The life of George Hamilton's mother is now the basis for a film.
The profile of Anne Hamilton was written in 1995 by a former Post staff writer.Hamilton died at the age of 93.
Anne Hamilton was long before Joan Collins dripped jewels or Roseanne cackled with candor.
A country doctor's daughter who dreamed of being a star, Hamilton chose instead to mastermind an extraordinary life that even the most gifted playwright couldn't have imagined.
She is wearing a feather-topped hostess gown in her Palm Beach condo.I have everything but money.I didn't have enough to relax and enjoy it....It would make the funniest movie.
Yes, it would.She said no to alimony from four husbands and dated Ronald Reagan and Clark Gable.
George Hamilton says that his mother always took the position that you could run out of money.
She changed her name to Hamilton because "it's just easier with George and all.''
She gushes about her mother, a Christian Scientist married to the town doctor, and describes her early years as idyllic.
After attending a Christian Science academy, Anne went to Mrs. Semple's Finishing School in New York City.
She says that they taught her how to make tea.They should have taught me how to make a cocktail.That would've helped me.
In Manhattan, Hamilton discovered the "in'' crowd: the Gabors, Truman Capote, and Liza Minnelli.
She says she didn't need to debut because she knew everyone.
At the Butterfly Ball, a society dance packed with preening, private-school girls, she met black-haired Wall Street bachelor Bill Potter.
A son by the same name became Anne's adviser on everything from fashion to finance after the pair wed in 1930.The stock market crashed and so did their marriage.
George William Hamilton became her second husband in 1937 after she met him in Memphis.
"I think he fell for her immediately,'' says David Hamilton, who lives in Palm Beach.He thought she was a little Hollywoodish."
Anne Hamilton, with rich black hair parted straight down the middle and swept back in a chignon like a flamenco dancer, continued her ascent up society's ladder by marrying Bostonian Carlton Hunt in the early '50s.
When pondering her failed marriages, Hamilton doesn't get melancholy.She's detached, as if talking about used cars.
She went into action in the new movie My One and Only, packing up her boys and leaving New York in a used 1947 Lincoln Continental convertible.
George Hamilton says he paid about $1,300 for it."I'm going to visit every man I've ever dated and see if I still love him."
George says that she planned to find her next husband in a different way.
Anne wouldn't meet husband No. in the Midwest, Beverly Hills and Mexico.She hit Palm Beach in the late '50s.The wackiness of the era, like the time the Lincoln's brakes failed in the mountains of Mexico, is what confuses the family.
In L.A., their mother partied with the town's finest, including Clark Gable and Ronald Reagan.
Anne Hamilton found her fourth husband in Palm Beach in the mid-'50s.