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In 1942, with three other post-debs (including her sister Nancy), Ceezee appeared in a cabaret show at the Ritz roof garden as part of an act called "Boston's American Beauties." Her theatrical ambitions were doubtless enhanced by her heavy beau of that time, Movie Actor Victor Mature, who was stationed in Boston in the Coast Guard. In 1944, when she was 24, Lee Shubert gave her a job as show girl in the Broadway revival of the Ziegfeld Follies. One night at a party she met Darryl Zanuck, who arranged a screen test on the basis of which 20th Century-Fox signed her for a seven-year contract. Ceezee did not bowl over Hollywood. After nine months of coaching and study, but no screen credits, she went back to Boston. But Ceezee was not to be completely without an audience. On a trip to Mexico in 1945, she met Diego Rivera, who immediately wanted to paint her—in the nude. Ceezee didn't wince, and when the painting was later hung in Giro's Bar in the Hotel Reforma, she didn't think it was anything to get excited about.
Not so Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, who had first been smitten by Ceezee when he saw a picture of her and wangled himself an introduction. Before their marriage in 1947, at the Havana plantation of his longtime hunting pal Ernest Hemingway, Guest bought Ceezee's picture out of the barroom, for a mere 15,000 pesos ($3,075).
Gentle Giant. If Ceezee Guest's father and stepfather represent one kind of American society—or even aristocracy—her husband represents another. For Winston Guest's mother was a Phipps, and the Phippses are a dynastic family—a ruling house represented by a trust, which takes care of all the family finances down to their bills for shoes and ships and sealing wax.
The family fortune was founded, like many U.S. fortunes, about 100 years ago. Henry Phipps, the mild-mannered, warmhearted son of a shoemaker in Allegheny, Pa., found himself in the steel business with one of his neighbors, a weaver's son named Andrew Carnegie. His daughter Amy, a remarkable woman of good looks and terrifying energy (she was shooting lions in her 60s), went to England and married Captain Frederick Edward Guest, polo-playing first cousin of Winston Churchill (who became godfather to her son Winston) and Secretary of State for Air in Lloyd George's Cabinet.
Schooled both in England and the U.S., Winston opted for U.S. citizenship when he was 21. A handsome, gentle giant (6 ft. 4 in.), Winston became one of the world's top polo stars; he had a ten-goal rating (the maximum) and starred for the U.S. in international matches.
New Mechanism. As Mrs. Winston Guest, the gay, impudent, restless Ceezee settled down to being a woman in the kind of life she was cut out for just as the social scene in which she moved was acquiring its most important postwar emphasis: the charity ball. For three years—1959-1961—she headed the most elegant and profitable of the balls—the April in Paris, which raised over $200,000 under her chairmanship for French charities.