by Susan Ronald
7
THE MAN THEY CALL “FRANCK”
I think I’ve done well for myself.
—FRANK JAY GOULD
Frank Jay Gould was quite a catch on the one hand, and quite a handful on the other. He was the black sheep of the Gould family, leaving America in 1913 in a huff, declaring that he hated government interference in his private business affairs—and by the way, the new federal income taxes of 1913. It hadn’t helped either that two years earlier, Frank was among a host of businessmen indicted for the alleged violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law.1 Though already married to his second wife, Edith Kelly Gould, a British-born music hall singer and dancer, he had acquired a well-deserved reputation among le gratin as a drunken playboy. He had merely swapped the New York newspapers that reported daily on his antics as “the tear-away Frank” for the French press’s wonderment at the free-spending American they called “Franck.” Indeed, he was so generous with his money that the mayor of Maisons-Laffitte, where his horseracing stud was based, had him created a “Chevalier de la Mérite Argicole” in the first year of his arrival on French soil.2 Still, the French press didn’t understand just who the Gould family was in America.
At five feet nine inches, Frank was slim, trim, and the tallest of the sons of the notorious robber baron Jay Gould. He also had his father’s facial features. Like two of his brothers, George and Howard, he had a penchant for actresses and all that glittered. Viewed from outside the family circle, as an expatriate American and inheritor of one-sixth of Jay Gould’s immense fortune, Frank seemed a prime target for any gold digger.
All the same, that would be selling Frank, and the Goulds, short. Originally an English immigrant to Connecticut in 1647, Nathan Gold, as the Gould clan was called back then, was thought to be Jewish. Not true. Like many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century working families in the grab for surnames, the Golds took the name simply because they mined, worked with, or otherwise fashioned the valuable ore. Their very name made them rich, elevated socially, to their way of thinking. After two hundred years working the land and marrying into the best Puritan families, the Goulds were firmly eleventh- or twelfth-generation Americans. Sometime early in those generations, the spelling change to “Gould” was more than likely to do with the original English pronunciation than any desire to hide their nonexistent Jewish origins.
The Goulds of Delaware County in the state of New York were good Baptists. John Burr Gould farmed an ordinary 150-acre patch of land with a large white farmhouse near the village of Roxbury. His son Jason—known to all as Jay—had been a pain in the backside from the day he was old enough to talk. He always wanted more, thinking he was better than his own father and the good people of Roxbury. In 1850, Jay, aged fourteen, asked if he could go to the Hobart Academy to study engineering so he could become a surveyor. The boy would have to pay his own way, John Burr Gould said, and lose his share of the farm. There were the girls and young Abraham to continue in the family tradition, and if Jay thought he was better than the rest of them, then so be it.3
Jay Gould stuck it out at Hobart for six months before deciding he had already learned all the “business” mathematics he needed. So, in an age when degrees didn’t matter much, he went on the road, offering his services as a surveyor. Rural New York was not much better than a Wild West frontier in the early 1850s. Jay became well acquainted with danger and hunger. He was swindled by his first employer, and decided that every man was out to fleece him. To fleece or not to fleece offered no dilemma to Jay.
Within six years, Gould became the partner of a savvy landowner, Zadoc Pratt, by convincing the old man to buy land richly forested with hemlock timber from the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. Since Pratt was in the tannery business, and hemlock was a prime source of tannin used to cure leather, he was minded to go for it, so long as Gould contributed financially. Gould not only bought the first lot of land, but a second woodland, too, that bordered the railway tracks. Naturally, the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western was delighted to have a major new customer, not only for its redundant land but for the wood’s carriage, and offered Gould and Pratt preferential freight rates. Before his twenty-first birthday, Gould was running the sawmills, blacksmith’s shop, and tannery. Tanned hides were sold at the “swamp” on the edge of a meadow on the east side of Manhattan Island (as it was called in 1856), and Jay employed enough men to name his thriving little community Gouldsboro.
