While trapped in her quarantined home, Taylor Swift searched for a suitable source of inspiration for her new album “Folklore”: her own home.
One of their houses, anyway. In 2013, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter squandered $ 17 million for a stately seaside mansion on Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Now the previous owner of her house, the infamous deceased socialite Rebekah Harkness, has a whole hint of Swift in her honor.
The theme song for the song “Folklore” “The Last Great American Dynasty”, Harkness – née Rebekah Semple West – was born in 1915 from “a rich and emotionally frigid family in St. Louis,” according to the New York Times, and in 1947 it married William Hale Harkness, her second husband and heir to the Standard Oil fortune.
While the couple was only married for seven years: “The wedding was lovely, even if it was a bit gauche / There is only new money so far,” Swift sings, it was during that time that they bought their so-called “Vacation Home”. where the pop star now resides.
Even after her husband’s death in 1954 (“It must have been her fault,” Swift muses), Harkness threw wild parties that clearly stirred the feathers of her neighbors, with guests her son Allen Pierce once described as “all fairies flying off the floor, blackmailing the lawyers, the weird, the people in trance, “according to the Times. On any given night, JD Salinger or Andy Warhol could stop by.
As Swift mentions, Harkness was also friendly with Salvador Dalí; After dying of cancer in 1982 at the age of 67, he even requested that his ashes be kept in a $ 250,000 custom urn of the artist’s design. Unfortunately, according to the Times, “just one leg … or maybe half of his head and one arm” really fits in the jeweled container, prompting Harkness’ daughter to bring the remaining ashes home in a Gristedes shopping bag.
As Swift relates in his song, Harkness was a notorious (albeit well-intentioned) spender; Patron of the arts, she founded her own Harkness Ballet in the 1960s and poured many millions into the passion project, but it closed in 1975.
Swift also mentions the debutante’s “pack of bitches,” referring to her group of real-life school pranksters who enjoyed pricking bowls with mineral oil, filling pools with Dom Perignon, and swearing loudly on ocean liners. .
In its lyrics, the star makes clear how Harkness was perceived in the coastal community of the upper crust. “Here goes the craziest woman this town has ever seen. She had a wonderful time ruining everything,” Swift sings.
The Grammy winner herself has caused quite a stir among the Watch Hill locals since taking the Harkness residence, turning the city into a tourist and paparazzi hot spot, throwing star-studded Fourth of July parties for several years in a row and even inspired a neighbor to propose a “Taylor Swift” tax on second homes valued at more than $ 1 million. (It was finally withdrawn).
At the end of “The Last Great American Dynasty”, Swift has woven her own story alongside Harkness’, with her shared reputation for “insanity” that ties the years between the two.
“Who knows, if it never showed up, what could have happened?” she asks, changing the pronouns of the previous chorus. “Here goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen / I had a wonderful time ruining everything.”
As for the line about Harkness that once dyed a neighbor’s dog “lime green?” That really happened, but according to the Times, it was actually a cat. It is no wonder that Swift, a well-known cat fanatic, chose to modify the story.
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