When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  But it was the example of his own brother and sister-in-law that Frederick saved for the concluding flourish in his register of the outré and the unpardonable: “One of the most lavish and expensive—probably the most expensive—dinners ever given in America was a hyphenated feast, the record of which is writ large upon the annals of metropolitan society.” The great hotel built by the two warring Astor cousins had provided both opportunity and impetus for such presumably terminal antics of “the idle rich.”

  SEVEN

  Aladdin

  i.

  BY 1891, WHEN he turned forty-three and moved to England for good, William Waldorf Astor had cut himself free from all but his business ties to New York and his rejected homeland. His parents were dead, and his inheritance, loosely estimated to be between $150 million and $300 million, made him, like the founding Astor, one of the richest men alive. His wife, Mamie, to whom he had been genuinely devoted, died of peritonitis in 1894, at thirty-six. When he brought her body from London back to New York for burial in the Astor vault at Trinity Cemetery, he severed a last close tie to his earlier life. The House of Astor remained so split that neither his cousin Jack nor his aunt Caroline attended the burial services.

  William could now live exactly as he wished. He kept an affectionate, indulgent, but generally distant eye on his children. The daily burden of seeing after their needs and schooling fell on a staff of nannies and tutors. A widower with unlimited means, he was in vigorous good health, except for attacks of gout, the rich man’s disease thought to be brought on by rich food and flowing wines, both of which he not only enjoyed in a discriminating way but carefully ordered in daily instructions to his household staff. Fair-haired with piercing blue eyes, he was handsome, in a formal, somewhat forbidding way, attractive to women and taking pleasure in their company.

  For all his advantages, this Astor scion was one of the more unmerry creatures cast up out of the boil of heredity, nurture, endowment, and accident. Often the joke was on him: his career in politics a failure, his cobbled genealogy and literary efforts ridiculed along with his anomalous position as a “former American.” Soon his missteps in British society, along with an undisguised and increasing eagerness to enter the peerage, were to make him a further butt for ridicule. The entry in the current Oxford Dictionary of National Biography writes him off as “shy, austere, and, by all accounts, unlovable…. He despised his native country and said so in print. In return, he was lampooned by the New York press.” He had never been altogether able to shed the theology of unworthiness and damnation that his parents and nursemaids had drilled into him from childhood. But along with this joyless creed, and sometimes violently at odds with it, he had also inherited an unshakable sense of being in the first rank of the blue-blood elect. His wealth reinforced this, and so did his clear superiority to most of his social peers in intellect and cultivation. He had a passion for splendor and for building, and by his hotels left his mark on New York’s architectural and social style.

  He especially looked down on his younger cousin Jack, whom he regarded as a dilettante and playboy absorbed in the mindless pleasures of the very rich—clubs, yachts, racehorses, summers at Newport. Jack seemed to enjoy playing puppy dog to his powerful mother and his self-indulgent wife, the first of whom doted on him, while the other openly despised him. William’s imagination lived in a landscape of palaces, castles, great estates, domains of Tudors and the Medici; Jack’s, in his inventor’s workshop at Ferncliff, his collection of motorcars, and a future shaped by science and religion. In their social and domestic traffic with the present, both Astors suffered from inexpressiveness. William in particular had a capacity for silence and isolation along with a thickening crust of reserve and a habit of making brusque and ill-considered responses to what he saw as challenges to his dignity. But with a few men and women whom he respected he could be gentle and open. At least on his own narrowly restrictive terms he had a certain gift for intimacy. “My father was not at all hard hearted, in fact he was very sensitive,” his daughter Pauline said. “I often felt he needed help and sympathy, and yet it seemed impossible to reach him through his defenses of reserve and a certain aloofness…. His true self seldom appeared and his motives were often misjudged.”

