Eldergays. Tell me about Dina Merrill, plz.

B list.

She was the Charleston Chew heiress? Or the Payday princess?

Nepo baby.

I just didn't realize her mother had been married to DL fave Glenn Close's grandfather.

Dina Merrill: Beautiful. And pure class, sophistication, well-mannered and elegance.

I always mixed her up with Nina Foch.

brilliantly used by Robert Altman in The Player (1992)

Hated Trump.

Comfortable in a caftan...

Didnt she own Mar-A-Cheeto?

Second string "cool blonde" in the era where that meant something--she usually played roles that called for a bit of glamor and class which cam easy to her. Married to handsome but forgettable Cliff Robertson for awhile--a second string, but competent actor.

We had a very long thread about her when she died and DL pretty uniformly loved her. No doubt, she was born with a diamond encrusted platinum spoon in her mouth but so what. She went out and worked her whole life, never acted like a spoiled brat and was beautiful and charming. She was not a top actress but always competent in what she did. I liked her.

Shut up and eat your Post Toasties, OP.

H-e-e-e-e-r-e's DINA!

Dina & Joan. Two classy ladies....talk about their daughters

two great minds think alike, R13

Really, r14....really?

Yes, really!

R9, her Mother built Mar-a-Lago. Her mother left it to the U. S. Government for a Presidential retreat when she died but Carter gave it back. Dina and her two sisters sold it to Trump who essentially called Dina a chump. Dina was not pleassed.

On her toes...

R6, She was also in Altman’s “A Wedding”.

Is she what in America might be called upper class?

One of her sons was killed in a boating accident in the 1970s and his body was never recovered.

The daughter she had with Cliff Robertson died at 38.

Her son that died was cute.

So classy and cool in “Butterfield-8” which, despite its tawdry plot, I always have thought is underrated as one of MGM’s last classic melodramas inasmuch as filmed and staged in that special way that only their studio could still glamorously do so.

I'm wondering which sort of gays she'd have been friendly with. I'm guessing VERY expensive New York interior decorators. Hollywood fashion designers. Who else?

Bookend photo for r8...

R24 . . .

“EAST HAMPTON, L.I., Sept. 9—Rescuers in boats and helicopters searched all day today for David Post Rumbough, 23‐year‐old son of Dina Merrill, the actress, and her first husband, Stanley M. Rumbough Jr., the New York industrialist.

Coast Guard patrol boats, police land and sea units and Army Reserve helicopters joined the hunt for Mr. Rumbough, who was reported missing yesterday after a racing craft in which he was riding apparently went out of control and capsized in choppy water in Gardiner's Bay at the eastern end of Long Island. The search, halted this evening, was to resume tomorrow morning.

Mr. Rumbough's companion in the 27‐foot boat, 25‐year‐old Jonathan Keith, was rescued and taken to Southampton Hospital, where he was reported in satisfactory condition this morning.“

Sep, 1973 was the date for above incident

And as previously stated, his body was never recovered.

Being an elder gay, I recall the producers of the musical Seesaw, then on Broadway, temporarily removing a line from the show pertaining to Dina Merrill out of respect for her loss.

[quote]I always mixed her up with Nina Foch.

I mixed her up with Nina van Pallandt, who was 10 years younger and Danish. They played sisters in "A Wedding," and Pallandt was quite good in an earlier Altman film, "The Long Goodbye." But enough Ninas, back to Dina...

Nina and Dina

R33, Too bad they never met . . .

Awwww, r33, Virginia Vestoff...

Who the fuck cast that icy blonde bitch Nina van Pallandt as Desi Jr.'s mother???

She played Maxwell's mother on an episode of The Nanny

The poor man's Grace Kelly, ironically.

I remember her from To Tell the Truth.

She played a blind woman trying to survive a plane crash with six other blind people in Seven in Darkness, an early made-for-TV movie.

She was also in Desk Set with Katherine Hepburn and Joan Blondell.

