The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  On February 26 of that year, she and Mr. Belmont were married in a small ceremony at her New York apartment on West Seventy-seventh Street.

  Her final role as an actress was as Glad in The Dawn of Tomorrow by Frances Hodgson Burnett. At her farewell performance, just weeks before she would become Mrs. Belmont, the audience stood up, cheering and weeping, when she uttered, in her full, rich voice, the curtain line: “I’m going to be took care of now.”

  23

  RULES AND REGULATIONS

  “There are certain rules,” James H. R. Cromwell said in 1980, “which a young woman must follow if she’s going to marry a rich older man.” He was referring to a former sister-in-law, a one-time show girl, who married his brother-in-law Horace Dodge. The marriage ended in a rancorous divorce with accompanying bitter lawsuits. “She knew that Horace was rich,” said Mr. Cromwell. “And she also knew that he was an alcoholic, and not particularly attractive. If she had followed the rules, it could have worked out very well—but she didn’t.”

  The rules are unwritten, of course. When a woman, not rich, marries a man who is, one of the things she may safely assume is that he is also reasonably spoiled, and accustomed to having his orders speedily obeyed. Since it is usually unrealistic, if not futile, to expect any alteration to this habit, the wise wife adapts to it. It is one of the rules. As the wife of August Belmont, Eleanor Robson seemed to come to terms with the rules of her new life intuitively. As she had done with her lines, she did not seem to need to memorize the rules; she absorbed them. “A private railroad car,” she wrote, “is not an acquired taste. One takes to it immediately.” The private car, named the Mineola, after one of her husband’s favorite racing sloops, came equipped with its own French chef and black porter, and its purpose was to transport the Belmonts back and forth between their various residences scattered up and down the Eastern Seaboard, just as a chartered yacht had transported the newlyweds on an extended Mediterranean cruise.

  Housekeeping, she admitted, was her major difficulty—the problem being that there were so many houses, each to be occupied during its own rigidly prescribed season. From a small place where she and her mother had made do with a single, all-purpose maid, she was now confronted with the Belmont mansion, a six-story affair which occupied most of the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan’s Murray Hill. Then there was By-the-Sea in Newport, which required sixteen servants indoors, four men in the garage, three in the stable, and several gardeners. One of the rules was that the lady of such houses became the equivalent of an office manager of a large corporation, whose job it was to see to it that work flowed smoothly from department to department, that interoffice jealousies and squabbles were patched up smoothly, and that good performance was rewarded with praise and promotion.

  She also had to be chief bookkeeper. In any large organization there are apt to be pilfering, kickbacks, and under-the-counter dealing. Though her chef did the ordering, it fell to her to supervise not only the menus but the accounts. In addition, she had to be a kind of travel agent, overseeing the periodic moves from place to place, keeping lists of which articles of clothing were packed in trunks and which were to stay put, when the silver and the paintings were to be put in the vault in one house, and the furniture covered with sheets, and when everything was to be unsheeted and unvaulted in the next. Obviously, she needed, and had, a private secretary to help her with the complicated details which faced her organization daily. But what must have made her duties seem particularly exhausting was the knowledge that the sole “product” of the Belmont operation was no more and no less than the comfort and well-being of Mr. and Mrs. August Belmont. “It was another world,” she wrote with understatement.

  At the same time she was expected to be a charming and gracious hostess, an amiable and comforting companion to her husband whenever and wherever he needed her—and to disappear quietly when he did not—and to open her arms to him in love when at night he tapped on her bedroom door.

  There were also the arcane rituals of American society to be mastered. Golf, for example, was in those days the required rich person’s sport. One started golfing in April, and stopped in September. Eleanor Belmont, however, could not force herself to become interested in the game. Defiantly proclaiming herself a nongolfer, she claimed to see no point in a sport which involved chasing a small ball across a great deal of acreage when, as she put it, “you had the ball in your hand to begin with.” Nor did she have any taste for sports which involved bringing down small winged creatures from the sky with guns. Though she accompanied her husband on quail shoots, she always brought along a book to read.