  On an Atlantic crossing aboard the White Star liner Majestic he met Amy Small Richardson, an American woman married to a Washington, D.C., doctor. Over a period of five years, as a friend of both members of the couple and with no suggestion of attempted romance with the wife, he sent her dozens of candid and relaxed letters telling about his travels, his plans for perfecting his estates, family affairs. “I have seen my new granddaughter several times,” he wrote in 1907, “and I am told she looks like me and has my ingratiating smile.” The two shared an educated passion for gardens, architecture, and Tudor history. He sent her his stories, including one about his long past but never to be forgotten Italian “love adventure.” “It will amuse you,” he told her, “to see what your fellow traveler on the Majestic was like in those remote days.” One Christmas he had Tiffany and Company in New York send her a tiny chain purse: “As it comes from Aladdin, it can never be empty,” he wrote. Aladdin also sent her gifts of books and pictures, sprays of calla lilies and violets, and at least once a sum of money for her garden in Washington. “Do not thank me for the cheque, please, it makes me feel foolish to be thanked.” At least momentarily, in such private encounters he could feel his virtually matchless wealth to be an irony of circumstance, even an embarrassment.

  “I don’t like your English aristocracy,” he confided to his friend Lady Dorothy Nevill, the doyenne of London hostesses. “They are not educated, they are not serious.” Nevertheless, English aristocracy and English titles affected him like strong drink. He collected dukes, duchesses, and other titled folk—in his view the only fit company for an Astor—the way he collected art and antiquities. He had little difficulty working his way into the circle of the pleasure-loving Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. The prince was notorious for his reliance on his smart-set coterie of bankers and South African mining millionaires to get him out of debt. “I have never been directly asked to assist him financially,” Astor told Amy Richardson, “nor have I done so.” But at the very least the prince had held him in reserve. In 1896 “Wealthy Willie,” as Astor was sometimes referred to in print, was reported to be engaged to marry Lady Randolph Churchill, the recently widowed mother of twenty-two-year-old Winston Churchill. “Mr. Astor’s attentions to Lady Randolph Churchill have been so marked as to create no small amount of gossip,” Harold Frederic reported to the New York Times from London. Lady Churchill, the former Miss Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn, had many admirers, including the Shah of Persia (who cooled on the affair after deciding she wasn’t fat enough for his taste). She was dazzled by Astor’s money and social status, but nothing came of this, nor of a second rumor linking him with the Countess of Westmoreland, who proved to be companionably married to the earl. Of more consequence was to be William’s fevered, quasi-operatic romance, in 1913, when he was sixty-five, with the beautiful and sexually liberated Lady Victoria Sackville.

  As a London residence for his children and himself, Astor bought 18 Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St. James’s Park. It was already celebrated as one of the most elegant private houses in London, but, in his accustomed style, he had it thoroughly refurbished, added paneling, frescoes, and tapestries, and ordered a forty-foot-long table made for the enormous dining room. He offered what was reported to be a “fabulous” sum of money to rent, for just two days, a London house on the line of the parade and procession celebrating Queen Victoria’s sixty years on the throne in June 1897. His offer astounded the noble owner, who accepted without hesitation. “Mr. Astor, in his entertaining, his residences, and his stables, is handsomely living up to the foreign reputation of Americans for extravagance,” a New York Times editorial commented. “Perhaps, also, he is vainly endeavoring to live up to his income.”

  For his London business he
adquarters, and private retreat where he entertained casual women friends, he bought the building on Victoria Embankment at 2 Temple Place. He spent about $1.5 million converting it into a crenellated Tudor-style stronghold that assured him the maximum of isolation while serving as a private museum for his notable collection of paintings, autographs, books (including Shakespeare folios), and antique musical instruments. The interiors of Temple Place were more opulent than those of his London residence. The study in the main hall was over seventy feet long; two ornate chandeliers hung from its thirty-five-foot-high roof of hammer-beamed Spanish mahogany; Persian rugs and tiger skins softened the relative austerity of the inlaid marble floors.

