Tag: scandal

The Unfit Heiress

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

What’s the first thing you think when you hear the word heiress? Beautiful? Wild? Adventurous? Scandalous? Spoiled? Troubled? Does it summon images of glamorous women in gowns draped in furs and jewels? In nightclubs looking like weary painted dolls as prize balloons drop from the ceiling? Or in a simple cut suit that cost more than six months of a working girl’s wages as they testify in court to unburden themselves of another spouse? Or have I spent much of my formative years watching too many Preston Sturges movies while reading about Gloria Vanderbilt, Brenda Frazier and their ilk.

Almost forgotten among these Poor Little Rich Girls from 1920-1950 is one Ann Cooper Hewitt. Like her peers she had a sad childhood, too much money, a string of husbands, failed marriages, artistic leanings and headlines aplenty. What makes Ann Cooper Hewitt stand out? The sterilization surgery at only twenty years old, done without her knowledge or consent. Audrey Clare Farley’s The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt brings light to the infamous case and the not widely known history of forced sterilizations that still haunts us today.

Let’s go back almost nine decades. A troubled girl, the daughter of a brilliant inventor and his scandalous second wife, has a fortune but lives in a narrow world controlled by her mother, without a good education or an extended support network. Since she is underaged she doesn’t have a say in anything and her fortune is controlled by a trust with her mother receiving funds from the trust for her care. Very Gloria Vanderbilt, in fact Ann’s mother Maryon used to be involved with Gloria’s father, the doomed Reginald C. Vanderbilt back in the day. And one day, after being stricken with severe stomach pains, twenty year old Ann is whisked into surgery and wakes up to find out she will never be able to have children thanks to her Fallopian tubes being removed. Yes, removed.

Funny thing that. Actually not funny at all. A sobering reality is many young women where (and still are) subjected to sterilization without their consent or knowledge. Like boys? Get caught in a sexual situation? Family doesn’t want the shame of a loose daughter or sister? Maybe not be a Mensa scholar aka feeble-minded or a moron? Have a child out of wedlock? Forced into an institution to cover up a sexual crime against you? (Dead serious. Stop reading this and look up Carrie Buck) Not be lily-white? Be part of a culture or ethnicity seen as having too many children as a whole? You might be “fortunate” enough to have your ability and decision making about your reproductive right snatched away.

Enraging isn’t it.

So Ann Cooper Hewitt was one of this sad sisterhood, rendered sterile by specialists who decided she was over-sexed and a moron (using the actual medical term here-look it up). But was sex crazed Ann the truth or her mother trying to retain control of her and her money after she turned 21. And did her mother collude with the specialists. The case made it to trial but no one ever was convicted or served time. Infuriating.

Now here’s where Audrey Clare Farley’s The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt is more than just rehashing a forgotten trial. Our society has not gotten any better over the years. There where and still are women being subjected to sterilizations based on views and not facts. Women without agency. It’s heart rending and horrific. And really makes me think. Sent back to the 1930s, would I have been one of these women? A lower class, raised Catholic gal with disabilities who really likes the joys of the flesh with very limited opportunities. Chances are excellent I would have been on the operating table in a state institution.

To be frank, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt is not an easy or light read. It’s not a huge tome, it has a nice heft and slid right into my tote bag of laundromat supplies. But don’t come looking for some gossipy froth of a book. It’s sobering and will make you think of your particular privileges or lack of in choosing what to do with your body and your reproduction decisions.

If you see Audrey Clare Farley’s The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt ? Pick it up and do more than just skim the inside flap. Please.

This Crazy Thing Called Love

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

I was trying to rearrange things on my bookcase to make room for my latest treasures after last week’s trip to the Friends of the Ferguson Library book shop (stoked I found an almost pristine copy of the Mitford sisters letters in hardcover but it’s a doorstop and a half!) when I managed to knock over the knee high stack of mass market paperbacks next to my dresser. I really need to buckle down and write those V.C. Andrews reviews I’ve been planning one of these days. But instead of settling down with Clan Dollaganger, I found myself putting aside Dominick Dunne’s The Two Mrs Grenvilles. But Friday afternoon found me combing the stacks of the Avon Free Public Library and adding This Crazy Thing Called Love: The Golden World and Fatal Marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward to my armload of books.

Now given my fascination with true crime and the life of the very very rich, you would think I would have reviewed  This Crazy Thing Called Love: The Golden World and Fatal Marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward ages ago. This weekend’s reading wasn’t the first time I’ve encountered the book. Back in 1992 when This Crazy Thing Called Love was published I was right on the library reserve list behind all the old ladies who where old enough to remember the case and in one or two cases, ran in the right circles to have met the Woodwards back in the day. The old ladies in my home town? Full of surprises!  What boggles the mind is there are people out there who devoured Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers and Dominick Dunne’s The Two Mrs Grenvilles and took those embellished stories as the gospel truth. That’s like reading Jackie Collins writing about her late night soap opera diva Sugar Anderson and assuming you now know all there is too know about Joan Collins and Shirley Maclaine. The true story is so much more interesting.