  In Newport, she quickly noticed that there seemed to be a tradition that society should be divided along generational lines. Parties were given either for young people or for the young people’s parents. This struck her as a pity, particularly as her own age fell between the young group and the old. She decided to give a dinner party which would mix the generations up.

  It would seem like an innocent enough experiment, but the evening was an unqualified disaster. One of the young people she invited was a woman whom, unbeknownst to her, the senior Mrs. Belmont had snubbed as long as she lived. A whole elaborate caste system was thereby thrown into confusion because, of course, the young woman quickly accepted. Then, in setting out her place cards, Eleanor seated the crusty old chairman of Bailey’s Beach, Newport’s private swimming club, next to a pretty young girl named Elsie Clews—not realizing that Mrs. Clews and the chairman had not been on speaking terms since she had defied his 1910 rule that ladies could not bathe at Bailey’s Beach unless they wore long stockings.

  In the wake of that evening Eleanor Belmont suggested to her husband that she write a book called The Outlaws and In-Laws of Society. He discouraged the notion. “If you don’t tell the truth,” he said, “there would be no point in it. If you told the truth, the points would make you and everyone else uncomfortable.” He then quoted Mark Twain: “A little truth is a dangerous thing; a great deal is fatal.”

  Her second dinner party was more successful. For this occasion she hired Harry Houdini, the escape artist, who was then at the height of his fame and popularity. While guests gathered under a tent on the lawn, Houdini was handcuffed, bound with heavy ropes and chains, and then sealed in a large box to which heavy weights had been added. Then he was towed by launch out to the Belmont yacht, which lay at anchor in the harbor, carried aboard, and dropped from the deck into the Atlantic. Within seconds, he bobbed to the surface, free of his bonds.

  And so the new Mrs. Belmont learned the new rules—from her own experience, from her husband, and from her peers. Two women in particular provided useful examples—Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. Mrs. Astor was dead, and Grace Vanderbilt had come forward to fill her place as New York’s most important hostess. Her annual Christmas parties, with a gift for each guest tied to the branches of an enormous tree, were command performances for New York society. Mrs. Fish was the reigning grande dame of Newport, celebrated for her witty and often caustic remarks. At one of Mrs. Fish’s dinner parties, for example, she had seated the Russian Ambassador, George Bakhmeteff, on her left, and the Bishop of Rhode Island on her right. The protocol-conscious diplomat was miffed about this arrangement, and made no bones about it after dinner, saying, “Mrs. Fish, please explain. I do not understand. Is it customary in America to put an ambassador on your left and a bishop on your right?” “Oh, no, Your Excellency,” said Mrs. Fish. “I assure you it is not customary. It just depends on which you put first, God or the Tsar.”

  Both these older women took the new Mrs. Belmont under their wings, and years later, when Eleanor Belmont had become a grande dame in her own right, she would be able to deliver ripostes that would have made Mrs. Fish proud. At a 1953 dinner party at the Thomas K. Finletters’ house in New York, one of the other guests was John P. Marquand, the best-selling novelist. Marquand was holding forth, as he liked to do, delivering l
ong and entertaining verbal concertos, and on this particular evening his topic was “the lack of taste and reticence in today’s youth.” Suddenly he changed the subject, and began telling of his recent heart attack, for which part of the recovery procedure had been a daily abdominal massage. The young nurse who had performed this massage had, he said, after raising his hospital gown, said to him, “What a pleasure it is, Mr. Marquand, to be able to massage the lower abdominal muscles of a man like you!”

  There was a silence, as Marquand paused for effect. Then, from across the table, the rich, theatre-trained voice of Eleanor Belmont was heard to comment, “Tell me, please, Mr. Marquand, because I am curious to know—where was the taste and reticence in that anecdote?”

