the last great american dynasty

The sunlight streamed through the windows as the passenger cars of the train moved on the tracks. It wasn't all smooth, there were a few bumps along the railway, but knowing that it was enough to take Rebekah's mind off of St. Louis, she decided to not be fussy about them. They said, "Money couldn't buy you happiness." She and her biological family had enough money to keep them comfortable, and had every advantage money could provide, but it was happiness that she was chasing after because her family lacked the warmth and affection that a "family" should have.

It also helped her take her mind off of her former husband, photographer Dickson W. Pierce. Despite having two children with him, Allen and Anne "Terry" Pierce, the moment she walked down the aisle with him, she knew that she had made a terrible, terrible mistake, and therefore divorced him after seven years of marriage in 1945.

Rebekah met William "Bill" Hale Harkness in 1947, the heir to the Standard Oil Co. and inheritor of the company's fortune, while she was vacationing at her parent's, Allen Tarwater West and Rebekah Cook (Semple) West, a vacation home in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. A few months later, in October 1947, they were wedded. 730 Park Avenue, Bill's apartment, was where the wedding took place.

Upon William L. Harkness's death in 1910, Bill inherited a large share of Standard Oil Co. Although Rebekah came from a well-off Mid-west family, Bill and fortune put her into a different social stratosphere. With Standard Oil Co. being the world's largest oil refiner and the world's first and largest multinational company in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Rebekah became one of the richest women in the United States.

A year after their marriage, they purchased a house located on a beach in Westerly, Rhode Island, and named it "Holiday House". The house had more than forty rooms, four chimneys, and half a dozen terraced sundecks. One can see for miles up and down the coast in a room that had windows on three sides of it near the top deck.

The Harkness' held lively parties at the Watch Hill mansion most weekends, which made Holiday House a hub for social events in the city. There were a few notable guests such as writer J.D. Salinger and artist Andy Warhol. They continued even after Bill's death.

In 1953, Bill had a serious heart attack, then a second one a year later, but he, unfortunately, did not survive it. He was pronounced dead on August 12, 1954, in Westerly Hospital at the age of 54. Rebekah was slammed by the media, blaming her not only for her husband's death but also for destroying "the last great American dynasty" even though her husband's problems were his own. For the society around her, however, because she was an unconventional woman at the time, it made her an easy target, and thus easy for them to blame her for their own problems. She was labeled as "crazy" by the people in town because she was angry at the prejudice and the patriarchy for condemning and judging women.

Both of them reportedly had a happy marriage that lasted for 7 years before his death, despite his restrained and aloof personality of Bill, and the fact that he was fifteen years older than her. The couple gave birth to a daughter, Edith Hale Harkness. From her marriage with Pierce, she was granted full custody of Allen and Terry. Both went to live with the Harkness's, and Bill loved and treated both of them as his own.

When Bill passed, Rebekah inherited his fortune. Immediately after his death, she indulged in luxuries she knew Bill would disagree with: a penthouse in Madison Avenue's Westbury Hotel, a chalet in the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, a yogi named B.K.S. Iyengar, turning the Watch Hill estate into an artist's colony and purchasing the local firehouse for an Art Center. It was said that she cleaned her pool with Dom Pérignon and filled her fish tank with goldfish and scotch.

She spent more time with "The Bit*ch Pack", Rebekah's self-named squad of female friends that were formed after graduating from an exclusive Southern finishing school, where she was known for her pranks. They were notoriously known for the delight they took in subverting high society events, including lacing punch bowls with mineral oil and performing stripteases on banquet tables. She also took some time to hang out with Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, a dear friend of hers who designed sets, costumes, as well as jewelry, and personal items for her. Dalí was the designer of the 1965 USD 250,000 jewel-studded "Chalice of Life", a vessel made out of gold, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds and decorated with butterflies (which was purchased by Rebekah and eventually became the urn that held her ashes (or at least some of it) when she died of cancer in 1982 at the age of 67).