When the Astors Owned New York (14 page)

Already fancying himself as British as any duke and with as much dignity to maintain, William wrote a heated letter to the
London Times
accusing the
Daily Mail
of libeling him as “a foolish and ridiculous person” by publishing “a deliberate and mischievous fabrication.” He testified to that effect in open court before the lord chief justice. Through his distinguished counsel, formerly the queen's solicitor general, Astor complained that from time to time since settling in England he had been the subject of similar “personal and offensive paragraphs.” The aftermath of the suit that he brought was as demeaning as that of his injudicious ouster of Captain Milne. Hearing the case, the lord chief justice had some fun at Astor's expense and, contrary to customary decorum, even invited raucous laughter in the courtroom. He himself had been the butt of such American-style pleasantries, his lordship said. He cited a London newspaper story to the effect that as president of the divorce court he himself had pronounced his own divorce from his wife. “We are not divorced,” he said, “and I am not the president of the divorce court.” He suggested that Mr. Astor, who (as everyone knew) had enjoyed similar experiences with the press back home in the States, should by now have been hardened to such nonsense. Advised by counsel against letting his grievance go to a jury, Astor accepted an apology from the
Daily Mail
and withdrew from legal combat. While it lasted, “the W. W. Astor Libel Suit,” another chapter in the misadventures of a transplanted American Croesus, made good copy in both England and the States.

In 1906, having rescued Cliveden from decay and restored it to his exacting taste, Astor turned his drive to build and indulge his historical imagination to an even larger and more expensive enterprise than Cliveden. Mogul emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, and mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, builder of fantastic castles along the Danube, would have recognized the impulse. William bought Hever, a manor house estate in Kent, southeast of London. Once the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, it later passed into the hands of Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. William spent four years and an estimated $10 million to make Hever conform to his historical imaginings and, in effect, regress it four hundred years. He had a surrounding ditch excavated into a moat and filled with water, built a new drawbridge and portcullis, and repaired the battlements. Hever now had a deer park, fountains, a boating lake, and, among modern improvements, a power-generating plant and waterworks.

At one point Astor employed 840 workmen of all trades inside and out to create for him, in the heart of twentieth-century England, a self-sustaining and self-contained medieval domain. Guarded by a wall twelve feet high, its 640 acres comprised a model farm; a 50-acre man-made lake, in spots sixteen feet deep, dug out of marsh and meadowland; two bridges to span the winding river that ran through the estate; newly planted forests; a deer park; walled gardens and a fountain; and barbered grounds surrounding a maze of yew hedge. To houseguests, servants, and estate workers Astor built an entire thatched-roof Tudor village separated from the castle by the moat, drawbridge, and double portcullis. An eight-man security force patrolled the gates and kept out automobiles, uninvited visitors, cameras, and especially the press. A poster at the local railway station informed the public that Hever, long one of the local attractions, was no longer open to visitors.

In an article Astor commissioned and published in his
Pall Mall Magazine
the writer, Olive Sebright, described Hever in terms that explain part of its appeal to the new owner. Hever was “a haunt of ancient peace,” she wrote. “When we cross the bridge and pass under the double portcullis, we leave the world of to-day behind us, and in the old half-timbered courtyard, lose all sense of surprise and speculation. Life becomes a dream of tranquil simplicity, and the fitness of it all fills and satisfies our restless spirit.” Lordship of Hever Castle, surrounded there by artifacts of an era of absolute monarchy, gave Astor not only a private retreat from the present but a solitude in which to enjoy his treasures and the illusion of living in another time.

He dwelled alone in the ancient manor house that he had converted into a one-bedroom medieval castle furnished with skillfully adapted modern conveniences such as indoor plumbing and electricity. However anachronistic, he made such comforts the dominant note in his bedroom. “I should not like to live in a museum,” he told Amy Richardson.

