by gail maccoll
On June 29, it was all over. Leonard Jerome got into a cab with the Duke at his hotel, and they drove down to City Hall at 1 P.M. In the anteroom of Mayor Hewitt’s office were some forty friends, including Ward McAllister (who later took credit for making the match). Mrs. Hammersley, in écru cashmere with passementerie trim, impressed the Times reporter “simply as a magnificent woman.” After a long wait (while the contracts were drawn up), the mayor finally performed the ceremony and the little group dispersed—only to gather again, a few hours later, at the Tabernacle Baptist Church on Second Avenue. Because no Episcopal minister would marry a divorce, the Duke had prevailed on the Baptist minister to read the Episcopal wedding service. Lily wore a shot-taffeta street dress for the ceremony, and a broad gold band was added to the small solitaire diamond used in the first service.
Following a dinner for a dozen people at Delmonico’s, the Duchess retired to her house at 257 Fifth Avenue while the Duke returned to his hotel. They embarked the next morning for England, and by way of valediction the Times stated: “It has been generally understood that Mrs. Hammersley married the Duke for a title and that the Duke married her for her money.” (The Duke, in fact, was so anxious to make the marriage stick that he insisted on a third ceremony in England, at the registry office on Mount Street in Mayfair.)
It was a pretty cynical performance, and it would have its repercussions. Another bankrupt duke was soon to descend on New York, and everyone would remember his father’s wooing of Lily Hammersley.
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“Well, Blandford is married! I went with him to the Mayor’s office in the City Hall at one o’clock to-day and witnessed the ceremony. The bride was looking very well and all passed off quickly. I took charge of his cable to the Duchess, also sent one of my own to Jennie. I dine with them at Delmonico‘s this evening; a dinner given by Mr. and Mrs. Clews to the Duke and his friends. I shall go down to the Aurania in the morning to see them off. They had great difficulty in arranging the religions marriage. The clergy refused, he being a divorced man . . . .”
LEONARD JEROME, in a letter
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Delmonico’s, on Fifth Avenue at Twenty-sixth Street, was society’s watering-hole in the 1890s.
DUKE’S PROGRESS: THE ENGLISH LORD’S AMERICAN JOURNEY
Gallons of ice water. Great gusts of suffocating steam heat. The heiress-hunting Englishman was always being buffeted by extremes in America. Take, for instance, the hotels: so wonderfully luxurious, yet so deeply uncomfortable. The elaborate meals were poorly served, and wine was not a matter of course with dinner. The elegant bedrooms were heated to the point of boiling, the enormous, shiny bathrooms overrun with complex, unmanageable systems of faucets. There were bells, buttons and switches everywhere—but no one to look after His Lordship personally, to meet his own little idiosyncratic needs. And topping it all was the demeaning practice of signing the guest book, where any plebeian might thereafter finger his noble name.
The American taste for luxury (if not outright vulgarity) was evident in plush-upholstered railroad cars.
Above: From sea to shining sea: the Britons made every effort to make the trip.
Below: George Pullman’s leather-tufted private parlor car.
Charles Dana Gibson captioned this drawing: “$ $ $ $ $.”
No less confounding were the young American ladies. Never before had the English lord found himself in such unrestricted contact with unmarried females, hurrying here and there, from one social or sporting activity to the next, with no evidence of adult supervision. It was not the least bit necessary for the Englishman to exercise any rituals of courtship formalities until the very last moment. Although he might perpetually expect the red-faced, indignant parent to appear on the horizon of his lovemaking, none ever materialized. The indignity was, in fact, all his own and from another quarter: he soon discovered that he was only one among many, that the girl in question had a veritable horde of equally favored “admirers.”
The question of the girls aside, the English lord found that civilized America bored him. True, the famous American openness was preferable to the stilted formalities back home—no one was kept standing in the States, and everyone was free to speak his or her mind. But this very freedom produced a certain blandness. Only occasionally could one enjoy an excited discussion of corruption in government, and there was almost no gossip—no little scandalous stories, no intrigues to titillate and amuse. Of much greater interest was primitive America. “Though one can dine in New York,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “one could not dwell there. Better the far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys.” (Indeed, the West was so full of aristocratic Englishmen that the famous Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs had become known as “little London.”) Thus the wife-hunting English lord, after a patient review of American heiress strongholds along the Atlantic coast (where he might or might not attend to the business at hand), would head happily west to points wild and unknown.
