Helene Whitney was born in 1914 as Kenyon Fortescue and was the grandniece of Alexander Graham Bell and cousin once removed of President Theodore Roosevelt. She married Julian Louis Reynolds, heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune in 1936. But they divorced in 1939 and she started her acting work using stage names of Joyce Gardner, Helene Whitney and Helene Reynolds. After her theatrical work ended she became the proprietor of a Manhattan Art Gallery. She passed away on March 28, 1990 at the John F. Kennedy Medical Center of pneumonia.