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The Many Loves of Margarett Sargent McKean, Mad Brahmin Artist

For half her life, Margarett Sargent struggled against the strictures and demands of her Boston Brahmin upbringing. Then for the other half, she succumbed to it – and to madness and alcoholism.

A fourth cousin of another painter, John Singer Sargent, she suddenly abandoned her promising art career at the age of 44. Instead, she turned her passionate attention to gardening. Well, also to men. And to women.

“For twenty years, I worked,” she told her granddaughter. “And then I devoted myself to horticulture.”

Margarett Sargent in 1916

Margarett Sargent

She was born on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay in on Aug. 31, 1892 to Francis Sargent and Jane Welles Hunnewell. Her maternal grandfather, Horatio Hollis Hunnewell, was a railroad baron who spent much of his spare time importing and cultivating rhododendrons. Margarett took more pride in her paternal ancestors, who she viewed as more distinguished. The first Sargent had arrived in Massachusetts in 1689.

Margarett Sargent grew into an elegant beauty, nearly six feet tall. She had luxurious black hair, skin like marble and startling light blue eyes. And she had wit. One admirer later wrote, “Her words were swift as swallows in a gale…she was a blue brook broken to a thousand … bubbles by every conversational stone or water-soaked log of stupidity.”

She got kicked out of private school at the age of 16, so her family sent her to Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Conn. After boarding school she agreed to marry Eddie Morgan, a handsome, brilliant, rich friend of her brother’s.

Morgan was devoted to her, but also to alcohol and horses. She broke off the engagement because, she said, she wanted to go to Italy to sculpt.

Margarett Sargent never forgot Eddie Morgan, though.

Art Career

She spent a year studying art in Florence, something her family wished she hadn’t done.

When she returned to Boston in 1914, she studied with a rising young sculptress named Bashka Paeff. Margarett Sargent had talent and she worked hard at her art. In 1916, she began to reap the rewards, with two works exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. A year later, she showed two more at the National Academy of Design.

In 1917, she went to study with Gutzon Borglum in Connecticut. There she met and befriended George Luks – a barroom brawling member of the Ashcan School of art. He later painted her portrait from memory, and called it The White Blackbird – a title her granddaughter would use in a biography of her.

Margarett Sargent, The White Blackbird by George Luks

In 1919 she moved to New York, where she took an apartment with a friend – and probably lover – named Marjorie Davenport. She pursued avant-garde painting and sculpture and hung out with Harpo Marx and her downstairs neighbor, Fanny Brice.

Her Bohemian revel was short lived, however. The next year she married Quincy Adams Shaw McKean, another Brahmin from an old New England family. He succeeded at dog breeding and polo playing, but business, not so much. Fortunately for him, his mother gave him an allowance to help pay for their 13 servants.

Pride’s Crossing

While attending Harvard Law School, Shaw McKean bought a First Period saltbox house in Beverly, Mass., with his friends Bayard Warren and Cole Porter.

The house, built in 1630 had first belonged to the King’s tax collector. Later, General Burgoyne appropriated it during the American Revolution.

Shaw McKean bought this house, known as the Samuel Corning House, with Cole Porter

McKean eventually bought out his two friends. He and Margarett expanded the house and property into a 54-acre estate and Yankee palace, which included a large studio for her. Shaw encouraged her art, and they had four children in three years.

But her family and friends knew what McKean also probably knew: He felt much more strongly about Margarett Sargent than Margarett Sargent felt about him. And he didn’t help matters by raping her on her wedding night, at least according to her recollection.

Both had extramarital affairs.

The Many Loves of Margarett Sargent McKean

“Margarett was a highly sexed woman,” said one of her friends.

She would arrive in New York, check into a hotel and telephone her old beau Eddie Morgan at the New York Stock Exchange.

“Eddie, I’m here,” she’d say, and he’d rush from the stock exchange floor, ready for red-hot sex.

She was admired, and probably not from afar by the newly married Archibald MacLeish. And the ‘wonderfully handsome’ Isabel Pell, an heiress who joined the French Resistance during World War II. And the novelist Jane Bowles.

