When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  Despite the triumph of his new venture, Astor’s mood turned glum after a few days of what he complained had been the customary “notoriety, abuse, and ridicule” he received at the hands of the local press. His stay “would have been pleasanter,” he said, “had the newspaper men not dogged me about and Kodak-ed me with such patient industry.” His enormous American-derived wealth combined with his declared allegiance to the British Crown had made him both a curiosity and a notoriety, subject of the inevitable references to Benedict Arnold and to the rabbit skinner in the Astors’ ancestry. As he had on previous occasions, he vowed “never to set foot in New York again.”

  ii.

  FOLLOWING his cousin’s example, John Jacob Astor IV also built in Times Square, on the southeast corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. His Hotel Knickerbocker, opened in 1906 after construction costs of about $3.5 million, stood on one of the most valuable pieces of land in his Manhattan Island holdings, but, compared to the Astor, it was relatively low-key in decor and amenities and positioned in the hotel market to draw out-of-town visitors of moderate means. The management promised Fifth Avenue comforts at Broadway prices. Despite the fame of its barroom adorned with the popular artist Maxfield Parrish’s mural Old King Cole and His Fiddlers Three, the Knickerbocker was never a success, and Prohibition finished it off. (The Old King Cole mural was moved uptown and installed in the St. Regis.)

  Much closer to Jack Astor’s heart and technological interests was his St. Regis, opened in 1904 a month or so after his cousin’s Astor. It was a direct challenge to William’s imperial style and asserted Jack’s own personality, chronically undervalued but now enhanced by his public identity as Colonel Astor. Suggesting a decidedly masculine sort of competition, the new St. Regis was one story higher than the vaunted seventeen of William’s New Netherland. The $6 million hotel Jack Astor erected on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street was acknowledged right away to be the last word in the design, furnishings, and technology of “a great modern American hotel,” wrote Arthur C. David, a critic for Architectural Record. In the grip of an apparent paroxysm of wonderment, he went on to describe the St. Regis (named after a resort area in upstate New York) as an example of “probably the most complicated piece of mechanism which the invention and ingenuity of man have ever been called upon to devise. The only other modern mechanical contrivances which might be in the same class are a contemporary battleship and ocean-liner; and in some respects the requirements of a hotel are more numerous and various than those even of a steamship of the highest class…. The bowels and frame of such a building are in truth comparable only to the human body in the complexity and interdependence of the processes that go on within.”

  Unlike the frankly egalitarian Hotel Astor in Times Square, the St. Regis was located in what had become known as “Vanderbilt Alley,” a neighborhood of mansions, town houses, exclusive clubs, and high-end retail establishments like Cartier that catered to society and the very rich. It implicitly defined its clientele as the smart set: moneyed, luxury-loving, fastidious but elegantly casual, harbingers of an era of plush nightclubs, café society, and a general loosening of old-line social and sexual conventions. Inevitably, given the modernity of its presiding spirit, Jack’s St. Regis began to draw younger patrons away from the old (by Manhattan standards) Waldorf-Astoria. Jack’s passion for invention and innovation was visible in the hotel’s air-conditioning and forced-air ventilation system, thermostats and telephones in every room, and mail chutes on each floor by the banks of bronze-doored elevators. Normally aloof from her husband and his interests, Ava reportedly had a hand in designing some of the period interiors.

  Whatever guests required in the way of convenience, comfort, novelty, and visual splendor, Jack’s new hotel offered them, including a library of leather-bound books, an “Elizabethan” tearoom hung with Flemish tapestries depicting incidents in the life of King Solomon, a sidewalk café, a skylight ballroom on the eighteenth floor, and a bronze-and-glass sentry box for the doorman. In the immense dining room, modeled on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Harry Lehr’s wife was able to give a party for 150 guests. She seated all of them at one table that was so long, she recalled, that in laying out the hotel’s silver, Royal Worcester china, crystal, and linen, the waiters had to telephone “directions from one end of the table to another; while the florist’s men, in special shoes of white felt, walked about on the surface of the table to arrange their trails of roses and carnations.”

