When the Astors Owned New York (6 page)

In a discriminating, informed, and also wholesale way, using the almost limitless wealth at his disposal, William had begun what was to be a lifelong career as collector on an epic scale. Over the years he amassed books, manuscripts, autographs, Pompeian relics, coins, tapestries, armor, crossbows, halberds, classical and Renaissance statuary and sculpture, ecclesiastical vestments, Shakespeare folios. Instead of the French impressionists American millionaires were beginning to take back home with them, he bought paintings by early masters such as Holbein and Clouet. Among his miscellaneous artifacts were a seventeenth-century New England spinning wheel and a hat once worn by Napoleon, one of his heroes, along with the princes and condottieri of Renaissance Italy. He planned in time to install his collections in palaces of his own: the cream-colored chateau he was soon to put up next door to Collis Huntington's mansion on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, the fortresslike townhouse office at Temple Place in London, Cliveden in what was then Buckinghamshire, Hever Castle in Kent, Villa Sirena in Sorrento. His largest single purchase, an entire balustrade from the Villa Borghese garden, including statues and fountain, he bought while serving as American minister in Rome and kept in storage until 1893, when he acquired the estate of Cliveden from the Duke of Westminster. In purchases ranging in size from coins to stately homes William Waldorf Astor may have been the grandest (as well as one of the most knowledgeable and scholarly) of the American grand acquisitors who gathered in the spoils of Europe in the late nineteenth century.

When President Arthur's term came to an end in 1885, Willy had to resign his post and return to New York. After his mother's death in 1887 and his father's in 1890, he assumed a senior position in the management of the Astor interests. He also resumed in earnest the old battle for social primacy with Caroline Astor, his cousin Jack's mother. Pride, primogeniture, and custodianship of the Astor family plate dictated, he believed, that his wife, Mamie, not the imperious Caroline, should be the publicly acknowledged head of the House of Astor. He urged Mamie to compete with her rival in the grandeur, frequency, and exclusiveness of her New York and Newport entertainments. Caroline Astor, however, was a much more formidable competitor in the social arena. She dismissed her nephew William as a nuisance, “a prickly sort of person,” altogether unlike her adored and docile playboy son, John Jacob IV, and had as little to do with him as possible, which was agreeable to Willy. Caroline made a preemptive strike in her campaign for primacy by changing the wording on her calling card from “Mrs. William Astor” to “Mrs. Astor.” She thereby relegated Willy's wife to second place and launched what amused observers on both sides of the Atlantic were soon calling “the Battle of the Cards.” While the battle raged, it almost seemed that not since the Middle Ages, when rival popes at Rome and Avignon divided the Roman Catholic Church, had an issue of legitimacy stirred up such a
tzimmes.
Willy's gentle-natured wife did not have the stomach for battle. She was relieved when, following his “English Plan,” he finally left Caroline in sole possession of her title and moved his family to London.

“America is not a fit place for a gentleman to live,” Willy announced to his former countrymen. “America is good enough for any man who has to make a livelihood, though why traveled people of independent means should remain there more than a week is not readily to be comprehended.” Having “washed his hands of America and American methods,” he was determined “no longer to be connected in any way with that country.” William's aggressively insulting departure from New York provoked, among other send-offs from the press, a reference to the Astor family origins in “a German slaughterhouse” and the suggestion that the Astor coat of arms should be “a skunk, rampant, on a brindle ox-hide.” Papers in the States reported that “William the Traitor” had been burned in effigy in the streets and likened to Benedict Arnold. William kept a scrapbook of these stories and often brooded over the abuse he suffered in the press.

