The third husband’s name was the thing Eleanor never forgave. She had eloped with him on the night of the twelfth of April, 1930, twenty years old and already the second daughter of the wealthiest woman in America. He was a playwright named Preston Sturges, thirty-one, funny, charming, fluent in French, and the author of the Broadway hit *Strictly Dishonorable*, which had run sixteen months and earned him more than three hundred thousand dollars. Her parents had protested the match explicitly.

She married him anyway, in Bedford Hills, New York, and discovered two years later that he had not been legally divorced from his first wife, Estelda Wolfe Mudge, when he and Eleanor spoke their vows. The annulment was granted in May 1932. She was twenty-two. The marriage had lasted two years and had ended with the discovery that the man she had run away with had not been free to marry her at all.

Then, in 1933, Sturges sold a screenplay to Fox Film Corporation for seventeen thousand five hundred dollars. The film was called *The Power and the Glory*. It starred Spencer Tracy as a self-made industrialist who rises from poverty, builds a corporate empire, drives his wife to destruction with his obsession for success, and dies by his own hand at the peak of his power. The story was based, loosely but explicitly, on the life of Charles William Post, Eleanor’s grandfather.

The stories she had told Sturges in private, the sanitarium at Battle Creek, the invention of Postum and Grape-Nuts, the obsessive work, the paranoia, the suicide in Santa Barbara, had become the raw material of a major Hollywood picture, sold and put on screen without her name anywhere near the credits. It received the 1933 *Hollywood Reporter* Award for Best Original Story. Eleanor was twenty-three, recently annulled, and watching Spencer Tracy play a version of her grandfather in a movie her former husband had written from her own confidences. She said nothing publicly on record about any of it.

She married again in less than a year. She was not the only daughter. There were three. Her eldest sister, Adelaide, would eventually withdraw from public life entirely and die in a Maryland farmhouse that no one outside the family visited.

Her youngest half sister, Dina, would become a movie star and outlive two of her own children. Twelve marriages between the three of them. None of them inherited the mansion on the Atlantic coast, and the most valuable possession their mother ever claimed was something no inventory after her death could locate. Their mother was Marjorie Merriweather Post, the wealthiest woman in America, and this is the story of what her daughters did with the space she left around them.

Marjorie was born in Springfield, Illinois, on the fifteenth of March, 1887, the only child of William Post and Ella Letitia Merriweather. C. W. Post had come to Battle Creek, Michigan, as a sick man, in his mid-thirties, suffering from a digestive condition the medical establishment of the 1880s had been unable to treat.

He arrived at the sanitarium run by John Harvey Kellogg, already famous for its belief that diet, rest, and clean living could accomplish what medicine could not. He stayed. He recovered. And in 1893, in a kitchen in Battle Creek, he mixed wheat, molasses, and bran in proportions he had worked out from memory, heated it, and produced the first batch of Postum.

Marjorie was six. By the time she was eleven, her father had added Grape-Nuts. By fourteen, Post Toasties. By sixteen, the company’s annual sales were approaching a million dollars, and C.

W. Post had begun making his daughter sit in on board of directors meetings, not to observe but to learn. He took her on factory tours. He had her balance the company’s quarterly budgets by hand.

He taught her boxing, literally, the mechanics of it, the discipline it required. In 1904, when Marjorie was seventeen and at school in Washington at Mount Vernon Seminary, C. W. sent her a letter.

She had requested money for new furs. He wrote that she had more than double the clothes, shoes, and stuff that any girl, no matter how rich, should have at seventeen, and told her to make some of the furs she had do, and not order more dresses before she returned. Dad wanted her sensible, so go slow. She paid no attention.

In December 1905, at eighteen, she married Edward Bennett Close, a young investment banker from Greenwich, Connecticut. It made the newspapers. One New York paper predicted the Closes would occupy a prominent position in society, noting that the bride was twice a millionaire. As a wedding gift, C.

W. built the newlyweds an eleven-bedroom house in Greenwich called The Boulders. He also came along on the honeymoon. Italy, Egypt, three of them.