  “There is no more curious room in London,” a local architect wrote, “than this hall which was intended by its creator to be a sort of temple of culture and expresses in a curious way his own tastes in art and literature.” William hung a portrait of himself by Hubert von Herkomer on the wall along with portraits of the founding Astor and successors. Not an inch of door surfaces, walls, ceilings, and stairwells was left bare of carving, paneling, or other decorations. Wooden figures of the Four Musketeers stood guard on the newel posts. His writing table, carefully preserved by him over the years, was exactly as he had used it, ornaments and all, at the legation in Rome. An Italian fortune-teller had told him back then that his life was in danger. Her warning, along with the vulnerability inherent in the possession of wealth, had made him fearful of kidnappers and assassins with designs on him and his children. He kept a loaded pistol on the bedside table in his pied-à-terre and equipped the building with a security system that allowed him, by pressing a button, to lock and bar all windows and entrances (at the same time effectively, he must have recognized, keeping an intruder from escaping).

  An antique New England spinning wheel stood near his desk in the office library. The main hall displayed a frieze depicting characters from The Scarlet Letter, The Last of the Mohicans, and “Rip Van Winkle,” “all old friends of mine,” he called them. He was also a devoted reader of Leaves of Grass. The weather vane was a brilliantly gilded replica of one of Columbus’s caravels. It symbolized the linking, by discovery and commerce, of the Old World from which John Jacob Astor had come and the New World where he made his fortune. As fervently as he tried to make the opposite true, to the British, and to himself as well in the depths of his consciousness, William remained naggingly an American, and perhaps his passion for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was evidence of this. Unlike most other expatriates he never lost or tried to lose his native accent, and he remained proud of New York City’s tremendous vitality. He made several return visits to favorite places in the States—Gettysburg, the Massachusetts coast, the long stretch of the Hudson downriver from Albany—that he remembered from his boyhood.

  From this secure office on Victoria Embankment, said H. G. Wells, who interviewed him there for his 1906 book, The Future in America, William Waldorf Astor drew “gold from New York”—perhaps $6 million a year in rents—“as effectually as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit.” He commanded an empire of office buildings; immense apartment houses on upper Broadway; blocks of decaying but invariably profitable tenement properties; the northern half of the famous old Astor House, built by his great-grandfather and still doing business; the Waldorf half of the Waldorf-Astoria; and all of another hotel, the New Netherland, built to his specifications at a cost of about $3 million and, along with the Waldorf, opened in 1892. The Times welcomed the New Netherland as “the second of the magnificent creations of this sort which William Waldorf Astor has completed.”

  Seventeen stories high, promoted as the tallest hotel structure in the world and the first to have telephones in every room and its own telephone exchange, the New Netherland commanded the main entrance to Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. In external style a gabled and turreted brown brick version of German Renaissance architecture, his new hotel was similar to the Waldorf, but it had a a different ambience altogether, one of subdued but substantial elegance. In effect a marketplace and theater, the Waldorf-Astoria enclosed a world of glitter, wealth, and fashion bathed in an unremitting blaze of publicity. The New Netherland was aristocratic, reserved, and refined, more like a private club than a public facility. Reflecting William’s distaste for what he felt was the vulgarity of American democracy and its army of journalists, the New Netherland, not the Waldorf-Astoria, was where he stayed on his occasional business visits to New York. Especially compared with the Waldorf, the New Netherland proved to be a financial disappointment and a managerial problem. At one point, embroiled in a bitter conflict with the resident “proprietor,” General Ferdinand Earle, Astor evicted him and his family for nonpayment of back rent. He ordered the hotel emptied of its over two hundred guests, stripped of the furnishings installed by Earle, and briefly shut down. Even so, despite this experience, the New Netherland was not to be the last of Astor’s innkeeping enterprises. For all his fastidiousness and snobbery he remained as passionate and knowing about luxury hotels for the American public as about Greco-Roman statuary and estates in the English countryside.

