Customer Reviews

American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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Superb biography which open the window (and the door) into Marjorie Merriweather Post's fascinating life - - and shows that "money cannot buy everything" ....

Marjorie Merriweather Post enjoyed an exalted existence. But thanks to her father, C.P., through hard work and diligence, she acquired not only a sound business sense but came to understand that with privilege comes responsibility to others. Once the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Russia, Marjorie will forever be known as a kind, compassionate philanthropist who shared her love of culture, art and beauty with the rest of us.
"American Empress" is a page turning read about one of the world's most fascinating women.
Carol Smilgin

While I don't agree with other reviewers about the book being particularly well written, the story of this woman's life and the United States history that ocurred during her lifetime is well worth reading. Think about this, in 1914, less than 100 years ago, Marjorie was the majority shareholder of the corporation she inherited and yet had to be represented by her then-husband on the Board of Directors because she was a woman. She was a fascinating topic, led an amazing life through interesting times in U.S. history and I do think the book is well researched. I don't want to take anything away from the author's efforts but I found myself wishing time and again that a Laura Hillebrand (sp.?) who beautifully wrote Seabiscuit or someone like that had turned their attention to Marjorie Merriwether Post.

Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973) led a long and interesting life that encompassed two world wars, three daughters and four marriages. I generally do not enjoy reading biography as too often it can be a dry recital of the trivia of someone's life, but I have to say that Nancy Rubin in her biography of Mrs. Post, titled AMERICAN EMPRESS, has done a wonderful job in making it interesting. There was much I did not know about Mrs. Post. I didn't realize that she grew up in Battle Creek Michigan, or that her father was an entrepreneur. All I knew about her was her wonderful collection of Russian porcellain and religious icons that are in the museum that used to be her home, here in Washington DC.

It is odd to reflect now, here in the 21st century, how people used to rush into marriage. Mrs. Post was married four times. I could understand why she married Edward Close (she was only eighteen), E. F. Hutton (he was the love of her life) and Joe Davies (he was interesting), but I must say I didn't see the point of her marriage to Herbert May. But then women were made to feel that they couldn't go out if they didn't have some sort of male companion, and although her daughters encouraged her not to marry her male escorts, she herself was of an era when rigid notions of male-female relations prevailed.

Marjorie never did have much luck with husbands. She divorced two of them for infidelity, and the other two because, in their different ways, they cramped her style. Many of her friends speculated about why she was never happy for long in her marriages.
One of her friends remarked, "Marjorie, you could run General Motors. You could run U.S. Steel. You could run anything. You're the smartest woman I know. But why do you have so much trouble with husbands?"
"Clare, I honestly don't know. Ain't it hell?" Marjorie is reported to have replied.

But the answer of course is that from the fact that you have formidable organizational skills and a steel-trap mind - as Marjorie did - it doesn't at all follow that you will have a happy marriage. Because what is needed is a totally different kind of intelligence, what we now refer to as EQ or emotional intelligence.

This is not to say that Marjorie didn't have any EQ - she had good relationships with all three of her daughters - but she didn't have enough of it to offset all of her millions.

Because those millions, in my opinion, lay at the heart of all of her problems with her husbands. Four stars.

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 not commented on this striking fact?

And as for any authors past who, unlike Rubin, may have plagiarized the sterling, dusty work of TNY writers (then stored in the silent recesses of seldom-consulted library files) - never dreaming that someday, the entire contents of every issue of the magazine would be instantly available on DVDs - one can imagine their new-found dread of the inevitable detection of their theft.

Having said that, I would like to apologize to my college history professors...