The marriage lasted fourteen years and produced two daughters. Adelaide Brevoort Close, born the twenty-sixth of July, 1908, and Eleanor Post Close, born the third of December, 1909. By the time Eleanor arrived, The Boulders was already too small for the life Marjorie was building. She believed, consistently and with conviction, that the appropriate scale of things was larger than what she currently had.

This was not vanity, or not only vanity. It was a strategy learned at her father’s side. Expansion was the mechanism by which Postum had become Grape-Nuts, Grape-Nuts Post Toasties, and Post Toasties the company quietly preparing to acquire Jell-O, Maxwell House, Birds Eye, and Baker’s Chocolate. The world she inhabited was built on the principle that what you had was always the foundation for what came next.

There were complications. Ed Close, by the account of the period, drank. He found Greenwich society congenial and had no real interest in the Postum company, despite C. W.

’s initial hopes. He disapproved of Marjorie’s Christian Science, which she had adopted from her father. He found her appetite for the lavish, the parties, the clothes, the constant social movement, excessive in ways their increasingly separate lives could not contain. On the ninth of May, 1914, Marjorie received news that her father had died.

She was twenty-seven. C. W. Post had been ill, convinced he was terminally so, though historical debate remains about whether the diagnosis was accurate.

He died by his own hand at his estate in Santa Barbara, California. Marjorie attended the funeral rituals. She never, by every account that exists of her, fully recovered from his death. She inherited everything, the company, the assets, the board seats, and the twenty-million-dollar fortune in 1914 dollars accumulated by a man who had once wanted her to be sensible about furs.

Adelaide was five. Eleanor was four. Five years after the wedding, two daughters, a dead father, a disintegrating marriage, and a food company about to become one of the largest corporations in America. She was twenty-seven.

In 1919, Marjorie divorced Edward Bennett Close. Adelaide was eleven, Eleanor nine. She retained custody of both daughters. The divorce was finalized in November.

Less than a year later, on the twentieth of July, 1920, she married Edward Francis Hutton. She was thirty-three. Hutton was forty-five. The girls absorbed into a new household, a new name on the letterhead, a new man at the table.

And in 1923, a new daughter, Nedenia Marjorie Hutton, the youngest of the three, the one who had arrived into an already complicated household. By 1935, when the divorce from E. F. Hutton came through on grounds of adultery, Adelaide was twenty-six, Eleanor twenty-five, and Dina eleven.

By the divorce from Joseph Davies in 1955, Adelaide was forty-six, Eleanor forty-five, Dina thirty-one. By the fourth and final divorce, from Herbert May in 1964, Adelaide was fifty-five, Eleanor fifty-four, Dina forty. Four marriages, four endings, three daughters standing at different ages at each turn, absorbing the reconfiguration of a household in which their mother was always the fixed point and the men around her the variable. Marjorie was not sentimental about her marriages.

She believed in the institution in the sense that she entered it repeatedly. She did not believe in the permanent version. It was a coherent position. It was also a model, and three daughters watched it applied repeatedly across six decades.

Adelaide was the first to leave the shadow, and the first to disappear from it. She was, by all accounts, a well-behaved and composed young woman. She did not make news. She attended the appropriate schools.

She participated in the social functions her position required. She married Thomas Wells Durant first, then Merrill McNeal, then finally Augustus Riggs IV. Three marriages. She moved progressively away from public life, away from the Palm Beach circuit, the Washington benefit galas, the Hillwood dinner parties at which cabinet ministers ate from Emperor Franz Joseph’s gold service.

By the end of her life, she was living in Woodbine, Carroll County, Maryland, not Palm Beach, not Washington. She died on the thirty-first of December, 1998, at ninety years old. There is no *Time* magazine profile of Adelaide Brevoort Close Durant McNeal Riggs. There is no Hillwood catalog entry.

There is a Hillwood Museum Facebook post from the twenty-sixth of July, 2019, marking her birthday with a photograph from a display celebrating her dedication to the museum’s collection. The post has a modest number of responses. This is most of what the accessible public record contains about the eldest daughter, the first child, the girl in the white dress at The Boulders in 1915. There is a connection the record contains, sitting quietly in the genealogical line.

