And so the morning went. It was not until later in the day that Grace made her first public appearance, having spent hours dressing, selecting from among her hundreds of Paris fashions, some so heavy with pearls and embroidery that they had to be laid out in her closet on twelve-foot shelves; selecting as well from among her five hundred pairs of shoes and matching handbags, eleven white fox neckpieces, and hundreds of jeweled bandeaus, the fashionable headache bands that became her trademark.
Grace was entertaining at least ten thousand guests each year at 640 Fifth Avenue, at Beaulieu, and aboard the North Star. Through her drawing room and grand salon passed the greats of the day: Samuel Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan, Russell Sage, Herbert Hoover, General Pershing, Doris Duke, the duke of Kent, Jim Farley, Ignace Paderewski, Arturo Toscanini, the Prince of Wales, Lord Balfour, John Jacob Astor, every British monarch from Queen Victoria to George VI, King Albert of Belgium, the king and queen of Spain, the crowned heads of Scandinavia and the Netherlands, the king of Siam, princes and presidents, grand dukes, emperors, czars, socialites, brokers, bankers, diplomats. (Winston Churchill was a guest on the night of December 12, 1931, when he was struck by an automobile on Fifth Avenue after leaving the mansion. Grace had warned him about mixing drinks. ‘To the most powerful woman in New York,” he had toasted her. “She will remain thus if she does not meddle in the bacchanalian affairs of men.”25 While he was in the hospital, Grace sent him a wreath of grapes.)
The only person missing from her parties was her husband: Neily Vanderbilt.
It would have been pleasing if history had recorded that Neily Vanderbilt renounced a fortune for the woman he loved and lived happily ever after. Such was not the case. Neily realized soon after marriage how different he and Grace were. He was quiet, shy, introverted, a man who loved to tinker in a laboratory and read scientific journals. Grace was outgoing, exuberant, extroverted, completely self-absorbed. “Grace Vanderbilt,” Theodore Roosevelt once observed, “sees herself in a kind of perpetual fairy tale.”26 At an opera performance in Rome in 1903, she was asked to sit in the box with the king of England. Grace could hardly wait to tell everyone all about it. She wrote to her sister May:
I assure you everyone in the house looked at us, with great interest, seeing all the King’s party in our box. And the dear King himself couldn’t keep his eyes off our box!! I wore my jewels, which I afterward heard from many people were much admired….As soon as the King entered he looked around the house and again spied us out. He then pointed me out to the other royalties….And he said how charming I was. And they all said I had the most beautiful jewels in the house that night. This same lady in waiting said the King of England had told them before this that at Naples I had looked so lovely at the opera! Is it not kind of him to recommend me to the Italian King and Queen? I hear that all the Italian papers speak of me and my jewels. I wore my tiara, my emerald collar, my pearls with the emerald piece Belle gave me, my diamond fringe across the front of my gown (they admire that extravagantly) and my other emerald piece, all this with my yellow and silver gown looked very pretty….The next night we went to the British Embassy reception, arriving very late, 11:45, just as the King was starting away. He stopped and again began quite a conversation, keeping carriages and everything waiting, and he looked dead with fatigue, but his face lighted up and he said, Τ saw you, looking lovely, last night at the opera. Be sure to come to England this season,’ etc. etc. On Sunday the Emperor is to be received by the Pope and on Monday His Holiness is giving us a private audience!!!…Did I tell you old Grand Duke Michael sent me his photo? Dearest Sister, would you mind immediately sending this on to darling Mother and Father as I can’t write all this twice.27
Grace Vanderbilt was a woman who had to be in the limelight all the time.
“It’s just like Grand Central,” Neily once complained to his son about all the guests at 640 Fifth Avenue. ‘Tour mother has become a waltzing mouse.”28
Neily’s son remembered how sometimes before a dinner his father would tiptoe down the stairs and switch the seating cards. “When the guests filed in, and Mother found the tottering, black-wigged Mrs. Astor down with the nobodies at the far end of the table, and a ravishing debutante next to Father, the light of battle really glittered for an instant in those extraordinary green eyes.”29 Bored with the perpetual dinners and endless small talk, Neily began eating his dinner alone in his soundproof laboratory at 640 Fifth Avenue, while Grace reigned downstairs over her dinner table of guests. Soon he was finding reasons to go on frequent railroad inspection tours and to spend more time on National Guard duty, serving as a lieutenant colonel in the fight against the Pancho Villa raids on the Mexican border in 1918, and in World War I as a brigadier general in command of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Brigade in Europe.
