DOCTOR LOVE
From Blue Blood Copyright St. Martins Press

It had been almost a decade since Terry had been introduced to society on the Circle Line cruise in 1962. In the intervening years, her marriage to Tony McBride had ended in divorce. Now Rebefcah wanted to help her start over. She called on her friend Maria New.

"I'm going to give her a blast," Rebekah told Maria. "I want young people there. Can you get any young doctors there?"

Maria asked the chief resident at New York Hospital to invite several young single male doctors to the party. Among them was a thirty-three-year-old Danish gynecologist named Niels Lauersen. Handsome, curly-haired, and tall, Lauersen cut a striking figure. He would later become a minor celebrity by writing popular books on gynecology, appearing on television talk shows, showing up in gossip columns linking him to actress Liv Ullmann.

When Lauersen arrived at the Westbury for the party, Rebekah was instantly impressed. Just five years older than Terry, the young doctor seemed a likely enough prospect. But it was not Terry who was entranced with Lauersen. It was Rebekah.

From the beginning, Lauersen's courtship of Rebekah caused a stir. Rebekah, fifty-seven, had once again picked a man who was much younger than she. She was now drinking so heavily and was so deeply involved with drugs that she didn't know where to turn. Desperately lonely, wide open to flattery, she had become the perfect victim: the highly impressionable, vulnerable millionairess.

"She used to hate to have dinner alone," says Gappy Pantori. "The cocktail hour was her very bad time of the day. She had to have someone to talk to. If I wanted to go home at six or seven o'clock, it was very hard for me to leave her. She would keep you talking until the company would come. She couldn't stand to be alone."

Often when Rebekah was depressed-several times a day-she phoned Frank Andrews, a man in his thirties who reportedly read palms and tarot cards for Yoko Ono, Christina Ford, and Princess Grace. Frequently, she was desolate. "Lie to me," she told him. "Tell me somebody loves me."

"Rebekah would call me at two or three in the morning crying, and I had to go over there and pick her up in her own vomit," Andrews says. "I used to find big hypodermic needles. She would call me four or five times a day. She desperately needed someone to hang on to."

But she had no idea who that should be. In a reading with Andrews, she reflected on her dilemma. "I don't know who I can trust, I don't know who I can trust," she said.

"It's almost impossible to escape people taking from you," said Andrews.

"! know it. I know it." "It's like your plague. You'll just have to accept it to some degree."

"I do sometimes. It depends on what they take. Sometimes I think I'm overly suspicious, paranoid. But then sometimes I'm right."
More often than not, however, Rebekah was wrong. "She was a bad judge of character," says Andrews. "She picked the worst. She had a hard time saying no. I realized I wasn't helping her. If I am talking to her every day, then I'm like a psychiatrist, and that is not my goal in life. She became so dependent on me, everybody in the entourage hated me. They thought I was a Rasputin. But I didn't need her-I had Princess Grace as a client."

Despite the disapproval of family and friends, Rebekah determinedly pursued Lauersen. In the beginning, she was the aggressor. If Terry minded her mother's sexual competitiveness, she didn't articulate her grievances. "Terry was not particularly angry," says a friend. "But she was amused and a little horrified at the idea of her mother and Niels."

Even Maria New, who inadvertently had introduced the two, did. not think highly of the match. "I had never met Lauersen," she says. "How did I know he would turn out to be the kind of person he is?"

Meanwhile, Rebekah began her most ambitious dance project to date. In early 1972, she paid $1,500,000 for the old Colonial Theater on Broadway near Sixty-second Street with the intention of making it into the most elegant dance theater in the country. Just across from Lincoln Center, the Harkness Theater, as it was renamed, would enable her to go head-to-head against the dance establishment.

Inspired by the Kirov Theater in Leningrad, Rebekah pumped $5 million into the renovation. Black negro marquina marble was
shipped in from Granada, Spain, to line the foyer. The front doors were of specially made ironwork and, like the plaster moldings, were decorated with extensive gold leaf. Sixteen crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The stage had absorption units beneath the floor to give it special resiliency, making it one of the best dance floors in the world. Finally, Rebekah had 1,277 hand-carved Louis XIV chairs made in Valencia, Spain, and upholstered in velvet in her own color, Harkness blue. Much as she had once disdained the pretensions of society, having her own color-even though some said it was never the same shade of blue-had become a trademark of hers as much as a royal coat of arms.

