The rector of the fashionable St. George’s Protestant Episcopal Church in New York City doubted whether money of the rich spent on fancy dress costumes for the ball would really help the indigent: “This affair will draw attention to the growing gulf which separates the rich and the poor, and serve to increase the discontent of the latter needlessly. It is hardly to the point to talk of setting money into circulation. I believe it to be a deplorable thing to do anything that will emphasize the poverty of the poor or augment their discontent. The meat of the matter is that in a time of general depression, with poverty all too prevalent, it is unwise to give to social reformers and would-be revolutionists any handle for their fanatical efforts”15 The Reverend Dr. Rainsford advised his parishoners not to attend the ball.
“God pity the shivering, starving poor these days and send a cyclone of justice upon the ball of selfishness!” ranted a Brooklyn pastor. “Sedition is born in the lap of luxury—so fell Rome, Thebes, Babylon, and Carthage,” lectured the Reverend Madison Peters in his sermon “The Use and Misuse of Wealth.” “I believe that such an affair as that to be given by the Bradley Martins is an incentive to anarchy.”16
A politician, a Republican to boot, stated that it would serve the Bradley Martins right if an anarchist did throw a bomb into the party as the papers were predicting, and blow “the dancing fops and their ladies to spangles and red paste.”17
Nevertheless, the Bradley Martins pressed on, convinced of the soundness of their good intentions.
At 11 o’clock on the night of February 10, 1897, all of society was at the Waldorf: Mrs. Astor, Mamie Fish, Harry Lehr, Grace and Neily Vanderbilt, Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, Winthrop Rutherfurd, Lispenard Stewart, Mrs. Orme Wilson, August Belmont in a suite of gold-inlaid armor that had cost $10,000. (“Were all the costumes ticketed with the price?” the London Chronicle wondered upon learning the costs of many of the gowns and costumes, down to the price of the diamond buttons.18) No one would have missed this ball, especially with the exciting possibility of witnessing the first skirmishes of a class war as promised by the press. Society was prepared. Bradley Martin had hired a squad of policemen to stand outside and protect his guests as they arrived. All of the ground-floor windows of the Waldorf had been boarded to repel bombs. And Pinkerton detectives dressed in period costumes mingled with the guests, looking for anarchists.
The walls of the ballroom were draped with tapestries, the room filled with six thousand orchids. There were fifty musicians, jeweled favors, and endless quadrilles. Dinner was served by waiters in royal livery. And all evening long, Mr. Bradley Martin, dressed as Louis XV, and Mrs. Bradley Martin, as Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, bedecked in Marie Antoinette’s ruby necklace, dressed in a gold-embroidered gown trimmed with pearls and precious stones, greeted their guests as they approached their thrones.
The total amount of money that the ball put into circulation, according to Bradley Martin’s calculations, was $369,200. This had certainly not been the costliest ball of the Gilded Age, nor the most exclusive, nor the most original. But it was the most notorious. Fourteen years before, Alva Vanderbilt’s fancy dress ball had received front-page coverage as AN EVENT NEVER EQUALLED IN THE SOCIAL ANNALS OF THE METROPOLIS. The Bradley Martin Ball received front-page coverage consisting of ridicule and satire and condemnation. The times were changing.
The Bradley Martins never understood the public outcry over their ball, which they were convinced had sprung solely from their humanitarian impulse to help the needy. The criticism would blow over, they were sure. They could withstand it. But the final straw came with a visit from New York City’s tax collector, who reappraised their mansion in light of their obvious wealth and doubled their tax assessment. Enough ingratitude was enough. The Bradley Martins sold their home and moved to England, never to return.
2.
Among the most conspicuous of those indulging in conspicuous consumption were the grandchildren of Commodore Vanderbilt. The uproar over the Bradley Martin Ball bothered them not one whit, for they were believers in the types of sermons given by Bishop Paddock of New York City’s Christ Church. Wealth, the bishop preached, was God-given. “He calls some men to make money, a million it may be in one case, a thousand in another. Whatever the difference may be between the men who make these sums is God-given, and the millionmen should realize that fact and live accordingly.”19 The Vanderbilt grandchildren did. “They are inveterate builders, are these American millionaires,” wrote a historian of the Gilded Age. “What with the six or seven great New York houses of the Vanderbilt family, and their still larger number of country estates, it could be plausibly argued that among them they have invested as much money in the erection of dwellings as any of the royal families of Europe, the Bourbons excepted”20
The grandchildren of the Commodore had indeed done very well in the ten years since the death of their father, William H. Vanderbilt, in 1885.
