When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  After his father’s death, John Jacob Astor IV, then twenty-eight, kept a close and knowing eye on the management of his share of the Astor estate, but this took up only a tiny portion of his time. He belonged to about two dozen clubs in New York, Tuxedo Park, and Newport and “divided his time” (in the idiom of society news reporting) between his yacht, his Fifth Avenue mansion, his country estate at Rhinebeck, a seasonal “cottage” at Newport, and other residences. “The wilfully idle man, like the wilfully barren woman,” Theodore Roosevelt declared, managing somehow to conflate birth control and leisure, “has no place in a sane, healthy, vigorous community.” Roosevelt’s hyperenergized personality prevailed over the popular prejudice against blue bloods entering the hurly-burly of politics, but in this respect, as well as in so many others, he was an exception. For the two Astor cousins, neither of them outgoing, empathetic, or philanthropic in his makeup, it was nearly impossible to find a comfortable “place” in American life outside the family countinghouse. “We were too prosperous,” William recalled toward the end of his life. “We liked the amenities of foreign travel; we had been known to employ alien servants, French chefs and English butlers. We were un-American.”

  ii.

  GEORGE TEMPLETON STRONG, diarist, civic leader, and Trinity Church vestryman, was often a guest at the dinner table of John Jacob Astor III. Over nearly a decade he recorded his impressions of his host’s only child, William Waldorf, born in 1848, the year of the founding Astor’s death. “Has shot up too fast and looks delicate and fragile. He seems a nice, well mannered boy of eighteen, more or less,” Strong wrote. Nearing twenty-one, an accomplished fencer and boxer, Willy was “not handsome,” the diarist noted a few years later, “but well-bred, modest, self-possessed, and agreeable. He inherits something of his mamma’s refined, courteous manner.” Another few years later, after Willy had returned from a stay in Germany and Italy, Strong called him “a nice, refined young fellow” who showed significant artistic talent and initiative—“His statue, ‘The Wounded Amazon,’ is a creditable work.” Willy had made at least, a maquette of this ambitious standing figure while studying under the renowned expatriate sculptor William Wetmore Story. Story’s apartment in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome was one of the centers of artistic life for Willy and other Americans.

  At the age of twenty-six, when he made his last appearance in Strong’s diary, “nice young Willy Astor” was an imposing figure, athletic, over six feet tall, with polished manners, an intense and unflinching gaze, and a worldly assurance that belied his essential shyness and melancholy. Fluent in French, German, and Italian, he had by then graduated from Columbia Law School, been taken into the Astor estate “Counting Room” at 85 Prince Street, passed the bar, clerked in the law office of the attorneys for the estate, and acquired a command of real estate law and business practice, along with a measure of aplomb.

  Sent once on a business errand to Boston, he had time for a cultural visit to Cambridge. There William Dean Howells, then an Atlantic Monthly editor, took him to meet a famous neighbor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “the most beautiful old man I have ever seen,” Astor was to recall. The fame of the family real estate millions, and of how they were acquired, had preceded young Willy Astor to the Longfellow house on Brattle Street, and the poet put to him a question that he said had been “long in my thoughts.” “Frankly, when you foreclose a mortgage, do you not feel some compunction for a fellow creature?” Willy had learned his business well at the Counting Room on Prince Street. Compunction? “No,” he answered. “We could never feel the emotion you suggest, because we are not taking the Mortgagor’s money from him but our own.” “The great man listened dubiously,” his visitor recalled, “and turned the talk to other things.”

  “In boyhood,” Astor wrote toward the end of his life, “I was taught that I and the Estate would some day be one and that my life would be judged by my success or failure in its control…. My business education began on simple lines. I was instructed in double-entry bookkeeping. With a pocket map-book I was taken to inspect our real estate scattered in little patches from the Battery to Harlem. I was taught the art and mystery of coupon-clipping and in my time must have cut a barrelful of coupons…. I did the work in turn of every junior member of the office staff.” Serious, well trained, and conspicuously intelligent, he had a passion for art and history but appeared to be obediently headed for a life of duty much like his father’s and grandfather’s, as guardian and multiplier of old John Jacob Astor’s high-piled wealth and pillar of the American upper class.