DRAWBRIDGE RISES FOR ASTOR ENTRY:
newspapers ridiculed his improvements and accused him of “ruining” Hever just as (in their view) he had ruined Cliveden. But, just as he had done at Cliveden, he imposed his will and wealth on his property. When in residence at Hever Castle he flew his personal flag over the battlements. It displayed the coat of arms that supposedly linked the Astor butchers and rabbit skinners to a Franco-Spanish line of noble descent going back to the Crusades. He furnished Hever's great hall and minstrels' gallery with shields, banners, tapestries, pennants, halberds, swords, suits of armor, instruments of torture and punishment, and vanloads of museum pieces from the shops and warehouses of Regent Street and Bond Street dealers in antiquities. Established in such surroundings he enjoyed the prospect of one day entering the peerage as Baron (later Viscount) Astor of Hever Castle. Through agents and advisers he assembled a notable art collection at Hever that rivaled Henry Clay Frick's in New York: it included Holbein's portraits of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Titian's Philip II, Clouet's Edward VI, and Cranach's Martin Luther. He liked to believe that Hever was haunted by the ghost of Anne Boleyn, sent to the headsman's block by her husband, who accused her of incest and adultery. Her prayer book and bed were among the relics Astor acquired and installed at Hever. According to local legend, the headless queen, accompanied by a headless black dog, nightly walked the castle's dark passageways and windswept battlements. Making an exception to his ban on allowing strangers to penetrate his feudal fastness, Astor invited ghost hunters from the British Society for Psychical Research to keep a vigil at Hever. They reported no sightings.

iii.

W
HILE
W
ILLIAM
W
ALDORF
A
STOR
completed his transformation into an Englishman of the highest rank, his patriotic cousin Jack entered upon a military career of sorts. It had had its beginnings in 1894 with a largely ceremonial appointment. Jack's Rhinecliff neighbor New York governor-elect Levi P. Morton, a Republican banker who had been Benjamin Harrison's vice president, chose Jack, and half a dozen other rich and socially prominent civilians, to serve on his military staff as aides-de-camp. This granted Jack the rank of colonel, the duty of escorting the governor on public occasions, and the right to carry a sword and wear a gold-braid aiguillette on a dress uniform tailored for him at great expense.

Jack's appointment to a position of honor and display rather than valor and discipline did little to redeem his reputation from years of providing entertainment for newspaper and gossip-sheet readers. But he was soon in harmony with the war fever against Spain that was to sweep the United States. He had firm and outspoken convictions about the destiny of Cuba, which, he believed, was to be liberated from the grip of Spain and annexed to the United States. With the destruction of the battleship
Maine
in Havana Harbor in February 1898, the idea of a war with Spain came to a boil in the minds of President William McKinley, Secretary of State John Hay, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Jack moved with purpose and vigor to win for himself a place in the army. He wished to be “Colonel Astor” as fervently as William wished to be “Viscount Astor.” Putting aside his normally unshakable Astor pride, he lobbied, wheedled, and politicked in Washington, applied pressure and influence in the right quarters, and, in effect, engineered for himself a commission as army inspector general with the rank of lieutenant colonel. His appointment to the volunteer army, the
Times
noted dourly, had been made “without relevancy to the good of the service.” The notion of Jack Astor strapping on a sword and mounting a neighing battle steed aroused hilarity in the general public as well as resentment among more qualified warriors who were also seeking a commission.

Mr. Dooley, satirist Finley Peter Dunne's fictional Irish saloon philosopher, had Jack and his ilk in mind when he announced his views of the war in a nationally circulated column in the
Chicago Journal
. Mr. Dooley depicted a freshly minted officer in mufti, wearing an English suit and accompanied by his valet, as he explained to President McKinley why he was unable to leave immediately for the front in Cuba: “Me pink silk pijammas hasn't arrived.” “Wait f'r th' pijammas,” McKinley tells this would-be Alexander the Great. “Thin on to war…an' let ye'er watchword be, ‘Raymimber ye'er manners.'” Dooley predicted, “We'll put th' tastiest ar-rmy in th' field that iver came out of a millinery shop.” Special correspondents from
Butterick's Patterns
and
Harper's Bazaar,
he said, would soon be following onto the field of combat in Cuba the most fashionably dressed military force that ever creased its pants.