When Marjorie divorced Edward Bennett Close in 1919, he remarried. His second wife bore him a son, William Taliaferro Close, born in 1924, who became a physician. One of his children, born in 1947, was a daughter named Sydney Constance Close. She became an actress, known professionally as Glenn Close.

Glenn Close’s grandfather, on her father’s side, was Edward Bennett Close, the man Marjorie Merriweather Post divorced in 1919, father of Adelaide and Eleanor. Which means Glenn Close’s aunt, by this specific line of descent, was Adelaide Brevoort Close, the woman who died in a Maryland farmhouse on the thirty-first of December, 1998, having spent six decades moving away from her mother’s world. And Glenn Close’s aunt, by the same line, was Eleanor Post Close, who had, by 1947, already been married four times. Adelaide died the year after Glenn Close received her fifth Oscar nomination.

The historical record does not indicate that they were close. The name, however, is the same. Eleanor went in the other direction. The record of her six marriages is specific.

One, Preston Sturges, the elopement, annulled 1932. Two, Etienne Marie Robert Gautier, a French polo player, nephew of the mayor of Compiègne, married the fifth of April, 1933, in the chapel of the Église Saint Philippe du Roule in Paris. That marriage lasted a few months. Three, George Curtis Rand, an American, married the fourth of June, 1934.

Eleanor later alleged cruelty. She obtained a divorce in Reno, Nevada, on the twenty-fourth of February, 1938. Four, Janos Bekessy, who wrote under the name Hans Habe, a Hungarian-Austrian author. He had been captured by the German army in 1940, imprisoned at the Drancy transit camp in France, and escaped.

He wrote a novel about it, *A Thousand Shall Fall*. They married on the twenty-third of April, 1942. They had one child, a son named Antal, called Tony, born in 1944. They divorced in 1946.

Five, Owen Denny de la Garde Johnson, a staff member of the American Embassy in Paris, son of Owen Johnson, a prominent American writer. They married in Paris on the twenty-seventh of August, 1949, and divorced in 1953. Six, Leon Eugene Bazin, a Belgian-born American conductor born in 1900, founder of the National Orchestral Association, founding musical director of the New York City Ballet alongside Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine. They married in September 1954.

In 1958, they moved to Europe, to Switzerland. They remained married until Bazin died in 1999. Forty-five years. The arc of the six marriages begins with an elopement against her parents’ wishes at age twenty, passes through a man who turned her grandfather’s story into a film, a French polo player, a man she accused of cruelty, a Jewish writer who survived a Nazi prison camp, an American diplomat in Paris, and ends with a forty-five-year marriage to a Belgian conductor in Switzerland.

Five countries, six marriages, one son born during the war. She was forty-four when she married Leon Bazin. She was ninety-six when she died in Paris on the twenty-seventh of November, 2006. She outlived every one of her five previous husbands.

She outlived her son Antal, who died in 2015, but she did not know that. She had predeceased him by nine years. While Eleanor was working through her first three marriages in the 1930s, the youngest daughter was growing up at Mar-a-Lago. Nedenia Marjorie Hutton was seven when her parents divorced, eleven when the E.

F. Hutton era ended and the Joseph Davies era began. She was raised at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, at Hillwood in Washington, and at the Adirondacks camp, Topridge, in the summers, a childhood conducted across multiple estates with rotating staff and the seasonal rhythms of a household organized around social performance. Her half-sisters were fourteen and fifteen years older.

She graduated from Miss Porter’s School, the same school Eleanor had attended, enrolled at George Washington University for one term, then left. She went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and studied acting at the HB Studio under Uta Hagen, one of the most demanding acting teachers in the American theater of that period. Then she adopted a stage name. The name she chose was not Post, not Hutton.

It was Merrill, borrowed from Charles E. Merrill, the famous stockbroker, as suggested to her by her half-sister Eleanor’s husband at the time. She took a name from a man who ran money, in a family built on money, specifically in order to put distance between herself and the money. She was Dina Merrill.