  “I was myself brought up severely and kept upon a pitiful allowance,” William recalled. “I lived in an atmosphere of sinister religion filled with hobgoblins…. I was a mischievous little animal and everybody kept telling me I was so bad. The hellfire sermons of my childhood, the like of which no congregation out of Scotland would listen to today, frightened me silly and I knew those red hot things were being made ready for me.” Even in his mature years he was sometimes oppressed by the theological gloom of his boyhood in his parents’ somber mansion. “Sunday was a day of penance. My Mother fixed the employment of the hours left free between morning and afternoon service. No exercise, nor game, nor merriment. To walk (except to Church) was Sabbath breaking, to whistle a tune, sin. To write a letter, or pay a visit, or read a newspaper or listen to music was desecration. Apart from Church, it must be a day of idle vacuity. ‘I see no reason,’ she said, ‘why a Christian should not be cheerful,’ a phrase which now sounds ridiculous. She was proficient in the Christian doctrine of sin.” Many years later, leaving church after a Sunday service, he once said to his daughter Pauline (as she recalled), “I can never understand how we can thank God for our creation.”

  Brought up by governesses in the absence of a more than ceremonial and devotional relationship with his parents, educated at home by private tutors before he was enrolled at Columbia Grammar School, restricted in his reading to history and biography of an improving sort, Willy had grown up companionless. All his life he was to be torn between warring natures: the one romantic, artistic, and solitary; the other obedient to the principle of order, discipline, piety, and control that was part of his heritage. An expert chess player, he trained his memory by playing blindfolded and said the game had taught him “that in all things concentration is the key to success.” In later life Willy’s shyness and sensitivity often took the protective forms of truculence, impulsiveness, and a thickening crust of self-reserve. His chess-disciplined nature showed itself in obsessive personal habits. He demanded that his desk pencils be arranged with parade-ground precision.

  Despite the Calvinist rigors of his upbringing, during the time abroad that his parents allowed him—at the university in Gottingen and then in Italy—the more open side of his nature flourished. Willy developed an educated and acquisitive passion for Renaissance art and classical antiquities. He studied the lives of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Borgias, and the Sforzas and believed he could make a name for himself as an author of historical novels and stories.

  In Italy, when he was twenty-one, he had what he called “a love adventure…with a young lady of rare charm.” “She was a figure of statuesque beauty. It was a strange and delicious emotion, an intense dreaming and anguish,” he wrote in a letter in 1904 when he was fifty-six. “I became humanized and lifted out of my youthful savagery…. But the fates were unkind and we were not allowed to marry.” In all likelihood his parents summoned him home once they learned of the potential misalliance of the Astor millions with an Italian girl who was unknown to them and probably a Roman Catholic as well. But he continued to ask himself, “Had we been allowed to marry, would life have been happiness for us both?” In “A Secret of Olympus,” a story he published in his Pall Mall Magazine in November 1904, Willy wrapped his Italian love in a mantle of operatic prose. “Her dark eyes looked golden in the noonday, like yellow catseyes, and as she smiled her teeth showed white as fresh-cut ivory. Yet across her face floated a swift tinge of tragi
c passion—as unfathomable as the depth that lurks between the rose leaves…. I shall never again behold her; but now Time, with a thrill akin to rich accords of music, weaves for me an exquisite witchery about those happy days.” Toward the end of Willy’s story, the girl begs him to go away with her, “where none can find us.” “Our hands had met; and how often in after years…have I asked myself, would it have been well for us if that hand-clasp had been for life.”