As a virginal recent Harvard graduate, John Walker was staying at Pride’s Crossing one night when Margarett, twice his age, came into his bedroom in a negligee. She seduced him, not unwillingly. He went on to serve as director of the National Gallery of Art.

All the while Margarett Sargent McKean had been collecting modern art and creating it herself. She had a one-woman show in 1926 at the prestigious Krashaar Gallery in New York. She had her last exhibit in 1932 in Boston at the Doll and Richards Gallery.

Collapse

By the 1930s, her marriage had descended into bickering and shouting. Margarett crawled into the bottle. In 1936, she stopped painting. Margarett instead devoted herself to gardening, as had her Grandfather Hunnewell.

In 1944, she got committed to a sanitarium for the first time. Her husband left her in 1947 for a champion tennis player, Katherine Winthrop.

Margarett Sargent McKean went in and out of sanitariums for the rest of her life, even taking electroshock therapy.

Her minders decided she couldn’t live unsupervised, and so she went to live in a Commonwealth Avenue apartment with a nurse.

She died in a nursing home in 1978. Sixteen years later, a New York gallery held a retrospective of her work.

Her granddaughter Honor Moore asked her late in life why she had abandoned her art.

“It just got too intense,” she told her granddaughter.

With thanks to The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter.

Images: Samuel Corning house, By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20996685. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Lusitania Survivor Who Returned From the Dead

Lusitania survivor Theodate Pope was given up for dead when rescuers pulled her inert body from the Irish Sea with boat hooks. They placed her on the deck of the rescue ship in a row of corpses.

Theodate Pope, Lusitania survivor

Another Lusitania survivor, Belle Naish, had befriended Pope on the doomed voyage. Naish bent down and touched her friend, sensing a glimmer of life. Naish called for help, and two men cut off her wet clothes with a carving knife and spent two hours trying to revive her. Pope woke in front of a small stove in the captain’s cabin and heard a man say, “She’s conscious.”

Theodate Pope had no memory of the sinking. She recovered over many weeks in Ireland and London. Artist Mary Cassatt wrote her a letter saying, “If you were saved it is because you have still something to do in this world.”

Theodate Pope had plenty to do. Already the first licensed female architect in Connecticut, she married a diplomat, founded the Avon Old Farm School, designed the buildings for the Westover School, held séances in Farmington, Conn., reconstructed Teddy Roosevelt’s birthplace in New York City and bequeathed her home Hill-Stead as a public museum.

Theodate Pope

The sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat killed 1,198 people. Theodate Pope was lucky to be among the 761 survivors.

She was born Effie Brooks Pope on Feb. 2, 1867, to a wealthy and well-connected Cleveland family. She hated her name and changed it to Theodate when she was 19. Her parents sent her to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, where she conceived her lifelong dream of founding a boys’ prep school.

Hill-Stead

After graduating, she and her parents took a two-year Grand Tour of Europe. Upon return she hired Miss Porter’s faculty to tutor her privately in architecture. She restored a cottage and then began work on her parents’ retirement home with the help of architectural firm McKim, Mead & White.

When the Lusitania set sail on May 1, 1915, 48-year-old Theodate Pope was accompanied by her maid Emily Robinson and her companion Edwin Friend. Friend, 20 years her junior, shared her interest in spiritualism. He and Pope had resigned from the American Society for Psychical Research over an argument with the president, and were traveling to England in the hope of winning support for a new association from the English Society for Psychical Research.

During the voyage, Friend and Pope sat on the deck and read Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, a dense philosophical treaty.

The Lusiania in New York Harbor

Lusitania Survivor

The German U-boat U-20 was prowling the waters off the Irish coast on May 7, 1915, when its commander spotted the Lusitania. He ordered a torpedo fired into her hull.

The Lusitania’s first-class dining room

The torpedo scored a direct hit, and the vessel sank in 15 minutes. It listed so heavily that many lifeboats couldn’t be lowered. Even if they could, the crew trained to handle lifeboats had been killed in the initial explosion.

