Last Train to Paradise (4 page)

Flagler had amassed a fortune, it is true, but at the same time his monumental business achievements had brought him the apparent enmity of an entire nation. In addition, he had lost his wife, the virtual supporting pillar of his private life.

It should have come as no surprise, then, that a man in Flagler’s position—wealthy beyond imagination, his public life a source of never-ending condemnation, his personal life virtually obliterated—should be poised for a sea change.

But Flagler had begun to see the possibilities of satisfaction to be derived from sources outside the arena of business. His renovations at Satan’s Toe, along with the favor it found in the eyes of friends and business associates, had provided him with unexpected pleasure, and another uncharacteristic force had entered the purview of his life as well.

One of the nurses who had attended Mary Flagler during her final years was a young woman of thirty-five named Ida Alice Shourds, an attractive woman with flaming red hair, bright blue eyes, and a volatile temper. Flagler, who had lived thirty years with an attractive though restrained and often bedridden mate, found himself smitten. Though Ida Alice had no formal education and did not share Flagler’s own enthusiasm for reading and modest cultural interests, neither that nor the general disapproval of his friends and family seemed to bother the fifty-three-year-old Flagler greatly. His courtship was as resolute as his acquisition of wealth had been; in June of 1883, Flagler and Ida Alice were married.

Even Ida Alice’s fabled shopping sprees, which netted her one of the most elaborate wardrobes in New York City, didn’t faze him, for Flagler was a wealthy man, his net worth at $20 million and climbing with every barrel of crude oil that the vast Standard Oil combine pumped out of the ground. He had made it beyond his wildest expectations, this poor, puritanical boy from the sticks, and it seemed that he was ready to enjoy the fruits of his labor at last.

4

Paradise Found

Though Flagler, then fifty-three, and Ida Alice, thirty-five, had married in June, business considerations delayed their honeymoon until December. To escape the frigid New York weather, Flagler proposed a return to Jacksonville, where he and Mary had spent some of their more pleasurable days.

Flagler and his new bride traveled by rail to Jacksonville, and, after a few days rest, embarked on a sail down the St. Johns River to the historic town of Saint Augustine, founded by Spanish explorers in 1565 and the oldest settlement in the United States. To the Flaglers, harried by the press of city life, and mindful of a subzero cold wave that gripped the North, balmy St. Augustine, with its two thousand inhabitants, waving palms, and blooming orange groves, seemed like paradise itself. The honeymoon would last until March, and less than a year later, Flagler and Ida would return.

This time Flagler combined business with pleasure. He’d heard that a new hotel was being built in St. Augustine, and had been developing ideas of his own. He met with a Boston architect who had built a winter home of his own in St. Augustine, using a new poured-concrete process that allowed for considerable fluidity in styling, even where larger structures were concerned.

It was the key that Flagler had been looking for. In short order he had bought up a large section of unproductive orange groves, had hired himself a New York architect, and embarked upon the building of a lavish Mediterranean-themed hotel—the Ponce de Leon—in St. Augustine.

News of Flagler’s project swept through New York City financial circles like wildfire. For a man whose stature was the equal of John D. Rockefeller’s to embark upon a project of such magnitude at that time would be a bit like Walt Disney announcing plans to build a second version of Disneyland in central Florida. The ensuing publicity set off the first of the great Florida real-estate speculation frenzies, and Flagler was deluged with offers from every quarter, most of which he brushed aside.

For while this was clearly business, it was business of a different sort. No degree of success in hotel management could ever provide an income rivaling what had come from oil.

During an 1887 interview granted to the
Jacksonville News Herald,
Flagler was asked to explain why on earth a man with a major interest in the most powerful company on earth would want to get into the hotel business. Flagler responded by telling a story he’d grown fond of—that of the elderly church deacon asked to explain a sudden, unaccountable bout of drunkenness. The deacon explained to his pastor that he had spent all his days hitherto in the Lord’s service, Flagler said, and now he was finally taking one for himself.

Similarly, Flagler told the reporter, “For the last fourteen or fifteen years I have devoted my time exclusively to business, and now I am pleasing myself.”

Later in the same interview Flagler elaborated: “[T]he Ponce de Leon is an altogether different affair. I want something to last all time to come. . . . I would hate to think that I am investing money that will not bring a return in the future. I will, however, have a hotel that suits me in every respect, and one that I can thoroughly enjoy, cost what it may.”