  Who the girl was he never said, but he remained in touch with her—his “princess”—until she died in 1909. “We walked forty years in unaltered friendship, till by a singular coincidence forty years to a day from our first meeting the eyes I had loved closed forever.” With a lasting and chastening sense of regret about this road not taken, Willy returned to America, to his prescribed duties in the Astor estate office, and to an existence bounded by the conventions of his social class. In 1878, when he was thirty, he married Mary “Mamie” Dahlgren Paul of Philadelphia, a notable beauty who was endowed with the warmth and spontaneity he had never experienced with his parents. Although it may have lacked the high passion of his Italian affair, it was nevertheless a love marriage, happy and genuinely affectionate as well as socially impeccable. Willy and Mamie were to be the parents of five children (only three of whom—Waldorf, John, and Pauline—lived to adulthood). Meanwhile, they entertained grandly and generously in the house at 4 East Thirty-third Street that had been his father’s wedding gift to them, a country house on Long Island, and a rented estate at Newport. Despite Mamie’s ingrained reticence and gentleness, Willy urged her, although without much success, to enter into open competition with his aunt Caroline for New York and Newport social primacy.

  Willy’s tastes and habits did not run to horses, yachts, cards, and similar pleasures enjoyed by members of his social class. He took a different route altogether. The summer before his marriage, as he recalled, “I startled and amused my relatives by declaring my wish to stand for election to the New York State Legislature, a body endowed with infinite power for mischief.” In his letter accepting nomination, he declared his “devotion to the principles of the Republican Party, the maintenance of law and order, equal rights for all, and honest money.” His four-year sally into politics, a departure from the customary pursuits of young men of his class, took him from assemblyman to state senator and then to an unsuccessful run for the House of Representatives in the Seventh Congressional District, a Tammany-dominated area that included blocks of Astor tenements. Until then he had been a modest favorite of the New York Times, for one, which had praised him in editorials for his diligence, “thorough study of the law,” and “fidelity to public interests.” After his narrow defeat—by 165 out of over 23,000 votes—the paper turned on him for his “ignoble subservience to [the] machine dictation” of Republican Party boss Roscoe Conkling, dispenser of political spoils and enemy of civil service reform. “The moral is that the possessor of an honored name, of great wealth, of sound ability, and of an unexceptionable private character may throw all these advantages away when at a critical moment in his political career he forgets what is due to his constituents as well as to his own independence and self-respect.” The New York Sun wrote him off as “partisan,” “narrow-minded,” and “selfish,” with nothing to recommend him except his money.

  Embittered by his defeat and by similar denunciations on other editorial pages, Willy withdrew from politics and to the end of his days fed his rage on hatred of the American press—“tobacco-spitting journalism,” an “atrocity” that “trained vulgarians” inevitably visited upon men of wealth, education, breeding, and social standing. He looked back on his political career as “a fine roll in the mire—unfamiliar streets, outlandish slums, villainous drinking saloons, Negroes trying to be white, speeches inane, humorous, half mad.” In his rage and disappointment he overlooked something all too obvious to his campaign managers and the electorate. By upbringing and temperament William Waldorf Astor had been unsuited from the start for what he considered the shabby business of canvassing saloons, dance halls, breweries, and tobacco shops. This proud Astor had been compelled to play the part of suppliant, like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and stand at the city gates, hat in hand, begging citizens for their votes while recoiling from their touch and smell.

  On his election-eve swings through the city’s saloons he dutifully handed out cigars, put $20 gold pieces on the bar, and ordered whiskey and beer all around. He said a few accommodating words, sometimes in German, about the family roots in Baden, when he toured the beer gardens. Going against the advice of his handlers, he refused to canvass the tenements. Impeccably dressed and hatted, he kept his gloves on when he shook hands and barely sipped his drink before making a quick exit. His closed carriage, drawn by matched bay horses, waited at the door….

  A year before his defeat and exit from politics William began to turn over in his mind what he called his “English Plan.” “On the 20th day of September 1880, when I was 32, the thought occurred to me that we should fare better in another land.” Soon after, an ideal if only temporary solution to his unhappiness in America presented itself. In August 1882, Republican president Chester A. Arthur appointed him envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Italy. “Go and enjoy yourself, my dear boy,” the president told him. “Have a good time!” Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen offered a similar instruction. “Young man, don’t write me many dispatches.”

