Stephen Greco's Blog: Over a Cocktail or Two - Posts Tagged "barbarahutton"

I'm thrilled to say that my new book, The Last American Heiresses, is now available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The pub date in March, 2025.

"A dazzling novel based on the real, ultra-glamorous lives of Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, the public rivalry that defined them, and the secret bond that sustained them both, from the author of the acclaimed Such Good Friends.

"Interweaving past and present, filled with sumptuous details from an age of excess, Stephen Greco’s novel is also a mesmerizing story about the nature of celebrity and the transformative power of friendship."

It was a lot of fun to research and write this one, which spans eighty years and imagines the kind of friendship/rivalry that might have secretly existed between these uniquely privileged women... behind the headlines, as it were.

A little teaser excerpt from Chapter 22, of The Last American Heiresses:

It was after running into each other in Venice, in early June, 1957, at a costume party given by Elsa Maxwell on the rooftop of the Danieli Hotel, that Doris and Barbara decided on the spur of the moment to voyage together later that month to New York, where they were both expected: Doris by a current beau, Joey Castro, a handsome young jazz pianist who was then based mostly in Los Angeles and had gotten a brief gig in a New York club; and Barbara by her sixth husband, Gottfried von Cramm, with whom she’d be going on to Mexico, to the Japanese-style house that she was building in Cuernavaca. In order to spend a few days catching up more or less privately, the women decided to sail, and Doris insisted on their going on the SS United States, the most modern ocean liner of the time, “the incarnation of our global superiority since the war.”

Stealthily and separately, Doris and Barbara made their way to Le Havre and boarded the ship unobtrusively, unnoticed by the press. For herself, Doris had procured the ship’s most luxurious accommodations, the Duck Suite, which comprised two bedrooms and a spacious parlor, decorated in an uncluttered, fashionably contemporary style, with gold-leafed aluminum wall panels featuring delicately painted vignettes with ducks. She was traveling with her companion May McFarland, who several years before had taken over Doris’s Independent Aid charity, after dear Pansy died. Barbara had taken one of the ship’s fourteen other first-class suites for herself and her new favorite beau, Jimmy Douglas—a handsome young American, eighteen years her junior, whom she’d met at Maxwell’s party. Both women were so well-known that it was possible they’d be recognized by at least some on board, but in an effort to minimize unwanted fuss, May had seen to it that the ship’s passenger list would identify these first-class travelers as “Miss May McFarland and maid” and “Mr. and Mrs. James Henderson Douglas.” It was “Mrs. Douglas” who deposited with the purser a jewel case containing necklaces, bracelets, and earrings, but not the enormous thirty-eight-carat diamond ring that she wore practically every day; and it was “Miss McFarland’s maid” who was delighted to learn that she could stash her mistress’s jewels in the Duck Suite’s own safe.

Dinner on the first night was informal…

An excerpt from Chapter 12, of The Last American Heiresses:

The pleasure palace called Shangri La that Doris built on Oahu, on the other side of Diamond Head from Honolulu, was inspired by the art and architecture of the Near East and Far East. But rather than strictly historical, its design reflected a mix of styles including Moghul, Seljuk, and Ottoman, as well as faux versions of those styles. The project began in 1935, when Doris and Cromwell were on their honeymoon trip around the world, which had been planned to take four weeks and wound up lasting nine months, culminating with a long stay in the United States territory of Hawaii. Lush and fragrant, populated with warm and friendly people, Hawaii seemed to offer more privacy and relaxation than Doris had previously been aware of needing. Instantly she felt at home there. From their suite at the Royal Hawaiian, she and Cromwell spent weeks roaming the island, looking for a suitable place to build, until at last they found a spot that sang to them, a promontory overlooking the Pacific in Honolulu’s exclusive Black Point residential neighborhood. Doris hired architect Marion Sims Wyeth, the same architect who had designed Mar-a-Lago, to work with her on the house’s design. She also bought a large, dockside warehouse on Honolulu Harbor, which would function as a depository for all the larger, museum-level Islamic artifacts and architectural elements she was buying or commissioning from artists, artisans, workshops, and dealers in India, Iran, Morocco, Spain, and the like.

When finished, Shangri La was basically a modernist house onto which all these elements had been applied. The interior was a fantasy-like succession of dazzling salons, terraces, courtyards, and pavilions, whose tranquil atmosphere was enhanced by delicately carved marble wall screens, inlaid with semiprecious stones in floral patterns; lattice-work windows admitting jewel-like beams of light through panes that shimmered in pink and green and lavender; florid mosaic panels depicting mythical gardens; soaring antique columns; massively scaled carved wood doors; elaborately coffered and painted ceilings; an oak floor imported from a sixteenth-century French château; an eleventh-century Moorish mantelpiece purchased from William Randolph Hearst. . . . It may have been located in a territory that was known as a playground for the rich, but for Doris, this was no vacation house. Shangri La was a refuge, a retreat far from New York nightclubs and newspapers, which is why she named it after the legendary domain of beauty and harmony where people did not grow old, as described in the popular 1937 movie of the same name and the 1933 novel by James Hilton that the movie was based on.

“This is the heart of the house,” said Doris, on a small detour through her own bedroom suite. The sitting room featured a small fountain with a delicate acequia—or Moorish-style water channel set into the floor—streaming out to a pool in Doris’s private lanai, which gave onto a larger terraced garden that was built around a lily pond. Her octagonal bathroom of white marble accented with jade featured a fancifully vaulted ceiling, studded with tiny mirrors, worthy of a palace or temple.

“Don’t worry—your bathroom is nice, too,” said Doris, noticing Barbara looking up in wonder. “This one is Moghul. The one in the guesthouse where I’m putting you is Moorish—from a twelfth-century palace in Córdoba….”