FORTUNE’S CHILDREN
Arthur T. Vanderbilt II
EPIGRAPH
Generations pass while some tree stands, and old families last not three oaks.
–SIR THOMAS BROWNE
CONTENTS
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: THE COMMODORE
CHAPTER 2: THE BLATHERSKITE
CHAPTER 3: ALVA
CHAPTER 4: CONSUELO
CHAPTER 5: ALICE OF THE BREAKERS
CHAPTER 6: THE COURT JESTERS
CHAPTER 7: BILTMORE
CHAPTER 8: THE KINGFISHER
CHAPTER 9: REGGIE
CHAPTER 10: MRS. VANDERBILT
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SEARCHABLE TERMS
PICTURE SECTION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
The Fall of the House of VANDERBILT
INTRODUCTION
Imagine waking up one morning to learn you had won the lottery. You are informed that the jackpot is $10 billion. You, the sole winner, have become the richest person in the world! The lottery officials tell you that you will receive all of the prize money in one lump sum, tax free, that morning. As a condition of receiving the money, you must never give away any of it to charity.
A close approximation of this unlikely event occurred an astonishing number of times during the Gilded Age, that heady time from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, the height of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, when great fortunes were made and spent overnight in a way that had never been seen before and will probably never be seen again.
The nation’s first great industrial fortune was won by the Vanderbilt family, and for a while this family could claim the title of the richest in the world. Subsequent fortunes surpassed it, but by then great wealth was decried. The unique opportunity that confronted the members of this particular family was the freedom to use their fortune just as they damned pleased, to create whatever reality they wanted, to give free rein to their every impulse without any sense of the social responsibilities that great wealth confers.
For the Vanderbilts lived in a day when flaunting one’s money was not only accepted but celebrated. What may have started as playacting, as dressing up as dukes and princesses for fancy dress balls in fairytale palaces, soon developed into a firm conviction that they were indeed the new American nobility.
The bits and pieces of history that chronicle the four-generation saga of the Vanderbilt family are scattered everywhere like a broken string of pearls: in wills and court transcripts, letters, memoirs, journals, newspaper clippings, magazines, scrapbooks, photographs, and auction catalogs. But nowhere is that curious combination of magnificence and absurdity that was the Gilded Age more palpable than in the great country homes that still stand today as monuments to their dreams and fantasies: Idlehour, Marble House, The Breakers, Biltmore, Florham. These country estates were not just bigger or more ornate than other millionaires’ mansions. They rivaled the most magnificent country houses of England and the châteaus of France that had been passed down to titled descendants, generation to generation, since the Middle Ages. They were built to become precisely the American equivalent of these Old World palaces, great ancestral homes that would proclaim for centuries, for all time, the prominence of the Vanderbilts.
But it did not work out that way. Far from becoming ancestral homes, these monuments to limitless wealth, built for eternity, were hardly used for a lifetime. None was occupied by the next generation.
These great estates were but the family’s country retreats, built after the Vanderbilts had achieved social prominence. Their main residences on Fifth Avenue in New York City were designed to so startle the world with their size and splendor that they would secure the family’s preeminent position of social leadership. Dominating the prime real estate of what was even then one of the greatest cities of the world, the ten Vanderbilt mansions that lined Fifth Avenue were examples of epic extravagance. Yet these homes, too, failed to become the family seats their builders had envisioned. One by one, the Vanderbilt mansions on Fifth Avenue fell to the wrecker’s ball, their contents to the auctioneer’s gavel. The first of these Fifth Avenue mansions was completed in 1883, the first was demolished in 1914, and by 1947 every one had been broken to rubble.
This fabled golden era, this special world of luxury and privilege that the Vanderbilts created, lasted but a brief moment. Within thirty years after the death of Commodore Vanderbilt in 1877, no member of his family was among the richest people in the United States, having been supplanted by such new titans as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, and Ford. Forty-eight years after his death, one of his direct descendants died penniless. Within seventy years of his death, the last of the great Vanderbilt mansions on Fifth Avenue had made way for modern office buildings. When 120 of the Commodore’s descendants gathered at Vanderbilt University in 1973 for the first family reunion, there was not a millionaire among them.
What had happened? What had gone wrong with the Vanderbilts’ plans to found a family dynasty? There is no easy answer. The ratification in 1913 of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave Congress the power to tax incomes; rising property taxes; the imposition of estate taxes; the Depression; the fecundity of a family: All splintered the fortune. But taxes, depressions, and reproduction had posed no burden to the establishment of other family dynasties founded in the same era. The most recent listing in the Forbes Four Hundred of the richest people in the United States includes three Fords, with combined fortunes of over $1.5 billion; five Rockefellers holding net assets of over $3 billion, with another $2 billion spread among the rest of the family; and twenty Du Ponts, worth a total of $5 billion, in addition to another $2 billion held by other family members.
