Wherever money resides, extortion and blackmail forever threaten the secrets and scandals one wishes to hide. Alas a mother’s work is never done. In Boston, Henrietta Hartford is sued by Mildred King, alleging she saved Huntington Hartford from a disreputable lady. Will Huntington’s marriage to Mary Lee Epling finally be exposed? Other people and subjects include: Doris Duke, Nanaline Duke, Cholly Knickerbocker, Josephine Hartford, Edward Hartford, blackmail, scandals, secret marriage, secret divorce, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Tom Bower, Revenge book Archival Music provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, www.pastperfect.com.
Wherever money resides, extortion and blackmail forever threaten the secrets and scandals one wishes to hide. Alas a mother’s work is never done.
In Boston, Henrietta Hartford is sued by Mildred King, alleging she saved Huntington Hartford from a disreputable lady. Will Huntington’s marriage to Mary Lee Epling finally be exposed?
Other people and subjects include: Doris Duke, Nanaline Duke, Cholly Knickerbocker, Josephine Hartford, Edward Hartford, blackmail, scandals, secret marriage, secret divorce, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Tom Bower, Revenge book
Extra Notes / Call to Action:
Second Glance History – Twitter @2GlanceHistory or their website https://secondglancehistory.com
A few special articles:
https://secondglancehistory.com/not-dead-yet/
https://secondglancehistory.com/madame-palatines-burn-book-part-1/
https://secondglancehistory.com/the-hapsburg-anastasia-part-1/
Earbuds Collective will be featuring As The Money Burns in its Podcast Spotlight for the week of September 4th, 2022. Please check it out at:
Website - https://www.earbudspodcastcollective.org/
Twitter - @EarbudsPodCol
Share, like, subscribe
Archival Music provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, www.pastperfect.com.
Opening Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
Section 1 Music: There’s One Little Girl Who Loves Me by Jack Hylton, Album Fascinating Rhythm – Great Hits of the 20s
Section 2 Music: I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight? by Jack Hylton, Album Charleston – Great Stars Of the 20s
Section 3 Music: This Is The Missus by Sidney Kyte & His Piccadilly Hotel Band, Album The Great Dance Bands Play Hits of the 30s
End Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
https://asthemoneyburns.com/
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AS THE MONEY BURNS
Podcast by Nicki Woodard
Episode 066 – Love Pilot
Series Tag
00:00
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast by Nicki Woodard. Based on historical research, this is a deep exploration into what happened to a set of actual heirs and heiresses to some of America’s most famous fortunes when the Great Depression hits.
Each episode has three primary sections. Section 1 is a narrative story. Section 2 goes deeper into the historical facts. Section 3 focuses on contemporary, emotional, and personal connections.
00:31
Story Recap
Wimbledon star Frank Shields returns for Tennis Week in Newport, while Henrietta Hartford fights to keep one child’s marriage a secret when another is exposed.
Now back to AS THE MONEY BURNS
Title
00:46
Love Pilot
[Music Fade Out]
Episode Tag
Wherever money resides, extortion and blackmail forever threaten the secrets and scandals one wishes to hide. Alas a mother’s work is never done.
01:03
[Music – There’s One Little Girl Who Loves Me by Jack Hylton, Album Fascinating Rhythm – Great Hits of the 20s]
Section 1 – Story
[Music Fade Out]
01:21
September 8th, 1931, Boston
At the Federal Court House, a lawsuit is filed that will soon make headlines fast across the nation. The stamped documents are then promptly served to an apartment at the Copley Plaza.
September 9th, 1931
Another day goes by as newspapers fly onto doorsteps and porches across the country. In the richer houses and locations, the servants bring the papers to their masters and mistresses depending on their routine in bed or at the breakfast table.
Happy socialite Henrietta Hartford starts her day much like normal. She drinks her morning coffee over breakfast when she sees the headlines.
She spits out her coffee and drops her cup in astonishment and clasps her mouth.
02:10
The day Henrietta has feared is now happening. Only 1 week before Harvard’s 1931 Fall session begins.
For the next week, newspapers pile up with the various headlines:
Girls Asks for $100k In Suit Saving Love-Mad Youth
Glass House Fails to Guard Richest Boy from Temptress
Guard a Golden Heart, World’s Richest Boy the Most Chaperoned Harvard Student
Sues Mrs. Hartford, Alleges Aid to Son
Too Rich To Call His Love His Own
Sues for $100k
Mama Cages Richest Lad
Young Men Saved From Sirens
The overly dedicated mother has done everything in her possible being to protect her son, so much so that she over coddled and made him supremely vulnerable to the wiles of female seduction. What choices did she have?
