American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: lady bird, former ambassadress, years the heiress, American Empress, Palm Beach, Battle Creek (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This entrancing biography of Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973)-socialite, businesswoman, Palm Beach, Fla., pacesetter, opulent Washington hostess, philanthropist-is full of high drama, gossip, scandal and international political intrigue. Her father, C.W. (Charles William) Post, cured of "invalidism" at the Battle Creek, Mich., sanatorium of Dr. John Kellogg (inventor of packaged breakfast cereal), went on to develop Postum, a coffee substitute, and Post Toasties cereal. When C.W. killed himself in 1914, Marjorie, his only child, became sole heir of the Postum Cereal Co. With her sexually unfaithful second husband, stockbroker E.F. Hutton, Postum acquired Clarence Birdseye's frozen foods company, General Foods, which, partly through Post's influence as a board member, diversified into a food empire. Her third husband, Washington lobbyist Joseph Davies, became FDR's ambassador to the Soviet Union and helped cement the Soviet-U.S. alliance against Hitler. While living in Russia, Post was appalled at the Soviet police state. She divorced fourth husband Herbert May, a Pittsburgh executive, after a blackmailer's photographers revealed his homosexuality. Rubin, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, limns a warm, generous Christian Scientist, an imperious, perfectionist mother of three daughters, a down-to-earth woman who held square-dance parties and peppered her speech with expletives. Photos not seen by PW. First serial to Town & Country.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Rubin (Isabella of Castile, LJ 10/15/91) here delivers a sympathetic yet balanced biography of one of the 20th century's wealthiest women. Post inherited her fortune at the age of 27 from her father, C.W. Post, an early leader in the dry cereals industry. Her event-filled life, which included four marriages and dealings with many of the world's business and political leaders, was characterized both by generosity and extravagance. By contemporary standards, the role she played in shaping the development of General Foods seems less than extraordinary but was progressive by the standards of her day. Rubin successfully portrays the many facets of Post's life (philanthropist, socialite, mother, wife) and the high-society world in which she lived. A work with general appeal; recommended for popular history and business collections.
Mark McCullough, Heterick Lib., Ohio Northern Univ., Ada
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: IUniverse (January 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0595301460
• ISBN-13: 978-0595301461
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #52,227 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Empress by Nancy Rubin Stuart, February 21, 2007

By	Sonia Ibanez (NEW YORK, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't Marry A Cigar Store Indian, September 22, 2009

By	Don Reed "Don" (Cliffside Park NJ) - See all my reviews

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...