by Jane Brown
Jane Brown
Elton
23rd April 2016
One: Gilded Angel
In the long centuries from the Battle of Hastings to the death of King James in 1625, Dorothy’s Norman, Welsh and English forebears transformed themselves from warring ruffians into gentle landed knights. Ten years of Charles I’s preference for popish plots over parliamentary integrity then persuaded John and Elinor Whitney, with their five sons, to board the little ship Elizabeth & Ann in April 1635 for the perilous Atlantic voyage to the New World. They had to begin their climb back to prosperity all over again, but they did well. One of the intermediate eighteenth-century American Whitneys, Eli, pioneered the very assembly-line process – ‘while the worker brings his intelligence more and more to the study of a single detail, each day the master casts his eye over a more far-reaching ensemble’ – that enabled American entrepreneurs to create the industrial aristocracy into which Dorothy was born.1 Her mother’s family, the Paynes, were firmly entrenched with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and her father William Collins Whitney oversaw the ‘far-reaching ensemble’ of the Navy Department in President Cleveland’s first administration.
Dorothy was a late and welcome child, named their ‘Gift of God’, and born on a Washington day of grey cold and winter slush on 23rd January 1887. Her mother Flora hugged her. ‘This is better than all,’ she told her friends, the ‘all’ being her successes as a Washington hostess in Dolley Madison’s style. In early April the bells rang out for Dorothy’s christening before a congregation of five hundred, which included the president and his cabinet. The flags waved for ‘the Navy’s Baby Dot’, her arrival coinciding with her father giving contracts to the Newport News Shipyard for their first battleship, though the very first hull laid was for an iron tugboat named Dorothy.2
Will Whitney, a tall, dark-haired, moustachioed and handsome stripling of forty-six, had been Secretary of the Navy for two years. His money and his marshalling of the New York Democrats had brought Grover Cleveland’s success as the twenty-second president, the first Democrat to be elected since the fifteenth president, James Buchanan. The Whitneys had moved from New York to their big house near the White House, 1731 Eye Street at Lafayette Square, where Dorothy was born. Summer came early to that southern city and as soon as she was christened the family moved from the marshy bottom to their farm, Grasslands, four miles out on airy Nevada Avenue. The English diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, feeling his way in the still rather raw republic, found them there:
The Secretary keeps open house, or rather open cottages, and everyone who goes there has anything to eat, drink or smoke that they can wish. He is a clever lawyer who has married an enormously rich (and fat) lady with whose money he is gaining popularity and influence. They are both perfectly kind, and the reverse of snobbish.3
Everyone was déshabillé because of the heat and perhaps Flora was in something tent-like and without her corset and hour-glass curves; she was in her mid-forties and Dorothy had been her sixth confinement. Flora was a proud Clevelander born of two prominent families, the Paynes and the Perrys, with her brother named Oliver Hazard Payne for their mother’s family hero, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, famous for hounding the British Navy from the Great Lakes in the War of 1812. Their riches came from Senator Payne’s alliance with John D. Rockefeller, a Clevelander by adoption, whose Standard Oil refineries and petro-chemical works prospered in the city in the 1860s. After serving in the Union Army, Colonel Oliver Payne became treasurer of Standard Oil; he did not marry but lavished his wealth upon his sister, whom he adored.
Flora had always been plump and pretty, with a head of fair curls and a pair of beautiful blue eyes; she seemed to have the Perry spirit, she was wilful and determined – though perhaps too wise and well educated to be spoilt – and she invariably won her way with her powder-blue gaze. The colonel, her brother, claimed to have found her husband, his Yale friend William Collins Whitney, who had been to Harvard Law School and was then a corporate attorney in New York, but Flora was uncertain about marriage. She had been free to finish her education at the Spingler Institute in New York, to study with the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz and his wife Elizabeth in Boston and then to travel in Europe and discover the delights of Paris. If she epitomised de Tocqueville’s American girl of the nineteenth century, the product of democracy and education, a girl who thought for herself, spoke freely and acted independently and had learned to consider the great world ‘with a firm and tranquil eye’, then she could have read for herself his verdict on the American wife:
In America the independence of woman is irretrievably lost within the bounds of marriage. If the girl is less constrained there than everywhere else, the wife submits to stricter obligations. The one makes the paternal home a place of freedom and pleasure, the other lives in her husband’s dwelling as in a cloister.4
The perils of marriage, as well as the guilt of oil-bound riches, bothered her. She had kept Will Whitney waiting and had written to him of her determination to appreciate the good things that life had brought her, ‘to enjoy them with senses you are thankful for… [and] I want to live my life cheerily, exultantly and if the trials come to take them not as the necessities of life, but as the chastisements of a great God’.5 In October 1869 she left her father’s house on Euclid Street for the last time to be married in the Old Stone Presbyterian Church in the Public Square of Cleveland. She and Will spent their honeymoon at Niagara. The Payne family had bought and furnished their first home in New York, a brownstone at 74 Park Avenue, which they came to love. Their first child Leonora died, but Harry, Pauline, Payne and Olive Whitney were safely born at two-year intervals during the 1870s.6 Will Whitney was working too hard for long holidays but Flora had insisted on taking her children summering to Bar Harbor or the Catskills each year. In 1883 she took them to Paris, where they became ill, and Olive, aged five, died.
