Her parents decided to give up her and her brother for adoption as teenagers by their maternal aunt and uncle, Virginia and Ernest Whitworth Marland, who were both childless and fabulously wealthy from his success in the oil business in Ponca City, Oklahoma.

Lydie Roberts Marland enjoyed volatile times and drastic changes in fortune with her husband: he lost much of his money in 1928; she accompanied him to Washington, DC after he was elected to the US Congress in 1932, and to the Oklahoma governor's mansion as his First Lady in 1934.

She finished her education at the Oaksmere School in New Rochelle, located in Westchester County, New York on a property overlooking Long Island Sound.

Because of her family's wealth, her social activities, which included evening parties and formal fox hunts, were followed by the local and sometimes national press.

)[citation needed] They also had commissioned a larger Italianate mansion, the "Palace on the Prairie," designed by the architect John Duncan Forsyth.

Immediately afterward they announced plans to marry, but because of a negative response from friends, family, and the public to her relationship with her uncle and adoptive father the wedding was delayed six months.

He took seriously his oath that he would not, "knowingly, receive, directly or indirectly, any money or other valuable thing, for the performance or nonperformance of any act or duty pertaining to my office, other than the compensation allowed by law."

In 1941 the Marlands moved into the chauffeur's quarters and sold their Palace on the Prairie and most of the property to the Discalced Carmelite Fathers of Mexico.

The Carmelite Fathers asked for the removal of a statue of Lydie by Jo Davidson, which her husband had commissioned for the grounds.

In 1953, Marland had a nervous breakdown, publicly fought with her boyfriend Louis Cassel, ordered the destruction of her statue, and loaded her remaining possessions into a car before driving away from Ponca City without a driver's license.

Because her older brother reported her missing in November 1958, newspapers reported on rumors of her whereabouts over the years including working as a maid for a motel in Independence, Missouri, standing in a bread line in New York City, marching in an anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington, D.C., and living with a priest in San Francisco.

[5] Although a recluse, she led efforts to have Ponca City purchase the Palace on the Prairie when it came up for sale again, and turn it into a house museum.

It was eventually discovered by Paul Prather, former curator emeritus of the mansion, as documented in a feature that appeared in the Sunday Oklahoman, dug up and restored by patrons.