Behind the Scenes Minis: Mary and Marjorie

Tracy shares the surprising benefit of not having access to a lot of specifics regarding the work of Mary Golda Ross. Holly talks about Marjorie Merriwether Post being a serial monogamist.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Friedy. We talked about Mary Golda Ross this week.
Yes pros and cons to knowing so little about the

(00:21):
details of her work as a mathematician and aerospace engineer. Cons.
I felt like we were a little thin on details
to include in the episode. That's the tricky bit prose.
I did not have to figure out how to explain
incredibly complex mathematics and engineering stuff, right, Those are always

(00:46):
tricky A heech for me. Yeah, there's I did. I
never took an engineering class. Aside from my arithmetic difficulties
that we have talked about. Once I got into mathematics
that was more about like geometry and equations and stuff.
I I liked it a lot more than I did
when I was a kid, and I did pretty well

(01:06):
in classes like astronomy and physics and chemistry. But there's
like a ceiling. I get to a point where I'm like,
I don't understand this anymore. Yeah. I understood up until
this moment, and now I have no idea what's happening.
It's challenging I can't remember if we talked about this

(01:26):
when we talked about in the high episode, Holly, have
you been to the Museum of the American Indian in Washington,
d C. I feel embarrassed to tell you I'm not sure. Okay,
I mean, there's a lot of museums in Washington, d C.
I know it's recent enough that I should know, but
I go to a lot of museums, and my brain
is a little scrambled from a lot of travel in

(01:48):
the last several months, and I'm like, I'm not sure
if I have a false memory of this or not.
Oh sure, if I did, it was a brief run
through and not like a law leisurely day because then
it would impress more memory upon me. Yeah. Yeah, And
there have been a couple days where I was there
in Washington, d C. And buzz through three or four

(02:10):
museums in a day. Oh yeah, they all of them
get short shrift in that situation. But yeah. So the
company that we work for used to be owned I'm
saying this for listeners benefit used to be owned by Discovery,
and Discovery's headquarters were in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is
effectively next to Washington, d C. And so when I
would need to go there for work, I often would like,

(02:32):
if I needed to be there Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday,
I would fly in on Friday, and I would spend
Saturday and Sunday going to museums and stuff. And one
of the times that I did this, the Museum of
the American Indian was one of the places that I
went to, and I think I also went a second
time one time when you and I were there for
a live show, which would have been more recent. It

(02:54):
is one of my favorite of the Smithsonian museums. I
have seen exhibits there that are really cool. There was
one that was called up Where We Belong, and it
was about Indigenous people's influence on pop culture. And that
one had an incredibly cool audio tour that went along

(03:16):
with it that was a lot of music by Indigenous
recording artists. There's a thing that I think is part
of the permanent collection that's all about the use of
Indigenous imagery in advertising. Oh yeah. Things that I've seen
at that museum have wound up on the list for
episodes of the show, some of which this is. I mean,
we've talked about how long our shortlists are I've got

(03:39):
stuff from visits to that museum from years ago that
are still sitting on my to do list waiting to
be done at some point. And then, in addition to
how great I think the exhibits in the museum are,
the restaurant. Oh, I did not go to the restaurant. Yeah,
so it is. It is one of my favorite restaurants

(04:02):
on the National Mall. I think it might be. It's
hard to say because there are ones that have I
have less of an experience with. But for a while
I was like, this is my favorite place to eat
on the National Mall. It is indigenous inspired cuisines, and
they're different stations that you can go to that have
indigenous inspired cuisine from different parts of the Americas. All

(04:24):
of it really really delicious. The time I think this
is the time that I was there, when we were
there for a live show. I had gone to the
Museum of the American Indian I had looked at all
of the you know, the the temporary exhibits that I
had not seen yet, and then I had lunch in
the restaurant, and then I went to the National Museum

(04:45):
of African American History and Culture, which was newly opened
at that point, and I basically went and had a
second lunch at that restaurant, which was also really good one.
So yeah, anyway, the Smithsonian Museums, we have already talked
about being angry and upset about the way the Executive

(05:09):
Branch just treating the Smithsonian Museums. And then of course
at the moment that we are recording this, the government
is still shut down and so all of them are
temporarily closed, which is also upsetting. Yeah, other stuff about
the episode, this appearance that she did that Mary Golda

(05:29):
Ross did on What's My Line? Uh huh. At first
I thought this might have been maybe nervousness about being
on television, but then I read other accounts of friends
of hers that described her this way. She was so
soft spoken. Her voice was just so soft and gentle

(05:51):
that the first thing that she said when she was
sort of introducing herself on that show, I was like,
I feel like I need to listen more carefully whenever
you're talking leaning towards your screen. Yeah, but yeah, other
people described her similarly. There was also a quote from
doctor Norbert Hill, who I think spoke at her funeral.

