Before Taylor Swift Bought Her House, Rebekah Harkness’s Parties Were the Stuff of Legend
A closer look at the fabulous Rhode Island heiress’s unforgettable midcentury soirees
There was a time when famed hedonistic hostess Rebekah Harkness despised parties. “These stuffy society functions represented everything she hated,” writes Craig Unger in Blue Blood—the definitive biography of Harkness, an American heiress, socialite and arts patron best known to this generation for inspiring Taylor Swift’s 2020 song “The Last Great American Dynasty.”
In 1933, Swift’s muse was an 18-year-old debutante and already one the most famous (and most rebellious) women in St. Louis, Missouri. According to Unger’s book, with her inner circle by her side—a self-proclaimed “Bitch Pack” of finishing school rebels prone to partying until dawn—Harkness once arrived at a party by climbing onto the roof and sliding down the chimney, she hijacked cars for joyrides, swore and skinny-dipped, and, to the absolute horror of her conservative stockbroker father, performed a semi-striptease on a dining room table.
She set a high bar for partying, and a century later—in Harkness’s own decadent Rhode Island mansion, which Swift bought in 2013 with nearly $18 million in cash—the singer and her “Friend Squad” have kept the flame alive. Swift’s once-annual Fourth of July “Taymerica” bash has featured matching swimsuits, a blow-up waterslide, fireworks, and karaoke. But that’s downright quaint compared to the opulent shindigs and fabled debauchery of the home’s previous owner.
How did Harkness earn her crown as society set’s preferred party-thrower and literal host with the most? With the “Shake It Off” singer’s much-anticipated wedding quickly approaching, we look back at Rebekah Harkness’s own legendary Holiday House parties.
How did a middle-class divorcée do it?
At 24, Betty West—as Harkness was known at the time—met and married photographer Dickson Pierce. Her not-so-great reason to tie the knot? Because, by her own admission, she “had nothing else to do.”
She wasn’t wrong. Being the family’s third child and second daughter, third-wheel Betty was neither her family’s heir nor their best chance at climbing the social ladder through an advantageous match. When she expressed interest in the arts and landed a small role in the Chicago Opera Company’s staging of Aida, Betty’s father saw a disgusting display to be immediately vetoed. Meanwhile, as Unger writes, “the idea of a woman going to college was frowned upon, a career was out of the question, [and] even the men were not really supposed to work.” It looked like marriage was indeed Betty’s only option, though six years and two children later, she was filing for divorce.
The following summer, Betty and her kids headed to her family’s longtime summer home in Watch Hill, on the most southwestern point of Rhode Island. Though not quite as swanky as nearby Newport, Watch Hill residents spent summer days golfing and yachting, and summer nights attending each other’s black-tie dinners. That season’s most exciting addition, arriving via his 81-foot yacht, Unger notes, was the handsome and unfathomably rich bachelor William Hale Harkness: 15 years Rebekah’s elder, and also newly divorced. (And embarrassingly so; his first wife had very publicly left him for actor Robert Montgomery, father of Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery.)
Betty was clever, lively, well-bred, and attractive—blond, tall and whippet thin, thanks to dance and diets. Within a few months, Harkness had proposed, and Betty’s social stock skyrocketed beyond anyone’s imagination. As Swift sings it, “Bill was the heir to the Standard Oil name…and money”—a succinct understatement of the actual Harkness family fortune. Though estimations vary, in Blue Blood Unger indicates that their net worth was somewhere around $250 million in 1987 dollars, more than $700 million today. A mere fraction of that money bought their now famous Holiday House, a 12,000-square-foot Colonial-style mansion perched high atop the bluff of the village’s namesake hill.
Betty from St. Louis soon rebranded herself as the more sophisticated sounding Rebekah West Harkness. And at least for a while, she tried to behave. “There was no running around or kicking up her heels, Bill told her, and she complied,” writes Unger. For seven years, Rebekah acted the part of a perfect society wife and mother, albeit secretly dying her hair and topping up her drinks with gin. She may have continued this way indefinitely. Instead, both her stern father and her controlling husband passed away within a couple of years—leaving the new widow with roughly $27 million (more than $330 million today), the best real estate in town, and no one to tell her what she couldn’t do.
The parties were tasteful, if a little loud
Rebekah’s chaperoneless parties at Holiday House became legendary, starting immediately with her husband’s unconventional funeral. Unger quotes one attendee comparing the not-so-solemn service to “an MGM special, a huge marvellous Watch Hill cocktail party.” Visitors queued at the door to gain entry. “No one would have missed it for the world.”
Though her husband’s death made national news, decorum kept details of this “cocktail party”—and all the others—strictly under wraps. “This was a time when, as I was always reminded as a little boy, the only time you’re in the newspaper is when you’re born, when you get married, and when you die,” says Keith Stokes, Rhode Island’s historian laureate. “Otherwise, stay out of the newspaper.”
