Former model and rumba dancer married into money and gave much of it away.
Lillian Booth (1915-2007)
“If someone approaches me with a good charity, I will give them something,” said Lillian Booth. She gave away millions of dollars during her lifetime, funding entire facilities for hospitals and colleges and buying fire trucks for small towns. A former glamor girl with her own distinctive style, she was not shy about the fact that her fortune came to one of her husbands from his father, who had invested in IBM. For years, she carried a purse that was monogrammed with those initials.
Lena Vulgaris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Demitris Vulgaris and Hattie Vulgaris, immigrants from Greece. She had four siblings. She attended the Montrose School for Girls in Baltimore and moved to New York City. She rented an apartment in the West 50s, and worked as a model and rumba dancer.
She was attractive and warm, with blue-black hair. In her early twenties, she dated the singer Rudy Vallee while running a beauty shop. Then she met an asbestos heir named Tommy Manville, after which she stopped working as a beautician.
By 27, she owned 50 acres of mica-rich property in Georgia, and acquired a Southern accent. Her first husband, William Buckner Jr., came from a powerful life insurance family and had been convicted of mail fraud related to a conspiracy to boost the price of Philippine railroad bonds.
They met in 1941, and after William learned about Lillian’s property in Georgia, he secured backing to try mining it. He was sued by his financial backers, who accused him of cheating them. To help, Lillian gave him thousands of dollars and a car. He was cleared of the charges and they married in 1947.
By 1951, she and William were divorced and she was running a fur business. On June 18, 1955, she married “Colonel” Ferris Booth. Lillian was 40 and Ferris was 52. He was a private investment counselor, a Columbia University graduate, and a millionaire. Ferris’ father, Willis Booth, a vice president of Guaranty Trust, was director of and investor in IBM and Hotpoint Appliances.
In 1949, Ferris became famous when he placed a half-page ad in The New York Times titled “God and The Atom: A Sincere and Most Respectful Suggestion for President Truman.” Amid global unrest following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II, Ferris proposed that the then-president invoke the “power of God” to halt an atomic war and establish a cabinet-level Department of Ethics.
In 1955, Lillian and her new husband moved into his home, the Weylin Hotel on East 54th Street, where he died of a heart attack in their suite 87 days after their nuptials. His will was a subject of news coverage: it divided his estate equally among Lillian and her sisters Marie and Catherine. Her attorney at the time theorized she had convinced him to write the will this way so she could avoid paying taxes on the full estate.
In 1957, Lillian, then 42, met Misha Dabich, 27, a Pennsylvania-born ice-skating instructor at Rockefeller Center, acting student, crooner, and star of a comedy skating act. By the 1970s, the companions, who never married, had moved to Alpine, New Jersey.
In 1977 Lillian’s nephew Robert, a Tenafly, N.J., native, was charged with conspiring to murder her and Misha. Robert had previously been convicted of rape, assault, and breaking and entering. He also had been indicted (and later convicted) for the 1975 murders of Susan Haynes and Susan Reeve, whose bodies were discovered in Rockland County, New York.
In Trenton State Prison, Robert was secretly tape-recorded as he outlined a scheme to murder Lillian and Misha to a Bergen County detective, a man Robert believed to be a hired killer. The prosecution argued that Robert wanted to collect his share of what was then Lillian’s $50 million fortune. Lillian visited the Hackensack courtroom, sat behind Robert during the trial, and never believed the prosecution’s story, though he was convicted.
In 1996, Lillian, known as the “Angel of Alpine” for her generosity, gave Pascack Valley Hospital, where she and her sisters had had medical treatment, the largest gift in its history. She also gave to Lincoln Center, Hellenic charities, Englewood Hospital, and Hackensack Hospital.
Upon receipt of her $2 million gift, an assisted living and skilled nursing facility in Englewood for former Broadway professionals was renamed The Lillian Booth Actors Home of the Actors’ Fund. A drawing of Lillian hangs in the entrance hall.
When she died in 2007, at 92, her estate was worth $200 million. Misha sued when he discovered she left nothing for him, claiming he was due a portion as her common-law husband, though New Jersey does not recognize common-law marriages. After his claim was settled, he received $9.9 million, including their Alpine residence.
She left nearly $9 million to Robert Reldan, the nephew convicted of plotting to kill her, though in 2010 he was forced to hand over the award to a scholarship fund in Susan Reeve’s name at her alma mater, Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.