(06:13):
I had a hard time getting details about that. I
did find some write ups of it, but not like
a you know, full order of events of the day.
But this is a quote that was sort of relevant
but not directly about her that I saved for this
behind the scenes. And so he said, quote, We've had
indigenous engineers since time immemorial. We were able to build

(06:34):
things and make things, and we got amnesia about it
about who we are as a people building tepees and canoes,
the snowshoe and irrigation systems in Arizona. There are certainly
a lot of contributions that the Cherokees have made. We've
lost that in the narrative, the ability to say you're
a modern day engineer just like your ancestors. But I

(06:56):
love that. So the discussion of the haar dress in
this immediately made me think of a very popular style
of dress that is still made like among retro seamstresses,
called a patio dress. Okay, it was originally not called
a patio dress. It was called by an outdated, no

(07:18):
longer acceptable term for an indigenous woman. And it's interesting
because looking at pictures of tear dresses, they look very similar.
And I ended up in my own little side quest
rabbit hole of Like, are patio dresses, which are sometimes
also called fiesta dresses depending on where you're at and

(07:41):
what pattern you're using. I'm like, were those based on
these but they actually predate tear dresses, but they're also
based on older indigenous garments. So I feel like there's
this through line across multiple tribes and cultures trying to
replicate dresses that some sources will even tell you the

(08:02):
dresses that were being used as inspiration for patio dresses
were based on Indigenous dresses that were actually based on
European dresses, and so it becomes this circle of like,
I don't know at the beginning of this style exits, right, Yeah, Well,

(08:23):
and that was part of what they were challenged by
when they were trying to create something that felt appropriate,
as like Cherokee traditional dress, because there are indigenous nations
that do have a culturally specific style of clothing that
was being worn prior to the arrival of Europeans. Yeah,

(08:46):
and the Cherokee also had some ways of making netting
and beating and things like that that were culturally specific.
But like when it came to garments that people were wearing,
the way that it was explained by the Cherokee writers
that I read who were talking about the creation of
the stress like this, it was like you're making a
garment out of the skins of the animal that you're

(09:08):
also using the meat from, and it just it was
not something that was like, this is a Cherokee method
of making these coverings for your body. Right, and then
once trade goods from Europe were introduced, a lot of
people started wearing things that were very similar to, you know,
what the European people were wearing. And so it felt

(09:31):
culturally appropriate to have a dress that looked like a
European person's garment because that's what people had been wearing,
including before being forcibly removed to Oklahoma. But it also
needed to feel like it was something specifically Cherokee. And
so yeah, it does have that kind of circular like, Okay,

(09:51):
what what had Europeans introduced? How had Cherokee people made
it their own? How does that feedback into re establishing
a cultural identity after you know, centuries of deliberate erasure
and deliberate attempts to force the Cherokee to assimilate with
white culture. Like all of this feeds in together with

(10:13):
creating a garment and then saying, Okay, this has roots
to us and is also something that is our cultural
dress today and also very similar to a product very
popular in the nineteen fifties amongst white ladies. We also
stressed in the episode that like, this is something that
the Cherokee in Oklahoma, we're doing the Cherokee in North

(10:36):
Carolina or you know, on the East Coast, like have
they're they're related, But this was something that was happening
in Oklahoma that, as far as I know, the Cherokee
in North Carolina were not part part of that part
of it in the sixties and seventies, and they're making
this dress. I also watched an hour the our the

(11:00):
the video that we referenced. I watched the full hour
of it and just like wrapped attention of the creation
of these dresses and how they were made and different
fabrics that they can be made from, and the challenges
of working with fabrics that don't just tear from the
salvage edge like that. The tearing from the salvage edge

(11:21):
gave me such a like I don't know what I
would call it. Is it nostalgia, is it chuckle? I
don't know, but I mean, did you ever bump up
against the arguments over pro tearing fabric versus not. I
don't think when you were doing any sewing, because people
feel strongly about this situe in the sewing world. Some

(11:44):
people love it because they feel like, great, if you
tear across the cross grain, you know you're getting essentially theoretically,
I should say, a straight right cut air quoting cut.
But not all fabric are loomed exactly perfectly that way,
and they won't Oh sure, you will actually end up