Used to see her at Forest Hills for the old RFK Pro Celeb tourney. She was apparently close to Jackie and Ethel. Totally classy, never a snob.

Her real name was Adina. Shortened to Dina when she was a kid.

She was named Adina after a character in Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore.

She was lovely as Maxwell’s mother.

What every American woman should aspire to be. Pure class.

EF Hutton’s daughter, in an era when respectable wealthy girls weren’t actresses. So to appease her father she took the stage name Merrill, as in Merrill Lynch, a competing securities firm.

R45 I read that when her father objected to her becoming an actress, she took the name of his big competitor to spite him.

Her last husband, Ted Hartley, is still alive and 98!

She was no Betsy von Furstenberg.

I loved the scene she had with her mother in BU-8. Basically the same speech Norma’s mother gave Norma in The Women. Men sleep with girls like that but marry us, kind of thing. Of course Mum did not know Larry Harvey was an S&M freak.

She has a very gay very weird looking son who has been mentioned (and mocked ) a few times on here. Also that last husband of hers was a total leech I think the family took pains to make sure he wouldn’t inherit most of her money. He also looks like a burn victim.

grandson sorry

Why would anyone divorce Cliff Robertson?

Dina Merrill should have been a grand bitchy powerful dame on 'Dynasty.' She would have been great.

She always had a touch of glacial about her.

R54 looks a lot like Candace Bergens mother

I remember reding a book about her mother and IIRC Dina had a cousin who called her Teeny Tiny Deenie Weenie or something ridiculous like that.

For some reason, that stuck with me.

I think part of the reason she divorced Robertson because he was a whistleblower on a studio embezzlement scandal and he was blackballed for a few years.

Age took its toll on that gorgeous face.

R56, Cliff exposed David Begelman for the slimeball he was.

Back in the early 1960s, Begelman robbed Judy blind.

I like watching her in old episodes of To Tell the Truth. This one has Betty White and Johnny Carson in it too.

Her mother, Marjorie Merriweather Post, had three girls and Dina was the youngest one with a big gap between the others. From what I read her mother really doted on her. Her bedroom at Mar-a-Lago looked like something out of a fairytale. (Later it was made into Ivanka’s room.) I would love to read a biography on Dina.

I’ll try to find the quote from Dina about what she said about Donald regarding the sale of Mar-a-lago. I know he wanted her to include the dining room table in the sale, but Dina refused and ended up sending it to her mother’s museum in Washington D.C., Hillwood.

In the Mar-a-Lago chapter, Trump has harsh words for Dina Merrill, Marjorie Merriweather Post's daughter, who sold him the historic Mar-a-Lago estate.

He calls Merrill an "arrogant and aloof daughter [of Post], who was born with her mother's beauty but not her brains.

"During my fight to save Mar-a-Lago, Merrill would constantly criticize me and say things behind my back, all of which would get back to me. She should have been the one to save Mar-a-Lago. Mommy had given her the money, and it would have been an easy and popular thing to have done.

"Instead, she lives in a terribly furnished Palm Beach condominium, thinking about her failed acting career and how she can make me look as 'nouveau' as possible."

Merrill said Friday from New York that she has not read the book. But she began to giggle when a reporter began to read passages from it.

"How lovely," she said after parts about her were read. "He's a charming man, isn't he?"

Merrill said Trump probably was not pleased with a letter she wrote to him stating that turning Mar-a-Lago into a club was not good for Palm Beach.

"It is in a neighborhood of single-family residences, with large houses up and down South Ocean Boulevard," Merrill said, adding that when the owners of nearby estates die, their children may want to turn their homes into clubs as well.

"That [Mar-a-Lago] is a single-family residence," Merrill said. "If he wants to live there, wonderful. But don't turn it into something it isn't. It doesn't need to be a bed and breakfast."

Merrill said Trump invited her and her husband to Mar-a-Lago one night for a drink. She said he has done an excellent job of keeping up her late mother's home.