She made her stage debut in 1945 in a play called *The Mermaid Singing*. She was twenty-one. She did not ask her mother for a single line in the program about the Postum Cereal Company. By 1957, she had her first film role, *Desk Set*, opposite Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

Two years later she appeared in *Operation Petticoat* alongside Cary Grant, who had, in one of the stranger coincidences family histories accumulate, been previously married to Barbara Hutton, Dina’s first cousin. In 1959, a trade publication proclaimed her Hollywood’s new Grace Kelly. She was thirty-five, or thirty-three, depending on which year of birth she had given the studio. She had been listing 1925 for years.

The accurate year was 1923. When it became necessary to acknowledge it, she did. *The Sundowners* came out in 1960. *Butterfield 8* in 1960.

*The Courtship of Eddie’s Father* in 1963. A hundred film and television credits accumulating across six decades. She was, by every public measure, the most visible of Marjorie Merriweather Post’s three daughters, the one whose face appeared on movie screens across the country, whose name was in the newspapers for reasons that had nothing to do with her mother’s collection of Fabergé eggs. She married three times.

One, Stanley M. Rumbough Jr. , heir to the Colgate-Palmolive fortune, married in 1946, three children, Stanley, David, and Nedenia, called Nina, divorced in 1966 after exactly twenty years. Two, Cliff Robertson, the actor who would win the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1969 for *Charly*, married in 1966, the same year her first marriage ended, one daughter, Heather.

They appeared together on television, she playing Calamity Jane to his Penguin in two 1968 episodes of *Batman*, a detail the record preserves with deadpan humor. They divorced in 1986, after exactly twenty years. Three, Ted Hartley, a producer, married in 1989. In 1991, Hartley and Dina merged their production company with RKO to form RKO Pictures, which she joined as a business partner.

They remained married until her death. Twenty-eight years. Three marriages, two lasting exactly twenty years each, one lasting until the end. The pattern holds across all three daughters.

Adelaide, three marriages ending in Maryland. Eleanor, six marriages ending in Switzerland. Dina, three marriages ending in East Hampton. None of them returned to the scale of the household they grew up in.

What happened to Dina’s four children is where the record becomes hardest to read. By the time she died, two of them had predeceased her. David Rumbough, her second child with her first husband, was killed in a boating accident in 1973, in his early twenties. Dina was forty-nine.

She had been filming and performing without interruption since 1945. She had survived one divorce, remarried, and was in the middle of her second marriage. The record does not contain a public statement from her about it. Heather Robertson, her daughter with Cliff Robertson, was an actress and screenwriter who had followed her mother into the profession.

She died of ovarian cancer in 2007, at thirty-eight. Dina was eighty-three. She had outlived a son and a daughter. She lived ten more years, until the twenty-second of May, 2017, when she died at her home in East Hampton at ninety-three.

The cause of death was Lewy body dementia. David died in 1973, the same year her mother died. Two losses in the same year. The record does not indicate that Dina spoke publicly about either.

She continued working. Marjorie Merriweather Post died on the twelfth of September, 1973, at Hillwood in Washington, D. C. , after a long illness.

She was eighty-six. She was buried in the rose garden at Hillwood. She left the bulk of her estate to her three daughters, Adelaide, Eleanor, and Dina. The figures attached to the estate vary by source, but the general record suggests approximately one hundred seventeen million dollars to her family.

It is, by any measure, a large inheritance. It is also, by the specific measure of what she had accumulated across eight decades of continuous acquisition, a fraction of what she had originally held. Mar-a-Lago had been separately addressed. So had Hillwood.

And the jewelry. She had given the Napoleon diamond necklace, commissioned for Empress Marie Louise in 1811, to the Smithsonian Institution in 1962, eleven years before her death. While she was still alive, she did not wait for the will. She had also donated or arranged for donation to the Smithsonian the Marie Louise tiara, the Blue Heart diamond, the Marie Antoinette diamond earrings, the Maximilian emerald necklace.

These objects were placed in the care of a public institution. They were not in the will. They were not available to be divided among three daughters. She had once told a friend she wanted a little cottage by the sea.

