Episode 12: Adrift
Unsuccessfully navigating the rough waters of adolescence and love leaves one heiress literally drifting out to sea.
After getting into a fight with friend Doris Duke over the secret love affair between Louise Van Alen and Prince Alexis Mdivani, teen heiress Barbara Hutton finds herself stranded and alone in a sailboat in open sea.
Archival music provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, www.pastperfect.com.
Publish Date: September 17, 2020
Length: 18:58
Opening Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
Section 1 Music: Button Up Your Overcoat by Jack Hylton, Album Fascinating Rhythm – Great Hits of the 20s
Section 2 Music: You Hit The Spot by Carroll Gibbons, Album The Age of Style – Hits from the 30s
Section 3 Music: Top Hat, White Tie and Tails by Carroll Gibbons & Boy Friends, Album Sophistication – Songs of the Thirties
End Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
AS THE MONEY BURNS
Podcast by Nicki Woodard
Episode 012 – Adrift
00:00
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast by Nicki Woodard. Based on historical research, this is a deep exploration into what happened to a set of actual heirs and heiresses to some of America’s most famous fortunes when the Great Depression hits.
Each episode has three primary sections. Section 1 is a narrative story. Section 2 goes deeper into the historical facts. Section 3 focuses on contemporary, emotional, and personal connections.
Story Recap
00:23
With little time to revel over another successful party, Cobina Wright needs to confront her wayward spouse. Meanwhile her young proteges teen heiresses Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke struggle with their much needed acceptance by Louise Van Alen, which is threatened by Barbara’s interfering with love interest Prince Alexis.
Now back to AS THE MONEY BURNS
Title
00:45
Adrift
[Music fade out]
Episode Tag
00:47
Unsuccessfully navigating the rough waters of adolescence and love leaves one heiress literally drifting out to sea.
00:54
[Music – Button Up Your Overcoat by Jack Hylton, Album Fascinating Rhythm – Great Hits of the 20s]
Section 1 – Story
[Music fade out]
01:02
It’s another beautiful day and another Society event in elite Newport – a luncheon at the Ida Lewis Yacht Club. The modest gathering size of no less than 400.
Teen heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton circulate forever on the periphery of acceptability. Both appear out of place both by social peers and fashion – Doris again in old outgrown clothes while Barbara in ones far too extravagant but ill-fitting for her shape.
01:26
Through the crowd, Barbara seeks to find Prince Alexis to no avail. From a distance, the young proud heir Jakey Astor is away from his usual peers. His brother Vincent Astor with wife Helen making their way socializing with supreme hostess Cobina Wright. Cobina’s husband Bill charmingly has everyone laughing. Though always out of place Vincent barely cracks a smile, Doris’s ambitious mother Nanaline feigns a laughter trying to belong. Shuffling about, Barbara’s father Franklyn Hutton and his wife Irene schmooze away from the Wrights.
Everyone preoccupied with their own agendas and socially tiered consciousness.
02:02
Next to the lemonade and small refreshments table, Barbara and Doris hover when Jakey joins them. He’s less than enthused at the nonalcoholic option. He studies both girls. They haven’t been near each other much since the day aboard Vincent’s yacht Nourmahal. There’s lingering tension due to adolescent awkwardness. Jakey is far above their station, and yet he desperately needs to ask Doris a question. He stares over at Vincent and Nanaline. The ever awkward Doris is confusing, and she cowers whenever her mother glances at her.
Their silence is broken by society maven Daisy Van Alen seeking her daughter. Jakey politely tells her that Louise and the Prince have stepped outside for fresh air. Satisfied Daisy joins Cobina’s group.
02:46
Deep down, Barbara seethes. Urgently, she pulls Doris away.
Outside, Barbara searches frantically then spots perfect socialite Louise Van Alen with the suave but still wounded Prince Alexis Mdivani. This is not merely a helpful friendly embrace but one of secret lovers.
Barbara yanks Doris behind the wall. When they step back out, the couple has disappeared. Now more bereft, Barbara goes looking for them. Doris follows trying to calm Barbara down to no avail.
On the docks, Doris can’t take it anymore. “Let them be. Alexis loves Louise. You need to accept that.”
