Thursday, March 27, 2025
In 1959, Dina Merrill appeared as Ensign Benson in the Jerry Lewis comedy “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” then as Tony Curtis’s love interest, 2nd Lt. Barbara Duran — evacuated with other Army nurses on the USS Sea Tiger, a pink submarine (don’t ask) — in “Operation Petticoat.”
“Hollywood’s new Grace Kelly,” Merrill had an advantage over Princess Grace when it came to the two roles: she had grown up at sea.
Installation view: side chair, side table and detail of seascape by David James from “Setting Sail: The Story of Sea Cloud.”
Not entirely. But when the young Merrill wasn’t residing at one of the palatial homes of her mother, Marjorie Merriweather Post, she was a pampered passenger on the 360-foot Hussar V (later renamed Sea Cloud), launched in 1931 as the largest private yacht in the world.
A number of objects in “Setting Sail: The Story of Sea Cloud” — on view through June 15 at Post’s former Washington, D.C., estate, Hillwood — were donated or bequeathed by Merrill, whose birth name was Nedenia Marjorie Hutton, the Hutton from her stockbroker father, E. F.
Hillwood visitors will find “Setting Sail” in the log-walled Dacha, a faux-Russian cottage nestled behind the mansion and past the gardens, greenhouse and Merriweather Café. Heir to her father’s breakfast foods company, which she greatly expanded, Post had focused her collecting on 18th-century French decorative arts; but when her third husband, Joseph Davies, became ambassador to the U.S.S.R. in 1937, her interest turned to Imperial Russia. (Hussar V was renamed after her divorce from Hutton, two years earlier.)
“Ever pragmatic,” the exhibition text reads, “Post also used Sea Cloud to transport large quantities of frozen foods from her Birds Eye company to Russia to be used at the American embassy in Moscow amid food shortages.”
Installation view of “Setting Sail: The Story of Sea Cloud.”
As indicated on a world map, among the yacht’s 80 ports of call from 1931 to 1942, then 1947 to 1951, were St. Petersburg (Leningrad at the time), Tallinn, Riga and Helsinki. Others of note: eight on the Black Sea, Gibraltar, Tahiti and the Galapagos.
The cover of “On My Toes: A Memoir For My Children” by Dina Merrill Hartley — Merrill was married to her third husband, Ted Hartley, when she died in 2017 — shows the adorable daughter of Post and Hutton on deck atop a Galapagos tortoise she named Jumbo. In the exhibition’s section on family time and recreation are screens on which film footage and scrapbook photos from various voyages and shore excursions loop.
The centerpiece of “Setting Sail” is a recently restored, fully rigged scale model of the magnificent four-masted windjammer. Per the label, it was “given by Capt. C. W. Lawson to Nedenia” and left by Merrill to Hillwood. Lawson oversaw a crew of 60, members of which appear in a color film clip, likely from the 1930s.
The section on design and construction includes the yacht’s architectural and technical drawings, digitized on a screen, and a letter sent to Post from Kiel, Germany, in July of 1931 from interior designer Fred Vogel, who wrote: “Six hundred men are working on board at the present time, and at a meeting held this morning an additional one hundred twenty-five men (electricians) will be put on board, in order to speed up this end of the work, which has been rather slow.”
As captured in black-and-white images, no expense was spared in furnishing — “in a loosely eighteenth-century English style” — the paneled living room, dining room and smoking room, abovedeck, and the six cabins below. Exception: Post’s cabin was in her preferred French style. Actual pieces on view include a side chair from a set of at least 12, a side table, a globe, a clock, a pillowcase, a tankard, a silver cigarette box and a gold and mother-of-pearl compact mirror. Also on display, most courtesy of Merrill, are examples of tableware, including glass from T. G. Hawkes & Co. of Corning, New York, and porcelain from Haviland & Co. and Lenox.
On loan from Merrill’s estate are seascapes by British marine artist David James that hung in the ship’s dining room. But of special interest are two paintings by Jacob Lawrence, creator of the landmark 60-panel “Migration Series,” now owned 30/30 by the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection.
In 1943, the year after Post and Davies lent Sea Cloud to the U.S. Coast Guard for refitting as a weather ship, Lawrence, drafted into the Coast Guard, was assigned to its crew, in part as an official artist. Most remarkably, Sea Cloud’s was the first crew to be racially integrated, upon the initiative of its captain, Carlton Skinner. Another crew member was Joseph Jenkins, the first Black officer to graduate from the Coast Guard Academy. Commented Lawrence: “It was the best democracy I’ve ever known.”
The Dacha at Hillwood.
“Setting Sail” features two Lawrence paintings: “Dis-Embarkation” of 1943-45, from the Coast Guard Heritage Asset Collection; and “Captain Skinner” of 1944, donated by Skinner to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1990. Reproductions show works in other collections — notably the Coast Guard Museum’s terrific “Main Control Panel, Nerve Center of the Ship” of 1944 — and several known only from photographs in Jenkins’s scrapbook. Clearly, most of Lawrence’s work from the period is lost (start looking!).
Following a display of war-related items such as a pennant and a jacket, and a slideshow of images from the war years, the exhibition ends with objects dating to Sea Cloud’s postwar period, including a brooch on which tiny signal flags spell “Marjorie.” Sea Cloud was sold in the mid-1950s, when Post purchased a Vickers Viscount turboprop plane she christened Merriweather. Her blue-and-white carry-on bag, another gift to Hillwood from Merrill, is in “Setting Sail.”
Once owned by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, among others, Sea Cloud is now a luxury cruise ship; there is even a larger Sea Cloud II, built in 2001. FYI: a seven-night “Caribbean Farewell Sailing,” leaving St. Maarten on March 27, starts at $3,980 per person.
Setting Sail: The Story of Sea Cloud
Through June 15
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, 4155 Linnean Ave. NW
Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
hillwoodmuseum.org