Leila Hadley

Leila Hadley (22 September 1925 – 10 February 2009) was an American travel writer and socialite. Her books include Give Me the World (1958) and A Journey With Elsa Cloud (1997).

She was born Beatrice Leila Eliott Burton on September 22nd, 1926, and grew up in Old Westbury, Long Island, New York. Her mother, Beatrice Eliott Burton was the sister of Sir Gilbert Eliott, Chief of the Scottish Clan Elliot. Her father, Frank V. Burton Jr., inherited his business in the cotton trade. Her middle name, which she took as her first name, was pronounced "LEE-la" and was, according to her, "Hindi for 'cosmic play,' which should register in anyone’s mind forever, but doesn't". She attended the Green Vale School, Long Island, with Gloria Vanderbilt, then St. Timothy's School, Stevenson, Maryland. She was introduced to society at the Junior Assembly on December 23, 1943, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan.

She married Arthur Twining Hadley II, a Lieutenant in a Tank destroyer battalion, and the grandson of Arthur Twining Hadley, president of Yale University, on March 2, 1944. After the birth of her son, Arthur Twining Hadley III, in February 1945, her one and a half year marriage ended in divorce in 1947.

Hadley obtained employment in public relations, first working for cartoonist Al Capp and was described in a 1950 article in Look magazine as "the chic, high-level, in-the-know, celebrity-surrounded career girl that millions of young women dream of becoming in New York." She later was publicity director for The Howdy Doody Show.

In 1953 she married geologist and inventor Yvor Hyatt Smitter. They divorced in 1969, after having three children.

In 1969 she married 27-year-old, Swedish ship chandler, Hans Gillner.

In 1976 she married businessman William C. Musham, that ended in divorce in 1979. January 1990 she married her fifth husband, Henry Luce III. That marriage lasted until Luce's death in September 2005.

She quit her job in 1951 and took her son, Arthur Twining Hadley III, known as Kippy, then six years old, on a trip around the world that lasted one and a half years. She sailed on a barkantine schooner from Singapore to Ceylon, then from Beirut to Malta. It was on the schooner where she met geologist, Yvor Hyatt Smitter, the son of Faith (née Winters) and Wessel Smitter (author, F.O.B. Detroit). S. J. Perelman, who urged her to take the trip in the first place, then encouraged her to write Give Me the World (1958) about her journey.

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