When the Astors Owned New York (20 page)

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In addition to lodging, the so-called “American Plan,” soon offered by hotels across the country, included breakfast, lunch, early dinner, later dinner, tea, and supper and not only every meal but every dish on the menu. Even a down-market establishment like Thompson's Two-Bit House in Portland, Oregon, offered three kinds of meat at breakfast, dinner, and supper. The owners instructed guests to eat up and “get the wrinkles out of your bellies.” In a century of gluttony and food bolting, dyspepsia preceded obesity as the national affliction.

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A member of the high-toned Cabot family of Boston had also met up with a Jewish trip wire in the genealogical underbrush. His hired researcher, soon after abruptly dismissed, had traced the Cabot origins back to some tenth-century Lombardy Jews. (See Leon Harris,
Only to God
[New York, 1967], 4.)

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After granting a rare interview, Caroline Astor instructed her maid to offer Nixola Greeley-Smith, a reporter for the
New York World
, a $2 tip for her trouble. The reporter was Horace Greeley's granddaughter, and she had a ready answer (much polished in the retelling). “Will you deliver a message exactly as I give it to you?” she said to the maid. “Tell Mrs. Astor she not only forgets who I am, but she forgets who she is. Give her back the two dollars with my compliments and tell her that when John Jacob Astor was skinning rabbits my grandfather was getting out the
Tribune
and was one of the foremost citizens of New York.”

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Only two years before these negotiations, William Waldorf had given a big dinner in London on the night [Jack's] sister, Mrs. James Roosevelt, lay dead in the city. Perhaps in retaliation the following year, when Mrs. William Waldorf's body was being returned to this country for burial, Ava and
the
Mrs. Astor appeared at the opera together. Society was shocked at the impropriety.” Lucy Kavaler,
The Astors
(New York, 1966), 155.

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By 1913, when he published a second book, a memoir titled
Things I Remember,
Martin had changed his tune. “I cannot conceive why this entertainment should have been condemned…. I was highly indignant about my sister-in-law being so cruelly attacked, seeing that her object in giving the ball was to stimulate trade, and, indeed, she was perfectly right…. Many New York shops sold out brocades and silks which had been lying in their stock-rooms for years.” Man-about-town Martin sometimes supplemented his income with fees from the management for steering customers to the Plaza Hotel.