Her Last Lover
Memoir of a Golden Age Courtesan
FOREWORD
Time erodes the availability of reliable data. Some official public records offer only basic facts, such as names, dates, and places. They say nothing about the people themselves and very little about their lives. Census records sometimes provide a bit more because of optional questions added at each census to capture specific demographic information. For some states, old local and tax census records can be enormously useful, down to how many pigs a household owned. These hint at a comparative level of affluence, but still tell us nothing about the people themselves.
Nevertheless, the lives of preceding generations can often be partially reconstructed, in very general terms, if enough tidbits of information are found and assembled. What survives is rarely the story itself, only the evidence from which a story can be rebuilt.
Parts of Marla’s story, as with all biographies and autobiographies, are reconstructions.
Part I
PROLOGUE
The file didn’t look important.
It was a routine IRS tax filing from 1979, but it was flagged, as thousands were each year, triggering a dreaded interview. A simple review of the form showed nothing unusual; all entries and amounts were within the normal range, except that this Form 1040 and its attachments were filed by a woman who seemingly did not exist.
An interview was clearly in order.
For nearly forty years, the name associated with her earlier life—Marjory Harrington—had disappeared from American public records. No marriages. No employment history. No obvious trail linked a young woman last mentioned in the 1940 census to the woman filing her taxes and now living in quiet luxury in Arizona.
With an attorney and accountant from the Northern Trust Company assisting, Marla’s IRS interview went well. Having advisors from a prestigious trust company lent the meeting gravitas, and the IRS questions were resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, though we don’t know how she explained her long absence or her source of income.
Chapter 1: 1914—1940
Marla’s story begins with her father, Hugh Harrington.
Hugh was born in rural New York in 1885. As soon as he reached adulthood, he left home and traveled across the continent until he reached Vancouver, British Columbia, where expanding electrical systems provided steady work as an electrician’s apprentice.
There, he met Helen Marie Tosney of Cincinnati. No surviving account describes their meeting; history preserves only their 1914 marriage in Vancouver, a single recorded moment standing in for courtship and decision.
Not long afterward, Hugh, now confident he knew the ropes as an electrician, moved to Montana, where he joined the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad—the Milwaukee Road. The company had undertaken one of the era’s most ambitious engineering projects: electrifying more than four hundred miles of railway through the Rocky Mountains.
Before electric locomotives could run, men had to build the trolley-like electrical system that powered them. Hugh helped install 3,000-volt overhead catenary lines extending west from Harlowton toward Idaho. Construction advanced slowly through mountains and harsh weather, and the workers’ families moved with it, living wherever the line reached that season.
By 1917, Hugh and Helen were in Three Forks, Montana, where their son, Michael Henry Howard, was born. He was always known as Howard. Three years later, they relocated again to Frenchtown near Missoula. The pattern suggested progress—a young family carried forward by industry and motion.
It ended abruptly on August 19, 1920.
Hugh Harrington was electrocuted while working. The surviving accounts are brief, focusing more on procedure than on loss. Helen, thirty-two years old, was left widowed with a three-year-old child and another soon to be born. A newspaper obituary noted that she was “too sick” to accompany his body back to New York for burial, a phrase that explains nothing yet suggests the scale of disruption left behind.
Helen moved twenty miles back down the road to Missoula, a town of about 12,000 people at the time. There, Marjory Aida Harrington was born on January 28, 1921.
Widowed, with a baby and a four-year-old boy, Helen Harrington somehow maintained her small family in western Montana until Arthur McNie entered her life and took Helen and her children into his care.
Like many men who suddenly appear in family histories, Arthur McNie enters the story here. Arthur’s father, Malcolm McNie, was a prominent Iowa landowner, farmer, state legislator, bank executive, and church leader. He retired at the turn of the 20th century and moved with his wife to Long Beach, California. Arthur chose to remain in Iowa, probably for work. Twenty years later, on his way to a new job as an accountant with Anaconda Copper in Butte, Montana, he visited his aging parents in Long Beach.