Those were fateful words, spoken at the beginning of a new career for Henry Flagler. It was a credo that would inform all the subsequent work of “the man who built Florida,” a two-decades process that would culminate in the “lunatic notion” to build a railroad across the sea.

It is doubtful that Flagler was looking that far ahead at the time, for the building of the Ponce de Leon was no easy task: at the time, malaria was an uncontrollable threat to workmen in St. Augustine’s hot and humid climate, and the amount of native rock that needed to be quarried from nearby public lands required a government waiver. It took nearly a year and a half to build the 540-room hotel, a process that Flagler himself oversaw, down to the opening of crated furniture alongside his crews.

One of the favorite stories retold by Flagler biographers concerns the builder’s predilection for dropping by the building site unannounced, to see how things were going. One day, however, Flagler, who was smoking a cigar, found his way blocked by a zealous guard. The guard pointed out one of the many “No Smoking” signs posted about and furthermore informed Flagler that there was to be no trespassing on the construction site. When Flagler protested that he was the owner, the guard was unfazed. There had been a good many Flaglers showing up all week, trying to get a look at what was going on, the guard announced, and he’d thrown every one of them out. Flagler was still trying to talk his way in, when one of the general contractors happened by and began to chastise the guard for not recognizing whom he was talking to. Flagler interceded, however, pleased by his workman’s steadfastness and efficiency.

All of Flagler’s careful oversight was to pay off, moreover. When the Ponce de Leon opened, the national press proclaimed it superior to hotels such as Chicago’s Palmer House and San Francisco’s Palace, and socialites flocked southward to experience this Babylon, where even the meanest room featured electric lights and had cost one thousand dollars to decorate.

Certainly part of Flagler’s success resulted from his insistence that no detail be overlooked in creating an atmosphere of splendor for his guests. But in retrospect, his timing was perfect as well.

It was, after all, the middle of what historians have termed the “Gilded Age” of American history, a period that stretched from the end of the Civil War until the Great Crash of 1929, marked by unbounded industrial growth and prosperity, and an optimism that was barely dimmed by World War I. The term was coined after the title of a Mark Twain novel published in 1873, a characteristically dark satire attacking the pitfalls and excesses of land and business speculation rampant during the postwar years.

Twain’s reservations notwithstanding, public confidence and personal wealth were growing at an unprecedented rate. Centuries-old assumptions concerning the very nature of creation and man’s place in the universe had come into question as well: the work of Charles Darwin and advancements in the modern science of psychology reflected a growing sense of self-determinism that had begun to work its way into the very weave of Western civilization.

The public read of the accomplishments and vast accumulations of such men as Vanderbilt and Astor, Rockefeller and Flagler, and saw no reason why they could not do the same. The works of Horatio Alger, in which poor but honest boys succeeded by dint of hard work and other Boy Scout–like qualities, were runaway bestsellers of the time; in all, Alger would write more than one hundred books, of which more than 20 million were sold.

Most important, an extraordinary number of Americans were finding their efforts and their speculations rewarded. With fortunes growing and personal income at an all-time high, the demand for ways in which to dispose of wealth grew accordingly. If Mrs. Benjamin Harrison had traveled to St. Augustine along with Vice President and Mrs. Levi Morton to hobnob delightedly with the Wanamakers of Philadelphia at the Ponce de Leon, then there was no reason why others on the swelling rolls of the Social Register should not follow.

A writer for
Harper’s
visited the Ponce de Leon and, in an article titled “Our Own Riviera,” wrote vividly of what he saw: “[A] woman and her lady friend and maid were paying $39 a day for rooms and meals; where an Astor and his bride had paid the same sum per day during a week of their honeymoon; where one lady took a room solely for her trunks at $10 a day. . . . There was one little party that occupied three bedrooms, a bathroom and a parlor, taking up a whole corner of the hotel on the ground floor, whose bill . . . might easily have been $75 a day. . . .” All this at a time when a skilled carpenter or tradesman might earn two dollars a day for his labors.

The response to the Ponce de Leon was so enthusiastic, however, that Flagler was soon at work on a companion hotel nearby, the Alcazar, where he intended that guests of more modest means could experience something of the sybarite’s lifestyle. Flagler and his new wife took a suite at the Ponce de Leon, meanwhile, and announced that Florida was now their permanent winter home.

