Marianne “Manni” zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn

An artist in her own right having published a book of her private photographs, which was covered in the Style section of the New York Times:

Prince, Princess, You’re on Candid Camera

By ELIZABETH HAYT
APRIL 9, 2000

ALTHOUGH Princess Marianne Sayn-Wittgenstein had landed at Newark Airport only a few hours earlier, she wasted no time getting started on the party circuit. ”Doesn’t Inmaculada de Habsburgo live around here?” she asked last Monday night as she was driven to a town house in the West 40’s, referring to a Spanish relation to the Austrian royal family. ”I went to her house once with two sisters, Princess Maita di Niscemi and Princess Mimi Romanov, the wife of Prince Alexander, the great-grandson of Czar Alexander III. It was a spooky evening because the two sisters sang.”

Surreal recollections, byzantine genealogy and six degrees of separation animate the conversation of Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, the world’s only 80-year-old paparazza who is also a member of the Austrian aristocracy.

She was heading to a dinner party at the home of John Loring, the design director of Tiffany & Company. Once there, she sat next to a Swiss woman she had never met, though the two turned out to have friends in common. Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein also had no idea that her old buddy from Venice, Beppe Modenese, president of the Italian fashion council, would be present. Spotting each other at the buffet, they immediately started gossiping about a certain prince who had lost his looks. She slipped out a Pentax from her Chanel purse and snapped pictures of acquaintances old and new.

”Wherever I go, after two minutes, I know you or I know friends of yours,” she said at the table. ”My children always laugh. They say, ‘If Mommy lands in the desert, someone will spot her and say, Mamarazza! ”

”Mamarazza” is both the princess’s nickname and now the title of her recent book of 2,000 photographs taken over 50 years, which show titled Europeans, movie stars and socialites. The nickname was bestowed by Princess Caroline of Monaco in St. Mortiz, Switzerland, a dozen years ago, as Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein was snapping pictures. ”You are not a paparazzo,” Princess Caroline said. ”You are a mamarazza!”

In ”Mamarazza” (Steidl Publishers), there are familiar faces, including those of Sean Connery, Brigitte Bardot, Leonard Bernstein, Yves Saint Laurent and Aristotle Onassis. But most of the pages feature obscure aristocrats, along with Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein’s 5 children, 20 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren. To judge from the pictures, all seem to indulge in a life of privilege and decadent fun: picnics in the Alps, vacations in Gstaad, weddings celebrated in family castles and afternoons at the Grand Prix.

With little text, the book may seem irrelevant, if not pretentious, to Americans unfamiliar with feudal titles that include words like ”von” and ”zu.” But Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein insisted that to European readers, her book is a source of fascination. ”Taxi drivers and hairdressers buy it,” she said. ”They want to see what a noble family lives like.” After the German edition was released in October, she said, it sold nearly 3,000 copies in one month.

Listed at $125 in American bookstores, ”Mamarazza” is an addition to a curious genre of candid photography by members of high society, who view their world with a tabloid eye. Like the 1991 ”Short Visit to the Planet Earth” by Jean Pigozzi (the son of a prominent Italian industrialist) and ”The Way We Lived Then” by Dominick Dunne, Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein’s book is a visual diary of her jet-set days and nights spanning half a century.

Mamarazza, or Manni, as her friends also call her, usually comes to New York during the fall social season, but she arrived this time for two weeks to promote her book. Kenneth Jay Lane, the costume jeweler, gave a lunch in her honor on Thursday in his Park Avenue apartment, and Daisy Soros, the wife of the superinvestor Paul Soros, is planning a tea for tomorrow in her Fifth Avenue apartment. The socialite Lee Copley Thaw has scheduled a dinner.

Touring Mr. Loring’s town house on Monday, Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who wore cream-colored suede gloves, stopped before a 1770 portrait of the Duchess of Parma, Maria Amalia, by the French Rococo painter Francois-Hubert Drouias. ”Her sister was Marie Antoinette,” Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein said. ”Her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, was my great-great-great-great-grandmother. I’ve got to take a picture of that portrait.”

On her mother’s side, the princess is related to the Hapsburgs, the royal family of Austria. Her father’s ancestors, she said, were farmers who became wealthy in the mining industry in Austria and were knighted by the Emperor Franz Joseph. She married an equal in 1942, Prince Ludwig Sayn-Wittgenstein. (No relation to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.)

”I tried to educate my children to respect a farmer just as much as you respect a duke,” she said.

Despite her genteel upbringing, her book and pedigree both belie a life marked by hardship. During World War II, she subsisted by milking the 30 cows on her family’s land in Salzburg, making butter and peddling flowers at the local market, she said. In 1962, Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein was killed in a car accident, leaving his wife with five children and no means of support.

Although, for fun, she had chronicled her life in photographs since she was a child, she became a professional photographer by necessity in the mid-1970’s. She submitted pictures to German magazines she took as a guest at high-profile parties and state functions. ”I had to take a job to make money,” she explained. ”I was nearly bankrupt.”

Today, the princess, who is surprisingly agile and spirited given her years, not only does all her own cooking, laundry and gardening, but she forgoes a hairdresser, trimming her own hair and setting it with rollers. She depends on the kindness of others for her designer wardrobe. ”I wear my clothes 20 years and longer,” she said proudly. ”Dirndls all summer. Occasionally, I get a present, or Oscar de la Renta lets me pick out something.”

When she decided two years ago to publish her life’s work, it took months to sort through her collection of 100,000 photographs. She told the designer Karl Lagerfeld about her desire to publish, and he approached Steidl, which issues books of his own photography.

Of 2,000 people she approached for permission to publish their photographs, only 10 failed to respond. This caused the princess’s American publicity agent, Eleanor Lambert, to intervene. ”I convinced them by saying, ‘You’ll be part of the social history of the 20th century,’ ” Mrs. Lambert said. ” ‘It’s worth it.’ ”

from:  https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/09/style/prince-princess-you-re-on-candid-camera.html