The roots of the Jet Set are all about this displacement of pedigree by flash, and can be traced to 350 Fifth Avenue, the current site of the Empire State Building. This edifice had its own unique relationship to aviation, not just in the climax of King Kong but also through its 1945 front-page encounter with a B-25 Bomber that crashed into the skyscraper’s seventy-ninth floor in a thick fog. But it wasn’t this precursor to the airborne terror of 9/11 that links the site to the jet age and its attendant social order: 350 Fifth was the address of the mansion of Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, the richest grande dame of America’s Gilded Age, the period from the 1870s to the 1890s. The four hundred people who could fit into Mrs. Astor’s grand ballroom (every Fifth Avenue mansion had to have one, like fallout shelters in the 1950s) were designated America’s high society, and every change in what was considered America’s in-crowd was an evolution—or, in some cases, a deviation—from this original model.
Mrs. Astor, née Caroline “Lina” Schermerhorn, was Old New York, a charter member of Gotham’s Dutch founding elite. Her husband was the grandson of John Jacob Astor, the German-descended fur baron and America’s first multimillionaire. But in the post–Civil War boom that saw the rise of the robber barons, a couple of generations were sufficient to separate the nobs from the swells, and the Astors could confidently look down on the Vanderbilts and other “new money” as upstart and uncouth. In reality, Mrs. Astor was just a convenient front for the machinations of her Rasputin-like best friend and party planner Ward McAllister, who in 1888 labeled her circle of friends “The 400,” the first appellation of a seemingly impenetrable elite that became the lodestar of every outsider who had the dream to rise and shine.
Ward McAllister was the first public snob, the Marquess of Queensbury of social climbing. In setting the rules of the postbellum game of ambition, he put snobbery on the map and turned upward mobility into an imperative. The Martha Stewart/Robin Leach of his day, he installed the rich and their lifestyle onto a national pedestal. A Savannah, Georgia, grandee, McAllister himself was a precursor of Jet Set mobility. His father was a prominent lawyer/politician who lost a campaign for governor of Georgia by less than a thousand votes because his blood was too blue for the increasingly populist populace. Ward’s brother Hall sailed around South America to California during the gold rush and made a fortune as a prospectors’ attorney in San Francisco, where a major street was named for him. Ward, too, went west and joined the firm, but he hated the relative rigors of forty-niner life. He quickly fled back east, where he found and married a steamboat heiress who was an Astor cousin. Soon after the nuptials, he left his new homebody bride on her horse farm in New Jersey and took off to Europe for a grand tour, traveling in style with his own personal physician.
When Ward returned after a year of continental sophistication, the McAllisters set up a townhouse on Sixteenth Street in Manhattan and a country house, Bayside Farm, in Newport, Rhode Island. Formerly a summer escape for Southern planters, Newport was transformed into the American Riviera by McAllister, renowned for his fêtes champêtres, multicourse picnics worthy of the French Impressionists. At his urgings, the great robber-baron families built their summer mansions there, calling them “cottages” because one of McAllister’s edicts was that big money was never supposed to blow its own horn. Back in New York, he started a dancing school, created the opera season, and pioneered the then-alien concept of entertaining at public restaurants, rather than at home or in clubs. He made Delmonico’s—just down Sixteenth Street from his pied-à-terre—the most famous restaurant in America.
Alas, Mrs. McAllister was a homebody who was ailing much of the time. She hated her husband’s extravaganzas, his foxhunts, his carriage rides, his nights at the opera. So McAllister found a soul mate in Lina Astor, whose husband avoided partying as much as McAllister’s wife did. Notwithstanding her wealth and position, Mrs. Astor was no beauty. She was often described, behind her back, as having the visage of an orangutan. But McAllister made her feel like Venus. He called her his “Mystic Rose” and used her enormous resources to give what were widely considered to be the most extravagant parties this side of Versailles. What were these fetes like? Here’s McAllister’s description of his “Dresden Quadrille,” held in the Astor ballroom on March 26, 1883:
The ladies wore white satin, with powdered hair, and the gentlemen white satin knee breeches and powdered wigs, with the Dresden mark, crossed swords, on each of them … The most remarkable costume was that of a cat; the dress being of a cat’s tails and white cat’s heads, and a bell with “PUSS” on it in large letters. The Hostess (Mrs. Astor) appeared as a Venetian Princess, with a superb jeweled peacock in her hair. The host was the Duc de Guise. The host’s elder brother wore a costume of Louis XVI. His wife appeared as “The Electric Light,” her head one blaze of diamonds.
