When the Astors Owned New York (18 page)

“A woman in the flower of her prime—like yourself—needs a romantic attachment,” William wrote to her from Marienbad, where he had gone to take the waters for his gout and rheumatism. “Without it the heart grows cold. It is as necessary as daily bread, and not even Knole and four acres at Hampstead can take its place. It is the consciousness that someone is thinking of you, desires you, longs for the touch of your beautiful body that keeps the heart young. Sweetheart, goodbye.” He signed himself “Will.” He confessed that for years when they met socially he had been afraid of her, “by which I mean fearful of displeasing you, for to have done so would have pained me dreadfully.”

Everything between them had changed one afternoon—he called it his own “après-midi d'un faun”—when she came to see him in his “secluded retreat” at Hever Castle. “Have just come in for a walk,” he wrote after she left. “I smiled to notice the footprints, large and small, in the wet gravel at the House of the Poetic Faun…for anything I might have said and done in that splendid hour's excitement I entreat forgiveness…. I take away with me an infinitely delightful remembrance, and I kiss your hand.” Later he added, “That momentous Saturday was the psychological hour for which you and I have unconsciously waited…. What wonderful things awaken at the meeting of the hands.” He urged her to come to him again for lunch and the afternoon. “The only suitable rendezvous I know of in England is my office, a little palace on the Embankment where I live in solitude.
La ci darem la mano!
Without at present attempting details I would show you how to arrive veiled and unannounced and as I alone should let you in and out, none but we could know.” Fooley, his butler-valet, he assured her, “has been with me 13 years. He has seen many things and has always been discreet.”

Victoria declined the invitation, but teased him with the prospect of a chaperoned and chaste meeting in Switzerland, what she called “a picnic without refreshments.” Resigned to her proposed regimen of “iced love-making,” he said he would be happy, nevertheless, “to take your dear hand in mine again…. I shall have no other thought than to please you in all things.” In his love-struck Aladdin mode he had prevailed on her to accept from him “a little gift” of £10,000 in banknotes for the garden at Knole.

By the end of the winter of 1913–1914, though, Astor had been replaced in Victoria's affections by a former lover, a Swedish baron, whom she ran into in Perugia on her way to visit Astor in Sorrento. The baron had unexpectedly resurfaced in her life after an absence of thirty-two years, exerted his old powers, and “won me again entirely,” she wrote in her diary. Traveling by her chauffeured Rolls-Royce, she then proceeded south to Sorrento to break the news to Astor. After a weekend at Villa Sirena, the affair with him that she had managed with discretion and restraint—always “careful not to be talked about”—was pronounced dead, having suffered internal injuries on the way there. “He seems disappointed in me. What else can I do?” Victoria wrote in her diary. “We are parting perfectly good friends, but things have changed, alas.” From then on her loving “Will” signed his letters to her “W. W. Astor.” “He has become so hard on everybody,” she wrote in her diary, “even against his own children, and so self-centered and unfeeling about everything.”

For a year he had set aside his old self, and when his affair with Lady Sackville was over he began to shut down as if in preparation for his demise. He divested himself of his publishing enterprises. He conveyed to his sons, Waldorf and John Jacob V, all of his holdings in Manhattan real estate. Assessed at about $70 million, they included the northern part of the Broadway frontage formerly occupied by his ancestor's Astor House, the Waldorf section of the Waldorf-Astoria, the Hotel Astor, the Astor Theater, the Astor Court Building, the Astor Apartments, and the New Netherland Hotel, along with a number of office buildings and apartment houses that without blazoning the Astor name nevertheless asserted the Astor primacy on Manhattan Island.

