Click on image to ENLARGE.
This book has MUCH about Mary Lily (Kenan), Flagler, Bingham in it -- and I bought and read it YEARS ago: https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Prejudice-Family-Sallie-Bingham/dp/1557830770
This book is mentioned in the article -- and I bought both it and Chandler's book on Henry Flagler, when they first came out: https://www.amazon.com/Binghams-Louisville-History-Americas-Fortunes/dp/0517568950
Sallie's latest book: https://www.amazon.com/Silver-Swan-Search-Doris-Duke/dp/0374142599/
>>> Sallie, it's been a while since I've written you -- but YOU are prominently mentioned in a piece about Mary Lily (Kenan) Flagler, Bingham that I am going to post in its entirety on my blog, shortly
This afternoon, I also published your Facebook notice of "Eat the Rich" on my blog, https://theweathercontinues.blogspot.com/2020/06/donald-trump-replies-to-me-overnight.html, and I've been getting GREAT RESULTS from my blog (now over 1.8 million hits), exposing the CORRUPTION of my immediate and distant Kenan relatives -- right now over having caused the Wilmington 1898 Coup d'Etat, but also having put Trump into power to destroy Democracy, and running world-wide Hard Drugs with the Christian CIA, Bush, Cheney, and Clinton families -- and the Episcopal Church USA, which also murdered Tennessee Williams and stole his Estate from Harvard for Sewanee/University of the South where the ONLY Episcopal Seminary is in the "Old South".
The Wealthy Kenans gave Sewanee over $100,000,000.00 (really, I've researched it), in support of the Episcopal Confederate Mace kept there, and the Seal of the Confederacy All Saints Chapel Window, only removed "in the dead of night" 1.5 years ago.
I have been working with Activists in Wilmington, and we got the TWO BIGGEST Confederate Monuments REMOVED this past week -- IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT -- LOL!!!
That BEFORE Donald Trump's new Executive Order protecting Confederate Monuments (which I bet gets people to pull them down FASTER -- at least I hope so).
Anyway, I'll use this email in my posting, and then send you a copy so you see how I've done that.
All best,
Scott
Mary Lily (Kenan) Flagler, Bingham
From here: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1989-07-02-8902190293-story.html
THE TRAGIC MISTRESS OF WHITEHALL
STUART MCIVER
SUN-SENTINEL
July 2, 1989
FAR FROM WHITEHALL, HER OPULENT Palm Beach mansion, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham, the world's richest woman, lay in her coffin in the Kenan family plot at Oakdale Cemetery in Wilmington, N.C. She had been dead less than two months, but her uneasy peace was about to be violated again.
In the soft twilight of Sept. 17, 1917, the guards hired to protect her grave greeted two of her brothers, a team of doctors led by Dr. Charles Norris, director of New York's Bellevue Hospital Laboratories, and several cemetery workers. With shovels, spades and mining picks, the workers dug down six feet in the soft earth until they reached the coffin.
Darkness fell and still the men struggled with their task. At midnight the coffin was finally hoisted up from the grave and carried to the cemetery lodge.
Immediately, physicians and pathologists began the grisly autopsy. Using microscopes and chemical tests, they studied slices of Mary Lily's liver, kidneys and intestines. At 3 a.m., they had seen enough to tell her brothers, Will and Graham Kenan, the ugly truth.
Mary Lily's body had contained "enormous amounts" of morphine, accumulated over many months, as well as traces of injected adrenaline and heavy metal poisons, such as arsenic, and possibly mercury.
Everyone agreed that, pending further tests, the results were to be kept secret.
It didn't happen that way.
Within 48 hours the New York American had run a streamer across the top of its front page -- MRS. BINGHAM WAS DRUGGED!
And within days, papers across the country were filled with stories of the scandal. Had Mary Lily taken the drugs herself? Or had the wife of Robert Worth Bingham, of Louisville, Ky., been murdered?
It was her fabulous wealth that spawned the tragedy of Mary Lily, the soft- spoken widow of Henry Flagler. Shenanigans with a will, ugly rumors and the damning report of one of America's leading detective agencies all added up to the overpowering suspicion that Mary Lily had not met her death on July 27, 1917, from natural causes.
IT HAD BEGUN 26 YEARS EARLIER, IN 1891, when Henry Morrison Flagler, the uncrowned "king" of Florida, who had made a vast fortune as a founding partner of Standard Oil of Ohio, met Mary Lily Kenan at the home of mutual friends in Newport, R.I.
