Australian socialite Primrose Dunlop, whose bridegroom ‘prince’ ran off with the best man on the eve of their lavish wedding, has died at the age of 70.
Primrose, the daughter of Australian society doyenne Lady Primrose Potter AC and an heiress to a $60million fortune, entered full-time care with frontotemporal dementia in 2022.
She died on February 5.
‘My daughter, Primrose, has lost her battle with frontotemporal dementia – a heart-wrenching disease,’ Lady Potter said in a statement.
Primrose, who was raised in Sydney‘s exclusive Bellevue Hill, had a ‘brilliant and exciting life’, full of high-spirited encounters with the rich and famous, her closest friends have said.
Primrose made world headlines when she was meant to marry diminutive Qantas flight steward Lorenzo Montesini at Venice’s Basilica di San Pietro in April 1990.
Montesini claimed to hold the titles of Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of St Sophia and Baron Alexandroff.
Primrose herself dismissed the idea the union was her entree into European ‘royalty’ as ‘a load of rubbish’, but that didn’t stop the gossip. Unfortunately, the wedding never went ahead after Montesini ran away with his best man, Robert Straub.
Australian socialite Primrose Dunlop has died, aged 70.
Primrose Dunlop had a fabulous life among the rich and celebrated, but was never pretentious, even after becoming the subject of global gossip after she was left at the altar
Robert Straub (above) and Montesini had become lovers on a ‘moonlit’ beach during the Vietnam war, but that was all a ‘secret’ until the lavish wedding plans became a notorious social fiasco
It turned out Montesini and Straub had been a gay couple, in love in secret ever since an ‘encounter on a beach at moonlight’ during the Vietnam War.
‘Vale Primrose “Pitty Pat” Dunlop. Star of one of Australia’s great society scandals, left at the altar in Venice when the groom eloped with his best man,’ journalist Andrew Hornery penned on Tuesday in tribute.
‘She not only survived but thrived for many years, an exemplar of getting on with it despite the enormous scrutiny surrounding her.’
THE EXTRAVAGANZA THAT NEVER HAPPENED
Primrose was to become Montesini’s princess in a dress inspired by Balenciaga and wearing a diadem of gold oak leaves given to her by her fiance.
Three days of lavish celebrations would culminate in the wedding on Easter Monday 1990 at Venice’s Basilica di San Pietro.
After the wedding, the guests would return to the Palazetto Pisani in a regatta of gondolas, disembarking at the water entrance.
Champagne and a candlelit dinner would be served in the marble hall which runs the entire length of the palazzo.
The stage was set and for the Australians already flying in to Venice, it was to be the closest thing to a royal extravaganza they could experience.
Lady Potter and Primrose’s daughter Zofia Krasicki (above) remain close after the death of Zofuia’s father Count Jerzy Krasicki v Siecin and since her mother was confined to care
The Potters had even flown in their own society priest, the jet setting Father Vincent Kiss,
who unbeknown to anyone at the time had a predilection for stealing church funds and fondling boys.
But then the groom dropped his bombshell and did a runner with his best man to Paris, causing a media frenzy.
WHISPERS BEFORE THE WEDDING
Long before it fell into the most deliciously scurrilous feast for the world media – making news across Europe, in the UK, the US and Australia – Primrose’s bizarre wedding plan had been the subject of intense gossip and speculation.
It began with a friendship forged between Montesini and Primrose’s mother – Lady Potter – who he nicknamed ‘The Empress’ in deference to her noble manner and exalted status in Australian society.
Montesini later said he and Lady Potter ‘recognised in each other the quest for excellence in living’ which ‘replicated that civilised world’.
Montesini and Straub also became drinking buddies with Primrose, and at one cocktail session, Primrose was bemoaning the expense of getting to parties in London.
Straub suggested Montesini marry Primrose. He said this would give her access to cheap Qantas tickets which at the time were not available to same-sex partners.
The idea took hold, the news was leaked, the Potters announced the engagement and Montesini and Primrose posed for a formal photograph.
It was shot in the overstuffed living room of the ornately decorated twin rose pink terraces Montesini shared with Straub in the then shabby Sydney wharfside suburb of Woolloomooloo.
