In the 1970’s when I was just out of college I got married and moved to Palm Beach…big mistake but more about that another time. My then wife had a pretty house on the ocean and I got into a joint venture with a couple of guys in their late 40’s; we opened a small advertising and PR firm in the town. The rent was $700 a month and our receptionist made $300 a week. There were four gates at the Palm Beach airport and after living there a year or so I knew about every person in town. We played a lot of bridge, went to countless dinner parties and had lunch every Saturday at Lily Pulitzer’s wonderful old house on Lake Worth in the heart of town. Life was simpler then in many ways.
Into my life came this creature the likes of which I had never met and surely will never meet again. She was former silent screen, talkies and Broadway star Mary Duncan Sanford…Mary Duncan was her stage name and she had more than a few claims to fame. She had been big in the box office in the silent film era and ran around with Doris Duke, W.R. Hearst and her best friend in the world was Marion Davies. She came to New York and was a smash on Broadway in a drama called “The Shanghai Gesture” where amongst other things she got killed at the end of the second act and spent the entire third act playing dead…she got raves for that. Then back to Hollywood where she co-starred in the film “Morning Glory” getting second billing to Katherine Hepburn. Hepburn won the Oscar for best actress that year, 1935. So Mary Duncan was no bit player.
The following year or so she met Stephen “Laddie” Sanford, the polo player, thoroughbred horse owner and heir to the Bigelow Sanford Carpet fortune. He was for all intents American royalty. Brought up not to ever work a day in his life he was the life of every party and truly the catch of every young woman who wanted a handsome, rich good looking husband…that would be every woman in the world. Now Laddie’s father was the autocratic John Sanford who was a self-made guy and delighted in spoiling his son. However, John was no dummy and while Mary didn’t sign a pre-nup the corpus of the family fortune was never going to go to Laddie. It was in trust to go to the next generation of Laddie’s and his two sisters. Mary and Laddie were destined not to have children and maybe they knew that from the start. So the rumor was that John Sanford settled the extraordinary sum of $1 million on Mary prior to her marrying his son. He reckoned that if she was going to leave a lucrative career she should have her own money. Also, if she was in it for the money she could take the $1 million and go. This was in the late 30’s in America and a town house on the Upper East Side was $40 thousand!
Now I didn’t meet Mary until some 40 years later. Laddie had been bed ridden for some 15 years and was in a bad state. Rumors swirled as to what his ailments were but most had attributed his declining health to too many years of late nights and drink and he lasted until the late 1980’s in a more or less vegetative state tended to by 24 hours nurses in his hospital bed in “Los Incas”, their baronial 40 room Palm Beach estate. Mary told me she slept each night in his room in a twin bed behind a folding screen in his room and her love for her “Laddie Boy” never ebbed for a minute.
They had amassed some great properties during their years together. They had an enormous house on Long Island she sold to John Delorean at the height of his career, a multi thousand-acre ranch in upstate Florida that she sold to Roy Disney when they were assembling the land for Disney World in Orlando. She told me he impressed her so she took Disney stock not cash for the property…I think the stock was around $2.00 a share at the time. Then there was the cottage in Saratoga Springs and a coop in New York she owned with the fabulously wealthy Avon heiress, Baroness Terri von Pantz. No housing shortage there.
So Mary enters my life in 1975 and I am a couple of years out of school. We move to Palm Beach and she and I became instant best friends. The one thing that was forbidden was to mention any reference as to her actual age. Now look she was in silent films and this is 50 years later so she had to be around 75 years old but no one ever referred to it. Mary once said, “A woman who would tell her age would tell anything.”
So here is this unlikely duo and we were four times a week telephone pals, would lunch once a week and had dinner together at least twice a month. She was one of the great story tellers and to this day I remember in detail her stories of staying at San Simeon with “W. R.” and Marion, hosting the Grand Duke Dimitri in Palm Beach and asking him if he actually killed Rasputin (he said he did actually), her Broadway days and on and on.
She had a chef named Manolo, who was this 5 foot tall Cuban with a black toupee. A gentleman of I would guess 60 years of age and gay as “Jingle Bells”. He would cook lunch for maybe 16 at the house and appear at dessert in a Spanish dance costume, turn on a small tape recorder and dance a mad Flamenco for all of us. He was absolutely terrible but it was so dear to him that Mary couldn’t hurt his feelings by not allowing him to perform. Of course we all cheered for him as if he was a national hero. Hell he was a good cook and you gotta keep them happy right?
She belonged to all the clubs and liked to golf, which she did about three times a week. Problem was that her only golf partner of choice was her chauffeur of 30 years, Charlie who was married to her personal maid Margaret. So, she knew the clubs would not want her to bring him as a guest so they played at the public course in the South end of town. She simply was so secure in what and who she was that I am sure she never thought twice about it.
Finally, the jewelry. Oh God! The jewelry! To this day I think only Elizabeth II could rival it in size and quantity. I remember a marquis diamond ring that had to be 35-carats. I remember a Ruby parure. The ring was a 40-carat pigeon blood and the ruby necklace, earrings and bracelet. I mean that set alone had to be $5 million, and much more than that too. Once I picked her up in New York for dinner and she was wearing the rubies. I said, “Mary, aren’t you afraid to wear that on the street?”
She said, “Don’t be silly, darling. I’m an old bag. They all think it’s fake.” She could kid about her age; we didn’t.
Thanks for staying with me and here is my point of telling you about Mary. Mary was the Mrs. Astor of Palm Beach in those days. No one wanted cross her and all wanted to be in her grace and favor. She chaired two big charity balls a year. She ran the American Cancer Society Ball in Palm Beach each January and the April In Paris Ball in New York to benefit an orphanage in Paris. And run them she did. She picked her committees and no one ever said no if she asked them to join. She called corporate CEO’s and got them to buy tables, she found underwriters and hosted parties at her home for people that supported her efforts. She raised countless millions of dollars because she ran these extravaganzas for over 25 years!
Mary is gone over 10 years now and when she finally passed away she was supposed to have been 96. People had pegged her as younger because of the “don’t ask; don’t tell” rule.
Today we have some amazing people like the Gates family and Warren Buffet, David and Julia Koch and others who lead by example in philanthropy. However, we also have this cloying group of “celebutantes” who are famous for absolutely nothing. They borrow jewels and clothes from suckers who will loan to them. Walk the red carpet like movie stars. Put their names on charity committees and look for free tickets to the event…never entertain but always seek to be taken out. In short a group of zeroes who because there is so much media in search of content somehow worm their way into the papers and the internet. The photographers know one who will go unnamed as “elbows” because she is always shoving her way into the frame with famous people. They have probably never heard of Mary Sanford, but I can tell you that if they had been around when she was, they would never have seen one of Manolo’s flamencos.
I begged her to write a memoir and she thought that would be telling tales. I miss you Mary.
Paul