Lured by the buzz of Manhattan and the clever movement of money, soon enough, Gould set about swindling Pratt. He sidelined the profits from the sawmills and tannery, and set up his own private investment bank called Jay Gould and Co., of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. While, in theory, the tanning company owned the bank, Jay knew how to fiddle the books so that old Zadoc Pratt never knew the bank existed, until it was too late. While Jay made his first million with tannery money by speculating on the financial markets in New York City, Pratt was fleeced of a fortune. Soon enough Gouldsboro became a ghost town, but that hardly mattered to Jay.
He already had Charles Leupp, his next sucker, in his sights. It was Leupp who rescued Jay from the tricky situation with Pratt, putting up some $60,000* to prevent Pratt from foreclosing on the property he co-owned with Gould. Leupp drove a hard bargain for the bailout, as Jay expected from the seasoned Wall Streeter. Leupp reasoned that with the tannery business in Gould’s and his hands, they could make good money together in all forms of the leather trade.
All the same, the leopard didn’t change his spots. Gould engaged in wild speculation on Wall Street without telling Leupp. When the New York City branch of the Ohio Life Insurance Company collapsed, investment houses crumbled, and Jay was unable to meet his margin calls. So he drew on Leupp’s accounts to make some payments, and Leupp became an unwitting partner to his crimes. When the market failed on August 23, 1857, Gould, Leupp, and Leupp’s brother-in-law lawyer, David Lee, owned all the hides on hand in the “swamp”—on paper, that is—and every hide to be delivered to the New York market for the next six months.4
Leupp’s hard-earned reputation as a seasoned, honest investor was in tatters. When he finally pinned down Gould at his Stroudsburg investment bank in Pennsylvania, waving reams of bills and legal notices in Jay’s face, Leupp expected Jay to be contrite. It was all in the unwritten rules of the game, Jay replied, and all that he had done was in their combined best interests. Yes, technically they were bankrupt, but all they had to do was hold their nerve. Then Jay shared a bit of advice with his partner that old Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt gave out like confetti: to avoid being suckered, go out into the business world with the intention of doing it to someone else. The Commodore had a rare insight into the oxymoron of “business ethics.”
Leupp was aghast. He had been betrayed and bankrupted by a scoundrel. He should have known better after what Gould had done to Zadoc Pratt, he fulminated. Gould remained steadfast: just hold your nerve, he repeated endlessly. That evening, a downtrodden Leupp headed back to New York City by train. When he got home to his Madison Avenue mansion, he walked into his library, locked the doors, took a revolver from his desk drawer, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Charles Leupp became the first investor on Wall Street to blow his brains out, preferring death to dishonor.5
* * *
Leupp’s brother-in-law, David Lee, ensured that his death would be avenged. As he had done with Zadoc Pratt, Gould was parlaying differences in state law and the lack of federal legislation to play catch-up with such shady practices. Since the state of Pennsylvania did not recognize New York law in these financial dealings—and avenging Leupp’s death was all that mattered—Lee hired fifteen gunslingers in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who successfully occupied Gouldsboro and its tannery. Gould hired fifty men in reply and the inevitable happened. Many were killed, others injured, some arrested, but the odds were too great for fifteen hired guns against fifty. Although Lee lost a costly battle, he won the war: Gould was undone by refusing to pay the six percent in
terest to Leupp and Lee originally agreed upon on the initial $60,000 loan to buy out Zadoc Pratt. Gouldsboro soon became a home for tumbleweed.
While Jay Gould’s reputation was tarnished by fleecing his first two partners, he was already wheedling his way into the orbits of bigger men on Wall Street. Daniel Drew, George Law, and the biggest name of them all, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, had been shaking up Wall Street with dawn raids on each other’s, and lesser mortals’, holdings. They suckered European banks of France, Germany, and England, which had put up huge blocks of capital for the expansion westward by rail in the previous decades. To build America’s railroads, promoters came to Wall Street to sell stocks and bonds, just as cotton brokers came to New York to find the markets into the vast British Empire. It was an eat-or-be-eaten world, and Jay was hungering for a feast. In his first ten years on The Street, Gould and his new partner, Daniel Drew, enticed Commodore Vanderbilt onto the opposite side of a raiding war for the Erie Railroad. Vanderbilt lost.
