When the Astors Owned New York (12 page)

By rough count, among the other costumed guests were ten Mmes. De Pompadour, eight Mmes. De Maintenon, three Catherines the Great, several other Marie Antoinettes, and dozens of Watteau women and Dresden figurines. Almost one hundred men came as Louis XV, and there were a Richelieu or two, a Dutch burgomaster à la Rembrandt, several toreadors, a sprinkling of sheikhs and mandarins, and a number of others in three-cornered hats, apparently the leavings of the city's costume shops. Pierpont Morgan's spirited daughter Anne came as Pocahontas, in a feathered dress made for her by American Indians. A young Mr. Cushing of Boston, rumored to be an artist, came as an Italian falconer of the fifteenth century: under a short jacket he wore white tights that left little to the imagination and drew stares and polite giggles. The revelers did not include impersonators of Charlotte Corday, the unfortunate Louis XVI, or any such grim reminders that many of these historical figures, and perhaps their impersonators as well, danced on a volcano.

As the long evening of dining, drinking, dancing, and posing for formal portraits stumbled toward four in the morning, several courtiers tripped over their swords and as a last resort tucked them under their arms. Stanford White was seen in lecherous and drunken pursuit of a young beauty named Mrs. Starr. In addition to generous quantities of whiskey, brandy, and still wines, Cornelia Bradley-Martin's guests consumed sixty cases of a Moët & Chandon champagne that a local historian recalled as “the most expensive sparkling wine known in the United States in 1897.”

After the ball was over, it would have been reasonable to ask if anyone had a good time, and there were relatively few after-the-event reports on that point. But the evening left a general impression, according to the papers, that the great ball did not live up to its billing either in the degree of general happiness that prevailed, the number of guests (only about seven hundred) who actually attended, or how it stacked up against the Vanderbilt event. Nor was there either then or later any agreement on how much the whole thing had cost hosts and guests as a group. Cornelia's direct bill from the hotel for drink, food, and music came to a bargain $10,000, but this probably reflected a concession from the management and did not include trees and shrubs, Versailles panels and backdrops, banks of hothouse flowers, and pyramids of hothouse fruit. More significant, it did not even begin to reflect the sums Cornelia and her guests laid out for gowns, costumes, wigs, hairdos, jewels, accouterments, liveries for footmen and waiters, and the like.

“Half a million dollars gone up in frippery and flowers,” wrote the fire-breathing iconoclast William Cowper Brann, but the “bedizened gang” at the Waldorf did not, he claimed, have half the fun a cow yard of hayseeds would have had at a taffy pull or corn husking. “Mrs. Bradley-Martin has triumphed gloriously,” Brann went on, “raised herself by her own garters to the vulgar throne of Vanity.” The evening's aftermath was a long collective hangover, a mood of glumness, ennui, and dull resentment only briefly relieved by a burlesque of the “Bradley Radley Ball” staged by the showman Oscar Hammerstein.

The great event had proved to be so blatant and heartless in its abdication of taste and social conscience that public opinion, along with a punitive doubling of their tax assessment, eventually pushed the Bradley-Martins into exile or, as they thought of it, preferred residence in England. Two years after the ball they emptied their house on Twentieth Street and shipped the furnishings to London. In the last of their several farewells to New York society they gave a banquet for eighty-six of their friends at the Waldorf-Astoria. The guests consumed green turtle soup, timbales of shad roe, and mignons of spring lamb while the hotel orchestra played Spanish melodies and popular black songs, among them a particular favorite of those in attendance, “If You Ain't Got No Money, You Needn't Come 'Round.”

Wearing a gold-trimmed brocade-and-velvet suit and a powdered wig, Bradley-Martin's brother, Frederick Townsend Martin, had been a favored and apparently compliant guest at the ball. Clubman, cosmopolite, connoisseur, and confirmed bachelor, he had attended and kept track of many comparable events and knew what he was talking about when he rated them. In 1911 he published his observations in an alarmingly titled book,
The Passing of the Idle Rich
. It went over with the public and was so visual in its anecdotes that it lent itself to vaudeville burlesques and satiric dramatizations on the stage. In the intervening years he had become—or at least, as a published author, found it profitable to appear to be—a reproachful observer of the social scene, a combination of the Prophet Jeremiah and Banquo's ghost. It was clear from the thrust and texture of his argument that he had also read and absorbed
The Theory of the Leisure Class,
Thorstein Veblen's profoundly subversive analysis of the manners of the upper-class “barbarians” (as Veblen called them) who led American society.