“No, you didn’t see him with Silvia. If you had, you wouldn’t say that.”
03:29
In a blurr of fury, Barbara jumps into a small sailboat and sits with her back to the docks – away from Doris and the unforgiving world that will never understand the power of young love.
Frustrated, Doris tries to convince Barbara to get out, but Barbara won’t look at her. Doris jumps into the boat.
“Come on, let’s go. We don’t know whose boat this is.”
Barbara sits there unflinching staring out into the horizon. Her deep blue eyes fill up with tears.
Fed up, Doris gets up and hops back onto the dock. Her foot slightly nudges the boat. It sways outward. The rope tethering it to the dock is not truly secure and slips into the water. As Doris walks off, neither she nor Barbara turn to see each other.
04:12
Thus they both don’t notice that the little boat is drifting out to sea.
The sway and rocking forces the emotions out of Barbara who bursts out crying. Crying for her friend’s broken heart, and crying for her own inadequacies.
Because Barbara fears she herself will never be lovable, she is heavily invested in her beautiful slightly older friend Silvia, the lively and fiery daughter of a Spanish nobleman and a Columbian mother and thus extremely well connected in European royal circles. Silvia’s parents protested her involvement with the impoverished Prince Alexis thus she has become the living embodiment of Barbara’s dream heroine. Above all else, Barbara is a devotee of true love.
Barbara’s body rocks in heavy sobs as she pours out her pain.
05:01
When she finally reaches a state of catharsis, she opens her purse and pulls out a book which houses two letters – both from the Prince one to Louise and the other to Silvia. This little book isn’t a novel like seen on other days, but Barbara’s private little journal. One in which she jots down little poetry notes.
She begins writing poetry to clear her head.
The barely exposed sail catches a little wind steering the boat further outwards.
A bit later, feeling much better, she turns to get out of the boat to realize she has drifted into open sea.
She can’t even see land. Panic sets in. She drops her book on the floorboard as she scrambles around. She peers over the edge to see only dark blue water. She tries to find a compass or anything to give her direction. She finds an oar, but that is inadequate to row back to shore. Even if she could find the shore.
By now, the sail has deflated, angled to not catch any wind. She maneouvers the bar and opens up the sail, which grabs a little gust. As she repositions the mast, the boat jolts forward.
06:02
At first she’s nervous, she struggles to remember all the little details she’s picked up when out sailing with friends. She turns the boat around, guessing likely the best way would be backwards than forwards. At least, that should bring her in view of the shoreline.
Actually, the small boat readily follows her command. She does better than she expected. She grabs the rudder and steers a little more. The sail starts to slack, and she tightens it back to a strong sail. The ship obeys. She guides it, now determined.
The blaring sun burns her eyes, but she needs both of her hands controlling the boat. Her focus has a single minded clarity only those moments can bring.
06:42
When she finally spots the shoreline and looking at the clear afternoon sun, she instinctively knows which direction to head back towards Newport. The water gets a little choppier with the approach of the evening tides.
She has no idea how far she drifted or if she truly is going in the right direction, but she stays the course.
As the sun gets closer to the horizon, the Coast Guard locates her and picks her up. She wants to continue alone, but they insist for her safety. They tow the boat in, not 10 minutes away of making it all on her own.
07:14
Back at the dock, several people have gathered in concern.
When Barbara steps back onto land, Doris happily greets her. Barbara is so excited to tell about her adventure. Only then seeing the look on everyone else’s face, she stuffs down her joy in now shame and embarrassment.
A quick inspection of the boat, and Franklyn Hutton offers restitution for any damages and inconveniences and more importantly absolutely no press.
Barbara’s one moment of glorious independence and self-reliance snuffed before it can be acknowledged and celebrated.
07:50
[Music – You Hit The Spot by Carroll Gibbons, Album The Age of Style – Hits from the 30s]
Section 2 – History & Historiography
[Music fade out]
08:00
There is so much written about Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton that it takes a bit of work sifting through all of it to sort out what is true, false, rumor, speculation, and pure fabrication. There are enumerable articles and press clippings during their lifetime plus their examples resurface whenever seems relevant – on subject matter like wills, jewelry, fashion, husbands, etc… Each heiress has at least 4 biographies written by a range from close personal sources like friends, family, or former employees to professional journalists and celebrity biographers, plus all the minor mentions the heiresses appear in stories on other people, historical situations, and/or topics. Then with today’s internet, there are tons more fan sites and amateur historians digging up all kinds of facts and theories.
