Fortune's Children

by Arthur T. Vanderbilt

  “Of course I shall be delighted to see him,” Bessie replied, “and I shall tell the butler not to fill up his glass too often.”69

  Word that an Italian prince would be at the Lehrs’ party quickly spread among the guests, who were eager to meet him.

  At eight o’clock the next night, the doors of the dining room opened and there was Chicago merchant prince Joseph Leiter holding the hand of his guest, a small pet monkey dressed in formal evening clothes.

  The monkey was treated as the guest of honor, seated between Mrs. Lehr and Mrs. Fish in the place of honor usually reserved for Mrs. Astor.

  Forgiving Bessie Lehr noted that the little prince’s simian manners “compared favourably with those of some princes I have met,”70 at least until he had slurped several glasses of champagne and then climbed to the chandelier to throw light bulbs at her guests.

  Harry and Mamie were in hysterics for days about their Monkey Dinner, as it came to be called, though the papers and preachers were shocked by society’s decadence and wanton extravagance; Harry Lehr and Mrs. Fish, they scolded, had “held up American society to ridicule.”71 Mrs. Astor was not amused. Mr. Fish did not care. Early on he had questioned Mamie about the amount of time she was spending with Harry Lehr. “Oh, him?” she answered her husband. “Why, he is ‘just one of us girls’!”72

  Mamie and Harry began dancing to a wilder beat, with a driving rhythm of madness. “Society wants novel entertainment,” she explained. “It is like a child. It thinks it has everything it needs and cries for it doesn’t know what….I try to give it fillips.”73

  Another season in Newport with the same receptions, the same people, the same conversations. “Same old food, same old faces, same old cakes,” Mrs. Fish complained.74 The rarefied world of the Newport rich, Harry Lehr and Mamie Fish had decided, was vapid, silly, selfish. All the men could talk about was their boring work and making money. The women couldn’t even talk about that, for most confessed to having no idea what it was their husbands did. “My dear young woman,” one of the Four Hundred told a visitor, “there is no conversation in this country—none at all. No, no, no, none at all, and forgive me if I say so, madame, but here in Newport it is damn stupid.”75

  Harry Lehr decided it was time to do something different, and sent out invitations to a “dogs’ dinner,” inviting all of his friends’ pets, accompanied by their owners, to a dinner given on his veranda, with leaves from the dining room table set on trestles about a foot high as a table for the dogs. One hundred dogs attended, some attired in fancy dress, to eat the menu of stewed liver and rice, fricassee of bones and shredded dog biscuit. One dachshund ate so much that it dropped unconscious by its plate and had to be carried home.

  One day Mrs. Fish and Harry Lehr wandered into an auction in progress on Bellevue Avenue and seated themselves at the back of the auction room.

  “Who will bid for this magnificent piece of furniture?” the auctioneer called out, pointing to a fire-screen. “Genuine Chinese antique.”

  Harry Lehr emitted a hollow groan. Mamie Fish covered her eyes with her hands and shook her head. Everyone in the audience turned to look, as the auctioneer glared at them with murder in his eyes. On he went, describing the fire screen. No one bid.

  A china cabinet was next on the block. Harry’s groans grew louder. Mamie seemed as if she would faint if she had to look at the cabinet. No one bid on the cabinet.

  Item after item was displayed, extolled by the auctioneer, and taken away without a bid, as Mamie and Harry continued their pantomime.

  The auctioneer slammed down his hammer. “The sale is suspended until the lady and gentleman in the back leave the hall!”

  Mamie and Harry sat looking straight ahead, the picture of innocence, until they were all but forcibly removed from the hall.

  They were not yet finished. No sooner had they walked outside than Mrs. Fish began shrieking, ‘Oh, oooh, look! He can’t get the horse to stop! He will be killed! There’s going to be a frightful accident! Oh! Oh! How terrible!”76

  Everyone in the auction hall rushed outside, only to see Mamie Fish and Harry Lehr driving off in their carriage, doubled over with laughter.

  Old Mr. James Van Alen had invited all of Newport to his home, Wakehurst, for a musicale in honor of J. Pierpont Morgan. Bessie Lehr received her invitation, but Harry was not invited.

