Dark Genius of Wall Street

by Edward J Renehan Jr

  After he was gone, those who loved him most would recollect particularly his frequent exhaustion: routine episodes of profound tiredness that his wife, Ellie, became expert at dealing with. Returning punctually at five every evening from the wars of Wall Street, Jay entered into a cloistered world that Ellie sculpted carefully for his comfort. Alice wrote that her aunt “managed the household with an adroit and also an exceedingly firm hand. Uncle Jay’s home . . . was his solace. And when he returned, weary, seeking quiet and repose, Aunt Helen made sure that he had it. Servants melted from view as through mysterious trapdoors when their functions had been performed. Often, at the table, Uncle Jay was too exhausted or preoccupied to speak. Sometimes he would not give utterance to a word during the entire meal. . . . I used to wonder if he knew what he was eating. At such times, Aunt Helen, with a look, enforced the strictest silence.”2

  But after a silent dinner, Jay would invariably regroup, reenergize, and reengage with his family. Jay was always, Alice remembered, “a devoted father [and] a thoughtful and considerate husband.” In fact he delighted in spending time with his children, of which there were now six. In addition to George, Edwin, and Nellie, the clan also included Howard (born 1871), Anna (1875), and Frank (1877). Late in life, George Gould would recall his father reading aloud from books (among them the increasingly popular collections of nature essays written by his old friend John Burroughs), telling tales of family, and instructing all who were interested in the intricacies of his garden. Always he did so in the gentlest of manners, as a soothing and just paterfamilias. “Uncle Jay,” Alice wrote, “was exceedingly quiet. His words were both few and carefully chosen. He was perfectly poised, always. In my many months of residence as one of his family, I never once saw him give way to anger. Self-control, I should say, was one of his most pronounced attributes. In matters connected with running the household, he was both fair and considerate. . . . As a result, there was not a man or woman on the place but held it an honor to wait on him, genuinely wished to please him. . . . It has often been repeated that Jay Gould was a man who took little pleasure in life; that the very magnitude and uniformity of his success robbed existence of flavor. . . . The truth was that he derived unlimited pleasure, satisfaction, from many things, but that his enjoyment was deep, contemplative, appreciative in quality.”3

  Unlike most women of her class, Ellie refused to delegate the upbringing of her offspring. The Gould home, though it included a cook and several butlers and housekeepers, employed no nanny and no nursemaids. With regard to Mrs. Gould and her children, Maury Klein wrote: “There is no doubt she was the dominant figure in their childhood. Although Jay was an affectionate, even doting father, the pressures of business limited his presence. The children learned early to obey him at once and not to disturb him unless invited, but it is misleading to view Gould as a stern Victorian patriarch. The trials of his own childhood instilled in him a devotion to family that was his true religion. He had no other creed and did not pretend otherwise.”4

  Thus he was not usually a member of the party when, every Sunday, Ellie marched her sons and daughters to Fifth Avenue’s Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest. On Sunday mornings, while Jay’s pious wife prayed for his reclamation, he worked with his flowers or read. One wonders whether he, or the woman who prayed for him, noticed when the New York Times, which rarely found words to praise Gould for anything, praised his honesty when it came to spirituality. “We do not like Mr. Gould,” wrote the editors. “We do not think he is a good man to have around. But it is much to his credit that he is wholly free from hypocrisy in the matters of religion.”5

  On Sunday afternoons, the Goulds entertained. Frequent guests included the Russell Sages, Ellie’s parents, and others of Gould’s inner circle, including Sidney Dillon, Jesse Seligman, and Cyrus and David Dudley Field. The wives conversed with Ellie while the men spoke, for the most part, of their one great bond: finance. With Morosini, however, Jay seems to have shared a somewhat closer relationship. Both enjoyed collecting antique editions of books, and this proved fertile common ground for nonbusiness conversation. Another genuine and good friend of Gould’s from his business life, whom he did not see very often but for whom he nourished a great and reciprocated fondness, was Silas Clark, a chronic hypochondriac with whom Jay commiserated on matters of health. After family, and after old friends from the Catskills whom he saw less often than he would have liked, it was within this clique that Gould was most at home, most relaxed, most at peace. (Boston’s Fred Ames, it should be said, does not seem to have spent much time at all with Jay outside boardrooms, except for joining him on inspection tours.)

