Frogs and comics

The co-founder of the Brookstone store chain had a life like a character in a Fred and Ginger movie from the '30s:

If it seems incongruous that so fundamentally Yankee an enterprise was conceived by a French count (for that, technically, was what Mr. de Beaumont was, though he did not noise it about, and, as his brother-in-law said on Tuesday, “he didn’t think much of it”), then it bears noting that he was also a trained engineer who had worked for the Packard Motor Car Company. 

Equally incongruous — and even less widely known — was the fact that Mr. de Beaumont happened to own the rights to an emblematic American art form, the “Mutt and Jeff” comic strip, which he had inherited from his mother, a countess and occasional Broadway chorus girl. She had obtained them after a marital dispute that was widely covered in the newspapers and also involved frogs. 

Pierre Stuart de Beaumont, familiarly known as Pete, was born in New York on Aug. 1, 1915, while his mother, a French beauty who had married a count, was on a visit there. After Pierre’s father, Count de Beaumont, was killed in World War I, his mother, the former Aedita Stuart, settled in New York with her son.
Under the name Gypsy Norman, the countess found work in the chorus of early-1920s Broadway revues, including “Bombo,” starring Al Jolson, and “The Whirl of New York.” 

Pierre de Beaumont attended Harvard, from which he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1938; he later worked for Packard, General Motors and other companies. 

Meanwhile, the Countess de Beaumont had married — and, in a welter of wooings and suings avidly chronicled in the press, separated from — the cartoonist Harry C. Fisher. Mr. Fisher, known as Bud, had created what became “Mutt and Jeff,” the long-popular comic strip about two mismatched tinhorns, in 1907. 

In 1925, Mr. Fisher married Countess de Beaumont aboard a trans-Atlantic liner. In 1927, a New York judge granted her a legal separation after she testified, as The New York Times reported, to “her husband’s cruelty” in “permitting her to be neglected by his servants while they looked after a number of live frogs he maintained in their former apartment on Riverside Drive.” 

Mr. Fisher died in 1954. Mrs. Fisher, who apparently never divorced him, retained the rights to “Mutt and Jeff.” These later devolved on Mr. de Beaumont.
“Mutt and Jeff” is currently reprinted in syndication in about 40 newspapers worldwide.