McAllister’s obvious specialty was theme parties, meticulously researched. He organized a Pinafore quadrille, where everyone dressed as sailors, and a Mother Goose quadrille, in which all the men wore pink and sang nursery rhymes. Whatever the theme, the message was the same: “Let them eat cake.” He had even less of an inkling than Louis XIV that, après lui, there might be a deluge.
During his social dictatorship, McAllister became a genuine celebrity in his own right. Newspapers, including the august New York Times, followed his every diktat. Who were the 400? Mostly millionaires like the Astors themselves, plus a lot of genteel nouveau pauvre post–Civil War Southerners who came north to marry off their polished trophy children to the robber barony. Families like the “Marrying Wilsons,” Memphis transplants whose four daughters hit a conjugal jackpot by wedding, respectively, an Astor (Mystic Rose’s son); a Vanderbilt; a Goelet, who was Knickerbocker royalty; and, for good measure, a Herbert, who was British royalty.
McAllister, nostalgic for his Savannah plantation past, had a soft spot for Southerners, whom he regarded with far more esteem than the uncouth Northern moneymen. There were few white-collar types in the 400, almost no lawyers, no doctors, just a lot of very big businessmen and very old money: in short, a fairly dull, guarded lot. He had no use whatsoever for artists, writers, singers, even opera stars, other than as hired entertainment. “Remember that Broadway only cuts across Fifth Avenue. It never parallels it,” he was fond of saying.
Known as “the Autocrat of Drawing Rooms,” McAllister, who placed himself squarely on the 400 list, was surely the most colorful of all. In 1890, he published his bestseller, Society as I Have Found It. By then he may have gotten too big for his morning coat. The book was a paean to Southern aristocracy and a broadside against Yankee parvenuity. The book basically lampooned the “society” McAllister had created above the Mason-Dixon Line, biting the many white-gloved hands that had fed him champagne and caviar. Typically, he wrote about the Southern view “that they alone lived well, and that there was no such thing as good society in New York or other Northern cities, that New Yorkers and other people are simply a lot of tradespeople, having no antecedents, springing up like the mushroom, who did not know how to live.”
While McAllister had done his best to “educate” New York in the ways of the Old South, he declared that the rest of the rapidly industrializing United States was basically a lost cause. He decried “the sharp character of Chicago magnates … Their growth has been too rapid to allow them to acquire both wealth and culture. Their leaders of society are the successful Stock Yard magnates, cottolene manufacturers, soupmakers, Chicago gas trust speculators and dry good princes …” The hog butchers of the world soon ganged up to turn Ward McAllister into bacon. Under pressure from her friends, and not just from Chicago, McAllister’s Mystic Rose severed their long relationship. Mrs. Astor informed her grand vizier that from now on, she would populate her own ballroom and create her own guest lists.
Bereft, McAllister withdrew from society, telling the press “it’s more of a bore than a pleasure to me. I merely perform my functions, you understand.” In the bitter winter of 1895, he died of th
e grippe after dining, all by himself, at the Union Club. He was sixty-eight. He would have found consolation that his funeral at Grace Church on Broadway, the temple of high society, was packed even tighter than Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, with the Episcopal bishop of Mississippi leading the service, a thirty-voice choir, and a society ballroom orchestra to dance the blues away.
Despite the rise of the tabloidish “yellow press” and the epic battles between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer to capture a national imagination that was stirred like nothing else by images of wealth and excess, Ward McAllister’s unique position as the ultimate social arbiter somehow stayed vacant until 1921. With the rise of the giant monopolistic trusts that so exercised Teddy Roosevelt and other reformers, big money became front-page news. However, society, such as it was, had taken too religiously to McAllister’s commands of tastefulness to make for riveting copy. The muckraked excesses of the big businesses were far more fascinating than the excesses of the big businessmen outside the boardrooms.