One of her key advisers throughout the planning stage was Lauersen. "She was willing to listen to anything he said with great attentiveness," says one of her attorneys. On Lauersen's advice, Rebekah engaged a Spanish artist named Enrique Senis-Oliver,- at a cost of $200,000, to paint a 120-square-yard mural, Homage to Terpsichore, on the stage's proscenium arch. Despite the fact that he had touted Senis, as opening day for the theater approached it became painfully apparent to insiders that the artist was having trouble executing the masterwork.

"I got a call from a staff member asking me sort of apologetically if I could take nude photographs of some of the dancers," says Michael Avedon. As Senis sat in the studio drinking beer, a male and female dancer posed naked on a glass platform so Avedon could photograph them from below. He made fifteen hundred prints of his work. "Senis used my photos either through tracing or projection to finish the mural. It was !ike painting by numbers," says Avedon. On the mural, a hand-lettered sign in the corner modestly noted that the completion time for painting was three thousand hours-many of which were spent by Senis on his back.

There were other problems as well. The theater was perfect for a medium-size dance company, but it was barely big enough to be able to pay off its high overhead even if it sold out. When costs increased, it became virtually impossible for it to be financially viable. But Rebekah rejected all advice that she abandon it.

"She was very determined, opinionated, and strong-willed," says an attorney who advised her on the undertaking. "She was so headstrong. Regardless of what was told her, she was going to do it."

Indeed, Rebekah was more completely committed to the theater than to anything since the launching of the dance company nearly ten years earlier. She spared no expense. She looked over every detail. One night, she and Maria New donned wigs and went down to the theater to check the progress without being recognized. The theater would be her ultimate monument to herself, her retort to the dance establishment and critics who had spurned her.

Since the grand opening would be her first great public event with Lauersen, Rebekah had still another face-lift. Gappy stayed by her bedside in the hospital. "She needed more drugs than they were willing to give her to put her out," says Gappy. "She would not take any pain. She said, 'Why should I have any pain when there's drugs? Just put me to sleep, and let me sleep for three or four days.'" She was released from the hospital more deeply addicted to Talwin than ever before.

Then she prepared for the April 9, 1974, opening of the theater, an evening two years in the making, Rebekah was to be accompanied fay guests of honor Betty and Susan Ford, but she was upset because Lady Bird Johnson and her daughters could not come. Tickets were $150 each. The most important figures in danee were to attend-George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirs-tein of the New York City Ballet, Lucia Chase and Oliver Smith of the American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey, Bob Joffrey, and Rudolf Nureyev. Rebekah also invited the same segment of society she had always sneered at-Angier Biddle Duke, various Vanderbilts, Prince Egon von Furstenberg, and other assorted nobility. Rebekah wore a white gown with white mink trim and a tiara designed by Dali with a string of diamonds dripping down her forehead. The sedate society matron who was once married to William Hale Harkness was now making a spectacularly garish display of her riches.

Rebekah's nephew Tarwater appeared at her apartment a few hours before the opening. He was battling his own drinking problem and had sworn he would abstain that evening. Nevertheless, Tarwater arrived "with only three and a half quarts of beer in me," he says. "I probably had some coke, some tran-quilizers, and two doubles on the way over-nothing very heavy, you understand, just enough to even things out. Finally, like the trembling of the gods of Valhaila, she came sweeping down the stairs.

"There was a whole hierarchy of who got into the Kino with Rebekah, Carnations were worn to identify us as family. We drove over in separate cars and met at the theater. It was the night. Geoffrey Holder looked spectacular. Alvin Ailey was there. Andy Warhol arrived wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a tuxedo top, and they wouldn't let him in.

"At the theater, the gigolos and the entourage were all dressed up by the same taiior, wearing eight-hundred-dollar tuxes, double-breasted, midnight blue, cut by the same hand, and I had an After Six job and felt really third-rate. And they had that ghastly painting. You could tell all [the artist] had done was project slides onto a canvas and copy them. There were so many limos downstairs, and a vapor of alcohol pervaded the whole thing. On [Rebekah's] right was Betty Ford, Rudolf Nureyev, Monique van Vooren, and me.

