Weird Island

28. TAYLOR SWIFT: The Story of Her Rhode Island Home

Episode Summary

In 2013, singer Taylor Swift showed up in Rhode Island with $17.7MM in cash and purchased a summer home called High Watch. Then, she wrote a song about it (see: “the last great american dynasty”). This is the real history behind Taylor Swift’s Rhode Island home.

Episode Notes

Episode Source Material:

Episode Transcription

Sitting high up on the shore in Watch Hill RI, there’s this enormous white home that somehow gets called both a mansion and a cottage, depending, I suppose, on who you’re talking to. At one point, writer Craig Unger described the building as, “the single most imposing structure in Watch Hill, situated on a bluff, the white clapboard house dominates the area. It is so large and rambling, with more than forty rooms, four chimneys, and half a dozen terraced sundecks, that it’s hard to believe it is a single-family summer dwelling.”
But that’s exactly what it is. A single family - or, maybe more accurately, single person dwelling.
An owner of this imposing home was once quoted saying, “Since I took up the study of music seriously five years ago, I’ve developed one ambition. I want to write something that will last, something that will be remembered.” This owner, she was a member of high society. She threw big, crazy parties. She danced, she composed music, she once appeared in a spread in Vogue. She even secured an invite to the White House. Knowing all of that, you’re probably feeling pretty confident that this woman did in fact write something that will last, something that will be remembered. Because you’re probably thinking that this woman is Taylor Swift.
But, you’d be wrong. Kind of. Because the person who said that was actually a woman named Rebekah Harkness, and that’s likely a name you’ve never heard before. She didn’t exactly achieve stardom for her musical compositions. But she was very much in the public eye for a time--for other reasons. Rebekah Harkness was known not for her art, but for her actions and eccentricities. Like the time she cleaned her pool with Dom Perignon or when she filled her fish tanks with scotch. Or the time she kidnapped a neighbor’s cat and dyed it green after a fight. Even though she isn’t remembered for her own songs, today her name is bubbling up again because of a song written by another artist. And that other artist is Taylor Swift, of course.
Hi, I’m Sara, and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up in my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, I’m telling you all about Taylor Swift’s Rhode Island home and its eccentric former owner, Rebekah Harkness.
But before we get into today’s episode, I wanted to give you a heads up that I’ll be doing a couple of live events--one virtual live event and one in-person event--in the upcoming weeks. If you’re interested in hearing a new, exclusive episode live as well as hearing a little bit about me and my process, then stick around until the very end of today’s episode for all the details. Or check out the Weird Island Facebook page under Events. Okay, now back to the story!
In 2013, singer Taylor Swift showed up in Rhode Island with $17.7MM in cash and purchased a summer home called High Watch. This cottage mansion was once said to be the most expensive private home in the state. If you’re not familiar with Watch Hill, it’s a village within the town of Westerly, and it became prominent in the late 1800s and early 1900s as an exclusive summer spot for wealthy families who weren’t trying to make a lot of noise. It was described in a 1981 New York Times article as a community with “a strong sense of privacy and of discreetly used wealth…” with “little in common with the overpowering castles of the very rich in Newport.” But when Taylor Swift showed up, her neighbors knew she was trouble when she walked in.
Discreet isn’t exactly the word anyone would use to describe Swift’s annual 4th of July parties, known as “Taymerica” parties, which had star-studded guest lists that included Gigi Hadid, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. In addition to “Taymerica,”, the star hosted listening parties for groups of fans. And it was mostly the fans that neighbors worried about, as they flooded into the area hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous celebrity.
But the truth is that High Watch has a history of controversial and eccentric owners, so no one should have been too surprised when “the loudest woman this town has ever seen” came into the picture, fell in love with her massive saltbox house on the coast and it’s unusual history, and then wrote a song about it. Yes, Taylor Swift wrote a song about the history of her house, which I think is incredibly charming.
If you’re not already singing “The Last Great American Dynasty” in your head, pause the episode and go listen to it. Because it will basically tell you the whole history of the home in a snappy, catchy format. And then come back and I’ll tell you that same story in a long, rambling format--because according to my brother’s review of the podcast, that’s kind of what I do.
In 1929, the hill on which High Watch stands was purchased by Mrs. George Grant Snowden of Philadelphia. And over the course of two years, she built the largest mansion in Watch Hill. She called the home Holiday House, and that’s what it would be known as for most of its life. The Snowdens owned the home until 1948, when newlyweds William Hale Harkness and Rebekah West Harkness purchased it.
William came from a seriously wealthy family. His grandfather was half brother to both Henry Flagler and Stephen Vanderburgh Harkness, shareholders in Standard Oil alongside John D. Rockefeller. The company was the largest oil refiner in the world at its height and one of the world’s first and largest multinational corporations. So members of the Harkness family, with their Standard Oil fortune, were essentially American royalty.