LORD HEAVYDEBTS: “I have got to do something, by jove! And your tin is needful, you know. I hate your beastly loud voice and manners, but, er.. . let’s marry, you know.”
MISS DOUBLEDOLLAR: “I like somebody else better, but just think of the syle I could put on. . . well, I am your girl.”
“HAVING A GRAND TIME . . . ”
Rustic Maine.
BAR HARBOR. Newport, round two, minus the Marble Age. Here were set-pieces of American relaxation-perpetual dressing, dining, dancing, and that horror of horrors, according to Lady Randolph Churchill, the leaving of cards. Decided pluses: the wraparound porches, the spectacle of men and women swimming together.
BOSTON. Vaguely frightening, somehow, even to Americans. The finicky denizens of Beacon Street, who had an overdeveloped sense of their role in the Revolution and its attendant responsibilities, displayed a mannered reserve and distaste for opulence that should have pleased the English but only underscored the pointlessness of being there at all. If the town took itself seriously, the girls were worse; they took a perverse pleasure in hewing to some arch intellectual line that got on everyone’s nerves and ensured that proposals of marriage would not be forthcoming.
Boston Common.
NIAGARA FALLS. One of the better opportunities for the Englishman’s preferred travel mien: admiration doused in complaint. The falls were magnificent, but the trinkets, the distractions, the buying and selling and building all round obligingly prevented unrestrained awe.
Eastern hospitality.
U. S. DOLLAR. Although the exchange rate on the pound was favorable, the cost of luxury American-style was deucedly high. To maintain the standards of a man of leisure, the Englishman would have to part with twice the amount he was used to spending in London.
THOMAS ALVA EDISON. Every Englishman’s favorite American. The 8th Duke of Marlborough’s most treasured moment may have been his meeting with the Wizard of Menlo Park (which he squeezed in while working on Lily Hammersley), who then wrote Moreton Frewen: “I thought the English Duke was a fool with a crown on his head. But this one knows a great deal which I do not intend inventing until next fall.”
The Wizard of Menlo Park.
WASHINGTON, D.C. A few comments here about the general blandness, architecturally and socially; a tour of the Capitol building, which was remarkably (or grossly, depending on the Englishman in question) free of guards, uniforms, any figures of authority or hierarchy; plenty of five o’clock teas where one had not the slightest chance of meeting members of Congress or in fact anyone to do with government, all of whom up to and including the President were considered by local matrons to be too gauche for words.
Symbol of the surprising gulf between government and society.
SPITTOON. “America,” declared Oscar Wilde, “is one long expectoration.” Quite foreign and therefore quite apt to be noticed, a constant in the background of the Englishman’s U. S. travels was the sound of tobacco being spit and then landing, splat, in the ubiquitous cuspidor.
An American c
uriosity.
THE SOUTH. Virginia a joy, with the cult of the horse in full flower. Obvious similarities to English country life, and shared sympathies over the outcome of the Civil War, meant the Englishman felt right at home; however, selfsame similarities and Civil War meant he was going nowhere with Southern girls (as poor as English girls) or Southern mamas (like English ones, not about to let their daughters marry away from home).
Languor at White Sulphur Springs.
THE WILD WEST. Ranches, and ore mines, and lots and lots of buffalo. The West had danger, heathens, horses, big game—in short, the romance of adventure. The romance of romance was necessarily absent, since Western daughters went east the minute they became heiresses. The Englishman would have better luck meeting Wild West millions at his mother’s house in London.
Sitting Bull himself, with Buffalo Bill.
