A Woman Who Brought Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams to Life

I’ve never really wanted to be rich. I mean hugely, fantastically, beyond-your-wildest-dreams rich, in the way of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the daughter of cereal company magnate C.W. Post, from whom she inherited the company when she was still a young woman. Still, I sometimes speculate on what I would do with my money if I had lots of it. Would I work? Start a foundation, collect vintage wine, marry a prince? Live in Newport, R.I., or Jackson Hole, Wyo.? Travel constantly?

Though these may not seem pressing questions in our uncertain time, asking them helps me recognize what I value most in life.

Recently, a visit to Hillwood, the Washington, D.C., mansion Post bought in 1955 and filled with French and Russian decorative arts largely from the 17th to 19th centuries--Faberge eggs, royal portraits and diadems, Sevres china, tapestries, chandeliers, jewel-encrusted snuffboxes--brought the what-if-I-were-rich question back to mind.

The 25-acre estate is in a leafy neighborhood near Rock Creek Park. It opened as Post’s personal museum in 1977, four years after her death, and is a testament to what one rich woman did with her resources.

Hillwood, visited by reservation only, is surrounded by winsome gardens and has a cafe that serves high tea. There my sister, Martha, and I behaved, briefly, like ladies of leisure, keeping our pinkies up while eating cucumber sandwiches and scones with Devonshire cream.

We talked about Post, who lived at Hillwood in the temperate spring and fall and spent the rest of the time at her 207-acre estate (with 18 guest cottages and a maid for each) in New York’s Adirondack Mountains; at Mar-a-Lago, her 115-room Palm Beach, Fla., mansion; or aboard the Sea Cloud, her 316-foot, four-masted yacht, which had a crew of 72 and a fireplace in the master suite.

Post spent a quarter of a million dollars a year on her wardrobe. (When she found shoes that fit her, she had them made in a rainbow of colors.) Hillwood dinners were lavish, and invitations to her May garden parties were prized. She built museum-style display cases at Hillwood for her objets d’art and loved to show them to guests. Clearly she had no guilt about being born rich. Martha and I figured her for a Republican.

But as I later discovered, Post was a staunch supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed her third husband, Joseph E. Davies, U.S. ambassador to Russia in 1936. Her year-and-a-half stay there sparked her interest in Russian art at a time when the Soviets were pillaging the estates of dead or banished aristocrats and Orthodox churches for treasures to melt into much-needed hard currency. She could often be found rummaging through shops for liturgical vestments and chalices. Twenty percent of her Russian collection came from such forays, the rest from smart buys later, like her 1966 purchase of the diamond nuptial crown worn by Alexandra the day she wed Czar Nicholas II.

Post loved beautiful things with royal associations, which endears her to me. When I was young, kings and queens fascinated me too, especially the ill-fated Nicholas II and Alexandra, killed by revolutionaries in 1917. Hillwood has numerous pieces connected to them, including the pink enamel, gold-encased Catherine the Great Easter egg, which holds pride of place in the museum’s first-floor icon room. It was made by the Faberge workshops in 1914 for Nicholas II to give to his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Federovna. Post’s daughter, Eleanor, gave it to her 17 years later.

Post had three daughters, two by her first husband, Edward Bennett Close, and another, Nedenia (actress Dina Merrill), by her second husband, Edward F. Hutton. The mother-daughter theme is evident at Hillwood in warm paintings of Post with her daughters, an 18th century copy of a portrait of Marie Antoinette and her children and the touching “L’Enfant Cheri” (“cherished child”), painted around 1790 by Marguerite Gerard, sister-in-law and student of artist Jean-Honore Fragonard. In the French drawing room, there’s an 18th century desk with more than 40 secret compartments, which Post let Nedenia explore as a girl.

Riches don’t make life smooth, evidently. Marjorie Merriweather Post married four times. Nancy Rubin, author of “American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post” (Villard Books, 1995), suggests that Post’s second husband, handsome and charming E.F. Hutton, was the love of her life, though the marriage failed in 1935 after she caught him with a girlfriend. At 71 she wed Pittsburgh businessman Herbert May, but her fourth marriage ended six years later amid allegations that May was homosexual.

But there must have been compensations, like waking in her elegant Louis XVI-style bedroom suite, which overlooks Hillwood’s lovely French parterre garden, and having dinner served on china used by kings and queens.

Outside, my sister and I strolled through the gardens, with two 65-foot dawn redwoods, thought to be extinct until a grove was found in China in the ‘40s. We decided that Hillwood’s elaborate furnishings could be an art history lesson but wouldn’t suit our living rooms, though we each chose an item we’d like to own. Martha, who has the eye of a connoisseur, selected a small pink stone rabbit she saw in a case on the first floor. I’d take the Catherine the Great Easter egg, which I’d sell, yielding a tidy little nest egg of my own. Meanwhile, with no vintage wine in the cellar or princes on the horizon, I would keep living exactly as I do now.

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Hillwood Museum & Gardens, 4155 Linnean Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20008; (877) 445-5966 or (202) 686-5807, fax (202) 966-7846, www.hillwoodmuseum.org.