What happened to the richest family in the world is a remarkable story that no novelist would dare invent. What began as that peculiarly American dream of rags to riches—in this case, the dream of a Staten Island water rat who turned his ambition and energy, his frugality and hard work into an astounding fortune—became for the Commodore’s descendants an unusual nightmare as they discovered what they could do with the money and what the money could do to them. If ever Scott Fitzgerald needed evidence to substantiate his aphorism that “the very rich…are different from you and me,” it was here in spades in this portrait gallery of extravagant crazies that is the unique saga of the Vanderbilt family.
Today, you can wander through some of the remaining architectural relics of this other world, these homes of baronial opulence whose extraordinary lack of human proportion and perspective says so much about the Gilded Age, and listen to the echoes of the past. What did you think, Alva, as you were building Marble House? Did you think that the world you created would go on forever, that the ball would last past dawn? As they sat in the quiet of the upper loggia of The Breakers and watched the sun rise over the ocean, what dreams did Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt dream? What was the power of the dream that led to the creation of their “summer cottage’? Did this bizarre monument to a fortune make them happy? How did it feel to be rich enough to build Biltmore, that 250-room French Renaissance château set on 146,000 acres in the hills of Asheville, North Carolina, a house so large, its proud architect noted, that the surrounding mountains “are in scale with the house”? What was it like to have more money than anyone else?
The Fifth Avenue mansions, alas, are long gone. But today, if you stroll down Fifth Avenue and if the light is just right and you half close your eyes, you might spot a red carpet being unrolled from the door of a limestone château down the steps to the curb, watch as a burgundy Rolls
-Royce stops in front and guests walk up to the door flanked by maroon-liveried footmen, and hear coming from inside the faraway sounds of an orchestra.
1
THE COMMODORE
1794–1877
1.
That Wednesday morning, May 10, 1876, reporters from every New York City newspaper gathered in front of the townhouse at 10 Washington Place, waiting for some sign that eighty-two-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Commodore as he was called, had passed away.
During the last few days, no one had seen the aging millionaire at any of his favorite haunts. He had not come to his office to oversee his railroad empire. He had not driven his fine team of trotters in the warm spring afternoons while nursing a tumbler of gin laced with sugar. He had not gone to the Manhattan Club for an evening game of whist. Something was wrong. Something had happened.
All morning, the reporters paced up and down Washington Place, a fashionable street until the city’s elite had begun moving up Fifth Avenue. Some ate sandwiches and drank beer. Others played cards. Now and then, one would leave to file a bulletin: The Commodore was dead! The stock market plunged. The Commodore was still alive! Wall Street rallied.
Finally, Frankie, the Commodore’s ravishing thirty-seven-year-old wife, invited the reporters to come in, leading them over threadbare rugs to the large parlor. As they milled about, admiring a bust of the Commodore, and an oil painting of the Commodore in a road wagon driving his favorite team, and the small solid-gold model of one of the Commodore’s steamships, a voice roared down from the upstairs hall, spewing forth a string of obscenities mixed with a message for the reporters:
“I AM NOT DYING!”
The house shook. The reporters froze.
“The slight local disorder is now almost entirely gone! The doctor says I will be well in a few days! Even if I was dying,” the voice bellowed, “I should have vigor enough to knock this abuse down your lying throats and give the undertaker a job!”1
It was vintage Vanderbilt. The reporters quickly departed, convinced the richest man in the world was alive and obviously well.
Alive, yes, but not feeling very well. After the reporters left, the Commodore summoned Dr. Jared Linsly, his physician for the past forty years.
“Doctor,” he told him, “the devil has been after me.”
“Well, don’t let him catch you for if you do, you will not be Commodore Vanderbilt any longer for Commodore Vanderbilt never suffered anybody to catch him!”2
“Doctor, if all the devils in hell were concentrated in me I could not have suffered any more. I want you to make a thorough examination of my case. I think I have neglected myself too long already. I have difficulty in urination, the efforts being protracted and painful. I have hernia and I have piles.”3
He was also suffering from chronic indigestion, he told his elderly physician, accompanied by excessive belching and flatulence.
After examining him, Dr. Linsly advised the Commodore that the difficulty in urination, which was causing the excruciating pain, was the result of an enlarged prostate gland. And what had caused that? the Commodore asked his doctor.
“The authorities considered it might be due, either to stricture, gonorrhea, horse-back riding or excessive sexual intercourse,” Dr. Linsly answered. “It drives the victim of it into venereal excesses; it produces a species of lascivious mindedness; this is what the authorities give as the tendency of that disease.”4
Well, that explained a lot. The Commodore winked at his doctor and asked no more questions about the cause of his troubles. Now all he had to do was get better. He told Dr. Linsly that he “and the Lord were fighting the devil, and were going to whip him.”5
Every day, Dr. Linsly stopped by to visit. When the crusty Commodore was in pain, he lashed out at his physician in terrible fits of temper. “Has the old Doctor come?” he yelled to Frankie. “Is the old Doctor here? Is the old granny here yet?”6 “Blatherskite!” he exploded as Dr. Linsly entered his bedchamber, hurling his favorite epithet for anyone the Commodore considered a dolt. “Bloxhead!” Do something for the pain!7
Uneducated, barely able to read (if a letter was longer than a paragraph or two, he would throw it down in disgust and have his clerk read it to him), superstitious, the Commodore believed in mysticism and the occult and, much to Dr. Linsly’s dismay, was willing to try anything suggested by anyone promising a cure. Believing they were “health conductors,” he even had four pans of salt placed under the four posts of his bedstead, just as a spiritualist advised.
