When the Astors Owned New York (11 page)

In September 1899 the nation welcomed back to its shores the conquering hero of the Spanish-American War, Admiral of the Navy George Dewey. From his flagship, the cruiser
Olympia,
in Manila Bay, he had issued an order that became almost instantaneously famous: “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.” In the annals of naval warfare his order took its place with David Farragut's “Damn the torpedoes!” and Horatio Nelson's “England expects every man will do his duty.” Without losing a ship or a man (except for an engineer who died of heat prostration), Dewey's squadron destroyed the naval forces of Spain, captured Manila, and avenged the sinking of the
Maine
. Although the battle, interrupted by a pause for breakfast, had been more like a turkey shoot than “the Greatest Naval Engagement of Modern Times,” Dewey's entry into New York City on the twenty-eighth was like the triumphs ancient Rome granted victorious emperors and generals. Dewey's
Olympia
led a two-and-a-half-mile-long parade of ships up the Hudson River and anchored opposite Grant's Tomb. That night, fireworks in the sky traced a thousand-square-foot portrait of the hero. The Waldorf-Astoria, the city's premier social venue, staged a monster reception—it started in the evening and continued through the next morning—for the most celebrated person who had ever passed through its doors.

Months earlier there had been fevered talk of Dewey as a presidential candidate in 1900, and he might well have been nominated, if he had not been addicted to blurting. He had barely survived a public-relations disaster when he said to a man he scarcely knew, “Our next war will be with Germany.” He hadn't realized, he said later, that the person he made this prediction to was a newspaper reporter who knew a story when he heard one. Dewey did not survive the next disaster. Finally announcing his availability as a presidential candidate, he explained that after long and careful study he had concluded that “the office of President is not such a very difficult one to fill, his duties being mainly to execute the laws of Congress. Should I be chosen for this exalted position I would execute the laws of the Congress as faithfully as I have always executed the orders of my superiors.” “I don't understand how I got the idea in the first place,” he said later. Afloat on billows of public laughter, the admiral sailed into America's Valhalla of forgotten heroes.

i.

D
URING THE WINTER OF
1896–1897 the United States was mired in a period of economic distress and widespread unemployment that had begun with a Wall Street panic in 1893. Financiers, businessmen, and members of the clergy denounced a growing socialist, trade union, and protest movement as a threat to order, decency, and what remained of national prosperity. At a cost of much violence and bloodshed, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to put down a strike at the Pullman Sleeping Car Company that had halted rail traffic in the Midwest and elsewhere. Meanwhile homeless men lined up at soup kitchens in the streets of New York and Chicago. In January 1897 a socially prominent couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin, sent out about a thousand invitations to a private costume ball at the Waldorf. The party was to cost its sponsors and guests an estimated total of $500,000, roughly equivalent to $7 million in current purchasing power.

Mrs. Martin, the former Cornelia Sherman, was the only child of Isaac Sherman and his wife. Enjoying comfortable retirement from the leather and fancy wood business, Sherman was generally thought to be worth a respectable $200,000. Cornelia and her husband, Bradley, who came from a rich upstate manufacturing family and had plenty of money of his own, lived with her parents in their house at 20 West Twentieth Street. Relatively inconspicuous young members of New York society, homebound in their tastes and habits, the young Martins raised four children and were not known for giving parties or fancy entertainments.

When Isaac Sherman died in 1881 probate revealed to everyone's surprise that he had been a very rich man. To his widow he left a comfortable annuity, but to Cornelia he left about $7 million, an amount not in the Astor and Vanderbilt league but sufficient, especially when supplemented by Cornelia's husband's fortune, to allow her to have nearly everything she wanted. In time this included ownership of Marie Antoinette's crown jewels, occupancy of a hunting, shooting, and fishing estate at Balmacaan on Loch Ness, and a reputation for giving spectacular parties. Sudden wealth had the effect on Cornelia of a burr under her saddlecloth. Soon after Isaac's funeral at All Souls' Unitarian Church and an obligatory month of mourning she whipped herself up from a demure walk around the New York social track to a full gallop.

