9 Romantic Gestures That Went Horribly, Terribly Wrong

You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?

What's that Mango?

So I was commuting this week to the Midtown offices at iHeart and I read a story that kind of related to my commute. It's about a guy named Morton Plant.

Morton Plant. What a great name. I feel like you could just stop right there and I'd be happy. I think we're done.

That's it. Well, it is a great name, but it gets a little better. So Plant was a financier who had made a fortune from his family's railroad company. And this was in the early nineteen hundreds. He built himself a limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue and fifty second Street, which is obviously a pretty smank area, and then a decade later he built another mansion on fifth and eighty sixth Street. Now, when Plant and his wife relocated, he agreed to lease the fifty second Sat property to a

So Cardier like the jewelers we know today, right, Yeah, that's right.

And around the same time Plant's wife May she walks past the Cardier window and she spots this gorgeous double strand natural pearl necklace, so it is super fancy, and she tells her husband all about it, and he decides he's gonna do the romantic thing. He's gonna go out and get it for her, which is really really sweet, right it is, But I don't think you'd leave it just there.

I feel like there's gonna be a twist to this story.

We're gonna end this episode twice early Sinday. Right, No, there is a twist. So this isn't just any necklace. It is incredibly expensive. So Plant made a deal with the Cardiers. In exchange for the necklace and one hundred dollars in cash, he traded them his mansion, his entire mansion. So he's wait, he traded his mansion for a single necklace. Yeah, but at the time the necklace was valued at a million dollars, which is about twenty four million dollars to day,

Only worth one hundred and fifty one thousand dollars, I mean, that's not even worth wearing mango. That's almost embarrassing to have a necklace worth this time.

But no, I mean like twenty four million dollars.

True, No, that that is wild. And what we do know you definitely can't buy a fifth avenue mansion for that amount of.

Money, definitely, But remember the Plants still had their other fifth Avenue mentioned, so you don't have to feel too bad for them. And to this day, more than plants Old Home is the Cardier's flagship store in New York, so you can think of him the next time you're making a reckless purchase to impress someone you love.

I will keep that in mind. Well, today we've got eight more stories of romantic gestures gone a little bit wrong or sometimes a lot wrong, because that is how we celebrate Valentine's Day around here. Whether you're single, taken, or it's complicated, this one's for you. So let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always, I'm here with my good friend Mangesh hot ticketter and over there just sobbing into a pine

Yeah, but actually he's holding up a sign it says I didn't get dumped. I just did my annual rewatch of A Walk to Remember, which I believe is a Mandy Moore movie.

You know, I've actually never seen it. Mango, I need to confess that.

He's making another sign now that says this one says, I cannot work for people who've never seen a walk to remember. So we don't want to lose Dylan. So we'll be streaming that tonight.

Tonight, for sure, I'm on it.

So this week we thought we'd do something on romantic gesture has gone wrong. And one of the things I found in my research were cards known as vinegar Valentine's. Have you heard of these?

Will? I don't think I have? What are they?

So? They're like straight out of middle school mean Kids playbook, as Atlas Obscura describes them. In the Victorian era, there was no better way to let someone know they were unwanted than with the ultimate insult, the vinegar Valentine, also called comic Valentine's. These unwelcome notes were sometimes crass and

Oh the horrible. That is insane. Mango.

Yeah, I guess nothing says I hate you like a vinegar Valentine. The Smithsonian called it an early of trolling. But it's a little different from what we're talking about today, which is mostly elaborate romantic gestures that just went wrong. So will what do you want to start with today? All right?

I think we need to go way back, Mango. I think we should start with Stonehenge. Of course, you know the big pile of rocks in England.

Or little pile of rocks if you're watching spinal tap. But this is true, I am familiar.

All right. Well, archaeologists believe it was arranged in its current semicircular shape sometime around twenty five hundred BCE, so a long time ago, and believe it or not, for a long time it was privately owned. The property was bought and sold several times finally ended up in the hands of a family called Antrobus. Now they passed it down through the generations until Sir Cosmo Antrobus inherited from his older brother Edmund, who died in early nineteen fifteen.

I mean, Cosmo Antribus is another amazing name.