Flora seemed to recover first, and it was she who encouraged her husband to his new interest in politics, to Grover Cleveland’s campaign, and so success had brought them to Washington. Flora was in her element, entertaining for the bachelor president, her style celebrated by John Philip Sousa’s march ‘La Reine de la Mer’ played by the Marine Band in her honour. Then the president had surprised everyone by marrying the young Frances ‘Frankie’ Folsom (rather than her mother as the gossips surmised), when he was fifty and she was twenty-two; Flora and ‘Frankie’ became the best of friends. Privately the Whitneys still mourned Olive, and most privately, disregarding her doctor’s advice, Flora decided that only another baby would do, and so Dorothy arrived, their gift from God.
Eventually Baby Dot settled into her quiet nursery routine. President Cleveland lost the election in 1888 to Benjamin Harrison and the following year, when Dorothy was just two, the Whitney family returned to New York, this time to the huge mansion on Fifth Avenue at West 57th Street, immediately south of Central Park, which Colonel Payne had bought for them. Dorothy’s nursery was high up above the sidewalk with grown-up life carrying on in the stately rooms beneath her; she had few memories of this time, one of playing bear-chases with her brother Payne, who would have been fifteen when she was four. Pauline and Harry, at seventeen and nineteen respectively, were all too engrossed in their busy lives to have much time for their baby sister.7 Her parents were often absent, her father was working hard, and Flora, fresh from her Washington success, was determined to meet the challenge of New York’s demanding and censorious Gilded Age society. It was said that she was ‘addicted to activity’, to parties, concerts, the opera and even to the White Star Line, which took her on shopping trips to Paris.8 This was not the outdoor life that, in her heart, Flora would have preferred, and with too many banquets and no real exercise her weight became a problem. Worst of all, Dorothy managed to overhear, with her little girl’s sharp ears, talk that she was the cause of Flora’s problems: her mother should never have had such a late baby, and her heart was seriously weakened. Dorothy’s last memory of her mother came fr
om soon after her sixth birthday in 1893, when she was led into her mother’s room where Flora was lying on a couch, and she was told to say ‘goodbye’. She was taken from the house, even from New York, for the critical time, and some weeks later, as she recalled, she was told that her mother had died.9
Her efforts to remember her mother always ended in tears, and other memories of her childhood assumed a nightmare quality. She clung to her Irish nurse, ‘Ma Bonne’, but could not give her real name, only that they so often walked down Fifth Avenue to St Patrick’s Cathedral where she was left alone in the echoing void while ‘Ma Bonne disappeared into that fearsome brown box’. Even more troubling were the annual Ash Wednesdays, when she was taken to the altar to have her forehead smeared with ashes, she knew not why. She had no memories of her father, perhaps because he disappeared for months on end, taking Harry, Pauline and Payne to the West Indies, then to England and the Continent to salve their more grown-up grief. Dorothy’s saviour was her first friend, Gladys Vanderbilt, who was a few months older but also inhabited her nursery eyrie in the even more monstrous and grand mansion across the street. They rigged up, presumably with help, a kind of private telephone with a light rope slung across the chasm, which made them feel close, two fluffy chicks on Manhattan cliffs. They went to dancing classes together, and Dorothy always remembered the hot chocolate they drank afterwards, ‘the favourite drink of my youth’.