He was 61; she was 23. He was instantly attracted to her -- and it wasn't hard to see why. Contemporaries described Mary Lily as "a strikingly beautiful young woman," the pride of a prominent North Carolina family. Her petite hour-glass figure, 105 pounds on a voluptuous 5-foot-1 body, caught the eye of many men, as did her thick dark hair and blue eyes. A warm, friendly, poised manner added to her charm.
When Flagler met his Southern belle, his marriage to Alice, his second wife, was falling apart. Alice was careening toward insanity, and Flagler's doctor had recently warned him that it was no longer safe to share a bedroom with a wife who was showing homicidal tendencies.
Flagler found himself growing more and more attracted to Mary Lily. He sent a special train to Wilmington, N.C., so she could visit him at his palatial Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine.
At first it was platonic. Henry still had a wife as well as a New York mistress. But along the way the relationship heated up. Press reports titillated the public with snippets about the May-December romance between the Southern belle and the wealthy tycoon whose Florida East Coast Railway was transforming the desolate east coast of Florida into America's favorite winter resort.
The Kenan family was shocked, not so much by the affair as by the unwelcome publicity. They demanded to know Flagler's intentions.
Flagler assured them that he would take care of Mary Lily, whether he obtained a divorce or not. As a token of his affections, he presented her with jewelry worth $1 million, and another $1 million in Standard Oil stock. He also instructed his architects to design a magnificent Palm Beach mansion for her.
Next, he set about seeking a divorce. His first move came in April, 1899. Since insanity was not grounds for divorce in New York State, he made Florida his legal residence. Insanity was not legal grounds for divorce in Florida either, but Flagler figured he could change the rules more easily in a state he practically owned.
Sure enough, two years later a bill was introduced into the Florida Legislature making "incurable insanity" grounds for divorce. Two and a half weeks later it sped through the Legislature and was signed into law by Gov. William Jennings.
Rumors quickly spread that Flagler had "bought" the Legislature. Nothing was proved at the time, but 70 years later it was discovered that the price he had paid to members of the 1901 Legislature was $125,000. The "Flagler Divorce" law, used only by the great man himself, was repealed in 1905.
Two months after the bill became law, Flagler obtained his divorce from Alice, who was now confined to a sanitorium. He gave her securities and properties worth $2.3 million, which, when she died in 1930, had grown to $15.2 million.
TEN DAYS AFTER THE DIVORCE, Henry married Mary Lily at the Kenan family's ancestral home, Liberty Hall, at Kenansville, near Wilmington. A special train carried some 20 wedding guests, a 15-piece orchestra and a team of Baltimore chefs to a nearby station. Carriages then transported them eight miles to Liberty Hall over a road Flagler had built for the occasion.
The 72-year-old groom's wedding gifts to his 34-year-old bride were a $500,000 pearl necklace, a check for $1 million, and $2 million in bonds. For their honeymoon they left the steamy August heat of North Carolina for Flagler's summer home at Mamaroneck, N.Y.
At Mary Lily's insistence the tycoon scrapped his earlier plans for a mansion for her. Instead, work began on a Southern-style palace in Palm Beach, complete with columns. Mary Lily would name it "Whitehall, a house of marble."
Lavishly furnished, the $4 million palace was opened on Jan. 26, 1902. Upstairs were 14 guest suites, each designed to represent a different epoch in world history. The modern American room boasted Florida's first twin beds.
Arthur Spalding, the organist at Whitehall, described life at the palace in letters to his sister:
"The more I see of Mrs. Flagler the better I like her and she is not at all the kind of woman I was prepared to see. Of course she is not perfect any more than the rest of us are, but there is nothing snobbish about her. If you treat her well and don't appear to be using her for what you can get, you can't ask for better treatment than she will give you in return."
Mary Lily accompanied Flagler on business trips to Havana and Nassau, and it became obvious that he was finding it difficult to keep up with her swifter social pace.
Still, his love for her remained undiminished to the end. With his final anniversary gift to her in 1912 he included a particularly touching note:
"To my darling wife, in loving remembrance of the day you became my wife and the many happy days you have given to me since our marriage. May the dear Lord reward you for what you have done for me."