In all likelihood it was Astor himself, out of the same perversity that prompted his farewell message to his countrymen, who was eventually responsible for inventing or approving a story blazoned across the front page of the
New York Times
on July 12, 1892. It was headlined:
DEATH OF W. W. ASTOR. HE SUDDENLY EXPIRED YESTERDAY IN LONDON.
By swallowing whole what later appeared to have been a hoax, the
Times
and other American newspapers had demonstrated what Willy saw as their habitual irresponsibility, slovenliness, and, above all, hypocrisy. For now, in an obituary of several thousand words, the
Times
extolled the former “William the Traitor” as “an ideal American,” “a millionaire who believed in the American idea of government” and had done noble public service as legislator and diplomat:

The
Philadelphia Public Ledger
was equally unstinting and imaginative. “His nature was kindly, his manner simple, unaffected, sincere. He had many friends who admired him for his learning, his talents, and the noble qualities of heart which were his most distinguished characteristics.” While accepting the story of his death as true, the
New York Tribune
said it was “not an event of great and lasting significance whether in the world of action or the world of thought.”

The
Times
conceded that there had been “some curiously conflicting reports” as to the authenticity of the news. Like other doings and undoings of the very rich, the news of the death of William Waldorf Astor made too good a story to be allowed to succumb to checking.

MR. ASTOR NOT DEAD,
the
Times
announced the next day, July 13. reported as rapidly recovering. Mr. Astor apparently enjoyed his obituaries and the gorgeous fantasy, familiar to him from his reading of
Tom Sawyer,
of observing mourners at his funeral and listening to his own funeral sermon. He “treated the affair with levity,” according to a spokesman, and said he was getting used to being made a ghost. Normally he would not have tolerated a prank at his expense but would have dispatched a whole posse of lawyers to pursue the offender. But this prank was grand, transatlantic, and imperial, on a scale with Astor's ego and his fortune, and its eventual butt was not Astor but his old enemy, the American press. A threatened investigation of the hoax by British cable authorities trailed off into unsubstantiated published rumors that Astor had been mildly deranged at the time of his death notice. Perhaps, it was also rumored, he had absorbed the mystical teachings of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the late Russian soothsayer and conduit to the spirit world.

 

His public career behind him, and an immense fortune at his command, William was now freer than ever to indulge his passion for collecting, the arts, and a literary career. He founded a monthly publication, the
Pall Mall Magazine,
partly as an outlet for his short stories and his views on literature, history, politics, and American society. Rudyard Kipling, George Meredith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Israel Zangwill, and Thomas Hardy were among the distinguished authors of the day who contributed fiction or verse to the magazine.

Several of Astor's own pieces in the magazine turned out to be its chief weak points and aroused both consternation and hilarity in his readers. As if inaugurating a brand-new line of inquiry, he entered the debate over the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare. “Even the staunchest adherents of the Stratford man admit the existence of a few awkward facts which cannot be explained away,” Astor wrote. “Let us glance, briefly, at some of them.” The historical Shakespeare, a butcher's son (like old John Jacob Astor), a sometime stage carpenter and actor, had terrible handwriting: “Fancy a play traced in such barbarous characters!” “He was reputed intemperate; he was whipped for poaching; he married Anne Hathaway under circumstances discreditable to them both. At sixteen he is said to have been apprenticed to a butcher, after which he becomes a dealer in wood.” This thoroughly inadequate creature spent the last decade of his life, Astor wrote, in a “dirty and soulless little village,” and he died of a fever resulting from a drinking bout “of exceptional length and severity.” “Is this,” William concluded with a triumphant flourish, invoking the examples of Columbus, Napoleon, Luther, Newton, Galileo, Goethe, Richelieu, and Dante, “consistent with a great man's nature?” Astor's article became “a universal target for chaffing and ridicule,” the
New York Times
correspondent, the novelist Harold Frederic, reported from London. “The second syllable of his name is clearly superfluous.”

Following another line of scholarly inquiry, Astor tried to plumb the secret of the witty and beautiful Madame Juliette Recamier, object of the emperor Napoleon's “amorous advances,” and concluded she had been married to her own father. In another much-quoted article he described London's famous fog, the city's chronic pall of mist and greasy coal smoke, as “an enveloping goddess in operatic raiment.” He was unswayed by ridicule.

iii.