03:11
Last year, hormones and a little taste of freedom allowed richest boy Huntington Hartford to venture out with his roommate Ned Rollins to a brothel. That eye opening experience led to several revelations and the beginning of a rebellious streak in Hunt.
Like any good overly involved mother, Henrietta immediately attuned that he might be led astray by the wrong sort of female and searched for a more assured way to put more socially acceptable females in his line of sight. Henrietta really feared a showgirl or god forbid a harlot might tempt her son away and trap him. Instead her son secretly married a girl studying to become a kindergarten teacher. Thus ruining all the better marital matches a mother aspires for her son, like the preferred Newport next door neighbor Doris Duke.
04:03
Henrietta has played the social game fairly well until now. But these last two years she avoided the summer activities of the social season in order to circumvent potential scandal.
As the papers tell the story, Henrietta searched for a reputable young lady to aid in redirecting Huntington’s focus to more desirable female companions. From the New England Conservatory, pretty redheaded Mildred King would act as music instructor as well as a love pilot guiding him to better young ladies. Henrietta suspected that a Manhattan femme fatale, some Broadway siren or even likely lady of the evening has caught Hunt’s romantic attentions.
04:46
If Mildred succeeded in this endeavor, Henriett*a offered to adopt her or pay her a $100k (that’s nearly $2 million in 2022). Mildred organized several gatherings under the guise of music enrichment, and one in which a Lesley College student Mary Lee Epling joined. Miss Mary Lee is now the secret Mrs. Huntington Hartford. The daughter of a West Virginian dentist isn’t exactly the caliber Henrietta was seeking.
Now returned from Hawaii & the Canadian Rockies, Henrietta has been unable to persuade the young couple to separate and annul their marriage. Though they do concede to return to school in their separate living arrangements. Henrietta cannot have this secret exposed. All this new attention will make it even more difficult.
05:33
The newspapers alight that Huntington must be nearly engaged to Doris. Oh how, Henrietta and Doris’s equally ambitious mother Nanaline Duke could hope. Yet alas, Doris’s social secretary denies the suggestion as the youths have barely met a few times and definitely no such nuptial plans or intentions exist.
To Henrietta’s defense, gossip columnist Cholly Knickerbocker reports the honorable Henrietta claims to have never met Mildred and that this obvious blackmail is par the course for the rich. Always the target and the focus of unscrupulous fortune hunters by any means available.
Henrietta maneuvers fast to squelch the story.
But ohhh, not fast enough.
06:20
September 13th, 1931
News is that Huntington is engaged to Mary Lee Epling. Depending on the paper, they met through Mildred in Boston and/or met eh-hem again and fell in love on a cruise ship to Hawaii. As the stories are being published, the young couple are visiting both families to get better acquainted.
By September 16th, 1931 and for some late comers 17th or later
News from Mary Lee’s hometown of Bluefield, West Virginia, reveals that the couple is married as of last April 1931 and now on their Eastern honeymoon.
Crisis not averted.
07:05
By later in the fall, reports will be made that the love pilot claim was likely settled for $10,000 (in 2022 that would be $195k, one paper claims as much as up to $40,000 which would be the ridiculous and highly unlikely sum of $779k). According to Cholly Knickerbocker, Henrietta considers $10k a reasonable sum to make the whole matter finally go away. She dreads any more information that will get dredge up and further ruin their hard newly won social standing.
But do things ever really go away? This is certainly not the end, but only a beginning of several more scandals to come.
07:50
[Music – I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight? by Jack Hylton, Album Charleston – Great Stars Of the 20s]
Section 2 – History & Historiography
[Music Fade Out]
08:09
When I first began researching the subject of the wealthy during the Great Depression, I ran across some early articles detailing their plight in an unsympathetic world. One February 1929 Vanity Fair article laments the problems with searching for love among the wealthy and the profound fear of deception. Another February 1929 Vanity Fair article discusses the problems of being a millionaire especially if born into money and how ill-prepared many are in dealing with life. These are both written prior to the October 1929 Wall Street Crash.
