Marjorie Merriweather Post inherited a cereal company and turned it into one of the great American fortunes, then spent that fortune on art, jewels, mansions, and the company of presidents and royalty. She lived so lavishly that her name became synonymous with American wealth, yet today she is remembered most for two things: the extraordinary collection of Russian and French art she assembled, and the Florida mansion she built in the 1920s, a place called Mar-a-Lago that would become famous in ways she could never have imagined. She was born on March 15, 1887, in Springfield, Illinois, the only child of Charles William Post and his wife, Adela Leticia Meriwether. Her father’s path to success had been rocky.
Before Marjorie’s birth, Charles Post had suffered a mental breakdown from the stress of working as a farm implement manufacturer. He changed careers, moving into real estate, but that did not suit him either. After a second breakdown in the early 1890s, he tried yet another direction, and in 1895 he founded the Postum Cereal Company. The venture was both a business and a personal mission, born of Post’s interest in the connection between health and nutrition.
In 1897 the company introduced its first major product, Grape-Nuts, which made the bold and medically dubious claim that it was a cure for appendicitis. Despite that, the Postum Cereal Company became a success, and that success would shape Marjorie’s entire life. Her parents divorced in 1904. Charles Post initiated the split, wanting to marry his twenty-seven-year-old secretary, Ella Young, even though he was entering his fifties.
This was a painful rejection of her mother, who had cared for Charles through years of severe ill health. Around the time of the divorce, Marjorie attended the Mount Vernon Seminary and College in Washington, D. C. , a school she would support generously for the rest of her life.
Charles Post remained plagued by illness into the early twentieth century, and he died prematurely in the early summer of 1914 at the age of just fifty-nine. Marjorie, his only child, became his sole heir. She inherited the Postum Cereal Company, which by then was worth approximately twenty million dollars, a sum equivalent to more than half a billion dollars today. Overnight, she was one of the wealthiest women in the world and the wealthiest woman in the United States.
She did not simply collect the income. Post played an active role in running the company for more than forty years, expanding it and acquiring other major American food brands, including Hellman’s mayonnaise, Jell-O, and Maxwell House coffee. In 1929 the company was renamed General Foods Corporation to reflect its broader holdings. Though she was not entirely in charge, she shaped much of its direction.
In the late 1920s, after tasting frozen haddock while dining on a yacht off the coast of Massachusetts, she convinced the board to invest heavily in frozen food, a decision that proved hugely profitable in the postwar years. Her personal life was as eventful as her business career. She married four times. Her first husband was Edward Bennett Close, an investment banker from Connecticut, whom she married in 1905.
They had two daughters, Adelaide and Eleanor, born in 1908 and 1909, and divorced in 1919. Her second marriage followed almost immediately, in 1920, to Edward Francis Hutton, a financier who had established E. F. Hutton & Co.
, one of the largest investment firms in the United States. Hutton became both a marriage partner and a business partner, serving as chairman of Postum for a time in the 1920s. They had a daughter, Nedenia, born in 1923, who would later enjoy a significant Hollywood career under the name Dina Merrill. That marriage broke down in the mid-1930s, partly because of Hutton’s affair with Dorothy de Matska, a woman half his age.
Marjorie’s own growing relationship with Joseph E. Davies, an American lawyer and diplomat, also contributed to the marriage’s collapse. She married Davies within weeks of finalizing her divorce from Hutton. The marriage would last twenty years, until 1955.
One of its most significant aspects was that Davies served as the United States ambassador to the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, as the world moved toward the Second World War. Through Davies’s Russian connections, Post built up an extensive collection of European art. After the Davies marriage collapsed, she remained single for several years, the first time she had not entered immediately into a new marriage. In 1958 she married Herbert A.
May, a Pittsburgh businessman, though that marriage, like her previous three, ended in divorce in 1964. Post became one of the most notable art and jewelry collectors of her era, with a particular focus on French works. In 1960 she acquired a Napoleonic diamond necklace, commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1811. It consisted of a band of twenty-eight large diamonds surrounded by another band of twenty-three even larger ones, with a total weight estimated at 263 carats.
Her acquisition was philanthropic in this case, because she quickly donated it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1962, where it remains on display. The price she paid is unclear, but it was probably in the millions. When the necklace was first made in the early nineteenth century, it was valued at 376,000 French francs, the equivalent of millions of dollars today. She also acquired diamond earrings that had belonged to Queen Marie Antoinette, along with other large diamond necklaces, jeweled pieces owned by European monarchs, and stones that had belonged to the short-lived Emperor Maximilian of Mexico.
