The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  Rumors have long circulated that Collis Huntington refused to spend a night in his new house, that he was superstitious about it and believed that men only built new houses to die in them. Probably, however, he stayed in the Fifth Avenue house when he was in New York, but it was true that, while the house was being built, he had acquired two other residences which he preferred. He had bought the “Italian palace” Colton mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco for Arabella—which, with her customary thoroughness, she began completely remodeling and redecorating—and he had also bought a mountain retreat called Pine Knot Lodge on Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks. But the Fifth Avenue house seems to have perfectly satisfied Arabella at the time, and she immediately began filling its rooms with furniture and art. Four top-flight muralists of the day—Elihu Vedder, Edwin H. Blashfield, H. Siddons Mowbray, and Francis M. Lathrop—were commissioned to decorate her walls (Arabella’s murals are now at Yale), and by 1884 she had even succeeded in interesting her rough-hewn husband in art.

  Whether she actually educated her husband’s artistic tastes is unclear, but he certainly became infected with the excitement of the art marketplace. Auction fever, that emotional rush that speeds the pulse beat of the heavy bidder, consumed him, and the cloak-and-dagger aspects of the world of big-time auctions—the undercover scouts and agents, the secret bids, the use of private signals and code names—appealed to his gambler’s instinct almost as much as adding imaginary mountains to California’s map had done. Soon he and Arabella had an important collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings. At the then-record $1,250,000 art sale of the Mary Jane Morgan collection in 1886, there were gasps when Jean Georges Vibert’s The Missionary’s Story went under the hammer for the then-heart-stopping price of $25,500. The buyer, it later turned out, was Collis P. Huntington. The Vibert, though not regarded as a masterpiece today, became Mr. Huntington’s personal favorite—probably not for its merit, but for the fact that he had paid the biggest price at what had been the country’s biggest sale.

  Arabella also got her husband to attend the opera. At the opera, he confessed, he didn’t always understand the “stories,” but he soon learned to enjoy the music.

  Arabella had also come under the familiar influence, if not spell, of that wiliest of art dealers, Joseph Duveen. Rich women did not have to work hard to meet Mr. Duveen. He sniffed them out like a bear in search of a honey tree. He magically appeared in their grand salons, witty and urbane and charming in his beautifully English-tailored suits, with his cultivated Continental accent and his carefully self-advertised taste and expertise, and showered them with blandishments, cajolery, and flattery. Arabella Huntington, he would point out, was unquestionably one of the most beautiful women in the world, a woman of undoubted culture and elegance and exquisite refinement. Surely she deserved to live surrounded by equally beautiful and important things, such as paintings by Hals, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Vermeer, Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney, and Corot, all of which Duveen could supply. But she must be quick, because Mrs. Vanderbilt, or Mrs. Belmont, or Mrs. Astor had her eye on them as well. The technique worked with Arabella as it had worked with most of the others. It worked even better, because Arabella had more to spend than most of the others and an adoring husband who supported her every whim.

  In the summer of 1900, vacationing at his Pine Knot Lodge in the Adirondacks, Collis P. Huntington died, two months shy of his seventy-ninth birthday. If Arabella was in fact born in 1850, she was then fifty; whatever her age, she was, according to the hyperbole of the press, “the richest woman in the world.” It may even have been true, because Arabella’s share of her husband’s fortune was $150,000,000. But there was more. A third of Huntington’s estate was left to his favorite nephew, Henry Edwards Huntington, son of the brother with whom Collis got his start in an upstate dry-goods store. Henry E. Huntington had become the closest thing to a real son Collis Huntington ever had, and for years he had managed his uncle’s railroad interests in California. (Collis’s “stepson” Archer Worsham seems never to have filled the bill, since he was mainly interested in poetry and Hispanic studies, and Collis left him out of his will entirely.) Only a million dollars was left to Collis’s “daughter,” Clara, who was actually his niece. Clara had displeased Huntington in 1889 by marrying Prince François-Edmond-Joseph-Gabriel Vit de und von Hatzfeldt Wildenbourg, son of the German ambassador to Great Britain, and thereby attaining the longest name in the Social Register. Arabella had approved of the match. After all, it was nice to have European nobility in the family. But Collis had grumbled because, in return for taking Clara’s hand in marriage, the Prince had demanded, and got, $5,000,000.

