Biography
She was born Beatrice Leila Eliott Burton and grew up in Old Westbury, Long Island, New York. Her father, Frank V. Burton Jr., inherited his business in the cotton trade. Her middle name, which she took as her first name, was pronounced "LEE-la" and was, according to her, "Hindi for 'cosmic play,' which should register in anyone’s mind forever, but doesn't". She attended the Green Vale School, Long Island, with Gloria Vanderbilt, then St. Timothy's School, Stevenson, Maryland. She was introduced to society at the Junior Assembly on December 23, 1943, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan.
Read more about this topic: Leila Hadley
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
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