08:44
I take great pains in reconstructing the situations and dynamics beyond the straightforward listing of facts and chronology in the more dominant documentary styles to which we are generally accustomed. I think it hardly does justice to list a single fact with a few sentences and then jump ahead to the next, especially when it comes to heavily based emotional matters. That manner can work well if discussing a battle or a technological invention, however it hardly scratches the surface when the decisions are of a highly intimate nature such as a marriage or a divorce which might have endless layers of complications.
09:22
As I pull back the layers and dive into the past, I get mired in lots of little threads like being stuck in a spiderweb with so many extensions and seemingly random points nevertheless connected. As I move along one, I get wrapped in another. It is following those misdirections that lead to several more interesting potential discoveries.
Then there are the complications of dealing with so much innuendo and scandal. Things that appear true might be false, a façade constructed to protect or imprison one into compliance. Seemingly false things might be true but have been so submerged little will ever see the light.
10:07
To that matter in digging more out of the love pilot scandal, another interesting sidenote that emerges is one of Henrietta Hartford’s own skeletons which came out in a syndicated article. This means there are several copies of variations of the same article, though I am unable to confirm through an independent separate source. This tidbit on Henrietta is a doozy if true. Her first marriage is to Edward Hartford, father of her two children Josephine Hartford and Huntington Hartford. But somewhere along the way, Henrietta upset with Edward divorces him then weds an old and devoted friend, who is unnamed and lacking more identifying description. However that second marriage “fails to flourish” so they divorce, and Henrietta then remarries Edward. No dates, no other details, merely 2-3 sentences. What is well known, Edward will later separate from her again and then will die alone from delirium in a hotel room leaving her and her children a substantial fortune.
11:18
In trying to figure out more, I ran into a dead end with only seeing it mentioned in that one syndicated article related to both Huntington, Mildred King, and Hunt’s sister Josephine Hartford. Not even Huntington’s biography Squandered Fortune mentions the in between marriage. However I did locate a different minor scandal in a 1928 article where the alcoholic death of a Swedish Vice Consul is attributed to the widow Henrietta’s rejecting that gentleman’s romantic overtures. In the biography, it does mention that Henrietta did have several boyfriends over the years even while Huntington is growing up. The men came in and out rather quickly thus giving Huntington some attachment issues. Embarrassingly for her son, she is also prone to flirt with the fathers of his classmates.
12:09
Nevertheless, Henrietta remains discreet enough to keep most things out of the papers. As referenced in the biography, there are very few other confirmations except when another situation will emerge in a few more years.
Wisely, Henrietta makes a powerful friend in Maury Paul, otherwise known as Cholly Knickerbocker, who regularly gushes over her in his column and defends any bad accusation. Through Cholly, we get little bits about the travel both to Europe and Hawaii. Cholly praises her social acumen and seemingly blaise attitude to endlessly play the Society games with its mandatory attendance. It is not revealed that both trips were indeed to avoid the scandals of Huntington’s cheating at St. Paul’s and his abrupt secret marriage. I am not quite sure if Cholly knew the truth, cared about the truth, or preferred the lies as everything is relevant like in today’s vernacular “her truth” and “recollections may vary” mantras.
13:12
When the love pilot escapade comes to the forefront, Cholly defends Henrietta as a decent and noble woman trapped by ambitious and greedy operators, referring in this instance to Mildred King. I refer to the scandal as blackmail because it essentially surfaces a secret due to the lack of $100k payment, whether agreed or not. And the amount is exorbitant even today when talking about $100-200 million dollar trust fund, and more so in 1931.
Who knows what truly happened between Henrietta Hartford and Mildred King. There more than likely was some plotting amongst each other and then a falling out. Mildred King might have overstated her hand and thought the introduction of Mary Lee Epling as a suitable mate, while Henrietta thinks of Mary Lee as far subpar than the mother’s desired intentions.
14:04
Makes me wonder who leaked the marriage details? Did Mildred know about Huntington and Mary Lee then pressed for payment? Or did Mary Lee or one of her defenders leak the information? A lot of press covered the lawsuit, but most of the articles are syndicated and repeat the same information. However one source brought to light a little sooner details of the potential engagement and marriage and with far more accurate details from none other than Bluefield, West Virginia – very close to Mary Lee’s hometown. So if it wasn’t Mary Lee, then it was someone defending her.
14:44
As the story leaks out, more details emerge. First the now obvious, they met on a cruise to Hawaii and fell in love then engaged. To within a couple of days, they met while both at school in Boston and married in April. Then there are additional details that Mary Lee has visited Newport and Huntington is now visiting her in Virginia with Henrietta to join. Still hard to believe when the school session begins again, they will still be living separately in their pre-marriage residencies. Yes, maybe that’s the most ridiculous situation of all.
