Thanks for your time! [1] Before their divorce in 1946, they had two children; Allen Pierce (b. Unfortunately for Rebekah, the endeavour ended in national embarrassment and disaster. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. She applied herself with a rigid, frightening discipline that would become her trademark later in life. Rebekah Harkness and her Harkness Ballet in 1966. Rebekah died that same year after a long bout with cancer. She even hosted a ballet workshop there for 20 dancers from the Robert Joffrey Company (now known as the Joffrey Ballet) in 1965. From the outside, Rebekah and William Harknesss marriage looked immaculate. Wade, teaches a dance school for children and directs 2 dance companies, one providing performing opportunities for children and one for adults. We were in heaven, said Danish ballerina Lone Isaksen. We want our readers to trust us. Aerial view the former Holiday House. She danced, too, and composed music. It makes no sense - and no sense is made of it. I tried to get my ex-wife served with divorce papers. Her youngest daughter, Edith, had tried to commit suicide at the age of 15 by flinging herself out of a high rise in front of her. Salinger had the perfect stories for her music, so one day she disguised herself as a cleaning lady, knocked on his door, then tried to convince him to let her use his fiction. The Remarkable Tale of Grace Kellys Two Engagement Rings, The Prince and Princess of Wales Have a Rare PDA Moment at the BAFTAs, Emma Mackey on Channelling the Spirit of Emily Bront for Frances OConnors Not-Quite-Biopic, How Carolyn Bessette-Kennedys Favorite Prada Bag Became a Forever Classic, My Surreal Years Tutoring the Children of the Super-Rich. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. The caption read: "A young woman with a surprising range of interests, Mrs. Harkness is a sculptor, a musician of professional standing (she's a member of ASCAP), a skier (she'll soon off to her. Romance and heartbreak (and revenge) ballads make up the primary focus of most albums; however, her newest album, Folklore, which debuted today, features a song, titled "The Last Great American Dynasty," about a New England philanthropist and patron of the arts, Rebekah West Harkness. The pair was horribly mismatched, with Lauersen a whopping 20 years younger than his bride. Swift gave all her friends matching red-white-and-blue onesies. Copyright 2022 SLM Media Group. '', This post-mortem mischief was going on at Harkness House, the East 75th Street town house headquarters of the Harkness Ballet Foundation, which Mrs. Harkness had modeled on the St. Petersburg Ballet School. All Rights Reserved. Image courtesy Holiday House, Courtesy Google, Maxar Technologies. She used much of her inheritance to become a patron of the ballet, as well as to compose music. [4], On October 1, 1947, Harkness married William Hale Harkness (19001954), the son of William Lamon Harkness, both Standard Oil heirs. The building, according to Craig Unger, the author of this rich-man/eye-of-the-needle biography, was in a state of putrefaction, ''crumbling like Tara after the Civil War.'' Doctors told Harkness that she had one ailment that no amount of money could cure: She was dying of stomach cancer. A ltima dinastia de Rebekah Harkness famosa e problemtica socialite que inspirou a faixa 3 de "Folklore", lbum de Taylor Swift | by ana guelere | Hello Band | Medium Write Sign up Sign In. The celebrities brought paparazzi and, echoes of the Rebekah Harkness era, complaints from the neighbors. Harkness had quite the life according to The New York Times (opens in new tab) . At the same time, she studied music composition and dance. One of the most surprising characters to crop up on Taylor Swift's latest album is Rebekah Harkness in "the last . People already thought she had betrayed Joffrey, but they now watched in horror as she ran her ballet into the ground. Illustrated. As well see, Rebekahs love only devolved from there. As Rebekahs friend said, Just a leg is in there, or maybe half of her head, and an arm. So instead of giving her mother a dignified end, Rebekahs daughter Terry had to carry the rest of her ashes home, bound up loosely in a humble supermarket bag. Her daughter Terry gave birth to a severely retarded and disabled child. