Biography
She was born on July 25, 1873 to John Pierpont Morgan and Frances Louisa Tracy.
In 1903 she became part owner of the Villa Trianon near Versailles, France, along with decorator and socialite Elsie De Wolfe and theatrical/literary agent Elisabeth Marbury. Morgan was instrumental in assisting De Wolfe, her close friend, in pioneering a career in interior decoration. The three ladies, affectionately known as "The Versailles Triumvirate," hosted a famous salon in France and, in 1903, along with Ann Vanderbilt, helped organize the Colony Club, the first women's social club in New York City and, later, helped found the exclusive neighborhood of Sutton Place along Manhattan's East River.
In 1912 she started The Society for the Prevention of Useless Gift Giving (SPUG) with Eleanor Robson Belmont.
In 1916, Morgan and De Wolfe largely funded Cole Porter's first Broadway musical, See America First, produced by Marbury.
From 1917 to 1921 Morgan took residence near the French front, not far from both Soissons and the "Chemin des Dames" at Blérancourt, and ran a formidable help organisation, The American Friends of France (it employed several hundred people at a time, volunteers from abroad and locally recruited staff), financed partly out of her own deep pockets, partly with the help of an active network in the States. The AFF was active in succoring noncombatants, organizing a health service that still exists in Soissons, a workshop to provide basic furniture to bombed-out families, a holiday camp for children, and a mobile library that was taken over by the library in Soissons, and so on. She returned in 1939 to help the Soissons evacuees.
Morgan's friendships included many socialites and celebrities of her day. Her connection to individuals such as Cole Porter, as mentioned above, allowed her to compile a cookbook for charity. Titled the Spécialités de la Maison and published in 1940 to benefit the AFF, it offered recipes by cultural icons such as Pearl S. Buck, Salvador Dalí, and Katharine Hepburn.
A four-story townhouse built in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York City for Anne Morgan in 1921 was donated as a gift to the United Nations in 1972. It is now the official residence of the United Nations Secretary-General.
She died on January 29, 1952 in Mount Kisco, New York.
Read more about this topic: Anne Morgan (philanthropist)
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