Tea at Trianon: The Family Who Inspired ‘The Philadelphia Story’

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 8, 2022

The Family Who Inspired ‘The Philadelphia Story’

From The New York Post:

Helen Hope Montgomery was perfectly suited to a life of excess. She regularly made the best-dressed lists beside Babe Paley and once sang a naughty song to the Duke of Windsor. She won a Charleston contest judged by Josephine Baker.

A legendary bon vivant, she would become the inspiration for Katharine Hepburn’s character Tracy Lord in “The Philadelphia Story” — a spoiled Main Line heiress who remarries her debonair ex-husband, played by Cary Grant.

“She was charming, flirtatious, disciplined, competitive and driven,” writes her granddaughter Janny Scott in her new book “The Beneficiary” (Riverhead Books), out now.

Montgomery grew up on Ardrossan, a storied estate dubbed “The American Downton Abbey” that her father, an investment banker, built during the Gilded Age and named after a Scottish town and castle that supposedly belonged to his ancestors. On a plot of land the size of Central Park, the family compound — which they referred to simply as “The Place” — included farmhouses, stables, barns, kennels, swimming pools, a skating rink, a 50-room mansion and dozens of other homes that at one point housed four generations of the Scott family. (Read more.)

From Mainline Today:

At 368 pages and with over 450 photographs, Ardrossan has generated some buzz. The book’s distributor chose it as one of 18 books to bring to last year’s BookExpo in New York City. “That shocked me to pieces—but thrilled me, too,” says Wren, who’s done local signings at the Acorn Club, Radnor Hunt, the Radnor Historical Society, the Union League and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

Ardrossan‘s New York City-based publisher, Bauer and Dean, bills the Montgomerys as real-life American counterparts to the Granthams of Downton Abbey. Bauer and Dean also notes that Philip Barry’s 1939 play, The Philadelphia Story, and the subsequent Hollywood film are based on the family. The latter, however, is “a generic version of the play,” Wren says. “With respect to all who love The Philadelphia Story, the family is a bit over it.” (Read more.)