Born: 1875, United States
Died: 1957
Country most active: United States, international
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Born in 1875, she was abandoned as an infant in rural Kansas, later moving to Chicago with her adoptive parents. When her father wouldn’t let her join a theater troupe in the 1890s, she married a man she’d just met and promptly ran off, leaving both her parents and new husband behind. She took to the stage and gained notoriety, performing on Broadway and hobnobbing with the elite before traveling to London in the early 1900s and starting a “salon” in Paris. Beautiful and charming, Livingstone claimed to have had affairs with prominent men while in Europe, and married three more times, to an Italian count, an English engineer, and a wealthy man from Cleveland.
At 52 and in need of money, she returned to New York in 1927 and was soon drawn into the newly created culture of underground speakeasies. Devising a plan for a “super-speakeasy” for the high society crowd, she opened her first establishment on East 52nd Street in Manhattan, charging $200 for an annual membership. Unable to pay her bills, it closed, but she opened another one in 1929. The Silver Room at 384 Park Avenue, called “New York’s most fashionable speak-easy,” was soon raided by federal agents and Livingstone arrested. Not one to give up, she opened her next, the Fifth-Eighth Street Country Club, with Florentine ceilings, marble floors, an indoor mini-golf course, game rooms, and a pond with goldfish, among other amenities. But the opulence didn’t protect her—within weeks, she was raided again. Attempting to escape clad in red silk pajamas, she was unsuccessful and ended up in jail. Finally accepting discretion as the better part of valor, she took her earnings and left New York. When Livingstone died in 1957 at age 82, she had arranged a monument in a French graveyard reading, “This is the only stone I have left unturned.”