Fake connections to Carnegie, Rockefeller, Sidney Poitier?
What a brilliant, devious, tried-and-true device. Since the links would inevitably involve sin and sex, who would trust family denials?
So. If I were to situate my fictitious claimant in the present, what famously wealthy and powerful family could more logically present itself than the Vanderbilts, much more disreputable than the Presbyterian Carnegies or the Rockefellers who were Dutch-Reformed Protestants? There are hundreds of Vanderbilt descendants and even the family cannot keep track. Most of them misbehaved in scandalous and spectacular ways. For my novel, there was an additional irresistible factor.
The Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, still owned and managed by Vanderbilt family members, is just a few hours’ drive from where I live in Columbia, South Carolina. I have also lived in France and I am familiar with the chateaux of Blois and Chambord, the models for Biltmore as designed by George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of Cornelius, brash founder of the family fortune.
Biltmore, ‘America’s only castle’, a 250-room mansion, is a major tourist attraction. Let me confess that I am fond of Biltmore, that it is the place where I take Australian relatives and visitors, that I am an ardent fan of the architect Richard Morris Hunt and an even more ardent fan of Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed both Central Park and the vast gorgeous gardens of the 8000-acre Biltmore Estate. I persist in this fondness in spite of the fact that Henry James, a Biltmore guest in February 1905, was appalled by the place. He wrote to his friend Edith Wharton ‘that the desolation & discomfort … are, in spite of the mitigating millions everywhere expressed, indescribable … I mean one’s sense of the extraordinary impenitent madness … which led to the erection in this vast wilderness, of so gigantic & elaborate a monument to all that isn’t socially possible there. It’s, in effect, like a gorgeous practical joke – but at one’s own expense … if one has to live in solitude in these league-long marble halls, & sit in alternate Gothic and Palladian cathedrals, as it were, where now only the temperature stalks about …’
But Henry James was a guest in February – mid winter – so could have seen nothing of what I consider to be the essence of Biltmore: its flamboyant and stunning acres of azaleas and the landscape magic of Frederick Law Olmsted.
From the point of view of my novel, Biltmore is a fortuitous blend of British and American aristocracies, of British titles and American wealth.
In 1924, Cornelia – the daughter of George Washington Vanderbilt (builder of Biltmore) and Edith Stuyvesant Vanderbilt – married the Honorable John Francis Amherst Cecil, third son of Lord William Cecil and a direct descendant of that sixteenth-century William Cecil, Lord Burghley, chief minister of Elizabeth I and the most powerful man in England during her reign. The wedding reception was held in the glass atrium (the Winter Garden) at Biltmore and the guest list included such names as Astor, Condé Nast, Pulitzer, Radziwill, Rockefeller, Hunt, Olmsted, Wharton, Cecil, Amherst and Stuyvesant, as well as the Ambassadors of Spain, France, Great Britain and Italy; ministers from Hungary, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Czechoslovakia, Egypt and China; and the US Ambassador to France.
Cornelia Vanderbilt and John Francis Cecil behaved in predictable family ways. They filed for divorce in Paris in 1934 after only ten years of marriage and their successive affairs and multiple remarriages (which, in Cornelia Vanderbilt’s case, included an Australian connection) made for juicy gossip. Nevertheless Cornelia and John Cecil had two sons, George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil, born in 1925, and William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil, born in 1927. Both births took place at Biltmore House. At the time of the divorce settlement, Cornelia specified in her will that Biltmore was to be left to her two sons, and it is those two Cecil sons and Cornelia’s grandchildren who continue to own and manage the Biltmore Estate.
They do so with adroit marketing skills, having acquired for display Elizabethan portraits of Lord Burghley himself (above the mantel in the ‘Old English Room’) and of his two grandsons (a 1599 portrait by Italian painter Zuccaro). The two grandsons of the chief minister of Elizabeth I hang above an oak chest of drawers. They appear to be perhaps eight and six years of age. Both wear corset-like bodices nipped in at the waist, below which voluminous and pouffy Elizabethan skirts descend to the ankles. Much is made of Biltmore’s connection to the court of Elizabeth I. The glossy and lushly illustrated book of the history of Biltmore and of the Vanderbilts and the Cecils, available in the estate bookstore, makes no mention whatsoever of the fact that Cornelia Vanderbilt and Cecil were so soon divorced. All hint of scandal has been air-brushed out.
