When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  No longer reclusive, he accepted invitations to rounds of dinner dances, fancy-dress balls, weddings, auto shows, and other fashionable events. His name on guest lists appeared almost daily in the papers. With one of his sisters as hostess he entertained lavishly at the Fifth Avenue house and at Beechwood, his mother’s “cottage” on Bellevue Avenue in Newport. More and more frequently he was to be seen in the company of a teenage girl he had met at Bar Harbor in the summer of 1910. He had apparently fallen in love with her right away. Madeleine Talmage Force, tall, strong-featured, pretty rather than beautiful, was a recent debutante and a graduate of Miss Spence’s School for Girls. Having prospered in the shipping and forwarding business, William Force, her father, now a prominent sportsman and member of the New York Yacht Club, had moved his family from Remsen Street in Brooklyn to a house at 18 East Thirty-seventh Street in Manhattan. Madeleine’s upwardly scrambling mother was known behind her back in society circles as “La Force Majeure.”

  When she and forty-six-year-old Jack Astor met, Madeleine was seventeen, considerably less than half his age, a year younger than his son, Vincent, and only about seven years older than his daughter, Alice. At first his friends tended to wave away this sudden, somewhat unsavory development as a passing infatuation on the part of a love-starved bachelor with an impressionable teenager who, unlike Ava, was responsive and dazzled by him. The gossip press exploited rumors of a possible or imminent engagement of a couple grotesquely disparate in their ages and in most quarters barred from marriage because the prospective groom was an accredited adulterer. “If Mr. Astor has found a woman willing to have him,” said his divorced wife, by then comfortably settled in London society, “I do wish he would get married and drop out of the public prints; as he and I have nothing in common. I am sick and tired of it.”

  “Mother Force,” the scandal sheet Town Topics soon reported, had “let no grass grow in getting her hook on the Colonel.” This one-of-a-kind prospective son-in-law, an Astor of the Astors, was blessed with a fortune of over $100 million, a brand-new ocean-going steam yacht, and more hotels and skyscrapers than any other New Yorker. The Forces, mother and daughter, were soon regular guests in Astor’s houses in New York, Ferncliff, and Newport; aboard the Noma traveling back and forth between New York and Newport; and in the Astor box, made famous by his mother, at the Metropolitan Opera. The Colonel and Madeleine were seen together so frequently that Father Force said he feared that such apparent intimacy, unless sanctified by a publicly avowed intention to marry, could lead to “unpleasant gossip” and the smutting of his virgin daughter’s reputation. “I called Colonel Astor on the telephone today,” Force told a reporter from the Times, “and we discussed the matter. He accepted my point of view, and it was agreed between us that I should make the announcement. No date has been set yet for the wedding.” Having floated a gentle threat of a shotgun union, on August 1, 1911, Mr. and Mrs. William Force announced the engagement of their debutante daughter, Madeleine, to Colonel John Jacob Astor, great-grandson of John Jacob Astor and the recognized head of the Astor family in the United States.

  Five weeks later, on September 9, following a desperate search for a clergyman willing to officiate, Astor and Madeleine were suddenly married by the Reverend Joseph Lambert, pastor of the Elwood Temple Congregational Church of Providence, Rhode Island. Recruited on short notice and on payment of a fee of $1,000 (which the groom complained was extortionate), Lambert was about the only clergyman—and a Congregationalist at that, not a proper Episcopalian—who would agree to marry the pair. Lambert had been chosen over several other candidates who either volunteered or were scouted for the job, one of them a pastor in rural Tennessee, another an eighty-three-year-old Providence Baptist (and sometime spiritualist) who worked as a carpenter and occasionally picked up an odd dollar by performing ministerial duties. While the search was on, the Reverend Edward Johnson, a Newport Episcopalian, had turned down the $1,000 offer. “It was a lot of money to refuse and a big temptation to a poor minister, but I do not feel that I could marry the couple whatever was offered.”

