website watertownhistory.org
ebook History of Watertown, Wisconsin
Watertown Boy and The Battle
Creek Girl
Davies Nuptials Simple –
for a Big Apartment
The Milwaukee Journal, 12 17 1935
New York, N. Y. -- The marriage of Mrs. Marjorie Post Close Hutton to Joseph E, Davies, Washington attorney, formerly of Watertown, Wis., which took place Sunday, was emphasized as a simple and quiet affair in early accounts relayed to reporters. But it is difficult, it appears, to be entirely simple in a 70-room “apartment” and with an income reputed to be at least $1,000,000 a year.
Heiress to about $10,000,000 of a cereal fortune, Mrs. Post, tradesmen revealed, took immense pains with the decorations and refreshments for her third marriage. Three florists and 16 helpers worked two days in arranging 5,000 blooms in innumerable chambers.
Pink Flowers
Created
The decorations of the living room were pink, and 500 of the white chrysanthemums for the altar were made to conform to that motif with carmine ink at a cost of $2,000, A $500 triangle of blue spruce was set up at the entrance to bring the total of floral decorations to at least $7,300, tradesmen estimated. In addition, there was an altar formed of giant cypotium [cibotium] ferns and chrysanthemums.
Mrs. Hutton had sent a sample of her blush pink wedding gown to the caterers with orders to make the wedding cake icing match the gown. The cake was five feet high, three feet in diameter and weighed 150 pounds.
The cake, the caterer said, took three “artists" a week to make and was designed as a temple of love, crowned with five-inch layers. The sides were decorated with salmon pink doves and garlanded with white spun sugar roses. It cost $300 and if divided among the 40 guests present came to $7.50 for each slice.
“Diamond Like
Half Dollar”
The bride carried white orchids, and flowers were strewn in her path as she walked to the altar. The Rev. Charles W. Pinkney of Watertown, Davies’ boyhood pastor [First Congregational], performed the ceremony.
Davies, an international lawyer, former Democratic national committeeman from Wisconsin and once western manager of President Wilson’s campaign, was reported to have given Mrs. Davies a diamond "about the size of a half dollar” as a wedding present. It was his second marriage; his first, to the former Miss Emlen Knight, ending in divorce.
Three caterers and 25 servants served the guests at dinner in the tapestry hung, pine paneled dining room. The guests were arranged at five tables, each with a different color motif, the bride's in pink, one in silver, one in green, one In blue and one in scarlet.
Among the ornaments of the Hutton apartment is the golden sleigh of the former czar of Russia, a decoration so huge that the walls of the apartment were cut open years ago when it was Installed.
Get Report
Through Door
Special canopies were erected for the entry of the guests and stringed orchestras played during the afternoon. Reporters, standing in the rain, received an account of the progress of the ceremony shouted through a grilled door by an unidentified benefactor.
"Now they're walking down the line." the broadcaster shouted.
"Now they're getting married," he reported five minutes later.
"It's all over and he kissed her twice, once on each cheek," was the final line.
A little later Alfonso B. Landa of Davies' Washington office said of the wedding, “It was simple, dignified and quiet. The gifts wore small and attractive, and the entire atmosphere homelike."
"She Spends
Plenty"
"One of the nice things about Mrs. Hutton is that she spends plenty," tradesmen added.
The Davieses now have the 70-room city apartment, two Long Island estates, an Adirondack lodge, a Carolina shooting box, a Palm Beach hacienda [1], a home in Washington and one of the largest sailing vessels in the world, a four-masted yacht, the Sea Cloud, for a honeymoon.
Many of the wedding guests, including cabinet members and senators, came here from Washington in a private car.
_________________________
[1] The Mar-a-Lago estate
History of Watertown, Wisconsin