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. She lived on champagne and injections - Vitamin B, testosterone, painkillers - as a result of which her bathrooms were splattered with blood and her muscles calcified. She had a marvelous time ruining everything, Swift crooned. She once served them a cake with $10 bills baked into it. Materials. Rebekah's younger daughter Edith, a failed suicide who had spent many years in mental institutions, took only her mother's pills: Seconal, Nembutal, Valium, Haldol, Librium and various painkillers - 40 vials in all. Though the Harkness Ballet was floundering, there was one brilliant choreographer, Larry Rhodes, who received good press. New York: William Morrow & Company. She was notorious along the eastern seaboard for her tacky, campy, new money sensibilities, and her Harkness Theater was the epitome of her gaudy aesthetic. Rebekah Harkness was a 1900s socialite and it is a crazy story that includes the entire Harkness family from her ancestors to her four husbands to her children. Generous, wasteful, willful, demanding and delusional, she broke with Joffrey to form the Harkness Ballet when he refused to perform the compositions she insisted on writing. Swift bought Harknesss Rhode Island Holiday House in 2013 and used the near-palatial estate to throw her own lavish parties, notably her Taymerica July 4th bashes. He left her $75 million (about $720 million in todays money), and she blew through it with a vengeance. Shutterstock Advertisement 17. Without any real studio space, her dancers often practiced on her front lawn. Her passion, such as it was, burned itself out quickly, coincidentally with the baby's pulling a ribbon out of her hair. Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks and Andrew Mellon owned homes there. Today its pretty much forgotten, despite the tens of millions of dollars she spent on it. Their wedding took place at 730 Park Avenue, which was Williams apartment. All the extra rooms would give the nannies plenty of space to feed and bathe the babies without Rebekah having to know a thing about it. She died June 17, 1982. Pierce. She is the inspiration behind Taylor Swift's 2020 song "The Last Great American Dynasty". The Harknesses were married for a brief periodjust seven years. Mary and Edward Harkness were married in 1904. As she aged, Rebekah started to live off of champagne and injections, including testosterone and an assortment of pain medications. If I report on the demise of the multimillionaire patron of the dance dry-eyed, it is because I am confident in the belief that nothing we say about the dead can prejudice the Defense or tip the Scales of Judgment. Oh my God, the question here is: What didnt she do? Convicted of murder in the second degree, he was behind the bars of a Florida jail. Half sister of Private; Private and Anne T. McBride. They called her ballets worthless, her music crap. Fast forward 60 years, and another thin, rich, beautiful white woman bought Holiday House. Upon her death in 1982, Rebekah Harkness was called many things in her New York Times obituary. Jean Stein and George Plimpton did that brilliantly in ''Edie,'' the biography of poor Edie Sedgwick. Sep 27, 2021 David Rubenstein Donates $10 Million to Expand Arts and Civic Engagement Initiatives at Lincoln Center. Mary took a portion of the estate to start Camp Harkness in 1920 for children with polio. An artist (a descriptor she bestowed upon herself). (Yes, the seaside mansion that was the setting for Taymerica.) Reportedly, the baby Angel innocently pulled a ribbon from Harknesss perfectly coifed hair. For all her money, Harkness did not have good taste. Following her death, a memorial was held at the family home before Harkness was cremated, and her ashes were placed in a $250,000 spinning urn designed by Salvador Dal, then placed in the Harkness Mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery. The Joffrey had a price to pay for Rebekah Harknesss support. Besides despising Rebekahs children, Scevers also hated her disabled granddaughter Angel. Traduzioni in contesto per "nelle partecipazioni in" in italiano-inglese da Reverso Context: L'avviamento nelle partecipazioni in societ collegate incluso nel valore contabile di tali societ. He appears to have been an embarrassing sort of man; he wrote and privately published a book called ''Totem and Topees,'' which he described as a ''conglomeration of uninteresting misinformation,'' and followed that with a book called ''Ho hum, the Fisherman,'' which, he said, did not ''have the excuse even of literary merit.'' Faced with Ediths grim drive to end her life, Harkness was coldly philosophical. But behind her perfect faade lies a chilling history. In 1954, something curious happened to Rebekah Harkness: Her oil tycoon husband passed. Lets start from the beginning. Not only did her ballet collapse, her whole family did as well. By Elise Taylor. Your suggestions can be as general or specific as you like, from Life to Compact Cars and Trucks to A Subspecies of Capybara Called Hydrochoerus Isthmius. Well get our writers on it because we want to create articles on the topics youre interested in. For what its worth, Allen called the years he spent in the clinkerand away from his motherthe happiest of his life.. Rebekah Harkness was born in 1915 to a rich, emotionally frigid St. Louis family. In 1947, she married William Hale "Bill" Harkness, an