(12:04):
with an angled piece or one of the other things
that can happen is as you're ripping it. And also
you have to be kind of good at it to
get it like a clean tear. But sometimes as you're
doing the tear, the threads that make up the grain
of the fabric will get a little warped in the process,
and people get squeamish about that. Like there are if

(12:27):
you're in say a costume shop, Let's just say as
a theoretical example, and someone chooses to like they're making
something that has like a million ruffles, and they choose
to start tearing the fabric instead of cutting it. Some
people will be totally cool with it. And some people

(12:47):
will lose their minds and act as though you are
doing the most chromagnon thing you could possibly do with
a piece of fabric, which is no slight to chromegnons.
They just didn't have scissors yet. It's very funny to
watch that divide open up amidst a bunch of stitchers.
Yeah yeah, and watch how vehemently each side will make

(13:11):
their case that the way they do it is the
proper way. Yeah. I just find I'm very you know,
we roll with stuff in our sewing room. Yeah, whatever
way you like to do it is the correct way
for your project. Yeah. I have definitely had the experience
of trying to tear a really inexpensive inexpensive is the

(13:32):
wrong word a cheaply made piece of fabric and had
that go very wrong. Uh. Yeah. Sometimes if there's a gap,
if the thread count is not very high on those
grain threads, it will make a right turn and tear
up the grain instead of directly across the whole way. Yeah,
and that's not fun. That'll mess up your plan in

(13:53):
a hurry. So yep, that goes back to that whole
technique thing a little bit. You got to be fast confident.
You gotta tear with confidence. Yeah, and not all fabrics
will do it either. I don't think I have anything
else to say about Mary Golda Ross. I know almost
nothing about her personal life beyond her giving apricots to
people as gifts. I mean, that's all I need to know.

(14:16):
She's a cool lady. Yeah. Yeah. We talked about Marjorie
Meriweather post this week, who I'm very fascinated by because
she does seem like one of those early instances of

(14:38):
someone with more money than she needs who decided she
would use it to help other people, which I admire,
and also who encouraged other people that were similarly blessed
with wealth that they needed to also step up and
do the same thing. I love that she's like, this
construction project might be a money pit, but I don't

(14:59):
want to put all these guys out of work and
make an entire big problem because a lot of people
are employed by my project. Hmm. I love that. I
love that about her. There are some very funny things. Apparently,
when she built Mary Lago, which she envisioned, is this
amazing place she was going to host parties, She did
have some times where she actually got overwhelmed by it.

(15:20):
Like they would invite two hundred people at a time
to come and stay there and like go to a
full array of activities, you know, kind of the way
we see in films of old English country houses having
everybody come and visit for a week or whatever, and
they have a full schedule of activities and balls and meals.
And apparently at one point she had invited a bunch

(15:40):
of people and some of them brought their kids, which
they had not told her ahead of time, and so
there were more people than they had planned for, and
then an illness broke out amongst the party group, and
so they were having to like separate people into different
bedrooms and all of the rooms were filled, and more
guests were still coming. Oh no, but they managed it. Somehow,

(16:02):
they managed it. Marjorie Merriweather Post was a serial monogamous. Yeah,
it's interesting. There's a book a biography of her that
I read that was written by Nancy Ruben Stewart in
nineteen ninety five, although she wrote an article about her
in twenty twenty three for Saturday Evening Post where she

(16:25):
references a lot of things that Marjorie's children and grandchildren
have commented on over the decades about her and about
like their disagreements of her assessments of things, but also
their you know, love of her. And she was a
person that really helped a lot of people, you know,

(16:46):
in their family and outside of their family, and you know,
anybody that they were connected to when they fell on
hard times could come to her from help and always
get it. But they also talked about how she just
thought you were supposed to be married, that was what
was up. You needed to be coupled up. And so

(17:08):
even after she had broken up with herb her fourth husband,
and that whole scandal, at one point there were rumors
that she was going to get remarried, which she dismissed,
but apparently among the family they had said something about it,
and she was like, yeah, but I'm lonely, Like I'm
in this huge house by myself, Like why wouldn't I

(17:28):
get married again? Even though at that point, you know,
she's into her late seventies, early eighties, so she just
she loved the companionship of marriage, and it seems like
it was a she had a sense of personal failure
at never having had what she perceived as a successful marriage. Yeah,
even though her marriage to Davies lasted twenty years, I

