The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  At first Mrs. Yarrington and her children lived in a rented house on Bleecker Street, and to help make ends meet she may have taken in boarders there, though there is no actual record of this. Then, before the end of 1869, the Yarringtons moved a few blocks east to 5 Bond Street. It was still a poor neighborhood, and it was here that the census of 1870 found them all. Arabella and Johnny Worsham, now established as husband and wife, shared the house with Mrs. Yarrington and the other children, and by now Johnny and Arabella had a child of their own, whom they had named Archer (which was Johnny’s middle name) Milton (her father’s middle name) Worsham.

  The census taker’s report, however, on what must have been a thoroughly confusing household, was itself a muddle of confusion. Catherine Yarrington is listed correctly as head of the household, but John A. Worsham is identified as “John De Worsion,” and Arabella is listed “Bell De Wersion.” Their three-month-old baby, Archer Milton Worsham, appears as “John De Wersion.” Maher concedes that sloppy census methods might be blamed for these errors and spelling inconsistencies. But he also points out that a census is an official record, and both John Worsham and Arabella may have had good reason to want to cloud that record.

  In any case, Johnny Worsham’s lucky streak had deserted him when he got to New York City. As a faro banker, he simply did not have the wherewithal to take on the established competition. In 1870, not long after the census taker’s visit, he disappeared. This was the year, Arabella explained, of her husband’s death. But the thorough Mr. Maher was able to find no record of Johnny Worsham’s death. Nor, for that matter, was he able to turn up any record of the marriage to Arabella Yarrington. The reasons for this, as it turned out, were quite simple. Johnny Worsham had not died, but had simply given up and gone home to Richmond. To say that he had died, it seemed, was simply Arabella’s convenient way of explaining the termination of their relationship, just as saying that they were married was a convenient way to legitimatize it. Because, back in Richmond, Johnny rejoined Mrs. Annette Worsham, the wife to whom he had been legally married all along.

  Maher speculates that Johnny, down on his luck and saddled not only with a mistress but also with an infant son, simply abandoned Arabella. But it is also possible that Arabella threw Johnny Worsham out, sent him packing and told him never to darken her door again. Because by 1870 it begins to seem as though Arabella had other, more interesting, irons in the fire.

  She seems to have attained a sudden new affluence. Presently she was moving to a comfortable town house at 109 Lexington Avenue, on the slope of fashionable Murray Hill, just a few blocks north of elegant Gramercy Park. Morgans and Vanderbilts and Astors were now Arabella’s close neighbors. With her had moved her mother and young son, and presently, too, Mrs. Yarrington was purchasing parcels of choice Manhattan real estate, around and just off Fifth Avenue, the city’s ultimate address. Mrs. Yarrington seemed to have no difficulty obtaining generous mortgages from New York banks, and she also seemed to have at her command considerable amounts of cash. It was her habit, too, once she had acquired these properties, to immediately convey them to her daughter, “for and in consideration of natural love and affection and the sum of One Dollar lawful money.” No one questioned these transactions at the time, since both Mrs. Yarrington and her daughter now comported themselves as southern ladies of immense breeding and wealth. Having arrived in a city where they had no history, the ladies found it easy to invent whatever history they saw fit. But it did seem possible that Mrs. Yarrington was being used as a go-between for her daughter and some very rich person who wanted to establish Arabella as a woman of means and, at the same time, wished his identity to be unknown. At 109 Lexington Avenue, for example, it was not known that Arabella had a very rich landlord. Collis and Elizabeth Stoddard Huntington already owned a good deal of New York real estate, which they had purchased jointly. The town house at 109 Lexington, however, had been bought by Mr. Huntington alone.

  Again, the time and circumstances of Arabella’s meeting with her new benefactor will probably never be known. Her veil of deceptions has successfully buried them. But by 1869 Collis Huntington had acquired control of another important line in the East, the Chesapeake & Ohio. He made frequent trips on C&O business to Virginia and Maryland, and in early July of that year he was in White Sulphur Springs. This was about the time Johnny Worsham was winding up his affairs in Richmond to head for New York, his “wife”-to-be to follow him. Huntington liked to gamble, and it is certainly possible that in the course of his Virginia sojourn he visited what was left of Johnny Worsham’s faro establishment. Though Maher does not draw the connection, it is interesting to note that between early July 1869 and early March 1870, when Arabella’s baby was born, there is an interval of nine months. Was Huntington the father? Who can tell? True, Arabella gave little Archer Johnny Worsham’s middle name. This may have been for appearance’ sake, and, of course, if she was sleeping with two men at once, she would have had no way of knowing who her child’s father was.