She and Bradley bought the house next door to her parents', took a long European trip, and during their absence abroad had the walls between the houses knocked down and the two converted into a mansion suitable for grand entertainments. They staffed it with an English butler, several liveried footmen, and a corps of other household servants. Cornelia's regular presence at fashionable events began to be noted in the press. Gorgeously got up as Mary Stuart (and wearing Mary Stuart's diamond tiara), despite her dumpiness, Cornelia was one of the more admired guests at Alva Vanderbilt's fancy-dress ball in the winter of 1883. This was the showiest and most expensive event of its kind (estimates ran to a quarter of a million dollars) that New York had ever seen, “a walking jewelry store,” as one reporter was to describe a comparable event.
LIKE AN ORIENTAL DREAM,
the
New York Herald
headlined its story,
THE WEALTH AND GRACE OF NEW YORK IN VARIED AND BEAUTIFUL ARRAY.
Soon after this triumph, members of Cornelia's circle and the gossip columns of the city's newspapers began to hear about a new purpose she had found for her life. One day, she said, she herself would give a costume ball surpassing Alva Vanderbilt's in dazzle and expense and thereby clinch a high place in New York's social royalty. In one of several lavish rehearsals for her costume ball, in 1885 she roofed over the gardens of the Twentieth Street mansion and staged an evening entertainment that confirmed her place in the front rank of contenders for the crown.

During the decade-and-a-half run-up to her climactic bid for the summit Cornelia generated yards of newspaper copy. She organized a Christmas Eve surprise party to pay tribute to Caroline Astor, undisputed leader of New York society. About a hundred celebrants drove uptown in their carriages from Cornelia's mansion to
the
Mrs. Astor's ballroom, which had been elaborately garnished, somehow unnoticed by her (or so it was claimed), with immense masses of holly, white carnations, and white violets. Even the normally aloof William Waldorf Astor, wearing a white fur-trimmed Santa Claus cap, put aside his chronic enmity to Caroline and joined her delegation this evening. A few months later he also attended Cornelia's dinner party and cotillion for nearly three hundred blue bloods at Delmonico's. The men that evening went home with party favors, chosen by Cornelia, of jeweled daggers and replicas of the ancient Order of the Golden Fleece. Her entertainments, said the
New York Times,
“have become famous in society for their lavishness of expense and richness of appointment.”

It was at about this time, on the eve of their annual sailing to London for the social and sporting season there, that Cornelia and her husband, the couple formerly known as Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin, sprouted a hyphen in their surname, somewhat like a supernumerary nipple, and, in parallel fashion to the orthographic coupling of the Waldorf and the Astoria hotels, began to call themselves the Bradley-Martins. In a similar status uptick they followed the virtually hallowed practice of their class by acquiring for their daughter an impecunious but titled mate, the twenty-five-year-old fourth Earl of Craven. A secure room in the basement of the Bradley-Martin mansion, which had been several times a fat target for burglars, now held, it was announced to the press, some $200,000 worth of gold and silver wedding gifts.

In one season at their well-stocked estate on Loch Ness the sporting members of the family and their guests dispatched about six thousand head of game, including fifty-five stags. During their annual stays abroad, the Bradley-Martins were said to have “equaled all previous records set by rich Americans in the entertaining line.” When the family returned to New York in December 1894 on the White Star
Teutonic
, they were accompanied by one servant for each member, another servant for each of the half dozen and more steamer trunks, and an additional forty pieces of luggage. Back in their mansion on Twentieth Street, Cornelia and her husband, by this time veterans of publicity and aware of its enhanced value when withheld, declined to talk to representatives of the press and had the butler turn them away at the front door. “I don't see what there is to interview them about,” her brother-in-law, Frederick Townsend Martin, explained to a reporter who walked with him up Fifth Avenue on the way to the Union Club. “They have simply come back as any other travelers from Europe might do, and are to take up their old life here in just about the same way as they left it.”

“Only more so,” he could have added: his sister-in-law Cornelia was soon to make her grand move and issue invitations to a fancy costume ball to take place on February 10, 1897. On her orders, the entire two lower floors of the Waldorf, crammed with flowers, mirrors, and tapestries, were to be transformed—inevitably, given the taste of the period—into the Versailles of Louis XIV and Louis XV. She asked her guests to costume themselves as aristocrats, nobles, and famous figures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This excursion into gilded history provoked a competitive display of diamonds and heirloom pieces, some of which were bought or borrowed for the occasion; others, retrieved from bank vaults, had not been seen in public since the Vanderbilt ball. Cornelia regarded the announcement of her ball to be a much-needed stimulant to trade in a depression year. It immediately drove up the price of goods and services supplied by costumers, seamstresses, caterers, jewelers, wig makers, hairdressers, milliners, shoemakers, tailors, dancing masters, florists, antiquarians, fencing masters, and even armorers. Several guests planned to wear swords, and one, Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, Alva Vanderbilt's new husband, reportedly paid $8,000 (in 1897 dollars) for a museum-quality breastplate of steel inlaid with gold, under which he planned to wear a Henry VIII velvet costume with ruffled sleeves.

“Future generations,” said the gossip sheet
Town Topics,
“will date every event in relation to the Bradley-Martin ball.” Soon after the invitations went out Cornelia's private affair became a public event discussed not only in the clubs and restaurants of New York and London but in factories, shops, business offices, pulpits, and probably mine shafts as well. But beneath the buzz of gossip rumbles of discontent and protest began to be heard.

