Around this time, Harkness fancied herself a composer. She dyed a cat green. She was 67.) They featured fireworks, boat rides and a giant inflatable water slide. When publicizing her ballet, Harkness became notorious for refusing to showcase any of her talented dancers in the promotional photographs. At Factinate, were dedicated to getting things right. Harkness started acting out early in her adolescence, and her antics would put any other mean girl to shame. She blew through her fortune on the boys and the ballet. (Harkness was an avid patron of the arts and founded her own company, Harkness Ballet. '', 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. She ended up selling the theater at a huge loss, and the Harkness Ballet company folded in 1975. 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.. . . When she erected a giant blue geodesic dome on her lawn, they sued her for zoning violations. Though the Harkness Ballet was floundering, there was one brilliant choreographer, Larry Rhodes, who received good press. Her children, not so much. Harkness had quite the life according to The New York Times (opens in new tab) . Who is Rebekah Harkness Dating? Catherine of Aragon is now infamous as King Henry VIIIs rejected queenbut few people know her even darker history. Meanwhile, in her apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, people who called themselves Rebekah Harkness's friends were pillaging, ''grabbing things right and left.''. Discover Rebekah Harkness, the extravagant woman who inspired Taylor Swifts song the last great american dynasty.. Maybe. Upon her death in 1982, Rebekah Harkness was called many things in her New York Times obituary. Bobby Scevers, Mr. Unger writes, ''had no sympathy'' for the child. A terrible story is told here. [4] Harkness also surrounded herself with other well-known creatives, like yogi B.K.S. Like this story? 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. Our credibility is the turbo-charged engine of our success. Aerial view the former Holiday House. An avid dance enthusiast who had studied ballet and Spanish dance, her second marriage - to Standard Oil heir William Hale Harkness - made her one of the wealthiest women in America. The Robert Joffrey Company summer workshop at Rebekah Harkness' Watch Hill estate in Rhode Island, July 1962. Her 1955 tone poem, Safari Suite, was performed at Carnegie Hall, and in 1957 she released an album titled Music With a Heartbeat. Not only did her ballet collapse, her whole family did as well. (Harkness reportedly cleaned her pool with Dom Prignon.) Although William Harkness came from a well-respected family that was supposed to give Rebekah even more of the status she craved, William himself wasa total fool. He later said his time in prison was the happiest of his life. The caption read: A young woman with a surprising range of interests, Mrs. Harkness is a sculptor, a musician of professional standing (shes a member of ASCAP), a skier (shell soon off to her chalet in Gstaad with her three children for a holiday), and an active supporter of many charities. Below her in the spread? Yet while there, Harkness gave new meaning to the word prima donna. The socialite, fancying herself a dance expert, started writing her own ballets. Though Kean consulted with multiple US presidents, he also had big-time mafia ties. Jean Stein and George Plimpton did that brilliantly in ''Edie,'' the biography of poor Edie Sedgwick. Without any real studio space, her dancers often practiced on her front lawn. Harkness definitely wasnt the most fiscally-responsible business woman, but she does have the distinction of being the strangest girl-boss in history. So in 1977 she checked into Silver Hill, a rehab clinic in New Canaan, Conn. ''Costumes, sets, musical scores,'' Mr. Unger writes, ''many of the best dancers, the entire repertory - even the works choreographed by Joffrey himself - were owned by her foundation.''. Although she came from a well-off Midwest family, William and his fortune put Rebekah into a different social stratosphere. The music video featured the beach and the waves from the house, just as Rebekah Harkness would have seen it. One could almost feel sorry for her. A patron of dance and medicine. It was shaping up to be a white-picket fence brooduntil, that is, Rebekah proved herself to be an utterly horrific mother. There she delighted, as she wrote in her scrapbook, in setting out to ''do everything bad. Her grandfather founded the St. Louis Union Trust Company. People called it the Taylor Swift Tax, though it never became law. She was born Rebekah Semple West in 1915 to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. She