(17:50):
mean it lasted a long time. Yeah. But yeah, Also,
all these rich people were just switching up spouses periodically,
Like I don't mean any kind of like we're doing
a spouse swap, but it would be like we got
divorced and then at a party a couple months later,
I met this other person and they were married to
somebody else, but they got divorced, and then we got married,
and then that person got married to another person. It's

(18:13):
just wild. Yeah. Point of trivia Edward Close, her first
husband is, if I did the math right, the grandfather
of Glenn Close. I wondered when I got to the
name Close and the outline if there was a relation there,
and then I was like, surely not, there is there is. Yeah, man,

(18:37):
that's fascinating. There are also some interesting There's so much
that I had to leave out because she I didn't
get into any of her collecting. Yeah, because she did
collect a lot of amazing stuff, like you know, tapestries
from France that were made by the same weaving company
that had made tapestries you know for the royal palaces,

(18:58):
Like pieces of find china that she collected when she
was in the Soviet Union, pieces she collected all over
Europe on her travels, pieces she collected from around the
United States when she trivel Like she just had an
eye for jewelry and art and sculpture and was very
smart about acquiring things and using them, which is pretty interesting, right.

(19:22):
They didn't just go into storage. They were included in
the designs of her homes. They were part of the
way she arranged things. Her fine china got used, and
she had very specific ways she liked it to be
arranged and displayed on the table with very specific flowers
that she wanted to have if she was using any
given set of china, Which is all pretty interesting. Now,

(19:45):
I want to go to Hillwood. I've never been. Yeah,
it looks beautiful. I've never been. Let's go. That tree
and flower lines walk that her friends made sounds really
lovely to me. I feel like that is a real,
really good indicator of who she was as a person.
That her friends were not like, you know, it's her

(20:08):
seventieth birthday, let's buy her something ostentatious and huge, right.
They were instead like, let's build a beautiful place that
she can walk, and that other people could also walk
because that's what she wants. I feel like that's a
good indicator that she was not a monster. Yeah, fingers,
fingers Yeah. One of the other things that does come

(20:30):
up in all of those those quotes from her family
after her passing is that she was not good at
dealing with things. She did not like Oh sure, she
wouldn't like address things head on and like try to
fix it. She would just cut it out of her life.
Something I'm embarrassed to tell you. I feel a certain

(20:53):
kinship to you. But like even with her husband, her
second husband, when she found out he was cheating, she'd
she didn't say like, hey, you're cheating. Here's a thing.
It was I'm about to step onto a boat and
go away for months. By the way, we're getting divorced, goodbye. Yeah,
because she didn't want to have the conversation about it.
She just wanted to say how it was going to

(21:15):
be and leave and not right. This reminds me a
little bit, in a slightly different way of a relationship
that I ended immediately after my birthday party was over
and all the rest of the guests had left because
I didn't want to deal with it. Prior to the
birthday party, but it needed to be dealt with. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(21:38):
she just wouldn't have dealt with it. She would have
moved out the next day while that person was like
at work or on an Errand yeah, I didn't have
that option. There are various people that come up on
the show where like I really feel like I have

(22:01):
the same mindset about something, or I really empathize with
them in a particular way. And I do not have
that with the need for her to be married, because
way earlier in my life I came to the decision
that a bad relationship was way worse than no relationship,
and I would much rather have no relationship if that

(22:25):
was the options, Like, those are my choices. Oh yeah.
And so sort of feeling like she needed to be
in a marriage is just like it's not a thing
where I am in sync with her thinking on that. Well,
I think too right. She wasn't a person who like

(22:46):
got into a marriage that she knew was not gonna
be great. Every time she started one of her four marriages,
she felt very in love with that person. They all
seem like they were great starts. Oh sure, And she
did roll out as soon as she was she was
in any way wronged by it, yeah, or felt like
it wasn't working for her. But she you know, keep

(23:09):
in mind, she was very beautiful, she was very charming,
she was super smart, self possessed, had more money than
anybody she was going to meet, just about I mean,
it's funny because there are a lot of write ups
about her that, you know, like the brief versions were there,
like she was the richest woman in the United States

(23:30):
or one of the richest women in the world. I'm like,
she was one of the richest people in the world. Like, right,
you don't need to specify by sex or gender in
this instance, because she was a millionaire when she was
a teenager, like a multimillionaire right in the nineteen teens. Yeah,
in nineteen teens. Dollars of multimillionaire. Yeah, she was richer

(23:51):
than most people ever, so she knew that was another thing.
She knew she was never going to meet somebody who
was her equal in that regard. Like there was just
no the odds were incredibly low to Jill. But she
did seem to very much like love, love, and truly
fall in love with these people, and she charmed them.

