When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  These glittering events, high points of the London social season, inevitably began to attract party crashers. Cursed with a low boiling point of indignation and a towering sense of lordship, William decided to do something about these affronts and make an example of the next interloper. “It angered me, perhaps unduly,” he confessed to Amy Richardson long after the event, “that my house should be regarded as a place of public amusement…. I allowed my temper to carry me beyond the bounds of moderation.”

  Captain Sir Berkeley Milne, a distinguished British naval officer, arrived at a concert evening at Carlton House Terrace in July 1900. He escorted one of William’s invited guests, Lady Orford. Unaware of the lady’s sponsorship of Milne, William found an occasion to assert both principle and authority as host. He confronted the captain, refused to shake hands with him, and demanded to know his name. He then sent the captain packing with the promise that all of London would soon know of this infraction of good manners. The next day, still possessed by what he considered justifiable outrage, William published an item in his newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette. “We are desired to make known that the presence of Captain Sir Berkeley Milne of the Naval and Military Club, Piccadilly, at Mr. Astor’s concert last Thursday evening was uninvited.”

  William learned right away that he had kicked over a hornet’s nest. Protégé and intimate of the Prince of Wales, Milne was the former commander of the royal yacht Osborne, a future admiral, and on all counts the wrong man to boot out of the party. Lady Orford and her friends responded to what was construed as an insult extending far beyond her injured sensibilities and those of Captain Milne to the entire British navy, from first lord of the admiralty to Jack Tar thirsting for his daily dipper of grog. Milne’s patron, the Prince of Wales, reportedly regarded the incident as unpardonable and intended to have William ejected from the royal circle at Marlborough House. With all of London talking, even the aged queen, who had reigned for almost seventy years, was said to have “interested herself in the matter.” William finally published a grudging apology in his paper, but it was a while before the dust settled. An affair of negligible specific gravity had mutated, if not into a tiny reprise of the War of 1812, at least into a farce that managed to make everyone look silly, especially its hot-tempered instigator. One noble earl called William “a purse-proud American, whose dollars could not save him from the contempt of his countrymen.” Further incurring the royal wrath by snubbing Mrs. George Keppel, Edward’s mistress (“a public strumpet”), William had to wait until 1916, by which time both Victoria and Edward VII were dead, before his wealth and strategically placed benefactions eased his way to the peerage.

  “Congratulations are due to the English people, already pretty well occupied with many serious questions,” a New York Times editorial commented on the Milne affair from across the Atlantic, “upon the breaking up of a storm center at home that threatened for a few moments to add to the worries of the English speaking and reading race…. We beg to renew to our British brethren the assurances of our continued sympathy and esteem. You may forgive; if you are magnanimous you will forget. You may do both, but do not send him back.” That editorial, too, went into William’s scrapbook.

  ii.

  WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR’S grandest English acquisition was Cliveden, a 376-acre estate of spectacular gardens, lawns, and woodlands along a serpentine stretch of the Upper Thames, twenty-six miles from London. All the spectacular beauty of “England’s green and pleasant land” seemed to have been concentrated, with jewel-like brilliance, in this one place in Buckinghamshire. In 1893 he had rented Cliveden for five months from its owner, the Duke of Westminster. At the expiration of the rental term he bought the place outright for a reported sum of $1.25 million, but not without a bitter dispute with the duke over ownership of the visitors book that contained signatures going back to the seventeenth century. The great estate, and the history that came with it, satisfied Astor’s seigneurial imagination and gave a transplanted American at least a probationary place in the English tradition. The original Cliveden main house had been built in 1666 by the Duke of Buckingham, a sometime favorite of King Charles II and famously satirized by poet laureate John Dryden:

  Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;

  Was everything by starts, and nothing long:

  But in the course of one revolving moon,

  Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.

