THE RICH: Post Hostess with the Mostest

Marjorie Merriweather Post lived as queens once were wont to do and now seldom can afford. As heiress to a breakfast-cereal fortune and founder of the General Foods empire, Mrs.Post reigned for most of her years as the grande dame of American high society and regal mistress of a life-style evocative of the lost opulence of Victorian empires. Last week, at her Georgian estate in Washington, D.C., Marjorie Post died quietly of a heart attack at age 86, and with her death a gilt-edged volume of American history came to an end.

The Post family fortunes (last estimated as high as $250 million) began with Charles William Post, a farm-machinery salesman and inventor whose Welsh ancestors had come to America in 1633. In the 1890s, Post moved with his wife and only child to Battle Creek, Mich., in hopes of improving his health. When the change failed to help, Post came up with a cure of his own. After concocting a combination of wheat, molasses and bran as a healthful coffee substitute, Postpatented his recipe, dubbed the mixture Postum, and launched one of the first advertising campaigns for a prepared food. One ad exhorted: “Is your yellow streak the coffee habit? Does it reduce your working force, kill your energy, push you into the big crowd of mongrels, deaden what thoroughbred blood you may have, and neutralize all your efforts to make money and fame?”

At age eight, Daughter Marjorie was gluing Postum boxtops in the family’s Battle Creek barn. By age ten she was accompanying her father to board meetings and factory tours. With C.W.’s death in 1914, Marjorie Post inherited several million dollars and control of the Postum Cereal Co., which by then included Post Toasties and Grape Nuts cereals. At the urging of her second husband, Manhattan Stockbroker Edward F. Hutton, the Postum Co. began adding a cupboard full of new products. The Postum Co. was renamed the General Foods Corp.

As the rest of the country slid into the Depression, Marjorie prospered as the Post hostess with the mostest. Her estates became the playground for the surviving American moneyed, from the Phippses and Vanderbilts to the Kennedys and Dodges. Winters were spent at Mar-A-Lago, a 115-room, $7,000,000 residence in Palm Beach, Fla. Decorated with Italian stone, tiles made in 15th century Spain, and tapestries from the palace of the Venetian Doge, the crescent-shaped, turreted mansion and its estate boasted a nine-hole golf course, 10,000 potted plants, and well placed sand that enabled the family pooch to visit the trees without getting his paws dirty. House guests received a list of activities each morning, new movies were shown at night, and once the entire Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus was brought in for an afternoon.

In the summers, the Post entourage moved to Camp Topridge, a mountain-top hideaway in upstate New York. There a visitor could rough it while living in a guesthouse staffed by a butler and maid. A crew of woodsmen-guides was on hand to help explore the outdoors, while the less energetic could get a glimpse of the St. Lawrence Seaway from Mrs. Post’s four-engine plane.

In the fall and spring the entourage moved to Hillwood, the Georgian mansion on Mrs. Post’s 24-acre estate in Washington, D.C. With ambassadors and heads of state as her guests, the style was more elaborate. Liveried servants served formal dinners on vermeil plates originally cast for Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. Guests could view the most extensive collection of Czarist icons and jewelry outside the Soviet Union, the result of a Post buying spree in Moscow with her third husband, Ambassador Joseph E. Davies. At Hillwood, Mrs. Post’s pet schnauzer slept in a bed once used by Belgian royalty.

No Diamond Dusting. Yet if Mrs. Post’s life-style was extravagant, so too was her philanthropy. During World War I she built a 2,000-bed field hospital. During the Depression she put her jewels into a vault, canceled their insurance, and used the money saved for a New York kitchen that fed 1,000 people daily. Her endowments to C.W. Post College of Long Island University and her own alma mater, Mount Vernon Junior College have long been the envy of less wealthy institutions. She gave well over $1,000,000 to the Washington National Symphony Orchestra.

Though bothered by increasing deafness, Mrs. Post never succumbed to the role of diamond-dusting dowager. She remained an active member of the General Foods board until her 71st year, when company policy forced her into retirement. She maintained her regal, ramrod posture and her vigorous golf swing well into her eighth decade, and rumors of yet another romance circulated after her fourth divorce in 1964.

“My father once said that if I were cast ashore on a desert island I’d organize the grains of sand,” Mrs. Post told friends. With that same gift for organization, she prepared carefully for the future of her estates. Hillwood and its treasures have been willed to the Smithsonian Institution. Topridge will be used by seminars of C.W. Post College, while the Palm Beach property has been donated to the Federal Government for use by foreign dignitaries. None of the storied retreats will belong in the future to any single individual, which perhaps is just as well: it is hard to conceive of anyone else able to grace the palaces with the panache to which they have been accustomed.