Mission to Sun Valley
MANNERS & MORALS
In 1935 Joseph E. Davies, distinguished lawyer and socialite, crossed the Atlantic, walked into his wife's suite in London's Claridge's Hotel. Mrs. Davies hurried forward affectionately to greet him, but Joe held her back with a dramatic gesture. "Emlen," he intoned to his wife of 33 years, "I want my freedom." She replied: "Why certainly, Joe." Soon Emlen divorced Joe Davies. At about the same time, Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton, the Post Toasties heiress, divorced Edward Hutton, her second husband (the first: Edward Close).
The 1935 wedding of Joe and Marjorie Davies was a $100,000 affair in her 66-room Manhattan apartment. Everything was pink; she gave the caterer a swatch from her wedding gown material, and he matched it perfectly in the cake icing. Marjorie was 48 and Joe was 59. They embarked on a West Indies honeymoon cruise aboard her yacht, the Sea Cloud, manned by a crew of 75.
Out of the Freeze. F.D.R. appointed Joe Davies Ambassador to Moscow, a tour of duty (1936-38) which resulted in the second worst book ever written about Russia,* his bestselling, rose-spectacled, Mission to Moscow.
During the drab Moscow months Marjorie bore up bravely, fortified by the two tons of frozen food which she imported from the U.S. both to fill out her menus and to display American technical progress. (The Russians were amazed that anyone would freeze food on purpose.) Marjorie was delighted when Davies was transferred to Belgium as U.S. ambassador. "Thank God," cried she. "It's got a king."
Back in Washington during the war years, Joe Davies became the oracle of Soviet-American friendship, and Marjorie gave some of the capital's gaudiest parties at their 29-acre estate, Tregaron, where the hothouses sprouted 80 kinds of orchids. The Davies were a famous waltz team. But all idyls have an end. In 1950, at 63, Marjorie took up square dancing. Joe never learned how.
Out of Illusion. Last summer Marjorie rented an English castle without Joe, but came back to Tregaron for a glittering round of parties. Then Marjorie, who had announced her departure on a world cruise, went instead last January to Sun Valley, Idaho.
Last week Marjorie, as well-preserved at 67 as a deep-frozen peach, appeared in an Idaho courtroom. Joe, she said, has "a funny lack of basic straight thinking that was awfully hard to live with." Moreover, he was always accusing her of making passes at other men. Once, she declared, she leaned out of her box at Madison Square Garden to congratulate Industrialist Henry Kaiser for his speech to a war-bond rally. "I was kept up half the night wrangling over this -- that I was making a pass at him [Kaiser]." Joe put up no defense in the Idaho court, and the divorce was granted.
At week's end, her maiden name restored, Marjorie Merriweather Post, as she now prefers to be known, entrained for New York and her new apartment at the Ambassador Hotel. Gossip columnists guessed that she might marry again* --perhaps the hotel's noble-born president, Serge Obolensky, who said he was flattered by the rumor but blamed it on the fact that he eats Post Toasties for breakfast.
* The worst: Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. * Between them, Joe and Marjorie Davies and their six daughters, three each by former marriages, have been married 20 times. Her daughters have had ten husbands; Adelaide Close married 1) Thomas W. Durant, 2) Merrall MacNeille and 3) Augustus Riggs IV; Eleanor Close married 1) Preston Sturges, 2) Etienne Marie Robert Gautier, 3) George Curtis Rand, 4) Hans Habe, 5) Owen D. Johnson and 6) Leon Barzin; Nedenia Hutton married Stanley M. Rumbough Jr. The Davies daughters have wed six times: Eleanor married 1) Thomas P. Cheeseborough Jr. and 2) ex-Senator Millard Tydings; Rahel married 1) Aldace Walker 2) Burdette M. Fitch and 3) Fontaine Broun; Emlen married Robert Grosjean.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.