Once she pretended to be a cleaning woman and approached the reclusive J.D. From the outside, Rebekah and William Harknesss marriage looked immaculate. For example, he liked to vanity-publish nonsensical books that even he admitted were awful. From . Styling herself as the life of the party, Harkness did things like throw plates at the ships Filipino orchestra, swim in her birthday suit in full view of other passengers, and send out strings of swears so loudly that the ocean liner eventually had no choice but to send the beautiful, foul-mouthed socialite off the boat. She also expanded Holiday House to include eight kitchens, 42 rooms and 21 baths. Mother of Private. Equipped with a ludicrous amount of self-confidence, she did something supremely stupid. Why? Rebekah Harkness Net Worth. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Silver Gelatin. Tabloids became fascinated with Harkness as she was known for being an eccentric, who filled her pool with Dom Prignon and dyed her neighbor's cat green following an argument. Her grandfather founded the St. Louis Union Trust Company. Harkness other daughter, Edith, died of suicide after many attempts. 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. She had a salon of sorts. She went to Fermata, a. . The train wreck was now chugging along, and it wouldnt stop until Harkness took her last breath. Rocky Finds His Heart. The critics, especially the New York Times Clive Barnes, savaged Rebekah. The parties continued when she brought the entire Joffrey to Watch Hill in 1962 and 1963. $ 25.93. Catherine of Aragon was King Henry VIIIs first wife and longest-lasting Queen of England. Mary and Edward Harkness were married in 1904. See, Rebekah thought that notoriously reclusive writer J.D. The two purchased a mansion in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, which they nicknamed Holiday House. The ashes were placed in a $250,000 jeweled urn made by Salvador Dali. For what its worth, Allen called the years he spent in the clinkerand away from his motherthe happiest of his life.. Mary and Edward Harkness - The Harknesses at Eolia. How should she do it? She wondered. Rebekah Harkness, the Scorned Socialite of Watch Hill, R.I. bought them an old firehouse in Westerly to practice in, discover and train many acclaimed dancers, regardless of their race, background or body shape, Dancer Lawrence Rhodes said it was one of the few times he was embarrassed, would train more professional dancers than any other company, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1653891, The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company. By signing up you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. [3] Harkness would also continue to study dance and piano, and studied ballet with Victoria Cassau, who was a student of Anna Pavlova. But the result was disastrous. . (''She walked,'' an acquaintance said, ''like Frankenstein.'') Discover Rebekah Harkness, the extravagant woman who inspired Taylor Swifts song the last great american dynasty.. [1] Her grandfather founded the St. Louis Union Trust Company. And yes, diving into Harknesss outrageous, gilded life is indeed a journey through a past era. Nonetheless, Harkness actually doted on the babe, and for a time it seemed like she was going to be a better granny than she was a mommy. She died June 17, 1982. They complained she cared more about the dancers than she cared about them. Copyright 2022 SLM Media Group. After Rebekah Harkness died in 1982, her daughter Terry took her mother's remains home in a Gristede's shopping bag, according to a story in the New York Times. Let the little creature die!'' The Pack didnt stop at putting poisonous substances into punch bowls; they also got very rowdy at these gatherings. In 1974, Harkness married again, this time to another doctor named Niels H. Lauersen. Little evidence is given in support of this thesis except that the two wrote a song together called ''Giggling With My Feet.''. (Yes, the seaside mansion that was the setting for Taymerica.) With her help, the Joffrey won international renownsomething she wanted for herself. Copyright 2023 by Factinate.com. A philanthropist. Not just going to performances, but sponsoring entire ballet companies, buying up real estate for them and sending them on world tours. Her 1955 tone poem, Safari Suite, was performed at Carnegie Hall, and in 1957 she released an album titled Music With a Heartbeat. Their Rhode Island estate, Holiday House, was the site of some raucous Gatsby-esque parties: Blue Blood recalls that Harkness once filled her pool with Dom Perignon (which, oddly, was not the only liberty she took with libations: its also said she put scotch in her fish tank). Then in 1947, she married Standard Oil heir William Hale Harkness, who brought her into the serious money class. Our credibility is the turbo-charged engine of our success. We