  Within a month of its opening the St. Regis had generated so much press coverage all over the country that the resident lessee, a Hungarian named R. M. Haan, said he had no need to advertise. He believed, however, that many potential guests had been frightened away by the extravagance of some of the claims that had been made for his hotel. Satiric items in the comic papers speculated about how it might feel to sleep in a museum-quality bed that supposedly had cost the hotel owners $10,000, or to pay $500 for a half portion of chocolate éclair. “There has been the wildest exaggeration about my prices,” Haan told a reporter. “They are slightly higher but not alarmingly so. The difference is in the service, china, and the objects of art and refined luxury in my dining room. My hotel is not a place for billionaires only, but a hostelry for people of good taste who have the means to live as comfortably as they choose.”

  Between them, and in competition with each other, but with William setting the pace, the incompatible Astor cousins built about half a dozen hotels, three of which were triumphantly popular and profitable ventures that shaped the face and style of New York. By inheritance and long-standing policy as New York’s landlords and slumlords, the two Astors made themselves their city’s premier innkeepers, and in so doing they virtually invented the American luxury hotel. What motivated them was not mere hope of gain: the entire landscape of venture and acquisition capitalism had been open to them as heirs of the first John Jacob Astor. They could have made more money just by doing nothing but raking in rents, interest, and dividends from what they already owned. They had chosen hotels to be the stage for a family drama of pride, spite, rivalry, self-projection, and the love of grandeur and prominence. A visitor from abroad imagined these “amazing Astors” strolling along Broadway and Fifth Avenue, stretching their arms to point, and exclaiming, “Mine! Mine! All mine!”

  iii.

  AFTER NEARLY three years of seclusion following a stroke, the Mrs. Astor—née Caroline Webster Schermerhorn—died in October 1908 at the age of seventy-eight. She left her famous diamonds to her son along with a five-strand pearl necklace that the appraisers found also held ninety imitation stones. In her last years she had withdrawn into a sweet and harmless fantasy, abetted by her servants and attendant nurses, that she was still living in her glory days. A month before she died, in a flash of hypomania she overcame her lifelong reluctance to grant interviews. “I can speak with authority about our young people,” she said, referring to women who “smoke and drink and do other terrible things.” “They are of a new age and have ideas different from my conservative ones…. I am not vain enough to think New York will not be able to get along very well without me.”

  Edith Wharton’s short story “After Holbein” pictures Mrs. Astor at the end of her life, “a poor old lady gently dying of softening of the brain” and imagining herself still “New York’s leading hostess.” Wearing her purple-black wig, she receives a stream of imaginary guests in her grand house on Fifth Avenue, an “entertaining machine” that dispensed terrapin, canvasback ducks, saddles of mutton and legs of lamb, magnums of champagne, and pyramids of hothouse fruit “to the same faces, perpetually the same faces, gathered stolidly about the same gold plate.” “She had lived, breathed, invested and reinvested her millions to no other end.”

  Queen Victoria’s death seven years earlier, said H. G. Wells, had been like the removal of “a great paper-weight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds.” Mrs. Astor’s demise was comparably liberating. For two or three decades,
much as Victoria had presided over her empire and her household, Mrs. Astor had presided over New York “society” and its inner group, the so-called Four Hundred. She favored the old colonial and Knickerbocker families, Schermerhorns and Armstrongs, from whom she was descended, and she looked down on relative newcomers such as the Vanderbilts. During her reign Caroline Astor imposed principles of decorum on a self-appointed American aristocracy that was founded on descent, inherited money, and a code of exclusion but on no discernible intrinsic merit such as intellect, learning, or originality. She had been a one-woman regulatory agency like the Interstate Commerce Commission, established in the same era to impose a comparable order on business. “Society,” in the sense Caroline Astor defined and institutionalized it, did not altogether die with her, but like a spray of her hothouse orchids struck by frost, it shriveled. Outside of the surviving members of the Four Hundred, their offspring, and their imitators, hardly anyone of sense in the larger world missed it or mourned it.

