Princess Marianne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, jet set photographer nicknamed ‘Mamarazza'

Yahoo

11-05-2025

Princess Marianne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, who has died aged 105, spent decades photographing the jet set from within.
Her archive of more than 10,000 images captured her friends in off-duty moments of frivolity, from King Juan Carlos of Spain playing table tennis and a picnicking Yves Saint Laurent to the Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos larking around in a false moustache or Maria Callas snorkelling off Aristotle Onassis's yacht with her dog on her back.
A cheap camera – Pentax or Instamatic – came everywhere with Princess 'Manni', tucked into her Chanel handbag 'like a lipstick', she said. Sometimes she attempted more elaborate equipment. At the 1968 wedding of Princess Benedikte of Denmark, she took up an offer from her fellow camera enthusiast, the Queen Mother, to help with the lighting. But when they plugged in the rig, the ballroom was plunged into darkness.
Princess Caroline of Monaco nicknamed her 'Mamarazza' – mother of the paparazzi – which later gave her the title for her first photography book. Chronicling family Easter-egg hunts as well as the high life, Mamarazza (2000) unexpectedly sold thousands of copies: 'I thought of course that my friends and family might like it, but I sell it to the hairdresser and the butcher,' she recalled. 'The taxi driver! He buys it.'
Not all of her subjects were willing. Salvador Dali, with whom she spent a 'spooky' week in 1977, began to weary of her attentions, not least because she was documenting his flirtation with a much younger woman. 'Stop taking flash,' he barked. 'Bad for my eyes.' But in general, in that more innocent age, 'famous people were more relaxed and it was easier to photograph them,' she observed.
Leonard Bernstein nicknamed her 'meine Marschallin', and sang arias from Der Rosenkavalier in her ear. She met Imelda Marcos several times, and rated her 'one of the 10 big personalities I met in my life'. She convinced Margaret Thatcher to come to lunch, to the detriment of her official schedule, when she promised her that Sean Connery would be there. 'Oooh, you mean, James Bond?' said the prime minister.
Similarly, when Princess Marianne heard that the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was in Salzburg in 1978, she immediately invited him to lunch, thinking: 'Oh, the poor man. He will only meet the stupid Mayor of Salzburg and all these official people. He should meet down-to-earth people like me – real Austrians.'
This was not entirely deluded. Despite her grand name and a social circle peopled with tycoons, playboys and European nobles whose convoluted titles, as the Telegraph put it in a 2000 interview with her, 'are impossible to say without breathing apparatus', Princess Marianne Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn was not removed from the harsher realities of life.
When a drunk lorry driver ran over her husband in 1962, she was left a 42-year-old widow with five children to bring up and little money of her own. She was soon, by her own admission, 'nearly bankrupt'. It had been an economic necessity to start selling her pictures to gossip magazines – to the envy of the career paparazzi: 'The poor people are standing behind the barrier, and I'm stepping over it in my evening dress because I'm invited. I feel very sorry for my colleagues, too, but what can I do?'
She persevered in entertaining on a grand scale, claiming that she had at least 80 people to lunch every Sunday in July and August, but since she could not afford to buy meat for so many she lived off the deer of the forest, serving venison goulash frozen in batches of 500 portions.
The eldest of nine children of Baron Mayr-Melnhof, Maria Anna 'Manni' Mayr-Melnhof was born on December 9 1919, and grew up near Salzburg in the castle of Glanegg – not a baroque manor house, as many Austrian schlosses turn out to be, but a true castle, with a massive keep. Her mother was Maria Anna, Countess of Meran, a descendant of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II; her father's family, who had mining wealth, had been more recently ennobled.
The childrens' upbringing was strict: two dirndls in summer, two loden skirts in winter, and a thick jacket. Their father decreed: 'The brats will not be taken to school by chauffeur, they go on a bicycle, it is healthy for them.' Her first memory, aged four, was the scandal of their butler cheating in a sledging race by putting weights in his uniform pockets.
In 1935 she was given her first camera, and was told by her British governess: 'If you are intent upon pursuing such an expensive pastime, then make sure to paste the photos properly into an album.'
She studied art at the Blocherer School in Munich, where she met Prince Ludwig, or 'Udi', zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, who was on leave from the front. A few days later they were engaged, and her mother took her out of art school and enrolled her in cookery school. They married in 1942 and a daughter and a son swiftly followed.
The war encroached. Two of her uncles were sent to Dachau for resisting the Nazis. Ludwig was posted to the Eastern Front, then was reported missing in action. As the Russians advanced, Princess Manni moved westwards from Salzburg to the relative safety of Bavaria.
In 1946 the husband – whom she was convinced was dead – returned, having been a prisoner of war in England: by that point in their marriage, 'we had only seen each other for three weeks in our lives. We were strangers.' They made their way back to his castle at Sayn, with a 10-day journey on a freight train in midwinter and a spell in a displaced persons' camp.
They discovered that the castle had been blown up by retreating German soldiers. A local priest put them up, and they waited out the bitter winter. One day, in the thick snow of the railway tracks, she came across '14 briquets of coal. Oh, they seemed like gold. Tears came when I saw them. It took me quite a while to pile them up and carry them, as the snow was quite deep. When my husband came home and saw the coal, it was like Christmas.'
They flirted with the idea of emigrating to Brazil but instead spent the next few years building up a flower and vegetable business, selling at local markets. Their 'pride and joy' was a small three-wheeled Tempo delivery van, which they cleaned up in the evenings to attend embassy receptions in Bonn.
On her first postwar visit to New York, she asked a taxi driver to take her to the Plaza Hotel. It occurred to her that the journey was taking longer than usual, when the taxi pulled up, she recalled, 'in front of a burned-out building in Harlem. And then [the driver] suddenly said in German, with a Jewish accent, 'I can hear where you're from. And now I will tell you in German how the Nazis murdered 32 members of my family.'
'So he started to talk about it, and I didn't know what he might do to me, because it was the first time that the poor man had heard the terrible German language again after all he had gone through.
'Then for some unknown reason, I got out of the back seat and sat down next to him in front. I had to see his face. And I started to cry. After about an hour of hearing his story, I began to talk about the war, and how it felt from my side. We lay in each other's arms crying, and then he took me home.'
In 1958 Prince Ludwig succeeded as the 6th Prince zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, only to die four years later. Princess Marianne jointly managed the Sayn estate with a guardian until her son Alexander came of age.
In 1970, on the encouragement of her friend, the actress Lilli Palmer, she began to seek commissions for her photography. When King Juan Carlos of Spain spotted her in the press corps, he shouted to his wife: 'Come see, Manni is a professional!'
Motorsport became a specialism, as Sayn was close to the Nürburgring track. When she was 80, BMW magazine sent her to cover the 24 Hours of Le Mans. In 2014 she published an award-winning collection, Stars and Sportscars.
Her other books included Mannifesto and The Sayn-Wittgenstein Collection. She was appointed to Austria's Order of Merit.
The secret to her long and eventful life, she said, was curiosity. 'The day is too short for me… When I wake up, I always think, 'Who will I meet? What will I hear?' She was opposed to facelifts: 'Men like to talk to an interesting woman, not an idiotic woman with no wrinkles.'
Princess Marianne is survived by her three daughters and two sons.
Princess Marianne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, born December 9 1919, died May 4 2025
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