When the Astors Owned New York (7 page)

 

“None knew better how to make the utmost of opportunity,” William wrote at the end of his long essay about his great-grandfather. “In the midst of indefatigable industry, a vein of sentimental sadness, of which his private papers give repeated indication, tinged his thoughts with a strange and retrospective pathos. Perhaps this was but a trace of the reverie of one who, grown meditative as the shadows lengthen, and passing the joys and loves and triumphs of a lifetime in review, catches beneath a thousand memories their inevitable undertone of tears.” Old Astor had long continued to grieve over the death of his wife. John Jacob Astor II, their first son, was feebleminded, an imbecile in the terminology of the time, “a confirmed lunatic,” according to Whitman. Three other Astor children had died in infancy.

Even after detailing such humanizing events William was not satisfied with his attempt to reconcile greatness, fame, and wealth with his ancestor's “peasant” origins and his “forlorn boyhood” spent in the “humble surroundings” of the family butcher shop. Some vital, infusing element was missing from the Astor story, some aristocratic spark and genetic link that would account for what was perhaps a uniquely American phenomenon: John Jacob Astor, “a poor German lad…born in a peasant's cottage,” had “sprung fresh from the people,” as William wrote, but his heirs only one or two generations later were blue bloods bestriding the summit of the social heap. From an unimaginable height they looked down on “the people”—that is, if they were even aware that the people existed except to serve them and yield up tribute in rents. So they must have been blue bloods all along.

During the 1880s, while serving as U.S. minister to Italy, William had hired a firm of London genealogists—Janson, Cobb, Pearson and Company—to mouse around in French, German, and Spanish villages and search local histories and parish records for the name “Astor.” Their five years of expensive digging dead-ended in a Baden butcher shop owned by “Jacob Ashdor,” father of John Jacob Astor. The genealogists had better luck, William believed, in tracking a somewhat similar name, “d'Astorga,” that belonged to a dynasty going back to Count Pedro d'Astorga of Castille, a Crusader killed at the siege of Jerusalem in 1100 while locked in mortal combat with the Saracen “Yusuf Tashafin, King of the Almoravids of Morocco.” Some years earlier, the researchers reported, an unnamed “Spanish Queen” had granted to one of Pedro's ancestors “the arms of a Falcon, Argent, on a gloved hand, Or, in acknowledgment of the recapture of her favorite Falcon. The recipient adopted as his name the Spanish word Azor (The Goshawk).” Among more recent Astor forebears, according to this account, was “Jean Jacques d'Astorg,” a French Huguenot of noble descent who had fled to Germany “upon the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685” and died near Heidelberg in 1711. Some twenty generations of blood allegedly linked John Jacob Astor of Waldorf, who died in New York in 1848, with the Christian warrior who died in Jerusalem in 1100.

In a devastating article in the
New York Sun,
Lothrop Withington, dean of American genealogists, pronounced the Astor tree pure moonshine, a “fabrication” riddled with inaccuracies and phoney dates. A real-life Comte d'Astorga living in France dismissed it as “an appalling mixture of facts, some of them actually turned upside down.” No evidence whatsoever supported any connection between the Spanish Crusader who fell at Jerusalem and a clan of beer-swilling, hog-butchering Germans in the village of Waldorf, duchy of Baden. There was, however, the remote but mortifying possibility, as Withington pointed out, that the putative founder of the Astor dynasty, if one could be found, had not been a Crusader but a Jewish doctor of Carcassonne named Isaac Astorg, who died in 1305.
*
William's London researchers warned him that the Astorga/Astor connection was at best an exercise in the optative mood. But he was so pleased with this genealogy that, dismissing all doubts and objections, he reproduced it as a full-page illustration in his great-grandfather's biography.

In point of authenticity, the Astorga/Astor connection scarcely differed from other fanciful lineages that American plutocrats were buying by the yard, along with needy dukes and lords as mates for their daughters. Referring to William as “an eminent semi-American,” a
New York Times
editorial said, “Everybody knew before that ‘family trees' were delicate vegetables, soon to be shaken to pieces by the wind of investigation.” As always William refused to be shaken by either ridicule or revelation. His Spanish Crusader was the central actor in his version of what Sigmund Freud was to call “family romances,” daydreams about replacing forebears with “others of better birth. The technique used in carrying out phantasies like this…depends upon the ingenuity and the material which the child has at his disposal.” The adult William had plenty of both. When he became a British subject in 1899 he adopted a personal coat of arms, a silver goshawk perched on a gold-gloved hand. He displayed it along with shields, banners, and other heraldic furnishings at Cliveden, his great estate in the Thames Valley, and at Hever Castle, his moated retreat in the Kent countryside.