We are racking them up today and there's more here. So enter our next character, who is a barrister by the name of Cecil chubb An another great name. It's just like one after another. Well, anyway, one day in the fall of nineteen fifteen, Cecil makes plans to attend

I feel like I can't imagine the conversation when he got home, Like, you know, he's talking to his wife and he's like, sorry, I forgot the curtains, but I did get you the most expensive pile of rocks in the world.

Yeah, it's pretty much a big swish there. Well, apparently Mary Chubb wasn't thrilled with the surprise gift. Sure to be fair, Cecil's impulse by may have had a more noble motivation. So at the time there were rumors that wealthy Americans might want to buy Stonehenge, perhaps to dismantle it and ship it off to the other side of

I like that, and in a way, I guess making a gift like that to your country is kind of a romantic gesture, but maybe not from his wife's perspective. Well, hopping over to another continent, I want to tell you about Ishmael Pasha, the viceroy of Egypt under Ottoman rule. So as a young man, he studied at Broad in Paris, where he became enamored with all things European. So when he came to power in eighteen sixty three, one of his top priorities was making Egypt look more like France.

I mean nothing against France, but that's kind of a shame. I feel like being Egypt is sort of one of Egypt's biggest strengths, don't you.

Yeah, seriously, But Ishmael was obsessed with European architecture. He also loved the art music, you know, the whole nine yards. And at the time, the Suez Canal was being built by a French company and that had been granted a concession by the Egyptian government. So there were lots of connections between Egypt and France in the eighteen sixties, including a rumor that Ishmael had fallen in love with the

He must have been impressed by the canal, because can you imagine being one of the first people to see something like that.

Yeah, it must have been incredible. But even more impressive was the palace that Ishmael had built for the occasion. He called it the Palace al Jazeera, and it costs about seven hundred and fifty thousand Egyptian pounds to build, which was really a fortune at the time. He hired European architects to build it in this neoclassical style. He

Wow, So what ended up happening? Did that? Did that win her over?

It really wasn't enough, apparently, Like the thing is, Eugennyan Napoleon didn't have a great relationship that was kind of widely known. He kept mistresses on the side, but for whatever reason, whether it was loyalty or not wanting to cause an international incident, when the Suez Canal festivities ended, Eugeni just packed bags and went home to France. And

Well that's a great travel tip. All right. Well, let's stay on the topic of prominent national leaders, and I'm going to go to Winston Churchill for my next fact. I know you've heard lots about Churchill's political life, but today I want to take a peek at his personal life. So he married a woman named Clementine Josier. This was in nineteen oh eight and they remained together until his death in nineteen sixty five. But before he settled down,

So does he buy her like an extravagant gift or what happens here?

Not at all? That was actually part of the problem. So Churchill had wealthy relatives, but he himself wasn't super rich, and Pamela made it known she wanted to marry someone with money, since she didn't come from a family of means either, so Churchill relied on his greatest skill. Those were, of course words. Now he began writing her this steady stream of love letters and kept at it for up to two years. Now. In what might have been my favorite gesture of all, when he finished his first and

Wow. So at this time, I'm guessing he's pretty financially secure, he's employed, he's a good writer. So does she fall from him now?

Mega? Remember this is an episode about romantic gestures that did not work, so of course not in this case. So Churchill proposed repeatedly and Pamela rejected him every single time, eventually marrying Victor Bulward Lytton, who went on to have a prominent political career of his own. But he never not once gifted her a manuscript of a novel. So I think it's just just a shame.

Well, at least Churchill figured it out and ended up in a long and happy marriage of his own. The same cannot be said of our next hapless Romeo, Count Gregory Orlov. He was a Russian military officer from a prominent family, and in seventeen fifty nine he met the Grand Duke Peter, who later became Emperor Peter I, and his Prussian wife, Catherine, who was later known as Catherine the Great. It said that Katherine and Orlov fell deeply

I mean, it kind of sounds like they never should have gotten married in the first place.

I mean, it was one of these royal things, right, Like it's an arranged marriage designed to strengthen the ties between Prussia and Russia. But Peter became an emperor in seventeen sixty two, and shortly thereafter Orlov and his brother Alexey helped plan a coup that overthrew him, making Katherine the Empress of Russia.

I mean nothing, says, I love you like a coup mango. Let's be honest.

Yeah, and not only that, Just a week after the coup, Alexei strangled Peter to death so Catherine would never have to deal with his poorish behavior again. There's actually no evidence that she was aware of that part of the plot, but still it paved the way for her in or Love, to become Russia's biggest power couple. Accept Catherine's advisors weren't

Oh that is a rough story. We'll have another one about a diamond as well, this one involving movie stars, a media frenzy, and of course un unhappy ending. So I'll tell you all about it after we take a quick break.

