La reine des diamants d’Amérique, ses caprices et son SS1

An SS1 tourer, a car for a sporty young man, seems like an odd choice for a woman accustomed to opulent Rolls-Royces, a large open-top Minerva and a unique coach-built Duesenberg with a sun roof, cars she was reported using in the U.S.A. and Europe, which prompts a thought that perhaps Mabel Boll bought the SS1 as a coming-of-age gift for her son.

The latest sales advert for this SS1 states that it was delivered new to Countess Porceri/Mabel Boll in February, 1935. She was then still living at her villa in the south of France and did so until at least late in 1936 but, according to the February 6th, 1935, Bystander magazine, for that month at least Countess Porceri was staying in London with her son Robert Scott II., often mingling with other guests at the Dorchester Hotel. Perhaps they even visited Mabel’s sister Lillian, married to Leicester hosiery equipment manufacturer Dr. Edwin Wildt since 1925.

Mabel’s son was born on November 12th, 1913, during her first marriage, meaning that early in 1935 he had only recently turned twenty-one. He had lived mostly with his grandparents or uncle George Boll in Rochester, N.Y., but did live with Mabel and her mother in Paris for a while from 1923, returning to live in Rochester by 1930. Did he take the SS1 back to the U.S.A. after his 1935 London visit? If so, he could only have owned it for a few years because he died in 1942, by then a respected Manhattan jeweller.

Of Mabel Boll and her cars, there are a few recorded sightings. Notorious for her desire to fly but not as a pilot, neither was she was notable as sports car owner or even an owner-driver.

Fleeing from a threat of a robbery attempt on her jewellery in Nice around 1925, she had to be taken from Gare de Lyon to a Barclays bank vault in an armoured car. With more newly-acquired wealth after the death of Hernando Rocha in a car accident in Columbia in 1928, she was described in New York “being whisked from luncheon to shop to aviation field in her green Rolls-Royce” and later reports claimed she had also used a bright green Rolls in Paris. In England in June, 1928, she was reported to have motored up to see her sister, viâ the Shady Lane arboretum in Leicester, but was also photographed alighting from her chauffeur-driven 1928 Minerva at a hotel in Nice before taking it back to New York that year.

Divorcing Count Porceri in August, 1933, she purchased her Duesenberg by February, 1934. Reports of what happened next do vary but she was described first arriving from Paris at a French Riviera hotel “with her maid and chauffeur.” Reuters’ news-agency reported May 16th, 1934: “Soon she and a good-looking young man became a familiar sight to residents as they raced along the coast in sports cars.”

She took over the Villa Florentina, St. Jean, Cap Ferrat overlooking the sea but seemingly refused to let her 27-year-old suitor, hotel owner and dancer Georges Charlot, move in. Rebuffed, he tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide by shooting himself in her garden, resulting in hospital treatment. Mabel, Reuters then said, “drove up in his blue sports car” at the nursing home in Nice where he was recovering. Two hours later she had to evade a crowd of paparazzi to re-enter the car and escape. She returned to collect him later in an ambulance, which drove off in the direction of her villa.

After her sojourn in London with her son in 1935, she was in London in September, 1936, “at the Savoy with only a French maid to guard her £250,000-worth of jewels while she drove about London for six days” before returning viâ Paris to her Riviera Villa. There she continued to use her Franay-bodied Duesenberg until at least the end of the year but, when war threatened, she left it there and returned to the U.S.A. for good. She married again in spring, 1940, having already bought a house in Florida, where she was seen with her husband and son, but died in New York in 1949.