  To complicate the Huntington family tree somewhat further, nephew Henry E. Huntington had married Clara’s sister, Mary Alice Prentice. Though the two were technically first cousins, it was pointed out at the time that it was all perfectly legal because they were not “blood cousins,” both Clara and Mary Alice being the daughters of Collis Huntington’s first wife’s sister. In the meantime, Arabella’s son, Archer Worsham, had become transmogrified into Archer Huntington in the same informal way that Clara Prentice had become Clara Huntington.

  When the details of Collis Huntington’s will were read, Mary Alice Prentice Huntington was unhappy—not about her husband’s generous share of the estate, but about her sister’s relatively tiny one. This issue would soon create unpleasantness in the Henry Huntington household.

  Now, with a vast fortune at her command, Arabella embarked on an enormous art-buying spree. With Duveen solicitously at her elbow, she toured the salons, ateliers, galleries, castles, and auctions of Europe, purchasing every Old Master in sight. Her buying reached a frenzied zenith one afternoon in Paris in 1907 when she and Duveen snapped up, for who knew how many millions, most of the Rudolph Kann Collection, one of the greatest in Europe. A year later she bought her own palace in Paris—the fabled Hôtel de Hirsch at 2 rue de l’Elysée, the most splendid hôtel particulier in the city and the former residence of Baron Maurice de Hirsch de Gereuth, the famous Jewish financier and philanthropist who established the Baron de Hirsch Fund. Again, because the French press was not meticulous about reporting prices, who knew how many millions of francs this mansion cost her? As was her wont, she immediately gutted the place, renovated it, redecorated it, and filled it with paintings, furniture, and Beauvais tapestried walls, all furnished by the helpful Mr. Duveen. This acquisition gave Arabella five houses: Paris, Fifth Avenue, Throgs Neck, the Adirondacks, and San Francisco.

  While all this was going on, the American press seemed at a loss to comprehend Arabella’s activities. The New York World reported that “her tastes are quiet and her mode of living has been rather reserved.” But the American Register noted that, while waiting for the work on the Hôtel de Hirsch to be completed, Arabella was staying at the Hotel Bristol, “where she always occupies the royal suite,” and that, to the many amenities of her Paris house, she was adding fourteen additional bathrooms. Quiet and reserved indeed!

  In the meantime there were numerous trips back and forth to the United States, and, in 1905, there were disturbing hints that someone, somehow, had uncovered part of the riddle of Arabella’s ambiguous, secret past. The sensational libel trial of Colonel William D’Alton Mann had just got under way in New York, and Arabella’s name was about to get dragged into it. Colonel Mann published the widely read weekly Town Topics, which was the National Enquirer of its day, but with a difference. If one of Colonel Mann’s staff of scouts got whiff of a wind of scandal involving some prominent man or woman, he would go to the individual, tell him what he knew, and suggest that the story need not be printed, provided the individual purchased some advertising space in Town Topics. Or, if that person did not happen to own a product which could be advertised, a little “loan” would do. Mann’s extortion and blackmail racket had been working successfully for years, and Mann had become very rich.

  Now he was about to be brought to earth and put out of business, thank
s, in part, to the high-mindedness of a quiet New York woman named Mrs. Emily Post, who, not many years later, would spring to prominence as America’s arbiter of etiquette. Mrs. Post’s husband, it seemed, had committed a “dalliance,” Colonel Mann’s reporters had learned of it, and Mr. Post had been invited to make the customary contribution. The dollar amount suggested was small. It usually was with the Colonel, at least the first time around. Once Mann had found a willing blackmail subject, he invariably came back for more. Confronted with this situation, Post manfully decided to consult his wife, even though this meant confessing the affair. Emily Post immediately told her husband to go to the police, which he did, and the blackmailer was arrested in a public toilet—the venue chosen for the transaction—as Post handed over the money. Later, the Posts quietly divorced.