Friend exclaimed, “By Jove, they’ve got us.” In the mayhem that followed he ran inside the ship to find lifejackets. He found three, one for himself, one for Pope, one for her maid.

They saw a lifeboat tip over and spill its passengers into the water as it was being lowered. Then they saw that the Lusitania threatened to roll over other lifeboats as she sank. They decided to jump. Friend went first, and from the water beckoned to them, smiling.

“Come, Robinson,” Theodate Pope said to her maid.

Pope jumped and was sucked down into the water and caught between decks, sure she would die. Then she opened her eyes and saw green water and the bottom of a lifeboat.

Pope floated upward, hitting her head on the lifeboat keel. Then she surfaced for air and found herself in the midst of a “hundred of frantic, screaming, shouting humans in this grey and watery inferno.” A man climbed onto her back, thinking she could support him.

She saw an old man upright in the water and asked him if he saw any rescue ships. He didn’t.

She heard people singing Tipperary.

Theodate Pope found an oar, decided it was all too horrible to be true and lost consciousness. Sailors aboard the trawler Julia discovered her in the evening.

Aftermath

Avon Old Farms

The bodies of Edwin Friend and Emily Robinson were never found. Theodate Pope held séances to communicate with Friend. She reported he was flushed and furious about the dastardly deed that ended his life.

In gratitude for saving her life, Pope gave a lifetime pension to Belle Naish. Naish donated her land to the Boy Scouts to establish a camp as a memorial to her husband Theodore, who was not a Lusitania survivor.

One day short of the one-year anniversary of the Lusitania sinking, Theodate Pope married diplomat John Wallace Riddle. He became ambassador to Argentina. She devoted much of her time to founding and running the Avon Old Farms School.

The sinking of the Lusitania changed American public opinion about entering World War I. Two years later, the United States declared war against Germany.

During World War II, Theodate Pope Riddle had a falling out with the school administrators. She was friendly with President Franklin Roosevelt, so she closed it and turned it into Old Farms Convalescent Hospital for blinded Army veterans. The school reopened in 1947. Theodate Pope Riddle died on Aug. 30, 1946, leaving Hill-Stead as a museum devoted to her art collection and her architecture.

Photo of Hill-Stead: By Daderot – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2151554 This story was updated in 2022.

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6 Stops on the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was a network of people who hid fugitives from slavery in their homes during the day. At night they moved them north to free states, Canada or England.

Refugees naturally headed for New England. The region had banished slavery and nurtured a strong abolitionist movement. And people fleeing slavery could also get there easily from the South by rail and by coastal vessels.

The Underground Railroad by Charles T. Webber

People who helped African-Americans escape used railroad terminology as a code to describe their activities in case someone overheard their conversations. People who moved the refugees were called conductors. The buildings that sheltered them were stations and the people who fed and clothed them until they were ready to move on were stationmasters.

Here, then, are six New England stops on the Underground Railroad, one for each of the New England states.

Austin F. Williams House

Austin F. William Carriage House and House

The Austin F. Williams House and Carriage House in Farmington, Conn., played a central role in a major drama before the Civil War: The Amistad Affair.

Williams, an active abolitionist, conducted for the Underground Railroad. In the Amistad case, a group of slaves on board the sailing vessel Amistad managed to free themselves and killed the ship’s captain in 1839.

They were subsequently brought to America and arrested. Abolitionists viewed their case — which resulted in acquittal on the grounds that they acted in self-defense — as an important victory.

Following the trial, Williams built a house on his Farmington property where the freed Africans stayed before returning to Sierra Leone in 1842. The Williams property is not open to the public.

Abyssinian Meeting House

Portland became a northern hub of the Underground Railroad because it was so easy to get to by rail and sea. The city’s 600 or so free blacks clustered in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood. They mostly worked as mariners, on the waterfront or on the railroads.