Pauline Whitney came home from Europe engaged to an Englishman, Almeric Paget.10 They were married on 12th November 1895 at St Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, a few days after Gladys’s cousin Consuelo Vanderbilt had married the Duke of Marlborough. Fifth Avenue existed in a rose-petal storm. Dorothy emerged from her schoolroom at the age of eight years and ten months making her debut as a flower girl in a dress trimmed in sable, with a floppy velvet beret à la Rembrandt. Her father’s treasure hunting in Europe had included buying a painting by the Dutch master, the ultimate in Fifth Avenue status symbols. The following year Harry Whitney married Gertrude Vanderbilt in August in Newport – ‘our Social Capital’ – on Rhode Island. Gertrude was Gladys’s big sister, and something of a goddess to the younger girls – she was very tall, willow slim, with a pile of dark curls and green eyes. Harry’s and Gertrude’s was a boy and girl next door romance: she had looked after Harry’s dog while he was at Law School and they had fallen in love. The wedding was a fairytale. The Vanderbilts’ new and breathtakingly grand mansion, The Breakers, gleamed like a wedding cake, trimmed with vine-covered pergolas casting filigree shades, overflowing with pink and white flowers and cascades of cooling ferns. Dorothy and Gladys wore white silk with floaty gauze, which they flew as wings in the sea breezes.
There was another wedding in the following month, September 1896, which Dorothy knew little about, when her father left in his yacht for Bar Harbor in Maine, where he married the widow of a British army officer, Edith Randolph, in the little St Sauveur’s Church. Later in New York he explained that Dorothy had to choose whether to live with him and Edith, or with Uncle Oliver and her brother Payne. The family had divided over this second marriage. Colonel Payne’s grief over his sister Flora’s death persuaded him that Whitney was betraying her memory, and Pauline and Payne, listening to the rumours that Edith had been their father’s mistress before Flora died, felt the same. Dorothy chose to stay with her father, and she loved to recall how joyously her life was transformed. Her tall and beautiful stepmother Edith won her over with love and laughter, she was surprised into the delight of being gathered into Edith’s arms and given goodnight kisses. Her days were full of fun and activities, and Edith’s children, Adelaide and Arthur – Addie and Bertie to Dorothy – became her boon companions. They played musical houses, Whitney giving Harry and Gertrude the big West 57th Street house, which was so full of Flora’s tastes and belongings, and commissioning his architect-friend Stanford White to decorate and furnish 871 Fifth Avenue at 68th Street for Edith. For Dorothy, no longer banished to her schoolroom, the world beyond Fifth Avenue opened as a kaleidoscope of adventures as they summered at Bar Harbor where she learned to sail, explored the Berkshires from her father’s house at Lenox, travelled by private railcar to his farms and racing stables at Aiken in South Carolina, and most beloved of all by Dorothy, lived out lazy days at Old Westbury on Long Island. Edith loved horses and riding, they all rode with the Meadow Brook Hunt Club, and Dorothy hit her first golf ball – though her golf was always a somewhat comical amusement – at the old course there.
Her happiness was all too brief. Just after her tenth birthday they were hunting at Aiken, and Dorothy, riding behind her stepmother, saw Edith fall, knocked from her saddle by an overhanging branch. Edith lay seemingly lifeless, not dead, but despite the efforts of many doctors she was paralysed. Dorothy’s father searched and hoped for a miracle cure but in vain. Edith remained loving and cheerful with them all for just over two years, but she died in May 1899. Dorothy wrote, ‘My poor father, he loved her so much and she brought the gaiety of life to him, and to me, and I see her always now with a light around her.’
Once again her father found his consolation in Europe, especially in England for the racing. Dorothy could no longer enjoy riding, and it was only to comfort him that she attempted a brief interest, noting that he had invested in ‘some important bloodstock’. He leased a horse called Volodyvoski, a relative of the legendary Eclipse and King Edward VII’s Persimmon in the hope that he had spotted a potential Derby winner.11
At home again he became very sociable, giving parties and musical dinners; they called him ‘Mr Fifth Avenue’, and as a handsome widower he was a favourite with Mrs Astor and the Four Hundred, the most fashionable set of the day. His box at the opera could be safely graced by every visiting grande dame, of whom the grandest and his favourite was Alice Keppel.12 His most spectacular ball was for his stepdaughter Addie’s coming-out, for five hundred guests, with relays of musicians so that the dancing never stopped until buffets of French delicacies appeared as if by magic, the magic of Sherry’s, his favourite restaurant. Even though it was December the house was filled with ‘American Beauty’ roses and lily of the valley, and at the witching-hour a flower-decked, chauffeur-driven automobile, headlights blazing, rolled onto the dance floor carrying the favours.13 Addie, who had grown as tall and lovely as her mother, was the star of the evening; Dorothy had grown tall but felt herself far from lovely with a mop of unruly hair and rather heavy features – like the schoolroom girls in novels, she had to watch from the stairs.