One sentence of Veblen's about the leisure class could have served as a motto for Frederick Martin's book and an epitaph for his sister-in-law's carnival: “Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability.”
The Passing of the Idle Rich
served up vivid instances and dire predictions about the fate of a social class which, Martin said, had “sunk to the level of the parasite” and was “condemned to death.”
*
He included the fashionable practice of dining out at great hotels among the many dreary schemes “devised to keep us from being bored to death by the mere fact of living.” Among his dozen or so instances of colorful and indicative behavior on the part of the idle rich were Chicago gas company heir C. K. G. Billings's dinner served on horseback on the fourth floor of Sherry's Restaurant with waiters dressed as grooms; a birthday dinner for a black-and-tan dog, among whose presents was a diamond collar worth $15,000; Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's dinner honoring a monkey in a full dress suit; a millionaire who had his dentist drill two rows of diamonds into his teeth; several “Jack Horner” dinners, one hosted by Stanford White, another served in tribute to Diamond Jim Brady: greeted by drunken applause a small flock of canaries and nightingales emerged from a giant pie, followed by a naked girl.

But it was the example of his own brother and sister-in-law that Frederick saved for the concluding flourish in his register of the outré and the unpardonable: “One of the most lavish and expensive—probably the most expensive—dinners ever given in America was a hyphenated feast, the record of which is writ large upon the annals of metropolitan society.” The great hotel built by the two warring Astor cousins had provided both opportunity and impetus for such presumably terminal antics of “the idle rich.”

i.

B
Y 1891, WHEN
he turned forty-three and moved to England for good, William Waldorf Astor had cut himself free from all but his business ties to New York and his rejected homeland. His parents were dead, and his inheritance, loosely estimated to be between $150 million and $300 million, made him, like the founding Astor, one of the richest men alive. His wife, Mamie, to whom he had been genuinely devoted, died of peritonitis in 1894, at thirty-six. When he brought her body from London back to New York for burial in the Astor vault at Trinity Cemetery, he severed a last close tie to his earlier life. The House of Astor remained so split that neither his cousin Jack nor his aunt Caroline attended the burial services.

William could now live exactly as he wished. He kept an affectionate, indulgent, but generally distant eye on his children. The daily burden of seeing after their needs and schooling fell on a staff of nannies and tutors. A widower with unlimited means, he was in vigorous good health, except for attacks of gout, the rich man's disease thought to be brought on by rich food and flowing wines, both of which he not only enjoyed in a discriminating way but carefully ordered in daily instructions to his household staff. Fair-haired with piercing blue eyes, he was handsome, in a formal, somewhat forbidding way, attractive to women and taking pleasure in their company.

For all his advantages, this Astor scion was one of the more unmerry creatures cast up out of the boil of heredity, nurture, endowment, and accident. Often the joke was on him: his career in politics a failure, his cobbled genealogy and literary efforts ridiculed along with his anomalous position as a “former American.” Soon his missteps in British society, along with an undisguised and increasing eagerness to enter the peerage, were to make him a further butt for ridicule. The entry in the current
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
writes him off as “shy, austere, and, by all accounts, unlovable…. He despised his native country and said so in print. In return, he was lampooned by the New York press.” He had never been altogether able to shed the theology of unworthiness and damnation that his parents and nursemaids had drilled into him from childhood. But along with this joyless creed, and sometimes violently at odds with it, he had also inherited an unshakable sense of being in the first rank of the blue-blood elect. His wealth reinforced this, and so did his clear superiority to most of his social peers in intellect and cultivation. He had a passion for splendor and for building, and by his hotels left his mark on New York's architectural and social style.

He especially looked down on his younger cousin Jack, whom he regarded as a dilettante and playboy absorbed in the mindless pleasures of the very rich—clubs, yachts, racehorses, summers at Newport. Jack seemed to enjoy playing puppy dog to his powerful mother and his self-indulgent wife, the first of whom doted on him, while the other openly despised him. William's imagination lived in a landscape of palaces, castles, great estates, domains of Tudors and the Medici; Jack's, in his inventor's workshop at Ferncliff, his collection of motorcars, and a future shaped by science and religion. In their social and domestic traffic with the present, both Astors suffered from inexpressiveness. William in particular had a capacity for silence and isolation along with a thickening crust of reserve and a habit of making brusque and ill-considered responses to what he saw as challenges to his dignity. But with a few men and women whom he respected he could be gentle and open. At least on his own narrowly restrictive terms he had a certain gift for intimacy. “My father was not at all hard hearted, in fact he was very sensitive,” his daughter Pauline said. “I often felt he needed help and sympathy, and yet it seemed impossible to reach him through his defenses of reserve and a certain aloofness…. His true self seldom appeared and his motives were often misjudged.”