The "old man," as he was called around Palm Beach, stayed busy to the end of his life. Much of his energy went into what many thought was the impossible task of extending his railroad across the Florida Keys. In late 1903 he gave his famous order: "Go ahead. Go to Key West."
Built across the Keys at a cost of $50 million and more than a hundred lives, the railroad reached Key West on Jan. 22, 1912. It proved to be the last major triumph in the old man's life. In March 1913, he fell down the stairs at Whitehall and broke his hip. At 83, he was too old to fight off complications from the injury. Two months later, on May 20, he died in one of his beachfront cottages. Mary Lily was at his side.
On that day Mary Lily Flagler became the world's richest woman.
Her husband had left her cash, stock, properties and companies valued at more than $100 million, the equivalent today of about $6 billion. In Florida alone she now owned the Florida East Coast Railway; the Model Land Company, which held four million acres of land; 11 Florida hotels; the East Coast Steamship Company; the Miami Electric Company, which later became Florida Power & Light; two water companies, and three daily newspapers, including the Miami Herald.
But in that spring of 1913, two deaths many miles apart doomed Mary Lily. One at Whitehall made her a widow; one in Louisville made Robert Bingham a widower.
Only a month after Flagler's accident, Eleanor Bingham, Bob Bingham's wife, was killed in Louisville. A car in which she was riding stalled at a crossing and was hit by a trolley car.
The paths of Mary Lily and Robert Bingham were destined to cross soon afterward -- and not for the first time. For him it would mean wealth, power and fame. For her it would mean a horrendous death.
ROBERT'S ANCESTOR, WILliam Bingham, had come to North Carolina from Ireland in 1791. Ten years later he accepted a post at the state university in Chapel Hill. Soon after, he was forced out because of his pro-British views. His principal foe was General James Kenan, a university trustee and Revolutionary War hero. For the next century the Binghams and the Kenans would clash often.
Robert Worth Bingham was born in November, 1871. At the age of 16 he became the fourth generation of his family to enroll at Chapel Hill, just 20 miles from his home.
"He was the handsomest man I ever saw," recalled a former classmate. "All the women loved him and all the men admired him. He was the social lion of our day."
At a dance in 1890 -- just one year before she met Henry Flagler -- Mary Lily Kenan and Bob Bingham met and began an affair. The attraction was physical: handsome Bob, voluptuous Mary Lily. And perhaps the old feud between their families may have kindled the extra excitement of the forbidden.
The two became lovers, but once again the family feud came between them. It is not clear what happened, but Bingham left school, apparently forced out by the powerful Kenan family. Against her family's wishes, Mary Lily continued to see him occasionally after he enrolled at the University of Virginia.
Then Bob's father moved the family's prestigious Bingham School, the oldest prep school in the South, 200 miles west to Asheville, in the North Carolina mountains. There Bob met a gorgeous and wealthy brunette vacationing from Kentucky. In May 1896, Bob married Eleanor "Babe" Miller and moved to Louisville.
Bingham plunged into the practice of law -- and into the corrupt world of Kentucky politics. He was elected county attorney, and appointed mayor of Louisville and later a judge in the county circuit court. Arrogance and shady deals doomed his first efforts at politics.
Sometime around 1904, Bingham became friends with Dr. Walter Fisk Boggess, a pediatrician, and Dr. Michael Leo Ravitch, a Russian-born dermatologist.
Despite his political troubles, Bingham still had the advantage of a marriage into a wealthy family. This benefit declined after Eleanor's death, particularly after her mother learned of his improprieties in the handling of collateral for one of the family businesses.
In the meantime, however, Bingham had run up huge debts through failed political ventures and bad investments. Louisville banks began to press him for payment. He told the bankers he had no money, but that he might obtain help through an old friend, Mary Lily Flagler, now America's wealthiest widow.
In the summer of 1915, Mary Lily was staying in Asheville at the Grove Park Inn, so Asheville was where Bingham headed. But once he was on the scene it appears that Mary Lily may have become the huntress. Says Tom Kenan, the family historian: "The Grove Park Inn in Asheville is where she re-struck her acquaintance with Bob Bingham. She was utterly lonely and she probably forced the play. She was a powerhouse."
The two years since Flagler's death had not been kind to Mary Lily. At 48, graying hair topped a face marked with worry lines. It was said that she drank too much bourbon and even laudanum, a form of opium.