Dressed in a tuxedo pinned with his Vietnam medal, Montesini stood behind an elegant Primrose who sat on an elaborately carved chair beneath a chandelier.
Over the ensuing months, as Lady Potter organised her daughter’s extravagant wedding, tongues wagged at Sydney parties about Montesini’s claim to royal titles and his relationship with Straub.
Society royalty, Lady Primrose Potter AM (centre, in 2018 with grandaughter Zofia, left) planned a glittering wedding in Venice where daughter Primmie (right) would become a princess
Montesini said his grandmother was Princess Anna Grazia Papajionavi Giustiniani, but someone would claim his mother had been illegitimate, rendering him ineligible to be prince.
Burke’s Peerage, the London-based reference for the aristocracy, described the title as ‘a bit dodgy’ and said they had no record ‘of a Montesini’.
Montesini said he grew up in a grand house in Egypt, spoke four languages, and that his mother was a grande dame of post-war Egypt, a cross between ‘Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman’.
He and Straub had been together since the end of his deployment to Vietnam, but being openly gay back then was impossible.
Primrose, pictured above in classic high spirits with author Janise Beaumont, entered permanent full-time care in 2022, suffering from right frontal lobe dementia
Of the wedding, Montesini later said, Straub ‘wanted it to happen, and it would shut everyone up that we were not gay’.
Montesini said he tried to call it off, but the plans had taken on their own momentum and when he broached it with Lady Potter she replied, ‘now, now, now Lorenzo’.
‘I was in this bubble. Midsummer madness. I tried to be as sane as I could. But it did get completely out of hand [and] I found myself on a plane heading for Italy,’ he later told ABC.
Before prenuptials could begin, an argument broke out about money.
Montesini later said he walked out after being expected to pay for a meal in Venice.
‘With the rich … they can spend millions on you and yet you can fall out over a taxi fare,’ he told the ABC.
‘I grabbed the opportunity when I was asked to pay for a rather large lunch and I said .. that’s it, not doing it.
‘We had to try and sneak out and it didn’t work. It all blew up.
‘We flew into Charles de Gaulle there was a whole media pack. We were followed around in taxis.’
The Italian and British press in particular had a field day, with La Republica published a cartoon of two men throwing a tiara to a bride on a jetty while escaping in a gondola.
The Observer called it a ‘jet set sensation’ and ‘wedding eve fiasco’ and Primrose hired celebrity agent Harry M Miller to handle offers for the rights to her story.
Montesini said back in Sydney he ‘retreated’ into his ‘bubble’, but in truth the city’s society set dropped him like a stone.
Lorenzo Montesini endured being outcast from Primrose’ circle, the death of his lover Robert Straub from HIV, but has poured himself into the construction of a grand library in his native Alexandria, Egypt
When Primrose relocated from Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay to Melbourne, she met a real estate agent named George Kirk.
The suave 60-year-old was actually Polish Count Jerzy Krasicki v Siecin and in 1993, 39-year-old Primrose married him in a small family wedding.
She became the Countes Krasicki v Siecin and they had a child, Zofia, a year later.
After a short period of being chased by the media, Montesini retreated into his own world with Straub, who had contracted HIV.
There would be no rapprochement between Primrose, the Potters and Montesini.
In 1994, Sir Ian Potter died, leaving a $60m estate to Primrose.
After 27 years together, Straub died in Montesini’s arms in St Vincent’s hospice on August 15, 1995.
Lady Primrose Potter AC made a $1million donation in her daughter’s name to The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health on Sunday.
Lady Potter made the donation in her daughter’s full name: ‘ Countess Anne Margaret Primrose Krasicki v Siecin’.
‘We are enormously thankful to Lady Primrose Potter for this significant and impactful gift,’ Florey’s executive director Peter van Wijngaarden said in a statement.
‘With the generous donation in honour of Countess Krasicki v Siecin from the Potter family, a team of Florey researchers will investigate better ways to diagnose FTD and other dementias.
‘We hope that this research will pave the way to improved diagnosis and treatments.
The family will hold a private memorial service this week, and are asking mourners to donate to dementia research in their loved one’s name , rather than send flowers.
