[2] Born in 1872 into one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Boston, he was a first cousin of Civil War soldier Robert Gould Shaw.

His maternal grandfather, Louis Agassiz, was a prominent paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist, and scholar of the Earth's natural history who immigrated from Switzerland in 1846.

The couple were married in May 1906, settling in Cliveden, a present from his father and the Astor family estate in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England.

Adjoining tracts of land were converted into the Wells Avenue office park in the 1970s, and the Charles River Footpath (since renamed the Helen Heyn Riverway) in the 1990s.

[30] Artist R. G. Harper Pennington in one of his paintings depicted a nude RGS II as the character "Little Billee" from the bohemian novel Trilby (1894) by George du Maurier.

This painting hung in the bedroom of Henry Symes Lehr, the homosexual husband of Elizabeth Wharton Drexel.

[31] In a 1982 episode of Masterpiece Theatre that chronicled the life of Nancy Astor, Pierce Brosnan portrayed RGS II as a profligate and promiscuous gambler.