  Harry rushed to the home of Mrs. Fish to determine what the problem was. She was equally chagrined. Mr. Fish had received an invitation, but she had not been included. At Bailey’s Beach, Mrs. Fish cornered Mr. Van Alen.

  “Very sorry, my dear,” he said, adjusting his monocle. “Upon my word very sorry, but I can’t have you and Harry Lehr at this party of mine. You make too much noise.”

  “Oh, so that’s it! Well, let me tell you, sweet pet,” Mrs. Fish informed the old man, “that unless we are asked, there won’t be any party. Harry and I will tell everyone that your cook has developed smallpox, and we will give a rival musicale. You will see that they will all come to it.”77

  Van Alen relented when he was promised that “the two disturbing elements” would stay on the terrace during the music.

  Once Mrs. Fish sent out invitations for a dinner and ball “in honour of the Grand Duke Boris of Russia,” who was then visiting Mrs. Ogden Goelet (Grace Vanderbilt’s sister, May) in her Newport mansion, Ochre Court. (Grand Duke Boris, who had married the sister of the czarina, had ingratiated himself with the Four Hundred by commenting, “I have never dreamt of such luxury as I have seen in Newport. We have nothing to equal it in Russia.”78) Because of Mrs. Fish’s refusal to invite a friend of Mrs. Goelet’s to the ball, Mrs. Goelet arranged another dinner for the grand duke at her home the same night as Mamie’s reception.

  Mrs. Fish was frantic.

  “You have got to get me out of this, Lamb,” she said to Harry Lehr. “You must do something.”

  “Mrs. Goelet will keep her word; she won’t let the Grand Duke come,’ Harry thought aloud. “The only thing you can do is to turn the whole thing into a joke. You must make people laugh so much that they will not be quite sure of what has really happened.”

  Mrs. Fish hit upon it.

  “I know, Lamb, you will have to impersonate the Czar of Russia!”79

  That evening, Mrs. Fish greeted her guests in the hall of Crossways. All two hundred who had accepted her invitation arrived, despite the later invitation each had received from Mrs. Goelet. All waited for Grand Duke Boris to appear.

  He was late. The guests began whispering that maybe he was over at Mrs. Goelet’s party after all.

  Mrs. Fish seized the moment.

  “His Majesty is a little late.”

  “His Majesty?” the guests around her asked.

  “Yes, His Majesty! I could not get the Grand Duke Boris after all, but I have got someone better. Lambs and pets, His Most Gracious Imperial Majesty—the Czar of All the Russias!”

  The door flew open. Mrs. Fish dropped in a low curtsy, followed by all the other ladies, as the gentlemen bowed, to rise “with shrieks of laughter when they realized they were paying homage to Harry Lehr.”80

  There, coming through the doors, dressed in Mamie’s ermine-lined opera coat turned inside out, his chest covered with medals purchased the day before at a Newport party shop, was Harry Lehr, who took Mrs. Fish by the arm and paraded among the guests, speaking a few words to each in broken English.

  The next morning at Bailey’s Beach, the grand duke spoke to Harry Lehr.

  “I hear you represented the Emperor last night. It’s a good thing you were not in Russia, but I only wish I had been there to see it. It must have been most amusing. Our party was poisonous. We shall have to call you King Lehr in the future!”81

  And King Lehr it was, forevermore.

  Oh, Harry, Harry, quite contrary

  How does your garden grow?

  wrote Mamie in verse for Harry.

  With terrapins and champagne corks

  And magnums all in a ro
w. 82

  Mrs. Astor was shocked by what was happening to society. Surely Ward McAllister had been correct. “Society,” he had said, “needs to be managed just as a circus is managed.”83

  “I am not vain enough to believe that New York will not be able to get along without me,’ Mrs. Astor opined as the twentieth century commenced. “Many women will rise up to fill my place. But I hope that my influence will be felt in one thing, and this is, in discountenancing the undignified methods employed by certain New York women to attract a following. They have given entertainments that belonged under a circus tent rather than in a gentlewoman’s home.”84

  It was obvious that Mrs. Astor was referring to Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish.

  “Mrs. Astor,” cooed Mamie in her sweetest voice, “is an elderly woman.”85

  3.

