Life and Work
He was born in New York City, the eldest son of Francis Xavier Alexander Sr., a top-ranking American tennis player and of the Italian Princess Donna Marina Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi. Through his mother he is related to several Italian princely families (most notably Borgia, Medici, d'Este, di Savoia). His uncle, for example, was Don Alessandro Torlonia, 5th Prince di Civitella-Cesi, the husband of the Spanish Infanta Beatriz de Borbón y Battenberg, so that he and King Juan Carlos of Spain share cousins in the Torlonia-de Borbón family.
He attended the Buckley School in Manhattan and St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, where he captained the crew that rowed in the Henley Royal Regatta in 1962 and was a member of St. Anthony Hall. An avid sportsman, Shields never lost his love of rowing and founded the Power Ten New York, an organization dedicated to the sport, in 1980.
After starting his career on Wall Street, he moved to Palm Beach, Florida, in 1988, forming a real-estate company. An avid hunter and fisherman, the 6-foot-5 inch Shields spent much of his free time at the camp he owned in rural west Florida, Canoe Creek. In 1964, he married Maria Theresia Schmon (or Schmonn), better known as Brooke Shields' mother/manager, Teri Shields. After their divorce, when Brooke was only five months old, he married, in 1970, Diana "Didi" Lippert, former wife of Thomas Gore Auchincloss, who is the son of Hugh D. Auchincloss and half-brother of Gore Vidal and a stepbrother of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He had three daughters by his second marriage: Marina, Olympia, and Christina.
He died in Palm Beach, Florida, of prostate cancer at the age of 61.
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