She dyed chocolate mousse blue. You can still file a request but no one will be notified. Meanwhile, in her apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, people who called themselves Rebekah Harkness's friends were pillaging, ''grabbing things right and left.''. Saint Louis, St. Louis City, Missouri, USA, Manhattan, New York County (Manhattan), New York, USA. Rebekah Harkness, who also went by Betty, was the previous owner of Taylor Swift's Rhode Island home and serves as the inspiration for the third track on her latest album Harkness died of stomach cancer in her Manhattan home on June 17, 1982. Quickly see who the memorial is for and when they lived and died and where they are buried. She had spent the 1987 equivalent of $38 million on a failed enterprise. Craig Unger, a former editor at New York magazine, appears to be dazzled by all this, although it is sometimes hard to tell whether his breathlessness arises from approval, disapproval, sadness, awe or simple bewilderment. Thanks for your help! ''You see,'' she said. The resulting damages to … There she delighted, as she wrote in her scrapbook, in setting out to ''do everything bad. Harkness completely remodeled Holiday House, their Rhode Island mansion. A terrible story is told here. Translation on Find a Grave is an ongoing project. In 1957, Harkness keeled over at Holiday House while sitting for a sculpture Rebekah was working on, dead from a heart attack. Rebekah Harkness asked. We do not have any photo volunteers within fifty miles of your requested photo location. ). We have a volunteer within ten miles of your requested photo location. Try again later. GREAT NEWS! Rebekah Harkness in 1966, Taylor Swift in 2020. Soon Clive Barnes was writing that the Harkness Ballet had ''descended beyond the necessity of serious consideration,'' and in 1975 it folded. Her daughter Terry hired Roy Cohn in a (failed) attempt to have her will invalidated. For a time, Rebekah Harkness appeared to be enamored of the passive child, called Angel. You need a Find a Grave account to add things to this site. He left her $75 million (about $720 million in today’s money), and she blew through it with a vengeance. He likes to talk about blowing people away. After her husband’s death, Harkness renovated the home she owned in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. Flowers added to the memorial appear on the bottom of the memorial or here on the Flowers tab. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Your new password must contain one or more uppercase and lowercase letters, and one or more numbers or special characters. You have chosen this person to be their own family member. Blue Blood is a story of tragic proportions. 7/27/2020. Following her death, a memorial was held at the family home before Harkness was cremated, and her ashes were placed in a $250,000 spinning urn designed by Salvador Dalí, then placed in the Harkness Mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery. Jack Mitchell Getty Images Rebekah was also married four times, founded an eponymous arts foundation, and sponsored Robert Joffrey's ballet troupe for … '', This post-mortem mischief was going on at Harkness House, the East 75th Street town house headquarters of the Harkness Ballet Foundation, which Mrs. Harkness had modeled on the St. Petersburg Ballet School. Please try again later. Thanks for using Find a Grave, if you have any feedback we would love to hear from you. Rebekah West Harkness (April 17, 1915 – June 17, 1982) also known as Betty Harkness, was an American composer, sculptor, dance patron, and philanthropist who founded the Harkness Ballet. Composer, Sculptor, Philanthropist. Photos larger than 8Mb will be reduced. I am beginning to think that biography, especially the biography of such a chaotic personality as Rebekah Harkness, needs to be molded and informed by a novelist's ordering imagination. She traveled a lot. The Rhode Island estate sat empty for years, until Swift's arrival. She supported the arts in general, ballet in particular, and she had the wealth with which to do it. Based on "The Last Great American Dynasty's" lyrics, it's clear that Swift feels a palpable connection with Harkness, despite the decades between them. We have 2 volunteers within fifty miles of your requested photo location. Raised primarily by a series of nannies, Harkness took up dancing and ice skating to lose weight and was highly disciplined in both endeavors. In 1961, she married Dr. Benjamin Harrison Kean a physician who was a professor of Tropical Medicine at the Cornell Medical College. In the 1960s, Harkness became well known as a philanthropist and patron of the arts. If I report on the demise of the multimillionaire patron of the dance dry-eyed, it is because I am confident in the belief that nothing we say about the dead can prejudice the Defense or tip the Scales of Judgment. She moved hundreds of thousands of dollars from one bank to another for the pleasure of confusing her accountants. Her passion, such as it was, burned itself out quickly, coincidentally with the baby's pulling a ribbon out of her hair. Bobby Scevers, Rebekah's lover, 25 years younger than she and a self-declared homosexual, pronounced her children ''the most worthless, selfish, useless creatures I've ever seen.'' This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. The email does not appear to be a valid email address. This arrangement effectively kept her from having to see her three children on anything like a regular basis. 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