Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/734535
neighborhood spectacle. Guiberson even once showed up at a museum ball in overalls and a conductor's hat — and it wasn't a costumed affair. Betty's expanding resume of marriages provided particularly delectable fodder for the gossip pages. In 1973, when she split with Guiberson, New York society columnist Suzy Knickerbocker put it this way: "Betty, 'Boops' to her chums, is a strict Christian Scientist. Which just goes to prove you don't have to drink or smoke to have a good time." Wedded bliss escaped her grasp, but Betty was, if not an eternal romantic, a pragmatic. "It's as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is a poor man," she would say. After she divorced Guiberson, she changed her name back to Blake, spending the next 43 years single. When Douglas once asked her why she didn't remarry, her witty comeback slammed a lid on it: "Oh yes, I'd marry again. As long as he doesn't drink or smoke, is older than I am, and has more money." She was independent, and that more than anything, might have made Betty ultimately shy from marriage. "Betty liked to be in control of things," remembers Dallas financier Dulany Howland, who met Betty in the late '40s in Newport. "I got to know her when she'd bring her daughter Joan to birthday parties at our house. Kids would come in chauffeured limousines with nannies and nurses, but Betty drove Joan herself in the car. She always liked to be the driver. She wanted to have her hands on the wheel." T ongues wagged when Betty arrived in Dallas in 1943, with new husband Jock McLean, owner of the Globe Aircraft Corporation in Fort Worth. Jock was handsome and steeped in old money; his father was Washington Post founder Edward Beale McLean, and his mother, gorgeous mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, was the last private owner of the 45-carat Hope Diamond, which she wore draped around her neck, stuck in her hair, or dangling from her dog's collar. The McLeans' substantial wealth gained them entrée into Dallas society, but not without raised eyebrows: Not only was Betty divorced; she was on husband number three. Like her mother, Betty was athletic. She swam, played tennis and golf almost every day, and preferred trousers to skirts, a scandalous predilection for the day. When she was spotted shopping in a pair of pants at Neiman Marcus shortly after arriving in town, Jock fielded phone calls from members of Dallas society about the indiscretion. Betty could not have cared less. "My mother's favorite expression was, 'I don't give a rat's ass,' and that's probably how she responded," says Douglas. Despite the shaky start, the city eventually embraced Betty's brash charm, Brahman Main Line accent, and free spirit. She fell in love with Dallas' Wild West, can- do resolve. "There's a sense that anything is possible here, [and] anyone can be a part of it," she told W magazine in 1985. Betty set roots in Dallas, but Newport was always home. Jock bought his new wife a dazzling chateau on Ocean Drive, built in 1937 by English architect William MacKenzie. Seafair, as it was known, earned the nickname Hurricane Hut, since its exposure to the sea made it particularly vulnerable. Ignoring pleas to evacuate, Betty rode out many hurricanes in her Seafair fortress — but, on one occasion, some of her servants drowned trying to leave. During a particularly violent siege, waves ripped away a large sculpture in the front yard, only to wash it back up many years later. I t was at finishing school in Paris that Betty was first exposed to art — Madame Chapon, noticing her charge's precociousness, escorted her personally to the Louvre three times a week. As she told Newport Art Museum & Art Association director Karl Willers, "I became completely enamored of the 18th- and 19th-century French art, then of course, the thought came to me, 'Well if these paintings are so staggeringly beautiful, what are they doing today?'" An obsession with modern art was ignited, but she didn't start collecting until she moved to Dallas a decade later. With Mexico City so easily accessible, she traveled there often, buying works by great contemporary artists Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and Frida Kahlo. "Mexico City was like Paris before the war," she told Willers. "Everyone was there." A circa-1934 photograph of Betty was used as the cover of her 100th birthday celebration invitation. (continued on page 94) 55