Betsey Maria Whitney ( Cushing, formerly Roosevelt; May 18, 1908 – March 25, 1998) was an American philanthropist, a former daughter-in-law of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later wife of U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St James's, John Hay Whitney. Dr. Cushing, who was descended from Matthew Cushing, an early settler of Hingham, Massachusetts, served as professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Yale universities, and established the family in Boston. schooled by their social-climbing mother to pursue husbands of wealth and prominence. All three Cushing sisters married into wealth and prominence: Her older sister, Mary "Minnie", married Vincent Astor, the heir to a $200 million fortune, in 1940, and her younger sister Barbara "Babe" was married to Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer Jr., and later to CBS founder William S. Paley. Both of her sisters died of cancer within months of each other in 1978.

After her husband's death in 1982, she donated $8 million to the Yale Medical School, then the largest gift in the school's history. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. acquired nine important American and French paintings, as well as $2 million for future acquisitions. She left $15 million to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in her own will.

Personal life

In June 1930, she married James Roosevelt II (1907–1991), the eldest son of then Governor of New York, and eventual President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt. After her father-in-law became president, her husband served his father as an aide at the White House, and she often stood-in as hostess at the White House when Eleanor was absent. When FDR entertained King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at a picnic at the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York in 1939, she was present and accompanied FDR as he drove the King and Queen along the Hudson River.

She and James had two daughters:

  • Sara Delano Roosevelt (March 13, 1932 – October 22, 2021), who married Anthony di Bonaventura (1929–2012) in 1953. They divorced in 1972 and she married Ronald A. Wilford (1927–2015) in 1973.
  • Kate Roosevelt (1936–2002), later known as Kate Whitney after her stepfather adopted her.

In 1938, James left for Hollywood to work as an aide to Samuel Goldwyn. Betsey followed him, but they divorced in 1940. She was granted custody of their daughters, along with child support, though by biographers' accounts, James had little to no contact with his children, and eventually married three more times. who had been previously married to socialite Elizabeth Altemus. Whitney adopted both of her daughters. They moved to London in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower named Whitney Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

During the 1970s, Whitney was listed as one of the ten wealthiest men in the world. Their residences over the years included the Greentree estate on Long Island; Greenwood Plantation in Georgia; a town house and an elegant apartment in Manhattan; a large summer house on Fishers Island, near New London, Connecticut; a 12-room house in Saratoga Springs, which the Whitneys used when they attended horse races there; a golfing cottage in Augusta, Georgia; and a spacious house, Cherry Hill, in Virginia Water, Surrey, England, near the Ascot racecourse. In addition, the Whitneys shared a Kentucky horse farm with Whitney's sister, Joan Whitney Payson. Her personal fortune was estimated at $700 million in 1990 according to Forbes magazine. Her estate bequeathed eight major paintings to the National Gallery of Art.

Art owned

  • Self-Portrait (1889) by Vincent van Gogh
  • Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bolero in Chilpéric (1895/1896) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
  • Open Window, Collioure (1905) by Henri Matisse
  • The Harbor of La Ciotat (1907) by Georges Braque
  • The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1906) by Raoul Dufy
  • Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the fifth most expensive painting ever sold, when adjusted for inflation.

References

Further reading

  • The Sisters: Babe Mortimer Paley, Betsey Roosevelt Whitney, Minnie Astor Fosburgh: The Lives and Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters by David Grafton (Villard 1992).
  • Last Cushing sister dies: Betsey Whitney outlived husbands, by Enid Nemy, The New York Times, March 26, 1998.