  Mrs. Astor was indeed getting old. The world might be changing, with each woman “trying to outdo the others in lavish display and mad extravagance”86 as she said, but her own world changed not at all. Once a year, her subjects, responding to her imperial summons, came to pay homage to their dowager queen at her annual ball, with its predictable ceremonial quadrilles and stilted conversations. Elderly, bewigged, wrinkled, but still game, she dressed in a royal-purple Marie Antoinette costume and wore “a massive tiara that seemed a burden upon her head” and “was further weighted down by an enormous dog collar of pearls with diamond pendant attachments.’ She wore also her celebrated Marie Antoinette stomacher of diamonds and a high diamond corsage ornament. Diamonds and pearls were pinned here and there about the bodice. She was, Town Topics concluded, “a dozen Tiffany cases personified.’87 Early in the evening, after greeting all her guests, Mrs. Astor slipped away from her party and went to bed.

  To the press, she was still “the Queen.” In January 1900 it was reported as a news item that “she drives in the park each day between the hours of 4 and 5 and…she one day during the week got down from her carriage and walked a long way on one of the paths while her carriage followed her slowly.’88

  The only challenge to Mrs. Astor’s long reign had come not from one of the new leaders of society with their madcap amusements, but from within. Her nephew William Waldorf Astor believed that, as head of the House of Astor, his wife was the one and only “Mrs. Astor,” and to prove it even went to the trouble of having calling cards engraved for her with those two magic words, MRS. ASTOR. The attempted coup to overthrow the queen of society was an utter failure, and, frustrated, William Waldorf Astor packed his bags and took his wife to England, never to return. But he would have the last laugh: He arranged for his family’s mansion, which was separated by a garden from Mrs. Astor’s home at 350 Fifth Avenue, to be razed, and on the site constructed the thirteen-story Waldorf Hotel, thus rendering Mrs. Astor’s famous brownstone uninhabitable.89

  Mrs. Astor had learned a thing or two over the years from her friend Alva Vanderbilt, and in 1891, soon after the noisy construction began on the Waldorf, called Richard Morris Hunt to design for her a gray limestone French Renaissance château uptown at 840 Fifth Avenue, far away from the Waldorf Hotel and above the Vanderbilts’ territory on the avenue. On February 1, 1896, she moved in, and two days later opened for her annual ball her new gold and white ballroom with its rug woven of peacock tails.

  And on and on she went, year after year, until 1905 when, at the age of seventy-five, she suffered a stroke and fell down a flight of marble stairs, and the bronze gates of her Renaissance palace closed forever to the faithful Four Hundred. Januaries came and went and the invitations to her annual ball were never sent. She was “quite small and shrunken with white hair and a cap,’90 a granddaughter recalled, as she wandered alone through the grand halls and salons of her home, checking the dining table, ordering the preparation of invitations that were never mailed, standing in front of her portrait greeting one last time “imaginary guests long dead, conversing cordially with phantoms of the most illustrious social eminence,’91 until her death on October 30, 1908.

  Alva Vanderbilt had no intention of picking up Mrs. Astor’s crown as society’s queen, having lost interest in it years before when she realized that it could be hers. And she certainly wasn’t ready yet to lead the life above reproach required of the Queen of Society.

  It had been rumored at the time Alva and Willie separated that Willie was seeing Alva’s best friend, Consuelo, duchess of Manchester. With her divorce final and her daughter safely ensconced at Blenheim with the duke of Marlborough, Alva turned to Willie’s best friend, Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, as her next project.

  O.H.P. Belmont was the recently divorced son of August Belmont, a German Jew who had come to the United States in 1837 at the age of twenty-one as the agent for the Rothschilds, and had immediately assumed an important role in handling the banking requirements of a growing nation. A financial genius who quickly accumulated an enormous personal fortune, a diplomat who served as American minister to the Netherlands and consul general of Austria, an urbane man of continental charm and glamour, Belmont married in 1849 the dreamily beautiful Caroline Perry, the daughter of Commodore Matthew Perry, credited with opening Japan to American commerce, and the niece of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the naval hero of the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. For many years prior to the ascendancy of Mrs. Astor, the Belmonts were the leaders of New York and Newport society.