As Neily’s parents, Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt, perhaps had realized, clashes with Grace were inevitable.
Grace and Neily had different friends. Grace would not invite Neily’s business friends to the house until she learned they were socially accepted by some of her English acquaintances. Neily had no use for Grace’s pretentious friends. Grace preferred Newport and New York City; Neily, his yacht. Grace loved the opera, or at least to be seen at the opera. Neily could not stand it. Grace never touched a drop of liquor and could not tolerate people who did. Neily smoked three or four packs of cigarettes a day and was drinking heavily.
In the summer of 1924, Grace wrote to one of her sisters:
Darling Sister: a thousand thanks for all your dear letters—another one this morning to cheer and help me! I am feeling so terribly disheartened this evening—and am writing to ask advice, as I am really at the end of my resourceful mind!
The situation is this (and very, very sad for all of us). Neily, poor darling, was so very drunk this evening (our first appearance since landing!) in the restaurant at dinner that, before we had our dessert, Reggie Pembroke very kindly put his arm into Neily’s and led him through the dining room and up to our rooms where he left Neily asleep on the sofa.
Poor darling Neily is continually drunk—every evening. I really do not know what to do or where to go—it is horrible.
I am frightfully grieved and feel treacherous in telling all this so frankly—so bluntly—but now that he has made this unfortunate public exhibition it will be the talk of London—and of the world….I have all these years managed to get Neily straightened out by taking him along for cures and doing something—but now the devil seems to have got hold of him and I cannot combat whatever it is….30
By the time their son, Neil, was ten, in 1908, he became conscious of his parents’ quarrels and fights, of angry voices coming from their rooms, of doors slamming in the mansion, of his father angrily storming out the great bronze doors to Fifth Avenue. Sometimes, the fights were over trivial matters. Neily wanted to take showers; Grace felt a shower was “un-English” and refused to have any installed at 640 Fifth Avenue, so that Neily had to retreat to one of his clubs to take a shower. Suspicious of what her husband was doing whenever he spent time away from home, Grace opened his mail and listened in on his phone conversations until he had private wires installed in his bedrooms in New York and Newport. Most often the disputes had their origins in the role Grace felt that her husband should assume—that of the distinguished host at her multitude of parties, a role in which Neily had no interest. In the family dining room was a small elevator concealed behind the paneling, through which Neily could escape down to the 51st Street entrance when he felt a scene coming on with his wife.
“Your mother is a bully,” Neily once told his son. “If she can’t have her own way, there’s simply no use arguing with her.”31
3.
Grace and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s English butler once commented that Mrs. Vanderbilt ran her house “with more pomp and circumstance than many of the crowned heads of Europe.”32 Six footmen in maroon livery stood at attention each time she left or entered the house, and the red carpet was always r
olled out to the street for her departures and arrivals.
This world in which the Vanderbilts’ two children, Neil and Grace, grew up was certainly one of the most unusual in the United States, a world that was made even more difficult for them by the open warfare between their parents.
“We were taken downstairs to see our parents twice a day: at 9 A.M. to say ‘good morning,’ eat breakfast and bow gracefully; for twenty minutes at 5 P.M. to be displayed to the guests gathered in the drawing room for tea. On neither occasion were we allowed to speak until we were spoken to or beg favors.”33
Aboard the North Star, the children were lectured on how to behave with royalty, and dressed in their little coats with ermine trim when the kaiser came aboard. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a good friend of Grace’s, found the Vanderbilt children “terribly repressed.” As Neil later wrote: “There was no such thing as self-expression in our young lives. We were taught never to exhibit strong emotion, never to laugh or cry too loud; always to rise when a lady entered or left a room and never to sit down in a carriage until all the ladies were seated. We never broke into adult conversations, nor did we speak unless first spoken to. I bowed and sister curtsied to our elders.”34
Andrew Carnegie came over each Sunday evening from five to seven, “accepting the flattery of the grownups and never failing to repeat to the children that the most difficult art on earth is that of holding on to money.”