(24:12):
There The story of when she met her husband, Joe
Davies for the first time, is like everybody in the
room saw it happen, like where they were all they
all kind of knew, like, all right, well, his marriage
is going to end because he just fell in love
with this woman at first sight. Like even his kids
were like, whoa, okay, our lives just changed. Like they

(24:34):
all recognized that they had a really intense attraction to
one another and a devotion to one another. So it's
it's interesting. I don't think she was willing to put
up with not a good relationship. She just was a
romantic in many ways and thought she wanted to be
with somebody and have that you know, magical connection. Even

(24:56):
though I mean, I think that's probably what led her
to not realize that her last husband, if he was
I mean, we don't know. The words never came out
in any kind of like I identify as oh, sure
he was a closeted homosexual, or he was bisexual or whatever. Right,
I don't think that ever crossed her mind for a second,

(25:17):
because she was like, I am in love with this person,
and he's in love with me. Yeah. And even though
there were instances later on where people were like, remember
that time where you said he was weird around that
waiter and he acted too familiar because he was hitting
on him, and she was like really like she just
didn't didn't have any any sense of it. Yeah. I

(25:40):
kind of went like poking around for more detail about
that after reading the outline this morning, because I was
kind of curious, and I also was like, okay, like
what ages of young men are we talking about here?
And the pictures that showed like what is what is
the nature of what we're talking about here? And my

(26:02):
cursory reading of it made it sound like that he
genuinely did have feelings for her in some way. Yeah,
and and that like also he was involved with man,
so yeah, I mean that's the thing. It makes me
think he was probably by but again, you don't want
to assign that to anybody because we don't know. Yeah,

(26:24):
but he seemed very into her. I mean he pursued her, right,
So mysteries mysteries. So she was so good at keeping
things private that there are big chunks we don't know about, right,
like her divorce, Yeah, from Hutton is still shrouded in
a little bit of mystery. It's that combination of not

(26:46):
having the inner thoughts of either of them really on this,
and then also like the continual evolution of how we
talk about these things in society, which is constantly changing
and evolving. Anyways, she fascinates me. Yeah, I do love
that she proselytized to all of her wealthy friends to
be like, the way you make best use of your

(27:09):
money is to spread it around and give money away
all the time, use it for good, for good aims,
try to make the world a better place with your money.
You can still keep making money for you, but you
got to also do these things if you really want
to live, right, And I'm like, I love you. Yeah, Yeah,
I feel like we're living in a society where there

(27:29):
is way too much wealth concentrated with a few specific
people who have way too much power over the lives
of the rest of us. So I do like the
fact that she was not focused on like getting more
and more and more and more and more to the
exclusion of attempting to do good for other people in

(27:51):
the world. Yeah. Even as she got older, her you know,
large lavish parties often came with by the way, are
you donating money? Which I love. I love it anyway,
may we all live with the sense of duty to
help others with what we have. Yeah, speaking of donating money,

(28:14):
we're recording this a couple of weeks in advanced Will
the government still be shut down when this episode comes out?
Who can say? Will people have gotten their snap benefits
in November? Who can say? What we can say is
that we know there will still be a need for
people to have food. And so if you have the
ability to donate to your local food bank or a

(28:34):
food rescue organization or some organization that is helping to
keep people fed, if you're able to do that, it's
a great time to do it. One of my very
favorite ways to support the community is to always, always
we do a big usually Thanksgiving, we do a donation
and then we tie a nerdy Star Wars thing to

(28:57):
Mardi Grass season, where the idea is that, oh, yeah,
yeah tasting. We should also be giving to places that
feed people, whatever organization feels right to you. Local organizations
are great, I mean, we all have plenty. That's like
my life motto. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot
going on in the world and a lot that people
can want to contribute to, and just everything's harder when

(29:19):
people are hungry. Yeah, if you've ever been hungry, you
know it sucks. We should help people not have to
feel that and not be ashamed when they need help
make the world better. If this is your weekend, I
hope you find a way to make the world better.
If it's not your weekend, I hope whatever your job
is does not burden you in a way that makes

(29:39):
you feel like the world is worse. I hope that
everybody treats each other kindly. We all take care of
one another. We will be right back here tomorrow with
a classic episode, and then on Monday with something brand new.
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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(30:04):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.