Empire Gty soon became known as a “homey” track, plain and comfortable as an old shoe, quite the opposite of the fancier and more social Belmont. It offered thoroughbred racing for the common folk, but it quickly became one of the most profitable tracks in the East. Some of its profitableness was directly due to its owner’s now-famous economies. It became known as “The little track beside the water tower,” and it faced Yonkers’s Central Avenue. When the buildings and the fence around the track needed painting, Mr. Butler directed that only the side that was visible from the avenue be painted; the sides that could not be seen received no paint. On dry days, the crowds from Empire City would emerge at the end of an afternoon of racing covered with dust, because Squire Butler would not buy a watering rig. When, at last, he decided that he would have to buy a rig or lose attendance, he bought one, but he personally supervised every watering operation, periodically shouting to the man in charge, “Don’t waste my water! Don’t waste my water!” In the early days of Empire City, a band would appear to play “The Wearing of the Green” whenever a Butler horse won. But when the band became too expensive, Squire Butler fired them all. When someone asked him, “Who’ll play ‘The Wearing of the Green’ now, Jim?” he replied, “The crowd can whistle it.” Though he was a millionaire, he always drove to the track in an ancient and dilapidated Ford car that terrified his passengers and that he refused to turn in for a new one.
With his Empire City Racetrack, the Squire began buying race horses in quantity, the way he bought groceries for his stores. He was out to prove, he said, that fine horses could be bred and raised in the Northeast as successfully as they could in the traditional “bluegrass country” of Kentucky and Virginia, and he proved it. Among his more successful horses were Direct and Directum Kelly. Directum I, a pacer, and son of Directum Kelly, sold for $40,000 in 1915. The Squire had paid $8,250 for Direct, who went on to become the unbeaten champion of old-style sulky racing. Driving King Direct, one of Direct’s descendants, Mr. Butler himself broke the world’s amateur sulky racing mark by doing a mile in 2.0475 minutes. Other noted thoroughbreds were Pebbles, Spur, Sting, and Questionnaire, the last of which won both the Empire City and Brooklyn Handicaps, plus the Metropolitan in 1931, and the Paumonok at the opening of the 1932 racing season at Jamaica. Between the years 1914 and 1933, Butler horses won a total of $649,573. Squire Butler’s favorite horse was Sting, and in 1925, after Sting had won a number of important races, Mr. A. C. Bostwick, through an intermediary, offered Mr. Butler $125,000 for him. Butler replied, “That’s a nice offer, but you tell Mr. Bostwick that there are a lot of men in the world who have that much money but there is only one man who has Sting. I wouldn’t take a million for him. I’m a sentimental Irishman, and Sting will stay here until his dying day.” Stay Sting did, and after his dying day a bronze statue of him was erected on the lawn at East View Farm.
Other horse breeders, jealous of the parvenu Mr. Butler’s great success and noting his pronounced penuriousness, liked to circulate stories that he fed his horses short rations, and that he would rather see a crate of Butler eggs spilled on the sidewalk than see a race horse pampered or overfed. But no one who really knew him could say that his love of horses was not genuine, even though he was well aware of the value of each of them, and watched the performance of each with a hard eye on the ledger sheet. He once turned “white as a ghost” when handed the news that three of his prize horses had been killed simultaneously by a bolt of lightning. “All men are equal, on the turf or under it” was one of his favorite sayings. No one could deny, either, that the Squire was tightfisted. One of his business tactics was to have periodic picnics for his grocery clerks at Empire City. After the picnic, the “boys” were instructed to “clean up the place,” which they did, enabling Mr. Butler to charge the cost of the outing as a business expense for “rubbish removal.”
At one point a rumor got around—circulated, no doubt by jealous rivals in the grocery business—that Mr. Butler was in the habit of “levying” a dollar a day on each one of his stores (the implication was that there was something evil and un-American in the practice). “Ridiculous!” said Mr. Butler indignantly. “If I had a store that didn’t pay me more than a dollar a day, I’d close it.” He was, on the other hand, lavish in his spending when it came to horseflesh and racetracks, and he eventually acquired a large share of Laurel Park, in Maryland, and helped put up the track at Juarez, Mexico, where he once spent a pleasant afternoon chatting with Pancho Villa.