  Caroline’s son, John Jacob Astor IV, was among those liberated by her departure. With his family, he had been living in the white marble double mansion at 840–842 Fifth Avenue that for years had been Caroline’s residence as well and the setting for her famously selective and glittering dances and dinners. Although shackled in marriage to each other, he and the beautiful Ava were thoroughly alienated and rarely seen together, even on the same continent at the same time. A daughter, Alice, had been born to them in 1902, more than ten years after their marriage in 1891 and the birth of their son Vincent, but this had apparently only aggravated rather than eased the tensions between them; moreover, the child was rumored not to be Jack’s. Their options had been limited. In the eyes of faithful High Church Episcopalians such as the Astors, mother and son, divorce was a sin and, conceivably, something worse, an embarrassment, because it violated the sanctity of the wedding vow by demanding, as New York State law then did, the charge and attested proof of an act of adultery. Divorce had routinely been a cause of peremptory banishment from Caroline Astor’s favor, although, showing remarkable aplomb, she had once made an exception in the case of her headstrong daughter Charlotte Augusta, mother of four. Caroline managed to weather Charlotte’s public embroilment in a steamy divorce brawl spiced with transatlantic flight, disinheritance, charges and countercharges of infidelity, and even the prospect of an old-fashioned duel in Paris between the lover and the outraged husband. Especially after her stroke, Caroline Astor’s obedient son had been unwilling to put her to a further trial of this sort.

  A year after his mother died, and following months of secret negotiations in the interim, he set in motion the machinery of divorce: by prior arrangement Ava sued him for a legal separation on grounds of adultery. Soon after, she won an interlocutory decree that gave her custody of six-year-old Alice, an annual allowance of $50,000, and an undisclosed settlement, rumored to be $2 million or $3 million, and possibly more. The settlement was in lieu of alimony, which would have required both parties to shed their cloaks of darkest secrecy and testify in open court. The smoothly silent way in which the Astors managed to get themselves severed by judicial fiat provoked at least as much public attention and protest as the divorce action itself. To prevent even a hint of the proceedings from seeping into public knowledge, eminent lawyers for both sides—Ava’s was President Taft’s brother—detached themselves for the occasion from corporate and estate responsibilities downtown, trooped up from their Wall Street offices, and filed the necessary papers in an out-of-the-way courtroom in New City, Rockland County. There, a state supreme court justice, Isaac Mills, heard the petition and referee’s report, ordered the papers sealed, and declared the proceedings closed. Neither party to the divorce ever appeared in the courtroom or was mentioned by name. The identity of the correspondent (probably hired for the purpose) who alleged Jack’s infidelities, the witness who corroborated them, and the place where these acts had occurred—none of these were ever disclosed. Not even the title of the case appeared on the sealed envelope containing the papers. Nothing was open to public inspection until the judge unsealed his decree, but not the papers supporting it. Defending the unusual secrecy, Mills denied, contrary to all appearances of favoritism and privilege, that Colonel and Mrs. Astor’s power, money, and feelings had anything to do with the way he had arrived at his decision: he had only meant to protect the couple’s two innocent children from the attentions of the tabloid press and its voracious readers. Names were not named, he tried to explain, because there was no need to name them.

  CONTEMPT OF COURT, SECRET DIVORCE, GUMSHOE DIVORCE—there ensued a storm of editorial comment charging that the law had been perverted by wealth and influence; the guilty adulterer shielded from exposure and shame; and the rich favored over ordinary people, whose divorce actions on grounds of adultery were by custom laid out by the tabloid press in detail often lurid enough to corrupt the imagination of the young. “Never was a divorce proceeding made more thoroughly sound proof,” said the New York Globe. “There was not the slightest leak. It takes experts to turn out such a job, and to experts it was confided.” “In the Astor affair,” the Syracuse Herald said, “not even the beginning of the suit was noted on the public record. Everything concerned with it was literally a ‘sealed book.’…There is something radically amiss in any judicial system which favors the rich.” “By what right,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch said, “do our courts become so palpably respecters of persons? The law clearly contemplates publicity in divorce suits, as in others.” According to the New York Times, a former justice of the state supreme court, Roger Pryor, claimed that “society was being injured a thousand times more by the spectacle of the rich and influential obtaining divorces in secret than by the publication of the testimony in divorce cases.”

  Both Astors remained far away from the turmoil of outrage as it slowly burned itself out into the customary acceptance of the fact that the very rich had special access to the ear of justice. The former Mrs. John Jacob Astor IV, under an assumed name—Mrs. Austin of Red Bank, New Jersey—secluded herself at French Lick Springs, a fashionable resort in Paoli, Indiana. A few days after the final decree came through she boarded the Cunard liner Lusitania and sailed for London. For years she had been a society fixture there, and her marital future was already being discussed, as if she were a horse entered at Ascot: Lord Curzon, until recently viceroy of India, was touted to be the front-runner among suitors for her hand. (The eventual winner was a wealthy sportsman, Lord Ribblesdale, Prime Minister Asquith’s brother-in-law.)