15:19
Let it be known that for probably 95% of the world – Mary Lee would be considered an excellent and wonderful spouse or daughter-in-law. She is bright, studious, and a go getter. She has a pleasant personality but with a strong will. She is the type that runs the PTA, a devoted mother, and likely a fun bedmate. I take these inferences from other information that I know about her but won’t reveal at this time. She would be the perfect wife for someone with goals and be the caregiver so desired especially back then in the maternal role.
15:54
In contrast, babyfaced and overly coddled Huntington Hartford needs to grow up and get a better backbone. Other than his bank account, he doesn’t have a lot to recommend. He hasn’t learned to manage life’s challenges so far, he is a daydreamer who rarely lives up to his imaginative potential, and he will often defer to his mother or wife to make the harder decisions and deal with any fall out.
Oh yes, he is going to be the center of much chaos to come mostly stemming from his immaturity.
Henrietta obviously is a little more familiar with scandal surrounding amorous liaisons. This is also far from being the last situation she will deal with during her lifetime.
Maybe love pilots should teach safety procedures for when love crashes?
16:46
[Music – This Is The Missus by Sidney Kyte & His Piccadilly Hotel Band, Album The Great Dance Bands Play Hits of the 30s]
Section 3 – Contemporary & Personal Relevance
[Music Fade Out]
17:04
Plenty of blackmail and scandal surrounds the wealthy. Secrets are only as powerful as those wanting or needing to keep them.
So much energy goes into keeping secrets. The best hope is that if they ever do come out, then it is much after the fact and with little impact in the present and future. And yet there are plenty of secrets that linger forever, always waiting to come into the light.
The question is how dangerous is the actual secret. For most cases, it merely has the power over the person wanting to keep it. No more, no less. Even if it is traumatic, the actual openness allows a person to deal and confront.
But the hardest secrets are the ones in which we confine ourselves. The lies we tell to make our life seem okay or how we want it to be or at least have others believe it to be.
18:02
Most recently, the book Revenge: Meghan, Harry, and the War Between the Windsors by Tom Bower retreads the ground of the former royals’ dispute and their abrupt exit in 2020. In it, Bower goes over bit by bit every fact known about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry and either validates or disproves their claims. Previously, Buckingham Palace issued the statement “recollections may vary” in response to the Oprah interview from 2021. This book focuses on exposing many of the lies and half-truths spread over the last couple of years. Is it scandalous, or will it finish what seems to be nonstop endless scandals if only for headlines? The secrets are out, but were they ever really secret depends on the perspective.
18:53
A secret wedding to a lesser but otherwise reputable person is far less scandalous than the troubles ahead for our heirs and heiresses. If only those future situations will resolve as amicably. Love is a tricky situation needing plenty of guidance…
19:12
History is a fun and strange thing and can often require a second or third look into the subject. Want some fun trivia? Check out Second Glance History blogs & posts which resurfaces forgotten stories. Second Glance History recently celebrated 4 years of stories and puns, so there is plenty to enjoy.
Twitter, the handle @2GlanceHistory
OR
their website https://secondglancehistory.com
Links available in the Notes Section along with a few special articles.
https://secondglancehistory.com/not-dead-yet/
https://secondglancehistory.com/madame-palatines-burn-book-part-1/
https://secondglancehistory.com/the-hapsburg-anastasia-part-1/
19:46
Earbuds Collective will be featuring As The Money Burns in its Podcast Spotlight for the week of September 4th, 2022. Please check it out at:
Website - https://www.earbudspodcastcollective.org/
Twitter - @EarbudsPodCol
Links will also be available in the notes section and via all social media for As The Money Burns as well as the News & Events tab at https://asthemoneyburns.com.
If you enjoy As The Money Burns, then please share, like, & subscribe.
Hook
20:20
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
Next when we return to AS THE MONEY BURNS…
Royal titles might be grand, but one prince proudly turns in his title to become an American citizen.
Until then…
Credits
20:37
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast written, produced, and voiced by Nicki Woodard, based on historical research. Archival music has been provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, check out their website at www.pastperfect.com.
Please come visit us at As The Money Burns via Goodpods, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Transcripts, timeline, episode guide, and character bios are available at asthemoneyburns.com.
21:11
THE END.