  Half an hour after the couple exchanged vows the hastily arranged wedding breakfast was hastily consumed. The newlyweds left Beechwood by taxicab hired by a reporter (not expecting his services to be needed, Astor’s chauffeur had taken the day off). They boarded the Noma and sailed out of Newport, cheered on by crowds of spectators gathered on the dock. Before he left, Astor released a curiously reasoned statement to the press. “Now that we are married,” he said, “I don’t care how difficult divorce and remarriage laws are made. I sympathize heartily with the most strait-laced people in most of their ideas, but believe remarriage should be possible once, as marriage is the happiest condition for the individual and the community.”

  The couple’s opéra bouffe departure by ship left behind on shore the holiday-making crowd of local citizens along with members of the press hungry for details of what was instantly recognized as the most unusual marriage ever to take place in the high reaches of Newport. Also left behind was a clutch of Christian clergy embroiled in recriminations scarcely more dignified than a catfight. The rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, who had earlier denounced the Astor-Force “alliance” as abhorrent, unholy, and in defiance of God’s laws, now denounced his clerical brother, the Reverend Mr. Lambert, as a Judas who had taken a thousand pieces of silver to perform “a nasty job.” He hoped Lambert would now “be driven from his sacred office and set to tending an Astor garage or cleaning an Astor stable.” Another minister called Lambert “a disgrace to Congregationalism.” “Of course, I can speak only for myself,” said yet another, “but I unhesitatingly say that it was a shame and an outrage.” Under fire from both fellow clergy and his parishioners for a sermon in which he defended the marriage, an Episcopal priest in Meriden, Connecticut, resigned his pulpit in disgust and said he was going into business instead.

  Hot with disapproval of his union with a teenage girl they considered an arriviste, few of Astor’s social peers, summoned on short notice, had attended the marriage ceremony at Beechwood. Little better attended were the entertainments Jack and Madeleine offered after returning from their honeymoon. To escape further snubs they spent the winter months of 1911–1912 traveling in Europe and enjoying the luxury of a houseboat on the Nile. When Madeleine learned she was pregnant they decided to cut short their stay abroad and come home. On April 10 they took the boat train from London’s Victoria Station to Southampton and boarded the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic.

  NINE

  Baron Astor of Hever Castle

  i.

  WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR turned sixty-four in 1912, the year his cousin Jack, unmourned by him, died on the Titanic. A peerage, which had been the height of William’s ambition as a subject of Queen Victoria; her successor, King Edward VII; and, in turn, his successor, King George V, had continued to elude him. His old offenses against the dignity of the royal circle had never been forgotten; neither had his walling-off of Cliveden to keep the public out, resentment of the invasive power that came with the possession of millions of American dollars, and his opposition to the liberal policies of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s government. “I was doing effective work all summer against Socialism,” he wrote in 1909, “and believe I can be of use to my Conservative friends.” Like his aunt Caroline, the late queen of New York society, but with a vehemence alien to her, he had appointed himself champion of aristocratic and regressive values.

  More British than even the class-bound British establishment, he joined its battle against egalitarianism, reformist social change, and home rule for Ireland, the most divisive issue of the day. His chief weapon in the battle was the Pall Mall Gazette, a moderately liberal London evening paper he had acquired back in 1892, soon after moving to England. The conditions he laid on his appointed editor, Henry Cust, a former MP, were ominous and characteristic: “He shall at all times be bound by any instructions and directions which may be given him by the proprietor, wh
ose right of controlling the policy and management of the paper are hereby acknowledged.” Four years later, following disputes over policy and the handling—sometimes tactless rejection—of Astor’s own contributions, he dismissed Cust. He then transformed this once open-minded paper into what a historian of the Astor family, Derek Wilson, calls a “mouthpiece of the most reactionary elements in British politics.” “Mr. Astor’s paper,” Wilson writes, “urged employers to stand firm against striking workers, advocated closing all museums and galleries to women in order to prevent sabotage by militant suffragettes, inveighed against attempts to engineer international armament reductions, resisted the imposition of death duties and estate taxes, and vociferously supported tariffs and imperial preference.” The Pall Mall Gazette, William Waldorf Astor announced, was henceforth to be “written by gentlemen for gentlemen.”