A couple of years later, probably remembering the warm winter weather he had experienced while visiting his parents, Arthur decided to move to California, perhaps to help his younger brother, Robert, care for their mother. Malcolm had died a few months after Arthur’s visit. Helen went with him, bringing Howard and Marjory into yet another beginning. The journey marked a transition familiar to many Western families of the period; reinvention, dramatic decisions, and relocations, with crowds of Dust Bowl and other failing farmers moving toward the promised land of California.
Arthur initially tried poultry farming in Arcadia, drawn by widely circulated claims that small farms could bring quick prosperity. The experiment proved short-lived. Agricultural success required a temperament and experience he lacked, and within a relatively brief time, the family moved again, this time to Pasadena, where Arthur returned to bookkeeping, working for an automobile dealer in the rapidly modernizing, sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles.
In 1924, Arthur and Helen finally married, bringing a degree of permanence that had been absent from Helen’s earlier years. The family remained in Pasadena until after the 1930 census, when they relocated to Long Beach, where Arthur established an accounting practice.
Helen was—or became—an enthusiastic competitive whist player, according to social items in the local newspapers of the time, and she played in regional tournaments and participated actively in local social circles. Yet further disruption was at hand for her children, who were never formally adopted by McNie.
In 1939, Helen died at fifty from long-term thyroid cancer, first detected in 1932, that had metastasized throughout her body. Her death left Arthur once again presiding over a household altered by loss, with her children, now nearly grown, standing at uncertain thresholds.
The federal census from the following spring is informative. On April 11, 1940, the enumerator found Arthur and his stepchildren, Howard and nineteen-year-old Marjory, still living together in Long Beach. Howard was finishing community college and preparing to move to Hawaii. Neither sibling was listed as employed or seeking work, a detail that may reflect the ambiguity young people faced during the lingering years of the Depression.
Soon afterward, Howard departed for Hawaii and enlisted in the Army, a full year or more before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Military records show Howard served steadily in Hawaii until 1944, when he was admitted to the Army hospital. Weeks later, he was discharged with a “Section 2” general discharge. Section 2 was an administrative classification indicating he was considered unfit for continued service. It was generally used for chronic alcoholics, homosexuals, and uncontrollable troublemakers who were not otherwise deemed “dishonorable” in their work and military discipline. It denied those veterans the health, education, and housing benefits available to “honorable” discharged veterans, often a debilitating burden for those discharged with it on their record.
After Howard’s discharge, he next appears in 1950 as a retail store clerk selling drafting and surveying equipment and living alone in downtown San Francisco. Twenty years later, two blocks from where he had been living in 1950, Howard died in a seedy Eddy Street flophouse, two blocks from the landmark St. Francis Hotel. He was 49, died of pneumonia, and had been working for seven years as an insurance adjuster. His military service earned him the honor of burial at the Golden Gate National Cemetery.
After the 1940 census, Marjory disappears from public records.
For decades, nothing firmly linked the young woman recorded in Long Beach in 1940 to the person who would later appear in Arizona. The question was how and why.
Chapter Two: 1978—1983
The moment Marla Harrington boarded her flight in Geneva in early 1978, she knew she was starting a new life.
Unlike earlier departures, this one carried no urgency. There was no visible flight from circumstance, no hurried reinvention. The decision seemed deliberate, even calm, as if the long sequence of movements that had defined her past had finally resolved into a choice.
She was fifty-seven years old.
Those who met her remembered a woman who carried herself with quiet assurance. She remained slender and striking, dressed in attire that suggested expense without ostentation. Time had marked her lightly, and she seemed neither nostalgic nor defensive about the years behind her. She had never married, yet now, for the first time, solitude lay ahead as an intention rather than an unavoidable feature of the life she had fallen into.
She settled into her first-class seat, accepted a glass of champagne, and looked out the window as gray winter light threatened rain. Switzerland had offered her a predictable, discreetly cloistered, and carefully bounded life. She regretted leaving her one close friend in the world, Constance “Connie” Goulandris.
Connie, married to George Peter Goulandris of the long-established Greek shipping family, lived a life defined by privacy rather than display. In that sheltered world, she had become Marla’s only confidant and, by all accounts, the only person who fully knew and understood why Marla was leaving. The decision was neither exile nor adventure. It was an exchange: public invisibility in return for personal security—comfort rather than wealth, stability rather than belonging.
