When the Astors Owned New York
Page 17
Along with his villa at Sorrento, William Waldorf Astor’s Hever Castle, his “House of the Poetic Faun,” likewise passed into outside hands. In 1982 his grandson Gavin Astor put Hever up for sale (at $25 million) after a series of floods turned the property surrounding the castle into a giant moat. At last report, the current owners, Broadland Properties Limited, operate Hever as a combined conference center and theme park. Visitors can buy tickets for admission to the castle, gardens, maze of yew hedge, topiary, and the former owner’s collections of Roman statuary, arms and armor, and “historic instruments of execution, torture, and discipline” (the last a powerful attraction for the young). Hever also offers special events like a Royal Jousting Tournament, a demonstration of Tudor archery, and a festival of autumn colors. Astor’s Anne Boleyn relics are still in place, an essential element, the proprietors say, in the castle’s “homely atmosphere.” The Tudor village Astor designed to accommodate his guests and staff while he lived alone in his moated castle is now “an exclusive-use venue with twenty-five bedrooms and is used for corporate events and private dining throughout the year.” A few years after his death Astor’s office building at 2 Temple Place went to an insurance company for use as corporate headquarters. Damaged in the bombing of London during World War II and afterward repaired, Temple Place is now a conference center. The weather vane Astor designed for his London retreat, a golden replica of one of Columbus’s caravels, still turns in the wind.
Together, and also in competition with each other, the two Astor cousins had enriched hotel life, social life, and even civic life on the American continent. In doing this they had asserted personal pride and an unshakable sense of superiority derived from great wealth and the loose definition of aristocracy that Americans have always favored. Even though he had made a gift of it to his son, it was the estate at Cliveden that closed the circle on William’s own life and on a career, like his cousin’s, as innkeeper on an imperial scale. William’s statue of a wounded Amazon, emblem of his youthful ambition to escape the family countinghouse, still stands in the rose garden he commissioned. He had brought over to Cliveden and installed above the parterre the monumental stone balustrade from the Borghese garden in Rome acquired during his term as American minister. Impassive and commanding, William Waldorf Astor himself looks out from Von Herkomer’s portrait in oils that hangs above the marble mantelpiece in the dining room. His ashes are buried beneath the chapel floor. Even after the radical changes in style and atmosphere that his daughter-in-law had ordered, Cliveden bears his signature and expresses his determination to reconstitute himself as a Briton and commemorate himself by possessing one of the stately homes of England.
Cliveden’s subsequent history would have dismayed William. In the fall of 1937 Claud Cockburn, a member of the British Communist Party and editor of the influential single-sheet news bulletin the Week, wrote a story about what came to be known as “the Cliveden Set.” According to Cockburn, this was a clutch of highly placed Britons, some of them prominent in public life, who supported Hitler, favored accommodation to the Third Reich, and hoped to shape their own government’s policy accordingly. In effect (or at least intention) Cliveden had become the seat of “Britain’s second Foreign Office.” According to Cockburn, members of this cabal met on long country weekends at the Astor estate and laid their plans there with Hitler’s representatives. (The British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day presents a highly colored version of these conferences at Cliveden, renamed “Darlington Hall.”) During the anxious months before German tanks rolled into Poland, the notion of a “Cliveden Set,” however much it had been a product of Cockburn’s flair for the sensational, captured the public imaginings and provoked alarming news reports. “Friends of Hitler strong in Britain,” the New York Times reported from London. “The apparent strength of Germany’s case in this country comes from the fact that Germany’s best friends are to be found in the wealthiest ‘upper crust’ of British life.” In all likelihood, according to a recent study (Norman Rose, The Cliveden Set [London, 2000]), Cockburn’s sinister “Cliveden Set” was a more or less harmless think tank composed of amateurs, misguided do-gooders, and busybodies who were, as Ishiguro’s novel suggests, “out of their depth.”
Cockburn’s story and its sequels left a permanent smudge on the reputations of Nancy Astor and her husband, Waldorf, hosts and organizers of the Cliveden weekends. Otherwise outspoken chiefly on the subject of racehorses, Astor published a long letter to the Times of London in which he denounced Cockburn’s article as “a Communist fiction,” “a myth from beginning to end.” He charged that it maliciously conflated a well-intentioned policy of exploring avenues to peace with active support of Adolf Hitler. But the damage had been done: Cliveden, William Waldorf Astor’s retreat in the English countryside, was to be remembered as a nest of vipers. For his part, Cockburn was delighted by the immediate and lasting currency of the phrase he coined. “People who wanted to explain everything by something and were ashamed to say ‘sunspots,’” he wrote in his memoirs, “said ‘Cliveden Set.’”