  The rules of being a rich man’s wife, meanwhile, did not prevent a woman from creating and claiming an independent bailiwick of her own, an area of service or expertise in which she could personally shine. On the contrary, it very much behooved her to do so. Caroline Belmont’s function had been essentially decorative, but her daughter-in-law was much too energetic and inventive to settle for a life that was no more important than a doily. Eleanor Belmont remained an Englishwoman at heart, and she shared her husband’s enthusiasm for horses. Long before their marriage he had delegated to her the task of naming his race horses.

  To those unfamiliar with the world of horse racing, this may not sound like a great chore, but it is a complicated process and is itself surrounded by rules and traditions. A horse is traditionally named, for example, with a name using the same first initial as its dam. Then, if at all possible, the name should convey some suggestion of the animal’s breeding line. (The son, say, of a horse named Bright Day, might be named Berry O’Day, or some such.) But it is even a bit more complicated than that. The proprietors of the Stud Book, which oversees such matters throughout the world, insist that no race horse carry the name of any other in the entire history of racing. Each name must be unique. Owners of new-foaled horses often submit long lists of possible names to the Stud Book, only to have every one turned down. A certain amount of imagination and a nose for research are required.

  These Eleanor Belmont was able to provide. For example, she proposed that a filly foal be named Mahubah—a greeting she had heard in Tunis which, freely translated from the Arabic, means “May good things be with you.” She was confident that no other race horse had borne the name Mahubah, and she was right. The name was accepted by the Stud Book immediately. Later, she discovered that, though she had spelled the name right phonetically, the correct English spelling should have been Mahabah. But it was too late for a correction. Mahubah had already gone down in the annals as the dam of one of the greatest champions in racing history, Man o’ War, another Belmont horse whom Eleanor had named. Other favorite Belmont entries, christened by Eleanor, were Stromboli, Hourless, and Ladkin.

  The world of big-time racing was full of drama and suspense. In 1910 one Belmont two-year-old, whom Eleanor had named Tracery, was sent to England with the expectation that he would win the English Derby. Disappointingly, he came in third. Two years later, however, Tracery won the St. Léger, one of England’s classic turf contests, and the following year he was entered for the Ascot Gold Cup, the most famous trophy in England, and one that had thus far eluded any horse from the Belmont stable. Coming down the home stretch, Tracery was in the lead by several lengths when a spectator, waving a suffragist banner in one hand and brandishing a revolver in the other, leaped out of the infield and onto the track and seized Tracery by the bridle. Tracery fell on top of his assailant, the jockey was thrown, and two other horses and their riders, just behind, tumbled on top of Tracery. The horse in fourth place was far enough behind to steer wide of the collision, and went on to win the Ascot. Miraculously, no one was killed, and in the extensive press coverage of the incident the activist apparently got what he wanted—publicity for his cause.

  Tracery’s shoulder was badly damaged from the fall, and it was assumed that the valuable animal would never race again; for several hours the Belmonts debated whether Tracery should be destroyed. August Belmont argued that the suffering horse should be put out of his misery, but Eleanor insisted that the veterinarians be allowed to do what they could to save him. As it happened, Tracery recovered splendidly, and later, over the same course where he had been brought to grief, handily won the Eclipse Stakes, another English classic.

  Meanwhile, Eleanor Belmont was expanding her field of interests to include philanthropy. In 1915 the novice philanthropist did not have to be very clever to realize that philanthropy in America was in a state of chaos. The Lady Bountiful syndrome was in full flower, and every woman of importance had her “pet” charity, to which or whom she was often exceedingly generous. But the trouble was that, with no overall organization, individual giving was random, sporadic, and idiosyncratic, with a great deal of duplication and overlapping. For example, any cause which benefited little children was popular, and any number of American women worked for, and gave to, their favorite children’s hospitals. Hospitals and homes for the aged, however, were less glamorous, and got very little help. It was easy to raise money for an orphanage or home for wayward girls, but no one cared much about the fate of wayward boys. Certain diseases—such as cancer—which no one liked to think about were unpopular causes. But money could almost always be raised to aid those afflicted with less frightening ailments, such as blindness or tuberculosis. The various Christian churches had no difficulty collecting, from their wealthy parishioners, large sums of money which were used to finance missionary work around the world to Christianize the heathen. At the same time hundreds of thousands of Americans, who had already been Christianized, lived in poverty. (The Jews, who did not believe in proselytizing and had no missionaries, were able to funnel the money from their coffers directly back into the community.) In education, wealthy Americans gave impressively to create private boarding schools in New England and to endow Ivy League colleges, which, in those days, were still essentially schools for the well-to-do. Less elegant schools and colleges, ignored by private philanthropy, suffered accordingly.