The driving force in William's final years remained the determination to win a place in the British peerage. He made no secret of his ambition, even at the cost of inviting ridicule. Once, without having received any signal to justify his confidence that the day of his elevation was at hand, he appeared at a party wearing a peer's ermine-and-velvet robe. What he believed was the holy grail of a title, more down-to-earth and realistic folk recognized as being in many cases a crass recognition of successes in commodities such as beer, soap, and cereal, and of generous contributions to party coffers. In the spirit that drove his quest he had more in common with his former countrymen than he would have liked to acknowledge: instead of comporting themselves like citizens of a democracy that had shaken off aristocratic distinctions, Americans were notorious for becoming virtually unhinged with borrowed glory when they found themselves shaking hands with a duke. Even more than the cooked-up genealogy William had commissioned, the prospect of becoming Lord Astor was a preemptive way to at least mitigate the fact of his descent from the soil of Baden.

Before 1914, when England entered the war, and especially after, he made large gifts to the Conservative Party that were duly noted by the dispensers of royal favor: he also gave $250,000 to the universities, and during the war $275,000 to various charities and hospitals, $200,000 to the Red Cross, and $175,000 to a public fund for the wounded. Counting in his “war loans” and outright personal gifts, he may have given away as much as $5 million. “It must have been a great deal more fun to make money and spend most of it on the public, as Mr. Carnegie did,” the
New York Times
commented when Astor finally achieved his peerage, “than to be born rich and then try to make your way to other distinctions.”

After a decade of benefactions bolstered by direct and indirect politicking, William was at last named a peer of the realm on King George V's New Year's Day Honors list in 1916. Two weeks later, robed as Baron Astor of Hever Castle, he made a twenty-minute pro forma appearance in the House of Lords. He reappeared there the following year when he was upped a notch to viscount. Meanwhile he carried on an extensive correspondence with the College of Arms and the editors of Debrett's
Peerage
on the subject of the heraldic device to replace the one on his pre-peerage flag. After drafts and redrafts he settled on the motto
Ad Astra
and the emblem of a falcon surmounted by an eagle and three stars and flanked by two standing figures, an American Indian and a fur trapper, altogether a conflation of Astor family history, both true and imagined.

Astor's elder son, Waldorf, was already well launched on a career in politics as member of Parliament for Plymouth. He did not welcome his father's elevation to the peerage. For him a hereditary title in the Astor family, far from being a desirable distinction, was a disaster, even a stigma to be passed on by law from father to son: by law, on William's death Waldorf would have to resign his elected seat and, against his will, move to the relatively ineffectual House of Lords as the second Viscount Astor. Displaying a remarkable lack of empathy, he demanded that William renounce his hard-won title. That failing, he threatened to find a legal way to relinquish it when it passed to him. In his father's view all this was not only an impossible demand but an unpardonable insult. “I am sorry that Waldorf takes my promotion so bitterly hard,” William wrote to his daughter-in-law, Nancy. “I cannot think that what has happened is in any sense a decadence and the course of advancement is as open to me as to him…. The love of success is in my blood, and personally speaking I am delighted to have rounded these last years of my life with a distinction.” “I have never gone in pursuit of this honor,” the first Viscount Astor added, possibly having convinced himself, while in the grip of denial, that this was conceivably the case. “In all things the honor should come to the man and not that the man should go stalking the honor.” He banished Waldorf, and during the three years before William's death, they never spoke to each other.

William's relationship with Waldorf's sister, Pauline, was equally contentious and as brutally terminated. She had tried to mediate the quarrel over title and succession only to be similarly banished as a party to her brother's insulting behavior. Even much later, although suffering from progressive heart disease and chronic gout and declining into invalidism, William rejected an offer from Pauline to nurse and companion him. “I told you three years ago,” he wrote, “that I did not wish to see you again. There is no reason for me to change my mind.” “I pity my father from the bottom of my heart,” Pauline said, “and think it's almost impossible for us to realize the emptiness and the misery of the life he has made for himself.” Viscount Astor was now alienated from two of his three children. He had given over Hever to the third, John Jacob V, recuperating there from war wounds and the partial amputation of his right leg.

