The life of oil heiress Rebekah Harkness inspired a song stranger than fiction on Taylor Swift’s new album, folklore.
Photo: Jack Mitchell / Getty Images
Taylor Swift’s eighth album, folklore, it is out of the forest and reaches our ears. She has collaborations with Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner of National. She has a song about a sweater. It has strange nuances. It has … a long semi-fictional hint about Rebekah Harkness, a St. Louis-born rookie who married the Standard Oil heir, bought a giant house in Rhode Island, lived a wildlife, died, and received some of his rests. her daughter’s house in a Gristedes bag because they would not all fit in the urn made to measure by Salvador Dalí. Swift then bought the house for $ 17 million and used it, in particular, to host July 4th parties around the world.
Hope for?
Sure, I’ll back off. The song is called “The Last Great American Dynasty” and tells the story of Rebekah Harkness. She was a mid-century socialite whose story aligns very well with Swift’s lyrical love of everything to do with Champagne, pools, and narratives about patriarchal society.
Okay. So Rebekah is from Missouri?
Yes. “Rebekah got on the afternoon train, it was sunny,” Swift sings at the top of the track. “Her salt house on the coast made her forget St. Louis.” Born in 1915 into a family of the Times Described as “wealthy” and “emotionally frigid”, her primary caregiver was a babysitter who was selected primarily because she had been employed in a “madhouse”. She attended a completion school where her primary goal, according to her scrapbook, was “to do everything wrong.” (Craig Unger wrote a 14-page profile that later became a book, Blue blood, about Harkness for New York in 1983. The details of the Times are through a book review).
Tell me about the “pack of bitches” that Swift sings about. Is that real?
Currently, yes. Harkness and some of his friends were known in the popular media at the time as the “bitch squad”. Sounds familiar? In the lyrics, Swift talks about how Harkness would take the squad to their home in Rhode Island for lavish parties. “He flew in all his Bitch Pack friends in town. He filled the pool with champagne and I swam with the big names. “Again, does that sound familiar?
When did you get divorced?
Harkness had already been married and divorced once when she married Will Harkness in 1947. That’s why Swift says people are already gossiping about Harkness and wonders how a “middle-class divorcee” managed to hook the heir to Standard Oil. . Unger describes Harkness as a “shameful” type of person. Shameful, but very, very Rich. “The wedding was lovely, if a little gauche. So far there is only new money. ” Together, the couple bought a complex off the coast of Rhode Island.
Harkness in 1966.
Photo: Jack Mitchell / Getty Images
Oh. But I suppose she’s also doing some kind of needle, on that line, since she bought her house.
Right, but we are getting ahead. Will Harkness died seven years after their wedding. His widow was in charge of renovating the house. She put up eight kitchens and more than 20 rooms, a design move described by Unger as an attempt to see her children as little as possible. It was during this period that Harkness became known for throwing parties with guests like Dalí, the artist who would later design her urn with $ 250,000 jewelry, nicknamed the Goblet of Life. It was designed to rotate on itself so that Harkness could, as the story goes, always be dancing.
Harkness dancing with his ballet company in 1966.
Photo: Jack Mitchell / Getty Images
What else did you do with your money?
Harkness considered himself a patron of the arts, although his efforts, by his own choice, failed spectacularly. She spent nearly $ 40 million (in 1980s dollars) to effectively run a ballet company with her name on the floor. When a choreographer started getting a good press, she fired him. (This was all after she and the great ballet Robert Joffrey ended their initial partnership because Joffrey refused to perform works written by Harkness herself.) “The dancers practiced on the lawn for more than a few summers.” Times he wrote in a story about the great Rhode Island house in 2016. “Although when Mrs. Harkness planted a blue plastic Buckminster Fuller dome there as a practice space, the neighbors were outraged and sued to have it removed.”
Uh, what about that phrase about her dyeing a “lime green” dog?
Yes, I don’t know what to tell you about that. the Times However, it makes reference to an anecdote about her dyeing a green cat. There is also a detail about a fish tank full of goldfish and whiskey. And once she decided to harass JD Salinger at her home while dressed as a maid.
Have you ever remarried?
Yes and yes Harkness had two more husbands. Both marriages ended in divorce.
So, about those kids I really didn’t want to see.
Her daughter Edith died by suicide. Before her death, Edith jumped off the roof but survived. The same for an overdose attempt. (“How should I do it?”, Rebekah Harkness was quoted in the Times. “Is there a fancy way to go?”) Her daughter Terry, who allegedly brought the Gristedes bag home, gave birth to an intellectually disabled daughter whom Harkness initially adored until the girl removed a bow from her head and that was it. . (The boy died at age 10). Her son went to prison for shooting a man during a fight, describing his imprisonment as a happy period in his life. In fact, he happiest period of your life.
Harkness once tracked JD Salinger to his home to try to convince him that he should write songs based on his stories.
Photo: Louis Liotta / New York Post Archives / The New York Post via Getty Images
What a life. Or lives, I guess. Still alive?
Harkness died of cancer at age 67 in 1982. Her daughter Terry unsuccessfully attempted to invalidate her will with the help of attorney Roy Cohn (as in Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s lead attorney, Roy Cohn). A choreographer who was on hand described the scene as chaotic, in truly wild detail about the people trying on wigs as Harkness lay dying.
And Swift … lives in her house now?
Swift bought Harkness’s Rhode Island “Holiday House” in 2013. She reportedly paid in cash. Like Harkness, her arrival caused a stir. Neighbors were concerned about fans and paparazzi. They were angry that she raised a wire fence, despite having obtained permission from the proper channels to do so. Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo proposed (and later withdrew) a strong second home tax that was dubbed the “Taylor Swift Tax.” No signs of intrusion appeared on the property. They had a letter from Swift, “I knew you were a problem when you walked in,” printed on them.
Did you buy the house just to write this song seven years later?
Honestly, it’s Taylor Swift. No one plays a game longer than she does. But also why I would not do it You buy a fabulous seaside mansion with a truly weirder story than fiction, and then throw day parties for your friends on the lawn if you have the means. Sounds like fun.
Sorry I’m still thinking about the Gristedes bag and the elegant urn.
Let me make sure it stays in your brain forever. After some of the remains of Harkness – “there is only one leg there, or perhaps half of its head and one arm,” according to a friend, were placed in the urn, the upper part came off later. No one knew how it happened.