"Rebekah was drinking this pink Bacardi garbage. Bacardi had run out of it, and someone at the factory told her we can't give you just one bottle, we have to make a run of at least twenty thousand or two thousand bottles or whatever. So Bacardi gave it one day's run, and she had thousands of bottles. Since then, this pink Bacardi cocktail was her favorite, and people were looked on rather favorably if they chose this peculiar garbage drink. It was awful, but I liked it. It was a quick route, reddish violet, the most expensive sneaky Pete wine there is. So I was the pink Bacardi gofer, carrying the flask for Rebekah. I took it to the chauffeur, who filled it up, but by the time I got to them, I had drunk so much of it myself that I had to go back for a refill."

At intermission, at one of the first performances, Rebekah snuck off to the bathroom. "She was straight at the beginning of the night," says Gappy, "but she must have given herself one or two shots when I wasn't with her. She had this long gown and she must have hit a vein in her leg, and the blood came streaming down all over the back of her shoe, and it stained the satin shoe, and the dress. She had blood running down her leg. 1 had to walk her back covering her with my shawl, and put her in the bathroom and lock 'die door. Meanwhile, they had had the bright idea that somebody might steal the gold-plated faucets in the theater, so opening night they took all the faucets off, and you couldn't run the water. It was so sick. I had to tell the maid not to let anyone in, and everybody was knocking, and here I was with toilet paper, trying to clean her shoe. I was so embarrassed for her."

After the opening-night performance Rebekah went backstage to congratulate the dancers. "She came back to my dressing room," says one of the soloists, "and she said how proud she was of me. Then she fell. It was really embarrassing. She just fell. And she got up and started walking up the steps. And she fell several times. I excused it. I thought, well, she's celebrating."
But there was not much to celebrate. In The New York Times, Rebekah's nemesis, Clive Barnes, could not fail to note that what was happening offstage was far more interesting than what was taking place onstage. He savaged the troupe's choreography in several separate reviews during it's two-week stand, and said the theater was too hot, had poor sight lines, mediocre acoustics, and a claustrophobically tiny lobby. "Getting to know a new theater is rather like getting to know a ship on its maiden voyage," he wrote. "The first night out might tell you something-especially about the quality of the champagne and the garishness of the fittings, but it is only when you are well out to sea that you learn about the menu, the heat of the cabins and, occasionally, that the name on the lifebelt is the S.S. Titanic."
The dancers themselves were given excellent reviews, but the repertory, Barries said., was "extraordinarily weak." He added, "I am reminded of a colleague, years ago in London, who, during a sad performance, startled the woman in front of him by tapping her on the shoulder and saying in a penetrating whisper:

'Excuse me, madam, would you mind replacing your hat? I can see.'"

In retaliation, Rebekah got Senis to dash off a caricature of a nude, overweight Barnes in toe shoes on the sinking Titanic, which she immediately hung in the theater's lobby. But Barnes's review was by no means the most vicious. Time magazine compared Rebekah's shrine to the Wagnerian theater that Mad King Ludwig paid for, adding that "One can only sorrow that so much love, money and care was expended to such little result." New York magazine compared the "garish bordello of a dance theater" to a "Staten Island beauty parlor." Dance magazine said the theater looked like "a lavish ladies' powder room."

And everywhere, Senis's painting came in for the most brutal criticism of all. Newsweek called it "the ugliest mural ever painted." Noting that one should not ridicule any theater designed for dance, Dance nonetheless asserted that Senis's work gives the word vulgarity a whole new meaning. Done in the Daliesque vein, it is redolent with that sort of come-hither nudity that porno magazines have thrived on for years. Flying, leaping, standing or sitting male and female figures (some, portraits of Harkness dancers), glisten in tautly suggestive poses. Amidst them all, stands the soi-disant visionary figure of Mrs. Harkness, her head held high, but unfortunately painted in such a way that she seems to be looking straight at the buttocks of her more fleshy male dancers. I was especially amused at one section of the mural, showing a group of grimly caped and hooded figures, whom I assumed to be those Harkness dancers banished from the company some years ago.

The Toronto Globe and Mail critic John Fraser said it was . . . perhaps the most tasteless, ludicrous and eminently vulgar mural of any theatre in the world. There is more genitalia per square inch floating around in this horrid murai than any hardcore rag could dream up. This all reaches its apogee with the top-most figure directly over centre-stage so that the audience's perspective of him is through turned-out feet, buttocks and testicles.

Senis's painting of Clive Barnes on the Titanic added "the perfect final touch," Fraser wrote, "to an evening with the Harkness-the theatre and the company that dares to be known by bad taste alone."