  A few years earlier, in 1901, the Junior League had been founded by two New York debutantes, Mary Harriman, the daughter of E. H. Harriman, and Nathalie Henderson—“for the benefit of the poor and the betterment of the city.” Much of the Junior League’s time was spent providing volunteers to work in New York’s hospitals, which was fine as far as it went. The trouble was that most of the well-born young women whom the League invited to join their club preferred working with children’s hospitals, and disliked situations involving the elderly, the incontinent, the maimed, the insane, or the terminally ill. Thus private philanthropy remained lopsided and inefficient.

  There were plenty of examples, too, of private philanthropy in which huge sums of money were donated for causes that some people thought frivolous. In New York, Mrs. James Speyer, the wife of a Wall Street investment banker and a devoted dog lover, gave millions of dollars to establish the Ellin Prince Speyer Animal Hospital on the East Side. The Speyer Animal Hospital was fitted out with equipment more sophisticated than could be found in most ordinary hospitals of the day.

  New York’s Jewish upper crust, meanwhile, though a much smaller group, had already done a great deal to give Jewish philanthropy some cohesiveness and focus. Under the leadership of such New Yorkers as Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall, the Joint Distribution Committee and the United Jewish Appeal had already been established. Eleanor Belmont’s idea was similar—to establish a central planning agency for philanthropies which would study areas of need, and try to persuade individual donors to let their gifts be allocated and apportioned among these. It was simply an early version of what would later be called United Appeal. The name Eleanor gave her New York group, however, was wittier: the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving.

  Though Eleanor Belmont felt uncomfortable as a fund-raiser and disliked asking people for money, she was still a stage performer of extraordinary tale
nts, and her bailiwick became the speaker’s dais. From here she could eloquently present her ideas, and with significant results. Among other things, she succeeded in calling the attention of wealthy New Yorkers away from sickly children, female orphans, and “wronged” teen-age girls, and in getting them to recognize that the young working woman might deserve some attention, too. One of Eleanor Belmont’s philanthropic creations was the Working Girls’ Vacation Association, which was just that—a fund to help young women who worked to get out of the city a couple of weeks a year.

  In 1917, when the United States entered the First World War, Mrs. E. H. Harriman invited Eleanor to apply her persuasiveness on the dais in behalf of the Red Cross. The war had brought the Red Cross from Europe to America with an international charter “to … aid the sick and wounded of armies in time of war … to mitigate … the suffering caused by pestilence, famine, fire, floods, and other great national calamities.” President Woodrow Wilson attached great importance to the Red Cross, and had established the War Council to take charge of its operations, with Henry P. Davison as chairman of the Council. Davison immediately announced that the then-staggering figure of $100,000,000 must be raised through contributions to the Red Cross that year, and Mrs. Harriman and Eleanor Belmont would head the New York team.

  Once more, as in her theatre days, Eleanor Belmont was off on tour. During the first three months of the war she made forty-five speeches in thirty-eight cities in ten different states in behalf of the Red Cross, and, in the end, the War Council topped its goal by collecting $114,000,000. All told, in three successive annual wartime drives, over $400,000,000 was raised, including the costs of donated equipment and supplies, with Eleanor plugging from the platform all the way.