Her charm and humour made her a popular guest at salons in Paris between the wars, standing out even in a social circle known for its flamboyant talkers.

As recorded by Parisian raconteuse Bettina Bergery, “when Dolly was very young, she used to like to take lumps of sugar, dip them in her pretty mother Lily's perfume, and eat them.”[2] In 1914, she travelled to France in order to drive an ambulance in World War I.

About 1917 or 1918, while both were living in Paris, she had an affair with one of her fellow ambulance drivers, Standard Oil heiress Marion "Joe" Carstairs, who in the 1920s became a speedboat racer and was known as "the fastest woman on water.

She went through several detoxification attempts, none successful; she emerged from one nursing-home stay with a new dependency on the sleeping pill paraldehyde, then available over-the-counter.

[8] Wilde's longest relationship, lasting from 1927 until her death, was with openly lesbian American writer Natalie Clifford Barney, who was host of one of the best-known Parisian literary salons of the 20th century.