Alice-Leone Moats (1908–1989)

Alice-Leone Moats was born in Mexico, the only child of wealthy and socially prominent American parents. She attended convent schools in Mexico City, Rome, and Paris, the Brearley School in New York City, and the Fermata School for Girls in Aiken, North Carolina. She learned to speak five languages. She was accepted at Oxford University but spent only three days there. In 1933, she published No Nice Girl Swears, a tongue-in-cheek etiquette guide for young girls that became a bestseller. She went on to a serious career in journalism as a foreign correspondent for Collier's magazine, the New York Herald Tribune and CBS in Japan, China and the Soviet Union, among other countries. Reporting in Spain in 1944 during World War II, she made contact with the French underground, and walked over the Pyrenees to Occupied Paris. She wrote a book about the experience called No Passport for Paris (1945). After the war, she preferred freelance writing for magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies Home Journal, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, the New Yorker, Life, and Time. She lived for 11 years in Rome as a correspondent for Newsday, and in Paris from 1962 to 1963 as a writer for Le Monde. On her return to the USA, she settled in Philadelphia and became a longtime columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her other books included Off to Mexico (1935), Blind Date With Mars (1943), and The Million Dollar Studs (1977).