Eventually, reflecting on what he claimed was the implacable American resentment of Astor greatness, William gave up, at least privately, the battle to claim a noble ancestry. “I do not believe,” he wrote to an American friend, Amy Small Richardson, in 1905, “that anything would avail to change the ordinary acceptation in America of my great-grandfather's life and character. He will go down as a ‘Dutch sausage peddler,' and my fate promises to be the same if the American press can make it so.” He consoled himself with the hope of one day being elevated to the British peerage.

i.

F
ROM CHILDHOOD
John Jacob Astor IV was an unlikely counterpart to his powerful older cousin, William Waldorf Astor. Pampered by his mother and his four older sisters, neglected by a distant, dissipated, and frequently absent father, he was socially and physically graceless. A long beanpole body and relatively small head made him look as if he had been assembled from mismatched parts. He seemed dreamy and affectless, someone almost to be pitied despite his wealth, position, and flashes of seigneurial authority. A lonely and awkward adolescent, he was sent away to prep school at St. Paul's, in Concord, New Hampshire, after which he spent three years at Harvard as a special student. He enrolled in science courses and left without taking a degree. After a year or two of travel in Europe, India, and Egypt, in 1887, at the age of twenty-three, he returned to New York to take his place as scion of the cadet branch of the Astors. Like a debutante, he was formally introduced to society at an eight-hundred-guest reception his mother, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, gave in his honor at her house on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street. The scandal sheet
Town Topics
hailed young Astor on his entrance into the mating market as “one of the richest catches of the day,” and added, “It is very questionable whether, were he put to it, he could ever earn his bread by his brains.” He was not put to it to any extent until after his father died five years later and left him, at least nominally, in charge of a staff of lawyers, accountants, and managers who, along with several trustees, were responsible for administering his share of the Astor estate.

Soon after his debut, Jack got into a much-publicized brawl with another young blade of blue-blood extraction, Beekman Kip Burrowe, in the men's room at fashionable Sherry's Restaurant. They quarreled over which of them should have the privilege of sitting with a young upper-class beauty they both fancied. The two gentlemen went at each other with fists and walking sticks before someone separated them. “It's been a long time,” a newspaper commented, “since any incident has occasioned so much amusement in society.” In consequence the press awarded Jack Astor the inevitable punning nickname that was to follow him most of the days of his life, “Jack Ass.”

Caroline Astor's son had a reputation for making clumsy and urgent advances to the wives, sisters, and daughters of his social class and for getting himself into other sorts of scrapes. To serve the white marble double house he later built for himself and his mother on upper Fifth Avenue, he announced his intention to put up a two-story stable for their horses and carriages. The proposed site for the stable was a twenty-five-by-one-hundred-foot lot he owned around the corner on Madison Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street. If built there, his stable would have abutted B'Nai Jeshurun, the city's largest Orthodox synagogue. Synagogue officers and the neighbors, non-Jews as well as Jews, were outraged. “We condemn the spirit of Mr. Astor in disregarding our desires, interests, and rights in the premises, and we denounce his threatened act as unbecoming a landowner of this city, to which he is so greatly indebted.” Jack and the managers of the Astor estate refused the offer of the synagogue trustees to buy the lot from him for $61,000. According to a spokesman at the estate office, “Mr. Astor needs another stable, and he is going to build it there.” The protesters drew up a formal resolution listing their grievances and submitted a bill (subsequently vetoed by the governor) forbidding “the housing of animals…within 100 feet of a house of worship.” After six months of acrimonious debate—and playful editorial discussions of fleas, stable odors, stable noises, and equine hygiene in general—Jack withdrew his plan, but not before leaving an indelible impression of contemptuous behavior.

