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
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“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 death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)