Helen Hope Montgomery was perfectly suited to a life of excess. She regularly made the best-dressed lists beside Babe Paley and once sang a…
Helen Hope Montgomery was perfectly suited to a life of excess. She regularly made the best-dressed lists beside Babe Paley and once sang a naughty song to the Duke of Windsor. She won a Charleston contest judged by Josephine Baker.
A legendary bon vivant, she would become the inspiration for Katharine Hepburn’s character Tracy Lord in “The Philadelphia Story” — a spoiled Main Line heiress who remarries her debonair ex-husband, played by Cary Grant.
“She was charming, flirtatious, disciplined, competitive and driven,” writes her granddaughter Janny Scott in her new book “The Beneficiary” (Riverhead Books), out now.
Montgomery grew up on Ardrossan, a storied estate dubbed “The American Downton Abbey” that her father, an investment banker, built during the Gilded Age and named after a Scottish town and castle that supposedly belonged to his ancestors. On a plot of land the size of Central Park, the family compound — which they referred to simply as “The Place” — included farmhouses, stables, barns, kennels, swimming pools, a skating rink, a 50-room mansion and dozens of other homes that at one point housed four generations of the Scott family.
Helen once, at the age of 18, “fielded (and tossed back) four marriage proposals.” She’d been raised for “succeeding at parties and marrying well,” which she did — joining forces with the grandson of a 19th-century robber baron whom she loved deeply, becoming “the CEO of a blue-chip domestic union” which lasted all of their lives, Scott writes.
The playwright Philip Barry was a regular visitor to Ardrossan, and when his 1939 Broadway play, “The Philadelphia Story,” was published, it was dedicated to “Hope and Edgar Scott.” It would go on to become one of the most beloved movies of all time, winning two Oscars.
“She woke up every morning and asked herself, ‘How much fun can I have today?’” writes Scott of her grandmother.
“You could not argue that she was in any particular way burdened by the wealth and ease that was passed to her,” Scott tells The Post. “She lived a wonderful life.”
But her son, on the other hand, had a far more complicated relationship with his inheritance.
Robert Montgomery Scott followed the script he was handed without any hint of rebellion. He went to the same boarding school as his father, brother and paternal grandfather and then to Harvard. He graduated from the law school that had trained his great-grandfather and worked at the law firm that his great-uncle founded, Scott writes.
He entrusted his money to the stock brokerage that his grandfather and father had started. After marrying, the month after graduating from Harvard, he moved back to his family’s estate, setting up a home one field away from where he’d grown up, often visiting his parents or grandmother for a drink after work at the firm in the city.
To the outside world, he was a charming and successful figure, dubbed “The Duke of Villanova” by his family.
“He’d married a woman not only able but willing” to fit into his rarefied background, Gay Elliot, who came from another wealthy family.
