#if she scores the roof might blow off the bell center

[alexbkrieger13]

[recklesstreacherous]

Oh my gosh, Rebekah Harkness had such a messy and sad life www(.)nytimes(.)com/1988/05/22/books/is-there-a-chic-way-to-go(.)html?pagewanted=all

Thanks for linking this article! I love reading about her… and yes, she did have a very unique and tragic life. I’d love to watch a documentary about her.

_______________________________________________________________________‘IS THERE A CHIC WAY TO GO?’A week after her death on June 17, 1982, the mortal remains of Rebekah Harkness were toted home by her older daughter Terry in a Gristede’s shopping bag. The ashes were placed in a $250,000 jeweled urn made by 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. Several hours later, the top of the urn - called the Chalice of Life - was somehow, by unknown agencies, uncovered. “Oh, my God,” said a witness. “She’s escaped.”        

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. 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.” Meanwhile, in her apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, people who called themselves Rebekah Harkness’s friends were pillaging, “grabbing things right and left.”        

Rebekah’s younger daughter Edith, a failed suicide who had spent many years in mental institutions, took only her mother’s pills: Seconal, Nembutal, Valium, Haldol, Librium and various painkillers - 40 vials in all. Allen Pierce, Rebekah’s son by the first of her four husbands, was unable to be present. Convicted of murder in the second degree, he was behind the bars of a Florida jail. Bobby Scevers, Rebekah’s lover, 25 years younger than she and a self-declared homosexual, pronounced her children “the most worthless, selfish, useless creatures I’ve ever seen.” (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 I report on the demise of the multimillionaire patron of the dance dry-eyed, it is because I am confident in the belief that nothing we say about the dead can prejudice the Defense or tip the Scales of Judgment. I myself wouldn’t give the time of day to anyone who cleaned her pool out with Dom Perignon, put mineral oil in the punch at her sister’s debutante ball and (all in the middle of the Great Depression) got tossed off an ocean liner for shouting obscenities, throwing dinner plates at an orchestra of Filipinos gamely playing the American national anthem, and offending the sensibilities of her fellow passengers by swimming nude - for which actions she counted herself witty. (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.” After his brief interlude in the oasis, Mr. Castelli was made the artistic director of the Harkness Ballet. “Kiss me,” she commanded. “The others, they just know how to bite.”) Craig Unger, a former editor at New York magazine, appears to be dazzled by all this, although it is sometimes hard to tell whether his breathlessness arises from approval, disapproval, sadness, awe or simple bewilderment. Mr. Unger, who records interviews uncritically and unreflectively, does not permit us to know exactly how he feels about his subject.        

Rebekah Harkness was born in 1915 to a rich, emotionally frigid St. Louis family. She was brought up by a nanny who was chosen because she had worked in an insane asylum. She went to Fermata, a South Carolina finishing school that had sheltered Roosevelts, Biddles and Auchinclosses. There she delighted, as she wrote in her scrapbook, in setting out to “do everything bad.’'  After her divorce from W. Dickson Pierce, an upper-class advertising photographer, she chose for her second husband the Standard Oil heir William Hale Harkness, who enjoyed a lofty social status, as her own family did not. He appears to have been an embarrassing sort of man; he wrote and privately published a book called ’'Totem and Topees,” which he described as a “conglomeration of uninteresting misinformation,” and followed that with a book called “Ho hum, the Fisherman,” which, he said, did not “have the excuse even of literary merit.” We are told by Mr. Unger - who is an uncomfortable stranger in the world of the rich, unused to deciphering nuances of caste - that the Harknesses’ seven-year marriage was a happy one. Little evidence is given in support of this thesis except that the two wrote a song together called “Giggling With My Feet.”        

After she was widowed, Mrs. Harkness renovated her Rhode Island house; she installed 8 kitchens and 21 baths. This arrangement effectively kept her from having to see her three children on anything like a regular basis. She had a salon of sorts. She traveled a lot.        

She fancied herself a composer.        

She acquired a guru, also a yogi.        

She married again. And again.        