On an Atlantic crossing aboard the White Star liner
Majestic
he met Amy Small Richardson, an American woman married to a Washington, D.C., doctor. Over a period of five years, as a friend of both members of the couple and with no suggestion of attempted romance with the wife, he sent her dozens of candid and relaxed letters telling about his travels, his plans for perfecting his estates, family affairs. “I have seen my new granddaughter several times,” he wrote in 1907, “and I am told she looks like me and has my ingratiating smile.” The two shared an educated passion for gardens, architecture, and Tudor history. He sent her his stories, including one about his long past but never to be forgotten Italian “love adventure.” “It will amuse you,” he told her, “to see what your fellow traveler on the
Majestic
was like in those remote days.” One Christmas he had Tiffany and Company in New York send her a tiny chain purse: “As it comes from Aladdin, it can never be empty,” he wrote. Aladdin also sent her gifts of books and pictures, sprays of calla lilies and violets, and at least once a sum of money for her garden in Washington. “Do not thank me for the cheque, please, it makes me feel foolish to be thanked.” At least momentarily, in such private encounters he could feel his virtually matchless wealth to be an irony of circumstance, even an embarrassment.

 

“I don't like your English aristocracy,” he confided to his friend Lady Dorothy Nevill, the doyenne of London hostesses. “They are not educated, they are not serious.” Nevertheless, English aristocracy and English titles affected him like strong drink. He collected dukes, duchesses, and other titled folk—in his view the only fit company for an Astor—the way he collected art and antiquities. He had little difficulty working his way into the circle of the pleasure-loving Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. The prince was notorious for his reliance on his smart-set coterie of bankers and South African mining millionaires to get him out of debt. “I have never been directly asked to assist him financially,” Astor told Amy Richardson, “nor have I done so.” But at the very least the prince had held him in reserve. In 1896 “Wealthy Willie,” as Astor was sometimes referred to in print, was reported to be engaged to marry Lady Randolph Churchill, the recently widowed mother of twenty-two-year-old Winston Churchill. “Mr. Astor's attentions to Lady Randolph Churchill have been so marked as to create no small amount of gossip,” Harold Frederic reported to the
New York Times
from London. Lady Churchill, the former Miss Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn, had many admirers, including the Shah of Persia (who cooled on the affair after deciding she wasn't fat enough for his taste). She was dazzled by Astor's money and social status, but nothing came of this, nor of a second rumor linking him with the Countess of Westmoreland, who proved to be companionably married to the earl. Of more consequence was to be William's fevered, quasi-operatic romance, in 1913, when he was sixty-five, with the beautiful and sexually liberated Lady Victoria Sackville.

As a London residence for his children and himself, Astor bought 18 Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St. James's Park. It was already celebrated as one of the most elegant private houses in London, but, in his accustomed style, he had it thoroughly refurbished, added paneling, frescoes, and tapestries, and ordered a forty-foot-long table made for the enormous dining room. He offered what was reported to be a “fabulous” sum of money to rent, for just two days, a London house on the line of the parade and procession celebrating Queen Victoria's sixty years on the throne in June 1897. His offer astounded the noble owner, who accepted without hesitation. “Mr. Astor, in his entertaining, his residences, and his stables, is handsomely living up to the foreign reputation of Americans for extravagance,” a
New York Times
editorial commented. “Perhaps, also, he is vainly endeavoring to live up to his income.”

For his London business headquarters, and private retreat where he entertained casual women friends, he bought the building on Victoria Embankment at 2 Temple Place. He spent about $1.5 million converting it into a crenellated Tudor-style stronghold that assured him the maximum of isolation while serving as a private museum for his notable collection of paintings, autographs, books (including Shakespeare folios), and antique musical instruments. The interiors of Temple Place were more opulent than those of his London residence. The study in the main hall was over seventy feet long; two ornate chandeliers hung from its thirty-five-foot-high roof of hammer-beamed Spanish mahogany; Persian rugs and tiger skins softened the relative austerity of the inlaid marble floors.