The friend described her husband’s reaction: then showed him Marjorie’s plans. What they got was this. Fifty-eight bedrooms, thirty-three bathrooms with gold-plated fixtures. She believed gold was easier to clean.

An eighteen-thousand-square-foot living room with forty-two-foot ceilings. One hundred ten thousand square feet of Spanish tiles, Italian marble, Venetian silks, and gold leaf. A nine-hole golf course. A private beach.

A staff that issued typewritten weekly schedules to guests. Construction began in 1923, took four years and six hundred workers to complete, and cost seven million dollars in 1920s currency, which translates to somewhere between ninety and one hundred twenty million dollars today. She called it Mar-a-Lago, sea to lake, seventeen acres between Lake Worth and the Atlantic. In her will, she left it to the United States federal government.

Her intention was specific. She wanted the mansion to serve as a presidential retreat, a winter White House for the president and visiting foreign dignitaries. The federal government accepted it. Then the federal government read the maintenance reports.

By 1980, Congress had repealed acceptance of the estate. The maintenance costs were too high, the security requirements too complex, the building too expensive to operate for the purpose she had intended. In the property was formally returned to the Post Foundation. It went on the market.

Three potential sales collapsed. In December 1985, Donald Trump purchased Mar-a-Lago from the Post Foundation, approximately five million dollars for the property itself, additional millions for the furnishings. The woman who built it spent seven million in 1920s dollars. The man who bought it paid five million in 1985 dollars.

The arithmetic of that transaction sits in the historical record without comment. The property had been declared a National Historic Landmark in 1980, the same year Congress decided it could not afford to keep it. She was buried in the rose garden at Hillwood when all of this happened. She did not see any of it.

Hillwood had a similar trajectory, though it ended differently. Marjorie purchased the twenty-five-acre Washington estate in 1955 after her divorce from Joseph Davies, spent two years renovating it, installing museum-grade lighting and climate controls alongside the Gobelin tapestries and the Russian porcelain. She lived in it as her primary Washington residence from 1955 until her death, hosting cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and at least two presidential nominees for dinner in rooms where the furniture had been made for Marie Antoinette. She had designed Hillwood to become a museum, planned it that way from the beginning.

The labels on the display cases, the catalog of nearly twenty thousand objects, the layout of the rooms. It was not a home that happened to contain a collection. It was a museum that happened to contain a bed. In her will, she bequeathed Hillwood to the Smithsonian Institution along with the collection and the estate’s operating endowment, on one condition, that it be maintained and operated according to her specifications.

The Smithsonian accepted it. Then the Smithsonian read the maintenance reports. In 1976, three years after her death, one year before the museum was scheduled to open, the Smithsonian returned Hillwood to the Marjorie Merriweather Post Foundation, citing operational costs too significant to absorb within the institution’s existing structure. The foundation, unlike the government, did not give it back.

In 1977, Hillwood opened as an independent museum. It operates today as Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens, a private non-profit institution in Northwest Washington, D. C. , adjacent to Rock Creek Park.

It houses the most comprehensive collection of Russian Imperial fine and decorative arts outside Russia. It houses her eighteenth-century French decorative collection. It houses the portrait of Marjorie Merriweather Post, circa 1935, at the center of the main hall, and the rose garden where she is buried. Neither the Smithsonian nor the federal government managed to maintain what she built.

The Post Foundation did. The inventory of Hillwood contains 19,971 entries. The relationship between a mother and her daughters does not have a catalog number. It is not in the Smithsonian, not in Palm Beach, not in the rose garden.

It is in a Maryland farmhouse that no one outside the family visited, and in a forty-five-year marriage in Switzerland that nobody predicted, and in a stage name a woman carried for seventy-two years specifically so that no one would know where she came from. Three daughters, one name between them, not the one they were born with. What they thought of the woman at the center of all of it, the woman Lady Bird Johnson said turned everything she touched into beauty, they never said for the record. What they did was draw lines.

A farmhouse in Carroll County. A Swiss apartment with a conductor’s scores on the desk. A stage name borrowed from a stockbroker. The lines were quiet.

They were not angry, or documented, or public, but they were there.