She was surrounded by a group her son Allen described as “all the fairies flying off the floor, the blackmailing lawyers, the weirdos, the people in the trances.” “We were the favorites,” says a dancer. “We were the loved ones.” In 1961, Rebekah Harkness became the sponsor of the late Robert Joffrey’s small ballet troupe. She did this in grand - if occasionally Marie Antoinette-ish -style. Generous, wasteful, willful, demanding and delusional, she broke with Joffrey to form the Harkness Ballet when he refused to perform the compositions she insisted on writing. In the eyes of many, she had betrayed him. “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.”        

“You see,” she said. “Money can buy anything.” It bought her the services of George Skibine, Marjorie Tallchief, Alvin Ailey, Erik Bruhn and Andy Warhol, but it did not guarantee her success. 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. Soon Clive Barnes was writing that the Harkness Ballet had “descended beyond the necessity of serious consideration,” and in 1975 it folded. She had spent the 1987 equivalent of $38 million on a failed enterprise.        She rang J. D. Salinger’s bell dressed as a cleaning lady, having conceived the harebrained scheme that the reclusive writer’s short stories be put to music.        

She dyed chocolate mousse blue. She dyed a cat green.        

She moved hundreds of thousands of dollars from one bank to another for the pleasure of confusing her accountants. She believed in reincarnation. She filled her fish tank with goldfish and Scotch.        

Her daughter Terry gave birth to a severely retarded and disabled child. For a time, Rebekah Harkness appeared to be enamored of the passive child, called Angel. Her passion, such as it was, burned itself out quickly, coincidentally with the baby’s pulling a ribbon out of her hair. Bobby Scevers, Mr. Unger writes, “had no sympathy” for the child. “So absurd,” Mr. Scevers pronounced. “When they started talking about putting the nursery over my room … I just hit the ceiling. I don’t want this screaming baby over my room! … Let the little creature die!” When she was 10 years old, she did.        

Her daughter Edith jumped off roofs, swallowed pills and managed not to kill herself. “How should she do it?” Rebekah Harkness asked. “Is there a chic way to go?”        

She lived on champagne and injections - Vitamin B, testosterone, painkillers - as a result of which her bathrooms were splattered with blood and her muscles calcified. (“She walked,” an acquaintance said, “like Frankenstein.”) One could almost feel sorry for her.        

At the very end, according to Bobby Scevers, as she lay dying of cancer, “It was complete chaos… . It was so wonderful - everybody running around signing wills and trying on different wigs.”      

Her daughter Terry hired Roy Cohn in a (failed) attempt to have her will invalidated.        

Her daughter Edith killed herself. (“I’m glad Edith is gone,” said the unquenchable Bobby Scevers.        

“I can’t believe it took her this long to succeed.”) Her son Allen says the years he spent in prison were the happiest of his life. He likes to talk about blowing people away.       Knowing all this (and much, much more; Mr. Unger withholds no ugly or racy detail), what is it exactly that we have learned?        That money can’t buy happiness? That even the rich must die? These are facts of which we have already been apprised.      

One sometimes wonders if the point of all these poor-little-rich-girl/boy biographies is to lull the rest of us into a false sense of security: She is so unlike us that we are not encouraged to reflect upon our own mortality, the contemplation of which is a healthy and necessary exercise. We are meant to take comfort and a measure of relief from our difference - though, as we know but do not frequently wish to remember, the grave awaits us all.        

It would be interesting to see what a social historian, someone familiar with the hierarchies of caste and class in America - or, better yet, a novelist with a theological bent - would make of the raw material Mr. Unger has gathered. I am beginning to think that biography, especially the biography of such a chaotic personality as Rebekah Harkness, needs to be molded and informed by a novelist’s ordering imagination. It might also have been interesting to see how a feminist writer would have assimilated the facts of Rebekah Harkness’s sorry life. Might Mrs. Harkness be seen as a casualty of her own doomed and defiled expectations? Unfit for mothering, unfit for ordinary love, unfit - untrained - to be the caretaker of a great fortune, was she altogether silly or altogether bad? Was she power or pawn? And how in the world did she get that way?        

It is possible to write an edifying biography about an unedifying life. Jean Stein and George Plimpton did that brilliantly in “Edie,” the biography of poor Edie Sedgwick. “Blue Blood” is edifying only insofar as it raises questions about what a biography should be. A terrible story is told here. It makes no sense - and no sense is made of it.