America Heritage
Grande Dame of Palm Beach
T BY BILL HOFFMANN
he story of marjorie Merriweather Post — the beautiful heiress to the Post cereal fortune who built Mar-
a-Lago, the famed Florida mansion now owned by former President Don- ald Trump — is the stuff of fi rst-rate fi ction. Post ruled as the Grande
Dame of Palm Beach for near- ly half a century, entertain- ing world leaders, industrial- ists and celebrities, heading a multi-million- dollar food business and becoming one of the nation’s great philanthropists. And that made her a natural for best-
POST
selling author Allison Pataki, who has written The Magnifi cent Lives of Mar- jorie Post, an epic re-imagining of the life and times of the once-wealthiest woman in America. “This is a woman who lived through
so many of the momentous periods of the 20th century,’’ Pataki, daughter of former New York Gov. George Pataki, told Newsmax Magazine. “She lived a long, incredibly mean- ingful life with cameos from some great
Marjorie Merriweather Post Richest Woman
in America ▪ She pioneered America’s frozen food industry with her acquisition of Birds Eye.
New book reveals the incredible life of cereal heiress who built Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.
historical fi gures — everyone from Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roos- evelt to John F. Kennedy to Ziegfeld to Winston Churchill.” Her book, written in Marjorie’s own
voice, begins with the only child of breakfast cereal magnate C.W. Post being born March 15, 1887, in Springfi eld, Ill., where as a young girl she helped glue cereal boxes in her father’s barn. In 1914, her dad, plagued
by ill health, took his own life with a self-infl icted gunshot, leaving Marjorie, just 27, in
control of the Post business empire. She would turn out to be a brilliant businesswoman, snapping up brands such as Jell-O, Maxwell House and Hellman’s Mayonnaise and renaming her company General Foods. She also dove into philanthropy,
funding a U.S. Army Hospital in World War I France, establishing a Salvation Army food camp in Depression-Era New York City and helping countless charities. But Marjorie achieved the most noto-
riety as the Grande Dame of Palm Beach society when, during the Roar- ing 20s, she built Mar-a-Lago, a breathtaking blend of Span- ish, Venetian, and Portuguese architecture with 126 rooms, 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms and 12 fi replaces on 17 acres overlooking the Atlantic. It became a pivotal gather-
ing place of the world’s wealth- iest industrialists, politicians, celebrities, sports fi gures and artists — and the site of lav-
34 NEWSMAX | APRIL 2022
▪ She leased her 360-foot, German- built yacht Sea Cloud to the U.S. Navy for $1 a year during World War II.
▪ In 1968 she off ered Mar-a-Lago as a gift to the nation to be used as a winter White House, but President Lyndon Johnson deemed it too expensive to maintain.
▪ Then valued at $2 million, the property employed among its maintenance staff 22 year-round gardeners tasked with, among other things, moving 10,000 potted plants indoors to greenhouses when Post was not in residence.
ish, some would say decadent, costume balls and galas. Sadly though, her personal life was
less than successful — with four mar- riages and divorces. “She said, ‘I had many beautiful
things — but in love, I was just never lucky,’” says Pataki. Her fi rst marriage to Edward Ben-
nett Close, a lawyer, war hero and blue- blooded son of one of the founding families of Greenwich, Conn., sputtered after he returned home from the battle- fi elds of France during World War I. She was said to have caught her
second spouse, self-made millionaire fi nancier E.F. Hutton, cheating on her. She and her third, lawyer Joseph
Davies, were having too many fi ghts. And her fourth, Westinghouse execu- tive Herbert May was caught cavorting nude with young men poolside at Mar- a-Lago. When Mrs. Post died in 1973 at age 86, she left three homes and about $200 million.
The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post by Allison Pataki is published by Ballantine.
POST/GEORGE RINHART/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES / MAR-A-LAGO/STEVE STARR/CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES
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