She is the half-sister of racehorse trainer Jeremy Tree and author Frances FitzGerald, and she is a niece of former Massachusetts governor Endicott Peabody.
Tree's family initially objected to her career as a model,[3] and when she was first photographed at age 13 by Diane Arbus, her father vowed to sue if the pictures were published.
[3] It became a social space for hippies during the "Swinging Sixties" who, Bailey recalled, would be "smoking joints I had paid for and calling me a capitalist pig!"
[citation needed] Scars from late-onset acne ended her career[3] in the early 1970s: "I went from being sought-after to being shunned because nobody could bear to talk about the way I looked.
Penelope Tree is a patron of Lotus Outreach, a charity which works in Cambodia in partnership with local grassroots women's organisations to give girls from the very poorest families the wherewithal to go to school.