The Commodore had frequently told his friends that he never made a business decision without advice from the spirits, so it was not surprising that now he summoned mediums to his aid.
“I have a communication from your dead wife,” a spiritualist murmured to him during a seance in his darkened bedchamber.
“I don’t care for that now,” the Commodore snapped. As long as he had made contact with the other side, he wanted to take full advantage of the practical aspects of the opportunity. “I want to know about the price of stocks,”8 he told the medium. “Business before pleasure. Let me speak with Jim Fisk.”9 He was clearly feeling better.
The spiritualist obediently conjured up the wraith of his deceased business rival, who began forecasting the prices of railroad stocks. Not agreeing with the predictions he was hearing, the Commodore argued with the spirit, until the medium convinced him he was interfering with the communications from the other world.
Reporters, Wall Street operators, doctors, and occultists were not the only ones interested in the state of the Commodore’s health. His ten children had grown old waiting for this moment. His oldest child was sixty-one; his youngest, forty. Now, like vultures, they swooped around 10 Washington Place, consumed by the vision of picking over his sumptuous estate. The Commodore was not keen to see any of them, for when they entered his room, each one inevitably asked about his will.10 He told them he “had done the best he could for all” in his will and that if he had made a hundred more wills he could not make a better one.11 When he refused to see them, these birds of prey would gather in an adjoining room and, scared to death of the sick old man who was their father, peek through the crack in the open door, staring, waiting.
He felt especially indifferent toward his eight married daughters. They were all right as women went, but, he complained, “they are not Vanderbilts. They do not bear the name of Vanderbilt.”12 One of his daughters had sold her house and given her father the money to invest for her. After he had doubled it, he refused to give any back to her. “Women are not fit to have money anyway,” he explained.13
And he wanted nothing to do with his namesake, Cornelius, the younger of his two sons. Two or three times a day, Corneel would stop by the house, asking to see his father.
“Your son Cornelius is downstairs and wishes to see you,” a servant would tell the Commodore.
“Where is he?”
“In the reception room.”
“Well let him stay there! Why does he come down here? He ought to stay home in Connecticut; he has no business here. I don’t want to see him. Go down and tell him not to come in here again while I am living, or after I am dead.”14
Only fifty-five-year-old William, his older son, was permitted to enter the Commodore’s room unannounced when he stopped in to see his father twice a day.
When Dr. Linsly told the Commodore he was well enough to see all of his children, the Commodore responded in a sudden rage, “No, damn them, they are all bastards but Bill.”15
Alone in the large, sunny second-floor room at the southeast corner of the house, propped up in his bed in the middle of the chamber where he could gaze out the window or at his safe in the corner, the Commodore dozed and dreamed, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Fantastic recurring visions disturbed the octogenarian’s sleep. He felt himself falling, falling to the bottom of the sea. Only the full power of one of his old steamships, the Vanderbilt, was able to pull him slowly to the surface. In
another dream, he had a vision of a roadway shaped like a horseshoe stretched around his bed. At one end of it gathered a large number of his acquaintances, his business associates and rivals from his steamship and railroad days. He traveled with them along the road around his bed, watching as on occasion one of them walked to the edge of the road and dropped off, never to be seen again. Several times during the journey he recalled going to the edge of the road and coming back again, and then continuing on. Now he felt he was standing on the edge once more. He could not tell in what direction he would go.
2.
His journey had begun sixty-six Mays before, on a sunny day on Staten Island when he was about to turn sixteen.
Cornelius had been born on May 27, 1794, in a small farmhouse at Stapleton, Staten Island, a stone’s throw from the waters of New York Bay. He was the fourth of nine children. His mother, Phebe, was a bright, shrewd woman of English ancestry who was the head of the family. She once saved the family farm from foreclosure by opening the grandfather clock in the kitchen and pulling out $3,000 she had squirreled away. His father, Cornelius, was descended from Dutch farmers who had come to the New World from the village of De Bildt, in the highlands of Holland, and settled near Brooklyn, moving to Staten Island in the early 1700s. Plodding and lazy, he supported his large family with some farming and fishing.
A big, healthy, vigorous boy, young Cornelius had no patience for school. He roamed the waterfront by the hour, watching sailing ships from all over the world tack back and forth through the Narrows as they approached New York Harbor and the island of Manhattan, hazy on the horizon. By the age of eleven, he was spending all his time working with his father around the waterfront farm and, whenever he was allowed, helping him sail his periauger—a heavy two-masted barge constructed like those that were used on the Dutch canals—as he took loads of hay, farm crops, fish, and an occasional passenger over to Manhattan, five miles across the Narrows. Cornelius could barely read or write, let alone multiply or divide, but he had mastered the channels and kills around the islands, and knew the ways of the currents and tides and the wind upon the water.
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