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if it was a maid's hat, her mother's, or even Madeleine Astor's hat." We may never know, but regardless, the tragedy that occurred four years before Betty's birth would leave an indelible mark. A member of what Gore Vidal described as "America's ruling class," Betty's family shared the power and advantages of many of their patrician compatriots — the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, and other captains of industry. Her life was one of boarding schools, summers in Vichy and Newport, debutante balls, and blue-blood associations. At Madame Chapon's finishing school in Paris, where she spent two years, Betty knew Lady Fermoy, who later became Princess Diana's grandmother. At 18, after making her debut in Paris, she returned stateside, coming out at Newport's most-legendary Ocean Drive "cottage" — the 30,000-square-foot French neoclassical Miramar mansion, owned by Eleanor Elkins Widener. The irony couldn't be missed: Eleanor and Betty's mother were lifeboat companions on the Titanic. Betty was fiercely independent and seemingly impervious to criticism — traits she cultivated early on, partly in response to her mother's indifference. Lucile never visited her at school in Paris, Betty said, and she was less than charitable about her daughter's looks. Karl Willers, executive director of the Newport Art Museum & Art Association, elicited a candid interview with Betty in 2006, for a catalog the museum published in conjunction with an exhibition of her private art collection: "My mother was very, very beautiful — she was a blonde — and she considered me to be very, very ugly. She always said, 'Oh, you poor thing. You'll never get a man with that nose spread out all over your face.' " But, Betty's pluck and resolve steeled her against the odds. "Luckily it didn't affect me, not at all," she said. "I sort of rolled with the punches … and didn't give a hoot! I never considered myself to be a great beauty. That's not all there is to life." Lucile died in 1934, the same year Betty made her debut. Set somewhat adrift, Betty shuttled between Almondbury — her father adored her, she said — and Palm Beach with her friends. Before the year's end, she eloped to London with the East Coast's most eligible bachelor, 19-year-old Tommy Phipps. Nancy Astor's nephew, and son of the English architect Paul Phipps, Tommy was the son of American socialite Nora Langhorne, the youngest of the beautiful and much chronicled Langhorne sisters of Virginia. Yet, even when presented with Paul's unimpeachable aristocratic lineage, Betty's family disapproved. "He wasn't from Philadelphia," Betty would say. Tommy was a writer and editor at Vanity Fair in New York. In London, the couple lived a devil-may-care, carousing life, with Betty — a teetotaler — often driving Tommy, Lord Astor, and all the Astor boys pub-hopping. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Fred Astaire were Tommy's chums, and when he wasn't making merry, Tommy wrote movie scripts. (He went on to be a successful and prolific TV writer and playwright.) Betty fell in with a fashionable crowd in London that included legendary interior decorator Syrie Maugham, the former wife of author Somerset Maugham. Another famous London decorator, Nancy Lancaster, was an Astor — and a friend. Betty bought boatloads of Syrie Maugham-designed furniture, with which she furnished all her houses throughout her life. Tommy and Betty had a son, Wilton — nicknamed Tony — but the marriage lasted only a few years, and she retreated with Tony to New York. Betty remarried, this time to stockbroker and grocery store heir Eddie Reeves. They had a daughter, Joan (now living in New York and married to the writer Lewis Lapham), and when Reeves died, Betty tied the knot with mining heir Jock McLean, who, it turns out, had been a witness at her wedding to Reeves. Jock moved her and the two children to Texas, and when that marriage dissolved, she wed oilman Tom Blake, with whom she had two more children, Douglas Blake and Tom Blake Jr. In 1960, Betty's first-born son Tony died in a boating accident on Lake Michigan. Betty dealt with it like she did every tragedy that befell her — with a stiff upper lip. "She had a real strong spiritual side to her," says Douglas' wife, Diane Blake, and she believed in the afterlife. If Betty ever got down about anything, it wasn't for long. "She never looked back," says Douglas. "It was always about, 'What's next?' She was curious about everything. That's what kept her going — her love of life, and will to overlook tremendous pain." Betty's iron will allowed her to ignore the kind of physical pain that would flatten most people. At 88, after returning from trekking in Nepal, she was told she needed to get both knees replaced. When she couldn't find a doctor who would perform the surgery on both knees at once — the agony would be too intense — she hired two different doctors to do it at the same time in the operating room. Says Douglas, "I asked her afterwards, 'Mom, aren't you in a lot of pain?' And she said, 'I don't know what that is.'" When Betty's union with Tom Blake failed, she dusted herself off and picked out a new husband: Allen Guiberson, an eccentric oilman who had one of the world's largest collections of electric trains — the big choo-choo that he rode around their front yard on Beverly Drive was a Stanley Marcus, right, studies a Paul Signac landscape at the opening of Betty McLean Gallery, 1951. A 1932 newspaper caption reads: Miss Elizabeth M. Brooke at Newport. 54