  In any case, these were the circumstances in 1877 when the lovely “Mrs. Worsham,” “widow,” and son arrived in Austin, Texas, as Collis P. Huntington’s “niece.” And these secrets and scandals, with their half-answers, half-guesses, and half-explanations would have remained interred with Arabella in her mausoleum had it not been for James Maher’s enterprising diggings, which he published in 1975.

  Ah, the successful courtesan. With what a rich broth of feelings do we watch the career of an Arabella—skipping, like an aerialist, along a tightrope strung across the chasm of discovery and disaster. We watch her with a mixture of disapproval and envy, scorn and grudging admiration. There, we think, but for the grace of God go we, and yet, given the opportunity, wouldn’t we do the same? The failed courtesan is merely pitiful, but the successful kept woman brings a special intelligence, even class, to her craft. We may, in the 1980s, applaud the gains and goals of the Woman’s Movement, but a visceral feeling tells us that to be a rich man’s moll offers a luckier life than scrubbing floors.

  Arabella was exceptionally successful. Hardly anyone guessed any of the details of her secret life. Did Elizabeth Huntington suspect? Perhaps. Early in the affair Huntington had his wife sign away her dower rights to 109 Lexington, and she must have known that Arabella lived there. But she said nothing. One of the few people who grasped the situation was James Henry Duveen, the cousin of Joseph Duveen, with whom Arabella would presently be doing business. James Duveen disliked her, but in The Secrets of an Art Dealer he wrote, “One of the most extraordinary women I have ever known was Arabella … extraordinary because of her indomitable mind and an outrageous spirit which compelled her to outvie all competitors. Long before I met her, Arabella was the unofficial wife of Collis P. Huntington.”

  It was a position she would fill for nearly fifteen years.

  19

  MRS. HUNTINGTON

  Collis P. Huntington had once boasted that he never spent more than $200 a year on “personal adornment.” But now that Arabella had become a permanent fixture in his life he could no longer make that claim. By 1874 the house at 109 Lexington Avenue had begun to seem a bit cramped, and New York society was abandoning Murray Hill and Gramercy Park and moving relentlessly uptown, on and just off Fifth Avenue north of Fiftieth Street. The attraction was Central Park, the magnificent rectangle of green that Frederick Law Olmsted had laid out in the heart of Manhattan and through which the fashionable regularly paraded in their carriages. That year, Catherine Yarrington paid $43,000, most of it in cash, for a residence at 68 East Fifty-fourth Street and, as was her custom, immediately turned over title to the property to her daughter.*

  Three years later, Arabella sold 68 East Fifty-fourth Street to one Isaac Henderson and, in the same transaction, bought 4 West Fifty-fourth Street from him. Now she was only two doors away from Fifth Avenue, and the new William H. Vanderbilt mansion—the talk of New York—was right around the corner. The price for the Henderson house was $250,000—again most of it
in cash—and within a few months Arabella also bought the two vacant properties on either side, to give her new house some elbow room.

  Four West Fifty-fourth Street was Arabella’s first “important” house—not for its architecture, which was undistinguished, but for what she herself did to its interior. Her renovation was total. She gutted the house to its brick and brownstone skin, knocked out a wall, and built a new wing. Partitions were moved, rooms rearranged, and then the entire four-story structure was fitted out with rosewood paneling, brocade-covered walls, a great curving staircase at the center lit by a rooftop skylight of stained glass. An Otis passenger elevator was also installed, one of the first in New York in a private residence. On the main floor was a long grand salon, which opened into a smaller Moorish salon. Above was the formal dining room, serviced by a dumbwaiter from the basement kitchens. On an upper floor Arabella installed a complete Turkish bath. Indications of the success of her renovation and redecoration are the fact that 4 West Fifty-fourth Street later became the New York home of John D. Rockefeller, and the Rockefellers were so pleased with what Arabella had done that they hardly changed a detail; and that several of Arabella’s rooms, through a gift from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., are now on display at the Museum of the City of New York and the Brooklyn Museum. (The site of the house is now the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.)

