SOCIALITE WHO INSPIRED ‘PHILA. STORY’ DIES AT 90 HOPE MONTGOMERY SCOTT, REGALED ON THE MAIN LINE AND IN ROYAL CIRCLES, WAS INJURED IN A FALL SUNDAY.

Newspaper January 10, 1995 | Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)

Author: Ralph Cipriano, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER | Page: A01 | Section: LOCAL

Hope Montgomery Scott, the high-society party girl who inspired The Philadelphia Story and was the pre-eminent symbol of Main Line society, died yesterday of head injuries sustained in two falls at her Radnor Township estate. She was 90.

Mrs. Scott was injured shortly after 5 p.m. Sunday, while she was leading two donkeys into a stable on her 650-acre estate, said her son, Robert Montgomery Scott.

Later, inside her home, after getting her hair cut and declining an employee’s offer to take her to the hospital, she collapsed. About 6:30 p.m., her son found her unconscious on the floor of an upstairs bathroom.

At the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, doctors discovered that Mrs. Scott’s head had swollen from internal bleeding that damaged her brain, according to family members. She underwent surgery, but remained in a coma and died at 3:10 p.m. yesterday.

Mrs. Scott’s death was no occasion for tears, her son said.

“I have decided that I should rejoice. She was such a wonderful character,” he said, reflecting on her 90 years. “What else can you get out of life?”

The former Helen Hope Montgomery was the daughter of Col. Robert L. Montgomery, a legendary financier, and his wife, Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler, a needlepoint artist.

She was raised by governesses on Ardrossan, the largest estate on the Main Line. She made her formal debut in Philadelphia society in 1922, and had four wedding proposals by the end of the night.

She’s been a star ever since.

She married an heir to the Pennsylvania Railroad fortune, threw the best parties, and became the finest American horsewoman of her day.

She danced at the Stork Club with the Duke of Windsor, partied with Adele Astaire (Fred’s sister), and sat for a portrait in London by Augustus John. ”He was madly in love with me,” she once told an interviewer.

The Philadelphia Story was written in 1939 by playwright Philip Barry, a

college classmate of Mrs. Scott’s husband, Edgar, at Harvard Drama School.

“Philip Barry suddenly came to me and said he had written a play, The Philadelphia Story, and that he had used me for the inspiration,” Mrs. Scott said in a 1991 interview. “I didn’t really think too much about it at the time.”

The play, which was made into a 1940 movie of the same name, was credited with revitalizing the career of its star, Bryn Mawr graduate Katharine Hepburn, who only two years earlier had been pronounced “box-office poison” by critics.

In the movie, spoiled and snooty Main Line heiress Tracy Lord (Hepburn) is pursued on the eve of her second wedding by ex-husband C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) and a magazine gossip columnist, Macauley Connor (Jimmy Stewart). Lord falls off her pedestal when she gets drunk and goes for a late-night swim with Connor.

Mrs. Scott had a lot in common with the character played by Hepburn, including high cheekbones and a love of high-society parties.

“I was a party girl,” Mrs. Scott said in 1991. “I wanted to know everybody in the world.”

In 1956, The Philadelphia Story was remade as High Society. This time the setting was moved from the Main Line to Newport, R.I., but the movie retained a Philadelphia flavor with its star, Philadelphia’s Grace Kelly.

Mrs. Scott was a slim, athletic woman who rode horses from the age of 4.

She had a long association with the Devon Horse Show.

“In the early days, I would ride my pony over to the Devon show” from Villanova, she said in 1990. The trip took less than an hour, she said.

She won many awards at Devon. For the last 30 years, Mrs. Scott was a principal organizer of the event.

Mrs. Scott was chairwoman and executive director of the Devon Horse Show and Country Fair Inc., and chairwoman of the horse show committee.

She refused to give up riding, even after she had both hips replaced.

“I rode so much I knocked the cartilage out,” she said in 1991.

At Ardrossan, Mrs. Scott displayed paintings by Renoir, Degas and Mary Cassatt (a cousin of her husband’s), along with paintings and photos of her most productive Ayrshire cows. She kept 310 cows on her farm, all of whom she had personally named, along with a pack of beagles and two bull terriers.

Unlike The Philadelphia Story, Mrs. Scott’s romantic life was very uncomplicated.