developed an addiction to injections of B-vitamins, painkillers and testosterone. In 1957, Harkness keeled over at Holiday House while sitting for a sculpture Rebekah was working on, dead from a heart attack. She maintains an online podcast that is available on iTunes or online at http://playerplaza.podbean.com . There's something about the family structure that encourages secrets. Born April 17, 1915 Died June 17, 1982 (67) Showcase yourself on IMDbPro Add to list Credits In addition to her marriage, Harkness also became well known for her personal eccentricities, as well as her contributions to the arts. In the first verse of The Last Great American Dynasty, Swift sings that the ceremony was charming, if a little gauche / Theres only so far new money goes.. They performed a strip tease at a social event and put mineral oil into the punch bowl at a coming-out party. 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.'' . Yet its also impossible to avoid drawing parallels between Swift and Harkness. (I do admit, however, that I'd go a long way to read a sentence like this, spoken by Bertrand Castelli, the co-producer of ''Hair,'' about the time he made love to Rebekah Harkness in her office: ''It was as if we were two camels in the desert who suddenly know that the only way to make an oasis is to really talk sense.'' Soon Clive Barnes was writing that the Harkness Ballet had ''descended beyond the necessity of serious consideration,'' and in 1975 it folded. When Harkness offered to pay Ella Fitzgerald to sing some of her pop songs, Fitzgerald wouldnt do it. Rebekah also loaded up on art and real estate. In 1973, at 36 and with his grad-student days not far behind him, Lauersen married 58-year-old Rebekah Harkness, widow to William Hale Harkness, of the Harkness philanthropic dynasty. Putting mineral oil in the punch at her sisters debutante ball. For what its worth, Allen called the years he spent in the clinkerand away from his motherthe happiest of his life.. 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. From petty paybacks to insane acts of karma, these bitter people somehow found the most ingenious ways. . Rebekah Harkness was born in 1915 to a rich, emotionally frigid St. Louis family. 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. A philanthropist. William Morrow & Company, $19.95 (0pp) ISBN 978--688-05081-8 Rebekah was born in 1915 to Allen and Rebekah West in St. Louis, Missouri. The children were visiting Bill's family and Alfonso had left . The last great American dynasty, indeed. The two purchased a mansion in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, which they nicknamed Holiday House. Though Rebekah grew up in a wealthy St. Louis family, her social status was elevated when, after her first divorce, she married William. And then in 2020, the houses owner, Taylor Swift, wrote a song about Rebekah Harkness, called The Last Great American Dynasty. Nine servants and three cooks kept the place running. At least once, Harkness and her friends got up on a banquet table and performed a strip tease for the distinguished guests around them. The lovely pair only made it four years before divorcing. After she was widowed, Mrs. Harkness renovated her Rhode Island house; she installed 8 kitchens and 21 baths. Rebekah Harkness Net Worth. [16], In 1961, Harkness married Ben Kean (c.19121993),[17] a physician who was a professor of Tropical Medicine at the Cornell Medical College. . Harkness only left death in her wake wherever she went. Her grandfather founded the St. Louis Union Trust Company, ensuring she grew up comfortably. The 1988 novel was published about Rebekah . 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. The pair was horribly mismatched, with Lauersen a whopping 20 years younger than his bride. She applied herself with a rigid, frightening discipline that would become her trademark later in life. Rebekah Harkness. One critic denounced it as the worst mural ever made. This arrangement effectively kept her from having to see her three children on anything like a regular basis. First, a brief biography: Born Rebekah Semple West in St. Louis in 1915, Harkness was a divorce whose second marriage was to Standard Oil heir William Hale Harkness. Rebekah Semple West was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1915. After his brief interlude in the oasis, Mr. Castelli was made the artistic director of the Harkness Ballet. Join thousands of others and start your morning with our Fact Of The Day newsletter. After that, Rebekah really let it all hang out. Then a little-known ballet company, they spent the summers practicing and experimenting with new ideas. Though Harkness didnt