. The summer of the divorce Charlene, for a brief time, stepped out of the racy world she was raised in. She enrolled in a West Palm Beach sec retarial school, attended regularly, earned high marks and was proud of them. Did she want to get a job? Did she long to be a "normal girl"?
Who knows? She met a man whose name was Igor Cassini. Everybody called him Ghighi. He loved society, in all its forms, and he made a living by chronicling its activities. He knew enough and he got around so fast that his column was very readable.
Ghighi, who was born in Russia and was twelve years older than Charlene, appealed to her, and in 1952 she became his third wife. His second, Austine ("Bootsie") Cassini, had divorced him, married William Randolph Hearst Jr., Cassini's boss. Ghighi was Hearst's top society columnist, using the pseudonym of Cholly Knickerbocker.