As an infant, he was adopted by Katherine Temple (née Emmet) Canfield, a descendant of Irish immigrant and New York State Attorney General Thomas Addis Emmet, and her then husband, Cass Canfield, a publishing executive who was the longtime president and chairman of Harper & Brothers and, later, Harper & Row.
[1] His parents divorced in June 1937 and his father remarried to Jane Sage (née White) Fuller (1897–1984), an author and sculptor.
[3] According to the memoirs of Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, Edward VIII believed that Canfield was actually the biological son of his brother Prince George, Duke of Kent (the fourth son of King George V) and Kiki Preston, a "glamorous but drug-addicted American socialite who was a member of Kenya’s notorious Happy Valley set".
[4][5][6][7] Canfield attended the Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts on the shores of Lake Cochichewick, before serving in the United States Marine Corps during World War II where he was wounded at Iwo Jima.
[8] After Harvard, he went to London as an aide to Winthrop W. Aldrich and secretary to John Hay Whitney when they were Ambassadors to the Court of St James under President Dwight D.
[10] In London, he lived at Canfield House in Eaton Square and was elected a member of White's, the elite gentleman's club in St James's.