Weeks later she was on bridesmaid’s duty again, dressed in light grey satin crepe with Alice Hay, for the wedding of her brother Payne and Helen Hay. Helen and Alice were the daughters of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay, and their mother Clara Stone had been Flora’s friend. Colonel Payne lavished presents and a Fifth Avenue house on Payne and Helen, but as the colonel and Dorothy’s father were still not on speaking terms but had to share a table at the wedding breakfast with the Roosevelts and the Hays, a stiff-lipped truce reigned. Dorothy’s affection for her brother Payne never diminished, despite his rift with their father.
With Harry and Payne married, and Pauline and Almeric Paget moving to England, Dorothy now had more of her father to herself; Cordelia-like as his youngest daughter, she wanted his blessing. Together they explored places and ideas that meant so much to Flora, who had believed with all her passionate soul in the beauty of America and the special good fortune of being American, which is why she had honoured the annual return to the wild or the sea for both recreation and thanksgiving.14 She had known full well that the pleasant lakeside Cleveland of her childhood was being transformed into an industrial realm, largely by her relatives and their business colleagues. As her husband had become increasingly involved in railroad franchises the progress versus paradise debate had sparked disputes around their own dinner table. Flora’s favoured Catskills harboured Washington Irving’s ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, and Hawthorne’s image of the lo
comotive shattering the peace of the legend, the advent of the machine in the garden, was a warning to the would-be despoilers.15 As a disciple of Agassiz and Harvard President Charles William Eliot’s cohort of Harvard natural scientists, Flora had been an outspoken pioneer, and perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that she was in Washington when the government removed exploitative leases and gave protection to some 81 million acres of America, freeing Indian lands and water resources.
Rich men were now obliged to play their part and Will Whitney was not to be left out. He bought thousands of acres and dozens of lakes in the Adirondacks leaving reserves for animals and birds. At Washington in Massachusetts, between the towns of Lee, Lenox and Becket, he bought a mountain, October Mountain, which sheltered buffalo, moose and their kind. At Aiken in South Carolina he created thousand-acre farms, and racing stables to bring employment to a depressed land.16 These were the places he shared with Dorothy; she loved their springtime visits to the white wooden house, Joye Cottage at Aiken, where she could play hostess to the townspeople who sang her father’s praises for putting them on the map. They explored October Mountain and enjoyed summer camps at Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks, with fishing, canoeing and campfire suppers. Just in time, and as Flora would surely have wished, Dorothy learned the summering habit from her father. It supported her forever afterwards; for her it was more than a return to the American garden, it was her return into her parents’ embraces, just as they had hugged her as their gift from God.
Yet, once again, hers was all too short a happiness. Just after her seventeenth birthday on 23rd January 1904, her father was taken ill in his box at the Metropolitan Opera, during his favourite Parsifal. Appendicitis was diagnosed and characteristically he refused a fuss. It was well known that the ‘Napoleon of the railroads’, E.H. Harriman, had been similarly struck down on his train in the middle of Wyoming, but he had withstood his doctors until he arrived back in New York and was successfully operated on by Dr William T. Bull. Whitney held out until that same Dr Bull arrived with his team to operate, but it was too late and blood poisoning and peritonitis caused his death. Dorothy, who was present during the days of drama, could not believe that her beloved father, ‘so full of spirit and so dynamic’, was lifeless. He was sixty-three. On a miserably cold February day his long funeral cortège with black-plumed horses and wagons piled with flowers made its way down Fifth Avenue to Grace Church, silent crowds standing by; in the church a wreath of lilies lay on his empty pew, ‘For Father’. Afterwards the family all boarded the train at Grand Central Station, taking them to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where he was laid close to Flora and Olive.