  Beyond members of the inner circle, Jay and Ellie did not socialize much. Jay’s nearly routine condemnation by the press and by those on the losing ends of his speculations made him something of a social outcast. This fact does not seem to have bothered Gould a great deal, as his banishment from polite society dovetailed nicely with his penchant for solitary avocations and the quiet insularity of family. On those rare occasions when Jay and Ellie received an invitation to a dinner, ball, or some other “inescapable” (Gould’s phrase), he would insist on a late arrival and an early departure. Ellie, on the other hand, desired a social life, welcomed what few “inescapables” came up, and did not appreciate being shunned. After having been weaned within a social class that defined itself wholly by whom it allowed in and whom it kept out, Ellie felt the profound isolation of Jay’s pariah status far more keenly than the Catskills farmboy ever would or could. As Edwin Hoyt wrote, “Jay was not particularly interested in parties or high life. He did not drink. He did not smoke. He did not sail small boats or shoot billiards. His passions were moneymaking, reading, walking, and the enjoyment of nature.”6

  In response to his wife’s distress, however, Jay did what he could. During the early 1880s, he joined with William K. Vanderbilt (grandson of the Commodore, son of William H. Vanderbilt) and other non-Knickerbocker millionaires in funding the new Metropolitan Opera House. The Goulds–along with the Vanderbilts, Goelets, Whitneys, Drexels, Rockefellers, Morgans, and Huntingtons–had previously been denied dress circle boxes at the Academy of Music on Irving Place, where old families like the Astors, Livingstons, Schuylers, and Beekmans reigned supreme. Now they subscribed boxes in the “Diamond Horseshoe” dress circle of the new opera house. “All the nouveaux riches were there,” said the Dramatic Mirror in reporting on the opening night in October 1883. “The Goulds and Vanderbilts and people of that ilk perfumed the air with the odor of crisp greenbacks. The tiers of boxes looked like cages in a menagerie of monopolists. When somebody remarked that the house looked bright as a new dollar, the appropriate character of the assemblage became apparent. To the refined eye, the decorations of the edifice seemed in particularly bad taste.”7 Ellie, who had thus wheedled her way into the right theatrical seating, was nevertheless shunned that same year when the William K. Vanderbilts, after having been denied entry into Mrs. Astor’s famous “Four Hundred,” announced their own ball to include New York’s elite “Twelve Hundred” and then left the Goulds off the list.

  It was the walker, horseman, and gardener in Jay who insisted every summer on a number of weeks in the country. After various stints not just at Long Branch but also spots more to Gould’s preference, places like the White and Green Mountains, Jay finally found a country retreat he liked well enough to make permanent. During the summer of 1877, Gould rented a walled, three-hundred-acre estate overlooking the Hudson River at Irvington (near Tarrytown). The place, not far from the estates of Cyrus and David Dudley Field, had formerly been the home of George Merritt, a once-prosperous New York merchant who had died in 1873. Gould rented from Merritt’s widow. Named Lyndhurst (originally Lyndenhurst, but later shortened) after the linden trees to be found on the property, the property featured the very finest example of Gothic Revival architecture to be found anywhere in the United States. The noted architect Andrew Jackson Davis first conceived and built the asymmetrical collecti
on of fanciful turrets, finials, buttresses, and trefoils for Lyndhurst’s first owner, William Paulding–a former mayor of New York City who called the place Knoll–in 1838. Twenty-six years later, Davis returned to double the size of the already large home, adding a new wing and tower at Merritt’s behest. Thereafter, the house resembled nothing so much as a dark and elaborate Gothic castle: quite a suitable home for a financial Dracula. (During the 1960s, the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows would be filmed here.) But that was only the impression from the outside. The interior was open, welcoming, and flooded with light from numerous strategically placed windows. The Goulds loved the place.

