Delphine: Speed, Pearls and a Rosé Built for Summer

She was born into one of the most storied fortunes in American history, daughter of Horace E. Dodge Sr., co-founder of the Dodge Motor Company, and she could have spent her life doing nothing more than attending garden parties and having her photograph taken. She chose instead to climb into a hydroplane cockpit and race it at sixty miles an hour across open water.

Delphine Ione Dodge, known later as Delphine Dodge Baker, was by any measure the "It" girl of the 1920s and 30s. Beautiful, impossibly wealthy, photographed constantly, and faithfully chronicled by a press that genuinely could not look away, she was the kind of woman society wanted to contain but couldn't quite manage. Her brother Horace Jr. spent the equivalent of over a million dollars alone in pursuit of becoming a famous speedboat racer, building a fleet of race boats, each one named in honour of his sister Delphine. And Delphine was right beside him on the water.

In 1925, she became the first woman ever to compete for the APBA Gold Cup, driving a hydroplane called Nuisance, which, given the response from her competitors, may have been the most accurate race boat name in history. In 1927, she went further still, becoming the first woman to win the President's Cup at the APBA Gold Cup race.

By 1933, her brother had built her a purpose-designed boat for the Gold Cup on the Detroit River: Delphine VII. Contemporary race accounts describe it as the most beautiful boat of the entire field, perfectly finished inside and out, and note that Delphine drove it beautifully from start to finish across all 90 miles, pushing the two leaders hard throughout.

But Delphine's role in the family's great boat-building enterprise went beyond the cockpit. Horace Jr. founded the Horace E. Dodge Boat Works in 1923, eventually building it into an operation employing 700 workers and producing 40 boats a day. As the Depression deepened in the early 1930s and the market for luxury runabouts collapsed, it was Delphine who stepped in as a source of private capital to keep her brother's dream afloat. She was not merely his racing companion and his muse; she was, quietly, one of his backers. The boats that bore her name were, in more ways than one, hers.

Every great story needs a talisman, and Delphine's was extraordinary.

When Delphine married James Cromwell in 1920 at the family estate in Grosse Pointe, her mother Anna was determined not to be outshone at her own daughter's wedding. Learning that the mother of the groom was famous for her pearls, Anna went to Cartier and acquired a five-strand necklace of 389 perfectly matched natural pearls, said to have once belonged to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, with a jewelled enamel miniature portrait of the Empress herself as the clasp. Cartier had acquired many pieces of imperial and aristocratic jewellery following the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Catherine the Great provenance, while not absolutely confirmed, is considered entirely likely. Horace Dodge paid $825,000 for the necklace, the equivalent of some $70 million today.

Anna admitted she wore the pearls only twice before passing them down to Delphine. From the moment they entered her orbit, the press could not leave the story alone. Newspaper accounts described Delphine as living in a perpetual state of dread: unable to step from her front door, enter a shop, or dine without a crushing awareness that the pearls made her a target. Whether Delphine shared that anxiety or simply wore the pearls with the flair she brought to everything, they became inseparable from her legend.

The end of the story is pure Dodge: extravagant, dispersed, a little heartbreaking. The necklace eventually passed to Delphine's daughter Yvonne, who divided the five strands among her friends and heirs. In 2008, three of those family members reunited their individual strands and sold them at Bonhams auction in New York. The enamel clasp bearing Catherine the Great's portrait, the very piece that authenticated the whole remarkable chain of custody, had been removed somewhere along the way. An empire, dispersed. A necklace, broken into pieces. A legend, still intact.