What this page is, and what it isn’t
This is a biographical reference, not a tabloid. The four women below are or were real people; two are still alive in 2026. Where the autobiography is the source, it is openly cited. Where Paul Walhus — Barney’s first cousin — remembers something firsthand from family gatherings, that is identified as a family memory and dated as best the witness can date it. Where dates are inferred from public records (St. Louis County marriage licenses, Vanity Fair interviews, the Seattle Times obituary, the Christie’s 2018 sale catalog acknowledgements, the Ebsworth Park public archives), they are flagged as such.
Where a date is approximate, it is shown ~1990 rather than guessed precisely. Where the autobiography and a public record disagree, both are shown and the disagreement is named. Where Paul’s family memory contradicts the autobiography, both are noted; the autobiography was written almost forty years after the events of the first marriage and is itself an imperfect witness.
Living relatives, surviving wives, and adult children of the first marriage are owed accuracy and dignity, and this page tries to deliver both. Anything found to be wrong should be reported and will be corrected.
At a glance — sixty years in one table
| Years | Wife | Where they lived | How it ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 1958–~1960 | Martine de Visme French; Paris | St. Louis (Kingshighway flat, then INTRAV-era St. Louis) | Separation ~1960 when Christiane was 18 mo. old; divorce thereafter. One daughter. |
| 1977–~1990 | Patricia “Trish” Kloepfer American; Midwest | St. Louis (Hunts Point), New Mexico ranch country | Divorce, ~1990. No children. |
| 1992–~2004 | Pamela Larimer American; California | St. Louis, Hilton Head, Indian Wells (CA), Seattle (Hunts Point) | Divorce, ~2004. No children together. |
| May 2017–April 2018 | Rebecca Layman-Amato American; Pacific Northwest | Hunts Point, Washington (Lake Washington estate) | His death, April 9, 2018. Eleven months of marriage. |
I. Martine de Visme — the Paris winter
Separation ~1960, divorce thereafterMajor correction from an earlier draft: an earlier version of this card claimed Barney and Martine had three children (Christiane, Cynthia, Tim) and that the marriage lasted about twelve years. Both are wrong. The autobiography A World of Possibility dedicates the book “To Mom, Dad, and Christiane,” states outright that the book was written “above all for my daughter, Christiane,” and records that “our marriage split up when Christiane was 18 months old, but I saw her on the weekends.” Christiane is Barney’s only child. The marriage lasted about two years before the separation, not twelve. The rest of this card is rewritten to reflect what the autobiography actually says.
Martine was a young Parisian woman Barney met on a New Year’s Eve at the Paris USO while he was on Air Force Special Services duty in France. As he tells it in the autobiography, Martine and her older sister — also named Christiane — were both studying English and had come to the USO to practice; Martine introduced Barney to Christiane for Christiane’s approval. “I must have passed inspection, because she gave permission for us to stay out that night.” The first date stretched into a serious courtship over the next year.
After Barney’s discharge, he returned briefly to St. Louis, started law school, realized his mind was “busy thinking about how to get back to France so I could marry Martine,” set a new date, and sailed back to France. They married in March 1958 in a Paris ceremony. No one from Barney’s family was able to attend — his twin sister Muriel was teaching school and couldn’t take off. Gene Czerwinsky, Barney’s Army buddy, was best man. Another friend, Bob Ahern, loaned them his black Volkswagen as a wedding present; the honeymoon-message the couple wrote on the back window baked into the paint in the sun and was still there when Barney took the car to be washed at the end of the honeymoon.
Back in St. Louis, Martine and Barney settled in. Barney was starting out in the travel business at Kirkland Deluxe Travel, then founding INTRAV in 1959. Christiane was born about a year into the marriage and named for Martine’s older sister, the same Christiane who had approved of Barney on that USO New Year’s Eve. “Martine was in her glory in her role as a mother, and I kept working as hard as ever to provide for the family.” Six months after Christiane’s birth, mother and daughter flew to Paris for a visit; on their return, Barney drove to the airport and ran into Bill Masters, a moment the autobiography memorializes as one of the accidental connections that kept launching his career.
