About Betty: The Life of Rebekah Harkness and “The Last Great American Dynasty”

BY ASHLEIGH WEAVER

Every person who listens to Taylor Swift’s folklore seems to latch onto a favorite character. Bettys, Jameses, and Augustines seem to be the most popular. But then there is The Last Great American Dynasty: A song with a drum-beat pulse, wherein Swift croons about a real-life woman, Rebekah Harkness. My first listen blended into the next five, 10, 20 – I couldn’t get enough. The life of Rebekah Harkness, in a word, seemed fascinating. I wanted to learn more.

There was only one problem. The only existing biography that was ever written about Harkness – Craig Unger’s Blue Blood – had long been out of print, and the popularity of Swift’s folklore caused the price of this elusive book to grow exponentially. So, I did what anyone who obsesses over a subject to the point of dreaming would do: searched my local library for help. Unfortunately for me, because I live in a rural area where people simply aren’t interested in long-out-of-print biographies just because Taylor Swift decided to write a song about the subject, finding what I was looking for proved unimaginably difficult. I scoured the internet for help, but found none there, either. The few and far between articles that I found about Harkness all seemed to focus on her unconventional life – some would even say that it was weird. But was it, really?

I decided to take a chance on my library and wait-list for Blue Blood through the interlibrary loan system. I waited and waited some more. I had to wait for about a whole month before I finally got my hands on a copy. The novel wasn’t in the best shape, and the contents were at times lacking. Written in the 1980s by a man about an unconventional woman, it wasn’t exactly groundbreaking in its viewpoint. Regardless, though, it held important information that I could not find anywhere else. Unger had done the groundwork: He had interviewed people who were in Harkness’s life, gathered all of the information that he could about her, and did his best to narrate her life.

One thing in particular that Unger spoke about stood out to me: Almost everything that was ever said about Rebekah Harkness was based on rumors. She was a woman whom society could not pin down – someone who did not seem to care about what was expected of her. Born in 1915, Harkness would only be five years old when the roaring 1920s began. It is said that Harkness was not raised by her parents; instead, the care of the Harkness children (of which there were three) was primarily in the hands of a nanny. She attended a School for Girls, which is essentially a boarding school wherein they teach things like “the values of nature,” “social responsibility,” and “arts and crafts skills.” Basically, Rebekah attended a school that was more focused on teaching the students how to behave like a lady and find a husband. Women like her were expected to settle down, marry, and start a family as soon as possible. As the rebel that she was, Rebekah did not conform to this society. She was rumored to have spiked the punch bowl at a debutante party and performed stripteases on banquet tables. She gathered with a bunch of her debutante friends and formed a group that called itself The Bitch Pack. In short, Harkness had no care for society’s expectations of her. She was young, free, and rich as hell. She was born into a high society family in an era that dared to push the societal norms of the time. It was a beautiful recipe for wondrous disaster.

Taylor Swift sings about Rebekah Harkness’s second marriage to a Standard Oil heir, William Harkness. Only then do we discover the connection that Swift has with Harkness (whose nickname was “Betty”): The house purchased by Swift in 2013 was once her home. Just as I became fascinated by the life of Rebekah Harkness – or Betty – Swift seems to have fallen under the same effect. She croons about Harkness and the rumors that surrounded her, a phenomenon that parallels Swift’s own celebrity. It’s not hard to imagine that the inspiration behind Swift’s writing is this shared experience. Swift leans into this idea as she sings the tales of Harkness’s champagne-filled pool and her neighbor’s key-lime-green dog. Along the same vein, Swift quietly twists the tales of such folklore to her narrative: It was not a dog that Harkness was rumored to have dyed, but a cat.

The life the enigmatic Rebekah Harkness led was not one that was expected of her. She was a patron of the ballet and pursued exactly what she wanted. She spent a lifetime fighting against what people wrote about her. Harkness was like the real-life Great Gatsby. In writing a song about her, Swift managed to shed some light on a woman which time seems to have forgotten. A woman who did not hold back her own dreams because it was in someone else’s best interest. If Taylor Swift can obsess over a woman of that caliber as much as I did, I must be doing something right.

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