Angel Dorothy
Page 3
It was reported that Dorothy collapsed at the graveside for she was inevitably reminded of her tears for Flora. This was an even greater blow, magnified by her adolescent emotions; she had loved the freedom of her father’s house, his houses, he had tutored her growing up as well as being her closest companion for more than three vital years. She was so proud of him; in her imagination she had lived with a merchant prince amidst his treasures, walking beneath blue-panelled ceilings rosetted in gold, dining in the company of old Italian paintings crowding the walls (‘a unique decoration for a New York interior’), and practising her skills at conversation before carved mantels of antique Fiesole stone. Jan Paderewski’s piano playing and Fritz Kreisler’s violin as well as dance music and laughter had echoed from these now silent rooms. The very act of leaving her father’s house – for leave she must as Harry had inherited so many houses he had no need for this one – becalmed 871 Fifth Avenue in her mind as her father’s gilded carapace, the evidence of his love and need for beauty.17
Two: ‘Dorothy Always Takes the Hard Chair’
From beyond the grave Dorothy’s father comforted her, his will expressing his confidence in ‘her striking American individuality and penchant for doing her own thinking in her own way’. Flora’s child was to be given her independence with a legacy of about $7 million in 1904 values, and her own home at Old Westbury.18 As she was only seventeen Harry Whitney was appointed her guardian and allowed $50,000 a year for her upkeep; in addition, a salary of $10,000 a year was to be paid to Miss Beatrice Bend as her companion, chosen with the approval of Harry, Pauline and Payne.19 When they were in the city Dorothy and Beatrice were to live with Harry and Gertrude, which meant her return to the house of her childhood at Central Park South, which had been Flora’s house and had – the cause of great excitement – a new electric lift.
Most people were kind, and Beatrice Bend was a promising companion, but for Dorothy it was still rather a shock to be pitched into an adult world of competing egos and gargantuan expectations. There were inevitably newsmen and photographers camped at the door of Harry and Gertrude’s house, for they were gossip-worthy, and as a pretty orphan-heiress she was also the delight of the columnists of Town Topics. After too brief an interval she had to weather the less-than-admiring commentaries on her father’s life and fortune-making: how he had played the ‘Kingmaker’ in Grover Cleveland’s rise to the presidency, how he had refused to return for Cleveland’s second term, giving Flora’s death as his reason but in reality preferring the ‘sportive indulgences’ of Wall Street and the racing at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. Dorothy had to hear jibes that her money was tainted as unscrupulous gains in the manner of the Vanderbilts, Carnegie, Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan.20 From the start she decided to ‘stick to her guns’; she tackled the shark-infested waters with her candid blue gaze, her smile lighting her face and dimpling her chin, holding out her hand and saying, ‘I am Dorothy Whitney.’21
She had always been a great reader and kept a record: Mrs Molesworth was an early stalwart; at ten she dismissed Little Lord Fauntleroy as ‘quite stupid’; at eleven she moved on to Louisa M. Alcott; and at twelve she had found her brothers’ copies of Henty, Conan Doyle, Stevenson and Dickens. The remainder of her education had been frankly scrappy (Flora would surely have arranged it otherwise), a series of governesses and false starts. She had attended Mr Roser’s Academy, where she found a lifelong friend in May Tuckerman, was adamant that she never saw the famous Mr Roser, but remembered a Miss Tomes teaching her in a private class with seven others ‘nothing except Greek mythology and Roman history’. When that class broke up she had been ‘whisked away’ to Miss Clara Spence’s on West 48th Street – the schoolbooks she saved show grammar, rhetoric, literature and drama as her subjects, with ‘composition’ essays on John Paul Jones, life in Aiken and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Her extra topic was a course of architectural history and her critical curiosity was to lead her into hours of pleasure simply looking at buildings in Beaux-Arts New York and old Europe.22
On 10th August 1904, six months after her father’s death, she set out on her first Atlantic crossing for her first taste of Europe. For the time being, her independence was quelled and she would do what was expected of her; a party that could have stepped out of a Henry James novel boarded the SS Baltic, the ladies in big hats with parasols, the men in blazers and white flannels – Harry and Gertrude Whitney, Dorothy and her friend May Tuckerman, Miss Bend and her mother Marraine, and assorted men friends of Harry’s to be trusted escorts and tennis partners.23 From the outset it had been clear that Beatrice Bend was an ‘older sister’ and equal; Beatrice was ten years older, tall and rather stately of bearing, not a lady to be trifled with, which was the idea. In the few months they had been together they had become inseparable, Beatrice adoring her charge, Dorothy pliant and affectionate.