Naturally, Vanderbilt was livid.* When a second raid on the Erie was mounted, Vanderbilt secured an injunction from his pet judge, George G. Barnard of New York State’s Supreme Court, to stop Gould. The Erie would cost Vanderbilt $8 million, a great deal of money even for the likes of the Commodore. Gould and his coconspirators cashed in, tossing bundles of money into trunks and moving the Erie’s headquarters to Jersey City—out of Vanderbilt’s and Judge Barnard’s jurisdiction. The Commodore couldn’t help but pay Jay a powerful compliment: Gould was the smartest man in America. Even so, it marked the beginning of their lifelong feud.
Mrs. Alice Vanderbilt, along with her friend Mrs. Caroline Astor, ensured that the Goulds were banned from New York’s “Four Hundred.”* Even in America, in an age when only men voted, it was the women who ruled society. Jay could have cared less. He had married the handsome heiress Helen Miller, and with backing from his father-in-law and what was left of the tannery money, he bought the Rutland and Washington Railroad, which ran from Troy, New York, to Rutland, Vermont. The Erie was his second major acquisition. Jay even bought his own newspaper, The World—sold later to Joseph Pulitzer—so he could tell his story at will. Other railroads would come later—so would his cornering the gold market. Soon enough, he was called the “Mephistopheles of Wall Street,” or the “Vampire of Wall Street.”6
* * *
Were the Goulds the kind of family that Florence had been looking for all along? Certainly by pinning her colors to Frank Gould’s mast, it showed that she was a fearless gambler. What if Frank was anything like his father, or even worse, the “Franck” the gossip columnists smeared? The call of all those juicy millions resounded in her head, louder than reason. Besides, Florence had yet to meet a man she could not control, and surely the next generation was wildly different from Jay’s.
Frank’s brother, Edwin, resembled his mother in his religious devotion and unswerving dedication to charity for the needy. Helen, the eldest daughter, had been her father’s housekeeper since her mother’s death in November 1887, when she was twenty years old. When Jay died, Helen ran the family estate, Lyndhurst, in Tarrytown, New York, and converted the bowling alley near the dock into a center for teaching undereducated women to sew on the new Singer sewing machines. They were brought to Lyndhurst’s dock on the Hudson River by private boat, fed, and taught the skills Helen believed would serve them in good stead to better their own lives.7 Edwin was like-minded, founding schools in Westchester County with his own foundation. Still, Helen was mocked by her other, more worldly siblings, George and Howard. The youngest children, Anna and Frank, grew to hate the puritanical atmosphere Helen created at home.*
Frank told Florence about his inheritance. If they were to become life partners, he wanted her to know just what she was getting into. Jay Gould died at the family’s 579 Fifth Avenue residence on December 2, 1892, aged only fifty-six. At the time, he owned Western Union Telegraph Company, the Manhattan Railway Company, the Missouri Pacific and St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern railways, as well as extensive investment and property interests, making him one of the wealthiest—and reviled—men in America.
Despite Jay’s terrible reputation, he was a wonderful provider to the wider Gould family, supporting his sisters and brother. He was abstemious, and a dedicated, faithful husband. He loved his children, too, after his fashion. Jay always knew he was building his empire for them, and set up a trust to protect his children from the prevailing tendency in society to be greedy for greed’s sake, which seemed to follow a patriarch’s death just as surely as night follows day. After bequests and payment of debts (including taxes) within the wider family, Jay’s estate was estimated at $73,224,547.08. This figure did not, however, include Jay’s shares in his companies Western Union, the Manhattan Railway Company, or large chunks of Wabash Railroad stock, Texas and Pacific Railroad, Consolidated Coal Company of St. Louis, Wagner Palace Car Company, and as much as $10 million in bonds of the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway Company. A far more realistic value to place on the trust was closer to $150 million.†
The lower calculation was made with an eye to inheritance tax, with New York estate tax set at roughly one percent on large estates. There were no federal income taxes or federal inheritance tax in 1892. Each of the six children shared their one-sixth equally. One of the other stipulations of the trust was that any children of his children needed to be blood children, meaning born in wedlock, to inherit. As both Anna and Frank were minors, George (with the guidance of Helen) would manage their affairs.