  Several favored archetypes continued to shape Astor’s bristling and conflicted but, as sometimes observed from the outside, vulnerable nature. One was the honest peasant of Baden who sprang fresh from the soil and, endowed with the genius of trade and modern capitalism, went on to amass one of the great fortunes of his time. In William’s imagination, the commoner John Jacob Astor, canny dealer in pelts and house lots, contended for mastery with the fictive Spanish Crusader of noble blood who fell at the siege of Jerusalem. The Crusader generally won out. Sometimes Astor also thought of himself as Aladdin, possessor and bestower of magic wealth. In his tender moments he liked to think of himself, too, as the amorous creature of Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous poem, “L’Après-Midi d’un faune.”

  “One’s heart just cries out for that poor old gentleman,” his daughter-in-law, the former Nancy Langhorne of Virginia, was to say of William after his death in 1919. “Had he been born with 2 sous, I feel, [he] would have become a great man.” Wealth, and the sense of privilege that came with it, had molded his character and given even his most apparently benign gestures a hint of self-serving and appropriation. His gift to Nancy, when she married his eldest son, Waldorf, in 1906, was the 55.23 carat Sancy diamond, a historic stone that during the past several centuries had supposedly passed through the hands of Charles the Bold, two kings of England, Louis XIV, and the czars of Russia. What William gave to his son was equally spectacular: the entire Cliveden estate along with all its decorations and furnishings, its sculptures and busts, Roman sarcophagi, enormous wine jars, funerary urns, suits of armor, and other antiquities collected over the years. “The most magnificent wedding gift ever made, I should imagine,” William called it. Pharaonic in their grandeur, such gifts coming from William as Aladdin could be received as acts of self-commemoration and even aggression. They overwhelmed their recipients and threatened to bend them to the giver’s personality.

  Lying ill at his office on Victoria Embankment with a severe attack of gout, William did not attend the wedding ceremony of Waldorf and Nancy. Although civil and even affectionate, the accommodation he subsequently reached with his sharp-tongued daughter-in-law proved to be at best a sort of negotiated truce. The most effectual and vivid of the modern Astors, she was William’s equal if not his superior in opinionatedness and intelligence. “I married beneath me,” she said in a famous quip. “All women do.” She was the first woman to win election to a seat in the House of Commons. A battery of rockets liable to go off in many directions at once, she differed with her father-in-law on virtually every question that could be raised between them. That she was an American previously married and divorced was among the tender points, along with her stand on social justice and women’s rights. He hardly tried to hide his exasperation at her egalitarian positions, her outspoken role as a Christian Science evangelist, and her ban on alcoholic beverages at Cliveden (and, if she had her way, in all of Britain). The renovations Nancy Astor ordered when she became chatelaine of Cliveden undid both the substance and the spirit of William’s most cherished possession. He had poured into the house and grounds the same passion for burnished splendor that shaped his hotels and his other private residences. Once installed at Cliveden the young Astors set about changing its feel and style. “The keynote of the place when I took over was splendid gloom,” Nancy recalled. “Tapestries and ancient leather furniture filled most of the rooms. The place looked better when I had put in books and chintz curtains and covers, and flowers.” She ripped out one of William’s prized installations, the mosaic stone floor in the main hall, and replaced it with a more welcoming and more fashionable parquet. She replaced the Italian-style dining-room ceiling that had been painted to William’s order and cleared out his collection of Roman sarcophagi, stone sculptures, suits of armor, funerary urns, and antique Italian furniture. She changed the Cliveden of “splendid gloom” and long history into a grand English country house where she was to play hostess to Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, Charlie Chaplin, and other grandees of her day.