In the 1820s, Portland’s African-Americans got fed up with shabby treatment by the Second Congregational Church. So they formed their own church, the Abyssinian Religious Society, in 1828. Then they started building the Abyssinian Congregational Church, a wood-frame building on a high brick foundation on Newbury Street.

The meeting house hosted a school for black children, church suppers, concerts and, of course, religious services. Abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison both spoke from the Abyssinian’s pulpit.

After the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850, the church’s members organized escape routes for fugitives to England and Canada. They found safe houses for escaped slaves, fed them and transported them. Reuben Ruby, a church founder and hack driver, conducted slaves to freedom in his coach.

Portland’s Underground Railroad operated in complete secrecy, and the only written record of a successful escape appeared in the memoirs of a stationmaster’s descendant. The Abyssinian’s Rev. Amos Noe Freeman hid a fugitive from slavery in the meeting house.

After Portland’s big fire in 1866, the Abyssinian Meeting House fell into disuse. The city of Portland seized it for back taxes and in 1998 sold it to the Committee to Restore the Abyssinian for a small fee.

Then the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 brought attention to the old meeting house, and $400,000 in donations poured into the committee. On March 10, 2022, Congress passed a bill that gave $1.7 million to restore the building.

The Abyssinian Meeting House, 75 Newbury Street.

Nathan and Mary Johnson Properties

Quakers Nathan and Mary Johnson harbored Frederick Douglass in 1838 at their home in New Bedford, Mass. The couple were free blacks who married in 1819 and became part of New Bedford’s robust African-American community.

New Bedford, a port city, was attractive to African-Americans because its industries — whaling and the maritime trades – were open to them.

By 1853, New Bedford had the highest population of African-Americans in the Northeast, and 30 percent said they came from the South.

It was estimated that at any one time before the Civil War, 300 to 700 fugitive slaves lived in New Bedford.

Nathan and Mary Johnson owned a confectionery store, several businesses and their home, a stop on the Underground Railroad. They were prominent abolitionists; Nathan, a pharmacist, was elected the president of the 1847 National Convention of Colored People in Troy, New York.

One of the Johnson properties was a residence, the other a Quaker meetinghouse.

The New Bedford Historical Society owns the Nathan and Mary Johnson Properties at 17-19 and 21 Seventh St. in New Bedford. To make an appointment for a tour, call 508-979-8828.

James Wood Farm

On the Croydon Turnpike in Lebanon, N.H., just before the East Plainfield line, the Wood Farm served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

James Wood, a prosperous and industrious Quaker, owned the 800-acre farm. Wood dealt in hay, kept bees and surveyed land.

Wood’s involvement as the station keeper for New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County on the Underground Railroad had scant documentation.

His journal from 1862, discovered by Steve Ristelli in a New Hampshire antique shop, uncovered additional details.

On June 1, 1862, Wood noted: “A fugitive slave? come here abt 10 o”clock this eve to stay all night. I fixed him a bed in wool room,” according to Slavery & the Underground Railroad in New Hampshire, by Michelle Arnosky Sherburne.

There is little additional information about the fugitives helped by Wood. Historians say the slight mention suggests that Wood did not consider the event to be particularly unusual. They say he probably helped others passing through. The Wood farm is not open to the public.

20 High St., Ashaway, R.I.

20 High Street. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Rhode Island had both a sizable number of Quakers who supported abolition as well the densest African-American population in New England. As a result, the tiny state had a busy Underground Railroad before the Civil War. Free blacks and wealthy industrialists both conducted fugitives north to safety.

Jacob Babcock’s house in the village of Ashaway served as the first Rhode Island stop on the Underground Railroad. Babcock, a prosperous mill owner, believed strongly in temperance and in abolition. He hid fugitive slaves in tunnels under his house, then brought them to a Mr. Foster farther north.

Babcock enlisted his 16-year-old nephew, Isaac Cundall, to take the escapees in a wagon to Mr. Foster. Six decades later, Cundall told the Providence Journal about one close call.