There were, meanwhile, repeated confrontations between the Squire and members of the Old Guard racing world, and Old Guard society. Once Mr. J. E. Widener (whose father had got his start as a butcher in Philadelphia) met the Squire and said, somewhat loftily, “Ah, Mr. Butler—how are your groceries?” The Squire, who always spoke with a bit of a brogue, answered, “Sure an’ they’re fine. How’s yer meats?” He refused to join clubs—calling them more “nonsense”—and refused “to have truck with” either society or politics. Once both Tammany and anti-Tammany groups wanted to put up James Butler’s name for Mayor of New York, and William L. Ward, the Republican boss of Westchester, asked him to run for Congress. The Squire would have no truck with either offer. “I’m a butter-and-egg man” was his reply to that. He refused to be listed in Who’s Who in America, and would not let his name be used as a dummy on any board of directors. The only club he joined was the Andiron Club on Seventy-second Street, where he liked to play poker and lift a glass or two of Irish whiskey. He did, however, become a good friend of his Westchester neighbor, John D. Rockefeller, whose estate adjoined East View Farm. Mr. Rockefeller enjoyed listening to Mr. Butler’s salty and vociferous opinions on “high finance,” for which the Squire had very little use. He had little use, either, for tennis or golf, and once when Mr. Rockefeller invited him over for a round on his private course, the Squire snorted, “Golf! That’s a rich man’s game.”
His interest in horseflesh in no way diminished his interest in groceries and, as his business continued to flourish and expand, he worked at it at a whirlwind pace. He built a two-million-dollar warehouse in Long Island City which contained 500,000 feet of floor space, and included a bakery, a coffee-roasting and a canning department, a printing plant for labels—including his East View Farm—brand egg and dairy products—and numerous other divisions. Big as his operation had become, the Squire’s hand was in every phase of it. He made periodic visits—always unannounced, of course—to each of his stores, checking on things, and on anniversary-sale days he often showed up on the loading platform of the Long Island City plant as early as six in the morning, when the early shipping crew was going to work. An admiring friend, commenting on the Squire’s almost magical ability to juggle dozens of different projects at once, told of how he would simultaneously “bargain for one hundred thousand eggs, buy the output of a vineyard in France, order the entire product of a canning factory, keep four or five lawyers busy with the technical details of a vast amount of litigation, discuss the best points of trotting horses, buy a farm, receive a delegation seeking help in some municipal undertaking (which usually meant money), and give ready and sympathetic response to appeals from churchmen to aid worthy cases of distress.” The Squire once boasted that he had not taken a day’s vacation for seventeen years.
The Squire’s philanthropic activities were almost exclusively confined to the Catholic Church, and when he entertained at East View Farm, or at his big town house in the city, it was usually for Cardinals, Bishops, or other Catholic dignitaries, and he often opened the place for Fresh Air Fund picnics and parties for Catholic orphans. He founded Marymount School and College in Tarrytown, New York, which was headed for years by James Butler’s first cousin, Mother Marie Joseph Butler, who became known as “Mother Butler of Marymount.” Although the “Mary” in the school’s name refers to the Virgin, Mr. Butler liked to think of the institution as a memorial to his wife. In 1926, James Butler purchased the old Florence Vanderbilt Burden house at Fifth Avenue and
Eighty-fourth Street, and presented it to Marymount so that the school could have a city unit. Once, at Christmastime, after he had presented his cousin with a million-dollar piece of property in addition to the Burden house, Mother Butler murmured to her staff, “Santa Claus has been very good to us this year.” He was equally generous with his gifts to New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and today the Butler family pew—Number II—is the only one still in private family ownership. The walls of Squire Butler’s bedroom at East View Farm were covered with photographs of Church figures, family, race horses, as well as with pictures of saints, the Blessed Virgin, Christ, and religious relics and crucifixes. For his contributions and devotion to the Church the Pope made James Butler a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory in 1912, an honor he was to take with great seriousness all his life.