Rebekah had survived the attacks on her after the Jeffrey debacle and the coup in Monte Carlo, but they were never this savage. Moreover, since she was now the company's artistic director, there was no one left for her to blame. What did they want from her? She could have been just another society dame; instead, after all her previous setbacks, she had made a greater commitment than ever before. The reviews were so cruel that for the first time, some reporters actually began to feel sorry for the woman who had everything. After thoroughly eviscerating both the theater and the company's choreography, one New York critic wrote:

None of this, however, seems to me grounds for the gossipy, often vindictive-sounding way much of the Eastern press has puffed and hammered a sad situation into a national issue . . . Harkness says she wanted to leave the world something besides a hangover. She already has, even though she may not be doing it the way you or I would want it done. ... In return, we could let her keep a little self-respect.

When it's two-week run ended at the new theater, the Harkness Ballet went on tour in Europe and the Middle East, mercifully out of reach of the New York critics. Meanwhile, Rebekah sought, without much luck, to rent the theater out to other dance companies, Broadway shows, or whomever might want it. By the fall of 1974, the company itself was in danger of folding, not from the internal strife that had marked Rebekah's past efforts, but because of financial problems. The theater had already cost her millions; and dark as it usually was, it was a continuing drain on her resources. In addition, the bear market of the seventies had left her finances in a shambles. She would not be able to carry the projected $1,500,000 deficit the company would run up each year.

Rebekah agreed to put up $500,000 for the company that year, but unless they were able to raise the additional SI million over the next few months, the troupe would fold the following spring. "This is not a gimmick," said her accountant "The stock market has been severe-people have been losing thirty to forty percent of their capital, and this, combined with inflation, is definitely the reason" the company needs outside money. The dancers literally rook to the streets, passing out pamphlets to raise funds. "Save our Company," read one, "The Harkness Ballet must raise $1 million by March 31, 1975, to survive." It noted that a donation of $100 would buy one costume, $25 one hour of class time, $10 a pair of toe shoes, and $5 a pair of tights. The company that had everything, Rebekah's lavish plaything, was reduced to begging in the street.

The public, however, was not terribly sympathetic. The arts, as always, were short of funds, and of all the many cultural institutions needing subsidies, the Harkness Ballet hardly seemed the most deserving. When the dancers themselves made a public plea for support in The New York Times, Clive Barnes declared the company unworthy. "The Harkness Ballet is not at present artistically viable," he wrote. "Does any independent, experienced voice in the dance world say it is? So far as the dancers are concerned, Mrs. Harkness has already wilfully disbanded a company of dancers far stronger than her present troupe."
The foliowing year, a four-sentence article in Variety told the story: The Harkness Ballet has folded. As for the theater, Rebekah's grandest creation of ali, her dance troupe had never even returned to it after its two-week run there in the spring of 1974. It was now available on a rental basis, and a handful of Broadway shows had brief engagements there, but more frequently it remained dark. Costly union contracts .blithely signed by Re-bekah ensured that even sellout performances rarely broke even. At best, it cost Rebekah more than $200,000 a year to maintain. Of Rebekah's dreams, only Harkness House remained.

"Because I'm loaded, they all iook at me and say, 'Show me,'" she told a reporter. "It's a very hard thing to face the fact that almost all people wish you ill."

"She was disgusted with the whole scene," says Cappy. "She really didn't want any part of ballet. She didn't want to be bothered. She'd had the best and fired everybody. Once she lost the ballet company, she said, 'I really want to go on to something else- I positively hate it."'

In the fall of 1974, six months after the opening of the Harkness Theater, Rebekah anxiously prepared for a big weekend at Sneden's Landing with Lauersen. Cappy recalls: "She said, 'I need this dress, and I need that dress,'" "And when I asked why, all she said was, 'We're dressing.'"

On October 12, 1974, a minister arrived at the house. "There was every indication she was getting married," says Cappy. "But she didn't want to tell me and she didn't want to tell Joe. She was so ashamed of marrying him, and they did it so sneaky, but we knew that they were getting married."

One of the few people in whom Rebekah confided was her psychic, Frank Andrews, who argued against the relationship. According to him, Rebekah was desperate. "At around the same period, she even asked me to marry her," he says. "I tried to prevent her relationship with Lauersen. I said look, if you love him, then don't ask me my opinion. But she was incoherent. I couldn't even read for her anymore. She actually believed in these people. She lived in a world of fantasy. She had all this money she didn't know what to do with."

