A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth

by Louis Auchincloss

  I am not speaking of professions like the clergy or the military or the law but of a class, like the aristocracy or the peasantry or the bourgeoisie. You can't really point to one in the United States. But you can certainly point to plenty of angry resentment against any who claim, or seem by their conduct to claim, to be upper class. The battle for a classless society has been long essentially won but the survivors do not all know it. Jealousy and envy are still rife.

  Anyone can claim to be middle class (no one would claim to be lower) but the natural successor to an upper class, if we had one, would seem to be the rich, for money can purchase a great deal of power in a commercial society. But millionaires are rarely popular, and billionaires even less so, and many of them are wisely inclined not to flaunt their wealth. Even if they were sufficiently united to form a class, it would not be a popular or formidable one. America would not care to be dominated by a vision of a line of marble palaces on the cliffs of Newport. The one thing that the rich share in common is apt to be the Republican Party.

  I try to recall what traces of class remained in my New York boyhood in the decade following World War I. My most vivid memory is of the destruction of the mansions on Fifth Avenue, which were being sold by the generation following the one that built them and replaced by huge apartment houses. The heirs were now sufficiently socially secure as no longer to need to impress their neighbors with a French chateau or Italian palazzo, and preferred a flat to the bother of running a palace. The wrecking crew of the latter would sometimes allow pedestrians to wander through the doomed ground floor, and I had a nurse who loved to do that, so I had a memorable vision of this twilight of the gods. I suffered at an early age from what the French call la folie des grandes maisons and imagined that I was viewing the tragic fall of an empire.

  Why did these magnates build so closely together, both in New York and Newport? There was, of course, the pleasure of visibly outdoing a rival, but I think it was more the need to be near someone who was like you. It is not always agreeable to stand out from the crowd and sometimes it is good to be free of the awkward questions that the uninitiated put to you. The very rich are particularly subject to intrusive interrogation about how they spend their money, which their equals spare them. It is the same way that royalties feel about people who want to talk about their rank. Queen Victoria once confided in a relative that she only felt truly at her ease with other royalties. And the exiled Grand Duchess Cyril, whose husband pretended to the Russian throne, told a friend who warned her that she was seeing the wrong people in Paris: "It's so hard to tell, you know. For us there's just us and the rest of you."

  Was superiority of birth ever an important factor in any of the New Yorks in which I lived? When I was very young, old city families such as the Van Rensselaers or the Livingstons were certainly spoken of by my grandparents' generation with a certain respect, but that has largely disappeared, partly because history no longer celebrates the families so named and partly because immigrants wishing to identify themselves with their new nation have changed their names to theirs. The only semblance to class distinction that we still have is through wealth. That name and birth count for little is shown by the fact that being called Rockefeller would do you no good unless you were a rich Rockefeller or supposed to be one.

  European titles of nobility were much valued by the daughters of the American rich in the nineteenth century, and by a steadily diminishing number in subsequent years, but that was always a kind of parlor game, never taken really seriously by the men. As a child I never thought that my native city was ruled by any identified class, though I was well aware that the downtown world of Manhattan contained a host of my family's relatives and friends who had a great deal to say in the running of the institutions that loomed large in our local life. But they had nothing to do with urban politics, public schools, the police or firemen, or indeed any of the infrastructure of the city. Indeed, they sent us to private day schools and out-of-state boarding schools and colleges.

  In a way we were privileged guests of New York; we knew no more of the West side world of Leonard Bernstein's opera than a Californian. Nor did our families want to know more. When we went to Central Park, or even just to walk for exercise in the streets, we were guarded by nurses, or, if old enough to go alone, severely instructed never to talk to strangers. Of one thing we were always aware: that the city was fraught with danger.

  If the poor inspired fear in a crowded, poverty-stricken city, the rich inspired not so much fear as the apprehension of condescension. A typical American will boil at the smallest hint that someone feels himself his social superior. This has lessened now, but when I published my first novels the literary establishment was full of liberal or even Marxist critics who wrote as if they were involved in a personal vendetta against characters of mine who struck them as belonging to an upper class that wanted to rule the world.

  This hostility, oddly enough, seems to have gone down just as the stock market has produced billionaires whose megafortunes might seem to justify it. Maybe it is because the old poverty has been lessened.

  24. Burdens

  WILLIAM A. M. BURDEN JR., who had received his fortunes from so many ancestors, came to me with the project of my writing a book about that family financed by him. He was so grave and serious it was almost impossible not to mock him a bit.

  "It's a wonderful idea!" I exclaimed. "It's the great American story, isn't it? You have the essential founder of the clan, Henry Burden, the poor Scottish immigrant who comes penniless to our shores and refuses to present any of his letters of introduction to tycoons till he's made his first million, and then he gives a dinner and hands each tycoon his unused letter. That really shows them, doesn't it? And then the horseshoes. Didn't he shod the whole Union army? And we won't ask any questions about the commander in chief being his son-in-law, will we? Nor about the long bitter litigation over management between his two sons that managed to transfer a hunk of the fortune to Joseph H. Choate.