For a time Flagler basked in pride, having created an entity that went well beyond the practical matters of fueling kerosene lanterns and lubricating machines. He had fashioned a pleasure palace in the midst of a lone and distant place, and the result, if not exactly profitable at the outset, had taken the social world of which he was a part quite by storm.

Flagler’s happiness was soon to be tempered, however. His daughter, Jennie Louise, by then thirty-three and married to the son of a Chicago industrialist, fell ill of complications during an unsuccessful childbirth. On her way by ship to St. Augustine, where it was thought she might rest and regain her health, she died.

Flagler was crushed, but he had learned something from the building of the Ponce de Leon. In a small way, he had become a creator instead of an accumulator, and had found a more substantive sort of satisfaction in such accomplishments.

As a result, he undertook to build a church in memory of his daughter and her stillborn child, a visible and positive symbol of his affection. The Memorial Presbyterian Church, constructed in the neo-Renaissance style popular of that day, remains to this day one of St. Augustine’s major architectural landmarks.

The loss of his daughter was not Flagler’s only concern by this time, however. Ida Alice, who had always felt snubbed by Flagler’s family and his social circle, had begun to act in an increasingly irrational way. She had always been prone to fits of temper, but now the slightest irritation could send her into a frenzy. During a yachting party that she was hosting off the coast of New England, a storm came up. Though the members of the party, as well as the captain and crew, begged Ida Alice to return to port, she was adamant that her party would go on. The ship was driven far out to sea by the storm, where it wallowed for hours before making it back to port.

Such incidents troubled Flagler greatly, but he was nonetheless going to great lengths to try to make Ida Alice happy, going so far as to commission a new 160-foot yacht, the
Alicia,
and building them a permanent winter home near the Ponce de Leon, which one writer termed “worthy of Versailles.”

Still, nothing seemed to appease Ida Alice, who, in an apparent attempt to garner notice, if not approval, took to scheduling an unbroken series of balls and other functions at their winter home, often appearing in increasingly risqué dress. Even a man as wealthy as Flagler had begun to feel the effects of his wife’s prodigious spending. For the first time he was forced to sell off some of his Standard Oil stock, and in a vain attempt to temper his wife’s enthusiasm, he began to withdraw from the endless bouts of partying.

If she missed Flagler’s company, Ida Alice did not say so publicly, for she had found new company in the spirits and disembodied presences with whom she had come in contact through a Ouija board someone had given her as a gift.

It was not long until she announced that the board had informed her that the tsar of Russia was in love with her, and that they were to be wed upon Flagler’s death. As if that were not enough, she began to complain that Flagler was mistreating her, and the resultant gossip among their friends pained him greatly.

In desperation, Flagler asked George Shelton, a family friend and physician, to observe Ida Alice and to advise him on any course of treatment that might benefit her. Dr. Shelton, alarmed at what he saw, called in a pair of colleagues who specialized in mental disorders, but their arrival at the Flaglers’ Manhattan apartment sent Ida Alice into such hysterics that the doctors recommended she be removed from their home and taken immediately to an asylum.

Flagler grudgingly gave his consent, but traveled regularly to see his wife. His visits to the asylum seemed only to further upset Ida Alice, however, who by this time seemed utterly out of touch with reason.

Shelton urged a distraught Flagler to remove himself to Florida for the ensuing winter, where he might better regain his spirits without the specter of his disturbed wife to torment him.

Flagler went, but it was an unhappy winter for him. When he returned north in June, he found his wife greatly improved, and prevailed upon her doctors to let him take her back to the Mamaroneck home he so loved. Though the doctors were still concerned, not the least because Ida Alice had vehemently threatened Flagler’s life during her breakdown, they relented.

Flagler, by now a man of sixty-six, took his wife home, resolute that this time things would be different. Though it was not long before Ida Alice was again begging for her Ouija board, and friends were advising him to have her committed once more, Flagler stood firm.

“I shall not let her leave home until it becomes absolutely necessary,” he vowed, though that would not take long.

When Ida Alice attacked her doctor with a pair of kitchen shears, the matter was decided. In March of 1897, Ida Alice was removed to a private asylum in Pleasantville, New York. Flagler would never see her again.