Soon after his elevation to viscount and his move from Hever, Astor went into seclusion in a house at Brighton, on the Sussex coast. He had long been fond of this favored resort of royalty and believed the sea air would act as a cure. Recently redecorated for him in the Astor manner, the last of his houses was an otherwise undistinguished two-story Regency building at 155 King's Road, almost across the way from the Edward VII memorial. Occupied by a reclusive millionaire, a famous former American recently raised to the peerage, Astor's silent retreat became one of the mysteries and curiosities of Brighton. A high board fence surrounded the property and blocked views from the outside. Astor's butler and a private detective patrolled the perimeter and guarded the front gate, turning away anyone who applied for admission. Not even the borough surveyor was permitted to enter to exercise his official function.

On the evening of October 18, 1919, Astor sat down alone to his customary four-course dinner prepared to his orders by a resident cook and accompanied by wines from his cellar. After taking coffee and port he withdrew behind the closed door of his lavatory and died there. The cause of his death at the age of seventy-one and a half was probably congestive heart failure. London and New York papers the next day were skittish in accounting for the precise location of his demise, it being more in keeping with both journalistic decorum in dealing with the dead and the dignity of the dead viscount to report that he had died in bed instead of on the toilet. After simple services in London attended by Astor's three children and their spouses the body was cremated, and, following standing instructions, the ashes were buried under the marble floor of the private chapel he had prepared at Cliveden.

Two years before he died, Astor had printed for himself and a few friends a seventy-six-page book of reminiscences,
Silhouettes: 1855–1885
. There he recalled his boyhood in New York; his parents' stifling religious orthodoxy from which, at the age of eighteen, he liberated himself; his training at the Astor estate office; his careers in politics and diplomacy; and, most poignant of all his memories, the Italian girl—“the Princess of my fairy tale”—whom he had not been allowed to marry. For all his contrary and agitated nature, he even managed to claim for himself the achievement of “a peace the classics knew,” a peace that was surely unsuspected by his children and others who had run up against his will. Turning to the literature of his native country, and to perhaps its most passionate celebrator of democracy, nativism, and solitude, he prefaced his book with a passage from
Leaves of Grass
. Walt Whitman's lines spoke as well for William's own longing for equanimity:

K
NOWN NATIONWIDE
as “the Forty-second Street Country Club,” the popular bar in Jack Astor's Hotel Knickerbocker on Times Square became a casualty of Prohibition in 1919. When it closed, it took the hotel down with it. In May 1929, five months before the stock market crash of Black Tuesday marked the end of good times, the Waldorf-Astoria, for four decades site, symbol, and catalyst of that era, also closed its doors. By Jazz Age standards its style and grandeur were stodgy, snobbish, and out of date. Relatively remote from the stretch of fashionable New York along upper Fifth Avenue, the hotel had also been hit by ten years of Prohibition that effectively shut off a major source of income and traffic. Reflective visitors who thronged the lobby and corridors during the hotel's last days in business recalled the dreams of wealth, luxury, glamour, and proximity to the great and famous that had been played out there. They visited for the last time the silken, velvet, and marble settings of Peacock Alley, the Turkish Salon, the Palm Court Restaurant, and the grand ballroom.

Closing-night entertainment in the ballroom was far from being one of the extravaganzas for which the hotel had been celebrated. The event was homelier, more in keeping with the coming era of the Depression: a performance by the one hundred members of the Consolidated Gas and Electric Choral Society. In the record three-week-long on-site auction that followed the closing, souvenir collectors, sentimentalists, antiquarians, and dealers bid on more than twenty thousand lots of hotel property. The auction inventory included bath mats and towels lettered “W.A.,” brass spittoons (destined to be recycled for use as fern bowls), chairs, dishes, bric-a-brac, 125 pianos, and other items down to the last spoon, finger bowl, and wine goblet. The world-famous name “Waldorf-Astoria,” which encapsulated the history of both an era and a dynasty, went for a token $1 to the builders of a new and otherwise unrelated hotel going up on Park Avenue. By February 1930 Henry Hardenbergh's great building, one of the architectural wonders of Manhattan, had been leveled. Its two-acre site, where the parents of the Astor cousins once dwelt in their brownstone mansions, was cleared for another architectural milestone, the 102-story Empire State Building.

