Interview with Nona Footz: A Mansion of Her Own

A Mansion of Her Own: The Mysterious Life of Heiress Alice Delamar – Nona Footz with Audrey Clare Farley – Grand Central Publishing – 9781538772072 – 272 pages – $32.50 – October 8, 2026 – ebook versions available at lower prices

It was impossible for me to resist a story about a reclusive heiress who lived only a few miles from where I grew up and lived in southwestern Connecticut. The towns there now are mostly well-to-do suburban enclaves, and best known for their wealth and well-known residents. But when I was growing up there, and earlier in the twentieth century, much of Fairfield County was quite rural. In those times, the area attracted many artists, writers, dancers and Bohemian types who found it a respite from the urban travails of nearby New York City. Only an hour by train or car (on roads with far less traffic than today), it was attractive to a wide range of people, some of whom were quite well off.

One of those very rich people was a secretive heiress, Alice DeLamar. In 1918 at age twenty-three, she inherited her mining magnate father’s massive wealth, making her the richest woman in America. She immediately became the target of the press, who wanted to know all about her, especially whom she would marry (of course).

Alice was not the kind of person who enjoyed this attention. She found a piece of land in then rural Weston, Connecticut, and built an estate, where she spent time with an amazing array of interesting people, most of whom were in the arts and many of whom either were then or who are now, quite well-known. She sponsored the children’s writer Ludwig Bemelmans (Madeleine was created there), the actress and producer Eva LeGallienne (with whom she had a lengthy romantic relationship), hosted Vladimir Nabokov, Salvador Dali, George Balanchine (who also lived in Weston), Dave Brubeck, and many others at social gatherings and soirees.

While she kept her apartment in New York City, and eventually had another large home in Palm Beach and a townhouse in Paris too, Weston was always the center of her multifaceted and mostly unknown and undocumented life.

HR executive Nona Footz also lived in Weston for a number of years. She only accidentally learned about Alice Delamar after reading a biography of Eva Le Gallienne by Helen Sheehy. Nona found herself drawn to Alice, and became dedicated to finding out more about this reclusive, highly secretive woman. She spent a decade tracking down anyone she could find who had known Alice, interviewing them and researching her life, all the while in search of Alice’s original papers, including a memoir Alice was rumored to have written, all of which had disappeared upon Alice’s death in 1983.

Nona’s book is not only a mystery story, it is also a memoir as well, in which she recounts her own saga of trying to understand and uncover the true life and times of a remarkable woman. It’s a great story and it was really special for me to have the opportunity to speak with Nona about Alice and this book. I am certain you will enjoy this conversation as much as I did. It is a great story. Don’t miss it!

“A journey through the bedrooms and drawing rooms of the twentieth-century art world where luminaries expressed forbidden sexual desires and found inspiration for much of the art they created. The book is so good, I picked it up and barely breathed until I was finished.” -Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women

Nona Footz is currently an executive and board recruiter and has been a freelance writer for the magazines VENU and for Art New England. A native of Canada, Footz is an adjunct faculty member at New York University. This is her first book.

Co-author Audrey Clare Farley is the author of The Unfit Heiress and Girls and Their Monsters, which won the Michigan Notable Book Award and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

Some interesting notes: a portion of what was the Delamar property is now the 21-acre Stonebridge Waterfowl Preserve in Weston, which she donated in 1969.

On her estate, Alice had a pool built that includes a tunnel leading from the basement. It is rumored that this was so she could swim in the nude without fear of being seen (or to walk outside).

Delamar funded the Civic Repertory Theatre established by Le Gallienne in New York City.

When she passed away, most of her estate went to Harvard, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins, per her father’s original will.

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Helen Sheehy: Just Willa (a novel)

Just Willa (a novel)—Helen Sheehy—Cave Hollow Press—978-2-7342678-3-9—paperback—428 pages—$21.95—April 13, 2025—ebook versions available at varying lower prices

As many Writerscast listeners know, I only interview writers about books I like and enjoyed reading enough to want to share with my listeners. So every episode of this podcast does represent a certain “best of” approach to my reading, since you will never hear about the books I did not love, or could not bring myself to finish.

From among those many books I like, Helen Sheehy’s Just Willa is a special one – this is a flat out just a wonderful novel. It focuses entirely on the story of one woman and her family, Willa Hardesty, and her difficult farm life in dusty, dry Oklahoma. Her story follows seven decades of one woman’s life, a twentieth century family chronicle that focuses on the small struggles of daily life, a difficult husband, the challenges of raising children and the heartbreak that goes with a large family.

Willa is tough because her world requires her to be tough. She is the daughter of a homesteader who somehow manages to be a single mother in an era that provides almost no support, then marries a bootlegging cowboy who is never honest with her. Her seemingly “small” life is really a world that is far greater than it seems, and she lives it with indomitable strength despite all her hardships and struggles to understand who she really is.

Like most great fiction, we come to realize that this novel is entirely true.

I really enjoyed speaking with Helen about her book, her writing process, and her past work as a biographer. I think you will enjoy this conversation, and I hope it might spur you to read Just Willa yourself, and because she is a really fine writer, and this book is autobiographical fiction, perhaps you will be interested in reading her biographies as well.

Helen Sheehy grew up on farms in Oklahoma and Kansas, although she’s lived in Connecticut most of her life. She’s been a dramaturg at Hartford Stage Company and written biographies of theatre pioneers; Margo Jones, Eva Le Gallienne, and Eleonora Duse.

Sheehy taught theatre and English in high schools in Kansas and Connecticut, which was the basis of her first book, a textbook titled All About Theatre. She was Adjunct Professor of Theatre at Southern Connecticut State University for over twenty years. Sheehy has also taught acting and improvisation to inmates in a maximum security prison in Connecticut.

She lives in Hamden, Connecticut. Just Willa is her first novel.

“Helen Sheehy’s masterful prose immerses you in Willa Hardesty’s world with such rich detail and emotional depth that you feel the dust of the Oklahoma plains and the quiet strength it takes to hold a family together. It’s a powerful reminder that even the women who shape our lives can hold truths we only come to understand with time. This book is for anyone who has ever known their mother—or thought they did.”—Michael Sucsy, Emmy-winning writer/director of Grey Gardens

Author website.
Buy the book on Bookshop.org

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