Her father was C. W. Post, the breakfast-food magnate. Her four husbands included the broker E. F. Hutton and Joseph Davies, U.S. ambassador to Stalin's Soviet Union. Her circle of friends ran the gamut from Florenz Ziegfeld and Billie Burke to the duke and duchess of Windsor, her niece by marriage was that poor little rich girl Barbara Hutton, and her youngest daughter is the film actress Dina Merrill.

But hers was not merely a life of reflected glory, and in American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post, author Nancy Rubin chronicles nine decades of American history as lived and influenced by one of this country's most dazzling, formidable women.

Marjorie, who as a child glued together Postum boxes in her father's barn, was soon a millionaire's ambitious daughter. After the suicide of her father, to whose memory she would remain idolatrously devoted, Marjorie oversaw the explosive growth of the company that eventually became General Foods, adding such gems as Jell-O, Sanka, and Birds Eye "frosted foods" to the corporate diadem.

America's first female tycoon also plunged headlong into the high life of the 1920s and '30s, electrifying Palm Beach with the construction of her fairy-tale estate, Mar-A-Lago, taking the lead in New York society goings-on, and sailing the world in search of pleasure.