My gratitude and appreciation go to Mike Curtin, attorney for Marjorie Merriweather Post and her estate. Thank you for speaking with me about your memories of Mrs. Post, particularly her incredible attention to detail and meticulous care that were so evident in your working relationship with her.
My thanks go to the Historical Society of Battle Creek and Battle Creek’s Church of Christ Scientist for their generous time and willingness to answer questions and share source material that proved invaluable as I worked to imagine and understand Marjorie’s life as a girl. Many thanks also to my friend Amy Salas, who helped me to understand the feel of growing up in Cereal City U.S.A. and the legacy of the food empires that were built there more than a century ago. Also incredibly illuminating and informative as I worked to understand those early years of Marjorie’s life was her father’s biography, C. W. Post, the Hour and the Man by Nettie Leitch Major.
I am grateful to the Greenwich Historical Society, and in particular curator and archivist Christopher Shields, who shared old maps of Marjorie’s neighborhood as well as copious newspaper articles, and who answered questions about the Posts’ and Closes’ neighbors, the train lines, the boating culture, and more. Those materials and conversations allowed me to better understand Greenwich as a community during the early 1900s, when Marjorie lived there.
I am endlessly grateful to the Crow family for allowing me to visit Camp Topridge, a singular place that held a uniquely meaningful spot in Marjorie’s heart until the end of her life. The Crow family has not only preserved Marjorie’s legacy there at Camp Topridge with beauty and care—everything from her monogrammed towels to her swimsuit, her family photos and so much more—but were so generous to allow me to visit and stay overnight in Marjorie’s cottage, much of which is preserved as she left it. I felt like I was in a museum. That visit with the Crows was a trip and an opportunity I will forever cherish. Sitting by the lake, looking out over the same view that meant so much to Marjorie, I said a prayer of gratitude for this woman’s life and a prayer that I would be able to do her story justice.
My thanks go to Misha Belikov and Igor Korchilov for helping me to understand Russian culture and history, for explaining the nuances and legends of the Russian diplomatic world during the Cold War, and for helping me to gain critical insight into Marjorie’s years in the Soviet Union serving as the first U.S. ambassadress and mingling with the top officials of the Kremlin. Thanks to Igor for helping me to answer all sorts of questions, ranging from what Madam Molotova might have served during a wintertime luncheon in her dacha to how Marjorie Merriweather Post would have first introduced herself when meeting formidable Soviet commissars. Thanks to Misha for your patient and willing explanations of some of the finer points of spoken Russian. And especially helpful and informative in understanding the years in the Soviet Union was Joseph Davies’s memoir, Mission to Moscow, which includes the ambassador’s personal letters, journal entries, dispatches to the State Department, photographs, press clippings, and more. Much from the sections of this novel set before, during, and after Marjorie’s time in Moscow were informed directly by that invaluable source material.
Thanks to Rose Guerrero, research director, and the staff at the Historical Society of Palm Beach County for photographs, newspaper clippings, and archival materials on Marjorie’s time in Palm Beach. And my thanks go to Jim Simpson for all that he shared with me about Mar-a-Lago and to Earle and Carol Mack for their generous friendship and for speaking with me about Palm Beach society and Marjorie Merriweather Post’s lingering legend and legacy on South Ocean Boulevard.
Thanks to Marya Myers Parr, to whom this book is dedicated, for always reading my first and roughest draft, and for hosting me in Washington, D.C., so that I could visit Hillwood. And to Kate Calligaro for tipping me off to the many ways that Marjorie Merriweather Post’s legacy continues in Washington to this day through the programs she founded and the buildings she once called home. And to Bernadette Castro for her enthusiastic and thoughtful sharing of Nettie Leitch Major’s C. W. Post, the Hour and the Man and for informing me of the history and legacy of the Post family in their former Gold Coast neighborhood on Long Island.
My job as the writer of historical fiction is to gather up and absorb many different details and facts and then attempt to get at the emotional truths that reside therein. The history, the dates, the individual people, and the facts of Marjorie’s life—these all provide the raw material with which I may then build a story, offering up an imagined narrative to the reader. Marjorie had so many roles throughout her life: daughter, wife, mother, businesswoman, advocate, philanthropist, press target, press darling, hostess, trailblazer, collector, diplomat, style icon, friend, and more. She lived through four very different and very passionate love stories, taking on four different last names, only to return finally to the very name that had been hers all along. In my opinion, this is ultimately the story of a woman finding her own indelible strength and identity, and embracing a power and a life force that set her apart. Is this a love story? Yes, it is many different love stories and I believe the most powerful one of all is the love story that Marjorie Merriweather Post ultimately found with herself.