Raising his motherless children, he was a strict and sometimes stern parent, and his offspring regarded the patriarch with awe and not a small amount of dread. As he had done with their mother, he insisted that the only spending money that the children could have was what they could win by placing two-dollar bets on Butler horses. He left a stern—some of his heirs thought too stern—and tough-minded will which, after a bequest of $100,000 to the Sacred Heart Convent in Tarrytown, gave each child $100,000 at age twenty-five, an additional $125,000 at age thirty, and the balance of the inheritance at age thirty-five, minus $250,000 that was to be set aside in an unshatterable trust. “None of my children will be spendthrifts,” he used to say. When the Squire died in 1934, and was gathered to his “room in heaven” and his mortal remains were placed in the Butler crypt at Marymount, beside his wife’s, over three thousand people turned out for his funeral at St. Patrick’s.
There was “some question” as to whether his oldest son, James Butler, Jr., who shared his father’s interest in horses, would be taken into the exclusive Jockey Club. But, after a certain amount of grumbling from some of the Old Guard, the younger Butler was accepted for membership. By the third generation, all the old feuds were forgotten and James Butler III went sailing into the club with no difficulty whatever. Squire Butler’s oldest daughter, Beatrice, had meanwhile married a prominent New York physician, D. Philip MacGuire, and it was their son, James Butler MacGuire, who married Mary Jane Cuddihy, tying up the Butler connection with the Murrays and McDonnells and the Funk & Wagnalls fortune. The first brush of scandal ever to touch any of the interconnected families occurred in 1947 when one of R. J. Cuddihy’s grandsons, T. Burt McGuire, Jr. (the other McGuires), married actress-singer Lillian Roth, the author of a confessional book called I’ll Cry Tomorrow which dealt candidly with her bouts with alcoholism. Not only had Miss Roth been a vaudeville performer, but she was Jewish, and had had four previous husbands and divorces. At the time of the McGuire-Roth nuptials, it was announced in the newspapers that the pair had met at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Miss Roth told reporters, “He has given me a love beyond my worth,” and Mr. McGuire revealed that when his wife struggled with insomnia he lulled her to sleep by sitting at her bedside and repeating “The Good Lord wants you to sleep” over and over again until she slept.
As if all this weren’t bad enough, several years later the McGuires were all over the newspapers again, this time battling for a divorce. Mr. McGuire accused his wife of “mental cruelty, physical violence, and habitual intemperance.” He claimed that Miss Roth had once attacked him with a knife at their Palm Springs, California, house, and that he had had to escape from her fury by locking himself in a bedroom and leaving the house through a window. “I’m afraid of this woman,” he declared. “When she drinks, she becomes violent, and I’m afraid of her.” In her countersuit, Miss Roth charged Mr. McGuire with adultery. To the chagrin of the Cuddihys, it was all very messy. What would Grandpa Cuddihy, such a stickler for moral rectitude within and without the Literary Digest, have thought of such proceedings? Heaven alone knew.
Through it all, Mr. McGuire repeatedly denied that family pressure had anything to do with his wish to divorce Miss Roth, or that he was trying, through the divorce, to obtain more funds from his family. There was no Cuddihy trust, he insisted, that was in any way contingent upon the marriage. But the fact was that when T. Burt McGuire, Jr. married Lillian Roth, his Cuddihy relatives ostracized him thoroughly from their midst. After the divorce, albeit reluctantly, the clan readmitted him.
Out in Hollywood, meanwhile, one of the Chicago meatpacking Cudahys, young Michael, was creating headlines with his well-publicized romance with Joan Crawford. When Michael, an enthusiastic playboy, suddenly died, Miss Crawford stole the show at the funeral by arriving in not one but two huge limousines. The second was filled with nothing but flowers. The first contained Miss Crawford, in full mourning, draped in black veils from head to toe and clutching a silver cross.
Chapter 8
THE WEDDING OF THE CENTURY
When Grandpa Thomas E. Murray warned his children that “money can divide a family,” he might have added that another divisive influence among the F.I.F.’s would certainly be the contentiousness and scrappiness of the Irish nature. Squabbles between the various members of Grandpa Murray’s family had become, by the early 1930’s, a consistent fact of family life both in Southampton and in New York. Each of his children had his or her own distinct personality, and that, of course, did not help.