attorney and heir to the Standard Oil fortune of William L. Harkness, which made her one of the wealthiest women in America. Harkness, born Rebekah Semple West, grew up amidst splendor in St. Louis as the third and youngest child of Allen Tarwater West, heir to a banking fortune, and Rebekah Semple, daughter of a wealthy merchant. In her obituary, shes credited with supporting the Joffrey and Jerome Robbins ballet companies. ''We were the favorites,'' says a dancer. Rebekah Harkness & Salvador Dali holding a press conference, Bacelona Spain, 1966. While Bill Harkness was alive, he and Rebekah threw raucous parties every weekend. [10] In 1947, William Hale married Rebekah Semple West, [11] who was previously married to Dickson Pierce. She retaliated by dying a neighbors cat green. Husbands hiding things from wives, mothers from children, and generation from generation. Eolia was one of their seven homes and reputed . Yet while there, Harkness gave new meaning to the word prima donna. The socialite, fancying herself a dance expert, started writing her own ballets. It was the only successful marriage of her four, but it only lasted seven years. They bought Eolia from Mary's sister and her brother-in-law, Jessie Stillman and William Taylor in 1907. Craig Unger, a former editor at New York magazine, appears to be dazzled by all this, although it is sometimes hard to tell whether his breathlessness arises from approval, disapproval, sadness, awe or simple bewilderment. For example, he liked to vanity-publish nonsensical books that even he admitted were awful. [4], In the 1960s, Harkness became well known as a philanthropist and patron of the arts. She hired Salvador Dali to design sets. ''Oh, my God,'' said a witness. Silver Gelatin. People reported that Harknesss lavish marble bathrooms were often splattered with blood, and that her muscles had begun to calcify. After two years, Rebekah Harkness suddenly cut her ties to the Joffrey when Robert Joffrey, its founder and choreographer, wouldnt rename his company for her. Swift Identifies with Harkness in her last line, There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen/ I had a marvelous time ruining everything., The music video that accompanies the song features the beach below Holiday House as Rebekah Harkness would have seen it. Rebekah and Bill Harkness had one daughter, Edith. These are facts of which we have already been apprised. [9] Through the William Hale Harkness Foundation, she sponsored construction of a medical research building at the New York Hospital and supported a number of medical research projects. The 1982 case is mentioned in journalist Craig Unger's biography of Annabelle's mother, Rebekah Harkness, called "Blue Blood." The book, published in 1988, offers an unflattering snapshot . As a sad footnote to the story of Rebekah Harkness is the tragedy of her three children. [7] In addition to founding the Harkness Ballet, Harkness launched a ballet school and home for the company called Harkness House,[8] as well as a refurbished 1,250-seat theater, which presented the Harkness Ballet and other dance companies to New York audiences. However, despite our best efforts, we sometimes miss the mark. Perhaps most tragically, Rebekahs little granddaughter Angel had passed just before Rebekah herself; she was just 10 years old. Family Members. The rich socialite whose judgment sometimes lapsed was just too good a target. The answer is more complicated than Swifts song reveals. Catherine of Aragon was King Henry VIIIs first wife and longest-lasting Queen of England. So what did she do? She would also fill her lavish fish tanks with Scotch, even as living goldfish swam in them. August 22, 1982 (33) Bethesda, Montgomery County, Maryland, United States (Suicide ) Place of Burial: New York, Bronx, NY, United States. $ 25.93. ''How should she do it?'' Or, at least, a leg, half of her. People called it the Taylor Swift Tax, though it never became law. Making distraction rewarding since 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/22/books/is-there-a-chic-way-to-go.html. Wealthy, elegant, and beautiful, Harkness seemed to have it allfrom her oil baron husband to her notoriously raucous parties. Her wealthy neighbors had other ideas, and scornfully forced her to remove the unsightly object. Her son Allen says the years he spent in prison were the happiest of his life. It is possible to write an edifying biography about an unedifying life. Rebekah Harkness spent much of the Standard Oil fortune she inherited on the ballet. Years he spent in prison were the favorites, '' the biography of poor Edie Sedgwick give month! The Taylor Swift Tax, though it never became law own ballets Henry VIIIs first wife and Queen. Bars of a Florida jail House, courtesy Google, Maxar Technologies possible! 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