In the early 1960s, during the cold war between the West and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, the name Cliveden gained further notoriety. A private poolside party there was the source of a scandal that involved an alleged breach of national security and caused the eventual fall of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government. Possibly inspired by the Fountain of Love statuary group William Waldorf Astor had installed along the grand avenue leading to the house, a teenage call girl named Christine Keeler shed her clothes, danced naked about the Cliveden pool, and engaged the fancy of two party guests in particular. Each of them, concurrently, became her lover. One was John Profumo, Macmillan’s minister for war, and the other was Captain Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet intelligence agent whose official cover was military attaché. Guilty of lying about the affair to the House of Commons, Profumo left his cabinet post in disgrace. “Profumo Affair” became as firmly fastened to Cliveden as Cockburn’s unsquelchable phrase.
Britain’s National Trust now owns the Cliveden property and its 375 acres of lawn, gardens, and woodland. During the 1970s the trust leased Cliveden to Stanford University, and subsequently to the University of Massachusetts, for use as an overseas study center for undergraduates—as it turned out, an awkward experiment in disparate living styles. The manor at Cliveden now operates as a luxury hotel that outdoes the prototypical New York establishments of more than a century earlier. Including butler, footmen, housemaids, and cooks, the hotel at Cliveden claims to employ a staff of four for each of its thirty-seven bedrooms. It’s the right place for those who, like its former owner, wish to live like a lord and can afford it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR THIER encouragement and support I thank my literary agent of many years, Sterling Lord, and at Viking, my vigilant editor Wendy Wolf and her assistant Clifford Corcoran. Maggie Berkvist proved to be the Kit Carson of picture scouts. Many thanks to my old friends Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn for their hospitality in London and for a memorable visit to Cliveden. For courtesies along the way I’m also grateful to Daniel Aaron, John Y. Cole, and the staffs at Harvard University Archives, Harvard College Library, and manuscript collections at the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. My deepest indebtedness is to my wife, novelist Anne Bernays, for her patient readings of the manuscript and invaluable editorial advice.
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INDEX
“After Holbein” (Wharton)
Alexander, Prince of Teck
Alexis, Grand Duke of Russia
Alfred the Great
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
Ambassadors, The (James)
Ambassadress (ship)
American Museum
American Scene, The (James)
American Tragedy, An (Dreiser)
Anne of Cleves
Antoinette, Marie
“Après-Midi d’un faune, L’”(Mallarmé)
Architectural Record
Armstrong, Henry
Armstrong, John
Armstrong, Margaret Rebecca
Armstrong family
Arthur, Chester A.
Asquith, Herbert
Astor, Alice
Astor, Ava Lowle Willing
Astor, Bertha
Astor, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn
Astor, Charlotte Augusta Gibbes
Astor, Gavin
Astor, Henry
Astor, John
Astor, John Jacob
see also
Astor House Astor, John Jacob
Astor, John Jacob
Astor, John Jacob
childhood of
divorce of
in Fads and Fancies
first wedding of
fortune of
inventions of
Nourmahal incident and
predictions of
proposed stables of
second wedding of
Spanish-American War and
on Titanic
W. W. Astor’s relationship with
see also Astor House; Hotel Knickerbocker; St. Regis Hotel
Astor, John Jacob
Astor, John Jacob
Astor, Madeleine Talmage Force
Astor, Mary “Mamie” Dahlgren Paul
Astor, Michael
Astor, Nancy Langhorne
Astor, Pauline
Astor, Sarah Todd
Astor, Vincent
Astor, Waldorf
Astor, William Backhouse
Astor, William Backhouse, Jr.
Astor, William Vincent
Astor, William Waldorf
on America
British politics and
childhood of
Daily Mail libel suit of
death of
as family historian
fortune of
genealogical research commissioned by
John Jacob Astor IV’s relationship with
Milne’s altercation with
as minister to Italy
newspaper clippings of
novels of
> peerage sought by
political career of
premature obituary of
Sackville romance of
Waldorf’s marriage and
see also Cliveden; Hever; Hotel Astor; Sirena; Waldorf Hotel
Astor Court Building
Astorg, Isaac
Astor House
Astoria, Queens
Astoria (trading post)
Astoria Hotel
Astor Library
Astor Theater
Atlantic Monthly
Backhouse, William, Sr.
Barber, A. L.
Barber, Ohio C.
Barnum, Phineas T.
Baum, Vicki
Beard, Dan
Beaux-Arts Plaza
Bellevue-Stratford Hotel
Belmont, August
Belmont, Oliver Hazard Perry
Bennett, James Gordon
Billings, C. K. G.
Black Tuesday
Blavatsky, Helena
B’Nai Jeshurun
Boer War
Boldt, George C.
Boleyn, Anne
Borgia, Cesare
Borgia, Lucrezia
Borgia family
Bowery Saloon
Bowne (Quaker)
Boyden, Simeon and Frederick
Bradley-Martin, Cornelia Sherman