Helen Marie Kearns, the youngest of four children born to Jennie and Thomas Kearns, a U.S. senator and mining magnate who first purchased a 50 percent stake in the Tribune in 1901, was born in Park City, Utah in 1899. Shortly after the death of her father in 1918 following an automobile accident, 19-year-old Helen married Glen Elroy McCarthey, a sales manager with Crown Zellerbach paper company whom she had met while McCarthey was stationed at Fort Douglas. They were married in a lavish ceremony at Salt Lake City's Cathedral of the Madeleine, and then made their home in California. Then, in January 1926, with the oldest child 5 years old and the youngest barely a year, the family stopped off in Salt Lake City to visit while traveling to the East to purchase furniture for a new dream home. Glen began feeling ill, and within a short time the pneumonia proved fatal. He died in the Kearns Mansion on South Temple — now the Utah Governor's Mansion — where Helen's mother, Jennie Judge Kearns, lived with her nephew Jack Gallivan, whom she had taken under her wing after her sister's death. A widow at 27, Helen was emotionally devastated. "I don't think she ever got over it," says Phil, a student of the family's history. "She was always a very lonely woman." Helen returned to California, but soon traveled with her mother and children to Europe on a trip "to forget all her sorrows." It was there she was swept off her feet by Mario Gabellini. "He was an Italian gigolo," said Tom. "In every sense." She married Gabellini in Paris and they had a son. The marriage, however, was annulled and Helen returned to the United States, where she married again, this time to New York attorney Harold Brophy. Helen's youngest son, christened Gian Carlo Gabellini, took the name John Paul Brophy, but went by the nickname "Gabby." "Harry" Brophy had little time for Helen's children, who were at times raised in Salt Lake City under the influence of their grandmother and at other times were sent to private schools and military academies. Helen split her time between a family ranch in Reno, a home in California and her mother's home, the Kearns Mansion. She traveled prolifically, exposing her children to all the sparkle and glitter of an affluent lifestyle. In July 1943, Helen died at the family ranch in Reno just before her 44th birthday.

source: Deseret News June 2006