From Geneva, she traveled through New York without pause, then on to a city she had never seen but had chosen: Phoenix, Arizona.
She arrived late in the afternoon at the aging Terminal 1, a modest gateway to a rapidly expanding desert city. A limousine driver waited with a hand-lettered sign bearing her name. He collected her luggage and led her into the cooling desert evening, where winter darkness descended quickly and without ceremony.
During the short drive to the Arizona Biltmore Resort, exhaustion overtook her. The city passed largely unseen as she drifted in and out of sleep, waking only when the car turned onto the quiet roads surrounding the historic resort.
Her new home stood among the original luxury properties from the 1930s near the Adobe golf course, within sight of a world associated with discretion and old money rather than spectacle. Nearby lived Edith Davis, mother of Nancy Reagan, and her husband, Dr. Loyal Davis—residents whose presence quietly signaled the neighborhood’s social character.
The driver handed her a manila envelope containing keys and documents, then helped her inside. The house was cool, dim, and fully furnished, its décor suggesting expense and reflecting someone else’s taste. Ownership had transferred; arrangements had been fulfilled. The life awaiting her inside was hers.
What she had not anticipated was the silence.
Silence carries its own weight. It does not erase memory; it amplifies it. Small details linger—the feel of silk garments in her closet, music once shared during private evenings, fragments of poetry associated with a man she called only “honey.” Phoenix offered disappearance, not forgetting. The past arrived quietly, embedded in objects rather than events.
Although accustomed to solitude, she soon found the large house out of proportion to her life. Within a year, she sold it and moved to a smaller residence in a gated community across the Biltmore golf course, where homes bordered small artificial lakes that softened the landscape and absorbed errant golf shots. The sale produced a modest profit—sufficient to attract the attention of the Internal Revenue Service, whose inquiry would later formally restore her to the public record.
Marla never learned to drive. Instead, she bought a bright yellow golf cart from a nearby estate sale, complete with decorative fringe, and named it Daisy. The cart became her way to navigate the compact Biltmore enclave: Safeway grocery store, local banks, the Biltmore Fashion Park, and Northern Trust, which had recently assumed responsibility for managing the financial arrangements that sustained her life.
Her days settled into a quiet routine—morning walks, exploratory drives in Daisy, and polite but noncommittal exchanges with neighbors who gradually came to understand that friendliness did not mean intimacy.
During these early months, she began visiting the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon in Biltmore Fashion Park.
The salon was managed by Heather, a former print and runway model whose work with the Oscar de la Renta organization had made her a familiar figure in Phoenix’s fashion circles. Elegant and approachable, Heather drew clients from across the country. For many women, the salon was more than a retail space; it offered companionship in a carefully curated social world.
Marla became a regular visitor.
She and Heather quickly formed an easy rapport, though Marla kept a subtle distance from the salon’s inner social circle, especially in winter, when part-time residents filled the neighborhood. Impeccably dressed and perfectly composed, she stood apart—not aloof, but self-contained. To the other women, she was unmistakably sophisticated and entirely unknowable.
When asked about her past, she rarely invented details. Instead, she deflected gently. Her “honey,” she explained, had died but had “taken care of her.” She spoke of friends in Phoenix who had supposedly drawn her west, though she said they had died soon after her arrival. She acknowledged without embarrassment that she had spent much of her life as a kept woman, offering just enough honesty to discourage further inquiry.
Paradoxically, this candor made her more intriguing. Many of the women who speculated about her origins had themselves risen to privilege through marriage or reinvention. To them, Marla seemed to have avoided the visible struggles that accompanied such transformations. She had comfort without explanation and independence without a history.
And so she became part of the landscape—recognized, admired, and quietly mysterious.
Only later would it become clear how meticulously that mystery had been crafted.
Among the many people who encountered Marla during those early Phoenix years, few asked about her past. In a community built as much on reinvention as on permanence, discretion was considered good manners.
Years later, when I began searching for records about Marla that it became clear that this quiet period—so uneventful on the surface—was the only chapter of her life that could be fully observed.
Everything that came before it would need to be recovered.