“It sounds like you’ve earned one.” I leaned toward him and obliged, my fatigue suddenly forgotten as I tasted his lips. Outside the window came a clamor of noise—taxi drivers in some dispute on the street below us—but it felt like a world away from where we were.
The kiss was over too soon, and I groaned when Ned pulled away, his expression bright with excitement. I could tell he was on fire, too, but he had something other than what I had on the mind. “Marjie, there’s just no stopping us at Post.”
Under Ned’s expert business guidance, we had recently taken the company public on the New York Stock Exchange. Uncle Cal was older now, well into his sixties, and so I had given my wholehearted approval to his suggestion that Colby Chester should prepare to take the reins of the company as president, with Ned coming on as chairman of the board. Not only had my new husband jumped at the opportunity to join my family’s company, but he had also taken no time to show us all that he was doing a damned fine job. He loved the work, and I loved him all the more for that.
Ned smiled as he rose from the bed, eager to get back to business, pausing only at the door to flash me one final grin and the promise: “I’ll tell you this much, boss: The Post Cereal Company…we are going to continue to shatter records. And expectations.”
* * *
—
We weren’t the only ones who felt these stirrings of excitement and promise at the start of the 1920s. Society had cracked wide open during the Great War: young men who had survived the barbed wire and poison gas of Europe had come home eager to make merry, and young women who had found their voices while working through the war were unwilling to step back into the stifling confines of the corset or the role of society hostess. The Four Hundred no longer held their undisputed lock on how things were done. Ned and I were new money, to be sure, but we had so much of it. Manhattan was our playground—a playground where suddenly it was less about one’s name and date of entry into the Social Register and more about youth, beauty, and money; those assets we had in large supply.
My social circle broadened with Ned at my side, since he, unlike Ed, was always eager to meet interesting new people, regardless of their pedigree or gentleman’s club affiliation. Gone were the staid nights of dancing quadrilles and the Viennese waltz in some stuffy country club. Now it was the Charleston and the foxtrot, the shimmy and the tango in crowded speakeasy basements, the music loud and the laughter loose and champagne-soaked. New York City was scintillating, the streets of Broadway haloed in new lights. We met and befriended the famous movie stars Mary Pickford and Billie Burke, as well as Billie’s charming cad of a husband, Florenz Ziegfeld, who reigned as Broadway’s leading man with his Ziegfeld Follies.
With the girls now at Mount Vernon for school, Ned and I decided to decamp to warmer climes for the winter season, so we rented a casita at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach. It was where we’d first fallen in love. And unlike Ed, Ned felt quite at ease in Palm Beach; he’d made millions as an investor for so many of the people who wintered there—Charles and Nelle Pillsbury, Consuelo Vanderbilt, Anna Dodge, the Astors, the Barclays. Ned and I had friends there all winter long and no shortage of invitations. We would dine out on Worth Avenue, ordering Oysters Rockefeller and champagne at the exclusive Alibi Club. We’d dance the hours away in the splendid Breakers ballroom, its floor-to-ceiling doors opened out over the ocean, or overlooking the rolling green of the palm-lined golf course at the Everglades Club.
During the days we’d swim and ride bikes along the Intracoastal, or Ned would drop a line off the breakwaters to fish, as I’d plop happily beneath a cabana and write to the girls or drift between napping and reading.
“What are you reading?” Ned asked me one afternoon as he sauntered up from a round of morning golf and found me sprawled on a lounger, consumed by my book. I showed him the cover. “The Great Gatsby,” he said, reading the title aloud. “Sounds intriguing enough. Who is Gatsby? And why is he so great?”
“More than intriguing,” I said, breathless, eager to get back to it. “It’s delicious, and it’s just about the only thing that I’d be willing to shoo you away for. So, be gone, Mr. Hutton, and I’ll let you have Mr. Gatsby after I’m through with him.” What I did not tell Ned in that moment—what astounded me most about the book—was that, as I read it, I felt that The Great Gatsby could have been written about my husband. So much so that the more I read, I truly began to wonder if perhaps Scott Fitzgerald, whom we’d met with his wild southern wife, Zelda, on several raucous nights in Manhattan, had based his Jay Gatsby on my husband: a handsome, smart, driven man who rises from nothing to climb to the top of the ladder. A romantic man, a generous man. An impossibly wealthy man. Only, unlike Jay Gatsby, my husband was open with everyone he met—loved by friends and all who knew him. And unlike Jay Gatsby, my husband had gotten the girl.