A Close Call

In March 1858, Uncle Jacob told him he had to transport a woman fugitive in broad daylight. The sheriff and the slave owner were looking for her in the neighborhood. Jacob knew the sheriff would get a warrant to search his house. So Isaac asked his cousin Sarah Babcock to take a ride with him. She put on a big hat, a veil and a heavy shawl, and they took off in a wagon.

Sure enough, they ran into the sheriff. They made sure to chat with him, made sure he identified Sarah Babcok. Then they rode on for a mile and turned around. They saw the sheriff and told him it was so cold they decided to head back to get warmer clothes.

Back at Uncle Jacob’s house the fugitive woman put on Sarah’s clothes plus another wrap. Then they easily passed by the sheriff. Isaac took her to a minister’s house, and she safely made it to the next station.

Jacob Babcock’s house still stands, though privately owned.

Rokeby

Rokeby in Ferrisburgh, Vt., belonged to Rowland T. Robinson, who openly sheltered escaped slaves as part of the Underground Railroad. Robinson’s extensive correspondence about how the railroad worked provides an important historic archive.

In 1793, Thomas and Jemma Robinson, Rowland’s parents, built Rokeby. He made abolition the cause of his life. Not only did he shelter fugitives, he negotiated freedom papers with slavemasters and found jobs for freedmen.

Today Rokeby, a historic farm property and museum, includes a 1780s farmstead. It also has eight agricultural outbuildings with permanent exhibits, and hiking trails that cover more than 50 acres.

You can find Rokeby at 4334 U.S. Route 7 in Ferrisburgh.

Photos: Austin F. Williams House and Carriage House By Ragesoss – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4674472. Nathan and Mary Johnson Properties By English Wikipedia user Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4384044. Rokeby By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11310696. Abussinian Meeting House By Dugan Murphy – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102430909.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Jacqueline Bouvier Comes of Age in New England

Jacqueline Bouvier was renowned for her poise and style as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. But she had floundered through her adolescence, uncertain about what to do with her life. She was slow to date the way her schoolmates did at her exclusive boarding school in Connecticut. And she married late for a society girl of her era, though her debut in Newport, R.I., earned her the title of Debutante of the Year.

Jacqueline Bouvier

She was born on Long Island, N.Y., on July 28, 1929, the daughter of a womanizing stockbroker nicknamed Black Jack Bouvier and Janet Lee, a driven, mercenary socialite.

At Miss Porter’s

As a child, Jackie loved to read, ride horses and make mischief. She went to the exclusive Miss Chapin’s School on New York’s East Side from first through sixth grade, where a teacher remembered her as ‘very clever and very artistic,’ but ‘full of the devil.’

She adored her father, whose Wall Street career went into a tailspin after the Crash of 1929 and whose own father squandered his inheritance. Jackie’s parents divorced in 1940, and two years later her mother married Hugh Auchincloss, the twice-divorced scion of an old money family. Jackie grew withdrawn.

Poor Relation

JBKO 563P The Auchincloss Family, ca. 1946. From back, L-R: Jacqueline Bouvier, Yusha Auchincloss, Nina Auchincloss, Caroline Lee Bouvier, Janet Auchincloss (holding baby Janet Auchincloss), Tommy Auchincloss, Hugh D. Auchincloss.

Jacqueline Bouvier with the Auchincloss clan

Janet, Jackie and Lee moved to the Auchincloss estate outside of Washington, D.C., along with three Auchincloss step-siblings. Soon there would be a half-brother and a half-sister. Jackie attended the Holton-Arms School for two years.

Black Jack was responsible for supporting Jackie and her younger sister Lee. He could barely afford tuition and their $50 a month allowance, a pittance compared to the entitlements of the Auchincloss children. Jackie was a poor relation though she attended exclusive schools, traveled in elite social circles and lived on large estates.

In the world Jacqueline Bouvier grew up in, there was only one desirable path in life: to marry a rich, socially prominent young man.

She prepared for that future in the autumn of 1942,when she went off to Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Conn.

Miss Porter’s

At Miss Porter’s, she studied hard, rode her horse and dated boys, in that order. Perhaps she was ambivalent about the stultifying life of a society wife that her mother planned for her. But she believed she needed a rich husband, and she wasn’t sure she’d get one.