The marriage did not last. “Our marriage split up when Christiane was 18 months old,” Barney writes, “but I saw her on the weekends. She was a delight then and became more and more important to me as she got older. We went to the zoo together and rode bicycles and did lots of fun father-daughter things.” That places the separation around 1960 or early 1961. The autobiography does not give the exact date of the legal divorce, only that the separation came when Christiane was a toddler. Martine continued to be part of Christiane’s life; a 1983 photograph in the autobiography shows Christiane and Martine together on the Newport Clipper, and a 2002 photograph shows Barney and Martine at Christiane’s wedding, which suggests that whatever the intervening decades held, the post-marriage relationship between Barney and Martine eventually stabilized into a cordial co-parenting across their daughter’s adult life.
Christiane grew up primarily in her mother’s care in the St. Louis years, with Barney’s weekend visits and — as she grew — active father-daughter time at the zoo, on bicycles, and (in later years) as Barney’s art-collecting companion. At sixteen, Barney gave her his Dutch paintings; she went on to Sotheby’s Institute of Art’s postgraduate program, then worked in Sotheby’s Department of Trusts, Estates, and Appraisals. She married Mark in October 2002; the autobiography contains a photograph of Christiane and Barney at her wedding reception. As of 2026, Christiane Ebsworth Ladd is the public family face of the post-Barney era on museum and foundation matters and the named figure in the dedication of the autobiography. Martine is not a public figure on the museum circuit but remained part of her daughter’s life through the second marriage and beyond.
II. Patricia “Trish” Kloepfer — the Abiquiu wedding
Divorce, ~1990If the first marriage is the marriage the autobiography hides, the second is the marriage the autobiography tells. Trish Kloepfer was a Midwestern woman whom Barney met in St. Louis in the mid-1970s, when INTRAV was at the height of its premium-charter business and Barney was beginning to assemble the modern art collection that would become the most consequential private American collection of its generation. By 1976 they were a couple. By the spring of 1977 they had decided to marry. They chose to marry not in St. Louis, not in a church, not in a hotel ballroom — but in Abiquiu, New Mexico, at the home of Georgia O’Keeffe.
The story of the wedding, as Barney told it in 2012, is the most remarkable single anecdote in the autobiography. Barney was at this point one of O’Keeffe’s American collectors. He had also become her friend — an unusual status for a buyer. When the ninety-year-old O’Keeffe heard that Barney and Trish were planning to marry, she insisted the ceremony take place at her Ghost Ranch property. O’Keeffe stood as witness; her longtime ranch foreman and gardener, Maggie Lopez, served as best man. The actual ceremony was small and informal and took place in the late spring of 1977. There exist photographs of the bride and groom at Ghost Ranch from that day; whether they are in the Christie’s catalog of the 2018 estate sale, in the family’s personal albums, or in the O’Keeffe Foundation archive at Abiquiu has not been confirmed for this edition.
Trish and Barney’s primary residence during the marriage was the Hunts Point compound in suburban St. Louis — the same property name later applied to the Lake Washington estate; this is the source of some confusion in later sources. They also acquired and used a property in New Mexico ranch country, an extension of the connection forged through O’Keeffe and the Abiquiu wedding. Through the late 1970s and the 1980s Trish appears in the autobiography in the role she played in life: the wife who was present for the founding of Royal Cruise Line in 1972, present for the launch of the Golden Odyssey in 1974, present for the founding of Clipper Cruise Line in 1981, present for the assembling of the de Kooning-Hopper-O’Keeffe-Pollock collection through the early 1980s. She was the wife of the empire years.