With such a reputation, anything even conventionally laudable that he did was bound to attract surprise and comment.
JOHN JACOB ASTOR A JUROR,
the
New York Times
reported in a page-one story. He had answered the summons and presented himself for jury duty, it was noted, instead of buying his way out by paying a fine, like other “millionaires of prominence,” among them polo enthusiast George Gould. Astor gave his business as “real estate” and served attentively on a case involving a shipment of eggs. He then had himself excused from further service on the grounds of having a prior engagement.

At about the same time (November 1893) as the stable-synagogue dustup, Jack inserted himself in the case of a drifter named John Garvin, an unemployed former grocery clerk and worker in a Bowery shooting gallery. A laundress in the Astor mansion had returned from a night out to find Garvin naked and sound asleep in her bed, with his hat, coat, shirt, and trousers piled on a chair. How Garvin got into the Astor house in the first place no one knew for sure, not even Garvin. He clearly “had a few pin wheels in his head,” according to Mrs. Astor's English butler, and may have suffered a brain injury from a rifle-loading accident at his Bowery job. A judge at the Jefferson Market Police Court fined Garvin $5 for disorderly conduct and released him after a benevolent stranger paid the fine. “I am utterly at a loss,” Jack said, “to understand why anyone should want to pay the fellow's fine and let him get away, and I think it is a most outrageous act…. It does not seem to me right that a man can enter the house of a citizen and be fined only $5,” Jack went on. “A great piece of injustice has been done.” He put himself forward as protector of the public welfare as well as the Astor property. “My mother is naturally alarmed by her experience and something must be done to punish Garvin, so that he will not attempt to repeat his offense. If he goes free, hundreds of persons may imitate his example…. Such a state of things is not to be tolerated, and I do not propose that it shall be.” On Jack's insistence, Garvin was immediately rearrested, charged with attempted burglary, locked up, and held on $1,000 bail.

Soon famous as the tramp who slept in one of Mrs. Astor's beds, even celebrated in a popular song, Garvin became a sort of public pet, a victim, as it appeared, of double jeopardy, false arrest, and the privileged wrath of a rich man who had appointed himself a champion of justice and appeared to have lost any sense of proportion. At the expense of his admirers, for about six months Garvin enjoyed cigars and steak-and-egg dinners with extra bread in his cell in the Tombs. He was finally carted off to the State Asylum for Insane Criminals at Matteawan.

Missteps aside, to his mother's immense gratification and relief, Jack entered into a diplomatically brilliant alliance that reinforced her own already secure standing as queen of American society. At twenty-six he married Ava Lowle Willing of Philadelphia, a great beauty of impeccable breeding and bloodlines. “It was not alone her beautiful face,” said society eminence Mrs. J. Bordon Harriman, a respected authority on such matters, “but the
tout ensemble,
arms, wrists, hands, ankles, and a brilliant distinction that was unforgettable.” “She rides well,” the
Times
reported, “dances beautifully, is musical, quite literary and uncommonly intelligent.” What was more, this spectacular specimen of American young womanhood came from a blood-proud and prominent family. Genealogists hired by the Philadelphia Willings had drawn up a family tree showing descent, on Ava's mother's side, from Alfred the Great and several other potentates, including Henry I of France and Henry IV of England. Their glittering history put the Willings several rungs above the Astors, whose not-so-distant patriarch, as they were often reminded, had come from the bottom.
*
Among the wedding gifts from the groom's parents were a furnished house on Fifth Avenue and diamonds from Caroline Astor's jewel case.

The same hand that assembled Jack apparently assembled the Astor-Willing marriage as well. It was even rumored that the bride had wept on the eve of her wedding and begged her parents to call it off. The day of the wedding private trains laid on by the Pennsylvania Railroad carried the cream of New York society to a city by tradition unaccustomed to such bustle and splendor. The marriage proved to be a miserable affair almost from the moment in February 1891 that the couple exchanged vows in the parlor of the Willing town house on South Broad Street. Ava did her dynastic duty by producing a son, William Vincent, nine months after the wedding night. Then she turned her energies elsewhere. She devoted herself to tennis, skiing, bridge, and other fashionable amusements. Once the then-current mah-jongg fever infected her, she was to be seen in Chinese restaurants on Mott Street in Manhattan taking lessons from Oriental masters of the game. By all accounts, Ava was self-indulgent, extravagant, and sharp-tongued. But, especially in contrast to her husband, she was also spirited, untrammeled, charming, and distinctly unstuffy, not above stopping in for a beer at a neighborhood saloon. She persuaded Jack to commission a friend of theirs, the architect Stanford White, to build an athletic complex at Ferncliff, the Astor country estate near Rhinebeck: it comprised a tennis court, two squash courts, a marble swimming pool, a bowling alley, a billiard room, and a rifle range. Ava had no interest in her husband beyond his money, which paid for such expensive improvements, and she made no attempt to hide this, even abusing him in front of guests and the help.