Welcome back to Part time Genius. Today. We've got nine romantic gestures that turned into disasters. Okay, well, so you said you've gotten another fact about a diamond.

Indeed, I do, and it's not just any diamond. So the jeweling question is a pear shaped beauty weighing almost seventy carrots. I love how we're throwing all these talk about carrots around as though we have any idea what this means. But that's a lot. So in nineteen sixty nine it was put up for sale at an auction. Back then, one of the biggest celebrity couples in the world was Welsh actor Richard Burton an American superstar Elizabeth Taylor.

That is incredible.

It's just just crazy and it's all very relatable at the same time. But at the auction, Burton got out bid by Cartier, you know, the jewelry we were talking about earlier. But Burton was absolutely insistent, saying, no one but Taylor could wear this diamond, and so he ended up buying it from Cardier for one point one million dollars or the equivalent of nine point four million dollars today.

That's incredible, and Elizabeth Taylor must have been ecstatic about this, right she was.

But you know, before the couple took ownership of the diamond, they allowed Cardia to it on display in their Fifth Avenue shop, where thousands of people lined up every single day to see it. And finally the diamond was delivered to the Burton Taylors on their yacht off the coast of Monica.

I feel like it just gets more and more relative.

It really does. This is wild. So they were there for Princess Grace's birthday party, and while I'm sure people were happy for her Highness, the real star of the event was Elizabeth Taylor wearing this enormous diamond around her neck. But you know this isn't going to end well. Of course, Taylor and Burton's marriage fell apart, and they divorced soon after. They remarried briefly, and then split for good in nineteen seventy six, at which point Taylor decided to sell the diamond.

There, I do like it. Well, here's a story about a different kind of beautiful ending. Are you familiar with the artist Marina Abramovich.

Yeah. Actually, she's the one that did the project at MoMA where she said and stared at people right.

Yeah. It was called the Artist's Present And she's had a really fascinating career kind of blurring the boundaries between conceptual art and performance art. And in the seventies and eighties she was in a relationship with a fellow artist.

My god, that sounds terrifying, yeah, but it's also art, right of course.

That's also the level of trust they had in each other. And in nineteen eighty they decided to get married with the performance slash romantic gesture that was bigger than anything they'd done before. Their plan was for each of them to start at one end of the Great Wall of China and then they just walked towards each other, a journey that would take months, and the idea was wherever

Isn't that wow? So it was like a romantic gesture turned romantic breakup, turned really really bad breakup pretty much.

Ulai even sued Abramovich in twenty fifteen in a dispute over royalties on their collaborative works, but a few years later they reunited when she spotted him in the audience at a lecture she was giving at a Copenhagen museum. He put his arm around her and they laughed like old friends, and later Abramovich said that in that moment, quote, I gave up all the anger, all the hate, all the rest, and I think what's left is the beautiful work that we left behind, and this is what matters.

Wow. All right, well, speaking of beautiful work, our next story is all about a watch that's both a technical marvel and an artistic statement unlike any other. Now, this all began in Versailles in seventeen eighty three. There was an admirer of Marie Antoinette's some say it was Swedish diplomat Axel von Furson. So anyway, decides to dazzle her

Which means he was designing a really really stunning watch. Yeah.

Actually, what made it really special is the number of complications it had, and watchmaking lingo. A complication is any function other than just telling time, So like an alarm, a date display, these are complications. And for this epic watch, Brigay loaded it with every complication he knew how to make. He built in a thermometer, a perpetual calendar, a chime, a display showing how much energy was left so you'd

I love that it tells you the temperature, the date it's gonna alarm on it. It's like a antiquated iPhone, right. But what did Marie Antronett think about all this?

Well, this is of course where the disaster part comes in. Because the watch was so complicated, it wasn't completed until eighteen oh two, almost twenty years after the work first began. By that point, Marie Antoinette was long gone. Now, if you recall French history one oh one, she got sent to the guillotine in seventeen ninety three, so she never got a glimpse of this amazing watch. And once more, Brigue himself died four years before the watch was finished.

So if Marie Antrnette wasn't alive to receive the gift, what happened to the watch?