  Even before 1899, when William finally renounced his citizenship to become a subject of Queen Victoria, his public career and conduct had become topics of outrage on both sides of the ocean. To his former countrymen he was a traitor who had fled to England like Benedict Arnold or Judah P. Benjamin, Jefferson Davis’s secretary of state; an ingrate who unforgivably, for all his advantages, had managed to find life in America not good enough for him; a coward who slunk away from politics after failing even to buy elective office; a would-be leader of New York society who ceded the field to his aunt, the Mrs. Astor, and her feckless son Jack. Like a burglar with a sack of family plate and candlesticks over his shoulder, he was seen to be taking American dollars abroad and, in the hope of buying himself a title, liberally bestowing them on the British. He gave millions of dollars to British universities, hospitals, and charities, and to the British army (including a $25,000 artillery battery) during the Boer War and World War I.

  Apart from the buildings in New York he had put up and the rents sweated from decaying slum properties there, Astor’s wealth represented the unearned increment of Manhattan land bought for a few dollars by earlier generations of Astors and now worth many times more than what they had paid for them. The owners had done virtually nothing in the meantime to alleviate the misery and increase the value of their extensive tenement holdings beyond holding them. The Astors toiled not, neither did they spin, but an earthly father, free enterprise, and compound interest had endowed them with the glories of Solomon. The enormous surplus value vested in their property did not belong to the Astors, it could be said by single taxers, socialists, and other reform-minded thinkers of the era: it belonged to the sweated wage earners whose labors had turned a low-lying village on Manhattan Island into the de facto commercial capital of the United States. Manhattan’s elevator-served, steel-framed office and residential buildings rose to the skies from their footings in the most expensive real estate in the world. William’s departure from New York provoked, among other sendoffs from the press, a reference to his family’s origins in “a German slaughterhouse” and derisive reminders of his unavailing efforts through hired genealogists to connect his beer-swilling forebears with “persons of condition” in the Crusades.

  When the news of the ex-American’s formal declaration of allegiance to Queen Victoria arrived by cable in New York, demonstrators cheered on by crowds of spectators erected and set fire to an oil-soaked life-size effigy of “William the Traitor” on the stretch of Broadway soon to be named Times Square. The police arrived and chased the crowd away, but not before the effigy had gone up in flames and left a smoking crater in the asphalt. W. W. ASTOR BECOMES A BRITISH SUBJECT: the Times ran the news on page one and pointedly juxtaposed it to an item about the military company the patriotic Colonel John Jacob Astor IV was raising to fight in the American war with Spain. William read these stories i
n the papers, put them in his scrapbook, pored over the clippings, and used them to stoke his undying fire of outrage at the American press.

  To loyal Englishmen, William Waldorf Astor was their worst dream of an American invader who bought his way into society, bought (and rebuilt, often heedless of tradition, to suit his extravagant tastes) estates that were part of the nation’s heritage, denied the public access to them, and also bought his way into journalism. “If this sort of thing is allowed to go on,” one London journal complained, “we shall soon be governed, not by Downing [Street], but by Wall Street.” He sent his sons to Eton and Oxford, and at a time when the United States was at war with Spain, and Jack Astor was rallying to the colors to see combat in Cuba, he entered the elder of the two, Waldorf, in Queen Victoria’s Household Cavalry. William’s money, purpose, and pride eventually prevailed over all the resistance and resentment he provoked. He could outspend, outcollect, outentertain, and outbuild anyone in England.

  By 1897, when the combined Waldorf and Astoria hotels went into full operation and hosted the Bradley-Martin extravaganza, William had already established himself as being among London’s premier hosts. That year one of his receptions and concert evenings at Carlton House Terrace counted among the guests the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess Michael of Russia, Prince Alexander of Teck, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, and, the papers reported, “a host of English dukes, earls, and counts, with their duchesses and countesses…. The display of jewels was simply prodigious, and the house was a mass of flowers.” Two celebrities, the Australian soprano Nellie Melba and the Polish piano virtuoso Ignace Paderewski, were among the performing artists.