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.)