Elizabeth Lehr, partner in a
mariage blanc
with Harry Lehr, one of Caroline Astor's pets, was often a guest at Ferncliff. She recalled that while Ava and her coterie played bridge, Jack “shambled from room to room, tall, loosely built, and ungraceful, rather like a great overgrown colt, in a vain search for someone to talk to.” When he switched on one of the player pianos he had installed in the house, a footman informed him that Mrs. Astor complained the music was disturbing her bridge players and wanted it stopped. “And he would sigh and turn it off.” Elizabeth went on:

Jack mostly remained silent at Ava's dinner table, where the conversation generally turned to postmortems of the afternoon's bridge games. On Sundays “he would come downstairs ready for church in cutaway coat and immaculate topper, only to find rubbers in progress already. So he would sit alone in his front pew, come back to lunch off a tray in his study, and return to New York in the afternoon, a lonely man in spite of all his acquaintances.”

Virtually a specter in his own houses, Jack spent much of his time away from Ava in the company of their son, Vincent (as he preferred to be called), who adored him and was adored in return. Ava called the boy stupid and avoided him because he was clumsy and lumpish looking, had big feet, and, perhaps worst of all, reminded her of his father. Jack was happiest sailing with Vincent on board
Nourmahal,
the steel-hulled steam yacht he had inherited from his pleasure-loving father. In refitting the yacht he added, among other features, a dining saloon capable of sitting sixty people, a forty-two-foot steam launch, an electric launch, and a battery of rapid-firing guns. They were installed on deck in readiness to repel Caribbean and Barbary Coast pirates
Nourmahal
might encounter on her cruises. Newspapers dutifully reported mishaps on the water that shaped Jack's reputation as a lubberly yachtsman, although his hired captains and crews were mostly to blame. Over a period of only a few years the accident-prone
Nourmahal
ran aground in the Hudson, rammed the Vanderbilt yacht
North Star,
impaled herself on rocks off Newport, and collided with a ferry in New York Harbor. The yacht's electric launch, the
Corcyra,
built to Jack's design and specifications, sank after being run over by a steamer.

Ashore, Jack isolated himself in the laboratory he ordered built for himself at Ferncliff. From his lonely boyhood on, and especially after his science education at Harvard, he had been a passionate tinkerer and aspiring inventor. Electricity and speed fascinated him, as did machinery of all sorts, in particular motor cars: his garage contained as many as eighteen, some of them designed for racing. In Paris in 1903 he was to make an ascent in the personal flying machine invented by the Brazilian dandy Alberto Santos-Dumont. Jack was happy and confident at the throttle of an Illinois Central locomotive that he drove for six hours one day with as much panache, the papers reported, as if it had been one of his own fast cars. (In taking over the throttle of the locomotive, engineer Jack, living out the daydream of many American boys, exercised his authority as the railroad's major stockholder.) He invented or projected an improved bicycle brake; a “rain-inducer” that blew warm moist air up into the clouds (he never tried it, he said, “but it would probably work”); a “pneumatic road-improver” that blasted away dust and dried horse manure from paved surfaces (it won a prize at the Chicago Exposition in 1893); a suction-cup system mounted on the legs of deck chairs and other steamer furniture to keep them from sliding in heavy weather; and an improved marine turbine engine. In its May 1909 issue
Scientific American
reported that Astor was constructing at Ferncliff a plant to compress and convert deposits of peat into a gas usable as a fuel for vehicles and machines. “The patent application is now pending and on its being allowed Colonel Astor intends to present it to the public.” He pasted in his scrapbook about two dozen news clips on the subject from the
Times
and papers across the country, all of them promising a bright future of cheap fuel. Two of the headlines were
PEAT GAS ERA MAY BE NEAR AND EVERY FARM MAY NOW PRODUCE GAS.
The device probably required too much energy in processing the raw material to make the end product worthwhile.