  "And didn't the family bring ruin on themselves and Troy by staying too long in horseshoes and ignoring the advent of the automobile? Did that put them out? No! Why? Because they learned what the Hapsburgs had learned. Nube! Marry! They resuscitated themselves neatly at the altar with not one but two Vanderbilt marriages, and Burden Beaux Arts mansions reappeared up and down Manhattan's East side. So what do we need to complete the American success story? But we have it! A crook! Joseph Burden went to jail for embezzlement in the nineteen thirties."

  Bill was not amused. "I don't know who's going to write that book," he muttered. "But if I'm paying, it won't be you."

  Maybe I was wrong. I might have had fun with it. It had some of the fun and contradictions of the weird American story.

  William A. M. Burden Jr., the rich investor and art collector, was a double second cousin of Shiela Burden Lawrence, my mother-in-law. His grandfather was Isaiah Townsend Burden and hers was James Abercrombie Burden Jr., who were brothers and sons of Henry Burden, the ironmaster of Troy, New York. But if the fathers of William and Shiela were first cousins, so were their mothers: Mrs. William A. M. Burden Sr. had been born Florence Vanderbilt Twombly and Mrs. James Abercrombie Burden Jr. had been born Florence Adele Sloane, both granddaughters of William Henry Vanderbilt, once deemed the richest man in the world. His fortune, however, was not divided equally, or even equally per stirpes: the bulk of it was left to his two eldest sons. William A. M. Burden Jr., however, received a fortune independent of the Vanderbilts from his maternal grandfather, Hamilton Twombly.

  Henry Burden had invented a machine that enabled its operator to make a horseshoe from an iron bar in four seconds. It was used by the federal armies during the Civil War, and was so envied by the confederates that Jeb Stuart instructed his raiders to be on the lookout for Burden horseshoes and pick them up wherever they could.

  After Henry Burden's death in 1871 dissention over control of the company broke out between his two older sons, and one of them retained Joseph H. Choat
e as counsel. The great lawyer came up from New York to reconnoiter the situation and wrote gloatingly to his wife in 1889: "The Burdens are famous for protracted lawsuits. The father of these men had one about spikes that lasted for twenty years. And why should this one about horseshoes come to an untimely end?"

  It didn't. The Burden ironworks continued, but on a steadily declining scale as late as the 1920s. The two grandsons of Henry Burden who reconstituted his fortune but not his business, James A. Jr. and William A. M. Jr., had the glorious good looks and athletic builds to aid them in their entry through marriage into the Vanderbilt clan in the 1890s. The company was finally liquidated in 1940. Soon only an abandoned office building remained like the "vast and trunkless legs of stone" of Ozymandias's statue, as a witness to past splendor.

  His wife, Adele, however, was no compliant Victorian spouse. She loved her handsome husband but she did not for a minute believe that fate had endowed her with Vanderbilt millions to pine away in dreary Troy where he insisted on living while steadily losing money of which she had no need. She would get Whitney Warren to build her a mansion on Ninety-first Street that needed twenty-six servants to keep it up and Delano & Aldrich to do another for her on Long Island with a famous garden. Both are still standing, the New York house as part of the Sacred Heart School and the Long Island one as a golf club. James, however, continued with the family stubbornness or loyalty to occupy the Burden mansion and office in Troy several days a week while his wife and children stayed in New York City. She also had a house in Paris. As she told me once in her old age: "Some of my cousins were embarrassed to have so much more money than other people. I knew it was there to be enjoyed, and I enjoyed it." She was lively and charming, a first-class horsewoman, devoted to fox hunting, an imaginative hostess and a wonderful friend. But her marriage was certainly under the constant strain of a frequently divided residence. Years after the premature death of her husband she remarried, in her sixties, Richard Tobin, an old bachelor San Franciscan, president of the Hibernian Bank there and our minister to the Netherlands. She adored him and proved a more compliant wife, for she was converted to his Catholic faith and even spent her winters in California. But when she died at eighty-eight, she surprised her family by leaving instructions that she was to be buried in the Burden mausoleum in Troy. Was it repentance? Her children were chagrined to find the neglected marble mausoleum in such bad shape it had to be expensively repaired to receive her remains.

  Adele left a diary covering her early twenties and first marriage that nobody had read and that I instantly saw as a document of some historical importance. With the family's consent I took it to Jackie Onassis at Doubleday, with whom I had already worked on several publications. I soon convinced her that almost everything written about the opulent New York society of the 1890s was trash, and that here was the real thing: a bright and observant heiress of the richest and most famous clan describing the daily doings of that extravagant era. I also had family albums showing the individuals and mansions involved. George Vanderbilt, for example, had had the tower on Biltmore photographed every day of its construction and I could show it as it was on the very day the diarist came to visit.