SAN FRANCISCO. The second leading supplier, after New York, of heiresses to the English nobility. The wet, fertile land was nicely reminiscent of home, but there was a lamentable lack of scent in the flowers and the gorgeous-looking fruit was tasteless. Dinner was liable to be served not in courses but in lots of little dishes, laid on the table all at once. Oyster cocktails and Monterey were, however, considered worth the trip.
CATTLE. Nowhere near as rewarding as young ladies with large dowries. Younger sons who plumped for cattle ranching would soon realize their mistake. In the 1880s, Englishmen lost £10 million ($50 million) on American cows.
Western hospitality.
THE PLUTOCRATS’ DAUGHTERS
The English aristocrats, by the 1890s, had finally learned what to expect of the American heiress. She wouldn’t pack a pistol, throw tomahawks or dance the cancan. Her voice would be loud, her dresses showy, her parents preposterous and her dowry large. But then along came a new, improved model of American heiress, retooled at great expense for the European market. This version of the heiress was the American Aristocrat, and she would marry a nobleman not on a whim, not because she needed the social boost, but because it was her right.
MARCH OF ANGLOMANIA
Bobert W. Garrett, former railroad president and Newport resident, convinced himself that he was the Prince of Wales. His house was altered to resemble the Court of St. James, his servants wore British livery, and his wife made believe she was the Princess of Wales.
Halcyon days in Newport, where boys and girls could picnic innocently together. Consuelo Vanderbilt is shown above (center of photo) with spiky flowers on her hat; the girl on her left, in the scallop-brimmed hat, is May Goelet.
THE GILDED AGE
By the 1890s, Old New York’s modest standard of living had become a quaint memory. Long gone were the poky brownstone parlors, the carriages drawn by one horse, the frugal evening parties. Cornelius Vanderbilt IV boasted in Queen of the Golden Age, his biography of his mother, Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, how “our hard-pressed English butler often complained that our family lived with more pomp and circumstance than many of the crowned heads of Europe.” It was easy to believe. Seymour Leslie, son of Leonie Jerome and Sir John Leslie, writes in The Jerome Connection about being shown around Frederick Vanderbilt’s house in Hyde Park: “These are Watteau panels,” Vanderbilt’s wife Lulu told him breathlessly. “This whole house was copied for us by Stanford White. . . . Fred’s bedroom, early Italian Renaissance. . . . Also the guest bedrooms, why we had a man here last weekend who said the chairs were so valuable he just had to sit on the floor.” Rugs were always Aubusson, chairs always Louis XVI crusted with ormolu, paintings always Old Masters. If there was anything American-made in the house, it would be a magnificent version of something European, such as Alva Vanderbilt’s stained-glass window (in the banquet hall at 660 Fifth Avenue) depicting the battle of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The only frankly American features would be the plumbing and the kitchen.
By the early 1890s the Patriarchs had expanded their rolls to include forty-nine men, among them J. Pierpont Morgan and Bradley Martin.
It was also increasingly likely, in the 1890s, that the leaders of American society would have friends abroad. The phenomenon of the raw tourist gaping with his Baedeker was still around, but the plutocrats no longer fit the pattern. Their trips to Europe now included, along with pilgrimages to Worth and expensive sessions with art dealers such as Duveen, a satisfying measure of social life. Gone were the days when New Yorkers considered it bad form to force themselves on the notice of acquaintances in foreign countries. Quite the contrary. They now eagerly sought out acquaintances, taking London by a slow accumulation of introductions in Rome, Monte Carlo, Paris. This was easy now: there were so many Americans living abroad, delegates from New York society, so that travelers had friends, or at least letters of introduction, in every port. Mrs. Ogden Goelet (née May Wilson), for example, lived mostly on her yacht, the White Ladye, cruising from harbor to harbor as the seasons dictated and earning the sobriquet “Steamboat Mary.” With her was young daughter May, who was gaining a very cosmopolitan view of the world.
Cornelia Martin, raised as much in England as in New York.
On a cruise up the Nile, c. 1882: Oliver Belmont, seated at left, with Willie K. Vanderbilt and Consuelo next to him and Alva lounging in a hammock at far right.