Rebekah Semple West was also born to a wealthy family in 1915. Her grandfather had founded the St. Louis Union Trust company, and her childhood was very comfortable--at least in terms of money. She was born and raised in St. Louis and summered in Watch Hill with her family. And people called her Betty. But money didn’t necessarily buy little Betty happiness. According to biographer Craig Unger, her parents were emotionally distant. She was largely raised by nannies, including one who was chosen because she had experience working in an insane asylum. And maybe because of her emotionally frigid childhood, she wrote in a scrapbook that she was setting out to “do everything bad.”
By the time they met, both Rebekah and William had already been married and divorced once. William had one daughter from his first marriage, and Rebekah had two children with her first husband, who she had married “because she didn’t have anything better to do.”
While Rebekah’s upbringing was one of privilege, compared to her new husband, she was almost middle class. Their marriage and his wealth and status skyrocketed her into a different echelon of society--one that she desperately wanted to be a part of.
A year into their marriage, the couple purchased Holiday House in Rhode Island. 9 servants and 3 cooks kept the massive home running, and according to Unger, their marriage was happy. Though a New York Times review of Unger’s biography notes, “little evidence is given in support of this thesis except that the two wrote a song together called ‘Giggling With My Feet.” But the couple had one child together, a daughter named Edith. They co-hosted loud parties most weekends, and were generally unpopular with neighbors because of those parties. And the marriage was Rebekah’s longest (of an eventual 4) so perhaps they were happy. Who knows?
In 1957, William died of a heart attack while sitting for a sculpture Rebekah was working on. William’s death left Rebekah with somewhere around $75MM - which equates to something like $720MM in today’s money - making her one of the wealthiest women in America. She promptly began blowing through that fortune and making a name for herself.
First she poured money into the house, installing 8 kitchens and 21 bathrooms. That means that she could use a different bathroom each day for three weeks. Think about that.
She threw Gatsby-esq parties, sometimes dressing up as a waitress so she could eavesdrop on guests. Some of her most extravagant and unusual exploits are outlined in Taylor Swift’s song. “In a feud with her neighbor, she stole his dog and dyed it key lime green.” That’s an almost real thing that happened. It was actually a cat that she kidnapped and dyed green, but close enough! Then there’s the line, “Losing on card game bets with Dali.” That would be Salvador Dali, the painter, who she reportedly played cards with, though truthfully there’s little evidence of that. But they definitely knew one another--and Dali would actually design her urn when she died. Then she “filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names,” or at least she cleaned her pool with Dom Perignon. And “She blew through the money on the boys and the ballet.” This was the biggest expense for Rebekah - and really what she’s best known for.
As an aspiring composer, who had studied musical composition and dance, she wanted nothing more than to write a piece of music that would make her famous. In the 1950s, she financed the release of three semi-classical records. And a 1955 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article notes that one of her musical pieces premiered at Carnegie Hall in NYC, but the truth was that her attempts at creating popular music weren’t very successful. When she offered to pay Ella Fitzgerald to sing some of her pop songs, the singer refused. But, her compositions for dance saw more success. After her dance piece Journey to Love premiered as a ballet at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, she shifted her focus to dance, and formed the Rebekah Harkness Foundation in 1959.
The foundation sponsored ballet companies, beginning with Jerome Robbins’ Ballet, then a dance tour of Africa by Pearl Primus. Then she funded the Joffrey Ballet.
The Joffrey Ballet was a little known ballet company before Rebekah became involved. Her support brought the company international fame. In the summer of 1961, she brought the Joffrey Ballet to Watch Hill, which she turned into a summer dance camp. During that time, she financed their every need--providing charge accounts for shops in town, paying for their dental work or nose jobs, buying them clothing and suits, and even once serving them a cake with money baked into it. Danish ballerina Lone Isaksen, who spent that summer with her raved, “We were in heaven.” Her money financed tours of the Middle East, Europe, and the Soviet Union and secured the group an invite to perform at the White House for the Kennedys--making the Joffrey the first ballet to ever perform at the White House. But while Rebekah effectively launched the Joffrey Ballet’s success, the relationship was rocky. Because Rebekah didn’t just want to be a patron - she wanted to be a star. She insisted the ballet dance to scores she had written, including one about a little boy with dreams of becoming JFK that particularly embarrassed the dancers. When Rebekah demanded the Joffrey Ballet change its name to the Harkness Ballet, founder Robert Joffrey refused and cut ties. This move could have sank the ballet, not only because it relied on her money, but because many of the ballet’s dancers were actually under contract with Rebekah’s Harkness Foundation. When the split happened, Rebekah founded her own Harkness Ballet company, built from Joffrey dancers. She again brought dancers to her home, this time to dance beneath a blue Geodesic Dome set up on her lawn (think those big plastic domes they use for winter outdoor seating at restaurants these days, only large enough for a ballet to dance under). Her neighbors were outraged, and sued her--saying the dome violated zoning restrictions. It’s when she was forced to take it down that she stole the neighbor’s cat and dyed it green.