Her art collection is best known today for its extensive Russian holdings, much of it acquired through her third husband’s ambassadorship to the Soviet Union. During those years in the late 1930s, the regime of Joseph Stalin had begun selling off valuable state artworks accumulated by the Romanov czars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, using the proceeds to fund industrialization and remilitarization in the face of the Nazi threat. Post and Davies acquired an extensive collection of Fabergé eggs, porcelain, French art tapestries, and European Baroque paintings that the czars had collected long before the Communists took power in 1917. The value was considerable; valuable Fabergé eggs in private ownership today often sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes a few million.
Late in her life, Post was recognized as the owner of one of the most significant collections of Russian and French art and jewelry in private hands. Her social status had been growing since the 1920s, when her marriage to Hutton placed her firmly in American high society. She attended lavish parties and operas, wore gowns commissioned only from New York’s finest dressmakers, and lived by a set of personal rules: always think for yourself, never take success for granted, and work hard. She hosted some of the world’s most famous figures, including the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, other presidents, Hollywood stars, and even royalty.
These events took place in her various mansions and aboard her enormous yacht, Sea Cloud, launched in 1931 and at the time the largest private yacht in the world. She also built a series of enormous mansions across the United States. In the early 1920s she purchased the Warburton Hall estate on Long Island and built a Tudor Revival mansion called Hillwood, designed by Charles Mansfield Hart, which cost more than one hundred thousand dollars to build. She sold it to Long Island University in 1951 for two hundred thousand dollars, a sum equivalent to more than two million dollars today, yet still a considerable undervaluation made as a philanthropic gesture.
In the mid-1920s she developed a huge estate in upstate New York, Camp Topridge, consisting of sixty-eight buildings on a 200-acre estate designed by Benjamin Mancel. The estate could only be reached by water, designed as an artificial island incorporating local rivers for ease of travel, and Post had a small airport built nearby with a fleet of small planes. In the 1950s she erected a sizable mansion in Washington, D. C.
, which she also named Hillwood, an expanded version of a Georgian Colonial home she had purchased in the center of the city. It was replete with dozens of rooms, a library, and a ballroom, and enjoyed views of the Washington Monument. But one house stood above all others. In the early 1920s, Marjorie and her husband Edward Hutton decided to build a new mansion in the relatively underdeveloped Palm Beach area of Florida.
It would extend the entire length of Palm Beach from the lake there out to the sea, and so they christened it Mar-a-Lago, meaning “sea to lake. ” The mansion was located on a seventeen-acre estate. Post and Hutton hired Marion Sims Wyeth as architect and Joseph Urban as interior designer. The grand house had fifty-eight bedrooms, thirty-three bathrooms, an enormous dining room with a nine-meter-long marble table, a spa, a gym, and other amenities one might expect to find in a hotel.
By the time it was completed, Mar-a-Lago had cost Post and Hutton approximately seven million dollars, an amount that adjusted for inflation would exceed one hundred million dollars today. She spent lavishly on entertaining there, once flying in the entire Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus to perform at a gathering in 1929. Yet there were philanthropic efforts too, and during the Second World War Mar-a-Lago was temporarily converted for the use of convalescing soldiers. Many years later, her estate was declared a National Historic Landmark, though it would become historic for altogether different reasons.
Post spent the last decade of her life single, living largely at her Hillwood estate in Washington, D. C. She died on September 12, 1973, allegedly following an unsuccessful attempt by her doctor to keep her alive, possibly in the hope of claiming some of her estate. That attempt failed, and Post bequeathed the bulk of her estate to her three daughters, while some of her artwork and houses were donated to the state, notably Mar-a-Lago.
General Foods went from strength to strength in the years after her death, and in November 1985 the company was sold to Philip Morris for 5. 6 billion dollars as the tobacco giant sought to diversify. Her impressive collection of Russian art is largely housed today in her Washington Hillwood residence, which has been transformed into a museum. The Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens has the unique status of being both home to one of the finest orchid collections in the United States and the museum of Fabergé eggs, with ninety Russian pieces in the collection believed to exceed twenty million dollars in value.
The most surprising legacy of Marjorie Merriweather Post, however, is the mansion she built in the 1920s in Florida. Mar-a-Lago became famous in American life principally because it was purchased by Donald Trump in 1985, and in more recent years was the scene of a famous FBI raid on the former president’s estate to recover illegally withheld top-secret documents. It is a strange legacy indeed for the woman who inherited a cereal company and turned it into one of the great fortunes in American history.