She was born Jane Smith, daughter of a Missouri high school principal and a teacher. Jane was a young woman with an ordinary name and extraordinary ambitions.
At a time when other students at St. Louis' Washington University were marching to end the Vietnam War, Janey, as she was called, was dreaming of high fashion and a Prince Charming.She was tall, 5-foot-9, and reed-thin; she had the fashionable gauntness of a young Audrey Hepburn, which was more in tune with Manhattan than the Midwest. Out of step with her generation, she showed up for classes in matched outfits and pique blouses while other students wore faded blue jeans, T-shirts and no bras, her former teachers told a Washington University spokeswoman.
In Cinderella-style, this plain Jane went on to become a glamorous fashion designer and to marry one of the richest men in the country.
But tragedy came this summer, and shortly afterward her high fashion business came to a dramatic halt. It was a shocking and perplexing chapter in the fairy tale, a story that will keep the fashion industry talking for years.
In a series of metamorphoses, Carolyne Jane Smith became Carolyne Roehm, wife of German chemical heir Axel Roehm, a marriage that lasted for about a year. Jane was now Carolyne, pronounced with a long "i" as in Princess Caroline of Monaco.
Carolyne Roehm was not content to be a society wife. A career woman with a strong desire for success, she worked for a sportswear company, then moved to the high fashion house of Oscar de la Renta.
"At first I held pins, ran errands," she recalled as she dressed models for a Palm Beach charity fashion show during those glory years. By the time she left de la Renta, she was an assistant designer who had revamped his boutique collection and was working with his signature evening dresses.
In 1985 at the age of 34, she became a fashion designer herself, opening her own company that specialized in society ball gowns and cocktail dresses, the kind of clothing worn in the Hamptons, not Hannibal. She studied French and piano, so she would be "more interesting," she said during one of her early store appearances in Palm Beach.
Shortly afterward, she became the wife of multimillionaire Henry Kravis, son of oilman Raymond F. Kravis of Tulsa, Okla., and Palm Beach, Fla. Henry Kravis was a founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., the largest leveraged buyout firm in the country with annual revenue over $40 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The young, rich, good-looking Kravises were the perfect couple for the '80s.
The girl from Missouri was soon the darling of Seventh Avenue, staging glamorous fashion shows in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, and flying high on the party circuit from Vienna to Vail to Palm Beach.
Last week, the bubble burst as she announced she was closing her 6-year-old business, due at least in part she said to "personal tragedy," which was assumed to be the death of Henry's oldest son, Harrison, 19, in a July 13 auto accident in Colorado.
The news spread through the garment industry faster than a run in black stockings. Rumors ranged from speculation that Roehm was so grief-stricken over her stepson's death that she was unable to work, to the possibility she was having an identity crisis in a changing market, or that Henry Kravis might have pulled the plug on his wife's business.
The last bit of gossip was underlined by a Wall Street Journal story that reported insiders saying, "Mr. Kravis had grown tired of pouring millions of dollars into his wife's ailing business," adding that he had invested in excess of $20 million in Carolyne Roehm Inc. since 1985.
The article, the first hint of trouble at the company, sent shock waves through the fashion industry. Roehm, after all, had just hired Kitty D'Alessio, former president of Chanel, in July to be the president and chief executive officer of Carolyne Roehm Inc.
By the end of the week, everyone on Seventh Avenue from designers to receptionists could quote the article, which also said D'Alessio had met with Henry Kravis several times at KKR offices to negotiate a severance package. Where was Roehm, they wondered.
Stunned designers quickly expressed sympathy and admiration for Roehm while distancing themselves from her company. In a claustrophobic business with room for only a few at the top vying for the same rich customers, there is a superstition that failure might be contagious.
Tom Fallon, promotion director for top society designer Bill Blass, speculated last Thursday about the demise of Roehm's business. "It was a young company and a small business at the top of the pyramid. She didn't have the broader base of accessible clothing under her label."
The closing of her business, he said, "doesn't signal the demise of the luxury fashion business." Blass' business is healthy, he said, and customers such as Liza Minnelli, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Walters keep buying the dresses that cost as much as $10,000.