GREAT NEWS! Taylor Swift tells the story of "The Last Great American Dynasty" in her Folklore track about one of the wealthiest women in America, Rebekah West Harkness. Failed to report flower. We have 2 volunteers within ten miles of your requested photo location. Your suggestions can be as general or specific as you like, from “Life” to “Compact Cars and Trucks” to “A Subspecies of Capybara Called Hydrochoerus Isthmius.” We’ll get our writers on it because we want to create articles on the topics you’re interested in. Her reason was chilling. Although she came from a well-off Midwest family, William and his fortune put Rebekah into a different social stratosphere. We’ve updated the security on the site. This memorial has been copied to your clipboard. You need a Find a Grave account to add things to this site. When Joffrey refused to perform the schlock, Rebekah’s revenge was brutal. She was 67 years old. Rebekah West Harkness, a philanthropist who gave millions to the dance and to medicine, died of cancer Thursday in her Manhattan home. Everyone advised her to get her affairs in order, but as we’ll soon see, things didn’t work out so neatly for Rebekah Harkness in the end. Friends who knew Rebekah and William said that although the oil tycoon was a bit of an idiot, the new Mrs. Harkness was actually “scared of him”—and for good reason. Did Mommy and Daddy notice? If Harkness’s lovers are anything to go by, she was a wildcat in the bedroom. Although William Harkness came from a well-respected family that was supposed to give Rebekah even more of the status she craved, William himself was…a total fool. In the 1960s, Harkness became well known as a philanthropist and patron of the arts. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Thanks for your time! If a new volunteer signs up in your requested photo location, they may see your existing request and take the photo. Rebekah Harkness stars in Taylor Swift's song "The Last Great American Dynasty." The reason behind this is pure cruelty. Swift bought Harkness’s Rhode Island “Holiday House” in 2013 and used the near-palatial estate to throw her own lavish parties, notably her “Taymerica” July 4th bashes. She was to look back on her comfortable upbringing with wry humor, reflecting that the finishing school to which she had been sent ''offered a lot of fox hunting'' and that she had been married to Dickson Pierce, the first of her three husbands, because she ''had nothing else to do.'' People reported that Harkness’s lavish marble bathrooms were often splattered with blood, and that her muscles had begun to calcify. Their Rhode Island estate, Holiday House, was the site of some raucous Gatsby-esque parties: Blue Blood recalls that Harkness once filled her pool with Dom Perignon (which, oddly, was not the only liberty she took with libations: it’s also said she put scotch in her fish tank). Well, Harkness couldn’t bear to be upstaged, so she unceremoniously fired Rhodes and doomed her own precious ballet company in the process. But some called it all a PR stunt. In Swift's latest track, she teases Harkness for "losing on card game bets with Dalí," the famous Surrealist artist. When she was still just a young girl, the Harknesses noticed that their Betty was putting on weight, so they signed the “pudgy” girl up for dance and figure skating lessons to help her shed those unsightly pounds. Photograph by John Rawlings. So what did she do? Your Scrapbook is currently empty. Rebekah had always been well-off as a child—as you might guess from the string of nannies who raised her—but marrying William Harkness thrust her into an entirely different tier of high society. Reportedly, the baby Angel innocently pulled a ribbon from Harkness’s perfectly coifed hair. A philanthropist. When we do, we depend on our loyal, helpful readers to point out how we can do better. The end came swift, fast, and brutal for Harkness. GREAT NEWS! The pair was horribly mismatched, with Lauersen a whopping 20 years younger than his bride. Use the links under “See more…” to quickly search for other people with the same last name in the same cemetery, city, county, etc. The train wreck was now chugging along, and it wouldn’t stop until Harkness took her last breath. Please try again later. That's how she was commonly regarded before marrying William Hale Harkness, the heir to the Standard Oil fortune. She also composed music for the ballet companies she sponsored, according to local Connecticut newspaper The Day. Before she passed, the socialite spent $250,000 to commission a bedazzled urn from none other than Salvador Dali. A philanthropist. Swift heavily focused on this facet of her celebrity life when she took on a darker alter ego for her Reputation album, a cathartic body of work where she scrutinized the media for always publicly scrutinizing her life. In a matter of years, her life would go from classy to just plain messy. Not long after Rebekah’s passing, her daughter Edith finally managed to succeed in her suicide attempts. The St. Louis-born patron of the arts has many more titles to her name than "middle-class divorcée," which Swift calls her in the first verse. In 1964, she founded the Harkness Ballet, converting an East Side mansion to a luxuriously decorated headquarters, with studio and performing facilities. William, 15 years her senior, saw Rebekah as a “naughty child” in need of a spanking. Harkness definitely wasn’t the most fiscally-responsible business woman, but she does have the distinction of being the strangest girl-boss in history. Not only did her ballet collapse, her whole family did as well. She was born Rebekah Semple West in 1915 to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri. 6 Things to Know About Rebekah Harkness, the Muse Behind Taylor Swift's 'The Last Great American Dynasty' By Heran Mamo. Let’s just…, The Truth Always Comes Out: Dark Family Secrets Exposed, Entrancing Facts About Madame de Pompadour, France's Most Powerful Mistress, Tragic Facts About Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s First Wife, 42 Devious Facts About Margaret of Anjou, The Villain Queen Of England, 42 Militant Facts About War Machines in History, 42 Unveiled Facts About The Secrets Of Russia's Winter Palace. William was rolling in money, which made him the perfect candidate for Rebekah’s expensive tastes. We do not have any photo volunteers within fifty miles of your requested photo location. Harkness pulled this prank at her own sister’s debutante ball. Remove advertising from a memorial by sponsoring it for just $5. Year should not be greater than current year. But the dancers - among them Helgi Tomasson, now a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet - were highly praised, as was the school. You are only allowed to leave one flower per day for any given memorial. As she aged, Rebekah started to live off of “champagne and injections,” including testosterone and an assortment of pain medications. What's Your Favorite Song on Taylor Swift's 'Folklore'? No clan is left untouched, and even families that seem happy and normal on…. She loved to pour Dom Perignon into her pool and let guests swim around in the bubbly. For what it’s worth, Allen called the years he spent in the clinker—and away from his mother—the “happiest of his life.”. Before his death in August 1954, they had one child together, Edith Hale Harkness. Its elevator shaft, painted with lifelike allegorical figures that slid in and out of view from the moving, open elevator cage, has long been a topic of amused discussion in the dance world, as were similar paintings over and around the proscenium of the Harkness Theater, described by one dance critic as a ''dream house for dancers. She married her second husband, Standard Oil heir William Hale Harkness, in 1947. We have set your language to Salinger had the perfect stories for her music, so one day she disguised herself as a cleaning lady, knocked on his door, then tried to convince him to let her use his fiction. And when the time came to put Harkness into the Chalice of Life, the plot thickened. At least once, Harkness and her friends got up on a banquet table and performed a strip tease for the distinguished guests around them. Sheesh, it’s not wonder Rebekah turned out to be a nightmare when she grew up. Harkness drew glares for her parties at Holiday House, as did Swift: Who could forget the frenzy over her celeb-studded Fourth of July bash? She once demanded Castelli to, “Kiss me. Now she has one more posthumous title: muse. Verify and try again. The Folklore singer-songwriter touches on Harkness' blissful, exposed recklessness in the chorus of "The Last Great American Dynasty": "And they said/ There goes the last great American dynasty/ Who knows, if she never showed up, what could've been/ There goes the most shameless woman this town has ever seen/ She had a marvelous time ruining everything.