They landed in England to be reunited with Pauline and Almeric Paget, Dorothy’s little niece, Olive, and Addie and Bertie Randolph who now lived with their English relatives. In Paris they found Gertrude’s mother with Gladys Vanderbilt on her debut tour; the shrieks of laughter and girlish giggles can almost be heard as Harry piled May, Dorothy and Gladys into his new Mercedes for a drive south – Dorothy noted ‘Automobiling great fun!’ – and a tour of the Loire valley. May, Dorothy and the Bends intended a long stay; after the sights of Paris and Versailles they went to Amsterdam to see the Rembrandts, then, as it grew chillier, they moved south to Nice, then Rome. They were in Rome for Christmas and Beatrice produced bulging stockings for May and Dorothy. On her eighteenth birthday, 23rd January 1905, Dorothy told her diary that she was ‘feeling terribly old’. From her life that had passed almost without record she had graduated to her Line-A-Day diary, that cipher of society existence that allowed space for morning, afternoon and evening engagements, but little more, just as there was little time to draw breath between the parties. She is revealed as a traveller rather than a tourist, making her own choices from the architectural guides, with abrupt comments, ‘very fine’ or ‘a splendid view’. She liked to wander around churches and through street markets watching the everyday patterns of ordinary lives; she seemed immediately at home in European cities and she was undoubtedly popular among the urchin gatekeepers and flower sellers to whom she was unfailingly generous.
May Tuckerman, who always brought a lot of fun into Dorothy’s life, left them in Rome and the ‘rump’ of three went to Sicily, returning northwards in easy stages as the weather improved and arriving in London in the spring of 1905. The Pagets had a house in Berkeley Square and a country place in Suffolk; though Dorothy was not ‘out’ her sister Pauline – who had many of their mother Flora’s organisational abilities – could not resist showing her off, being perfectly convinced that she had grown into such a lovely heiress that she would be well married before she was twenty.
In September Dorothy and the Bends returned to Paris to meet Harry and Gertrude who had arrived for their annual visit. There was an important ritual to be accomplished, Gertrude introducing Dorothy as a client at the House of Worth where she would buy dresses for her debut on her nineteenth birthday and which demanded a ‘royal’ accreditation – or a Vanderbilt would do. The legendary Monsieur Worth had dressed Flora, but now his son, Jean-Philippe, ruled the Maison in the Rue de la Paix, his effusive welcome hinting that she was expected to maintain the family tradition and order lavishly. Dorothy was more concerned to keep the mannequins and seamstresses in work and she endured her fittings by engaging them in conversation (and improving her French) whenever possible. They returned home on the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II. Her Line-A-Day, usually filled as if her life depended upon it, stayed in her case on board, and she was content with a good book and a quiet passage. It was Quarantine at Ellis Island, the prelude to docking in New York, that appalled her, the spectacle of ‘the huddled masses’ disturbing her dreams for nights on end.
Settled back home with her brother and sister-in-law, Dorothy
could not escape their influence. Harry Whitney, in his mid-thirties, was clever, handsome and charming; his tutors had said he had the makings of a brilliant lawyer but he preferred his sporting life. With the lion’s share of his father’s millions, his houses and their precious contents, his acreages and racing stables, Harry was more inclined to keep an eye on his investments and enjoy his seasonal round of tennis and sailing, racing and hunting, and playing polo, which he did to international standard. Asked once why did he not spend more of his fortune, he is supposed to have quipped, ‘I’m saving it for Dorothy for when she has given all hers away.’