In a comparably radical transition from the old order to the new, the marble chateau at 840 Fifth Avenue where Caroline Astor and her son Jack had assembled the chosen in the ballroom, had also yielded to Manhattan's inexorable tide of demolition, renewal, and social change. Torn down in the 1920s, the Astors' mansion was replaced by Temple Emanu-El, one of the world's largest synagogues and both symbol and assembly place of Manhattan's new Jewish hegemony.

In 1967, along with the Metropolitan Opera House, a similar monument of a bygone era, the spectacular Hotel Astor fell to the wreckers. Workmen said it was the most difficult job of its sort they had ever known: the walls were so fortress-thick that the massive iron ball of the demolition crane often brought down nothing but chips of masonry and clouds of dust. Meanwhile, the surrounding theater district, the
Times
reported, had become “standee country for viewers of one of the smash hits in town—the demolition of the Astor Hotel.” A towering office building went up in its place. “Meet me at the Astor,” a New York byword, was now a whisper from the past. In 1926, on the site of William Waldorf Astor's once-commanding New Netherland rose the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, a thirty-eight-story building more than twice as high as the one it replaced and topped with a slender spire. During the 1990s, having long since passed out of the Astor estate into corporate ownership, Jack's St. Regis underwent what was said to be a $100 million makeover that modernized and at the same time restored it to its original gilded, bronze, and marble splendor.

Along with his villa at Sorrento, William Waldorf Astor's Hever Castle, his “House of the Poetic Faun,” likewise passed into outside hands. In 1982 his grandson Gavin Astor put Hever up for sale (at $25 million) after a series of floods turned the property surrounding the castle into a giant moat. At last report, the current owners, Broadland Properties Limited, operate Hever as a combined conference center and theme park. Visitors can buy tickets for admission to the castle, gardens, maze of yew hedge, topiary, and the former owner's collections of Roman statuary, arms and armor, and “historic instruments of execution, torture, and discipline” (the last a powerful attraction for the young). Hever also offers special events like a Royal Jousting Tournament, a demonstration of Tudor archery, and a festival of autumn colors. Astor's Anne Boleyn relics are still in place, an essential element, the proprietors say, in the castle's “homely atmosphere.” The Tudor village Astor designed to accommodate his guests and staff while he lived alone in his moated castle is now “an exclusive-use venue with twenty-five bedrooms and is used for corporate events and private dining throughout the year.” A few years after his death Astor's office building at 2 Temple Place went to an insurance company for use as corporate headquarters. Damaged in the bombing of London during World War II and afterward repaired, Temple Place is now a conference center. The weather vane Astor designed for his London retreat, a golden replica of one of Columbus's caravels, still turns in the wind.

Together, and also in competition with each other, the two Astor cousins had enriched hotel life, social life, and even civic life on the American continent. In doing this they had asserted personal pride and an unshakable sense of superiority derived from great wealth and the loose definition of aristocracy that Americans have always favored. Even though he had made a gift of it to his son, it was the estate at Cliveden that closed the circle on William's own life and on a career, like his cousin's, as innkeeper on an imperial scale. William's statue of a wounded Amazon, emblem of his youthful ambition to escape the family countinghouse, still stands in the rose garden he commissioned. He had brought over to Cliveden and installed above the parterre the monumental stone balustrade from the Borghese garden in Rome acquired during his term as American minister. Impassive and commanding, William Waldorf Astor himself looks out from Von Herkomer's portrait in oils that hangs above the marble mantelpiece in the dining room. His ashes are buried beneath the chapel floor. Even after the radical changes in style and atmosphere that his daughter-in-law had ordered, Cliveden bears his signature and expresses his determination to reconstitute himself as a Briton and commemorate himself by possessing one of the stately homes of England.