Uncle Joe Murray was a shy Murray, the quietest and most retiring of Thomas E. Murray’s sons, devoted to his garden and his boxwood hedges, and the author, in his spare time—while not conscientiously toiling for his father’s companies—of a number of scholarly articles on the cross-pollination of different varieties of ilex, and the quiet resister, with lengths of wire, of his nieces’ and nephews’ motorized excursions across his precious lawn at Water Mill. His wife, the former Theresa Farrell, was also a shy and somewhat nervous person, a meticulous housekeeper—not in the Craig’s Wife sense, but rather out of her innate fear of offending or upsetting the “help,” which she had a great deal of trouble managing. Her five daughters, for example, were never permitted to have any breakfast if they appeared at the table later than 9 A.M., lest the servants object or a “fuss” be created in the kitchen. As a result, “the Joe Murray girls,” as they were called, were always trooping across the drive on summer mornings to Aunt Julia’s house, where they were cheerfully fed. (Though not without some grumbling from Nat, Aunt Julia’s butler, who was often heard to say, “Some household they’ve got here—breakfast at one end of the table, lunch at the other.”)
Aunt Julia, Uncle Joe’s sister (Mrs. H. Lester Cuddihy), ran a much more relaxed establishment in her big house, and Mrs. Joe Murray used to say that she “could never see how Julia did it.” Julia Cuddihy’s servants seemed to adore her, there were never any below-stairs fusses, and the help would change their plans at the wave of their mistress’s hand. Aunt Julia had (and was able to keep) an excellent cook, and the Cuddihys were famous for the food they served. If friends dropped by for cocktails, they were almost automatically expected to stay on for dinner, and even when as many as a dozen extra places had been set at table at the last minute, the meal was always faultless and faultlessly served. Once—it was a Friday night—on his way into the dining room, Mr. Cuddihy asked his wife, “What’s for dinner?” She replied, “Lester, you asked for broiled lobster.” “But what I really feel like,” he said “is a Spanish omelet.” Without a word, Mrs. Cuddihy stepped into the kitchen with her husband’s request. The others at the table were served their lobsters, and Mr. Cuddihy got his Spanish omelet.
Uncle Jack Murray, meanwhile, Thomas E. Murray, Sr.’s youngest son, was an altogether different sort. Jack was known as a “wild” Murray—handsome, definitely a blade, and a bit of a hell-raiser, who was often criticized by the other Murrays for “living high off the hog.” This may have been because he was clearly his father’s favorite. Jack was not without talent as an inventor and, in 1915, when he was only sixteen, received Patent Number 951,486 for a baseball game-pla
ying apparatus based on the gravity principle, invented when he was eleven, which had prompted Thomas A. Edison to write him a handwritten note that said:
This is pretty good for a boy of
only 11 years to have invented. It’s
“going some.”
EDISON
Jack Murray loved sports, and had been a star lacrosse player at Stevens Institute. But he had bowed to his father’s wishes after college, and had gone to work for the Murray enterprises. Though neither of his brothers—Tom and Joe—ever took so much as a glass of Dubonnet until very late in life when they were ordered to by their respective doctors, Jack Murray enjoyed strong whiskey, parties, and pretty women, all of which preferences caused raised eyebrows among others of his conservative family. And when, in the spring of 1918, he eloped with and married a beautiful girl named Jeanne Durand—who was an orphan and therefore of “questionable” heritage—there was criticism from the other Murrays, particularly his older brother Tom. The wedding took place in, of all places, Hoboken, where the bride was described as “popular in ‘frat’ parties,” and announcement of the union was withheld until almost three months later.
It would not be fair to call Jack Murray the black sheep of the Murray family, because, while he worked for his father’s various companies, he personally succeeded in securing some two hundred patents for his own inventions. But, after his father’s death in 1929, there was a bitter quarrel between Jack and his older brother Tom as to which man would control the family interests. The feud became so bitter that the two brothers barely spoke, and in 1930 Jack Murray left the company to go into politics. He was named Commissioner of the Port of New York Authority twice—once under Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and again under Herbert H. Lehman. And, in 1934, he managed Lehman’s campaign as incumbent Governor, Lehman’s theory being that a good Irish name was needed in the fight to offset his own Jewish-ness. He was, of course, successful. Following this, Jack Murray bought himself a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He had a brokerage office at 11 Broadway, but stockbrokerage did not suit his restless, active mind. He died in 1937 at his Brooklyn home the day before his thirty-eighth birthday, leaving his wife and seven young children.
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