As Harry’s wife and ‘senior sister’, Gertrude was head of the family. She was thirty, mother of Flora, Sonny and Barbara, and outwardly she personified the regal poise expected of a Vanderbilt heiress married to the Whitney heir; inside her was an artist longing to kick over the conventions. What could she do that was useful? She tried writing – plays, romantic fiction, her self-analytical journals – but her real talent was drawing, and she had dreamed of herself modelling clay figures, and so had begun her sculpture, largely self-taught. Harry had little sympathy for his wife as an artist, feeling her proper role was in patronage, so Gertrude struggled to do everything. She imagined a school, a gallery, perhaps a museum, with commissions for herself and patronage for American artists. She listed those who would help her: Harry obviously number one when she could win him over, and Dorothy at number four, ‘young now but that is the time to influence her so that financially she would be interested’.24
Dorothy, aware of these tensions, was always grateful for Gertrude’s love and ‘good companionship’; she saw her struggles clearly, how her money was a double-edged sword bringing hurtful prejudices and jealousies, as well as her expensive sculptural materials and her Tuscan-style studio designed by the architect William Adams Delano and built in their garden at Old Westbury. The incompatibility of being a creative artist and living with the obligations of wealth was starkly drawn. Dorothy knew that she had no choice, or rather that her father had made her choice for her – there was to be no posing in garret or studio for her, she loved and read poetry but wrote none, she attempted no novel nor drawing, nor painting, nor any needlework; she enjoyed classical and choral music but she did not play any instrument nor did she sing. She often joked wryly about her complete lack of ‘drawing room accomplishments’ – was she to live in a cultural desert? No, but she had other aims in view.
The year 1906 was her debut year: her Line-A-Day became frantic, and she stepped out in the supreme confidence of being Miss Dorothy Whitney. Politics and powerful men interested her and she made the first of several New Year visits to Washington, this time as the guest of President Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of State, the ultra-handsome Robert Bacon – the Bacons were her Long Island neighbours and had their eyes on her as a daughter-in-law, though she feigned innocence of this. She was actually busy charming Bacon’s chief, the formidable Elihu Root, whose mother was a Whitney as it turned out, and with whom she became a great favourite.25
Back in New York her aunt Lilley Barney gave a formal dinner on the eve of her nineteenth birthday; a week later Harry and Gertrude staged her coming-out ball, their house filled with the traditional ‘American Beauty’ roses and Dorothy, her hair piled high, leading off the cotillion in her Worth gown, partnered by a most dashing beau. ‘Princess’ Alice Roosevelt and her fiancé Nicholas Longworth were among her guests, and on the following 17th February in spring-like sunshine Dorothy went to their wedding in the White House. It was like playing in the Giant’s Castle, their high spirits took wings in those fabled rooms and she long remembered how – in all their finery, hats flying – everyone ran helter-skelter across the East Lawn to wave the honeymooners on their way.
Being ‘out’ entitled her to membership of the Colony Club on Madison Avenue, founded by Gertrude, Payne’s wife Helen Hay Whitney and Mrs J. Borden Harriman, known to everyone as Daisy.26 Her New York days slipped easily into the pattern of the sisterhood, her Book Class or a gallery lecture in the morning, lunch at Delmonico’s, fresh air in the afternoon, tea at the Colony then home to dress for the opera in Gertrude’s box, or the theatre and dinner and dancing. She was often at Sherry’s on Fifth Avenue three evenings a week, which had been her father’s favourite haunt and was the fashionable party venue for her set.
As a pretty girl with a fortune must be in want of a husband, the question of beaux was uppermost, deftly managed by Gertrude from her own list of admirers. Dorothy’s early escorts included two architects, who found her knowledge of their profession intriguing: Lloyd Warren, whose firm was by appointment to the Vanderbilts, and Grosvenor Atterbury, a coming star. Atterbury was eighteen years older than Dorothy and, more critically, shorter; she had reached five feet ten inches in her heels and a hat. His missionary zeal in the unfashionable realms of low-cost housing and hospital building touched her social conscience, and he was not the last to mistake her friendly enthusiasm for his work as an interest in him. More light-heartedly there were Harry’s friends in the Long Island tennis set, the Bacons’ son Bob, in his last year at Harvard and destined for banking and the Treasury, and for a while the god-like Devereux Milburn, captain of Harry’s all-conquering ‘Big Four’ polo team. Courtland Barnes was briefly a beau until he married her cousin Kate Barney and as a couple they became her close friends. Much the same could be said of the lawyer Joseph Howland Auchincloss, who married Priscilla Stanton, another of Dorothy’s set.