Well, the Brigue company held onto it for a while, and then they sold it to a private collector, changed hands a few times, eventually landing in a museum in Jerusalem. Was actually stolen from there in the nineteen eighties and disappeared for decades. Finally, in two thousand and seven, it was recovered, along with several others stolen time pieces, and returned to that same museum. Oh that's incredible.

Well, we have one last story today, and this one doesn't involve jeweles, watches or any physical objects at all, because there's a whole other category of romantic gestures out there. I'm talking about, do do something for someone you love.

I like that Love Languages book. Have you read that? It talks all about like acts of service.

I haven't read it, but I imagine that's exactly what this is. So back in the nineteen forties, in the golden age of Hollywood, Rita Hayworth was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Right she was a trained dancer. She worked her way up the studio system, going from bit parts to a starring role opposite Fred Astaire in the nineteen forty one musical You'll Never Get Rich, and she became an icon, appearing in hit movies and on magazine covers. She landed this high profile contract with

Sounds like it's straight from a plot of a nineteen forties Hollywood.

Movie exactly so. Ali Khan was actually married at the time, and he had a reputation for being a playboy, but Hayworth found him really charming, and after just a few days of courtship, she moved into his villa in the south of France. He organized parties to introduce her to his society friends, but it was kind of awkward, right, Like,

This is good stuff, magatherre like lots of good components. Here, I got my bucket a popcorn, like, keep keep going.

This is really good, right. So Ali Khan's father wanted him to break it off because it was making the whole family look bad, and instead he gets a divorce and he and Hayworth finally marry in nineteen forty nine. But their lives are so different, right. He is a jet setter who keeps us safe full of various currencies so you can dash off to any corner of the globe at any moment's notice. And he was also expected to make official visits to the Ismaili communities in Africa

Oh that is a huge leap to make. So tell me, Mengo, unlike every other story we've heard so far, tell me they lived happily ever after.

I mean, you know where this is headed. So they had a daughter shortly after their marriage. But from that point on, it's just a disaster. Hayworth was totally out of her element on these diplomatic trips. Ali Khon didn't change his Playwroy ways, and Hayworth ends up going home to the US and initiating divorce proceedings. But the worst part is her reputation wasn't tatters her over the top lifestyle with Ali, not not to mention the fact that she'd taken up with a married man while being the

Of course this was aimed at her, not him.

I'm guessing right, yeah, I mean, he did get a little bit of blowback, but yeah, of course it was aimed at her. And in nineteen forty nine, an American women's club actually organized a boycott of her films, with one woman saying, quote Rita Hayworth's studio shitsacker, her trapesing around is an insult to American womanhood.

So did her career ever recover from this?

I mean, that is the good part. So she finally returned to the screen in nineteen fifty two. It was with a movie called Affair in Trinidad, and she went on to make several more hit films, but her relationship with Columbia execs remained tricky, partially because of her decision to quit the movies for love.

Wow, Well that's the lesson for today. I guess, don't abandon a lucrative Hollywood career to galivan around with a prince. Just write that down, always put that in your back pocket. Well, I know, we said nine mango. We love to do our nine facts. But how about we end the day with the story of a tryhard who actually did win his crushover in the end.

I'm for it. So who are we talking about?

And I remember us talking about this back in our mental loss days. This was, of course President Richard Milhouse Nixon. Now, from the outside, the Nixon's marriage wasn't one that most people envy. The New York Times referred to the love between the couple as quote dry as dust. Ben Bradley of The Washington Post called it sort of a dingy marriage.

I don't know that proposing marriage on your first meeting after someone has just turned you down for a date is the right way to go about winning someone's affections, mon, But I'm glad it worked out. But what about gifts? Was there anything tricky to got for Pat that we know about?

Let me think about as well, pandas. Of course, when Pat went to China with President Nixon, she was totally taken with the pandas, and President Nixon gifted China too Muskox, which they reciprocated with pandas. So in a way, the fact that we have giant pandas in this country is because of their love.

Oh that's when I had never thought of that. Well, I guess it's pretty romantic. But that does it for this very On Valentine's Day episode of Part Time Genius, don't forget to follow us on Instagram at part Time Genius. We have some exciting stuff coming up later this month, including a whole bunch of listener prize giveaways, so stay tuned for that, and in the meantime, Will, Mary, Gabe Dylan, and myself thank you so much for listening. Part Time