  But Jackie refused to be bound by my severe limitation of the illustrations to the dates and events described in the diary. When I would object to her including in the published book the picture of some great lady in fabulous fancy dress, pointing out that the party had been given after the diary ends, she would say, "Do we have to be so technical?" And then I learned that when you have as an editor a former first lady of the United States, you lose those arguments. And Jackie was right, too. The book was the portrait of an era.

  25. A Would-be Writer, Not Forgotten

  STUART PRESTON, who died at ninety, an expatriate president of Paris, is a name that one encounters not infrequently in the diaries and memoirs of noted society and literary figures, both French and English, of the 1940s and '50s. By the 1960s he was largely forgotten in the smart circles that he had frequented. It was not because people in the least disliked him or even disapproved of him; he was always kind and amiable and asked nothing of life but to be accepted by charming people who lived charmingly. He was certainly an elegant guest who fit comfortably and easily into the elegant homes where he was welcome. Why then was he more or less dropped by so many of the great ladies who had picked him up?

  I think it was because they ultimately feared not that other people might associate them with Stuart, i.e. think they were like him—they were mostly too independent to care what others thought—but that they might begin to think so themselves. In other words, that his superficiality might be somehow catching. It was not a thing really dangerous, but it might be well to avoid, like a friend's head cold. Or it may be that they just tired of poor Stuart. Snobbishness can become tiresome, and a love of ancient titles and historic homes, however disguised (as in Proust) as a passion for history, always contains an element of snobbishness.

  It was, however, undeniable that some of Stuart's most famous friends came to treat him with a bit of a sneer. Once when I reproached Nancy Mitford for a nasty remark she made about him, telling her I had thought Stuart was such a friend of hers, she had retorted: "Friend? Never forget, my dear, that we're a nation of warriors and don't number among our close friends young men who spent the war having tea with Sibyl Colefax." And Evelyn Waugh records in his journal of a New York meeting with Stuart: "Bald and waxy eyed. I suspect he drinks."

  Despite what Nancy said about the war it was that great conflict that brought Stuart his greatest success. He came to London as an obscure American sergeant in the intelligence force, surely no social recommendation to a congregation of warriors accustomed to meet only commissioned officers, and was stationed there for several years with apparently very little to do. An English friend arranged to make him the guest of honor at a grand dinner celebrating the centennial of Henry James, casting him as the "Passionate Pilgrim," and somehow it took on. Stuart became the rage, known throughout the swellest London society as the "Sarge." He appears as "The Loot," an uncomplimentary picture of him in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy.

  He was a lifelong friend of mine and my family's, and I have never known quite how to assess his remarkable popularity and its equally remarkable collapse, his appeal to all sorts of brilliant men and women and his fading from the scene, always in good humor. He had been very handsome; the poet Stephen Spender called him the handsomest man he had ever known, but he lost his looks with age and baldness. He was gay, but very discreetly so. In all the years I knew him, we never discussed the matter.

  A death notice gives an idea of his vogue.

  His high moment of fame came when he was confined to a hospital with jaundice in March 1943. "The whole of London congregates around the Sergeant's bed," wrote Lees-Milne. "Like Louis XIV he holds levees. Instead of meeting now at Heywood Hill's shop, the intelligentsia and society congregate in public ward No. 3 in St. George's Hospital. When a visitor arrived late to see George VI, the King said: 'Never mind. I expect you've been to St. George's Hospital to see the Sergeant.'"

  Stuart stemmed on the paternal side from obscure but respectable old New York stock, but his maternal grandfather was an Irish emigrant who became an important judge and millionaire and launched his vast tribe into society. The fortune ultimately disappeared in multiple divisions, but Stuart's small portion sufficed for him to live decently as a prudent bachelor. For some years he worked as a junior art editor, reviewing the minor shows perceptively, but never importantly. He tried to write books, but his attention span was too brief. His forte was the mot juste, the brief apercu. If you went to a gallery with him, and he was the perfect companion for this, and he brought something to your attention, it was apt to be funny or significant. I recall his nudging me to read this conscientious ticket under a vase in the collection of the duke of Wellington: "1817: Given to the first duke by Louis XVIII, King of France and Navarre. 1854: Smashed by Bridget Murphy, housemaid. 1855: Re
paired by..."

  Stuart died loved by those who appreciated what he had to offer, less so by the majority who always wanted more. Yet he resented nothing. His acceptance of life was perfectly cheerful.

  Part IV

  Farewells

  26. My Mother

  TOWARD THE END of her life my mother—like my father—made no secret of the fact that I was her favorite child, explaining half-jokingly that I was the only child who realized that she, too, had once had a mother. A truer explanation would have been that I understood her better as the only offspring who had been through psychoanalysis.

  John's early and extreme devotion to her had been soured in his later years because of her futile but persistent disapproval of his retirement at age fifty from the State Department and his choosing to live, however happily and comfortably, on the large fortune of his loving and beloved wife. Mother could never stop reproaching him in her mind for giving up a useful career, even when he was past sixty, and he and his wife were always conscious of this. "I detested your mother," Audrey told me after Mother's death.