  The chief appeal for Jay, however, was the grounds. Broad lawns–framed by stands of ancient linden, elm, beech, birch, and pine trees–sloped down to the river from the house. Along the shoreline, the long lawn stopped at the tracks of the New York Central, which held a right of way. From the house, large vistas across the Hudson provided beautiful views of the Palisades to the south and the Tappan Zee to the north. Here Jay would play croquet with his children. Here he would also walk at twilight or sit on a bench with one of his books. Lyndhurst likewise included large stables, allowing Jay and his boys to engage in their passion for riding. But most important for Jay, just north of the castle stood the largest greenhouse in the United States: 380 feet long by 37 feet wide, with 60-foot wings on either end and a high dome rising 100 feet in the air. On a clear day, standing atop the dome on a platform reached by stairs, one could look northward and see not only the Hudson Highlands but also the distant blue of Jay’s native Catskills, which he would point to and describe to the children as “home.” (Gould often waxed nostalgic about his old days and friends in the Catskills and continued to make the occasional appearance there.)

  Three summers at Lyndhurst so enthralled the Goulds that in 1880 Jay bought the estate from Mrs. Merritt, paying $250,000. Not long after the closing, he made a large second-floor billiard room into a gallery where he hung his growing collection of paintings by members of the Barbizon School. At the same time, he seized two more rooms on the main floor to create a private library with glass cabinets. As for the greenhouse, which had sat empty since Merritt’s death, Jay ordered the German landscape designer and master gardener Ferdinand Mangold–imported by Merritt in 1864–to fill the place with large supplies of rare roses, orchids, and other treasures. Every evening that summer, after coming home on the New York Central and sharing dinner with his family, a quietly pleased Gould would shuffle off to the greenhouse wearing his business suit and carpet slippers, there to work happily with Mangold, sorting and planting. By the time Jay and his clan returned to Fifth Avenue that autumn, he’d spent more than $40,000 on various varieties of flowers and plants. Through that fall he was frequently to be found at Lyndhurst on the weekends, playing with his roots and bulbs.

  Thus Jay was understandably shattered when, on the morning of 11 December, a fire, perhaps set by an arsonist, destroyed the greenhouse and everything in it. His response, however, recalled his reaction to the destruction by fire of his Delaware County history so many years before. Within weeks–working with an independent architect and the famous solarium makers Lord and Burnham–Jay finalized plans for a replacement structure of equivalent size that would stand complete by early 1882: the nation’s first steel-framed greenhouse. Jay’s new Eden included a grapery at its west end along with a cold house for rhododendrons, camellias, hyacinths, and bulbs. On the other side, the eastern wing featured individual houses for carnations, roses, orchids, azaleas, and other flowers. Jay’s favorite was the orchid house, which he eventually filled with the most significant collection to be found anywhere in North America: 8,000 plants, 150 species. The greenhouse’s semicircular central section, meanwhile, featured a large fountain surrounded by exotic palms.8 Beyond the greenhouse, Gould added to his domain until he possessed 500 acres total, much left to woodland but some converted for farming. Ironically, the boy who’d despised life on a dairy farm now took avidly to dairying. Gould kept fifty cows and three prize bulls. Through the efforts of a twenty-man staff overseen by Mangold, Lyndhurst produced 250 tons of hay and plenty of milk annually.

  In addition to its comforts and luxuries, the walled Lyndhurst offered security and a degree of freedom Jay and his family could not find elsewhere. The fact was that the Goulds had to be constantly on guard against a never-ending supply of crackpots, con men, and would-be assassins. Jay, as has already been noted, was once attacked at Delmonico’s. On another occasion, while walking near the intersection of Exchange Place and New Street in 1877, he became the target of a muscular Wall Streeter by the name of A. A. Selover, who punched him in the face, grabbed him by the seat of his pants, and hurled him down some steps leading to a basement barbershop. (It speaks to the steadfastness of Gould’s infamy that Selover’s great-grandson, reached by telephone, expressed pride in the memory of his forebear’s battery.) After that, Gould traveled nowhere in public without the robust Morosini or an alert Pinkerton guard by his side. The same went for his kin. Alice Northrop wrote of the “secrecy and precautions which surrounded, pervaded, the family’s doings, accepted, inevitable, a part of every day living.”9 Murder and kidnap threats abounded, as did attempts at extortion. Some of these came from extreme members of radical labor movements, others from opportunists trying to make a buck, and still more from simple cranks who imagined themselves instruments of God’s righteous justice, out to get the infamous Gould.