  Meanwhile Ava’s former husband, along with their eighteen-year-old son Vincent, then a student at Harvard, and Vincent’s companion, the future radio newsman H. V. Kaltenborn, had set off on a leisurely cruise in West Indian waters on board the Nourmahal. The Astor yacht was soon reported missing, presumably a casualty of a hurricane that was devastating Jamaica and other Caribbean islands and interrupting cable communications: the Nourmahal appeared to be adding dramatically to her long-standing reputation as a ship cursed with accidents. The vengeful god of storms ripped Colonel Astor from the privacy and isolation from the press he had managed to achieve during the divorce proceedings. For more than a week the Nourmahal’s fate made front-page news with daily reports of its loss or survival. Searching the Caribbean was, in time, a fleet of ships, more than twenty in all, including U.S. Revenue cutters, a Royal Navy cruiser, a German navy cruiser, and a couple of banana steamers. The lead-story headlines grew in tempo and urgency:

  ALARM FELT HERE FOR ASTOR YACHT;

  MAY HAVE MET HURRICANE

  ALARM GROWING OVER ASTOR YACHT

  YACHT LIKE ASTOR’S SIGHTED ON SUNDAY;

  FAR OUT OF HER COURSE

  SEARCH SEAS FOR MISSING ASTOR YACHT;

  ANXIETY HERE INCREASES

  WRECK MAY BE ASTOR’S YACHT: GERMAN SHIP

  REPORTS A SUBMERGED VESSEL NORTH OF MATANZAS, CUBA

  And finally, a coda, hesitant at first:

  REPORTS NOURMAHAL SAFE IN PO
RTO RICO;

  NEWS COMES FROM CURACAO

  DOUBT ASTOR YACHT IS SAFE AT SAN JUAN;

  COMMUNICATION CUT OFF

  ASTOR YACHT SAFE; IGNORANT OF ALARM

  For ten days the Nourmahal, isolated from cable communication with the mainland, had been sheltered from the storm and safely anchored in San Juan Harbor. Meanwhile, unaware of any anxiety felt on their account, the owner and his party, riding in one of his big touring automobiles that he had shipped ahead from Ferncliff, had been taking in the sights of San Juan and Ponce. Soon after, as reported in the Congressional Record, the Nourmahal episode provoked a lively debate on the floor of the House of Representatives. A proposed resolution called for an accounting of the public money spent on the search for the yacht. According to opponents of the resolution, it appeared to insinuate that the Revenue Cutter Service subscribed to “a creed of snobbishness” and might not have gone to the same trouble for a poor native’s fishing vessel. One congressman managed to claim that the search had cost the Revenue Service little more than $60. “Even if Mr. Astor is a rich man,” said another, citing Colonel Astor’s services during the war with Spain, “he is deserving of much from the people of the United States.” With the issue buried in a muddle of logic, it was decided to pass the resolution but ensure that the proposed investigation be conducted “in a perfunctory way.”

  iv.

  NO LONGER UNDER the thumb of two powerful women, his mother and his wife, the formerly withdrawn, gloomy, and beleaguered Colonel Astor became almost coltish. He had entered a new life under a new dispensation. He replaced the Nourmahal with a new yacht, the Noma. At enormous expense, he did over the white marble house on Fifth Avenue he had shared with his mother. He removed the partition wall between the two halves of the house. The space formerly occupied by twin staircases was now a bronze-domed reception hall exposing a vista that led past a great marble fireplace to a gold-ceilinged drawing room, a marble-columned dining room, a picture gallery, and the Astor ballroom, possibly the largest in the city. A portrait of old John Jacob Astor, the long-ago source of this splendor, hung in the dining room. In the newly relocated library, shrinelike, hung the full-length Carolus-Duran portrait of Caroline Astor in front of which she had stood when receiving her guests. A year and a half after his mother died Jack gave a lavish housewarming party at 840 Fifth Avenue—a dinner dance for 250 guests—to announce to New York society that a new Astor generation now ruled the roost.