American Empress

Her father was C. W. Post, the breakfast-food magnate. Her four husbands included the broker E. F. Hutton and Joseph Davies, U.S. ambassador to Stalin's Soviet Union. Her circle of friends ran the gamut from Florenz Ziegfeld and Billie Burke to the duke and duchess of Windsor, her niece by marriage was that poor little rich girl Barbara Hutton, and her youngest daughter is the film actress Dina Merrill. But hers was not merely a life of reflected glory, and in American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post, author Nancy Rubin chronicles nine decades of American history as…