For those of you who have never heard of the Capote or Dunne books or even know who the Woodwards were, here are basics. In 1955, socialite Ann Woodward shot what she thought was an intruder at her family’s country home. Only, instead of an intruder who had been targeting their neighborhood, Ann Woodward had killed her banking heir husband Billy Woodward. The Woodwards had a stormy marriage with affairs on both sides and many people thought Ann Woodward had killed Billy Woodward in cold blood to keep him from divorcing her to marry someone from his own class. Billy Woodward’s family stood by Ann Woodward but she spent the rest of her life under a cloud of suspicion and died just before Esquire magazine published part of Truman Capote’s uncompleted novel Answered Prayers that included the story of a scandalous woman who shoots her very rich husband.

Thanks to Susan Braudy, the picture of the Ann and Billy Woodward is treated with fairness and a steady hand. Ann Woodward (born Angeline Luceil Crowell) wasn’t a saint, but she wasn’t the whore that Dominick Dunne and Truman Capote paint her to be in their stories. There wasn’t a secret hick first husband she was hiding from Billy Woodward. Given the changes in Billy Woodward’s will as their marriage crumbled, Ann Woodward would have been better off financially as the former Mrs Billy Woodward vs the Widow Woodward. Believe it or not…there really was a burglar prowling in their exclusive neighborhood the fateful night Billy Woodward died. And you can’t help but feel that if Ann Eden (the stage name Angleine Crowell used before her marriage) had never meet Billy Woodward or at least if their affair had been just a passing thing versus a marriage, both parties might still be alive and thriving in their own worlds.

If you’ve read Answered Prayers and The Two Mrs Grenvilles, make an effort to track down and read This Crazy Thing Called Love. Ann and Billy Woodward and their family deserve that much.

Empty Mansions

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

The very rich have fascinated me since I was just a little thing. You could blame Gloria Vanderbilt, now best known for being news anchor Anderson Cooper’s mom, putting her famous name on jeans, perfume and whatnot. I was dragging home just as many books about the Vanderbilts, Astors and Rockfellers and their ilk as I was sex and shopping novels from Madames Krantz and Collins. (Blacklight: “So once again you’ve changed how?”). Now I have another person to add to my pantheon of tragic and creative socialites. If there is an afterlife for these talented ladies, I really hope Mary Millicent Abigail Rogers and Doris Duke are welcoming Huguette Marcelle Clark with open arms and a quiet sunny art studio.

So you might have heard of Doris Duke (her family put the Duke in Duke University) and Millicent Rogers (granddaughter of Standard Oil’s Henry Huttleston Rogers) but Huguette Clark? Who she?

Instead of shoving Mr Laptop open to Huguette Clark’s Wikipedia page, I can calmly hand the questioner (let’s say…Blacklight) Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr’s excellent Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune. It’s not one of those doorstops about the Astor or Vanderbilt clan I would pour over as a teenager. But it’s not a cheap and quick tell all either with Gothic horrors detailed in inflammatory language. The very best way I can sum up Empty Mansions is (and I mean this as quite high praise) it’s like one of those amazing profiles Vanity Fair used to run back in the days before Tina Brown and when Dominick Dunne was at the top of his game. The kind of writing that had me saving my allowance so I could buy the multi-year Vanity Fair subscriptions and line them up issue by issue on my bookshelves.

In all my mooning over the lost Gilded Age mansions in New York City, I never heard of the Copper King William A. Clark.  I never realized the grand and insanely wondrous creation he built for himself, second wife and their two young daughters which was torn down just sixteen years after it was built. Or that the first Girl Scout camp was founded after their older daughter Andree died much too young. And that their surviving daughter Huguette would go into relative social seclusion for decades until the descendants of her half siblings from William A. Clark’s first marriage feared the worst had occurred and decided to find out what happened to her.

There are parts of Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune were you’ll shake your head in sheer disbelief. Or feel to make sure your eyes haven’t popped right out of your skull. Huguette Clark wasn’t a Hetty Green, taking extreme measures to save and grow her fortune. Remember the subtitle? Just how Huguette Clark spent her fortune isn’t stinted. Picture the scene, I’m curled up on my bed in Moderate Income Apartments, feeling like a used up SOS pad and reading about how Huguette Clark decided to buy herself a lovely retreat in New Canaan, CT. Which she never lived in or set for in for the whole sixty years she owned it. A retreat with a 5000 square foot bedroom. A retreat were the groundskeeper earned more than my yearly pittance from Company X. This account with lesser writers? Would have me closing the book, stomping into the living room like a baby Godzilla and ranting to Blacklight about the sheer unfairness of the world. But Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr aren’t lesser writers, so I kept reading.