08:46
I mention all of this because this is the nature of exploring history. One should never simply take something especially a source at face value and must be prepared to vet it a little bit to contextualize its meaning. One has to be aware in essence of confirmation biasness or overly canonizing problematic material.
Now the story I am telling in this podcast is one where scandal, rumor, and fabrication does have its place. Why? Because half of this particular overall story is about perception and how that can become its own trap and reality.
09:17
There were articles detailing Doris Duke as one who had gold fountains and essentially washed her hair in Evian-like water. The same weird type of claims made about select supermodels in the 90s and 00s. From afar, we glamorize and mythologize the life of insurmountable wealth and its more materialistic pleasures. We are fascinated by these mythical beings in near proximity. Close enough we can almost touch them.
Doris with her miserly and isolationist tendencies and Barbara for her reckless spending and complicated love life proved endlessly fascinating to the public during their lifetimes. But while everyone else was so busy commenting on them, we rarely got to hear their versions directly from them. So much is hearsay or recounts by other’s memories.
10:02
Wouldn’t it be fascinating if there were journals or diaries? Doris was known to keep scrapbooks, and Barbara wrote poetry. They would make comments and have some personal conversations on semi-record.
I read a lot about them over the years and reread many things. So everytime I go to revisit certain topics now for this podcast, I have to search back through my horde of notes and copies to reverify the fact or situation I am now presenting.
10:26
I remembered a story about Barbara getting lost at sea, so I peruse through the 4 biographies I have knowing it appeared in only one of them. Only to realize that it appeared in the most controversial one – Poor Little Rich Girl by David Heymann, the one adapted for television in 1987 with Farrah Fawcett starring as Barbara Hutton. That’s how I first learned the story of her, and similarly Doris Duke through the 1999 tv miniseries Too Rich (with Hayden Panettiere, Lindsay Frost, and Lauren Bacall as Doris at various ages). Both tv miniseries rarely if ever re-air except occasionally on Lifetime or like cable channels and in some pieces via YouTube.
11:04
In my original attempts to flesh out this story for my own tv series project, I saw in Heymann’s forward the mention of access to personal and private diaries, journals, and letters by Barbara. Such a thing would be great, so I went on a mad hunt for these, multiple times. The book was published in 1984, so certainly there has to be a trail somewhere on the web. Over the years, I’ve had a very limited and restrictive budget sometimes eating on $10-30 for a week and a hald, so no flying off to research things in person, but I can still dig and find things.
Only no absolute luck. I have her other biographies, and none mention use of such materials. This gets maddening. If it’s out there, I will find it one way or another. That’s my forte since high school. NO LUCK, no hints, nothing,…
11:54
Then somehow I stumble across some 1984 news articles pointing out that Heymann’s biography was called out for several inaccuracies and in particular questions about the fake letters he produced including a perfectly forged signature and those diary journal extracts well written and copied in his handwriting. He is a well known celebrity biographer, but some of his other works also have been called into question both in fabrication as well as plagiarism. His biography came nearly 5 years after her death without her able to refute any of it.
12:27
Now re-reading the passage of the sailboat and seeing it contains large direct quotations from the diary, I have to question all of it. The amount of detail given is extremely precise and also doesn’t feel period or age wise appropriate. In this book, the way Barbara describes a few of young life encounters in sex and the sailboat don’t add up. They sound how someone might tell it in the 1980s, but not a shy confused girl in 1929 or 1930. I took the situation but discarded the details.
12:57
Another biographer from 1968 Dean Jennings mentions Barbara’s journals in relation to her poetry, and those are well known with some even being performed and published, of which I have a copy. But other close confidantes and servants never recall her actually documenting her life in journal or diary. In 1979, a longtime companion published his biography of her and the diaries used were his own, but he also admits to embellishing passages for dramatic effect, which were then plagiarized by the more problematic book. In 1988, one of her private secretaries also published a book with definitely more personal context of situations from Barbara’s and other close companions’ perspectives and interpretations. As the secretary retells the stories, she contradicts her own timeline and dates.