Tiptoeing into the McAllister void was a failed gunsmith and dairy farmer named Louis Keller, who found some success as a golf course developer. He finally hit the jackpot by tapping in to McAllister’s discovery of the power of exclusionary lists. Keller created the black-and-red Social Register, a small, handsome, annually printed hardcover book that enumerated the names, addresses, schools, and clubs of the “right people,” as defined by Keller. The Social Register had reached its peak of influence by the time of Keller’s death at sixty-five in 1922. The problem with the Register was that while it played to the egos of its listees, it did nothing for the imaginations of everyone else. It was so rigid, stuffy, and intolerant, with a divorce or a marriage to a Jew or a thespian, or, God forbid, a showgirl, grounds for expulsion, that it might as well have been called the Book of the Dead. But then Keller dropped dead, the movies emerged as the national pastime, and Prohibition turned America into a nation of hypocritical, hip-flask-toting, technically illegal party animals. Society, at last, began to loosen up.
There to report it was the country’s first great but unlikely gossip columnist, a tubby teetotaler who lived with his mother; his name was Maury Henry Biddle Paul. That third name was Paul’s main claim to Main Line social fame, along with his three years at the University of Pennsylvania. But the Biddles never claimed Paul, and neither did Penn. After dropping out, he worked for a while in a machine foundry and then sold costume jewelry door-to-door before finding his niche as a Philadelphia society columnist, listing weddings, charity balls, and the like for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
When his editor at that journal decamped for New York in 1914, Paul, then twenty-four, followed him, finding piecework at four Manhattan rags and writing under a different pseudonym at each one. He made his first Manhattan faux pas while covering an opening night at the Metropolitan Opera. Not knowing Who Was Who on his new turf, he created a list of first-nighters by copying the names on the brass donors’ plaques in the prime boxes. What he didn’t realize was that most of these aristocratic donors were not live at the Met but buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Gotham’s graveyard of the rich. His understanding editor gave Paul credit for his efforts and another chance.
Paul’s big break came in 1919 when William Randolph Hearst was trying to get the attention of his mistress Marion Davies, who was engrossed in a newspaper that Hearst did not own. “What are you reading?” Hearst demanded. “Dolly Madison,” the actress replied. “Get Dolly” was Hearst’s command. What he got was not what he expected: Dolly was Maury Paul. Hearst didn’t care. If “Dolly” was good enough for his mistress, he was good enough for the chief. Hearst hired Paul at a salary said to be higher than that of Edward Douglass White, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and Paul became the hanging judge of the new order he named “Café Society.” Not bad for an under-thirty dropout. The column was called “Cholly Knickerbocker,” a play on the Washington Irving character Diedrich Knickerbocker, a pretentious Dutch historian whom Irving had created in the early 1800s as the author of Irving’s A History of New York, a satire on Yankee pomposity. Cholly was the way fancy New Yorkers pronounced “Charlie,” as in Good Time Charlie.
A born list-o-phile, Maury Paul, who loved coining phrases, divided New York into two warring camps, pitching his Café Society against what he called the “Old Guard,” the Mrs. Astor set. Not that the Café people were Sacco and Vanzetti or a bunch of avant-garde artists. Rather, they tended to be Old Guard types who, instead of sitting in their clubs or drawing rooms, liked going out to restaurants and speakeasies and, when they were there, were not too snobbish to mix with new money whom they probably wouldn’t have invited into their mansions. They weren’t all that different from the nobs McAllister entertained at Delmonico’s, just a bit younger and looser. And, unlike the Old Guard who eschewed all notoriety beyond weddings, funerals, and debuts, Café Society liked, really liked, getting their names in the papers. With the rise of the tabloid press and the movies, the hypnotic power of the image became the civilized world’s leitmotif. Publicity became the drug, fame the cure, and Maury Paul the doctor to New Society.
Paul, too, became a major celebrity, just as Ward McAllister had, as famous as most of the swells his constant repetition in his column turned into household names, people like Jock Whitney, “Little” Gloria Vanderbilt, Barbara Hutton, Doris Duke, and superdeb Brenda Frazier. One of the wittier of his endless witty headlines was a profile of the Duchess of Windsor’s first husband, Ernest Simpson, entitled “The Unimportance of Being Ernest.” Many of the clichés Paul used over and over would enter the lexicon of the period, such as “chitchat,” “glamour girl,” “Longuyland,” “Reno-vation” (for a divorce), “snobility,” “oodles of ducats,” “heir-conditioned,” “yours truly.”