But like most conventions at the time, Rebekah didn’t subscribe. Even before her husband’s death, announcements of her parties and their honoured guests regularly appeared in The Providence Journal. After his death, the paper was invited inside. Harkness appeared on the front page of the Journal’s Home Section in 1957, showing off renovations to her more-than-30-room, 7-kitchen, 21-bath mansion. She posed for photos on the staircase, while composing at her grand piano, and during a dance class with her private live-in teacher. “The Arts Enliven a Watch Hill Estate,” read the headline.
That’s one way to put her deliberate disruption of the status quo. “Newport was a destination resort for elite families since the late colonial era,” says Stokes. The Astors and the Vanderbilts tend to hog the narrative—and the screen time in shows like HBO’s The Gilded Age—which has solidified the region’s Gatsbyesque reputation. “But by the 1950s, Newport’s heyday was over, and many of those mansions were closed.” As the old regime was fading, Harkness helped herald in the new by filling her home not with the usual uppercrust society—people she loathed—but with a community of hard-partying artists, musicians, writers, painters, and dancers, a group which Rebekah desperately aspired to join. “When she decided to become a patron of the arts,” reported The Providence Journal, “her mother said, ‘Dear, why don’t you just see a psychiatrist?’”
For the next twenty years, Rebekah’s get-togethers welcomed a revolving door of famous artists and performers, including Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, and Gene Kelly. They attended countless cocktail, dance, pool, and yacht parties that spared no detail or expense. Unger recounts how, at her daughter Terry’s 1962 debutante ball, for example, 350 socialites from all over the globe boarded a boat decked out with palm trees and grass huts, danced to music from an orchestra led by Lester Lanin (in tiki costume) and took home signed napkins from Dalí as party favors. For Terry’s wedding, which she hosted for hundreds of guests, Harkness decorated an American LaFrance fire engine with flowers and paraded the wedding party through town. Rumor has it that Rebekah cleaned the swimming pool with Dom Pérignon and filled her fish tank with Scotch whiskey—to pep the fish up, she said. (Instead, they died.) Even her cat ate filet mignon, Unger mentions.
A marvellous time ruining everything
It would be all too easy to dismiss Rebekah Harkness as a 20th-century Marie Antoinette. But unlike the clueless French queen, Harkness was keenly aware of her privilege and revelled in her position’s ridiculousness. One particularly fun party trick went this way: “She dressed up as a maid passing out drinks, eavesdropping on conversations and winking at those in the know,” writes Unger. All too cognizant that many people were after her money, on another occasion, she literally served it up in a cake: “When the guests cut into their portions, they found that she had wrapped ten-dollar bills in aluminum foil and dropped them into the batter.” Once everyone caught on, she sarcastically quipped, “Now who wants seconds?”
Harkness’s antics made a mockery of the social world around her, and her neighbors weren’t pleased to be the butt of her jokes. In 1966, a battle with the local zoning board over an outdoor ballet stage with an inflatable roofcovering (so the dancers could also pirouette in the winter) went all the way to the Rhode Island Supreme Court. Another feud inspired Swift to write that Rebekah “stole his dog and dyed it key-lime green.” (In fact, Unger explains, “he” was a “she,” the “dog” was a “cat”, and Harkness never got caught for the prank.) Her increasingly eccentric entourage widened to include psychics and mystics, spiritual consultants and “Dr Feelgoods,” as Unger calls them in a New York magazine article, who provided Harkness with various chemical pick-me-ups.
Booze and drugs had always flowed freely at Holiday House, but by the late 1960s, Harkness was in her mid-50s, and finding it harder and harder to keep up with her own parties. Unger explains how she often traveled with a bag full of injectable drugs, some not approved in the US, said to be anything from testosterone to pregnant cow serum to Seconal. The “Vitamin B-12 shots” often injected into Harkness and her dancers were probably amphetamines. But when combined with too many of her favorite “Pink Drink” cocktails, made with Bacardi and grenadine, they still failed to perk up the aging socialite. One night, writes Unger, Harkness got so drunk during a dinner party that she fell asleep face-first into her mashed potatoes. She still invited endless guests to elaborate dinners, but began excusing herself and not coming back to the soiree, all while the party roared on without her.
By 1973, having lived by her own rules for a long time at Holiday House, an aging Harkness in increasingly poor health finally decided to downsize from her beloved Watch Hill home. She left as she arrived: with speed and drama. Harkness vowed never to return, threatening to sell to equally unwelcome buyers like Frank Sinatra, the estate of Martin Luther King Jr., or Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead, the property was sold to the Watch Hill Association to protect it from development—and then to the future Mrs. Travis Kelce in 2013.
Swift and Kelce’s top-secret, star-studded summer wedding, should it happen at their Watch Hill home, will inevitably be a marvelous time. But unless there’s a pool of champagne, Rebekah’s reign as Holiday House’s wildest hostess will endure.
