Helen Huntington Hull

Helen Huntington Hull with Leonard Bernstein in 1962

Huntington was a lover of music and opera (she attended her first opera when she was two) and, therefore, helped to found the New York City Center and the New York City Opera.

She was a patron of the Metropolitan Opera on Broadway. She owned two boxes at the opera house, one she used herself and one she kept for her guests. In 1966, she was among those who attended the closing gala at the Met on Broadway and helped found its re-opening at Lincoln Center. She attended the inauguration gala night at Philharmonic Hall, directed by her friend Leonard Bernstein.[3][7][8][9]

Huntington was on the board of directors of the New York City Ballet, The Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.[3][7][9] She was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[3] She created the Musicians' Emergency Fund to support musicians, creating teaching and performing jobs.[3]

Also an accomplished piano-player, in 1942 Huntington performed at the Poughkeepsie High School in the presence of Eleanor Roosevelt. This was her only public performance.[3] After that, she continued to play into her 70s, often with her Locust-on-Hudson's neighbor, pianist Rudolf Firkušný.[10]

Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868)

Among the Sierra Nevada, California is an 1868 oil painting by Albert Bierstadt. It was acquired in 1873 by William Brown Dinsmore, Huntington's grandfather; when Huntington inherited the painting, she had the canvas glued directly to a curved wall on the second floor of her new mansion, Locusts on Hudson.[9] When she died in 1976, she bequeathed the painting to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.[9]

Huntington was a good friend of Elsa Maxwell, Cole Porter, and Maury Henry Biddle Paul (aka Cholly Knickerbocker).[7][11]

When, in 1913, Astor was asked if his future wife, Helen Huntington, believed in suffrage for women, he replied that she was far too sensible for that.[12]

In 1924, Huntington was an alternate delegate for New York to the Republican National Convention and in 1926 and 1927 she co-chaired the Women's Republican National Committee for New York.[13] She was a guest at the United States presidential inaugural balls of four different U.S. presidents: Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon. She was a good friend of Nelson Rockefeller and his wife, Happy Rockefeller.

In 1941, Helen inherited Staatsburg on Hudson from her maternal grandfather, William Brown Dinsmore II, head of Adams Express Company, a railroad and shipping concern. She demolished the previous mansion to build a much lighter house, known as Locusts on Hudson, that was designed by architect John Churchill in the Neobaroque style.[4][7][9][14] Her family had deep roots in politics.[lower-alpha 1] At Locusts on Hudson, she held her gala fundraising events and raised her six dogs, and at Hopeland House, she hosted her Republican political fundraising events, attended by the likes of former U.S. presidents Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge.

In October 1976, Huntington attended a fundraising dinner to support U.S. President Gerald Ford; this was the last event she attended before her death.

Huntington was bisexual. Even while married to Astor in 1914, they mostly led separate lives until their divorce, with Huntington preferring the company of her female friends. Glenway Wescott once called her "a grand old lesbian".[13][19]