Gertie: The Fabulous Life of Gertrude Sanford Legendre; Heiress, Explorer, Socialite, Spy

Gertie lived a 20th century life full of fun, adventure, derring-do and drama: a Gilded Age girlhood, explorations on three continents, hijinks on the French Riviera with the Lost Generation, work for the OSS (the original American spy agency) during World War II, and imprisonment by the Nazis. And that’s less than half the story!
Gertrude Sanford Legendre was a woman whose adventurous life began in Aiken, S.C. in 1902 and ended at her plantation outside Charleston in 2000. Daring and fearless, she undertook numerous challenging expeditions for natural history museums, and befriended some of the greatest personalities of the time, including Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Harpo Marx, Albert Schweitzer, General George S. Patton, Lilly Pulitzer, and Bing Crosby. In her later years, she became an ardent conservationist, fighting for habitat preservation on the South Carolina coast and leaving her 7,000-acre plantation in a conservation easement, a place where “the beasts can grow old and die.”

Gertie is a rollicking read about a woman who was not afraid to say yes to life!