As befit the eldest son, Cornelius had built himself the biggest mansion on Fifth Avenue and the biggest summer cottage in Newport.
Willie had the most elegant mansion on Fifth Avenue and in Newport, not to mention his eight-hundred-acre country estate on Long Island and the largest steam yacht afloat.
Brother Frederick lived in the mansion at Fortieth Street and Fifth Avenue that the Commodore had given his son William, and that William Vanderbilt had in turn given to his son Frederick. In the spring and fall, he could relax at his fifty-room Italian Renaissance mansion on six hundred acres in Hyde Park, New York, with commanding views of the Hudson; in the summer he could retreat to Rough Point, his mansion in Newport; and, in between, he sailed aboard his yacht, the Conqueror.
Sister Margaret Louisa lived with her husband, Elliott F. Shepard, in the twin mansion her father had built next to his home at 640 Fifth Avenue; at Woodlea, the couple’s estate in Scarborough, New York; and in their summer cottage at Bar Harbor, Maine.
The other twin mansion, at 640 Fifth Avenue, was occupied by sister Emily and her husband, William D. Sloane, when they were not at their villa, Elm Court, in Lenox, Massachusetts, or at their mansion in Washington, D.C.
Florence Adele, the third daughter of William H. Vanderbilt, had married Hamilton McKown Twombly, who had inherited from his father an interest in several railroads, and whose business acumen the Vanderbilts relied on in overseeing their finances. The couple lived at 684 Fifth Avenue in the mansion Florence’s father had built for them, as well as at Vinland, their summer estate in Newport, which adjoined The Breakers, and at Florham, their 110-room mansion set on one thousand acres in the rolling hills of Morris County in New Jersey.
In the mansion next door to Florence’s on Fifth Avenue lived sister Eliza, who had married Dr. William Webb, president of the Wagner Palace Car Company. When not in the city, they enjoyed Shelburne Farms, a sprawling mansion and thirty-five-hundred-acre estate in Shelburne, Vermont, near Burlington.
George Vanderbilt was the youngest of the eight children of William H. Vanderbilt, born nineteen years after his oldest brother, Cornelius. As the youngest child, he was his father’s favorite and his father’s constant companion.
George was different from his older brothers, showing no interest in the family business, in society, or in the sporting activities that occupied his brothers’ free moments. To his niece Consuelo, he didn’t even look like a Vanderbilt; with his dark hair and eyes, moustache, pale complexion, and slender, almost frail build, he seemed to Consuelo like a Spaniard.
As his brothers and sisters were engaging in the most frenetic mansion-building binge the United States had seen, George was quite content to live at home with his mother at 640 Fifth Avenue, haunting secondhand bookstores to buy volumes to add to his collection of old books, which he kept in a library near his bedroom on the second floor.
George had inherited $1 million from his grandfather, the Commodore; his father gave him an equal amount on his twenty-first birthday. He inherited $5 million more when his father died in 1885, as well as the inc
ome from a $5 million trust fund. But money seemed of little interest to him. Shy, introverted to the point of almost appearing simple-minded to those who first met him, he spent his time among his books, reading, studying philosophy, becoming fluent in eight foreign languages, and learning the histories of all the paintings in his father’s gallery.
In the winter of 1888, three years after the death of William H. Vanderbilt, twenty-six-year-old George and his mother went to the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina to get away from the cold New York City winter. George was captivated by the magnificent vistas and sparkling fresh air of this mountain country near Asheville, and decided he would build a retreat so that he and his mother could visit there every winter. This was just like George, his brothers and sisters concluded when they heard of his plans. Everyone was building on the fashionable sections of Fifth Avenue and Newport, and there he went, building a lodge in the impoverished Appalachian mountain country of western North Carolina, miles and miles from civilization.
George bought a tract of land in 1889 and began construction of his house later that year.