Now remember I mentioned how Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune reminded me of profiles in Vanity Fair? Those profiles always seemed to have a snake in paradise. A caretaker getting too big for their boots. Greedy extended family. Well, the story of Huguette Clark offers both. You have her day nurse/companion Hassadah Peri who ended up getting over $31 million in gifts from Huguette Clark. It makes me wish my mother was alive so I could call her and say “Mom, you were doing the housekeeper thing all wrong” because my mother thought it was amazing to get an extra $50 in her pay packet. She scrubbed toilets on her knees. Nurse Peri? Try walking around with a five million dollar personal check from Huguette Clark. Then you have extended (and yes we are talking about great-nieces and nephews and great-great-nieces and nephews) family who didn’t seem to know if their Auntie Huguette was even okay until they heard she was selling some of her treasures. Now add contested wills and courtroom battles and you have a juicy read better than anything my Company X workers say I have to read (please stop trying to get me to read Fifty Shades and Twilight people, really) .

As much shock and scandal Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune reveals, there is also a human side. Scattered among accounts of wild or unusual spending are remembrances of phone conversation author Paul Clark Newell Jr had with his great-aunt. Because from behind her wall of wealth and privilege Huguette Clark did care about her family and friends even remembering small details. You can feel the warmth and shots of joy she gave to people such as her beloved goddaughter even if she couldn’t let them get closer than the telephone. And at the end, you want to know more about that side of Huguette just as much as you want to know what happened to her estate.

*Note: at the time of publication for Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune, the lawsuits over Huguette Clark’s wills were ongoing. On September 24, 2013, a settlement had been reached with monies going to Huguette Clark’s extended family and her intended arts foundation.

 

Inside Peyton Place

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes when you read a book, you want to fire up the old Literary Time Machine (Blacklight: “Lemme guess, you want to make out with H.P. Lovecraft” Me: <death glare> “No…”) I want to go back to the 1956 and smack away every glass of Canadian Club and 7 UP that Grace Metalious even gave the slightest longing look at. And I also want to frog-march her directly to a competent agent and financial manager and not let her sneak back to The Plaza until every last paper was signed. I wonder if Emily Toth ever had the same crazy thoughts while she was working on Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious. Because let me tell you, out of the Shirley Jackson/Grace Metalious/Jacqueline Susann trio? Grace was the clear winner of the shouldn’t be coveted Most Bleeped Up Her Life title. And we’re talking about some stiff competition because Shirley Jackson and Jacqueline Susann? Lots of Bad Life Choice Theater.

Blacklight: “Who the heck is Grace Metalious again?”

In case you haven’t visited the Grace Metalious page or are my beloved Minecraft addicted spouse Blacklight, Grace Metalious is an author who wrote the mega best seller Peyton Place about the secrets of a small New England. This novel spawned an Oscar nominated movie, several television shows and sequels. If you’re under 40 years old? Your parents or grandparents read Peyton Place in secret, clucking over all the s-e-x. Unless of course you’re my parents. Neither of them read the darn book, even though my mother remembers watching the 1964-1969 prime-time soap opera and “not liking that Allison girl at all”.

Now of course as a wee lass reading Peyton Place, Return to Peyton Place, The Tight White Collar and No Adam in Eden, I had no idea that the lady behind these crumbling paperbacks I found at tag sales died young and broke. Or that we shared a French-Canadian heritage. Grace Metalious just seemed so young and innocent and sad in the iconic “Pandora in Blue Jeans” picture. Nothing like the glamorous leopard clad Jackie Collins whose books I was devouring as fast as Her Collins could produce them. Then one day, after I had a license and realized my library card could be used at any public library in the state, I found Emily Toth’s Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious. And boy oh boy was my image of Grace Metalious shattered.

Grace Metalious’ rise from child of blue collar workers in a New Hampshire mill town to marrying young to living a shack of a rented house  with a dry well to writing the bestseller Peyton Place was like something out of a Hollywood movie. One with Joan Crawford in Adrian gowns at the end. And what happened after the fame and fortune from Peyton Place? Something John Waters and his stable of stars would film with Divine in a sloppy housecoat with booze stains down the front as Grace. How do you just sign over all the film rights to a movie studio without protecting yourself? Or blaze through all your royalties and that sweet $250,000 studio check in less than eight years?

Would you still want to read Peyton Place, Return to Peyton Place, The Tight White Collar and No Adam in Eden after encountering Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious? YES! It’s worth the trouble of tracking them down. Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious adds annotations to the experience. Who knew Grace could have avoid certain legal troubles if she just changed certain character names? Or just how much of her own life was being woven into her books. The quick end coming out of nowhere in No Adam in Eden is easier to understand once you know the circumstances in which the book was written. And after reading Grace’s notes for a third Peyton Place novel, you wonder what could have been if Grace Metalious was able to stay away from the bottle long enough to plop her butt in that lovely office in her dream house and write. A lesser writer than Emily Toth would have sneered at the wreck of Grace Metalious’ life  with all it’s scandals but Emily Toth has the skill make you care as deeply about her subject as she did.