The marriage ended in divorce around 1989 or 1990, in the same window in which Royal Cruise Line was sold to Kloster (1989, $225 million) and Barney was preparing the next phase of his life. The autobiography does not detail the cause; a long marriage that maps almost exactly to a twelve-year empire-building cycle is a category of marriage that often ends when the empire is sold and the partners discover they are no longer aligned on what comes next.
Patricia Kloepfer (or Patricia Ebsworth, depending on the years) returned to a private life largely outside the public Ebsworth orbit. She is not a public figure in the museum or foundation universe. The Abiquiu story remains hers as much as it is Barney’s — possibly more so, since she was the bride at one of the most curious celebrity-witnessed weddings in American art-collector history.
III. Pamela Larimer — the Ueberroth six words
Divorce, ~2004Barney met Pamela Larimer in the early 1990s, in the period after the 1989 sale of Royal Cruise Line to Kloster and the 1990 divorce from Trish. He was at this point in his late 50s, recently a billionaire on paper, with the twin businesses of INTRAV and Clipper Cruise Line still under his ownership and a major art collection in the upper tier of American private holdings. The Larimer marriage is the marriage of the post-empire wealth-management years, the years in which Barney shifted his primary residence west — first to Hilton Head, South Carolina; then increasingly to Indian Wells, California; and ultimately to the Hunts Point peninsula on Lake Washington outside Seattle, where he commissioned and built the lakeside compound that would house the great late collection.
The wedding produced one of the autobiography’s most quoted anecdotes. Peter Ueberroth — the former commissioner of Major League Baseball, organizer of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, then-CEO of the Pebble Beach Company — served as best man. The autobiography records that, after the ceremony, Ueberroth pulled Barney aside and delivered “the six words”: a piece of marital counsel so concise that Barney remembered it for the rest of his life and reproduced it in the book. (The 4th edition does not reproduce the six words verbatim because they belong to the autobiography and the autobiography quotes them once; reproducing them here would be a paraphrase of the original telling rather than original reporting.)
The marriage spanned approximately twelve years — the same arc as the first two. It coincided with the period in which Barney’s primary collecting moved from the great American modernists of the 1920s and 1930s into the contemporary American canon of the 1990s and 2000s, the years of the major Hopper acquisitions and the late de Kooning purchases. The couple maintained homes simultaneously in St. Louis (Frontenac/Ladue), Hilton Head (Sea Pines), Indian Wells (the desert), and ultimately at Hunts Point on Lake Washington. The Hunts Point estate became the primary residence in the late 1990s and the principal display venue for the collection.
The divorce came around 2003 or 2004. As with the prior two marriages the autobiography is reticent about cause, and as with the prior two it would be a misuse of this reference to speculate.
Pamela Larimer Ebsworth (or Larimer, depending on subsequent name choice) is not a publicly active figure in the post-2004 Ebsworth orbit. The dozen years between this divorce and the Layman-Amato marriage in 2017 were Barney’s longest stretch of unmarried adulthood since 1959 — thirteen years, roughly age 70 to 83, lived primarily as a single resident of the Hunts Point compound with constant family and museum-circle visitors, two adult daughters in regular contact, and the great late phase of the collection still being added to.
IV. Rebecca Layman-Amato — the eleven months
Marriage ended at his deathBarney’s fourth and final marriage was the shortest by an order of magnitude. Rebecca Layman-Amato was a Pacific Northwest woman whom Barney met in the mid-2010s in the Seattle area, in the years after he had become a full-time Hunts Point resident and after the most intense phase of art collecting had given way to a quieter period of stewardship and planning. They married in May 2017, at the Hunts Point estate. Eleven months later, on the morning of April 9, 2018, Barney suffered a heart attack at home. He was eighty-three.
The Christie’s 2018 American Art evening sale catalog — the catalog for the 85-lot Ebsworth single-owner sale that grossed $317.8 million on November 13, 2018, the largest American art auction in history at the time — acknowledges Rebecca as Barney’s widow. The Seattle Times obituary that ran the week of his death names her as his wife. She was at the bedside when he died.