Bingham brought back a sense of joy and excitement to her life. She saw him at her apartment in New York's Plaza Hotel, at her mansion in Mamaroneck, at White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., and at Louisville. She even opened Whitehall again in February 1916, for the first time since Henry's death.
Family and Flagler business associates warned her that Bingham was a fortune hunter. But Mary Lily was a lonely woman and Bob Bingham had always been a lady-killer.
Late in 1916, Mary Lily and Bingham decided to marry. Under intense family and business pressure, they agreed to a will in which he waived his claims to her fortune.
Stories of the romance filled the nation's social columns, and Bingham found his image was improving. Instead of a sleazy politician, he was now presented, even in the staid New York Times, as a leading reform mayor rather than as a man forced out of office by a cleanup campaign.
The wedding was held on Nov. 15, 1916. Mary Lily gave Bingham a $50,000 certified check. He gave her nothing.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, MARY LILY'S LAWyers informed her that under Kentucky law, the will excluding Bob from her estate was invalid. When a new one was drawn up conforming to Kentucky law, Bingham again agreed to a waiver that excluded him. Meanwhile, Mary Lily had cleared up his enormous debts and given him $700,000 in Standard Oil stock, which provided him with an annual income of $50,000.
Things soon began to go wrong. Bingham's three children, aged 10 to 19, treated their stepmother coldly, a disheartening development for a warm and friendly woman. Bingham's daughter even spied on her and told her father that his new wife was a drug addict.
In late December, Mary Lily's health began to deteriorate. She complained of chest pains, Bingham said later. To treat a woman who could affort the best of everything, he called not a renowned heart specialist, but instead his old friend, the second-rate dermatologist, Dr. Ravitch.
That winter, when Mary Lily ordered Whitehall to be opened for the Easter holidays, Bob's children refused to go. He sided with them and a distraught Mary Lily closed Whitehall, canceled all the Palm Beach parties she had planned, and spent the holidays instead in the cold, unfriendly world of Louisville.
By late May, Dr. Ravitch had been brought in as a house guest. His job was to keep Mary Lily under 24-hour sedation. She needed to be totally pacified -- and Bob needed her signature on a change in her will.
He had learned he could purchase the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times for $1 million. He figured he could raise 60 percent of that amount by selling the securities Mary Lily had given him; the rest he could borrow only if her will listed him as the beneficiary of at least part of her vast fortune.
Apparently, he had no plans to kill her, just to gain the additional leverage that a place in her will would give him.
As treatment for her chest pains, Dr. Ravitch began giving Mary Lily shots of morphine. These were gradually increased until she became addicted.
To draw up a codicil to the will, Bingham needed a lawyer he could control, one who would not be suspicious of a change signed by a woman under the influence of drugs. He picked an old college friend, Dave Davies, whom he knew would trust him if he explained that his wife's dazed condition was due to a serious medical problem.
On June 19, 1917, Mary Lily agreed to meet with Davies at Dr. Ravitch's office. There she told him she did not want the Flagler trustees or her brother, Will, to know about the codicil, a secret handwritten paper she had brought with her. It stated:
"...I give and bequeath to my husband, R.W. Bingham, $5 million to be absolutely his..."
It was signed by Mary Lily Bingham and witnessed by Davies and Ravitch. The codicil was not filed at the courthouse, and remained a closely guarded secret. For his part in the conspiracy, Ravitch was paid $50,000.
AFTER THE SIGNING, MARY LILY VIRTUally vanished from sight. Bingham on the other hand was seen everywhere, busy politicking at meetings and rallies.
The couple spent the summer in the sweltering heat of Louisville, not at the comfortable waterfront mansion at Mamaroneck. Then on a day in July when the temperature soared to 102, Mary Lily tried to relax in a cool bath. An hour later a worried maid found her draped over the side of the tub, unconscious.
Ravitch, the dermatologist, was called. Suspecting a heart attack, he called in another old friend of Bingham's, the pediatrician Dr. Boggess, who brought along a young laboratory pathologist. Not one of the team was qualified to treat or even to diagnose heart disease.
The morphine injections continued, and two nurses were fired when they protested the dosage. Mary Lily's condition grew worse. Bob Bingham released statements to the press, hammering away at the theme of heart disease.
On the morning of July 27, 1917, Mary Lily went into a fit. At 3:10 p.m., she died while experiencing convulsions.
