Resort Life, Chapter XXXIII: August - December 1967
Down East + Palm Beach + Naples + Virgin Islands
By Augustus Mayhew
By 1967, Brooke Astor had already made a name for herself. Following her short-lived five-and-one-half year marriage to Vincent Astor, and his ensuing death in 1959, she spent the next more than four decades dispensing as much as $200 million. As head of the Astor Foundation, she became New York’s most generous godmother. Having transformed herself from an interior decorator to a cultural connoisseur and philanthropist, what to wear for a birthday dinner at a Down East cottage was probably second nature, maybe either a Bill Blass or de la Renta style party dress and simply enough diamonds and pearls so she would still sparkle in the thickest Mt. Desert fog.
In addition to Brooke Astor’s cameo at George Garrett’s at-home birthday dinner in Northeast Harbor, Ellen Ordway’s camera and commentary take us to Palm Beach, Little Dix Bay, and Port Royal in Naples. This chapter include a look at Nick and Pat Symington Penniman’s new house, news about Katharine“Kaa” Thompson Wood’s tragic murder in the upstairs bedroom of her “Chateau Country” estate, Elsie Woodward’s viewson Society, and a visit with “Sister” Bingham, Jennie “Jane” Marston Adams Burgard Tibbett Bingham, at Bali Hai in Naples on Florida’s gulf coast. The daughter of investment banker Edgar Lewis Marston and brother of financier Hunter Marston, Jane Bingham’s marriage (her 3rd) to Metropolitan Opera star Lawrence Tibbett once put her in the national spotlight.
August 1967
Northeast Harbor
“George Garrett’s Birthday Dinner Party”
|
