When you think of the woman with more titles than anyone, you’d think the Queen of England, right?
always queen
After all, she’s the Queen of the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland) and the Commonwealth (any country with a British accent, really) and anyone has to bow before her because she is basically in charge of something like 1/5 of the world’s surface.
However, there is one person with more titles than her, a distant relative of both the Queen, Princess Diana, and Winston Churchill: The Duchess of Alba, who held the Guinness World Record for over 40 titles including being a countess (19 times over), marquesa (23 times) and more.
The Duchess’s full name is María del Rosario Cayetana Paloma Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Fernanda Teresa Francisca de Paula Lourdes Antonia Josefa Fausta Rita Castor Dorotea Santa Esperanza Fitz-James Stuart, Silva, Falcó y Gurtubay (try fitting THAT on a driver’s license) but she simply went by Cayetana.
By the terms of royal succession, Cayetana would “[bow] to no one: not her king, Juan Carlos of Spain, nor Queen Elizabeth, nor the pope”, due to her extensive lineage (but being the *queen* she is, she did indeed bow to the Queen as well as the Spanish royal family.
She’s insanely rich, worth nearly $5 billion.
who are all these poor people?
She’s a cougar: in 2011, she was married at age 85 to her third husband, a government worker who was 25 years younger than her. When her children objected and called him a “golddigger”, she went ahead and gave them their inheritance in advance and had her new husband renounce any claims to the $750 million that remained.
She owns everything, from a letter by Christopher Columbus to a first-edition copy of Don Quixote to an art collection by every single European master of the past 300 years.
Here she poses with a Goya painting titled “The Duchess of Alba”, named after her relative and the last woman to hold her title.
She turned down an offer by Picasso to pose naked for a portrait, and was perhaps the only woman in history to turn down Picasso for anything.
turn down for what
She could cross the country of Spain without leaving one of her enormous estates.
Speaking of the Queen and throwing shade, she was married a month before Queen Elizabeth, in a ceremony that was even more lavish (she is after all worth 5 times more than the British Royal Family).
In 1959, she hosted a Dior fashion show in one of her palaces–and for kicks, invited a young Yves Saint Laurent to show off his threads too.
When her first husband died, she married a defrocked Catholic priest, which shocked Spanish society.
When her second husband died, she married that “toyboy” , which shocked Spanish society again, including King Juan Carlos. She claimed she was “madly in love” and married him anyway.
Her kids called her “emotionally unstable”, so in retaliation she graced the cover of Vanity Fair Spain and proclaimed that while she was widowed, they were divorced.
And then there was the plastic surgery.
with Jackie Kennedy in the 60s
1980s
2000s
2011
The Duchess made Joan Rivers look like an amateur.
Not many 85-year-olds can kick off their shoes and dance at their own wedding, but the Duchess did it.
This last quote from the sadly-just-departed Duchess makes her death all the more poignant:
I confess I am thinking of keeping on living. Although it’s only so I can enjoy the expression on people’s faces when I point at them and say “I’m going to bury you all.”
What a life well lived.
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