  The renovation cost her about $1,000,000.

  Where did Arabella’s taste come from? She had had, as far as is known, no more than a rudimentary education. Certainly, she had the advice of a number of expert craftsmen, cabinetmakers and decorators, but the overall scheme for the house was her own. Her taste for splendor may, of course, have been inspired by the rococo opulence of Johnny Worsham’s faro parlor, but even that does not entirely explain it. The fact was that Arabella read, and studied, architectural and decorating guides, and learned from these sources what she wanted. The Moorish salon, for example, would be considered a fanciful folly today, but Washington Irving had come back from southern Spain with his tales of the Alhambra, and society folk all over the country were building Moorish salons. They were very much the fashion, and Arabella knew it.

  Arabella liked to keep up with things. The newspapers and magazines of the day were filled with illustrations and descriptions of the castles of the rich. Even Marion Devereux, a generation later, filled her yards of print with word pictures of what people wore and how their homes were fitted out, with hardly a mention of what any of them had to say. In post-Civil War America, décor and appearance were all; form took precedence over substance. Arabella Yarrington Worsham, though she might, au fond, be only a rich man’s mistress, wanted to do things right.

  Collis Huntington, meanwhile, cared little for art and culture. Visiting the Paris Exposition, and asked what he thought of the Eiffel Tower, which was then the pride of Europe, he replied, “American engineers could build one a mile high if they wanted to. Besides, what’s the use of it?” In time, Arabella would redo Mr. Huntington’s tastes as well.

  Arabella’s house had only one drawback. She could not open it up for grand entertainments. She was still a back-street wife. In those days, to be a hostess one had to have a host. But that would also change, in time.

  Ensconced in the renovated splendor of her new house, Mrs. Arabella Worsham appeared to live a very quiet life. If anything immoral was going on at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street, her immediate neighbors had no inkling, and if Mr. Huntington came and went he managed his visits so discreetly that there appears never to have been a breath of gossip, or scandal, about either of the lovers during the years of Arabella’s residence there. “No man, for any considerable period,” wrote Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, “can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” But Arabella managed it. New Yorkers have always treasured privacy, and her neighbors awarded Arabella hers. They accepted her as what she seemed to be: a beautiful, and respectable, young widow in her mid-twenties with a well-dressed, well-behaved little boy. Whenever she went out, she was properly escorted and chaperoned by her mother.

  Arabella had always made the most of her looks. Her unusual height, for example, demanded an erect and careful carriage that was almost regal, almost imperious. (Later, a disgruntled art dealer would say of her that she “allows herself manners which even the Empress of Germany cannot afford.”) To this add her distinctive speaking voice, which was soft, low-pitched, and musical, with pleasant traces of her native Virginia. She dressed quietly, with taste and care, always mindful that she was officially a “widow.” She presented herself as a cultivated mixture of southern belle and New York great lady. No actress could have performed the part more convincingly, and, all the while, Arabella was grooming herself for a much larger role.

  This was finally offered to her when Elizabeth Stoddard Huntington died of cancer in October 1883. It had been a long and painful illness and, though both Huntington and Arabella were no doubt impatient for the end to come, the last months of Mrs. Huntington’s life must have been difficult for them both. Naturally, now, a “decent interval” had to be observed, and some nine months later, on July 12, 1884, Mrs. Arabella Duvall Yarrington Worsham became the second Mrs. Collis Potter Huntington. His sixty-third birthday was a few months off. She was, more or less, thirty-four. As befitted the circumstances, it was a smallish ceremony, with just Arabella’s mother, her son, and a few close friends in attendance, and the next morning the newspapers put their formal imprimatur on her utter respectability. The New York Tribune reported that Arabella’s “family and that of Mr. Huntington [are] on terms of the closest intimacy. She is wealthy in her own right. Her husband died several years ago.” (This last sentence was, by now, correct; Johnny Worsham had died in Richmond six years earlier.)