“I just know that no one will ever marry me, and I’ll end up as a housemother at Farmington!” she complained to a friend.

She once said she spent three years at Miss Porter’s imitating girls who had callers every Saturday.

I passed the finish line when I learned to smoke in the balcony of the Normandie Theater in New York from a girl who pressed a Longfellow on me then led me from the theater when the usher told her that other people could not hear the film with so much coughing going on.

Newport Debut

Hammersmith Farm

Jacqueline Bouvier was shy and reserved — some would say inscrutable — but she had an uncanny ability to draw attention to herself. She formally entered the marriage market at an afternoon tea dance for 300 of Janet and Hugh’s friends and their eligible offspring at Hammersmith Farm in Newport, R.I. Later, her mother threw an evening event for her; and then came a whirl of dances, dinners, parties and special breakfasts after late-night partying. A New York columnist named her Deb of the year. But no husband.

She spent the summer on a grand tour of Europe, and returned as single as ever.

“I didn’t know what I wanted,” she said. “I was still floundering.”

At her father’s urging she entered Vassar College in the fall of 1947, where again she excelled at academics. She wasn’t in love with the school, once calling it, ‘that damned Vassar.’ She spent her junior year abroad at the University of Grenoble in France and refused to go back to Vassar. She decided to finish her degree at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., while living at Merrywood.

Jacqueline Bouvier at her debut.

She was 21 and unmarried at a time when most young society women were already married. Worse, her younger sister Lee – also Debutante of the Year – had found a husband.

In October she won the Prix de Paris from Vogue magazine with her essay defending the three historical figures she most wanted to meet were Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and Sergei Diaghelev. The prize was a six-month Vogue junior editorship in New York and six months in Paris. On her first day at work, the managing editor took her out to lunch. Jackie asked her what city would be best for her.

The editor, Carol Phillips, replied, “Go to Washington. That’s where all the boys are.”

Jacqueline Bouvier quit that day.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Miss Porter’s Finishes Socialites, Scholars and a First Lady

The educational reformer who founded Miss Porter’s School in 1843 could not have imagined the fame, fortune, scandal and accomplishment her students would achieve.

Sarah Porter was born Aug. 17, 1813, the daughter of a well-to-do Congregationalist minister and his wife in Farmington, Conn. She had the best education available for young ladies at the time. Yale professors tutored her and she learned four languages. When she reached her 80s, she taught herself a fifth: Hebrew.

Sarah Porter

Sarah Porter started Miss Porter’s with 18 students. By the 1880s, Miss Porter’s grew into national prominence with nearly 100 students. The curriculum included Latin, French, German, spelling, reading, arithmetic, trigonometry, history, geography, chemistry, physiology, botany, geology and astronomy.

Miss Porter’s Alumnae

Classical scholar Edith Hamilton graduated from Miss Porter’s. So did her sister Dr. Alice Hamilton, the first woman faculty member of Harvard University Medical School and founder of the field of industrial medicine.

Miss Porter’s School, also known as Porter’s. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Graduates would include the mother, daughter, wife, sister-in-law and mistress of presidents.

Dorothy Walker Bush, the mother of President George H.W. Bush, attended, as did her granddaughter, Dorothy Bush Koch.

President John F. Kennedy had a penchant for Miss Porter’s graduates. He married one, Jacqueline Bouvier, and had an affair with another, Mimi Alford. Alford later wrote a tell-all book, Once Upon A Secret: My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath.

Jacqueline Bouvier’s sister Lee — later Princess Lee Radziwell — also studied at Miss Porter’s.

Jacqueline Bouvier at Miss Porter’s

When Jacqueline Bouvier attended Miss Porter’s, the girls were trained to have exquisite manners, to speak softly and to hold refined conversation. Housekeepers ironed linen napkins three times, but the girls waited on tables so they would know how to host dinners.