  With only nominal duties connected with the position, Willy was free now to lead the life of cultivated, guiltless, and studious leisure denied him back home. He and Mamie rented and took up residence in the enormous Palazzo Rospigliosi, entered Roman society, gave lavish parties, and quickly became court favorites of King Umberto and Queen Margharita. The queen pronounced Minister Astor’s wife “the most beautiful woman in Italy.” Willy returned to the passions of his youth, sculpture, drawing, and studies in Italian art and history.

  He wrote a novel about Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, Valentino: An Historical Romance of the Sixteenth Century in Italy, published by Scribner’s in 1885. “In Rome, on a crisp December morning in the year 1501,” it began, “Monsignor Roccamura, Governor-General and Prelate of the Castle of St. Angelo, stood at the rampart of that fortress gazing upon the eddying Tiber at his feet, upon the houses opposite, and upon the Alban hills stretching away southward in varying tints of verdure.” Four years later he followed this romantic effusion with a similarly atmospheric costume drama, Sforza, a Story of Milan, set in 1499 and also published by Scribner’s. “At the half-finished Duomo, the people streamed in and out, pausing in the cool, incensed air of the aisles to touch a finger in holy water.” Contrary to his expectations, neither book, for all their fashionable romantic lushness, made him a name as a popular novelist.

  In a discriminating, informed, and also wholesale way, using the almost limitless wealth at his disposal, William had begun what was to be a lifelong career as collector on an epic scale. Over the years he amassed books, manuscripts, autographs, Pompeian relics, coins, tapestries, armor, crossbows, halberds, classical and Renaissance statuary and sculpture, ecclesiastical vestments, Shakespeare folios. Instead of the French impressionists American millionaires were beginning to take back home with them, he bought paintings by early masters such as Holbein and Clouet. Among his miscellaneous artifacts were a seventeenth-century New England spinning wheel and a hat once worn by Napoleon, one of his heroes, along with the princes and condottieri of Renaissance Italy. He planned in time to install his collections in palaces of his own: the cream-colored chateau he was soon to put up next door to Collis Huntington’s mansion on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, the fortresslike townhouse office at Temple Place in London, Cliveden in what was then Buckinghamshire, Hever Castle in Kent, Villa Sirena in Sorrento. His largest single purchase, an entire balustrade from the Villa Borghese garden, including statues and fountain, he bought while serving as American minister in Rome and kept in storage until 1893, when he acquired the e
state of Cliveden from the Duke of Westminster. In purchases ranging in size from coins to stately homes William Waldorf Astor may have been the grandest (as well as one of the most knowledgeable and scholarly) of the American grand acquisitors who gathered in the spoils of Europe in the late nineteenth century.

  When President Arthur’s term came to an end in 1885, Willy had to resign his post and return to New York. After his mother’s death in 1887 and his father’s in 1890, he assumed a senior position in the management of the Astor interests. He also resumed in earnest the old battle for social primacy with Caroline Astor, his cousin Jack’s mother. Pride, primogeniture, and custodianship of the Astor family plate dictated, he believed, that his wife, Mamie, not the imperious Caroline, should be the publicly acknowledged head of the House of Astor. He urged Mamie to compete with her rival in the grandeur, frequency, and exclusiveness of her New York and Newport entertainments. Caroline Astor, however, was a much more formidable competitor in the social arena. She dismissed her nephew William as a nuisance, “a prickly sort of person,” altogether unlike her adored and docile playboy son, John Jacob IV, and had as little to do with him as possible, which was agreeable to Willy. Caroline made a preemptive strike in her campaign for primacy by changing the wording on her calling card from “Mrs. William Astor” to “Mrs. Astor.” She thereby relegated Willy’s wife to second place and launched what amused observers on both sides of the Atlantic were soon calling “the Battle of the Cards.” While the battle raged, it almost seemed that not since the Middle Ages, when rival popes at Rome and Avignon divided the Roman Catholic Church, had an issue of legitimacy stirred up such a tzimmes. Willy’s gentle-natured wife did not have the stomach for battle. She was relieved when, following his “English Plan,” he finally left Caroline in sole possession of her title and moved his family to London.