Six years later, with everything almost as he wanted it, he invited his mother and all his brothers and sisters and their families to come spend Christmas with him at his new home, Biltmore.
On Christmas eve, a procession of private railroad palace cars rolled into Asheville and were switched onto the spur line George had laid from the Southern Railway to his property. His mother arrived in her private car, followed by Cornelius and Alice and their children, Willie in his palace car, Idlehour, the Frederick Vanderbilts in their car, Vashta, the Seward Webbs, Florence and Hamilton Twombly—everyone was there, along with enough servants to take care of them for this week in the wilderness of North Carolina, while they inspected what young George had been up to.
George had begun with the purchase of five thousand acres in 1889, and then had decided that he did not want any neighbors close by. He continued acquiring land with the addition of contiguous parcels of small farms and one-room log cabins. One old black farmer with nine acres in the heart of the growing estate refused to sell, stating that he had “no objection to George Vanderbilt as a neighbor”21 But Vanderbilt money never failed to do the trick in this impoverished countryside. Before he finished, the estate boasted enough land to keep any neighbor far away: 146,000 acres, 228 square miles. It would have taken one week to travel on horseback around the borders of his kingdom.
The carriage trip for George’s mother and brothers and sisters and their families from the front gates, where the railroad tracks stopped, to his house was three more miles, but magical miles they were. When he had first begun buying this mountain property, he had called upon the most noted landscape architect of the day, elderly Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of such wonders as Central Park in New York, the grounds around the U.S. Capitol, public parks in Boston, Chicago, and Buffalo, and the university grounds at Stanford, Cornell, and Amherst. Olmsted spent several days riding around this domain with George Vanderbilt. He found Vanderbilt “a delicate, refined and bookish man, with considerable humor, but shrewd, sharp, exacting and resolute in matters of business”22 and thus was quite candid with him about the possibilities of this vast tract.
“Now I have brought you here to examine it,” George said to his wise old friend, “and tell me if I have been doing anything very foolish”
“What do you imagine you will do with all this land?” Olmsted asked.
“Make a park of it, I suppose.”
“You bought the place then simply because you thought it had good air and because, from this point, it had a good distant outlook. If that was what you wanted you have made no mistake. There is no question about the air and none about the prospect. But the soil seems to be generally poor. The woods are miserable, all the good trees having again and again been culled out and only runts left. The topography is most unsuitable for anything that can properly be called park scenery. It’s no place for a park. You could only get a very poor result at great cost in attempting it.”
“What could be done with it?”
“Such land in Europe would be made a forest; partly, if it belonged to a gentleman of large means, as a preserve for game, mainly with a view to crops of timber. That would be a suitable and dignified business for you to engage in; it would, in the long run, be probably a fair investment of capital and it would be of great value to the country to have a thoroughly well organized and systematically conducted attempt in forestry, made on a large scale. My advice would be to make a small park into which to look from your house, make a small pleasure ground and gardens; farm your river bottoms chiefly to keep and fatten live stock with a view to manure; and make the rest a forest, improving the existing woods and planting the old fields.”23
That sounded fine to George, who told Olmsted to begin at once. Old, lame, and in poor health, Olmsted was rejuvenated by the prospect of undertaking such an enormous project. With a large staff and no limit on expenses, he immediately began the work of surveying, grading, laying out miles of roads, constructing bridges, culverts, drains, preparing nurseries and fields, planting rare and unusual flowering trees and shrubs, scouring swamps and valleys for native azaleas and rhododendrons, building a great English walled garden of four acres with formal beds of roses, tulips, perennials, and annuals. Through his cultivation and alteration of the land, he began painting picturesque compositions with vistas and lawns, trees and shrubs.
The winding road the Vanderbilt family carriages followed that Christmas Eve took them along ravines, ever upward into the mountains, past woodland pools, springs, and streams, deep forests of majestic conifers and hardwoods, with each side of the road highly cultivated with azaleas and rhododendrons.
The road was designed so that there were no vast spaces or distant outlooks until finally the forests opened up. They were on the summit of a mountain that had been cut flat, with breathtaking views over the French Broad River where it met the Swannanoa River, over parks, pastures, hills, and beyond to the double peak of Mount Pisgah and in the distance the Great Smoky Range and the Black Mountains. George owned it all. But it was hard to focus on the view and hard for even this group of jaded millionaires to keep their jaws from dropping in wonder, for there before them stood young brother George’s retreat, Biltmore, the largest house that had ever been built in the United States.
