Marriages
Post married four times. In 1905, she married investment banker Edward Bennett Close of Greenwich, Connecticut, and divorced in 1919. Their eldest daughter, Adelaide, married Thomas Durrant, Merrall MacNeille, and banker Augustus Riggs. Their second daughter, Eleanor Post Close, later known in the media as Eleanor Post Hutton, married film director Preston Sturges, Etienne Marie Robert Gautier, George Curtis Rand, Hans Habe, Owen D. Johnson (son of author Owen Johnson), and orchestral conductor Leon Barzin. (Through his second marriage, Edward Bennett Close would become the paternal grandfather of actress Glenn Close.)
She married for a second time, in 1920, financier Edward Francis Hutton. In 1923, he became the chairman of the board of the Postum Cereal Company, and they developed a larger variety of food products, including Birdseye Frozen Foods. The company became the General Foods Corporation in 1929. Post and Hutton divorced in 1935. Their only child, Nedenia Marjorie, became an actress under the name Dina Merrill, who married Stanley M. Rumbough, Jr., actor Cliff Robertson, and Ted Hartley.
In 1935, Post married her third husband, Joseph E. Davies, a Washington lawyer. Before the couple divorced in 1955, they lived in the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1938, while he served as the second American ambassador to the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin. During this time, Davies and Post acquired many valuable Russian works of art from Soviet authorities.
In 1951, the house (the original Hillwood) in which they resided in Brookville, New York, was sold to Long Island University for USD $200,000. It became C.W. Post College in 1954, now known as LIU Post. Mrs. Post served as the honorary house mother of the college's first local fraternity, Sigma Beta Epsilon, which became in 1969 the New York Beta chapter of the nation's largest national fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Since Post had borne only girls, she referred to the fraternity of sons-in-law as her "boys" while they called her "Mother Marjorie." Post was honored by Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity as a "Golden Daughter of Minerva."
Her final marriage occurred in 1958 to Herbert A. May, a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman and the former Master of Fox Hounds of The Rolling Rock Hunt Club in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. She divorced May in 1964 and subsequently reclaimed her full maiden name of Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Read more about this topic: Marjorie Merriweather Post
Famous quotes containing the word marriages:
“Good marriages are made in heaven. Or some such place.”
—Robert Bolt (1924–1995)
“The happiest two-job marriages I saw during my research were ones in which men and women shared the housework and parenting. What couples called good communication often meant that they were good at saying thanks to one another for small aspects of taking care of the family. Making it to the school play, helping a child read, cooking dinner in good spirit, remembering the grocery list,... these were silver and gold of the marital exchange.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest-lived.”
—Bernard Devoto (1897–1955)