Hitching one’s wagon to a famous name and a title is hardly a new form of upward mobility. Sometimes, while not exactly dishonest, it is merely a marketing ploy. At present, however, shape-shifting seems unrelated to market strategy or social climbing. It would appear to be overwhelmingly criminal in intention.
But not exclusively so.
Consider again the case of Esther Reed, the ordinary girl who had no intention of financial gain and who fleeced nobody with the series of stolen identities into which she stepped as into costume changes. She was simply in flight from a self that she felt she had been erroneously dealt, a self which never felt authentic to her.
Consider also Cornelia Vanderbilt herself, born at Biltmore. (Her vintage crib –which also cradled the two Cecil sons as infants – is on display in the Birthing Room.) Cornelia changed her name legally several times by divorce, by remarriage, by flight, by emigration, but her driving passion appears to have been an intense desire not to be either a Vanderbilt or a Cecil. After one of her remarriages, and after setting up residence in London, she even legally changed her first name to Mary. On 24 August 1972, in a London suburb, she married Bill Goodsir (who had a brother, David Goodsir, in Australia). On the marriage certificate, Mary Goodsir listed her age as 55 (though in fact she was 72). Her new husband, aged 46, recorded his profession as ‘catering manager’ and his father’s profession as ‘merchant seaman’. Mary Goodsir listed her father’s profession as ‘art dealer’.
David Goodsir, the Australian brother-in-law, spent ten days with Bill and Mary in 1974. His brother and sister-in-law, he recorded, behaved like lovebirds. David found Mary warm and charming. She had a British accent and loved the ploughman’s lunch at the local pub. His brother Bill wrote that he was with her when she died of congestive heart failure in February 1976 and he held her hand. Bill also wrote to his brother:
Mary had asked me … to make [the funeral] as private as possible which I did. There was no publicity & a private service at the crematorium … her sons arrived with their wives from America … They are not interested in her English estate. Apparently they are extremely rich. George & his wife were especially nice to me [and] took me out to dinner in London & invited me to their home in America & to see Mary’s home.
Mary Goodsir (who was, once upon a time, Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil) always put her inherited wealth to charitable use. She founded the Mrs. Smith Trust in 1939, four years after her divorce from John Francis Cecil, and it is under the bland and anonymous rubric of the ‘Smith Foundation’ that Cornelia Vanderbilt’s wealth continues to underwrite such causes as the education of women and the amelioration of homelessness.
I decided that my novel, to be set in the present, would be about four intertwined characters who were all shape-shifters: two of them innocent escapees in flight from inherited lives, two others who were criminally cunning and conscience-free fame-and-fortune hunters.
It was then that I realised I had a major narrative problem. Though it was entirely possible in the late nineteenth century to change country and name and move on as a new person without committing any crime, this is simply not possible any more, or at least not possible without committing a felony. Certainly one can legally change one’s name by deed poll or by marriage, but such changes are readily traceable and therefore none too appealing to someone who truly wishes to disappear. Fake docu
ments and fake passports, we know, are available via shadowy terrorist or espionage networks. One can steal the identity and Social Security number of a dead or missing person, but the act itself is a felony.
I did not want my two innocent shape-shifters to be guilty of criminal acts.
And so I was stumped.
I decided that this was not a novel I could write. I abandoned it.
From my third novel (Borderline) onwards, this seems to be a crucial turning point for me in the evolution of a book. I have abandoned each one as not possible (at least not by me). Still preoccupied with the non-doable topic, however, I have read farther afield, voraciously, exploring the issue on which I have given up. I have abandoned my book but the book refuses to accept being trashed. I cannot get its grappling hooks off my back.
Eventually something far different from what I thought I was writing evolves, but the evolution of The Claimant was particularly torturous (though I think I remember having believed that for all my earlier books) because I felt somehow constrained by certain elements of the original historical saga: the French aristocratic mother, the overheated Catholic childhood, the cold and distant father, the shipwreck, the claimant as butcher, the inheritance up for conflictual grabs. The historical elements therefore survive in splintered and metamorphosed forms, much as a musical phrase reappears in transposed keys in a Bach fugue, or as Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat devolves into nothing but its grin.
