Jane Kendall Mason

Jane Kendall Mason Hamilton Abell Gingrich (1909 – 1981) was an American debutante, socialite, outdoorswoman, art collector and patron.

Biography Jane Kendall Gingrich was born Jane Welsh in 1909. A decade later, her mother Elizabeth, a divorcée who sang at private parties for members of New York City's upper class, began a relationship with the divorced Wall Street tycoon Lyman Kendall, who was worth an estimated $20 million. Kendall and her mother married, and he legally adopted the young Jane. The family moved to Tuxedo Park, New York and maintained residences in Miami and Washington, D.C., and sailed to Europe for extended stays.

Jane Kendall Gingrich was educated at exclusive private schools, where she showed promise in drawing and sculpture, and competed as an equestrian at Madison Square Garden.

When she was seventeen years old, she was presented as a debutante at two different balls in Washington, D.C. The Masons moved to Jaimanitas, a large estate west of Havana that was staffed by nine servants.

Ernest Hemingway, with whom she became close friends, referred to her as "about the most uninhibited person I ever met." He also based the character Margot Macomber in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber on Jane.

In the 1930s, Jane Kendall Mason developed a friendship with the American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who carved her bust in ebony. She also owned a cast of his bronze sculpture Glad Day.

In 1932, she wrote an article titled Resorting to Havana for Vogue.

She survived a suicide attempt in 1933, jumping off the balcony at her Cuban residence, and underwent months of intensive psychotherapy. The couple moved to Chester County, Pennsylvania, where Jane Hamilton bought Willow Brook Farm and befriended the painter Horace Pippin, who was a national figure and local celebrity. She eventually owned nine works by him, eight of which she left to the Metropolitan Museum upon her death.

In the late 1940s, she married the newspaper columinist George Abell and moved to Paris. In 1955, she married Arnold Gingrich, a former flame. She and Gingrich lived at different residences in New York before settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey in 1962.

In 1964 she suffered a stroke that left her semi-invalid for the rest of her life. After the stroke, M.F.K. Fisher described her in a 1968 letter as "a hopeless and completely helpless paralytic and ex-alcoholic cared for like a rare orchid."

She died in 1981.