  “I prefer to remember things as I left them,” William said soon after handing Cliveden over to Waldorf and Nancy and moving out for good. Resigned to changes the new owners were bound to make, he intended never even to visit, but when he did visit he was appalled. Dreading his response to her improvements, Nancy took to her bed when she heard his car arrive and deliver him for a visit. “The house has been somewhat altered in decoration and furniture,” he later noted, drily enough, considering his dismay, “and without objecting to these changes, it is no pleasure for me to see them.”

  Hever Castle was now his summer home, but he intended to spend the remaining winter months of his life in Italy. This was William’s country of romance. He had first seen Naples in 1855 at the age of seven, when Bourbon king Ferdinand II ruled the Two Sicilies. Later he had fallen in love in Italy for the first time and dreamed of living a life there devoted to writing, sculpture, and study, only to go home, with a regret that never lessened, to take up his business duties as an Astor. Still later, married by then, he spent three fulfilling years in Rome as U.S. minister. The year before he handed Cliveden over to his son, he bought a property in Sorrento, overlooking the Gulf of Naples and within sight of Vesuvius and Pompeii. “Sorrento is a place I have known and delighted in for thirty-five years,” he wrote to Amy Richardson, “and so far as beauty is concerned it is as near Paradise as anything I expect to see.”

  His new possession was a three-story nineteenth-century building on an estate that he named Sirena after the Greek sea nymphs whose song was supposed to have lured mariners to their island. Extending the property with an acre and a half of cloister garden and orange grove, he bought and tore down an adjacent church and monastery. Sirena was the last of his grand acquisitions and offered him the chance to enjoy an even deeper, more thorough immersion in the distant past than his historical fiction and his restorations at Cliveden and Hever Castle. Child of the century of steel, steam, electricity, and America’s leap to world power, he tried to create at Sorrento an alternative world bathed in the light of the Roman Empire at high noon.

  At a cost of half a million dollars, and after about two years of work, Astor constructed on the property an adjoining villa of a sort that might have been owned and inhabited by a patrician Roman family in the first century BC. He had decided to do this after his workmen uncovered among ruins in the garden a marble altar inscribed with the names of the villa’s first occupants. In the excavation and construction that followed he drew on his own respectable knowledge of classical culture. He ordered shipped over from England a “Noah’s Ark,” as he called it, of marbles and bronzes he had been keeping in storage. He hired scholars and artists to scour Europe’s markets and private collections for authentic period furnishings, painted decorations for the stucco walls, and mosaic pieces for the tessera floors. Twenty-four red and white marble columns with antique Corinthian capitals lined the court leading to the villa’s inner rooms. Each, a visitor wrote, was “furnished in the Roman style, with marble tables and bronze candlesticks…and with arm chairs in marble.” The villa’s wine cellar held Greek and Roman amphorae found durin
g excavation of the grounds. The kitchen was equipped with antique earthenware bottles and dishes, iron stew pans and gridirons, a mill for grinding grain, and a bronze mortar. Six stone lions’ heads supported an antique dining table ringed with bronze chairs covered with rough bear and wolf skins.

  ii.

  OVER THE YEARS, Astor had entertained unnamed women friends in his “studio,” a private apartment at his Temple Place office, and in his “secluded retreat” at Hever, to which only he had the key. Once or twice, and unreliably, he had been linked romantically with various titled or socially prominent women, but for the most part this was rumor only and short-lived. Dreading the attentions of the press, he managed to conduct his casual affairs without a hint of scandal, a remarkable achievement given his money, which drew inquiring reporters like flies to honey, and the fact that practically everything else about this richest of rich marriage prospects was newsworthy, even his arrivals, departures, and silences. In conducting his affairs with such discretion he had in mind the contrary example of his cousin Jack, who had seemed often to be living his private life under a noonday sun of publicity.