On March 5, 1923, Strauss married Alice Hanauer in a ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York. Born in 1903, she was the daughter of Jerome J. Hanauer, who was one of the Kuhn Loeb partners. She was a New York native who had attended Vassar College and was a skilled equestrian and potter. The couple had two sons, one of whom did not survive early childhood. While in New York, they lived on Central Park West, then on the Upper East Side, and later on Central Park South.