The Real Philadephia Story

Sunday Telegraph , April 16, 1995 page 1

The glamorous East Coast heiress whose story was to rekindle Katharine Hepburn's career and, in 'High Society', provide Grace Kelly with her most famous role, died earlier this year, aged 90.

by Ian Irvine

Helen Hope Montgomery Scott died, aged 90, on January 9 this year at her estate, Ardrossan, near Philadelphia. Her obituaries were long and respectful, as befitted someone who had been prominent in wealthy Philadelphia society for more than 70 years. They emphasised her career as a highly eligible heiress and party girl in the Twenties, and as a lavish hostess after her marriage. They mentioned her doing the Charleston with Josephine Baker in Paris, dancing a foxtrot with the Duke of Windsor at El Morocco ("He was pretty good") and lunching with Sir Winston Churchill on Aristotle Onassis's yacht. But all the obituaries opened with the element in her life which had had some curious consequences far from the ordinary life of a wealthy socialite - and which made her indirectly responsible for James Stewart's only Oscar, the establishment of Katharine Hepburn as a major film star and, later, the popularity of the Christian name Tracy. For Hope Montgomery Scott was the inspiration for Tracy Lord, heroine of The Philadelphia Story…

Philadelphia society then exhibited an extreme type of class-consciousness. The flood of wealth that created American family fortunes in the late 19th century settled around a handful of cities and was expressed in different forms of conspicuous consumption and elaborate social behaviour - as chronicled by Edith Wharton in novels such as The Age of Innocence. In dynamic New York and Chicago, Vanderbilts and Astors, Fields and McCormicks vied with each other in glitter and the acquisition of European titles through their marriageable daughters, but mere wealth usually provided a sufficient entree to their society.

In more traditional Boston and Philadelphia, however, society turned almost feudal, almost English in its attitudes - "old" money and "old" families counted for everything. The very term WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) was coined to describe members of Philadelphia society - its most characteristic institution was the Philadelphia Assemblies Ball. This is the oldest and most exclusive social gathering in the United States. Held every year since 1748, it is strictly reserved for members of the city's Social Register - no amount of money will allow entry; blood is everything. It was here, down the staircase to the great ballroom of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, that Hope Montgomery, in ballgown and elbow-length white kid gloves, made her entrance as a debutante in 1922.

The daughter of Colonel Robert Montgomery, head of a wealthy and ancient Philadelphia family, she immediately made an impact. That evening she received four marriage proposals - none of which she accepted. The following year she met "an older man" at a Main Line dinner party, the 24-year-old Edgar Scott, heir to the Pennsylvania Railroad fortune (and an old classmate of Philip Barry). After a dozen dates they decided to marry, but her parents insisted they wait nine months. "I always knew what I wanted, and so did Edgar. We both had the idea from the start that marriage should be something that lasts forever. And it did." It was inevitably described as the Society Wedding of the Year, and exhaustively chronicled by the press down to the orange blossoms that banked the church.

The couple moved into Orchard Lodge, a 1720 fieldstone house which her father had given her as a wedding present. It lies on the Montgomerys' 750-acre Ardrossan estate on the Main Line, only a mile across an enormous lawn from "the big house", the 45-room Georgian mansion where Hope had grown up. As a young wife, Hope Scott began to feature on the New York Couture Group's annual list of best-dressed women, and patronised the salons of many famous names, both in New York and Paris, such as Mainbocher, Falkenstein and Piguet. Her beauty and her slim, angular figure (size eight throughout her life) was much photographed and painted. Cecil Beaton took several portraits of her, and Augustus John painted her twice during her visit to Ireland in 1930. "Though I was sitting for Augustus John, I did not lack exercise. Most of his models found themselves doing a good bit of sprinting round the studio," she later recalled. One night John was prevented from climbing into her bed by the presence of a bolster beside her, which he angrily mistook for a fellow painter staying in the house.

The Scotts entertained, and were entertained, in a grand manner. "Everybody had so much money - there were so few taxes. People gave grand dinner parties and dances: women wore wonderful dresses and men came in fine evening clothes," she remembered. "It's a way of life that's completely gone now. It was really an imitation of Edwardian days in England.

© 1995 The Telegraph Group Limited