Women of Means

Marlene Wagman-Geller

Description

A Glimpse Behind the Façade of Rich and Famous Women

“…wild, witty, gossipy, and glamourous. A sheer delight.” ―Becca Anderson, author of Badass Women Give the Best Advice

#1 Best Seller in Women's Studies and Biographies of the Rich & Famous and Royalty

An intimate portrait of women of privilege. As Becca Anderson recommends, read about “heiress Barbara Hutton's outrageous lifestyle, Jackie O as a step-mom, Patty Hearst's many adventures, Peggy Guggenheim's collection of art (and men), and Almira Carnarvon, the real-life counterpart to Lady Cora of Downton Abbey.”

The grass isn't greener on the other side. Heiresses have always been viewed with eyes of envy. They were the ones for whom the cornucopia had been upended, showering them with unimaginable wealth and opportunity. However, through intimate historical biographies, Women of Means shows us that oftentimes the weaving sisters saved their most heart-wrenching tapestries for the destinies of wealthy women.

Happily never after. From the author of Behind Every Great Man, we now have Women of Means, vignettes of the women who were slated from birth―or marriage―to great privilege, only to endure lives which were the stuff Russian tragic heroines are made of. They are the nonfictional Richard Corys―those not slated for happily ever after.

Women of Means is a non-fiction best seller, full of the best biographies of all time. Some of the women whose silver spoons rusted include:

• Liliane Bettencourt, whose chemist father created L’Oreal... and was a Nazi collaborator
• Nica Rothschild, who traded her gilded life to become the Baroness of Bebop
• Jocelyn Wildenstein, who became a cosmetology-enhanced cat-woman
• Ruth Madoff, the dethroned queen of Manhattan
• Patty Hearst, who trod the path from heiress... to terrorist

Fans of Women of Means will want to try other Marlene Wagman-Geller books including Fabulous Female Firsts, Great Second Acts, Still I Rise, Unabashed Women, and Women Who Launch.

From the foreword:

Okay, let’s get this part out of the way first: If I had been born into enormous fortune, I would have been generous, and cautious about marriage and other personal entanglements; my purchases would not have been ostentatious, and I would not have been arrogant. And of course, that is exactly how you would act. In short, we would not behave as did the twenty-eight subjects of Wagman’s collection did. What connects them are the excesses and eccentricities that result when enormous wealth meets immaturity.

In A Delicate Balance, Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize winning play of 1967, Agnes laments that as men age, they are eventually obsessed with money and death – “making ends meet until they meet the end.”1 The women in these pages could not escape death – many died young, and most died in abject conditions – but for most of their lives, they did not have to be concerned with making ends meet. But if people of wealth are to be content, they have to have ends to be served by their means, and they must be as deliberate as those who are slowed and matured by financial concerns. The actions of the women you are going to meet here were flagrant, and eventually desperate, but never deliberate.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Prologue: A Rocky Ride
Chapter 1: Did I Make the Most of Loving You? (1876)
Chapter 2: The Golden Lion (1896)
Chapter 3: All the Difference (1898)
Chapter 4: Indian Summer (1901)
Chapter 5: What Profit a Man? (1902)
Chapter 6: The Porcelain Faces (1906)
Chapter 7: King Midas’s Granddaughter (1912)
Chapter 8: Lucky Strike (1912)
Chapter 9: Round Midnight (1913)
Chapter 10: She and Trouble (1920)
Chapter 11: Was It Worth It? (1922)
Chapter 12: The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)
Chapter 13: The Swan Princess (1924)
Chapter 14: Prince Charming (1931)
Chapter 15: Amazing Grace (1937)
Chapter 16: The Wounding Thorns (1938)
Chapter 17: A Facial Attraction (1940)
Chapter 18: The Book of Ruth (1941)
Chapter 19: The Comedy Is Over (1948)
Chapter 20: My Gold (1950)
Chapter 21: Rosebud (1954)
Chapter 22: The House of Hancock (1954)
Chapter 23: The Alchemist (1962)
Chapter 24: The Death of the Hired Hand (1962)
Chapter 25: Protects What’s Good (1964)
Chapter 26: Googoosha (1972)
Chapter 27: No More Tears (1979)
Chapter 28: Flowers in Their Attic (1997)

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Richard Cory (1897)
Bibliography
About the Author

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• Biography
• Royalty
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781642500189
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

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