PURCHASE
Blue Blood
“A model page-turner …[and] a cautionary tale about the American dream.”
One of the world's richest women, Rebekah Harkness was the Standard Oil heiress and founding patron of the Harkness Ballet who dazzled New York society in the Sixties and Seventies eccentricities. But beneath the elegant surface lurked a driven woman tormented by personal demons.
This biography tells the story of how one of the richest families descended into a world of drugs, madness, suicide, and violence.
Blue Blood is the incredible story of almost limitless fortunes squandered completely within one extravagant lifetime.
Reviews
“A week after her death on June 17, 1982, the mortal remains of Rebekah Harkness were toted home by her older daughter Terry in a Gristede’s shopping bag. The ashes were placed in a $250,000 jeweled urn made by Salvador Dali. They didn’t fit: ‘’Just a leg is in there, or maybe half of her head, and an arm,’’ said one of Rebekah’s friends. Several hours later, the top of the urn - called the Chalice of Life - was somehow, by unknown agencies, uncovered. ‘’Oh, my God,’’ said a witness. ‘’She’s escaped.’’
This post-mortem mischief was going on at Harkness House, the East 75th Street town house headquarters of the Harkness Ballet Foundation, which Mrs. Harkness had modeled on the St. Petersburg Ballet School. The building, according to Craig Unger, the author of this rich-man/eye-of-the-needle biography, was in a state of putrefaction, ‘’crumbling like Tara after the Civil War.”