American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post

Historians John Keegan & Martin Gilbert, on C-Span, were discovered to be great lecturers. But both of their anticipated, respective histories - identically-titled, The First World War - bombed, big-time. Nancy Rubin also starred on C-Span in February 2009 with an excellent lecture at Brown University. This time, The Book did not disappoint. AE originally was an after-thought, a player-to-be-named-later purchase on the same day I finally found a copy of Enemy At The Gates in Newport, R.I., in 2005. But after we had returned home from that detestable resort (see peevish diary entry, "Tacky Tourist Trapport"), it remained unread, the reader now leery of the imagined discovery of another weeper - another "Little Gloria, Happy at Last." What a moronic presumption. AE grew on me, steadily. Why, it is hard to say. Marjorie Post herself may have been a firecracker as a party giver/goer, but aside from her business acumen, she displayed little intellectual curiosity & less wit. Inheriting money does not inherently make you an interesting person (except to predators & tabloid editors). And being an eventual expert on frozen foods isn't my idea of someone whose life could have resulted in a spellbinding proposal to a publisher. Two explanations sound right. The book itself was well-written & edited; Rubin's standards were as exacting as those of Rodric Braithwaite (Moscow 1941, A City & Its People At War). It stimulated curiosity. A The New Yorker DVD was activated to reprint the lengthy 1939 profile of Marjorie Post (by Arthur Bartlett; a pleasure to read). And after reading @ Post's short but oft-brutal experience in the 1930s as the American "ambassadress" to the Soviet Union, I further researched the lives & fates of Stalin's endlessly expendable one-time domestic political allies, now accused traitors (absolutely not a pleasure to read). And it's possible that her second husband E.F. Hutton both redirected Post's life away from further orbits of socialite sterility & intrigued Rubin to the point where she felt she could write a book as compelling as AE turned out to be. Had his path not intersected hers, I doubt AE would have published. Her first mate, Ed Close, was a sad combination of a "trophy husband" (yes, it works in reverse!) & a Cigar-Store Indian. Her third, Ambassador & rank political opportunist Joe Davies, was a skank. And the Herb May "episode" was the elegant version of an identical fiasco that would transpire some forty or so years later, in the last decade of Leona Helmsley's tacky, toxically self-centered existence. Two points will end all this. If Post had been such an unquestionably fanatical admirer of royalty - to wit, the English royal family's prestige & traditions - how could she have simultaneously supported the cause of the Soviet Union in World War II, whose people had so unconscionably, brutally murdered the members of its royalty? Had Rubin noticed this? If so, why had she n

Superb biography which open the window (and the door) into Marjorie Merriweather Post's fascinating life - - and shows that "money cannot buy everything" ....