“There is no more curious room in London,” a local architect wrote, “than this hall which was intended by its creator to be a sort of temple of culture and expresses in a curious way his own tastes in art and literature.” William hung a portrait of himself by Hubert von Herkomer on the wall along with portraits of the founding Astor and successors. Not an inch of door surfaces, walls, ceilings, and stairwells was left bare of carving, paneling, or other decorations. Wooden figures of the Four Musketeers stood guard on the newel posts. His writing table, carefully preserved by him over the years, was exactly as he had used it, ornaments and all, at the legation in Rome. An Italian fortune-teller had told him back then that his life was in danger. Her warning, along with the vulnerability inherent in the possession of wealth, had made him fearful of kidnappers and assassins with designs on him and his children. He kept a loaded pistol on the bedside table in his pied-à-terre and equipped the building with a security system that allowed him, by pressing a button, to lock and bar all windows and entrances (at the same time effectively, he must have recognized, keeping an intruder from escaping).

An antique New England spinning wheel stood near his desk in the office library. The main hall displayed a frieze depicting characters from
The Scarlet Letter, The Last of the Mohicans,
and “Rip Van Winkle,” “all old friends of mine,” he called them. He was also a devoted reader of
Leaves of Grass
. The weather vane was a brilliantly gilded replica of one of Columbus's caravels. It symbolized the linking, by discovery and commerce, of the Old World from which John Jacob Astor had come and the New World where he made his fortune. As fervently as he tried to make the opposite true, to the British, and to himself as well in the depths of his consciousness, William remained naggingly an American, and perhaps his passion for Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
was evidence of this. Unlike most other expatriates he never lost or tried to lose his native accent, and he remained proud of New York City's tremendous vitality. He made several return visits to favorite places in the States—Gettysburg, the Massachusetts coast, the long stretch of the Hudson downriver from Albany—that he remembered from his boyhood.

From this secure office on Victoria Embankment, said H. G. Wells, who interviewed him there for his 1906 book,
The Future in America,
William Waldorf Astor drew “gold from New York”—perhaps $6 million a year in rents—“as effectually as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit.” He commanded an empire of office buildings; immense apartment houses on upper Broadway; blocks of decaying but invariably profitable tenement properties; the northern half of the famous old Astor House, built by his great-grandfather and still doing business; the Waldorf half of the Waldorf-Astoria; and all of another hotel, the New Netherland, built to his specifications at a cost of about $3 million and, along with the Waldorf, opened in 1892. The
Times
welcomed the New Netherland as “the second of the magnificent creations of this sort which William Waldorf Astor has completed.”

Seventeen stories high, promoted as the tallest hotel structure in the world and the first to have telephones in every room and its own telephone exchange, the New Netherland commanded the main entrance to Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. In external style a gabled and turreted brown brick version of German Renaissance architecture, his new hotel was similar to the Waldorf, but it had a a different ambience altogether, one of subdued but substantial elegance. In effect a marketplace and theater, the Waldorf-Astoria enclosed a world of glitter, wealth, and fashion bathed in an unremitting blaze of publicity. The New Netherland was aristocratic, reserved, and refined, more like a private club than a public facility. Reflecting William's distaste for what he felt was the vulgarity of American democracy and its army of journalists, the New Netherland, not the Waldorf-Astoria, was where he stayed on his occasional business visits to New York. Especially compared with the Waldorf, the New Netherland proved to be a financial disappointment and a managerial problem. At one point, embroiled in a bitter conflict with the resident “proprietor,” General Ferdinand Earle, Astor evicted him and his family for nonpayment of back rent. He ordered the hotel emptied of its over two hundred guests, stripped of the furnishings installed by Earle, and briefly shut down. Even so, despite this experience, the New Netherland was not to be the last of Astor's innkeeping enterprises. For all his fastidiousness and snobbery he remained as passionate and knowing about luxury hotels for the American public as about Greco-Roman statuary and estates in the English countryside.

Even before 1899, when William finally renounced his citizenship to become a subject of Queen Victoria, his public career and conduct had become topics of outrage on both sides of the ocean. To his former countrymen he was a traitor who had fled to England like Benedict Arnold or Judah P. Benjamin, Jefferson Davis's secretary of state; an ingrate who unforgivably, for all his advantages, had managed to find life in America not good enough for him; a coward who slunk away from politics after failing even to buy elective office; a would-be leader of New York society who ceded the field to his aunt,
the
Mrs. Astor, and her feckless son Jack. Like a burglar with a sack of family plate and candlesticks over his shoulder, he was seen to be taking American dollars abroad and, in the hope of buying himself a title, liberally bestowing them on the British. He gave millions of dollars to British universities, hospitals, and charities, and to the British army (including a $25,000 artillery battery) during the Boer War and World War I.