Cliveden's subsequent history would have dismayed William. In the fall of 1937 Claud Cockburn, a member of the British Communist Party and editor of the influential single-sheet news bulletin the
Week,
wrote a story about what came to be known as “the Cliveden Set.” According to Cockburn, this was a clutch of highly placed Britons, some of them prominent in public life, who supported Hitler, favored accommodation to the Third Reich, and hoped to shape their own government's policy accordingly. In effect (or at least intention) Cliveden had become the seat of “Britain's second Foreign Office.” According to Cockburn, members of this cabal met on long country weekends at the Astor estate and laid their plans there with Hitler's representatives. (The British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro's 1989 novel
The Remains of the Day
presents a highly colored version of these conferences at Cliveden, renamed “Darlington Hall.”) During the anxious months before German tanks rolled into Poland, the notion of a “Cliveden Set,” however much it had been a product of Cockburn's flair for the sensational, captured the public imaginings and provoked alarming news reports. “Friends of Hitler strong in Britain,” the
New York Times
reported from London. “The apparent strength of Germany's case in this country comes from the fact that Germany's best friends are to be found in the wealthiest ‘upper crust' of British life.” In all likelihood, according to a recent study (Norman Rose,
The Cliveden Set
[London, 2000]), Cockburn's sinister “Cliveden Set” was a more or less harmless think tank composed of amateurs, misguided do-gooders, and busybodies who were, as Ishiguro's novel suggests, “out of their depth.”

Cockburn's story and its sequels left a permanent smudge on the reputations of Nancy Astor and her husband, Waldorf, hosts and organizers of the Cliveden weekends. Otherwise outspoken chiefly on the subject of racehorses, Astor published a long letter to the
Times
of London in which he denounced Cockburn's article as “a Communist fiction,” “a myth from beginning to end.” He charged that it maliciously conflated a well-intentioned policy of exploring avenues to peace with active support of Adolf Hitler. But the damage had been done: Cliveden, William Waldorf Astor's retreat in the English countryside, was to be remembered as a nest of vipers. For his part, Cockburn was delighted by the immediate and lasting currency of the phrase he coined. “People who wanted to explain everything by something and were ashamed to say ‘sunspots,'” he wrote in his memoirs, “said ‘Cliveden Set.'”

In the early 1960s, during the cold war between the West and Khrushchev's Soviet Union, the name Cliveden gained further notoriety. A private poolside party there was the source of a scandal that involved an alleged breach of national security and caused the eventual fall of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's government. Possibly inspired by the
Fountain of Love
statuary group William Waldorf Astor had installed along the grand avenue leading to the house, a teenage call girl named Christine Keeler shed her clothes, danced naked about the Cliveden pool, and engaged the fancy of two party guests in particular. Each of them, concurrently, became her lover. One was John Profumo, Macmillan's minister for war, and the other was Captain Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet intelligence agent whose official cover was military attaché. Guilty of lying about the affair to the House of Commons, Profumo left his cabinet post in disgrace. “Profumo Affair” became as firmly fastened to Cliveden as Cockburn's unsquelchable phrase.

Britain's National Trust now owns the Cliveden property and its 375 acres of lawn, gardens, and woodland. During the 1970s the trust leased Cliveden to Stanford University, and subsequently to the University of Massachusetts, for use as an overseas study center for undergraduates—as it turned out, an awkward experiment in disparate living styles. The manor at Cliveden now operates as a luxury hotel that outdoes the prototypical New York establishments of more than a century earlier. Including butler, footmen, housemaids, and cooks, the hotel at Cliveden claims to employ a staff of four for each of its thirty-seven bedrooms. It's the right place for those who, like its former owner, wish to live like a lord and can afford it.