When asked whether she was surprised at Trump's biting comments, she replied, "I wouldn't be surprised at anything the man does, quite frankly. But I don't want to stoop to his level. I would rather not comment more."

The grandson is a chinless wonder and a cabaret singer. He's the odd looking guy in the middle.

She wore a black wig in “Courtship of Eddie’s Father” with Glenn Ford. She was the rich society lady that wanted to send Ronnie Howard to a boarding school. Eddie/ Ronnie would squint his eyes and say, “She has skinny eyes!!”

Marjorie Post’s other residence, Hillwood, is a museum in DC filled with 18th c. French and Imperial Russian art, not to mention some lovely gardens. The amount of loot expropriated by the Soviets that she and her idiot third husband (Dina’s stepfather) managed to buy and get out of Moscow is astonishing.

R43 her real name was Nedenia, not Adina…

She was the only child of Post Cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and her second husband, Wall Street stockbroker Edward Francis Hutton, founder of E. F. Hutton & Co.

You don't get much more silver spoon than that.

She makes Julia Louis Dreyfuss look a bit downtrodden.

They were nouveau in their time.

R66, there is truth to that. Marjorie Merriweather Post was a pretty amazing woman. She managed and grew her inherited wealth effectively but also went to great lengths to buy her class and status. She succeeded.

Dina Merrill (née Nedenia Marjorie Hutton) and Barbara Woolworth Hutton were first cousins. Barbara, as you all know, was once married to Cary Grant and Porfirio Rubirosa.

The ugly grandson runs in the same circles as Geoffrey Bradfield, the society decorator with the world's largest veneers and super-ectomorph Somers Farkas, so still pretty nouveau. I wonder if he's a would-be William Featherby (Geoffrey's boytoy).

[quote] Geoffrey Bradfield

Gurl puh- laaaaize!

The grandson is still in the closet.

R68, I think that is Dina with Car not Barbara. Teasingly called Cash and Cary at the time, he took no money in their divorce.

If I recall correctly, she was the one who got the city to install the pretty necklace lights on the Queensboro Bridge.

Sorry for thread drift but Barbara Hutton, like Dina, also had a beloved son who died in a tragic accident. Her only child, Lance Reventlow. Unlike Dina, Barbara seemed to have an unhappy life, despite her great wealth.

R74, Lance was once married to Jill St. John.

R71 how do you know

Since the posts above about Cliff Robertson imply he was some kind of low-down rat-fink, here is what Wikipedia says about his having "exposed" Begelman. Anyone in his position would have done exactly the same thing:

"In February 1977, actor Cliff Robertson received a 1099 form from the IRS indicating he had received $10,000 from Columbia Pictures during 1976. He had never received the money, and discovered that his signature on the cashed check had been forged."

We never met, but her money helped put me through college.

She looks good at R57. What is she supposed to look like? Would've been better if she had been sitting up straight.

[quote] "Instead, she lives in a terribly furnished Palm Beach condominium, thinking about her failed acting career and how she can make me look as 'nouveau' as possible." [Donald Trump.]

A hit dog will holler.

I was in acting class with her in the early 1980s. She was quiet, serious, kept to herself. Always dressed in slacks, sweater and a scarf on her head. She looked like an Upper East Side lady out for a run to the supermarket. She sat with all of us on folding chairs. She wasn't the only old time star dropping in now and then. I remember her performing a monologue.

She was on an episode of Murder, She Wrote yesterday

Cliff had a moment but he was generally colorless.

Cliff had two big moments: Chosen to play young JFK in PT 109 and winning an Oscar for CHARLY.

Dina and Cliff played Celebrity Villains on Batman as Calamity Jane and Shane.

[quote]She played a blind woman trying to survive a plane crash with six other blind people in Seven in Darkness, an early made-for-TV movie.

Why were so many blind people in a plane?

[quote]I was in acting class with her in the early 1980s.

Herbert Berghoff?