And so Rebekah took her fourth husband; she was now Rebekah Semple "West Pierce Harkness Kean Lauersen. Ten days later, she met with her attorneys and rewrote her will. Among the provisions she added was one stipulating that if her new husband should survive her, he would receive the net income from "a sum of money equal to the value of one-third . . . of my net estate." For all her financial problems, she still had millions of dollars and real estate holdings in New York, Sneden's Landing, Nassau, and Gstaad.

Even those close to Rebekah did not realize the couple was married until the press reported it months later. "Terry and I didn't even find out until we read about it in Time magazine," says M'iiss Crotty.

If Rebekah's method of informing her children was unusual, so was the marriage itself. Lauersen frequently worked late at New York Hospital. Rebekah had sold her place at the Westbury and bought an apartment in the River House, an exclusive East Side apartment building at which Lauersen often stayed when Rebekah went to Sneden's Landing. "She told me they had some kind of arrangement, and saw each other a coupie of days a week," says Andrews.

More and more, Rebekah remained holed up in Sneden's Landing, refusing to confront the outside world. Like Norma Desmond, the aging beauty played by Gloria Swanson in the film Sunset Boulevard, she sometimes sat in the great hall of her thirty-room house perched over the Hudson and watched old movies she had rented. She rarely made it to the end without dozing off. There she sat in the forty-five-foot-long room with its thirty-foot-high ceilings, two grand pianos, sofas and chairs covered with yellow and gray silks and velvet. At times everyone was stranded there, with all three cars-the two Mercedes and Rebekah's Rolls-out of commission. By 1976, such chaos was the rule. Even when Rebekah didn't eat at home, the grocery bills topped two thousand dollars a month. The servants had huge meals. The windows and doors in the house were often left open, even when the rain poured in, ruining the rare Oriental rugs. The dog gnawed away at priceless objets d'art.

More than anything, Rebekah feared getting old. She toid people she wanted to live forever, and she investigated cryogenics. The giddy, driven, highly disciplined energy Rebekah was known for had vanished, unless she was accompanied by her famous black doctor's bag. In the bathrooms, one occasionally stumbled across one of her hypodermics, used for her Talwin injections.

Some of Rebekah's friends blamed her husband. When Lauersen managed to make it out to Sneden's, he was frequently late. "If you were five minutes late, Rebekah would think you were dead," says Bobby Scevers, who was back on speaking terms with Rebekah. "Lauersen would tell her he was leaving the city and would be there in forty minutes, then not show up till
four hours iater. She was so nervous that by then, she would be into her sixth bottie of Bacardi."

According to M'liss Crotty, Rebekah was also taking more drugs than ever. "We got a sample of the pills she had. Whatever Sunny von Biilow was taking, Rebekah was taking more," she recalls.

Meanwhile, Sneden's Landing was rife with intrigue. For no apparent reason, anonymous obscenities were suddenly shouted over the household intercom in the middle of the night. Police found dynamite in the cliff on the property. Rebekah beefed up her security, but a prowler tried to break in by climbing the trellis. Joe Pantori was armed and instructed to sleep by the intercom. The place was surrounded by barbed wire. Helicopters patrolled the estate. "Once, someone actually climbed up the bluff and tried to get in her upstairs window and escaped by boat and they had helicopters chasing the boat and all," says Bobby.

One evening Rebekah invited M'liss to the theater with her. "Afterward, we all ended up at El Morocco, and Niels was all over the place, glad-handing all around the room, leaving Rebekah by herself. I could sense something was wrong," says M'liss.

The next day, Rebekah invited M'liss ou£ for the weekend at Sneden's Landing. Lauersen did not make it for dinner, nor did he arrive later that night. M'liss noted that at least three new Scandinavian servants-a butler, a maid, and a gardener-had been hired. "I got the distinct impression Niels had moved them in to keep an eye on her," says M'liss, "I was aware that she was drinking, but I didn't know the fuli extent. Lauersen should have stopped her. She was drinking like mad. Some of the help were terrified of him. Rebekah was pretty ossified and not paying attention to what was going on. Outside of Gappy and Joe, she was isolated from anyone who might nodce anything wrong. How the hell could they have confronted it? They would have been sacked immediately."

