It happened in 2020 so it’s ancient history.
The ink-stained wretch and Taylor Swift
That means I can tell you about my connection to Taylor Swift.
During that summer she released a surprise album. One of the songs, “The Last Great American Dynasty” , was strange. It was inspired by what she learned after purchasing the Watch Hill Rhode Island estate of the late heiress Rebecca West Harkness.
Rebecca’s paternal grandfather had founded the St. Louis Union Trust. He also co-founded G.H. Walker & Company with George Herbert Walker, the grandfather and great-grandfather of Presidents H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
Known for her outrageous behavior, Rebecca had lived in a penthouse atop the Westbury Hotel in Manhattan. She summered in Watch Hill. She was rich enough to support her own ballet troupe. Her most direct connection to Texas is having helped establish the dance department at Southern Methodist University.
She’s also my connection to Taylor Swift.
In the early 1960s my best friend was a painter. Rebecca West was his aunt. His father, Rebecca’s brother, lived in Arizona. His mother, a former model, lived between London and New York.
My friend had gone to LeRosey, the exclusive Swiss boarding school. He went on to study at the Boston Museum School in hopes of becoming a painter. He also had a generous income — at least by the standards of regular people — from a number of trusts. But he was a poor relative compared to his aunt.
When I met him in 1963, he had dropped out of the Museum School. He lived at the top of a slummy three-decker near Central Square in Cambridge, a kind of No Man’s Land between MIT and Harvard. Huge canvases lined his walls. Like his aunt, he loved to shock people and, appropriately, his favorite painter was Francis Bacon. (If you’re at home with films by David Lynch, Bacon is a way to go deeper.)
If your sidekick is crazy, it makes you look sane
We were good friends. He made anything I did look entirely reasonable. At one point, he thought it would be good for me to marry one of his cousins so I could help her manage the circus she owned. I thought otherwise.
When I first married, he was my best man. The wedding was at King’s Chapel, performed by an Episcopalian minister who would have preferred life in an earlier century. (I know this for a fact because years later, at a Boston Waltz Evening, he led the group in a Mazurka.)
A Best Man with blood on his hand
My friend arrived late and breathless for the ceremony with a bit of fresh blood on his hand. His girlfriend had bitten him during their last argument, moments earlier.
I went on to become the writer I wanted to be. My friend went on to demonstrate, many times, that outrageous behavior was a family trait. Years later, he married a Penthouse magazine centerfold.
It didn’t last.
Somewhere in Spain
He hasn’t answered his phone in New Mexico for more than a decade. I can only assume that he is hanging out in one of his buildings near Marbella on the coast of Spain.
So there you have it.
By the standards of what’s known as “the small world problem,” your columnist has a connection to Taylor Swift.
Yes, it is a small world
If you aren’t familiar with the small-world problem where relationships are talked about in “degrees of separation,” it is an issue that has been of interest to sociologists, mathematicians and economists for decades.
While most people remember Harvard psychologist Stanley Milgram for his experiments with obedience to authority, he was also the prime mover in an early sociology experiment to see how closely knit we all are. The result was the idea that we are no more than six people away from anyone in the world, or “six degrees of separation.”
The most popular expression of the idea is the game “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” in which you are challenged to choose an actor. Then you must find, in as few intermediaries as possible, a connection to actor Kevin Bacon. (At this point, I’m wondering how closely related Kevin Bacon is to Francis Bacon.)
It’s all about the math
A more esoteric expression is how mathematicians can be rated by their “Erdos number.” It’s named after Paul Erdos, perhaps the most prolific mathematician of the last century. You have an Erdos number of 1 if you worked with or wrote a paper with Erdos. You have an Erdos number of 2 if you studied or worked with a mathematician with an Erdos number of 1, etc. (I only know this because one of my brothers is an Erdos 3.)
The geometric math of networks
Among economists, it’s all about networks and the idea that their value increases geometrically rather than arithmetically. Add that we are in the Age of Networks and you have the manic foundation for the Internet bull market of the late 1990s and, more recently, the herds of venture capital-based “Unicorns,” tech companies valued over $1 billion without being listed on the stock market.
However you slice it, we’re all more closely connected than we think. Like it or not, we live in a human network that is a cauldron of unlikely relationships and improbable events.
Life begins when we dive in.
Related columns:
Scott Burns, “The Square of 3 Billion,” 11/01/2009 https://scottburns.com/the-square-of-3-billion/
Sources and References:
Stanley Milgram bio: https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/stanley-milgram
Stanley Milgram, “The Small World Problem,” Psychology Today, May 1967 http://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/milgram67smallworld.pdf
“Small World, after all,” Psychology Today, 11/01/2003 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200311/small-world-after-all
“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon#:~:text=Six%20Degrees%20of%20Kevin%20Bacon%20or%20Bacon%27s%20Law%20is%20a,ultimately%20leads%20to%20prolific%20American
Jorgen Veisdahl, “The Mathematical Nomad, Paul Erdos,” 9/10/2021 https://www.privatdozent.co/p/the-mathematical-nomad-paul-erdos
Elise Taylor, “The outrageous life of Rebekah Harkness, Taylor Swifts high society muse,” 7/29/2020 https://www.vogue.com/article/the-outrageous-life-of-rebekah-harkness-taylor-swifts-high-society-muse
Emily Yahr, “The story behind ‘The Last Great American Dynasty’, the most telling song on Taylor Swift’s surprise album, 7/24/2020 https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/07/24/taylor-swift-folklore-last-great-american-dynasty/
Official YouTube lyric video of “Last Great American Dynasty;” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s5xdY6MCeI
New York Times obituary of Rebecca West Harkness, 6/19/1982 https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/19/obituaries/rebekah-west-harkness-67-patron-of-dance-and-medicine.html
Rebekah Harkness, The Scorned Socialite of Watch Hill, R.I., https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/rebekah-harkness-the-scorned-socialite-of-watch-hill-r-i/
Website for Francis Bacon: https://www.francis-bacon.com/paintings
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(c) Scott Burns, 2023