Prince Vlora



Helen Kelly Gould with her two daughters









Helen Kelly (1885 – 1952), daughter of Edward Kelly, Commodore of the New York Yacht Club, and granddaughter of financier Eugene Kelly, in 1902 married Frank Jay Gould, youngest son of railroad financier Jay Gould. They had two daughters, Helen and Dorothy (who were reared mainly by Frank Gould’s sister, Mrs. Finley Shepard). The girls wed Swiss Barons, Jean-Daniel de Montenach and de Graffenried de Villars.

Helen Kelly Gould married second, in July 1910, Ralph Thomas, wealthy treasurer of the Sugar Trust, forfeiting half her annual alimony from Gould. He died five years later at the age of 32 (supposedly leaving her $2 million although she denied it) and, in June of 1917, she married in Paris, the Albanian Prince Noureodin Vlora, whose father had been the Ottoman Prime Minister.

He was born in Constantinople but the family estate was in Valona, Albania. His father, Ferid Vlora Pasha, was Vizier of Turkey under Abdul Hamid. Prince Noureodin’s sister, Djellalleddin Pasha, was the wife of the ex-Khedive of Egypt. Helen and Noureodin met in Biarritz in December of 1916. Within months, she was pictured in American newspapers arriving on the S. S. Aquitania as "Princess Vlora of Albania" with accompanying press assertions that she "may sometime be Queen of Albania."

Vlora did not appear at their Paris divorce proceedings in 1922 but Helen evidently maintained a certain fondness for the prince. Some years later, when he was imprisoned along with twenty-three rebels who resisted a coup led by King Zog, Helen appealed to the American legation to intercede in his behalf. Consul Robert Murphy tried to comply but all communications had been cut off with the capital of Tirana, and Prince Vlora was eventually executed.

Helen married again in 1926 to soap manufacturer Oscar F. Burke. Among the guests at their reception were Mr. and Mrs. Kingdon Gould (he was the nephew of Helen’s first husband, Frank). The Burkes also divorced and Helen retook her maiden name and died a few years before Frank Gould, her first husband, on August 8th, 1952, in Barbizon, France.

At one time, the much-married Ziegfeld girl, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, announced her engagement to Prince Vlora but he was not among her six husbands. Peggy’s then-husband, millionaire lumberman James S. Joyce, charged in their 1921 divorce that his wife’s plan had been to secure one million dollars from him and then to wed Prince Noureodin Vlora.