2023 has been the year of Taylor Swift. After wrapping up her record-breaking national Eras Tour, Swift grossed over $160 million for the tour’s movie counterpart since its opening weekend in early October. “Cruel Summer” from the singer’s Lover album just hit No. 1 on the Billboard’s Hot 100 chart – four years after its initial release. And if that wasn’t enough, Swift has opened a new chapter in her love life with her highly publicized relationship with Chiefs player, Travis Kelce.
Her success will likely only continue with the release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version), the latest of Swift’s re-recorded albums to drop. This album catapulted Swift onto the pop charts and earned her the Grammy Awards for Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Album in 2016. The album also marked a shift in Swift’s thematic focus for her music – particularly through the mega-hit “Blank Space,” in which Swift satirizes the media’s depiction of her as a boy-crazy serial dater.
Taylor Swift’s criticism of society’s reaction to powerful and influential women has been a theme in her music since – but this critique has extended beyond Swift herself. For example, in folklore’s “The Last Great American Dynasty,” Swift turns her attention to a woman named Rebekah, who marries a wealthy heir and proceeds to inherit his fortune for herself. But Swift didn’t pull Rebekah’s story from her imagination. In fact, the Rebekah of “The Last Great American Dynasty” is a fictionalized version of Rebekah Harkness, a St. Louis heiress who – like Swift – had fame, fortune, and the press closely watching her romantic relationships. Ahead, read the story behind the hit song, “set” to the tracklist from 1989.
"Wonderland"
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Although Swift describes her song’s heroine as a “middle class divorcée,” Rebekah Harkness’ early life was filled with money, a private education, country clubs, and summers spent in New England. Born Rebekah Semple West in St. Louis, Missouri on April 17, 1915, Harkness spent her youth growing up in a mansion in a prominent affluent neighborhood. She was the daughter of a stockbroker and the co-founder of G. H. Walker & Co. and granddaughter of the founder of the first trust company west of the Mississippi River. She attended John Burroughs High School and wrapped up her education at a finishing school in South Carolina, where she shared in her scrapbook that she was going to set out to “do everything bad.” Or as Swift’s summarizes during the chorus, “She had a marvelous time ruinin’ everything.” Upon graduating in 1932, Betty and her fellow wealthy teenage female friends formed what became known as the “bitch pack.” They were the flappers of their day, and the group was known to enjoy frequently subverting society events.
While she briefly worked at an advertising agency, Harkness married Dickson W. Pierce in 1939 and lived in New York City. The couple had two children together, but divorced in 1946. After that, William Hale “Bill” Harkness entered the picture and changed Rebekah’s life forever.
"This Love"
William Hale Harkness was a lawyer and the heir to the Standard Oil fortune. He had served in World War II and came back as a decorated war hero. When he first spotted 32-year-old Rebekah Pierce, she was pedaling on a bike along the main street of Watch Hill, Rhode Island one summer. Soon after, they married in New York City in October 1947. That Rhode Island town must have meant something to the couple because they made it the location of their summer estate, which they named Holiday House. Now, we’re entering familiar territory thanks to Swift’s lyrical prose.
By most accounts, they had a happy marriage and had a daughter together. But their time was cut short when William died of a heart attack in 1954 – just seven years after they wed. Swift covers this portion of Rebekah’s life in folklore when she sings, “It must have been her fault his heart gave out.” Although she would go on to marry two more times, Rebekah kept Harkness’s last name for the rest of her life. Yet her reputation as an extravagant partier followed her wherever she went.
“Wildest Dreams”
After being widowed, Rebekah Harkness inherited about $50 million from Harkness. Newspapers over the following decades would often call her the richest woman in America. She also became widely known as a patroness of the arts and a philanthropist. But how did she spend almost all that money, you ask? To quote Swift, she “blew through the money on the boys and the ballet.”
Rebekah poured tens of millions into the arts, especially ballet. Her lifelong passion for dance led her to write an experimental ballet titled Journey to Love, one of the first written by an American woman. In 1962, Jerome Robbins’s Ballets: U. S. A. was performed for the Kennedys under her sponsorship. It was the first ballet to ever be danced at the White House. She then went on to celebrate a homecoming of sorts in 1964 when her ballet Barcelona Suite was staged at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis.
While Harkness was known for her generosity, it could quickly turn to spite if things didn’t go the way she wanted. She was an early supporter of the Robert Joffrey Theatre Ballet company in the early 1960s. During that period, she allowed the company’s dancers to live and practice at Holiday House. But when the company refused to rename itself after her and to give her more say in how it operated, she completely pulled all her funding. She then used $2 million to establish her own ballet company and hired some of Joffrey’s best dancers away. Following that, she went on to buy and renovate the Colonial Theatre in New York City’s Upper West Side for $5 million. It was the city’s first theater devoted exclusively to dance and was renamed the Harkness Theatre. “You see, money can buy anything,” she said.
Harkness also poured money into Holiday House. Rumors claimed that its B-shaped swimming pool was once scrubbed and filled with Dom Pérignon. Harkness and her friends were even known to perform tabletop stripteases at serious dinner parties, and she once dyed her next door neighbor’s cat bright green out of revenge. Although, since Swift is a known cat lover, she sings that it was a dog in “The Last Great American Dynasty.”
“I Know Places”
“All the sensible things I’ve tried to do have turned out to be a mess, so I decided, ‘Why not do what I want?’” Harkness once told a reporter in 1965. “I’ll be so disgusted with myself when I’m 70 if I haven’t done anything with my energy, talent, and money. I like to see money used, I don’t think you should hoard it.” She stuck by that statement until she died of cancer in 1982. By then, she had spent almost the entirety of her fortune on dance. The bulk of what remained she left to her philanthropic ventures.
Harkness wanted her ashes to be placed in a jeweled, rotating goblet called The Chalice of Life, which she had paid her friend Salvador Dalí $250,000 to design. “The Pearly Gates are not for me,” she once explained. “My ashes are going into that chalice, and I’ll pirouette forever.” The New York Times reported following her death that the ashes that couldn’t fit inside the Chalice of Life were placed inside a grocery-store bag and whisked away by her daughter, Terry.
Other than a biography about her entitled Blue Blood by Craig Unger that quickly went out of print, it seemed that the blonde heiress was going to be lost to time. Flash forward to 2013 when Taylor Swift paid nearly $18 million to own a certain mansion on the Rhode Island coast. Seven years later, Swift released folklore.
Thanks to Swift, Harkness’s life has been immortalized for generations of music fans. But is it any wonder? The two women’s lives certainly parallel one another—the massive amounts of publicity surrounding their professional and personal endeavors, the rumors because of them, and, of course, a love for a certain house in Rhode Island to get away from the big city.
But the most significant similarity? Both women had the courage to pursue their dreams on their own terms in spite of what the world told them. So, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the St. Louis born heiress inspired Swift to write a song about her decades after her passing.
This piece is built around a blog post written by Kristie Lein for the Missouri Historical Society's History Happens Here blog.
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