Dorothy’s legacy from her father, Elmhurst at Old Westbury
The 1906 trip to Europe began in April as Dorothy was to be bridesmaid at Addie Randolph’s marriage to Lionel Lambart in London. They sailed on the Oceanie, Dorothy, Beatrice and Mrs Bend, now the intrepid four with the addition of Dorothy’s red-haired maid Louisa Weinstein, who was to be with her for the next twenty years. After the wedding in early May they made a quick diversion to Spain, to the Alhambra at Granada, and were back in time for Royal Ascot. There, Dorothy purred, ‘Mrs Keppel introduced me to the King,’ who kindly remembered her father and his racing successes. Additional beaux included sister Pauline’s protégé, a Scots Guards officer, Lord Falconer, heir to the Earl of Kintore of Inverurie in Aberdeenshire, Delancey Jay, a Harvard law graduate on secondment to the Foreign Office, and Sumner Gerard, one of the chivalric company of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders from the Cuba campaign of 1898.27 Dorothy was lightly pursued to Berlin, Munich and St Moritz before she returned to Paris – ‘I love Paris,’ she told her Line-A-Day; to all her suitors she smiled sweetly and said ‘No’. The highlight on their trip home on the SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria was her tour of the new Marconi radio room.
It became her habit after an Atlantic crossing to take refuge in her own home at Old Westbury on Long Island. At about the time of her birth her father had bought an estate of inland acres in the Wheatley Hills at North Hempstead in Nassau County as an escape from the city. He left Dorothy the Shingle-style cottage built for Harry and Gertrude, while they moved to his larger house five minutes’ walk away; hers was called Elmhurst – the postal address was Roslyn, and it was easily reached on the Long Island Rail Road, Glen Cove branch line, or by motor by wide sandy lanes alongside open fields and woods. This was old farming country, settled for two hundred years, studded with huge barns and water mills. Roslyn was a neat town with boardwalks, a General Store displaying shelves of Campbell’s red-labelled soups and a busy blacksmith named Napoleon Forget. The steamboat service along the East River brought trippers to Glen Cove in search of ‘Long Island Duck Dinners’, and celebrity escapees tucked themselves into clapboard cottages and discreet hotels, but nothing was spoiled, and it had the salty air of a happy haven.28
At Old Westbury Dorothy was safe, surrounded by people who had known her all her life. Harry and Gertrude were close, but not too close, and Payne and Helen were at Manhasset not far away. As for her style of living – certainly not rocking chairs, animal skins and elephant tusks as at Theodore Roose
velt’s Sagamore Hill at Oyster Bay, nor did the oppressive grandeur of tapestries, gilded woods and priceless ginger jars filled with ferns ever make it out of Manhattan. She gathered favourite pieces from family rooms, eighteenth-century pieces in the English Georgian manner, Chippendale upholstered chairs with reeded legs, knee-hole desks and dressing tables, block-fronted chests by Duncan Phyfe and other craftsmen of old New York, with pretty floral papers and chintzes: these were the backdrop to her life. A bowl of garden flowers reflected in a polished mahogany tabletop symbolised Elmhurst.29
Loyalty to her family and friends was Dorothy’s guiding star but she was impatient to have another occupation than that of bridesmaid, and yet she was nowhere near ready to be a bride. The year 1906 brought her another sisterly friendship, important because it broke the pattern of her social whirling before it became a habit. Soon after her coming-out she had been invited to dinner at E.H. Harriman’s house where she discovered his daughter Mary, who also thought for herself. Mary Harriman was six years older, the eldest child in an affectionate family, ‘a dark, pleasant girl with an infectious laugh’ who had been well educated, studying biology and sociology at Barnard College. Her father had a fearsome reputation: Alice Roosevelt was once a guest on his private train when he announced he was trying for the speed record home from the Midwest. Alarmed, the president had wired, ‘Please take care of the safety of my daughter on your train,’ to which Harriman snapped back, ‘You run the country – I’ll run the railroad.’30