13:41
Thus I have to be extra careful when relying on Poor Little Rich Girl as source material, though even in speculative situations it does present us with interesting questions. It can give topics to play with and conjecture, but despite the promise of true revelation it is not reliable.
13:56
The other biographies are definitely more trustworthy, but nevertheless I am having a difficult time with all of them when it comes to dating back to this period in Barbara’s story. There are few continuities which stand firm. Most important Barbara’s nearly 45+ yrs friendship with the belle of Paris and Prince Alexis Mdivani’s secret forbidden lover – hold on for her extremely complicated maiden name Dona Ana Silvia Rodriguez de Rivas y Diaz de Erazo, or Silvia de Rivas for short. Silvia was the daughter of Spanish Count de Castilleja de Guzman and a Columbian elite mother, and sister of the future Marquis and the 5th Count. Then there are Silvia’s married names, aka future de Castellane, Tallyrand, Posch Pastor and inevitably – lastly Hennessy.
14:44
Trying to find anything on Silvia outside of Barbara and the Prince is reduced to her marriages and children. Very few comments and snippets complicated further by newspapers spelling her name incorrectly or inconsistently. Silvia hasn’t appeared heavily in the story because she is based in Europe and right now we’re in the US, but she is very important to the plot and will occasionally be seen when the times come.
15:06
Amongst all these sources, the more I try to straighten out the timeline of the very complex and twisted love triangle or quadrangle between the Prince – Louise – Silvia – and Barbara. The more entangled it seems to get. No one has the proper dates. The earliest guess might be it all started as early as 1925 or 1928, others as late as 1930 or 1931. I have since collected news articles which corrects the dates, and sadly more often than not the biographies get several dates and orders wrong, each in their own way.
Why do I consider this important? Why invest in love triangles from so long ago? Because the need for love is a large driving force of this overall story behind fortune and complications of money, greed, lust, envy, and other forces of human nature. When previously retold, much of this actual storyline has been glossed over which dismisses its complexity in Barbara’s life, but it is the very essence and setup that will so profoundly impact her life decisions afterwards.
I am doing best to streamline and cover events and situations leading up to the Crash, because once that reversal in fortune happens everything is gonna get a lot crazier. This is information you will need to know. This isn’t a minor investment for those involved – it was years in the making.
16:26
[Music – Top Hat, White Tie and Tails by Carroll Gibbons & Boy Friends, Album Sophistication – Songs of the Thirties]
Section 3 – Contemporary & Personal Relevance
[Music fade out]
16:46
Summer has effectively ended. Youth have returned back to school, though most are virtual for the immediate time being. Therefore many are still missing out on those classic moments of adolescence.
Yet youth and love must find their ways to flourish both inside and outside of virtual and digital worlds. So much of young love is the trial and error, the fulfillment and disillusionment of romance and fantasy versus reality. The over inflated value given to a barely known crush and the agony of unrequited love. Altogether painful and exhilarating.
Some are finding ways to get small tastes of it, but it can make one nostalgic for those times presented endlessly everywhere in media and our memories. I wish the future situation resolves itself, but I know this year and the pandemic are far from over.
17:30
In our story, we still have a little more summer to cover before the big world altering event happens, but we are well on our way.
As most of us remain trapped in lockdown situations or limited mobility, I would like to point a great virtual tour and webinar site New York Adventure Club. They have multiple tours overlapping with several of our topics – the Vanderbilts, Harlem, Jazz Age, Newport, Gilded Age mansions & balls… The list goes on.
I also want to note my inspirations for the single narrator podcast comes from Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Aaron Mahnke’s Lore, and Dana Schwartz’s Noble Blood. All great deep dives into historical subjects I find compelling.
Hook
18:07
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
Next when we return to AS THE MONEY BURNS…
Parental conflict pushes an heiress into a match with a neighboring though equally challenging heir.
Until then…
Credits
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast written, produced, and voiced by Nicki Woodard, based on historical research. Archival music has been provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, check out their website at www.pastperfect.com.
Please come visit us at As The Money Burns via Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Transcripts, timeline, episode guide, and character bios are available at asthemoneyburns.com.
18:58
THE END