He was to inherit a large fortune from his maternal grandfather provided he changed his family name to "Smith", to which he agreed before reverting again.

Claiming to have an aristocratic background, Wolfe senior mixed in New York high society telling entirely fictitious stories of his life tiger hunting in India and so forth.

[4] His mother was the daughter of the immensely wealthy Benjamin Franklin Smith,[note 1] who together with his three brothers had made their money in gold and silver mining in Colorado in the mid-19th century.

Eventually Wolfe's academic progress was so poor that he was not allowed to continue at Phillips Academy even though the headmaster recognized his "faithful, conscientious effort" and the goodwill he had engendered at the school.

He then put himself on the year-long waiting list for the French Foreign Legion, while in the meantime joining the Red Cross ambulance corps.

[11][1] Wolfe stayed in Europe for a year before returning to Omaha to take part in running the family real estate business.

By strong family tradition his fortune would normally have been inherited by Mabel's brother but he had died long ago after leaving one son, Clifford.

[note 3] He joined the elite unofficial "Dicey" chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon and the "Owl Club", easily meeting the requirements of social status and wealth.

He became an accomplished skier – he achieved a ski traverse across the Mont Blanc massif – but he struggled to master the technicalities of climbing.

Alice, the eldest daughter of American conductor Walter Damrosch, had previously been married to Hall Pleasants Pennington but divorced in the late 1920s.

[22] She was opposed to Nazism and used her influence to help Jewish friends in Austria during the Nazi regime, including physician Hans Kraus.

[24] In early 1938, Wolfe and his wife held a party in their Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan to show friends photographic slides of their climbing and skiing activities in Europe.

In March 1939, he met Wiessner in England where they bought climbing equipment to complement the sports clothes he had purchased in New York.

[28][29] At Srinigar, at the start of the expedition proper, Wolfe was dismayed to find out that Wiessner had not taken his advice to bring two-way radios.

[32][33] On July 29, during one of three attempts at rescue, three Sherpas managed to climb up to Wolfe, but his mental state was poor and he refused to go down, asking them to return the next day.

Wolfe's brother, Clifford Warren Smith, considered taking legal action, but eventually decided to drop the case.