The Bradley Martins, another extreme case of the expatriate rich, had a perfectly nice double house off Fifth Avenue but rarely spent more than the winter season in New York. They preferred the estate in Scotland and the luxurious London house, where they entertained extensively. A number of Anglo-American couples, New Yorker Helene Beckwith and Lord Leigh among them, were introduced under Mrs. Martin’s hospitable roof. The Martins’ daughter Cornelia, with a million dollars of her own and only a nodding acquaintance with her native land, seemed inevitably destined for the British peerage.
Their growing exposure to Europe led the American rich to emulate the European aristocratic life. The ideal of the territorial nobility, dimly grasped, resulted in the erection of enormous country houses clumped together in acceptable-to-the-plutocracy locales such as Tuxedo Park and Newport. Especially Newport. The aristocratic fantasy, the plutocrats’ personal myth, took its most concrete form on the cliffs overlooking Rhode Island Sound.
The 4th Earl of Craven stayed with the Martins at Balmaccaan, the house they rented in Scotland. Cornelia was engaged to him before she reached her seventeenth birthday.
THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA
For some of America’s wealthiest citizens, the year was divided into international social seasons: Lenox in early fall, New York for the winter, an interlude in Paris to purchase a new wardrobe, London in late spring. But in the summer, wherever else they might have been during the year, America’s socialites went to Newport.
Newport resembled London in that it was a national rather than local social center. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Washington were all represented in Newport by their foremost citizens. American society, quite simply, made a wholesale annual migration to Aquidneck Island. In the summer of 1895, for instance, the entire British embassy (headed by Sir Michael Herbert, husband of American heiress Belle Wilson) closed up shop in Washington and moved to Bellevue Avenue.
Left: Bailey’s Beach, the sanctum sanctorum, was America’s most exclusive strip of sand.
Right: The gate at Tuxedo Park, the lakeside community planned by Pierre Lorillard. The Tuxedo season reached its zenith in the early autumn, after Newport’s was over.
The Newport Casino, built by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., to Stanford White’s design. Newport’s principal daytime gathering place, it featured grass tennis courts as well as the shops that faced Bellevue Avenue.
Newport had not always enjoyed such social eminence. In the early 1870s it was still an unpretentious resort town favored by Southerners, who took the long train ride north to savor the cool evenings, the crisp shadows under copper beeches, the brilliant sun and the constant pulse of the waves, steady as a heartbeat. It was a town of pleasant, rambling wooden houses with wide verandas
, where doors and windows were kept open and sea breezes blew letters off writing tables; donkey carts and picnics and vivid blue hydrangeas were the order of the day. Then the town changed. By the mid-nineties, the air and the beeches and the glittering sea were still there, but the informality had been buried. Newport had entered the Marble Age. Cheek by jowl the houses loomed along Bellevue Avenue, many of them designed by Richard Morris Hunt, most of them evoking some European model. Palazzo nestled next to hunting lodge (land in Newport was scarce, so the houses were awfully close together), château next to manor.
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“The Emperor Caesar Augustus ‘found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.’ Richard Morris Hunt might well have said, ‘I found Newport a town of wood and I left it a town of marble.’”
MAUD HOWE ELLIOTT
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Coaching in Newport reached new heights of elaboration. Here, Mrs. August Belmont prepares to go for a drive with her four matched horses, two liveried postilions, and two coachmen behind the carriage.
It was supposed to be country life, but it wasn’t; it was resort life, with all the artificiality and homogeneity that this implies. Country life, in the European aristocratic sense, meant retiring to one’s ancestral acres surrounded by dependents, tenants and other social inferiors. That wasn’t what Newport was about at all. In America, that kind of country life wasn’t even possible for the élite since the peak of the social pyramid was reached—and retained—only through constant social effort. Where would Mrs. Astor be if she retired to the country for six months? Forgotten, and nobody would save her place for her. So American society stuck together. Not only could no one afford to be absent; the truth was, to exist at all, society had to raise a quorum. In America, rank was only relative: it had to be measured against someone else’s. Thus the wholesale move, come June, to Bellevue Avenue. No one with real social ambitions could afford to miss the action.