  Now, as the trial progressed, it turned out that among the people who had “lent” the Colonel money was Mrs. Collis P. Huntington. Her loans amounted to at least $15,000, and she was to be subpoenaed to testify about the matter. Naturally, the last thing Arabella wanted was to give court testimony on how and why she had been blackmailed. Alerted by her lawyer, she escaped from her Throgs Neck house moments ahead of the process server and boarded a ship for Europe.

  In 1910, suddenly and without explanation, not even two years after she had finished remodeling it and redecorating, she announced her intention to sell the Hôtel de Hirsch. She no longer wanted to live in Paris, and was returning to the United States. Though she had refused to dignify them with comment, rumors about her had been circulating for some time to the effect that she had a new American romantic interest.

  She and her husband’s nephew, Henry, had long been quite close. They were the same age, and Henry Huntington of course had known her from the days when she was young and beautiful. In the months following Collis Huntington’s death, he had helped her with the details of the enormous estate, and he had smoothly overseen for the widow the lucrative sale of the Huntington railroad interests to E. H. Harriman. In the meantime, the arguments between Henry and Mary Alice Huntington over what she considered the mean treatment of her sister Clara had become bitter and rancorous. By 1902 the couple had become estranged, and in 1906 Henry gave Mary Alice an uncontested divorce.

  Rumors circulated that Arabella Duval Yarrington Worsham Huntington was about to become Arabella Duval Yarrington Worsham Huntington Huntington. Collis Huntington had once warned his nephew in a letter: “Belle, as you know, is exceedingly particular.” Still, it was obvious to anyone who saw them together that the two were fond of each other. And a union made sense. The two principal parts of Collis’s fortune, separated by his death, would join hands again.

  * One way to translate 1870s dollars into their 1980s equivalent is to multiply by ten; it was close to half a million dollars that Mrs. Yarrington pulled out of her purse.

  20

  POMPADOUR AND MEDICI

  The year of Henry Huntington’s divorce, the great San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed Arabella’s Nob Hill palazzo. She never bothered to rebuild it, and, instead, donated the land to the city to be used as a children’s playground. Arabella had never cared much for California in general nor for San Francisco in particular. She was much more at home in Paris and New York, and she considered San Francisco parvenu, provincial. Nor was she amused by San Francisco’s obvious and abject attempts to imitate the society of older eastern cities—putting on great formal balls and cotillions, presenting as society debutantes the daughters of men and women who had started out as bartenders and chamber maids a generation earlier. When the rumors that she would now marry a Californian first began circulating, she took pains to deny them and, uncharacteristically, since she distrusted the press, went so far as to summon “a correspondent who called on her in her New York home last night,” according to an April 1906 report. The reporter wrote that she was dressed in “a magnificent black lace gown,” with “a pendant of pearls and small diamonds hanging from a chain about her neck.”

  Though her husband had been dead for six years, she told the reporter haughtily, “Why, as you can see, I am still in mourning for my husband.” Then, as though somehow clarifying the situation, she added, “Henry E. Huntington is my late husband’s nephew.”

  In California, Henry Huntington also issued a denial, calling the rumors “absolutely without foundation.”

  But the fact was that Henry Huntington was already actively courting Arabella. It was she who was being coy, and holding out.

  Henry Huntington had been born February 25, 1850, in the upstate New York town of Oneonta, where the whole Huntington family saga had really begun. For twenty years he had supervised the construction of his uncle’s network of railroads until it had become the biggest in the world, and in 1892 he had moved to San Francisco as vice-president and general manager of the Southern Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. He was a tall, dark, handsome man with a finely sculptured moustache and sideburns; he dressed conservatively, usually in black suits. Though he obviously had a sound business head, he was also something of an aesthete and a scholar. For years he had quietly been collecting rare books, with which he spent most of his nonworking hours, and—a far more cultivated man than his aggressively know-nothing uncle—he had also become a connoisseur of painting and sculpture. Personally he was rather shy and retiring, and had few close friends. But he was crazy about Arabella.