  In a duel there, Buckingham killed his mistress’s husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury. Cliveden had also been the residence of a British military hero, the Earl of Orkney, and of Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III. The composer Thomas Arne had his “Rule, Britannia” performed for the first time at Cliveden in 1740, about fifty years before the original house burned down. Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament, replaced it with a baroque-style building that had a certain dominating and chilly grandeur but none of the esprit of the water tower, with a gilded clock face, that looked out over the entire estate. Queen Victoria had visited eight times. “It is a perfection of a place,” she wrote in her journal, “first of all the view is so beautiful, & then the house is a bijou of taste.” Cliveden had royal, aristocratic, and historical associations enough for the scholar, antiquarian, collector, and Anglophile in Astor. He was a time traveler like his cousin Jack, but his destination was a past securely in the grip of the old order.

  Applying his educated taste in architecture and landscape, William set out to rescue Cliveden from what he charged was “the neglect and abandonment into which that dreadful old creature, the Duke of Westminster, had allowed it to sink.” He took out of storage in Rome the immense stone balustrade from the Villa Borghese garden that he had bought years earlier during his tenure as U.S. ambassador and installed it below the house. His collection of Roman sarcophagi and funerary urns found a resting place on the great lawn. He also installed an ancient mosaic floor and a grand staircase in the main hall. For the dining room he ordered an ornate ceiling, painted under his supervision; a suite of eighteenth-century gilt wall paneling; and a table and other principal furniture that, along with the paneling, had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. To face the front entrance of the house, about midway on the grand avenue from the main gate, he commissioned Thomas Waldo Story, son of the renowned sculptor William Wetmore Story and himself a favorite in Britain, to create the alarmingly large white-marble-and-volcanic-rock Fountain of Love. Writhing nudes disported themselves atop a giant scallop shell. “The female figures,” Astor wrote in an interpretive note on the composition, “are supposed to have discovered the fountain of love, and to be experiencing the effects of its wonderful elixir.” His taste in sculpture and painting remained as stubbornly antimodern as his politics and his devotion to the England of absolute monarchy. Bringing his life full circle, he moved into the Cliveden rose garden his Wounded Amazon, the statue, admired by George Templeton Strong, that he had made in his twenties, before duty to his father compelled him to put aside art in favor of real estate. Looking ahead, in a similar gesture of closure, he designed a resting place for his ashes in Cliveden’s Octagon Temple, an eighteenth-century architectural conceit with a commanding view of the countryside and the winding Thames below. The structure had originally been a summer house; he had it made into a high church family chapel with an altar, a domed ceiling, and glass mosaics depicting the Annunciation, the Temptation of Eve, and scenes from the life of Christ.

  For a century before William became its master, Cliveden had been open to visitors and sightseers, one of several showplaces in England that were in effect, and by long tradition, public parks maintained at private expense. The new owner enclosed Cliveden within a high wall topped with broken glass, forbade access to a spring of water that had been a local pleasure site, and erected a blank wall to replace the iron grille gate that had allowed a sweeping view up the long driveway leading to the forecourt of the house. By his order, boating parties were forbidden to land and picnic on Cliveden’s
riverbanks. Unlike neighboring estates in the Thames Valley, Cliveden was now closed to the public, evidence, as it was seen by indignant neighbors, of the arrogance of a rich American who scorned local custom and good manners and asserted his right to privacy at any cost. When in residence Astor had his personal flag with armorial bearings raised over the main house at 9 a.m. and lowered at sundown. “Cliveden was a court,” his grandson, Michael Astor, recalled, “ruled over with a majestic sense of justice by a lonely autocrat who was obsessed by highly personal notions about convention. Everything in the house ran exactly to time. William Waldorf had a mania about punctuality.” He demanded from his guests inflexible conformity to schedule, decreeing, for example, precisely when they should write their letters, stroll about the grounds, or ride into the village. On his orders the clocks at Cliveden were set an hour behind English summer time, a recent reform that he considered silly. A cartoonist in a London newspaper renamed Cliveden “Walled-off Astoria” and depicted its owner as a strutting eagle, a British flag tied to his tail, standing on a ground covered with bags of dollars. A sign, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, hung on the by-now famous glass-studded wall. The cartoon showed William’s twenty-one-year-old son, Waldorf, dressed in his Household Guards uniform, doing sentry duty on the battlements.