  Alice remembered being at Lyndhurst, sitting with her uncle beneath a grove of birches in the early summer of 1881, when a servant brought Jay a telegram. “Alice,” he half-whispered after reading it, “Garfield has been shot, President Garfield has been shot.” Jay turned “very white. . . . He put his head back to rest, and rally that iron will.”10 As a congressional representative, Garfield had investigated Jay’s activities with regard to Black Friday, but in the years since Gould had come to know and like the man. Indeed, he’d supported–albeit quietly, lest hatred of Gould metastasize into hatred for Garfield–the Republican’s candidacy for the White House. “No man is safe from the ultimate theft,” a reflective Gould told Morosini not long after the lingering Garfield finally succumbed to his wound on 19 September. One day that same autumn, Alice arrived at Lyndhurst with Nellie to find both her aunt and uncle “deathly pale” and her uncle “perceptibly shaking” as the girls entered the house. A gun-toting stranger had managed to penetrate the grounds, and all the family were instructed to remain indoors until he was found by the men Alice characterized as Lyndhurst’s “armed auxiliaries.” Soon Jay’s detectives found the interloper hiding in a clump of shrubbery. A little later, the shaken Gould returned to the library, where the family waited. “The crank and his arsenal,” he told them, “are being well taken care of.”11

  During the same year that he opened the new greenhouse, 1882, Gould also moved his Manhattan home from 578 Fifth Avenue to a larger townhouse across the street. Number 579 sat on the northeast corner of Forty-seventh Street and Fifth. Jay followed the lead of his neighbor Darius Ogden Mills, the mining and banking magnate who lived one block to the north at 634 Fifth Avenue, when he hired the prominent Herter Brothers to redo the interior of the house. Contemporary photographs show a large, if not palatial, four-story, three-bay home with a central entry. The Goulds took up seven bedrooms on the second and third floors, with the fourth story and basement reserved for staff. Jay and Ellie shared large, adjoining second-story bedrooms fronting on Fifth Avenue. The second floor also included Gould’s elaborate, fireplaced library, housing a large collection of books that was not redundant with that found at Lyndhurst.12

  At both 579 and Lyndhurst, Jay’s siblings and their families were always welcome. The widower Abram Gould routinely sent young Fred to spend long summers with his cousins at the grand estate on the Hudson. Likewise the children of Bettie Gould and Gilbert Palen–Anna, Rufus, and Gilbert, Jr., the last born in 1870 and destined for a career as a prominent physicia
n–visited from their comfortable home in Germantown, Pennsylvania, some sixty miles from the prosperous tannery owned by their father and their Uncle Edward. (Another Palen son, Walter Gould Palen, died suddenly in 1877 at age two.) Most important, however, Jay and Ellie Gould made their homes open to Jay’s sister Sarah Northrop and her large brood.

  George Northrop had not had an easy way of it in later years. Eventually his tannery failed, after which Jay set him up with a general store in a Pennsylvania village not far from the Palens. But Gould’s generous charity didn’t, in the end, do anything to help Northrop. Past sixty, inconsolable over the collapse of his business, and with his health in decline, the proud man ultimately chose to take his own life. “Don’t worry Sarah,” Jay cabled his sister immediately after receiving word of the tragedy. “I will help you.”13 Soon thereafter, Sarah received a long, handwritten letter from Jay in which he gave her detailed instructions on exactly how she should close the store. In the same note, he explained that he would pay any and all debts George had left behind, and that henceforth Sarah would receive substantial quarterly checks for the support of herself and the children.