A vague death certificate listed the cause of death as oedema, or swelling of the brain, with myocarditis, a heart condition, as a contributing cause.
Her coffin was placed in her private railroad car and taken by train to Wilmington, N.C. She was buried in the family plot at Oakdale Cemetery.
Mary Lily left an estate valued at roughly $150 million. Her will was filed in the Florida courts. Then, in August, Bingham filed the secret codicil with the Louisville court. The Kenans and the trustees wondered if there would be more secret thunderbolts. Would Bingham take over the Flagler System or possibly assume a prominent role with Standard Oil?
Soon the word was out. The Kenans would contest the secret codicil.
They revealed that prominent Louisville residents had contacted them. Now they wanted to know why Bingham had brought in a team of medical quacks to attend Mary Lily.
The family hired one of the world's most famous detectives, William Burns, head of the William J. Burns Detective Agency. Burns quickly turned up detailed information on Mary Lily's drugging. The family learned, too, that Bingham had given Dr. Ravitch a new Packard 325 Roadster. Burns noted that the million-dollar pearl necklace Flagler had given Mary Lily had vanished, most likely stolen by Bingham.
In September, the trustees of the Flagler estate, reviewing the report in Standard Oil's New York offices, decided to open Mary Lily's grave. They wanted to know exactly what had caused her death.
Meanwhile, Bingham hired a New York pathologist, who concluded that death had been caused by endocarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart.
Challenging Bingham in the Louisville courts proved to be unrewarding for the Kenans. Sympathy was strongly in Bingham's favor. The local newspapers depicted it as a battle between one lone Louisville man and the monster Standard Oil monopoly. In addition, the hometown lawyer the Kenans hired proved inadequate.
In April 1918, Bingham was informed that there would be no further contest of the will. He would receive his $5 million on July 27, exactly one year after his wife's death.
Why did the Kenan family drop the case? No explanation was given. The report by Burns was never released. And even more startling, the official autopsy report was repressed.
David Leon Chandler, author of the recent best seller, The Binghams of Louisville, concluded that one reason may have been that Mary Lily had tertiary syphilis, probably transmitted to her by Bingham during their youthful affair.
Always a womanizer, Bingham underwent a series of confidential medical treatments that began after he quit college in 1891. He continued to receive them in later years from Dr. Ravitch, who was experienced in the treatment of syphilis.
Primary and secondary syphilis can masquerade as a fairly mild disease, sometimes involving little more than minor lesions or an unpleasant rash. Tertiary syphilis does not surface until 10 to 30 years later and can be a deadly disease. And it can sometimes cause endocarditis.
With syphilis, it would have been natural to call in Dr. Ravitch. The disease, so scandalous a malady that it could not even be mentioned in polite society, would also have given Bingham the opportunity for blackmail. Between the morphine and the threat of scandal, Mary Lily could have been persuaded to revise her will.
The problem was that Bingham kept the cover-up going. Even after it was apparent that Mary Lily's medical condition was life-threatening, the doctors he consulted were picked because they could be trusted to keep quiet.
Why was Bingham so smugly confident in the face of the Kenans' challenge? Why did the Kenans suddenly stop contesting the will after the autopsy? Scandal is the only plausible explanation.
And what happened afterward? Did Bingham wither away, consumed by guilt? Of course not. He thoroughly enjoyed his money. He bought the Louisville newspapers, which promptly brought him respectability.
With money and power he became effective in Democratic circles -- so effective that his staunch support for a rising young politician named Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought him a huge reward when FDR was elected president in 1932. Bingham was named ambassador to the Court of St. James in London, the highest ambassadorial position a president can bestow.
Even more important, a great communications empire developed from the $5 million Bingham received. The empire lasted six decades, until May 1986, and then was blown apart by the "grandchildren syndrome," a condition that sometimes arises from the sheer number of third-generation owners.
A key whistleblower in forcing the sale of the Bingham newspaper empire to Gannett Publishing was granddaughter Sallie Bingham, an ardent feminist who feels the Binghams have "shortchanged" the woman whose money benefited them. Sallie has established a Mary Lily Bingham Trust Fund to provide scholarships for girls.
"He killed her, didn't he?" says Sallie, who maintains a home in Key West. "I think it's time for a Bingham to give her some credit. It's a bit of justice for Mary Lily."
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