Paul was featured out and about on his nightly rounds in huge magazine spreads such as a 1941 issue of Life, showing him dressing in black tie and drenching himself in cologne in his East Side penthouse (his live-in mother wasn’t mentioned), with Rubenses and heraldic crests on his walls and houseboys at his beck and call. Once groomed, he hit everything from debutante balls to El Morocco, sitting with the Vanderbilts, Condé Nast, Brenda Frazier, nixing the champagne and sipping his own special tea blend, all the while collecting a then-behemoth annual $100,000 Hearst salary for what most post-Depression Americans had to think was the coolest writing job in the world. He had pulled a fast one, getting paid oodles of ducats to live the Fred and Ginger life. Paul was syndicated in more than a hundred newspapers and had five million readers.
Even if Maury Paul had gotten his start in the gossip business pretending to be “Dolly Madison,” there were almost no women whatsoever in the gossip trade. Yes, there were female “society editors” at many newspapers, but the trench warfare that was gossip itself, no matter how gilded, was effectively off-limits for the fairer sex. The glass ceiling here was shattered by Elsa Maxwell, who, in addition to becoming the greatest “party professional” of the century, became one of the leading gossip writers and an autocratic social arbiter who might have put Ward McAllister on her own waiting list.
Maxwell’s background for her position was even less likely than that of Maury Paul. Elsa Maxwell, a poor and portly girl from Keokuk, Iowa, was born in a box at the theater when her pregnant culture-vulture mother couldn’t bear to miss the next act at the opera. The homeschooled daughter of an insurance broker who eventually moved the family to San Francisco, Elsa never got over her parents’ being snubbed for the guest list of a party honoring a California senator’s daughter who was marrying a Vanderbilt. A woman who would become famous for her grudges against the rich and famous, Maxwell started with the Vanderbilts, vowing, according to her memoirs, “that no one would give more parties, with less Vanderbilts, than I would.”
To that end, Maxwell, who had learned to play the piano, hired herself out to a traveling vaudeville company. She went as far as South Africa, and toured Europe before World War I. Along the way, she became clever
ly sophisticated, a quality she brought back to New York and used to ingratiate herself with the reigning queen of Manhattan society, Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Vanderbilt Belmont, née Alva Smith. Alva was an upwardly mobile belle from Mobile, Alabama, whose mother had come to post–Civil War New York to run a boardinghouse. The rentals paid for the Worth gowns she dressed her daughter in. Alva’s mother’s sacrifices paid off as Alva married, in succession, a Vanderbilt and a Belmont, two of America’s greatest fortunes.
The cheeky, witty Alva came to adore the cheeky, witty Elsa, in whom she had found a kindred spirit. Alva was a proto-feminist, as was Elsa, who kept a beautiful lesbian companion (but no sex ever, she claimed), “Dickie” Fellowes-Gordon, from 1912 until her death in 1963. Maxwell had an uncanny knack for betting on the right horses. As with Alva Belmont, she was close to Jane Campbell from Bernardsville, New Jersey, who went to Europe, like Elsa, and, unlike Elsa, went the wedding-belle route, becoming the Countess di San Faustino and the grandmother of Fiat auto mogul Gianni Agnelli, assuring Elsa Maxwell’s tenure through three generations of Euro-glamour, from steamship, to the propeller-driven flying boats, to the jets. Ensuring her Jet Set inevitability, Elsa did not tether herself to high society alone. She “discovered” a young Cole Porter and sang his songs at parties where he played before he was famous. She staged concerts at Venice’s Lido by Porter and Noël Coward, whom she had befriended in her London vaudeville days. She was pals with Fanny Brice, George Gershwin, Vladimir Horowitz, all of whom she got to play at the parties she became famous for giving, so famous that she would charge socialites a small fortune for giving them. Her scavenger hunts, started in Paris during the Jazz Age, were her trademark. She became the greatest freeloader in history, traveling the world first-class, first by ship, then by plane, and paying for nothing except with her connections.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 4
