Her legal father was Alice Roosevelt's husband, Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth; her biological father, however, was Senator William Borah, as biographers Carol Felsenthal and Betty Boyd Caroli, and TIME journalist Rebecca Winters Keegan all report. In fact, Alice proposed the name Deborah for her daughter but her husband would not agree, thinking it looked too much like "de Borah", so Alice reluctantly chose Paulina for her daughter's name.[1] Nicholas Longworth died when Paulina was six, and she had a distant, strained relationship with her mother. Paulina made her social debut in Cincinnati, her father’s hometown. She briefly attended Vassar College.