seem to care that he was using her, she probably should have. Rebekah Harkness spent much of the Standard Oil fortune she inherited on the ballet. Shed had a brief, unhappy marriage to a doctor in the early 1960s. Want to share other feedback? Wade, teaches a dance school for children and directs 2 dance companies, one providing performing opportunities for children and one for adults. The Joffrey dancers who spent the summer at Holiday House loved it. In 1961, Rebekah Harkness became the sponsor of the late Robert Joffrey's small ballet troupe. My mom never told me how her best friend died. (Her reasoning was thus: I hope the beauty of Harkness House will persuade some of these people that ballet need not be dingy and that by their patronage they are contributing to the splendid and glamorous.) Yet disagreements over artistic direction led to the companys disbanding in 1970. It was shaping up to be a white-picket fence brooduntil, that is, Rebekah proved herself to be an utterly horrific mother. Rebekah Harkness was one of the world's richest women, the Standard Oil heiress and founding patron of the Harkness Ballet. They complained she cared more about the dancers than she cared about them. In addition to the three kids she has with Jamie, Rebekah has two children, Megan and Taylor, from previous relationships. Bill adored the child, as he did his stepchildren, whom he treated as if they were his own. The answer is more complicated than Swifts song reveals. Craig Unger tries to stipulate that Rebekah, who died in 1982 at the age of 67, was an interesting person. Tag Archives: Rebekah Harkness. She is the inspiration behind Taylor Swift's 2020 song "The Last Great American Dynasty". View Rebekah Harkness results including current phone number, address, relatives, background check report, and property record with Whitepages. As her own biographer put it, The only reason her works were ever played in public was because she subsidized the performances. Harsh, but true. She bought a mansion in Palisades, N.Y., a Manhattan penthouse and getaways in Nassau and Gstaad. Rebekah Harkness had ambition and drive. Rarely does singer and songstress Taylor Swift write songs about someone outside her immediate circle. 314-918-3000. Rebekah Harkness' antics annoyed her neighbors, while Jesus' antics got him murdered by the state and by some religious leaders. (Watch it here.). She brought in top choreographers, Jerome Robbins and Brian Macdonald to teach 16 and 17 year olds. De . P.O. .more Get A Copy Years later, I was using her phone when I made an utterly chilling discovery. She filled a pool with Champagne. We want our readers to trust us. Want to tell us to write facts on a topic? West co-founded G.H. The Joffrey had a price to pay for Rebekah Harknesss support. [2][4] During her final days, Harkness began to reconcile with her children. While Bill Harkness was alive, he and Rebekah threw raucous parties every weekend. The Harknesses were married for a brief periodjust seven years. It was Rebekah Harkness - whose second of four husbands, William H. Harkness, died in August 1954 in The Westerly Hospital after being stricken by a heart attack in the mansion - who patronized . (''I'm glad Edith is gone,'' said the unquenchable Bobby Scevers. ''Money can buy anything.'' ''I can't believe it took her this long to succeed.'') Mother of Private. When Rebekah decided to renovate her Rhode Island mansion, she demanded that it have a whopping eight kitchens and 21 baths. The same fate befell the popular tunes she composed. I knew that she was going to take it badly, but I had no idea about the insane lengths she would go to just to get revenge and mess with my life. With thanks to Blue Blood by Craig Unger and The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company by Sasha Anawalt. [4], On October 1, 1947, Harkness married William Hale Harkness (19001954), the son of William Lamon Harkness, both Standard Oil heirs. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory, Swift says of the inspiration behind her album, Folklore. Swift gave all her friends matching red-white-and-blue onesies. In the art world, the shade International Klein Blue is famous, and was custom-mixed by renowned artist Yves Klein in 1960. Christians have a tendency to do two things when exploring Jesus' death: downplay the role of the state, and interpret Jesus' feud with the Pharisees, in very anti-Semitic terms. In 1961, Harkness gave love another shot, marrying the prominent celebrity doctor Benjamin Harrison Kean. She filled her fish tank with goldfish and Scotch. She lost card game bets with Salvador Dal. 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