  As Willie’s best friend, Oliver Belmont joined the Vanderbilts on many of their long cruises aboard the Alva and the Valiant, including the voyage to India in 1893 on which Alva and Oliver fell in love.

  After his father died in 1890, Oliver had commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to build a cottage for him several blocks from Marble House down Bellevue Avenue. By 1893 his massive fifty-two-room Louis XIII—style manor, Belcourt Castle, was complete.

  As a new bachelor, he had designed it just as he pleased. Hunt must have swallowed hard and concentrated on his guiding architectural principle: “It’s your client’s money you’re spending. If they want you to build a house upside down standing on its chimney, it’s up to you to do it, and still get the best possible results”—for the entire first floor of the mansion was devoted to Oliver Belmont’s passion: It was composed of a multitude of stables for his prize horses. Belmont could drive his carriage right through the front doors of Belcourt Castle into the house, and there his horses could be housed in the splendor they deserved, with individual tiled, upholstered stables, paneled in teak, decorated with harness fittings of sterling silver, tended by special English grooms who changed the horses’ blankets of pure white linen embroidered with the Belmont crest three times a day. ‘Oh! To lodge horses so,” sighed a guest at Belcourt Castle, Julia Ward Howe, the poet who wrote ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “and be content that men and women should lodge in sheds and cellars!”92

  Leaving their carriage by the stables, visitors to Belcourt Castle would climb the grand staircase to the living quarters. A ballroom that could easily hold five hundred guests was graced by two stuffed horses, Oliver’s favorites with which he could not bear to part, mounted by dummies dressed in full suits of armor. More suits of armor decorated the monumental Gothic rooms with their huge thirteenth-century stained-glass windows, emblazoned with the coat of arms of Dunois, the Bastard of Orléans. “My dear Oliver,” Harry Lehr once questioned when he first noticed the coat of arms, “why proclaim yourself illegitimate?”93

  Belcourt Castle was just what Oliver Belmont wanted, right down to the solid-gold and sterling-silver door hinges and knobs. But Alva, who, like many women, found Oliver to be “one of the handsomest men…with his dark eyes, clear-cut profile and slender, faun-like grace,”94 knew that the house just could not be what he really wanted. As soon as it was complete and he had begun to live there, she helped him remodel it, adding additional master bedrooms, one with just the sort of sunken bathroom she would like herself, a bathroom the size of a large living room.

  Alva always bragged that she was one of the first to do ever
ything: the first of her set to marry a Vanderbilt; the first society lady to divorce; the first woman to ride a bicycle; the first to cut off her waist-length hair. (“I always thought long hair a frightful waste of time and energy. I don’t think it made women lazy, but it did make us irritable. To my mind it was woman’s curse and not her beauty.’95) There was no reason why she shouldn’t be the first divorced society leader to marry again, to marry a divorced man who happened to be part Jewish and, at thirty-eight, was five years her junior. To their surprise, Alva and Oliver found that no church wanted anything to do with their marriage, and so, on January 11, 1896, two months after Consuelo’s marriage to Marlborough, they were married in a civil ceremony, conducted by the mayor of New York City, attended only by Alva’s two sons, Willie K. and Harold. “I knew I had hungered for years, that I had existed, never lived,” said Alva. “At last free, my own mistress, the great power within me to love claimed my whole being and all willing, I married that man who completed for me a life in its perfection in every sense. Few, alas, I believe have realized as I have marriage in its entirety.”96

  “Every woman should marry twice,” Alva told her friends, “the first time for money, the second time for love.”97 For love and money, she might have added, for she was not so blinded by love to forget that “money alone has power.”98 Oliver’s wedding gift to Alva was the deed to Belcourt Castle. Alva closed up Marble House, except to continue to have all her washing and ironing done there because of its superior laundry facilities, and took over as chatelaine of Belcourt Castle.

  Tourists on day trips through the summer resort were brought outside of Belcourt where the driver of the sight-seeing van, speaking through his megaphone, described “one of the sights of Newport” to his passengers. One day, the tour guide stopped his van in front of the mansion as the guests at one of Alva’s luncheons were finishing dessert.