After she moved, the mansion become a guesthouse that hosted the elite and she remained the talk of the town
Notable guests of Villa Margherita, built for “Daisy” Simonds (pictured), included presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Grover Cleveland, as well as Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Henry Ford, and William Alexander Bell.
When Rose O’Donovan, moved here after marrying local banker Andrew Simonds in 1885, the New Orleans-raised socialite better known as Daisy attracted attention with the construction of the Beaux arts/Italian Renaissance-esque mansion called the Villa Margherita (Italian for “daisy”) at 4 South Battery.
Locals deemed her and the home too showy, but Daisy, who was born in Philadelphia on March 12, 1863, was determined to prove who could score the social coup of the season. In 1902 when President Theodore Roosevelt visited Charleston, she figured out how to allude the restrictions on private entertainment during his tight schedule and devised a lure. Stories have it that Daisy told the president the dying wish of a once-enslaved man in her employ was to meet him, but when he stopped in, he found a party awaiting him in her splendid dining room. When Roosevelt’s friend Owen Wister, who had written the 1906 novel Lady Baltimore about social climbers in Charleston, authored the president’s biography, he included that story and others unflattering to Daisy. She threatened a lawsuit. The book was withdrawn, and the pages replaced.
By then, Daisy’s husband had died, and she had remarried two more times to wealthier and wealthier men, who provided her with more lavish mansions in New Jersey and Washington, DC.
In her version of her life, The Autobiography of a Chameleon, she noted her social successes with royalty, presidents, and the highest ranks of society. She also published Favorite Recipes of a Famous Hostess, and tried, unsuccessfully, to get a memorial to mothers established in the nation’s capital. As the widow of Simonds, Barker Gummere, and Clarence Crittenden Calhoun, Daisy returned to the Lowcountry a year before her death on March 22, 1949.
Her Villa Margherita, which she leased when she left Charleston circa 1905, became a guesthouse, where the famous, wealthy, and elite came to further burnish her legend and her home—for a daily fee. Today, Villa Margherita is again a private residence, without its back wing, and Daisy remains the focus of many a tale told in the city.
