A young blonde tottered down the Great Hall’s lawn in her high heels to gawk at the potters. “Can I try?” she asked, her voice slurred by a few too many free cocktails. The crew from the Rose Town pottery hesitated, then one of them handed over a lump of reddish clay. “Just poke your finger in,” he said, demonstrating the first step in pot making.

It was the evening of the Jamaica Investment Forum in Montego Bay and another blonde, Michele Rollins, had invited hundreds of delegates, from entrepreneurs to corporate executives and ambassadors, for dinner al fresco at Rose Hall. True to form, she was using the event to promote her favourite charity, the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts.

“I fell into it by accident” Rollins said a week later, casually mentioning the Prince of Wales and the 2,000-ton luxury yacht he rented for his 2008 tour of the Caribbean. “Prince Charles invited us for tea on the back of the Leander. He wanted to prove that a community could be regenerated.”

That community was Rose Town, West Kingston, where his charity had already built a library and community centre. “I wanted more for them than that,” Rollins says in the cool, stone cellar of Rose Hall’s Great House. The community had a tradition of making ceramics, and she persuaded the Prince to build on it.

Tutored by experts from the Prince’s school in London, the Jamrock Potters make everything from plates and flowerpots to Spanish bowls and yabbas, a type of earthenware that dates back to the 17th Century. Rollins and the Prince also set up a community of wood carvers at Rose Hall specialising in Lignum Vitae, the wood of life. Crafts from both groups were exhibited in New York in November. “We’re now looking to St Elizabeth to do a weaving component,” she says.

After Portia Simpson Miller, the chairman of Rose Hall Developments Ltd is perhaps Jamaica’s most influential woman, with property and interests not only on the island but all over the US, thanks to her marriage to John Rollins, one of the 20th Century’s great entrepreneurs. Not that she lacks business skills and experience herself. “I had my hand in everything he was in,” she says. “John was the ultimate hands-off partner. He let me make mistakes and to this day I wonder what he was thinking.”

Despite her position as a leading landowner and businesswoman, she comes across as everyone’s favourite “Gram”, with a warm smile and a comfortable, gracious manner. Her eldest son just moved to Jamaica to learn the Rose Hall business, but, she says: “The joy of having the help of Michael is far exceeded by the joy of having my grandchildren here.”

Rollins herself comes from hard-working immigrant stock. Her father, Michael Metrinko, began working on Wall Street in 1929, just in time to lose a million dollars in the Crash. “He didn’t have a million, so it didn’t matter,” she says. Later, after she had grown up, he became the first Ukrainian-American member of the New York Stock Exchange.

She was the second of three daughters (“The middle part of the sandwich is always the best.”) growing up in a mixed Irish/Jewish community in up-town Manhattan, where she attended Mother Cabrini high school. “I am a product of the nuns,” she says. “I’m filled with sufficient guilt to make me do the best I can.” Her parents made sure that their girls were never idle, with activities from needlepoint to speech writing.

Blessed with both beauty and brains, she began modelling at age three to pay for her schooling, and won the Miss World USA pageant nearly 50 years ago. She earned three degrees, a bachelor of science in foreign service, a masters in taxation law and a doctor of jurisprudence, before going to work for the US government and later Sun Oil.

The romance with John Rollins – 28 years her senior with a son older than she – grew out of a mutual interest in Republican politics but blossomed over his love for Rose Hall. “At our first dinner, he talked about nothing but Jamaica. I decided I’d better like it or I’d better not waste time with this man,” she recalls.

On their second date he brought pictures of the island. “I thought I’d scare him away by saying I wanted babies and marriage. He said: ‘OK, but you have to have a nanny.’ ” Her voice rises in mock outrage: “I didn’t say I wanted them with you!” She eventually gave him four of his ten children.

John Rollins was already a self-made millionaire, having grown up dirt poor on a farm in Georgia. He worked three jobs to raise the money for his first business, a Ford car dealership, then bought a radio station because he couldn’t afford advertisements.

In 1964, he and his brother, Wayne, organised the world’s first leveraged buy-out, the takeover of the Orkin Exterminating Company. In all, he brought nine companies to the New York Stock Exchange. “He had a passion to get ahead and not have his mother be poor,” says his widow.

But at the time he started courting Michelle Metrinko, he was going through a rough patch. He had divorced his second wife and was in danger of losing it all. “He had the potential to go under,” she says. “What I loved about him was the calmness. He had the great gift of entrepreneurs that they can do it again. I grew to respect that, and then to imitate it.”

John Rollins always had four or five projects on the go, and was passionate about all of them. “Till the day he died he was young and virile and strong,” she says. Her children and step-children are currently helping her to put together a US$1 million scholarship for Delaware students. “Twelve years after John’s death, we are working together to celebrate his life,” she says.

Rollins splits her time between the Rose Hall estate in Jamaica and the family home in Delaware. In 2010 she unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination to become the state’s only member of the house of representatives during which she took flack from the Democrats for her commitment to Jamaica.

Rose Hall still has 4,200 acres of developable land, though most of it is behind the seafront. But her interest extends beyond just developing land. “For me, the goal isn’t so much the hotels and the rooms as the standard of life for the Jamaicans who work there,” she says.

The next big boost for tourism will come from gambling, she says, noting that the Palmyra hotel, now in receivership, came unstuck after it got its gaming licence simply because the government failed to set the regulations. “It’s time to get our act together on that.”

She’s also eager to make the next generation of Jamaicans bilingual, so that they can take advantage of the rising opportunities in Latin America. “I wouldn’t have one preschool on this island that isn’t teaching Spanish,” she says. “Kids now with their phones can see the world and they’re going to want to be part of it.” Her support for Spanish investors in Jamaica, particularly Iberostar, earned her Madrid’s Order of Civic Merit in 2010, which conferred the title “the Most Illustrious”. It seems fitting.