William Stephen Rainsford, rector of St. George's, a fashionable Protestant Episcopal church on Stuyvesant Square at Sixteenth Street and Second Avenue, had a well-founded although tactfully moderated liberal reputation. He gave his blessing to the labor movement, social reform, the institutional accountability of the church, dancing in the parish house, toleration of saloons as refuge and comfort of the working class, and other progressive causes. His programs enjoyed the moral and financial support of Pierpont Morgan, the church's senior vestryman. A charismatic preacher who adored the spotlight, in late January Rainsford made one of his frequent bids for public attention. He gave an extended interview to a reporter from the
New York Times;
his subject, the Bradley-Martin ball. He declined to say whether he had advised his parishioners not to attend, but he conceded that such ostentatious display in a difficult time was “ill-advised,” at least for practical reasons. It was bound to furnish ammunition to “socialistic agitators,” “demagogues,” “sentimentalists,” and other such mischief makers busily and irresponsibly stirring up discontent with the existing social and economic order. Rainsford had in mind, to name two of the most prominent of these mischief makers, Pullman strike leader Eugene V. Debs, a recent convert to socialism, and William Jennings Bryan, a declared enemy of Wall Street. Although decisively defeated in the electoral vote in his campaign for the presidency against Republican William McKinley, Bryan, running on a platform of radical agrarianism and opposition to big business, had polled an ominous (in Rainsford's view) six million popular votes.

When asked whether he'd prefer to see great accumulations of wealth either hidden from public view or given to charity, Rainsford said such questions were beside the point. He concerned himself not with the morality of wealth but with its public relations. “New York is now credited by outsiders with being ostentatious, luxurious, and unpatriotic,” he explained, carefully avoiding any reference to Christian precepts against laying up treasures on earth. “I think such charges are untrue, and I think the bringing of them is injurious to the entire country and to New York…. What I may have advised any members of my congregation…is nobody's business but mine and theirs—certainly not a matter for public discussion.”

In both the United States and England, however, Rainsford's ethical gymnastics made him a source of amusement: here was a clerical dude who played to the grandstand and ended up making the ball an event of much greater consequence than it might have been if he had kept his mouth closed. But at least he stirred up earnest discussion about whatever obligations the rich had to the poor and to their own salvation. Not quite ten years earlier Andrew Carnegie had told readers of the
North American Review
that it was a disgrace for a rich man to die rich instead of giving his money away to libraries, foundations, and other good causes. On the other hand, was it possible that extravagant spending and ostentatious display could actually be good deeds? They stimulated the economy, created jobs, and trickled money down to the pockets of the working poor. At least this was the reasoning that shielded the Bradley-Martins from any pangs of conscience.

ii.

F
EARING PROTEST
demonstrations and possible violent acts by anarchists, the Waldorf management ordered workmen to board up the windows on the lower two stories. The night of February 10 perhaps two hundred police, some in plain clothes, surrounded the building, lined the sidewalks from Fifth Avenue to Broadway, and barricaded the street in front of the hotel, all these measures taken over public protests against unwarranted protection of the rich and blocking of free access to the streets. Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the board of police commissioners, said all such complaints of unfairness and inconvenience were “nonsense” and claimed he would have ordered the same sensible measures if the occasion had been instead “a clambake or picnic on the east side.” Ten of his tallest men flanked the narrow passage from the curb to the draped doorway of the Waldorf on Thirty-third Street. The Bradley-Martins, who were reported to have received death threats, arrived at their party accompanied by two bodyguards. The United States Marine Band, brought in from Washington, sounded a fanfare and played through the long evening, occasionally relieved by Victor Herbert's band and a Hungarian Gypsy ensemble.

Gowned as Mary Queen of Scots, festooned with Marie Antoinette's crown jewels, including a massive ruby necklace, and seated on a throne as she received her guests, Cornelia could have been a model for Sir John Tenniel's picture of the Duchess in
Alice in Wonderland
. Her husband, dressed as Louis XV, stood at her side. He wore a suit of pink and white brocaded satin, knee breeches, white silk hose, low red-heeled shoes with diamond buckles, and a powdered wig. Jack Astor, appointed king of the ball by Cornelia, came in a relatively modest courtier's costume, but he carried a sword with a jeweled hilt and had a jeweled chain around his neck. (His absent cousin, William Waldorf Astor, was long since settled in England with his family.) Jack's wife, Ava, came as Marie Antoinette. In a velvet dress copied from a Van Dyck portrait, Caroline Astor, Jack's mother, wore a carapace of diamonds that flowed down her front from scalp to stomach.