Maybe because of this, she moved her ballet to New York, buying a mansion on the upper east side which was elegantly designed to mimic the royal dance schools in Europe, with a marble staircase, silk shades, and crystal chandeliers. Her obituary notes, “The Harkness Ballet produced no new ballets of generally acknowledged outstanding merit, and its repertory was described as overproduced… But the dancers… were highly praised, as was the school.”
She also purchased an old theater in New York and refurbished it to be the first theater devoted exclusively to ballet. But just after opening it, Rebekah began to run out of money. Yes, she had effectively blown through the equivalent of $720MM dollars in today’s money. She’d thrown parties, sponsored ballets, formed her own ballet, renovated the house, bought new property, married two more men, divorced them both. And through it all, she made a name for herself as kind of a wild woman. She eventually lost control of the Harkness Ballet and would sell the theater at a loss. But while Rebekah’s involvement in the ballet was filled with missteps, she played a significant role in that world. Today, the Joffrey Ballet is one of the premier dance companies in the world. And in its day, Harkness Ballet would train more professional dancers than any other company.
Taylor Swift was clearly inspired by the boldness of Rebekah Harkness. In the words of her biographer, Rebekah “did the kinds of things everyone else just talked about.” And that makes for a pretty cool story and a great song. But, Rebekah’s life was more tragic than Swift lets on. Throughout her life, Rebekah struggled with drugs and alcohol, and at the end, she was addicted to injections of B vitamins, painkillers and testosterone - in an effort to hang on to her youth. Her children claimed she cared about the dancers more than she cared about them, and her son Allen described the people she surrounded herself with as ''all the fairies flying off the floor, the blackmailing lawyers, the weirdos, the people in the trances.'' All of her children were very troubled by her choices. Allen ended up in prison, after shooting a man during a fight in Miami. He didn’t bother to get in touch with his mother, and said his days in prison were the happiest of his life. Rebekah’s daughter Edith tried to commit suicide multiple times, from as early as age 15. Rebekah was quoted in a New York Times article as having said, “How should she do it? Is there a chic way to go?”
When Rebekah herself ended up passing away, at age 67 from cancer, she made every effort to ensure it was chic. She demanded her ashes be put in a $250K urn designed by Salvador Dali dubbed “the Chalice of Life,” which was designed to spin on its base so she would always be dancing. But the urn was reportedly too small. Meanwhile, at her apartment, people who had called themselves her friends were “grabbing things left and right.” Her final partner, an honestly terrible sounding man 25 years younger than her, described her death as “complete chaos.”
Rebekah’s final days weren’t spent in Rhode Island. She had sold the Watch Hill house sometime in the 1970s. The house itself had gotten a little out of control, like Rebekah’s life. It had become so large that when it sold, it was divided into three lots. The lot with the house on it was purchased for a ridiculously low price, provided the new owner agreed to put in over a million dollars in renovations to reduce the house in size. Over the next five years, the new owners trimmed the house down through demolition on both sides and acquired the other two lots. The family renamed the house High Watch. In 1996, the house was sold again to a couple from Weston, MA - who owned it for the next 19 years, leaving it empty for most of that time. Then in 2013, Taylor Swift bought it, and the rest is history.
Swift surprised her fans with the release of her 2020 album Folklore - which broke the Guiness World Record for the biggest opening day on Spotify for an album by a female act. She said, "In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory. I've told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder, and whimsy they deserve. Now it's up to you to pass them down ... I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I’ve never met, people I’ve known, or those I wish I hadn’t ... a misfit widow getting gleeful revenge on the town that cast her out.”
Was Rebekah Harkness a misfit widow? Or is that a flattering simplification of a complex and troubled person? Like Taylor Swift says, it’s not only history, it’s fantasy, and that’s probably best to keep in mind with the song. But I’m reasonably certain of one thing. I think Rebekah Harkness would be pretty proud and flattered to be featured in a song by one of the world’s biggest pop singers--even if, maybe, she’d wish she’d written it herself.
Thanks so much for listening and for making it all the way to the end of the episode! As I mentioned up front, if you’re interested I will be doing two live events in the near future. The first one is on September 20th, at 7:30PM with the East Greenwich Historical Preservation Society. In an abundance of caution, this event will be held via Zoom - which is kind of great, because it makes it super accessible for you to tune in from wherever you are! I’ll be getting more info up on the Weird Island Facebook and Instagram pages, which are newly created so go check those out. I’ll also be doing another event, in person, in October - so expect some spooky stories in that one! Keep your eyes open for more details on that one soon!

Thank you to everyone who continues to listen and reach out! It means the world to me. And thank you to Melissa for the idea for today’s episode! If you have an idea for an episode, you can email me or send me a recorded voice memo at weird rhode island @ gmail.com. See you next week as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island. Until next time!