Books |
Living Artfully: At Home with Marjorie Merriweather Post
Estella M. Chung
By
Published: Aug 06, 2013
Category:
Art and Photography
Fifty Shades of Grey is the porn favorite for seventy million people.
House porn is the guilty pleasure of many fewer.
I’m in that group.
I don’t look at coffee table books about expensive houses because I wish I lived in them. I don’t. And the proof is that when we move to a larger apartment this weekend, we’re getting rid of half of our furniture and not replacing it. For us, at this point in our lives, luxury is pale walls and a lot of empty space. Like Pauline de Rothschild’s last apartment. Just on a smaller scale.
But as soon as I opened “Living Artfully: At Home with Marjorie Merriweather Post,” I could hear my pulse pounding. Because this woman not only had mountains of money, she used it to create her idea of a beautiful life. And she did it in an era when the private, privileged lives of the rich remained privileged and private.
Who was Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973)? Her family’s first fortune came from Postum, a non-caffeinated coffee substitute. It increased with Grape Nuts, Hellman’s Mayonnaise, Sanka, Jello, Maxwell House and a little company called General Foods.
Which meant she had the means to move with the seasons.
She spent a few months at her residence (now a museum) in Washington, DC, the summer at her estate in the Adirondacks, and the winter at Mar-A-Lago, her mansion in Palm Beach (now owned by Donald Trump.) At her first house, in Greenwich, she had a house staff of 14 and 60 workers on the grounds — later, she had l00 fulltime employees at her houses. She traveled with two chauffeurs, two secretaries, two maids, two masseuses. She owned 34 cars, a plane and a railway car. Yes, the book is happily dotted with photos. [To buy “Living Artfully” from Amazon, click here.]
It would be easy to dismiss Post with that now derisive term: hostess. That would be reflexive, and wrong. She sat on corporate boards, and was prepared. Many of her employees stayed with her for three decades. She paid wages a third higher than other rich estate owners. Health care? She paid that too.
At 77, she was asked if it was burdensome to be responsible for all those people. “Not at all,” she said. “It rolls off my back. I’ve been doing this since I was 18.”
She didn’t say, though she could have: “And I’m very good at it.”