  The months between Elizabeth Huntington’s death and the wedding had been busy ones for both bride- and groom-to-be, involved as they were with complicated real-estate transactions, at which Arabella was becoming quite skillful. First, she arranged to sell the lot just east of her Fifty-fourth Street house to William H. Vanderbilt, and negotiations to sell the house itself to John D. Rockefeller had already begun. Next, Arabella bought a 113-acre estate at Throgs Neck in Westchester County, overlooking Long Island Sound. Called The Homestead, it had been built by Frederick C. Havemeyer. Huntington, meanwhile, had deeded his late wife’s Park Avenue house to Arabella, and she immediately began tearing apart and refurbishing both places. The idea was that Throgs Neck would be the newlyweds’ summer place in the country, and 65 Park Avenue would be their winter address in town.

  But it was becoming clear that what Arabella really wanted was a mansion on Fifth Avenue. In a trade-off deal with the Rockefellers, Arabella accepted nine lots on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street in return for 4 West Fifty-fourth. She also bought eight more lots at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-first Street. Finally, perhaps because both Eighty-first and Seventy-second streets were still considered too far uptown to be really fashionable, and because—led by the Vanderbilts—the great Fifth Avenue palaces of the era were being built in the Fifties, Arabella settled for a six-lot parcel on Fifth and Fifty-seventh, right in the heart of things. This was the property William H. Vanderbilt had originally wanted for his mansion but had been unable to obtain. Now it was Arabella’s. It would be the first house she would build from scratch.

  The kindest thing that could be said of the Huntingtons’ new Fifth Avenue mansion was that it was very large. When it was finally completed in 1893, it was also very ugly. To be fair, Arabella had not been able to get the architect she wanted. She had wanted the great Richard Morris Hunt, who, among other notable residences, had designed the Vanderbilt mansion. But Hunt was not immediately available, and Arabella was impatient, and so she settled for an inferior talent, George Browne Post. Post spent months submitting sketches and schematics trying to satisfy her. First she wanted the house bigger, then she wanted it sm
aller. Rooms were added, then removed, then replaced in different positions. Again to be fair, Arabella had never built an entire house before and probably didn’t know what she wanted—and wouldn’t know until she saw it. At one point she tried to call in Richard Morris Hunt, who reluctantly decided that she was too far committed to Mr. Post’s basic scheme for him to successfully, and ethically, take it over.

  The result was a huge, three-story (plus basement and attics) pile of rough-cut Indiana limestone that was a strange cross between Romanesque, French Château, and German Renaissance. In fact, the house was of no particular style or period. Great mansard roofs were dotted with dormers, cupolas, and finials. There was a squat square tower perched at one corner, and there were a great many massive chimneys. Some windows were arched, and some were rectangular. Balustrades, pediments and crenels abounded. The building was wrapped round with a threatening-looking fence of wrought-iron spears. At one end of the house a protuberance that looked rather like a view of Chartres Cathedral extended from the rear. Everything about the house was ponderous, heavy, and it seemed to possess enough weight to send it plunging through the sidewalks.

  Oddest of all, the house seemed to have an expression. The huge central entrance archway looked like a gaping mouth ringed with jagged, fanglike teeth. Two arched windows just above looked like flared nostrils, and the big paired windows above and to either side of the nostrils looked like enormous, baleful eyes. Viewed from the street, the house seemed literally to be snarling at the spectator. Its whole appearance was dark, grim, and forbidding. Worst, perhaps, it didn’t look like a house at all. It looked like a public building. One might have entered it expecting to find a post office or a library or a police station, a strictly run girls’ school or a correctional institution. How much Arabella had to do with the final design, and how much of it was Post’s doing, is no longer known, since the house underwent so many revisions right up to, during, and after the groundbreaking. Nor is it clear how much Collis Huntington may have had to say about his Fifth Avenue monstrosity. But in The Big Four, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis pointed out that in his railroading days Huntington was responsible for putting up railroad stations in “hundreds of towns and cities in the West,” and that these were “notable examples of unmitigated ugliness.” In New York, wags could not resist pointing out that Mr. Huntington’s new house looked like a railroad station run amok.