M'Siss spent the night at Sneden's in the downstairs guest room, while Rebekah retired to her suite upstairs. At 6:30 A.M., M'liss was awakened by the sound of the dog squealing at the top of the balcony near Rebekah's room. "Get down here," M'iiss called to it.

The dog refused, even though he generally obeyed commands. "I climbed the stairs to drag him away, but he made a beeline to Rebekah's room," M'iiss continues. "Then he made a huge scene at her door, crying and scratching on her door, and I saw he was covered in blood..! pushed open the door. Rebekah was lying on the floor. There was blood everywhere-on the walls, beds, sofas, wastebaskets. I called her name four times, and finally she looked up at me. She was so groggy.

"There was so much blood in her hair. She must have fallen and hit her head on the marble coffee table. Some of it had started to dry, so it must have happened sometime earlier. The houseboy drove us to the hospital and I ended up in the emergency room with her, holding her hand as they stitched her up. They said she was lucky to be alive.

"The fall suddenly put things in perspective, and she squeezed my hands. She didn't cry. She was really a brick. Finally, she explained she had gotten up in the middle of the night without the lights on and fallen, and staggered back to sleep."

When they returned from the hospital, M'liss, fearing she might be overheard, went out again to call Terry from a. pay phone. Terry told her to find out exactly what Rebekah was taking. "I got into her medicine cabinet and I wrote down all) the prescriptions," M'iiss says. "She was taking the whole gamut-o Nembutal, Seconal, Tuinal, Valium, phenobarbital. She was injecting Talwin and drinking heavily, including Pernod and her Pink Drink, that Bacardi cocktail. And as things got worse and worse with Niels, she had begun drinking more and more. Terry said something has got to be done, she is going to kill herself. So it was decided that I was to have a chat with Rebekah."

M'liss packed her bags, expecting to be thrown out of Sneden's Landing as soon as she confronted her hostess. "I walked in and said to her, 'My bags are packed. I am leaving because I can't stand seeing what's been going on here. You are mixing lethal combinations of drugs and alcohol. You are courting death . . ." She hesitated. "If you feel I am out of order, I am ready to leave."

"No, please," Rebekah said, "Sit down. Have a drink.""Rebekahl This is not the time for Dubonnet. I can't stand by and watch what you're doing to yourself. I looked in your medicine cabinet. You're playing with fire."

"God, it's so clear," Rebekah said. "It's so obvious, and I have just been denying it: I have to get out of this marriage." Using al! the strength at her disposal, she became as single-minded as she ever had been. "I want a divorce now," she told M'Hss. "Where can I do that?"

In order to avoid suspicion, Rebekah returned to New York to spend the night at the River House, acting as if everything were perfectly fine. She secretly informed Edith, then living in suburban Maryland, of her plans. She also told Cappy and Joe, who awoke early the next morning and told Lauersen that Edith was having a crisis and Rebekah had to visit her right away. Early the next morning, Rebekah lied to her husband about where she was going. Accompanied by Joe and M'liss, she got in her Rolls-Royce and sped off to the airport in search of a Haitian divorce.

Finally, as provided by a divorce settlement-not the will- Niels Lauersen, Rebekah's last husband, received $165,000 after her death.

Over a three-year period, Dr. Lauersen declined more than a dozen requests for an interview by the author.

In brief telephone conversations with the author, Lauersen asked how Rebekah was. When he was told she was dead, he said, "Oh? I never really knew the woman."

Lauersen was asked how that could be since he had married Rebekah.

"No, I wasn't married to her," he repiied.

He was then reminded that his marriage to her had been widely reported by the press, in addition, legal documents, including Rebekah's will, cited him as her husband.

"That is a lie, sir, you know? It is all a fake, a lie. It's all misinformation. And I don't know any more about the case."

Later, Lauersen said there had been "a short marriage, and it was annulled right after the wedding. It was an agreement, really not a marriage, simply an agreement. The reason was to give her human support."

Maria New is still head of pediatrics and endocrinology at New York Hospital, where Rebekah's third husband, Ben Kean, also works. Rebekah's fourth husband, Niels Lauersen, was linked with actress Liv Ullmann in a stormy relationship that surfaced in the gossip columns when she reportedly made statements-later retracted-that "she doesn't like him . . . thinks he is using her." He now has a gynecology practice in New York. After Rebekah's death, he received $165,000 as part of the condition of her divorce settlement.

F. Straus first met Niels Lauersen at a penthouse dinner party in 1978, 32 years ago.