Jack gave good value for his appointment. He lent the navy his refurbished 250-foot, 745-ton yacht
Nourmahal
and offered free passage for troops and volunteers on his Illinois Central Railroad. He raised, equipped, and trained at his own expense—$75,000 and much more, as needed—the Astor Battery, a regiment of mountain artillery for service in Cuba and the Philippines: six rapid-firing Hotchkiss field guns served by 102 enlisted men with the words “Astor Battery” stamped in gold letters on uniforms, hats, and knapsacks. Brass buttons on their tunics bore the letter A and an eagle. Jack accompanied his Astor Battery to Cuba. Himself properly kitted out in field uniform and campaign hat, and with binoculars slung around his neck, Astor stood with the artist Frederic Remington within rifle and artillery range of the Spanish fortifications on San Juan Hill. Before they were ordered to move out of “this hellspot,” as Remington called it, they witnessed the uphill charge that was in effect Rough Rider colonel Theodore Roosevelt's dramatic first step toward the presidency.

Jack returned from a month in Cuba unscathed except for a touch of fever contracted in the field (and a shrapnel wound to his horse). On furlough after delivering dispatches to the War Department, he was reported to be planning to rejoin the army and his Astor Battery in the Philippines. An accompanying news item reported that the
Nourmahal
, back in its owner's hands after uneventful service with the navy, had remained true to form: it had run hard and fast aground in the Hudson off Haverstraw, some twenty-five miles downriver from Ferncliff.

For the rest of his life, and posthumously as well, Jack was “Colonel Astor,” patriot, war hero, and gallant gentleman. He had stood “ready to answer any call his country may make upon him,” as he told a reporter from the
New York Times,
and he was outspoken in his scorn for his renegade cousin William Waldorf Astor. He even played the genealogical card against his cousin. Unlike William, he could cite descent on his mother's side from patriots of the Revolutionary period. “I have the blood in me of my grandmother, who was a sister of Colonel Henry Armstrong and a daughter of General Armstrong. They were both true Americans and the Armstrong blood is strong in me.” Although somewhat eroded by his exemplary war service, Jack's old reputation as playboy and dilettante remained nearly impossible to shake. When the Murray Hill Republican Club proposed him for Congress (on a ticket with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt as governor), Tammany boss Richard Croker effectively shot down the idea. “I will stick to it that Astor is an ass,” he declared. “And that an ass even though an Astor has no business in the Congress of the United States.”

With no position in the Congress or any other public body, the demobilized warrior devoted his energies to Caribbean cruises aboard the
Nourmahal,
his collection of about sixty motorcars, his laboratory and workshop, his stable of Thoroughbreds, and two principal residences: Ferncliff, one of the largest country estates in America; and 840–842 Fifth Avenue, the white marble double mansion he shared with his mother. He belonged to more than forty clubs in New York, Tuxedo, Newport, Paris, and London. European travel, visits to Palm Beach, and, for shooting, to Aiken, South Carolina, were among other pleasures and distractions in what was generally recognized as a life without a significant focus aside from the mainly titular management of his business interests.

As head of the American branch of the Astor estate he controlled immense business and residential realty holdings all over Manhattan, including his half of the Waldorf-Astoria and the old Astor House. He had a seat on the boards of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, the Illinois Central Railroad, New York Life Insurance, Niagara Falls Power, Western Union Telegraph, several banks, and at least a dozen other companies. Fast trains between Albany and New York City made special stops for him at Rhinecliff to accommodate his business trips to the Astor estate office on West Twenty-sixth Street.

Together with eighty-five other “representative men,” in 1905 Colonel John Jacob Astor was a subject of virtual canonization in a mammoth (twelve-by-eighteen-inch) gilt-edged, opulently bound and illustrated album, offered to subscribers at $1,500 a copy:
Fads and Fancies: Representative Americans at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, Being a Portrayal of Their Tastes, Diversions, and Achievements
. The creator of this ultimate vanity book was the longtime gossip journalist and shakedown artist Colonel William D'Alton Mann, publisher of
Town Topics
. With
Fads and Fancies,
a grotesquely mild title for a hagiography of American capitalists and firebooters, Colonel Mann hoped to cash in on a lifetime of work.