The history of the Vanderbilt and Cabot families is widely known and is on the public record. The Vanderbilts were brash New Money and flaunted their wealth; the Cabots are Old Money, Boston Brahmins, as discreet about their wealth as their achievements in statecraft and the arts are illustrious. The Vanderbilt name evokes ostentation and notoriety, the Cabots decorum. Any schoolchild in Massachusetts can chant this jingle:
Here’s to the city of Boston,
Home of the baked bean and cod,
Where Lowells speak only to Cabots
And Cabots speak only to God.
It goes without saying, however, that the particular Vanderbilts and Cabots who are characters in this novel are fictitious and are entirely my own creation.
Only now that I have finished the novel have I realised that I have been overturning an American literary archetype. The Claimant is The Great Gatsby in reverse.
Bibliography
I am deeply indebted to the sources listed below. The three books, in particular, are finely written and exceptionally well researched. They are all far stranger than fiction.
Annear, Robyn: The Man Who Lost Himself: The Unbelievable Story of the Tichborne Claimant (Melbourne, Text Publishing, 2002)
Bhattacharjee, Yudhijit: ‘The Mind of a Con Man’, New York Times (Sunday Magazine), 26 April 2013
Erdely, Sabrina Rubin: ‘The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League: How a high school dropout created the ultimate fake ID, scammed her way into Harvard and Columbia, and became the target of a nationwide manhunt’, Rolling Stone, Issue 1080, June 11, 2009
Henriques, Diana B: The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust (New York, Times Books/Henry Holt, 2011)
Morris, Errol: ‘What’s in a Name (Part 1)’, New York Times (Opinionator), 29 April 2012
Simone, Alina: ‘Want a New You? Change Your Name’, New York Times, 26 December 2011
Vanderbilt, Arthur T. II: Fortune’s Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt (New York, Harper Collins/Perennial, 2001, copyright William Morrow, 1989)
www.facebook.com/pages/The-Real-History-of-Biltmore-House/ 253963044733415 (Cornelia Vanderbilt’s matamorphosis)
www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/arts/television/13rockefeller.html?_r=0 (Fake Rockefeller)
www.oddee.com/item_98608.aspx (Ten Most Famous Imposters)
www.oddee.com/item_96600.aspx#wuE4E5CVKwiQYk8D.99 (Andrew Carnegie’s ‘illegitimate daughter’)
www.oddee.com/item_96600.aspx#wuE4E5CVKwiQYk8D.99 (Imposter ‘son’ of Sidney Poitier)
Acknowledgements
A short section of this novel, ‘On the Czech-Slovak Border’, in slightly different form, appeared in Hecate vol 38, nos. 1 & 2 (2012): 207-9, an interdisciplinary feminist journal of literature and ideas, published twice-yearly by the University of Queensland.
The image of the Cheshire Cat is taken from Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for the 1865 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
I am deeply indebted to Carolyn Taylor Koroloff, my fellow student at Mitchelton High School. Her intimate knowledge of farming in Queensland (especially of ecological and self-sustaining practices, both in rainforest and in cattle country) has been invaluable to me. I confess to purloining two of her beautiful houses for three of my novels, and also to appropriating the lovely Darling Downs house, self-built, of my husband’s nephew Mark Blake. All three houses are at the heart of their own private Edens, surrounded by rolling hills, lush pasture, and rainforest or dense bush. From their verandas and balconies no other sign of human habitation is visible. This is my personal idea of paradise. Ti-Loup’s house in Dayboro is a conflation of Carolyn’s house near Gatton and Mark’s house outside of Warwick.
About the Author
Janette Turner Hospital grew up in Queensland and was educated there. Since her post-graduate degrees in Canada, she has taught in universities in Canada, Australia, England, France and the United States. She has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and four short-story collections, which have been published in numerous languages. In 2003, she won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Patrick White Award, and received a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland. She is Carolina Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of South Carolina, where she taught for twelve years. In 2010, she was a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York and is currently Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland.
By the same author
The Ivory Swing
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit
Borderline
Dislocations
Charades
Isobars
The Last Magician
Collected Stories
Oyster
North of Nowhere, South of Loss
Due Preparations for the Plague
Orpheus Lost
Forecast: Turbulence
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2014
This edition published in 2014
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
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Copyright © Janette Turner Hospital 2014
The right of Janette Turner Hospital to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
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The claimant / Janette Turner Hospital.
ISBN: 978 0 7322 9813 5 (pbk)
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Inheritance and succession—Fiction.
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