J. Neil Alexander, when he was Episcopal Bishop of Atlanta, March 2011.
As longtime Readers know, in 2008 or 09, disgruntled Sewanee alumni who were all lawyers in Birmingham, AL, contacted me after finding this blog. They were upset because J. Neil Alexander, then Bishop of Atlanta and the titular head of Sewanee/University of the South, was using proceeds from the Walter Dakin Fund (Tennessee's Estate, renamed for his grandfather, who had gotten his Divinity Degree at Sewanee), to COVER for a HUGE drop in Alumni Donations because "political correctness" -- and only that -- had forced them to remove the Episcopal Confederate Mace from public view.
I could prove that a Sewanee lawyer (Michael Remer), with Maria St. Just (a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, who had married the 2nd wealthiest man in England, the 2nd and last Lord St. Just, Peter Grenfell, and his Morgan Grenfell Bank came into Maria's control on Peter's early death. And it later became the International Banking Core of Deutsche Bank).
Another sentence got away from me, but Michael Remer, Maria St. Just, and John Eastman (Tennessee Williams's last lawyer and first brother-in-law to Paul McCartney), plotted the murder of Tennessee and theft of his estate from Harvard, just like Jackie Kennedy Onassis warned Tennessee at Jean Babette Stein (a recent 2017 "suicide" victim, her father founding MCA), and George Plimpton's party on January 11, 1982:
The party without the politics: http://laterdaysoftennesseewilliams.blogspot.com/2013/10/chapter-23-uptown-soiree.html
Anyway, this was the most popular blog posting of 2017, about Donald Trump's most important financial support and conduit of cash from Russian Oligarchs -- and no doubt Vladimir Putin himself (BEST FRIEND to my Kenan Family of Chapel Hill and our lifelong employee Rex Tillerson who GUTTED the US State Department), with Tennessee Williams, and even the University of the South:
I had had several SERIOUS confrontations with Bishop J. Neil Alexander and with then counsel of Sewanee, Donna Pierce, over Sewanee's role in the death of Tennessee Williams and theft of his estate from Harvard. Both of them threatened me with Libel charges over what I published in this blog, but THEY COULD DO NOTHING -- because I was not lying.
I need to "reset" my relationship with Rt. Rev. J. Neil Alexander -- the highest ranking Episcopalian Clergy I had some ongoing dealings with -- BEFORE writing Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and Dr. William Barber II.
Maria St. Just with a Tennessee Williams self-portrait in her Palladian Manor Home, "Wilbury Park".
The Lady and Tennessee
Lady Maria St. Just’s talent for outrageous mythmaking charmed Tennessee Williams. But in the last decade of her life, when St. Just became the self-appointed keeper of the playwright’s flame, her fantasies assumed a darker role.
By John Lahr July 28, 1994
Lady Maria St. Just, who, it was said, was neither a lady nor a saint nor just, died, in England, on February 15, 1994. She was famous for her high spirits and her high-hat ways, which won her many friends and many enemies. She was a resourceful hostess and a good cook, but humble pie was not on her menu.
Once, at a dinner party I was attending, she was summoned to the telephone to take an emergency call from Wilbury, her palatial country estate in Wiltshire and the oldest Palladian building in England. When she returned, she was agitated. “The dining-room ceiling has fallen in!” she said. “But God was with us, only the servants were hurt!”
Her outrageousness delighted many. Sir John Gielgud, whom she dubbed King Wallah from their theatre tour of the Far East just after the war, was a devoted friend, and so was Gore Vidal. But Maria’s deepest and most longstanding attachment was to Tennessee Williams. She was the model for the fierce survival spirit of Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955). She was also the manic, self-dramatizing, “two-faced” Countess of suspicious pedigree in the 1976 play “This Is (An Entertainment),” whose title at one time went on to include her maiden name—“For Maria Britneva”—in its parentheses.
And it was Maria whom Williams named, along with the lawyer John Eastman, as co-trustee of the Rose Williams Trust, established for his adored and lobotomized sister, who is eighty-five this year.
As an actress, Maria worked only occasionally, but, because of confusions in Williams’ clumsily drawn will, from 1984 to the end of her life she was cast as a player on the world stage. “She was to be the muse,” Gore Vidal explains. “She was the surviving relic and keeper of the flame. It gave her something to do, which was very sweet of Tennessee. She had no purpose in life.”
Wilbury Park was used in the Merchant/Ivory films Maurice and A Room with a View, both of which had small roles for "Maria Britneva".
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