Early life[edit]

Muriel was born on November 23, 1900, in New York City. She was the daughter of William Kissam Vanderbilt II (1878–1944) and Virginia Graham Fair (1875–1935).^[3] Her paternal grandparents were William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Erskine Smith. Harold Stirling Vanderbilt was her uncle and Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough until her divorce from Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough in 1921, was her aunt.

Her maternal grandfather, James Graham Fair, was a United States senator from Nevada who made a large fortune investing in silver mines on the Comstock Lode.^[4]

Her parents separated when she was a small girl and she would grow up on Long Island and on the West Coast of the United States where her mother had been born.^[5]

Career[edit]

She shared her father and grandfather Vanderbilt's love of horses. Her mother was also a fan of Thoroughbred horse racing and established Fair Stable that in 1924 and 1925 won back-to-back Horse of the Year honors with Sarazen.

She owned a ranch in Carmel Valley, California, where she built stables and kept thoroughbred racehorses. In 1930, it was reported that she received permission by the Chief of police of Middletown to carry a pistol after riding breeches were stolen from her.^[6] In May 1946, Frank B. Porter and his son Paul bought the 1,100 acres (450 ha) farm from Vanderbilt for an estiamted $200,000 (equivalent to $2,779,181 in 2021).^[7]

In 1947, with her third husband, she bought Edenvale Farms, a horse farm south of San Jose, California, where she bred and raised Thoroughbreds and built her own private training track. Her horse, Miche, won the 1952 Santa Anita Handicap and Desert Trial captured several important West Coast stakes including back-to-back editions of the Ramona Handicap. In 1956, she sold Edenvale Farm to Samuel Hamburger of San Francisco, for $650,000, who in turn sold it to real estate developers for approximately $1 million.^[8]

Later in life, Muriel Vanderbilt Adams owned an 80-acre (320,000 m²) horse farm in Marion County, Florida. Bred and trained at her Ocala farm in 1970, Desert Vixen was the most famous horse she ever owned and bred and in 1979 the filly was inducted into the United States' National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. The farm is now part of the exclusive gated community, Jumbolair.

Personal life[edit]

Muriel Vanderbilt married three times, the first in 1925 to Frederic Cameron Church, Jr., a Boston insurance executive.^[9] The marriage ended in divorce in 1929 and in September 1931, she married New Yorker Henry Delafield Phelps (1902–1976).^[10] Divorced from her second husband in 1936, she married for a third time in 1944 to John Payson Adams.

Muriel died in Florida on February 3, 1972, at the age of seventy-one.^[8]

The Simmons Bedding Company is an American major manufacturer of mattresses and related bedding products, based in Atlanta, Georgia. The company was founded in 1870, and is one of the oldest companies of its kind in the United States. Simmons' flagship brand is Beautyrest. In addition to operating 18 manufacturing facilities in the United States and Puerto Rico, the company licenses its products internationally. According to a Simmons press release, net sales for 2005 were $855 million, and its revenue was $1.13 billion in 2007 and $1.228 billion in 2013.^[1] As of 2011, Simmons ranked in third place among U.S. mattress manufacturers, with a 15.7 percent market share.^[2] In 2012, Simmons and its sister company Serta International were acquired by American private equity company Advent International.^[3] As of 2022, Simmons is a subsidiary of the American company Serta Simmons Bedding, LLC of Doraville, Georgia.^[4] On January 23, 2023, Serta Simmons Bedding filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.^[5]

History[edit]

Early history[edit]

In 1870, Zalmon G. Simmons opened his first factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He started out by manufacturing wooden telegraph insulators and cheese boxes.^[6] He branched into making bedsprings after receiving a patent for a woven-wire bedspring in payment of a debt.^[7] In 1876, Simmons became the first manufacturer to mass-produce woven wire mattresses. This process helped the company produce beds faster and cheaper, and by 1889, with the introduction of spiral coil springs into woven mattresses, Simmons’ mattress prices dropped from $12 to 95 cents, making mattresses more widely affordable.^[8] The business was incorporated in 1884 as the Northwestern Wire Mattress Company, adopting Simmons Manufacturing Company as its name in 1889. According to company records, by 1891 it was the largest company "of its kind in the world".^[7]

National business[edit]

Zalmon Simmons, Jr., who took charge of the business after his father's death in 1910, oversaw additional growth.^[7] In 1916, Simmons began advertising nationally, initiating its first national advertising campaign with a double-spread ad in the Saturday Evening Post.^[6]

By 1919, growth was fast. In response, Simmons acquired manufacturing plants in San Francisco, California; Los Angeles, California; Montreal, Quebec; Toronto, Ontario; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Vancouver, British Columbia; Elizabeth, New Jersey; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia.^[6] The following year, Simmons started a new sales arrangement. Instead of purchasing a mattress directly off the retail floor, customers could test the product on in-store samples, order a mattress through the retailer, and receive direct delivery within the next 24 hours from one of Simmons' 64 warehouses.^[6][7] This arrangement reduced the need for retailers to own and store their own product inventories.^[6] In 1923, Simmons moved its corporate headquarters to New York City.^[7]

Equipment developed by Simmons in 1925 automated the process of coiling wire and inserting it into fabric sleeves, called encasements. This allowed mass production of pocketed coils, a type of coil that had been available only in very high-priced luxury mattresses. The pocketed coil is the basis for the Simmons Beautyrest mattress brand, which was introduced in 1925.^[6] Although the new manufacturing technology greatly reduced its cost, at the time of its introduction a Beautyrest mattress sold for $39.50, three to four times more than the typical price for a standard wire mattress.^[7] Simmons promoted its products aggressively with ads that included testimonials from famous people such as Eleanor Roosevelt in 1927 and Henry Ford, H.G. Wells, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi and George Bernard Shaw in 1929. Eleanor Roosevelt continued to promote the brand into the 1930s, through her radio show.^[6] Cole Porter mentioned the Simmons brand in the lyrics of his 1934 song "Anything Goes".^[9]

In 1940, Simmons introduced the Hide-A-Bed, a sofa that incorporates a fold-out spring and mattress that pull out to form a bed. This became one of the company's best known products and was manufactured until the 1980s.^[7] During World War II, Simmons' facilities were diverted to military production, making cots, parachutes, bazooka rockets and other products.^[6][7] By the post-war year of 1947, the company was back in the mattress business and started using advertising to associate its products with the Hollywood glamor of actresses including Dorothy Lamour and Maureen O'Hara.^[6] A research and development facility was established in Munster, Indiana, in 1957, building upon pioneering studies on human sleep behavior that Simmons had sponsored in the 1930s. In 1958, the company became the first U.S. mattress maker to produce mattresses in king and queen sizes,^[6] an innovation that was promoted as solving the "space battle in the bedroom".^[8]

ARTIST:  REAL PHOTOS