Helen was given 579 Fifth Avenue with all its contents. She also had the use of Lyndhurst until Frank came of age. A stipend of $6,000 a month from the estate was also set aside to maintain both properties. George received $5 million outright and $500,000 for each of the five years he had managed the Gould property portfolio. The Gould Family Trust was intended to remain invested in its entirety. With its heirs living off the interest or dividends, and if properly managed, Jay’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren should never know hunger or poverty.
George had already saved Anna from that fate by intervening with a marriage contract just before she wed Boni de Castellane. By becoming her guardian, he again saved her from bankruptcy when he bought Boni off. Even so, the best of intentions do go pear-shaped.8
With Helen’s goodness shunned by Frank and Anna, her influence with George regarding their upbringing and family investments waned. Frank and Anna often called her “Sister Helen” behind her back, referring to her unswerving righteousness. While Howard, Anna, and Frank made their official homes with Helen, as Jay planned, Anna and Frank spent as much time as they possibly could at George’s more fun-loving abode. Their foibles were indulged there, and both grew estranged from their well-meaning sister.
* * *
All the same, did Florence already know about the Gould siblings’ penchant for showgirls and actresses? Had she made a study of the Gould men and their fortune as she’d done with the salonnières of Paris prior to meeting Frank? Their tastes in women were certainly printed in society and gossip columns around the world. Jay Gould died while Florence was a child living in San Francisco. Is it unthinkable that she remembered the Gould name as the family who owned the railroad that carried her away from her home in 1906?
Within a year of Jay’s death, Howard Gould joined the New York Yacht Club and began playing as hard as he worked. He also became smitten with a young actress named Bessie Kirtland, who used the stage name Odette Tyler. In March 1894, Bessie was given a $9,500 ruby ring by Howard, and she made sure that their forthcoming marriage became the steady diet of the Four Hundred gossips.9 That is, until Helen intervened. She discovered that Bessie was divorced. Helen scolded Bessie for dishonesty, until the poor girl called off the wedding. Just over three years later, Howard married a more independently minded actress, Katherine Clemmons, and withdrew further from the family.
This episode, if Florence knew about it, would not have worried her. George
had since married the actress Edith Kingdon, and had two children by his mistress, another showgirl, Guinevere Jeanne Sinclair. Frank told Florence all about the family reaction to them, while making his own feelings about George abundantly clear. George had spent the trust’s money as if it were water. In fact, Frank readily admitted to the acrimony that existed between the brothers.
By 1905, George was spending millions on railroad building, hoping to fulfill his father’s dream of a transcontinental railway.* But he was up against some mighty opponents like J. Pierpont Morgan and Edward Harriman, who were battling George to become the masters of America’s rails. Nothing was too devious for them, including hiring snipers, making piratical forays onto the railroads, and fomenting strikes. The upshot was a heavy reckoning to be paid. Between 1908 and 1911, George would face the wrath of Frank and Anna, both of whom were already spending more time in France than in America. Both accused him of mismanagement and sued. Now, there was an interesting tidbit of information for Florence to lodge away for a rainy day.
Florence told Frank she wanted their relationship to hold nothing back. She wanted both Frank’s heart and wallet. “To hold on to your man,” Florence told friends years later on the Riviera, “you need to occupy him. You make love together for, what? An hour? Maybe only half an hour? Then you have twenty-three other hours to fill. How to occupy that time, and your man, is only learned as one’s lifework.”10 Florence, however, had no intention of being a geisha. Those twenty-three other hours could be filled in whatever way she saw fit to occupy Frank. The best solution, for the present, was her stating that she did not expect him to give up other women, any more than she should give up her dalliances. To have faith in such a relationship, Frank and Florence shared their most private pasts. There would be no secrets between them, they agreed, ever.