She met Edgar Scott at a dinner party in Rosemont in October 1922.

“Edgar arrived for dinner, and he was introduced to me from across the table,” she told an interviewer. “I knew what a glamorous man he was, so then I thought he was wonderful.”

They talked the entire evening. After that, “we saw each other 10 times, then became engaged” when she was 18, she said. “Isn’t that great?”

At 19, Mrs. Scott became a bride.

For years, she appeared annually on the New York Couture Group’s best- dressed list, along with Jacqueline Kennedy and Grace Kelly. She was never impressed by the distinction. “It just completely brushes off,” she said.

Mrs. Scott was more interested in cows.

She learned the dairy business from her father, who didn’t think a dairy farm was a suitable place for a woman.

He raised Ayrshires, because the Montgomerys originally came from Ayrshire, Scotland. After her father died in 1949, Mrs. Scott took over the herd, which began in 1910.

“I was brought up with horses and cattle,” she once said.

“Ardrossan Farms is a little company of my brother, my sister and me,” she said in a 1990 interview. “But the cows belong personally to me.”

Her granddaughter, Janny Scott, 39, now a New York Times reporter, remembered Mrs. Scott, in shorts and a bathing-suit top, riding a tractor through the cornfields.

“She was just this incredibly strong character . . . who kept together this anachronistic way of life in the middle of encroaching suburbia,” her granddaughter said. “It’s a pretty improbable idea, a functioning dairy farm in the middle of the Main Line, and I’m sure with her death, it won’t function any longer.”

Four of her cows each produced a million pounds of milk in their lifetime: Pearline, Rosetta Lee, Katie and Noted. Their pictures hang in her home.

Mrs. Scott’s dairy farm was the top-producing Ayrshire herd in the nation. In 1990, the farm received an award for an average annual output of 20,000 pounds of milk per cow.

At 90, Mrs. Scott was still as thin and erect as a debutante. She wore her hair in the same sandy brown pageboy she had worn since the Coolidge administration. She wore no makeup, casual slacks, and often a sweater with big vinyl flowers on it that was a present from a bank teller.

“She was simply a knockout,” said a longtime family friend, Cathy

Boericke. “The way she carried herself, the way she put her clothes together, and the essence of wanting everyone to have as good a time as she was. She carried us along with her.”

Mrs. Scott had a salty sense of humor. “She loved telling dirty stories,” her son said.

“I get a lot of amusement out of life,” she said in 1991. “I love people. People fascinate me. My idea really is to give people fun. I tried to be a good wife and make my husband happy and my children happy.”

Last year, she threw a 90th birthday party for herself. During the party, Mrs. Scott and her 88-year-old sister, Mary Binney Wheeler, donned pigtail wigs and dressed up as the “Boopsie twins.” They sang “The Baby Sister Blues,” with lyrics like: “We’re just too old to play with toys / and just too young to go out with boys.”

The party, a fund-raiser for Bryn Mawr Hospital, raised $90,000.

On Sunday, Mrs. Scott went out at twilight to fetch her donkeys.

“It was such a beautiful evening,” her son said, that she told a stable hand, ” ‘I think I’ll bring in the donkeys.’

“She fell somehow in the stable yard.”

After the accident, Mrs. Scott came inside for a haircut. Her hairdresser noticed “a bit of blood on the back of her head,” her son said.

Mrs. Scott refused to go to the hospital. According to her son, she told her hairdresser, “I have just a headache, and I think I’ll take a nap after I’ve finished the haircut.”

Her son found her unconscious in an upstairs bathroom. She briefly regained consciousness before she was taken to the hospital.

“She woke up just long enough to know who it was,” her son said. “She grabbed my hand and gave it a kiss.”

In recent years, Mrs. Scott cared for her bedridden husband, a retired stockbroker who, at 95, drifted in and out of alertness. On Christmas Eve, she stood and offered a toast to her frail husband, who was sitting at the other end of the table.

“He gave me the chance to shine,” she said.

Sunday evening, when the ambulance attendants came to take his wife away, Edgar Scott was lucid. He covered his eyes.

“There goes my darling,” he said.

She is survived by another son, Edgar Jr., a sister, a brother, five grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

The funeral will be 4 p.m. Thursday at St. David’s Chapel in Radnor.

Contributions in her memory may be made to Bryn Mawr Hospital.