Began in New York society as a concert singer and later became a renowned hostess.
Best remembered as a gossip columnist for the Hearst newspapers in the 1940s.
Born a "poor little rich girl" on a sheep ranch in Oregon, she left to live abroad with an aunt and made her operatic debut in Germany.
Her second husband was millionaire Bill Wright of the New York Stock Exchange. Following their divorce she became the proprietor of a supper club that failed, and later found work as a nightclub singer at $500 a week. When daughter Cobina Jr. was 16, Cobina Sr. retired and pushed her reluctant daughter front and center.
Mother of Cobina Wright.
Wrote her autobiography "I Never Grew Up" in 1952.