She inherited a trust fund from her grandfather, William C. Whitney and on her father's death in 1927, she received a large part of the family fortune.

After the majority of the shareholders approved the move, Mrs. Payson sold her stock and began working to get a replacement team for New York City.

[4] An avid art collector, she purchased a variety of artwork but favored Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works with her collection containing watercolors, drawings, and paintings.

She owned numerous pieces including those by James McNeill Whistler, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustave Courbet, Maurice Prendergast, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Honoré Daumier, Joshua Reynolds, Claude Monet, Henri Rousseau, Jan Provost, Édouard Manet, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Alfred Sisley and Vincent van Gogh.

Payson was also a strong supporter of American artists, acquiring works by Thomas Eakins, Arthur B. Davies, Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent.

[5] In 1924, she married Charles Shipman Payson, a lawyer and businessman who was a native of Maine and a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School.

Besides the Greentree estate in Manhasset, the family lived in an Italian Renaissance-palazzo style mansion in Manhattan later known as the Payne Whitney House.

It was a wedding present from Joan's great uncle, Oliver Payne, her father's namesake, and designed by Stanford White.