George had developed almost a father-and-son relationship with Richard Morris Hunt when he had helped his father work with the architect in designing the family mausoleum on Staten Island. Hunt shared these feelings with his youngest Vanderbilt patron, and enjoyed every moment of his work on the proposed mountain retreat. “Richard went to Biltmore full in anticipation of pleasure,” Hunt’s wife wrote in her journal, “for here George Vanderbilt watched over him with affectionate solicitude, and…even his professional work was made easy by the perfect harmony between himself and his client”24
With this type of close working relationship, with the grand mountain site that George had selected, and with George’s desire to build a home suitable to house the monumental works of art he had been acquiring on his trips abroad and storing at his mother’s home, Hunt, like Olmsted, saw the opportunity to create the masterpiece of his career.
In the spring of 1890, Hunt made his first trip to the site in Vanderbilt’s private railroad car. There, everything was happening at once. The land was being cleared; trees were being planted; the site was being surveyed; thirty-two thousand bricks a day were spewing forth from the kilns that had been built on the estate; three hundred men were grading and clearing the forests. A nearby mountain with a spring of fine water that suited George Vanderbilt’s taste had been purchased and a reservoir was being built, along with a filtration plant, pumping machinery, and five miles of pipe to bring the water to his new house. “Everything is progressing rapidly and well” Hunt wrote to his wife; “certain vistas have been opened up within the last two days and a grand establishment may be expected—noth
ing being spared by G. W. V. If it is not a success the fault will lie with us, who are called upon to do our best”25
Architect and patron set out to create the finest country home in America. The thirty-five-acre leveled mountaintop, surrounded by several hundred acres of parkland Olmsted was creating from the forests, would be dominated by a great château, not cramped on a city lot on Fifth Avenue or on a few acres of windswept waterfront in Newport, but a real château set in countryside similar to France’s Loire Valley. Patterned after three of the greatest of the French châteaus—Chambord, Blois, and Chenonceaux—the mansion would have a front 780 feet long, and would cover 5 acres, the same size as the Commodore’s Grand Central Depot. Built of Bedford stone and Indiana limestone, with a skyline of towers and mullioned windows, the home would contain 250 rooms, including 40 master bedrooms, certainly enough if all the members of the Vanderbilt family came calling.
“The chateau is beginning to hum” Richard Hunt wrote to his wife as the work progressed. “The mountains are just the right size and scale for the chateau!”26
Just as the mountains seemed to be in scale with Biltmore, so the rooms of the mansion were in scale with the château, from the palm court, a sunken marble conservatory filled with flowers, palms, and ferns, to the walnut-paneled library with ceiling-high bookcases holding over twenty thousand leather-bound volumes, to the ninety-foot-long tapestry room, to the seventy-two- by forty-two-foot banquet hall with its ribbed timber ceiling arching seventy-five feet above the parquet floor, three enormous marble fireplaces, five 16th-century silk-and-gold Flemish tapestries that had belonged to King Henry Vili, a cathedral pipe organ taller than a three-story house, and seventy-six antique Italian chairs around the dining room table.
Young George Vanderbilt, accompanied by Richard Hunt and his wife, had traveled around Europe in the summer of 1889 to visit some of the historic châteaus of France and to collect treasures for Biltmore. “G.W.V. was insatiable in his desire to see beautiful interiors and pictures” Mrs. Hunt recalled, “and I can see him now, as he surreptitiously passed historic rooms and announced with glee that the long gallery at ‘Biltmore’ was a few feet longer or broader. One morning we spent at the great Oriental carpet warehouse of Robinson, where G.W.V. selected three hundred rugs for the house yet to be built”27 Every room in this magnificent château in the middle of nowhere was filled with priceless treasures, paintings by Renoir and Boldine, portraits by Sargent, Singer, and Whistler, Dürer engravings, tapestries by the score, wall hangings that had been Cardinal Richelieu’s, Napoleon’s chess set, not to mention the oak, marble, and limestone carvings of Karl Bitter that graced every nook and cranny of the home.
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