Basic Information
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Full name (as used here) | Eleanor Post Hutton |
| Also known as | Eleanor Close; Eleanor Close Barzin |
| Born | December 3, 1909 |
| Died | November 27, 2006 (Paris) |
| Parents | Marjorie Merriweather Post (mother); Edward Bennett Close (father) |
| Grandfather (family founder) | C. W. Post (Post cereal / Postum founder) |
| Children | Antal (Tony) Post de Bekessy (son, b. 1944 — d. 2015) |
| Notable half-siblings | Dina Merrill (maternal half-sister); William Taliaferro Close (paternal half-brother) |
| Public roles | Heiress, socialite, art collector, patron |
| Marital highlights (selected) | Elopement with Preston Sturges (1930); marriages across the 1930s–1950s including a long marriage to Léon Barzin (married 1954) |
I write this like a film scene that opens on a gilded drawing room — sunlight on lacquer, a silver tray, the muffled laughter of a country house — because that is where Eleanor Post Hutton’s story often begins: in inherited sunlight, with a family name that read like a company logo. Born December 3, 1909, she arrived into the heavy, old-money orbit of the Post family, the granddaughter of C. W. Post, whose cereal business seeded a fortune and a public life that her mother, Marjorie Merriweather Post, expanded into society and collecting on a cinematic scale.
A dynasty in her blood (dates and family by the numbers)
There are neat, ugly numbers to inherit: a company, estates, and the cultural capital of being a Post. Eleanor’s family tree reads like a small atlas of American wealth and social choreography. She was born in 1909; her life spanned 97 years, and those years overlapped epochal shifts — the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, World War II, and the late-century globalization that took many American heirs to European addresses. Her son Antal, born in 1944, carried the family name into the mid-20th century and died in 2015 — a second headline echo.
Marriages, elopements, and the society pages
If you like melodrama, Eleanor’s personal life supplied it by the dozen. The 1930 elopement with a young screenwriter/director made the papers; in an era when social columns were the tabloids of taste, heiresses made news with marriages as much as they made collections. Through the 1930s–1950s, Eleanor had a sequence of marriages and divorces — a pattern common to the social set she inhabited — and eventually a long partnership with Léon Barzin, whom she married in 1954 and who remained a central presence until his death in 1999. Timeline table below gives the flavor of the decades:
| Decade | Notable personal milestones |
|---|---|
| 1930s | Elopement (1930); multiple marriages and social headlines; divorce activity through the decade |
| 1940s | Birth of son Antal (1944); life increasingly centered in Europe |
| 1950s | Marriage to Léon Barzin (1954) — long-term union |
| 1999 | Death of Léon Barzin |
| 2006 | Eleanor dies in Paris, November 27, aged 96 |
Collector, patron, and transatlantic life
Eleanor didn’t “work” in a corporate sense; she curated — rooms, collections, friendships — and that curatorial life was itself a form of labor, paid in taste and reputation rather than paychecks. The Post/Merriweather legacy was one of art patronage and collecting; Eleanor and her son assembled and later dispersed items through auctions and sales, often across Paris and the great auction houses. Think of her as a bridge between American industrial wealth and European cultural life: an heiress who preferred salons, auctions, and the particular glamour of a Paris apartment over the boardroom.
Money, estates, and the mystery of net worth
People ask the obvious question — how much? — and the honest answer is cinematic in its vagueness: the family fortune is enormous as a historical fact, but Eleanor’s personal net worth is not pinned to a single public number. The Post fortune (seeded by C. W. Post) underwrote generations; individual estates and probate sometimes reveal sums, but she is better understood as a node in a larger financial—and cultural—network rather than a single line item on a balance sheet.
The gossip, the newspapers, the afterlife online
Eleanor’s life produced headlines in the era of ink and type: elopements, divorces, society columns that read like serialized soap operas. Later, her properties and collections surfaced in auction catalogs and design-oriented posts; photographers and real-estate writers sometimes label a Parisian salon “formerly the home of an American heiress,” and social feeds turn the historic into the Instagrammable. Her story, like a film that keeps getting re-released, lives in auction catalogs, obituaries, and the occasional design essay.
Numbers and milestones (compact table)
| Item | Number / Date |
|---|---|
| Birth | December 3, 1909 |
| Death | November 27, 2006 |
| Son (Antal) birth | 1944 |
| Son (Antal) death | 2015 |
| Marriage to Léon Barzin | 1954 — lasted until his death in 1999 |
| Lifetime span | 96 years (1909–2006) |
I tell these fragments in first-person because I want you to feel the creak of the chair in the reading room and the quiet clink of silver: Eleanor’s life reads less like a neat ledger and more like a novel with footnotes — emphatic, interior, full of rooms that open into other rooms.
FAQ
Who was Eleanor Post Hutton?
She was an American heiress and socialite, born December 3, 1909, granddaughter of C. W. Post and daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post and Edward Bennett Close.
What is she best known for?
She’s best known as a member of the Post family dynasty, a collector and socialite whose life bridged American wealth and European cultural circles.
Did she have children?
Yes — a son named Antal (sometimes styled Antal Post de Bekessy), born in 1944 and who died in 2015.
Was she married many times?
Yes; her personal life included several marriages and public elopements, culminating in a long marriage to Léon Barzin from 1954 until his death in 1999.
Where did she spend her later years?
She spent significant time in Europe and died in Paris on November 27, 2006.
Is her personal net worth publicly known?
No single, reliable public estimate of her personal net worth is available; she is most often discussed within the broader context of the Post family fortune.