  One of William Waldorf Astor’s never-ending battles with the press took the form of a $5,000 libel suit against the London Daily Mail. Citing him as the source, the paper had published a frivolous article, headlined MR. ASTOR’S STRANGE DINNER PARTY: allegedly, he had bet a certain General Owen Williams $2,500 that the trunks of some California redwood trees were large enough when sliced transversely to make a table around which two dozen and more people could dine in comfort. To win the bet, the story went on, Astor ordered a sequoia slab sawed to his order in California, had it shipped to Cliveden, and there, on his new table under a tent on the grounds, he served an elegant dinner to the general and twenty-four other guests and won his bet. At worst this was just another mildly satiric tale about rich Americans—Kentucky colonels, Montana cattle barons, Chicago meat packers, Pittsburgh steel masters, California railroad magnates—who were often caricatured as braggarts trumpeting the wonders of their country while proudly infesting England’s castles and stately homes.

  Already fancying himself as British as any duke and with as much dignity to maintain, William wrote a heated letter to the London Times accusing the Daily Mail of libeling him as “a foolish and ridiculous person” by publishing “a deliberate and mischievous fabrication.” He testified to that effect in open court before the lord chief justice. Through his distinguished counsel, formerly the queen’s solicitor general, Astor complained that from time to time since settling in England he had been the subject of similar “personal and offensive paragraphs.” The aftermath of the suit that he brought was as demeaning as that of his injudicious ouster of Captain Milne. Hearing the case, the lord chief justice had some fun at Astor’s expense and, contrary to customary decorum, even invited raucous laughter in the courtroom. He himself had been the butt of such American-style pleasantries, his lordship said. He cited a London newspaper story to the effect that as president of the divorce court he himself had pronounced his own divorce from his wife. “We are not divorced,” he said, “and I am not the president of the divorce court.” He suggested that Mr. Astor, who (as everyone knew) had enjoyed similar experiences with the press back home in the States, should by now have been hardened to such nonsense. Advised by counsel against letting his grievance go to a jury, Astor accepted an apology from the Daily Mail and withdrew from legal combat. While it lasted, “the W. W. Astor Libel Suit,” another chapter in the misadventures of a transplanted American Croesus, made good copy in both England and the States.

  In 1906, having rescued Cliveden from decay and restored it to his exacting taste, Astor turned his drive to build and indulge his historical imagination to an even larger and more expensive enterprise than Cliveden. Mogul emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, and mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, builder of fantastic castles along the Danube, would have recognized the impulse. William bought Hever, a manor house estate in Kent, southeast of London. Once the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, it later passed into the hands of Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. William spent four years and an estimated $10 million to make Hever conform to his historical imaginings and, in effect, regress it four hundred years. He had a surrounding ditch excavated into a moat and filled with water, built a new drawbridge and portcullis, and repaired the battlements. Hever now had a deer park, fountains, a boating lake, and, among modern improvements, a power-generating plant and waterworks.

  At one point Astor employed 840 workmen of all trades inside and out to create for him, in the heart of twentieth-century England, a self-sustaining and self-contained medieval domain. Guarded by a wall twelve feet high, its 640 acres comprised a model farm; a 50-acre man-made lake, in spots sixteen feet deep, dug out of marsh and meadowland; two bridges to span the winding river that ran through the estate; newly planted forests; a deer park; walled gardens and a fountain; and barbered grounds surrounding a maze of yew hedge. To houseguests, servants, and estate workers Astor built an entire thatched-roof Tudor village separated from the castle by the moat, drawbridge, and double portcullis. An eight-man security force patrolled the gates and kept out automobiles, uninvited visitors, cameras, and especially the press. A poster at the local railway station informed the public that Hever, long one of the local attractions, was no longer open to visitors.