Donald Spoto, in Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: A Life, described the Miss Porter’s creed:

A girl at Miss Porter’s was expected to rise to the occasion, to put her best foot forward, to do what was right — even in times of crisis — and to display, as the chaplain often said at the nondenominational Sunday services, “guts and gumption.”

Miss Porter’s has always enjoyed a reputation for academic excellence, though some of the heiresses who attended were more interested in café society than calculus.

Below is a brief list of some of Miss Porter’s famous graduates.

Rich Girls

Princess Anastasia

Princess Anastasia of Greece and Denmark was an American heiress born Nonie “Nancy” May Stewart Worthington Leeds in Zanesville, Ohio. Her family soon moved to Cleveland and sent her to Miss Porter’s. After graduation she entered high society and married Prince Christopher of Greece and Denmark after two failed marriages. Because of the prince’s finances, the U.S. press called her the ‘Tin Plate Heiress,’ the ‘Dollar Princess’ and the ‘Million Dollar Princess.’

Brenda Diana Duff Frazier was one of the Depression Era’s ‘Poor little rich girls.’ Neither of her parents were paragons of virtue in parenthood, according to a judge. They shunted her off to boarding schools, including Miss Porter’s, even as she appeared in café society at 15. She married football star Shipwreck Kelly and had affairs with New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno and Howard Hughes. Married unhappily to a sales executive, she tried suicide more than 30 times.

The Movies

Edith Bouvier Beale, a first cousin to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, pursued fame without much luck. Then the documentary film Grey Gardens came along. The film showed her living with her mother, poor and isolated on an East Hampton estate. When the film came out, Jackie intervened and paid $32,000 to clean the house, install a new furnace and plumbing system and cart away 1,000 bags of garbage. Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee bought the house in 1979.

Edith Bouvier Beale

Gloria Vanderbilt — heiress, socialite, blue jean designer — also fell victim to a custody battle. Her father died of cirrhosis when she was a toddler, and her carefree mother lost a sensational custody case to her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whltney. She married movie agent Pat DiCicco at the age of 17. After graduating from Miss Porter’s, she studied at the Art Student’s League. She maintained a romance with photographer Gordon Parks for many years. Other notable lovers included Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes, and Roald Dahl. Truman Capote was said to have modeled the character of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s on her. With her fourth husband, Wyatt Emory Cooper, she had two sons: Carter, who committed suicide at 23 by jumping out of a 14-story building, and Anderson, CNN news anchor.

Dina Merrill is the only child of Post Cereals heiress, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and her second husband, the Wall Street stockbroker, Edward Francis Hutton. As a Hollywood actress she appeared in 22 films, including Caddyshack.

Hostages and Hostesses

Dina Merrill

Cissy Patterson was the granddaughter of Joseph Medill, owner of the Chicago Tribune and mayor of Chicago. She made a name for herself in Washington society, then bought and published the Washington Times-Herald. She befriended Marguerite Cassini, daughter of the Russian ambassador, and Alice Roosevelt. The press labeled them the ‘Three Graces.’ She then married Count Josef Gizycki over her parents’ strenuous objections. Patterson should have listened to them. He beat her, cheated on her, gambled and kidnapped her for 18 months, demanding $1 million in ransom. Patterson spent 13 years trying to divorce him.

Theodate Pope Riddle graduated from Miss Porter’s with the Class of 1888. She hired faculty members to tutor her privately in architecture. After surviving the sinking of the Lusitania, she got her license as an architect in New York and Connecticut, the first woman to do so. Riddle designed Hill-Stead, the family estate (now Hill-Stead Museum) in Farmington, and she designed and founded the famous Avon Old Farms School and Westover School. She also reconstructed the birthplace of former President Theodore Roosevelt.

Cissy Patterson

Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, the granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, attended Miss Porter’s School during the 1870s. She inherited $10 million, and with it she bought and developed Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, Vt. She designed gardens, decorated the interior and planned meals – including one for President William Henry Taft. Her husband, William Seward Webb, missed that dinner, Taft said, because he’d gotten drunk.

This story was updated in 2023.

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