T
HE SENIOR,
more thoughtful and brooding of the two Astor cousins, William Waldorf appointed himself family historian and defender. “I am glad my Great Grandfather was a successful trader,” he wrote in his sixties, “because in all ages Trade has led the way to Civilization. I have studied his life, seeking to learn its aims, grateful to him for having lifted us above the ploughshares of Baden and bent on continuing his purpose.” One result of these studies was a ten-thousand-word essay in which he reviewed his ancestor's allegedly maligned career and posthumous reputation. Willy concluded that the offending party in this systematic libel had been American democracy itself. Originally “the poor man's country,” the United States had been undermined and betrayed in national purpose by envy, resentment, and a misguided hatred of wealth, distinction, and achievement. His great-grandfather's “life and character,” Willy wrote, “have been distorted and caricatured until only an odd travesty survives. He has been continually derided and reviled with that spirit of pure malignity which pursued the successful man. It is not democratic to climb so high.” Contrary to Willy, during the 1890s, and probably at any other time as well, so far from reviling and deriding rich people, the American public could hardly get enough of them—except, of course, for a few people who might be described by guardians of the social order as malcontents, radicals, and other ideological levelers embittered by envy and their own inadequacy. According to Mark Twain, the appetite for news of the moneyed classes and their doings could be satisfied even by a page-one headline
RICH WOMAN FALLS DOWN STAIRS, NOT HURT.

Willy believed that it was the American press that led the vendetta against old John Jacob Astor. Journalists and popular biographers like James Parton deliberately transformed a man of “patient courage and masterful resolve: of forethought and suggestiveness and common sense” into an ogre about whom practically anything to his discredit could be believed.

In 1896, nearly half a century after old Astor's death, a Chicago lawyer named Franklin H. Head invented and put into circulation a brilliantly elaborated hoax. According to lawyer Head's compelling story, the source of John Jacob Astor's fortune, the acorn of his oak forest, was a rusty iron box, bearing on its lid the chiseled initials “W.K.” and long buried in a cave on an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. The box supposedly contained the fabled treasure that the British pirate Captain William Kidd had squirreled away against his old age. In 1701, before he was able to retire from piracy and enjoy his wealth, Kidd's countrymen hanged him, but not before he managed to leave Mrs. Kidd a cryptic note giving the location of his treasure chest. The search for this Monte Cristo trove of gold and jewels had been teasing the public imagination ever since Kidd's fateful date with the hangman. It drove the plots of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Gold Bug,” Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island,
and now lawyer Head's almost thoroughly credible tale.

Old Astor was said to have acquired the box in a characteristically underhanded way through one of his French Canadian trappers. Until then, according to Head's review of the bank records, Astor had been “simply a modest trader, earning each year by frugality and thrift two or three hundred dollars above his living expenses, with a fair prospect of accumulating, by an industrious life, a fortune of twenty or thirty thousand dollars.” But his acquisition of the box and subsequent sale of its contents to a London dealer in coins and precious stones coincided with a jump of about $1.3 million in his account, $700,000 of which he used to buy property in the city of New York.

Head's readers learned that in 1699 Winnepesaukee, head sachem of the Penobscot tribe, had deeded the island to Cotton Mather Olmsted, an Indian trader and ancestor of the distinguished landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Central Park. The place had remained in the family ever since. Frederick Law Olmsted, its eventual heir and a close friend of Head's, allegedly sued the Astor estate for $5 million (the original $1.3 million plus accrued interest). Having been refused, he then demanded all the property in New York that John Jacob Astor, in effect a receiver of stolen goods, had purchased with the valuables Captain Kidd had taken from his victims and that more or less rightfully belonged to the Olmsteds. So much for the fruits of what William Waldorf Astor had memorialized as “patient courage and masterful resolve.” The hoax was so credible, especially since it was reinforced by the long-standing Astor reputation for rapacity, that until he died in 1903, Olmsted repeatedly denied he had pursued a claim on the estate.