Word: mackay
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...Manhattan on a flood of silver that seemed potent enough to sweep everything before it. But high society stood firm. At a devastating party the women closed ranks and turned on Louise the glacial stare that the elite reserves for the brash newcomer. Sniffed one dowager: ''Mackay? Oh, Irish, of course. They don't even pronounce it properly" (i.e., Mackey instead of Mckye...
Bitterly hurt, Louise retreated to Paris, where John Mackay bought her a mansion on the Rue de Tilsitt that was ''like the Palace Hotel, only on a smaller scale." She was quick to see that to Europeans it was completely unimportant that she had been snubbed in Manhattan. London and Paris expected lavish entertainment from Americans, not lineage. For two decades Louise Mackay supplied the entertainment. Her parties had a Babylonian magnificence, from "eighteen footmen on the stairs to the bowls of out-of-season violets in the blue salon." Her guests included the British royal family...
Perhaps the highest moment of her life came when she was presented to Victoria, Queen not only of England but of everything that Louise Mackay most admired. In Author Berlin's simple account of that occasion, two symbols can be glimpsed: the Kohinoor diamond on the Queen's breast and the Comstock Lode that had carried Louise to Buckingham Palace. The fabulous diamond and the fabulous silver mine, the power of empire and the American frontier thus met; they could scarcely be expected to understand each other, but their meeting nonetheless seemed to have about it a touch...
...Place. Louise's ride on the carrousel was nearly over. Her oldest son. Willie, was killed in a riding accident at his French chateau. Daughter Eva married an Italian count who proved to be a blackmailer. And on a summer evening in 1902, Louise sat by John Mackay's bedside and watched as he died of pneumonia...
Author Ellin Mackay Berlin (Lace Curtain, Land I Have Chosen) wrote this book as a kind of sentimental duty to the past. By the time the upstart Mackays had become aristocratic, she herself outraged her Roman Catholic family in 1926 by marrying Songwriter Irving Berlin, son of Russian Jewish immigrants. She notes with wonder that her grandmother was born in an East Side slum only a few blocks away from where, 50 years later, Irving Berlin spent his childhood. With just such a sense of place she moves competently from the mining disasters in the Comstock to the horrors...