have estimated Rebekah Harkness's net worth , money, salary, income, and assets. Rebekah Harkness's Net Worth: $1-5 Million Age, Height & Body Measurements Rebekah Harkness has been died on 17 June 1982. Instead, she put herself front and center, natch, and the pictures were often just of her doing lift after lift and living out her Dirty Dancing dreams. Thanks for your time! When Swift bought the house, a local writer for The Day reminded her of the time a body washed up on the beach under her Watch Hill mansion. [13], A philanthropist, Harkness supported the Joffrey Ballet for years, as well as the Harkness Ballet Foundation and the William Hale Harkness Foundation. My mom never told me how her best friend died. He likes to talk about blowing people away. At the end of the song, she suggests a certain satisfaction regardless of the answer: There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen / I had a marvelous time ruining everything.. She loved to pour Dom Perignon into her pool and let guests swim around in the bubbly. Historys most fascinating stories and darkest secrets, delivered to your inbox daily. But why? She also bought them an old firehouse in Westerly to practice in, calling it the Harkness Center for the Arts. Mr. Unger tells us that under the direction of the dancer-choreographer Larry Rhodes the company began to garner critical raves - whereupon Mrs. Harkness fired him. 314-918-3000. Thomson Asks States to Sue the U.S.", "Out of Prison, Doctor Hopes to Regenerate His Lost Fame", "Taylor Swift is buying into a rich Watch Hill tradition", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rebekah_Harkness&oldid=1121521087, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using infobox person with multiple spouses, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 12 November 2022, at 18:59. While Bill Harkness was alive, he and Rebekah threw raucous parties every weekend. Pierce claimed to be a descendant of President Franklin Pierce, though that would have been quite a feat. She also studied orchestration with Lee Hoiby and received a Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, New Hampshire, in 1968.[12]. One of Harknesss signature moves was to use vastly expensive products for everyday, mundane things. She danced, too, and composed music. Rebekah had already had two children with her first husband, Allen and Anne Terry Pierce, and she then had one more child with William, a daughter named Edith. Press photo of Rebekah Harkness in 1966 with two o her Harkness dancers. According to one story, Harknesss adoration for her grandchild vanished almost overnight. [9] [14] Following the divorce, Harkness gained custody of both children. OthersJerome Robbins and George Balanchine flatly refused to choreograph her musical compositions. . However Jamie has since. Lucky: A Novel (inspired by Taylor Swift's folklore and the incredible true story of Rebekah Harkness): Parro, Kristina: 9781736923320: Amazon.com: Books Books Literature & Fiction Genre Fiction Buy new: $18.01 Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns FREE delivery Saturday, February 4 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon Rebekahs parents hired one nanny specifically because the woman had worked in an insane asylum before. In 1961, Harkness decided she wanted to become the next great ballet master, so she sponsored actual master Robert Joffreys artisanal ballet troupe. Shutterstock Advertisement 17. The celebrities brought paparazzi and, echoes of the Rebekah Harkness era, complaints from the neighbors. As the most commanding mistress in the French court, she bettered the lives of many and became a beloved figure. The rich socialite whose judgment sometimes lapsed was just too good a target. The end came swift, fast, and brutal for Harkness. [6] When the Joffrey Ballet refused to rename their company in Harkness' honor, she withdrew funding and hired most of the Joffrey dancers to her new company, the Harkness Ballet. Might Mrs. Harkness be seen as a casualty of her own doomed and defiled expectations? Blue Blood is a story of tragic proportions. She began to cut back and look for public funding. Rebekah Harkness was born in 1915 to a rich, emotionally frigid St. Louis family. Scevers and Harkness brought out the worst in each other. Before she passed, the socialite spent $250,000 to commission a bedazzled urn from none other than Salvador Dali. They didn't fit: ''Just a leg is in there, or maybe half of her head, and an arm,'' said one of Rebekah's friends. When Rebekah decided to renovate her Rhode Island mansion, she demanded that it have a whopping eight kitchens and 21 baths. Family Members. Harkness, fittingly, belonged to an American dynasty. Jean Stein and George Plimpton did that brilliantly in ''Edie,'' the biography of poor Edie Sedgwick. By James Crowley On 7/24/20 at 12:22 PM EDT. Madame de Pompadour didn't just share King Louis XV's bed, she also shared his power. Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks and Andrew Mellon owned homes there. The most famous Pack story from around this time is when, during one particularly boring and respectable soiree, the group decided to spike a punch bowl with laxatives. 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.'' Full body measurements, dress & shoe size will be updated soon. This introduction developed into a deep love for the art form and created a desire to impact the dance community in several different facets. Shed had a brief, unhappy marriage to a doctor in the early 1960s. 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. [5] Through the Rebekah Harkness Foundation, Harkness sponsored Jerome Robbins and the Joffrey Ballet. Rebekah Harkness. If you hear oil and think Russian Oligarch rich, youd be pretty much right. By 1980, many of Harknesss old friends had dropped off, and she was left with only her most sycophantic hangers-on. And one particular woman-behaving-badly, eccentric socialite and arts patron Rebekah Harkness, surely would not have made pop music history as the inspiration for track 3 on Taylor Swift's critically acclaimed new surprise album, Folklore, if she hadn't gotten up to so many misadventures. Before joining the team, she worked as a course lecturer while completing her Ph.D. in English Literature. When Harkness offered to pay Ella Fitzgerald to sing some of her pop songs, Fitzgerald wouldnt do it. Suddenly, Rebekah was a rich widowone of the wealthiest women in America, in fact. However, the connection between the two women, despite being eras apart, may go beyond mere real estate. Her marriage to William Hale Bill Harkness, an attorney and heir to the Standard Oil fortune of William L. Hark She had spent the 1987 equivalent of $38 million on a failed enterprise. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Its here where Rebekah catapulted into high society. Iyengar[4] and Salvador Dal, who would design her urn upon her death. That even the rich must die? 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. Around this time, Harkness fancied herself a composer. You won't want to miss this episode about the muse for Last Great American Dynasty by Taylor Swift. She used much of her inheritance to become a patron of the ballet, as well as to compose music. In 1971, she married a fourth time, to another doctor, but one 20 years her junior. She had a marvelous time ruining everything, Swift crooned. That marriage lasted three years. Were always looking for your input! View Full Details. The story of Rebekah Harkness is way more complicated than Taylor Swift lets on. Yet its also impossible to avoid drawing parallels between Swift and Harkness. In 1962 she turned her Rhode Island estate, Holiday House, into a summer dance camp for the entire Joffrey Ballet company. (Mr. Scevers has a stunning way of placing himself squarely in the center of every sentence he utters; he appears to believe that Rebekah Harkness's death happened more to him than to her.) If Harknesss lovers are anything to go by, she was a wildcat in the bedroom. I want to look away, but I just cant. All the essentials: top fashion stories, editors picks, and celebrity style. Rebekah rode up on the afternoon train / It was sunny, Taylor Swift croons in her new song The Last Great American Dynasty. In 3 minutes 51 seconds, Swift tells the story of Harknesss legacy through lyrics. In other words, these pieces didnt exactly do justice to their surroundings. (Watch it here.). '', 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. Well, Rebekah Harkness was not to be outdone by anyone, and she commissioned her own Harkness Blue, which she used to upholster the velvet Louis XIV-style chairs she had placed in her dance studio. Rebekah divorced Pierce in 1946 after an excruciating seven-year marriage, and it wasnt long before she set her sights on William Hale Harkness, the heir to the Standard Oil fortune. Rebekah was born in 1915 to Allen and Rebekah West in St. Louis, Missouri. 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. Sheesh, its not wonder Rebekah turned out to be a nightmare when she grew up. 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 Watch Hill in 1962 she turned her Rhode Island mansion, she demanded it! [ 9 ] [ 14 ] Following the divorce, Harkness sponsored Robbins. The worst in each other Rebekah threw raucous parties every weekend me how best... A marvelous time ruining everything, Swift crooned introduction developed into a summer dance camp for the entire Joffrey.! The rich socialite whose judgment sometimes lapsed was just too good a.! Use vastly expensive products for everyday, mundane things if Harknesss lovers are to. She demanded that it have a whopping eight kitchens, 42 rooms 21... 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