  In an article Astor commissioned and published in his Pall Mall Magazine the writer, Olive Sebright, described Hever in terms that explain part of its appeal to the new owner. Hever was “a haunt of ancient peace,” she wrote. “When we cross the bridge and pass under the double portcullis, we leave the world of to-day behind us, and in the old half-timbered courtyard, lose all sense of surprise and speculation. Life becomes a dream of tranquil simplicity, and the fitness of it all fills and satisfies our restless spirit.” Lordship of Hever Castle, surrounded there by artifacts of an era of absolute monarchy, gave Astor not only a private retreat from the present but a solitude in which to enjoy his treasures and the illusion of living in another time.

  He dwelled alone in the ancient manor house that he had converted into a one-bedroom medieval castle furnished with skillfully adapted modern conveniences such as indoor plumbing and electricity. However anachronistic, he made such comforts the dominant note in his bedroom. “I should not like to live in a museum,” he told Amy Richardson.

  DRAWBRIDGE RISES FOR ASTOR ENTRY: newspapers ridiculed his improvements and accused him of “ruining” Hever just as (in their view) he had ruined Cliveden. But, just as he had done at Cliveden, he imposed his will and wealth on his property. When in residence at Hever Castle he flew his personal flag over the battlements. It displayed the coat of arms that supposedly linked the Astor butchers and rabbit skinners to a Franco-Spanish line of noble descent going back to the Crusades. He furnished Hever’s great hall and minstrels’ gallery with shields, banners, tapestries, pennants, halberds, swords, suits of armor, instruments of torture and punishment, and vanloads of museum pieces from the shops and warehouses of Regent Street and Bond Street dealers in antiquities. Established in such surroundings he enjoyed the prospect of one day entering the peerage as Baron (later Viscount) Astor of Hever Castle. Through agents and advisers he assembled a notable art collection at Hever that rivaled Henry Clay Frick’s in New York: it included Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Titian’s Philip II, Clouet’s Edward VI, and Cranach’s Martin Luther. He liked to believe that Hever was haunted by the ghost of Anne Boleyn, sent to the headsman’s block by her husband, who accused her of incest and adultery. Her prayer book and bed were among the relics Astor acquired and installed at Hever. According to local legend, the headless queen, accompanied by a headless black dog, nightly walked the castle’s dark passageways and windswept battlements.
Making an exception to his ban on allowing strangers to penetrate his feudal fastness, Astor invited ghost hunters from the British Society for Psychical Research to keep a vigil at Hever. They reported no sightings.

  iii.

  WHILE WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR completed his transformation into an Englishman of the highest rank, his patriotic cousin Jack entered upon a military career of sorts. It had had its beginnings in 1894 with a largely ceremonial appointment. Jack’s Rhinecliff neighbor New York governor-elect Levi P. Morton, a Republican banker who had been Benjamin Harrison’s vice president, chose Jack, and half a dozen other rich and socially prominent civilians, to serve on his military staff as aides-de-camp. This granted Jack the rank of colonel, the duty of escorting the governor on public occasions, and the right to carry a sword and wear a gold-braid aiguillette on a dress uniform tailored for him at great expense.

  Jack’s appointment to a position of honor and display rather than valor and discipline did little to redeem his reputation from years of providing entertainment for newspaper and gossip-sheet readers. But he was soon in harmony with the war fever against Spain that was to sweep the United States. He had firm and outspoken convictions about the destiny of Cuba, which, he believed, was to be liberated from the grip of Spain and annexed to the United States. With the destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898, the idea of a war with Spain came to a boil in the minds of President William McKinley, Secretary of State John Hay, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Jack moved with purpose and vigor to win for himself a place in the army. He wished to be “Colonel Astor” as fervently as William wished to be “Viscount Astor.” Putting aside his normally unshakable Astor pride, he lobbied, wheedled, and politicked in Washington, applied pressure and influence in the right quarters, and, in effect, engineered for himself a commission as army inspector general with the rank of lieutenant colonel. His appointment to the volunteer army, the Times noted dourly, had been made “without relevancy to the good of the service.” The notion of Jack Astor strapping on a sword and mounting a neighing battle steed aroused hilarity in the general public as well as resentment among more qualified warriors who were also seeking a commission.