Truman's Swans

Let me tell you something about money. About real money. The kind that doesn't keep a tally of itself and the curious effect it has on daughters. It makes them luminous. It makes them reckless. It makes them, in the particular case of Stavros Livanos, into two of the most coveted women in the world, both of whom would be married to the same man. Not simultaneously, naturally. Though with that set, one never entirely rules it out. Stavros Livanos. THE Stavros Livanos, to be precise. Patriarch, shipping magnate, Greek national monument in a suit who built one of the great maritime fortunes of the twentieth century in the quiet and unremarkable way that very rich Greeks tend to accumulate such things: methodically, and with a genius for being underestimated. His tankers crossed every ocean worth crossing. His money sat in every bank worth trusting. And his daughters, well, his daughters were another kind of fleet entirely. There were two of them, Eugenia and Tina, born in the 1920s in...

Now, lean in, darling, because I am only going to whisper this once. There are stories that belong in the papers, and there are stories that belong between us. The affair of Sunny von Bülow is very firmly the second kind. It has everything. Money so old it has grown its own atmosphere, a husband with a monocle’s worth of charm and a murderer’s worth of motive, and a woman so gentle, so accommodating, so devastatingly passive, that one almost wonders if the world simply decided to take advantage. Martha Sharp Crawford, or 'Sunny' as she was known due to her pleasant disposition, was born in 1932 in Manassas, Virginia, to the kind of family that does not need to announce itself. Her father, George W. Crawford, was an executive at Columbia Gas and Electric, and when he died, she was just four years old, barely old enough to understand loss but perfectly positioned to inherit it. He left behind a fortune of approximately $75 million. In 1932 dollars. Which is to say an incomprehens...

Now, I am going to tell you about Diana Mitford, and don't you dare pretend you've heard enough, because nobody ever has, not really. Not the whole glittering, catastrophic, morally indefensible thing so sit down and order something strong. This will take a moment. She was born in 1910, the third of the six Mitford girls and when I say "girls" I use the word with the same unearned tenderness one reserves for hand grenades. Their father was David Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale, a man of tremendous mustache and minimal patience, who believed that the primary purpose of daughters was to be beautiful and then married off before they caused trouble. He failed, darling, on the second count quite spectacularly. Their mother, Sydney Freeman-Mitford, Baroness Redesdale (nee Bowles), was the kind of Englishwoman who believed that children were best raised like rare orchids, admired from a distance and never over-watered with affection. The result, predictably, was ...