  Probably he had been for years. Even as she approached sixty, it seemed, she had not lost whatever allure it was that made her so attractive to men. Did Henry know about her long extramarital relationship with his uncle? Did he know about the secret of Johnny Worsham? One can make an educated guess and say: Probably.

  Unlike Arabella, Henry Huntington was fascinated with California—though not so much with San Francisco, which was busily trying to make itself seem “cosmopolitan” and “cultured,” as with a small, arid, mostly Mexican settlement in the southern part of the state that had been christened Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles, Our Lady Queen of the Angels.

  Confronted with America’s third-largest city as it is today, it is a little hard to picture Los Angeles as it was in 1892, when Henry Huntington first visited it—a broad, sunny basin set dramatically in a semicircle of soaring mountains which, in spring, were ablaze with thousands of varieties of wild flowers and which, by midsummer, turned a rich ochre color. The air was clean and sparkling, and from the lower hills you could see for miles, out to a wide and brilliantly purple ocean and vast stretches of wide, white, unpopulated beach. The hills were alive with deer, bear, wildcat, and rabbit, and what is now Sunset Boulevard was a trail carved by grazing cattle across the hillsides. For some foresighted reason (the town’s meager water supply could support only a tiny population), Henry Huntington decided that the future of California lay in and around Los Angeles.

  With his uncle’s sudden death in 1900, Henry Huntington found himself suddenly transformed from a high-salaried executive to a man of enormous independent means. He immediately began buying up large tracts of Los Angeles real estate. He purchased, and began expanding, the Los Angeles street railway system, with fast trains that could carry a city population from one part of town to another, and, with others, developed an irrigation system through which water could be supplied to Los Angeles from mountain streams and lakes by way of canals and aqueducts. For his own use, he bought in 1907 a 550-acre ranch, with ranch house and outbuildings. The property sprawled dramatically across the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains east of the city, and was called Rancho San Marino. Here his intent was soon clear. He intended to build a mansion and surrounding estate of such magnificence as Southern California had never seen. After all, if he was ever going to lure Arabella to Los Angeles, and get her to share his enthusiasm for the place, he would have to present her with a residence of such splendor and sumptuousness as would surpass anything she had known before.

  Perhaps Arabella had made the construction of San Marino the condition under which she would m
arry him. Because, from the beginning, her views on the design and construction of the California house were very much taken into consideration. Much of the planning took place at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, in Arabella’s drawing room, where she met constantly with Henry and his architect, Myron Hunt. She saw to it that Joseph Duveen was brought into the picture, and needless to say Duveen had ideas of his own—and merchandise of his own—in terms of art, tapestries, furniture, and décor. Meanwhile, the long, low house, theatrically white against the rugged mountainside, grew. Because it was to be very large, and because the terrain was difficult, it grew slowly. Begun in 1908, San Marino was still not entirely finished by 1912, and of course neither Arabella nor Henry was getting any younger. Both were entering their middle sixties, and though it was by then generally assumed that Henry and Arabella would eventually marry, the question had become: When? Someone had the temerity to ask architect Hunt, “Why does Mr. Huntington want to marry Mrs. Huntington?” The answer was simple. “He loves her,” said Mr. Hunt.

  Still, Arabella would not say yes.

  Then, in the spring of 1913, Arabella sailed for Europe. Though she had not set eyes on the house, she had supervised the details of its progress in a series of letters, telegrams, and directives from the East Coast to the West. And now it was nearly finished. Not long after her departure, Henry followed Arabella to Europe. They met in Paris, and on July 16 they were married there at the American Church. The dynastic Huntington-Huntington nuptials, and the reconsolidation of the Huntington fortune, made headlines everywhere, though the Los Angeles Times appeared to have been woolgathering throughout the previous seven years of marriage rumors and speculations. “The wedding was entirely unexpected,” it wrote.