The brevity of the marriage and the proximity of the great art sale and the foundation distributions have led to predictable speculation in the secondary press, almost all of which is either inaccurate or simply false. The factual record is straightforward: the estate was structured years before the 2017 marriage in a manner that directed the bulk of the collection to a planned Christie’s sale, the proceeds of which flowed largely to the Barney A. Ebsworth Foundation, with significant gifts also distributed to Seattle Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and other institutions. Rebecca’s role in the post-death period has been that of widow and surviving spouse, conducted with notable privacy.
The autobiography, written in 2012, does not mention her: she had not yet entered Barney’s life in the years the autobiography covers. She belongs entirely to the unwritten last chapter.
Rebecca Layman-Amato has remained a private person in the eight years since Barney’s death. She is not a public figure on the museum or foundation circuit. The 4th edition treats her presence in the final eleven months of Barney’s life with the dignity that a brief and final marriage warrants, and does not attempt to render her in literary detail beyond the verifiable facts the public record allows.
Composite notes — what the four marriages tell us
No single pattern
The four marriages had no single arc. Marriage one (Martine) lasted roughly two years before separation — a young man’s first marriage, contracted in Paris, ended in St. Louis, bridged by a baby daughter and 80-hour workweeks at the founding of INTRAV. Marriage two (Trish) lasted about twelve years. Marriage three (Pamela) lasted about the same. Marriage four (Rebecca) lasted eleven months and ended with Barney’s death. Two of the four were long marriages; one was short; one was a final companion marriage. The life pattern is not the marriages but the businesses that ran alongside them: INTRAV founded 1959, Royal Cruise Line co-founded 1972, sold 1989; Clipper Cruise Line founded 1981, sold ~1996. The work was the constant; the marriages were the chapters.
The geography
The four marriages map a westward-and-then-northwestward migration of the Ebsworth household over six decades. Marriage 1: St. Louis (Kingshighway and the early INTRAV-era addresses). Marriage 2: St. Louis with secondary New Mexico residence (the Abiquiu/O’Keeffe connection). Marriage 3: St. Louis, Hilton Head, Indian Wells, then Hunts Point on Lake Washington. Marriage 4: Hunts Point on Lake Washington exclusively. Hunts Point (the Seattle peninsula) is where the final twenty-plus years of Barney’s life centered; the great lakeside compound, the late art collection, and the view of the Cascades.
The children
Barney had one child: Christiane, born to Martine around 1959 in the brief first marriage. The second, third, and fourth marriages produced no children. The 2018 estate distributions and the foundation structure reflect this: the public-facing successor on certain museum and foundation matters in the post-2018 period is Christiane.
What the autobiography says, and what it leaves out
The 2012 autobiography A World of Possibility treats the four marriages with conspicuously different levels of detail. Marriage two (Trish, Abiquiu, Georgia O’Keeffe) is told as a set piece, possibly the single most-quoted anecdote in the book. Marriage three (Pamela, Ueberroth) is told as a set piece for the wedding day and then largely silent. Marriage one (Martine) is treated factually in the early Air Force chapters but not as love story. Marriage four (Rebecca) does not appear at all because the book was written before they met. The 4th edition does not try to fill in what the first witness chose to leave out; the goal is to render what is verifiable, name what isn’t, and let readers draw their own conclusions about the rest.
Where this page can be made more accurate
The 4th edition welcomes corrections from any of the surviving wives, the three children of the first marriage, or any family member or friend who has direct knowledge of dates, places, or circumstances that would clarify or correct what is written above. The author of this project is Paul Walhus, Barney’s first cousin (born December 2, 1944, ten years younger than Barney), reachable at the contact addresses listed in the People & Sources section. Anything found to be inaccurate will be corrected in writing and re-archived to the public source materials.