“Even a fool can make a million dollars, my boy, but it takes a sage to keep it,” Carnegie said. “Do you hear me, Neil?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” eight-year-old Neil answered obediently.35
Andrew Mellon and Henry Frick usually arrived at the house together. Frick, who grandfather Wilson did not believe was “a man to be permitted in the same room with children,” promised Neil a job in a steel plant “if I grew up to be a ‘good boy.’ “Neil noticed that “no other guest in our house mentioned the word ‘dollar’ so often.”36
Grace’s children sometimes were permitted to join her in her bedroom in the morning, helping to arrange the cards bearing the names of that night’s guests to work out the seating plans, alternating names depending on their importance and titles. “Sister and I were also given lessons in proper table settings. Followed by the butler bearing various dishes and condiments on a huge silver tray, Mother led us around and around the gleaming sixty-foot mahogany table. Before I was nine, I knew precisely which dishes remained and which disappeared during a complete seven-course dinner. Nothing in my training as a future perfect party host was left to chance. And when I was away from home, Mother kept up a barrage of hypothetical problems, enough to furrow the brow of the most adept party giver.”37
“Should the former Governor of New York be seated on the right of the hostess and the former Ambassador of Great Britain on her left or vice versa?” Grace quizzed her children in daily lessons on the social niceties. ‘Tears before I had learned the Constitution of the United States, I knew that a Secretary of War should never, never be out-seated by the Secretary of Labor, that both should be shoveled down toward the middle of the table in order to vacate a spot for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and that no Chairman of a New York bank, no matter how many millions in back-taxes he owed the U.S. Government, could be placed on the right of the hostess if a Congressman, no matter how small a chance for reelection he stood, were invited to break our bread. Many a time my sister and I were left without dessert for our failure to distinguish between a full-fledged Ambassador and a Minister Plenipotentiary and many a time we swore that when we grew up we would make all those frightfully important people eat in the kitchen and like it.”38
“By the time I was sixteen,” Neil remembered, “I had lunched and dined with every major crowned head of Europe and the sum of my scholastic knowledge compared most unfavorably with that of a boy of fourteen about to enter the freshman class in high school. It could not have been otherwise. Tossed among New York, Virginia and Florida in winter, I commuted between Newport and Europe in summer and had to rely upon private tutors chosen for their dignified appearance to atone for the lack of regular education. I spoke French, some German and Italian. I swam, fenced, boxed and sailed boats. I shot quail and danced with my tall English governesses, five times my age. But that was all. The rest consisted of disjointed bits and pieces of information communicated to me aboard trains, ships and motorcars….I likewise went to many summer schools in Europe, perhaps to too many schools for my own good: in England, when my parents expected to enter their yacht in the Cowes Regatta; in Germany, when they accepted the Kaiser’s invitation to join the Hohenzollern on a cruise through the Scandinavian fjords; in Spain, when the North Star was to visit San Sebastian. The choice of my summer schools depended entirely on the itinerary of our yacht. I even spent two days in the Academy for boys of ‘aristocratic birth’ in Czarskoie-Selo. I could not speak Russian nor understand my teachers there but it so happened that the reunion of the fashionable yachtsmen of the world was held that year off the coast of Russia.”39
On occasion Grace would take her young son for a walk through an old Newport graveyard, wandering with him among the crumbling tombstones, reading their inscriptions. “All those people in there thought themselves quite some pumpkins, darling, in their day and age. But who remembers them now? When you grow up, you’ll find that life is often very difficult. So have all the good times you possibly can, just so long as you don’t hurt other people.”40
Such was life with Mother Grace. Life with Father Neily was quite a different story. Neily had grown up with a cold, distant father, yet he was if anything even colder toward his son than his father had been toward him.
One day, when Neily and Neil were rowing out to a raft, the young boy fell overboard. Believing that his son was not developing into a good swimmer, Neily kept rowing away. “Of course he thought this would teach me to swim,” his son remembered. “But I nearly drowned before someone else picked me up and took me ashore, and I was ill afterward. I thought it terribly cruel and I never learned to swim until much later.”41
Some years later, when Neil was fifteen, “my father and I went down the gangway to the float of the New York Yacht Club at Newport. The bosun with the megaphone had hailed the North Star and they were sending the launch for us. As we waited on the float, I saw a small dinghy alongside and stepped into it, thinking the launch would come up on its other side. But the dinghy turned turtle with me. My father promptly stepped on its upturned bottom, which forced me to go down below and come up beyond it instead of taking advantage of the air under the boat. My father said such things were the way to teach a boy to be a man, and his father had done the same things to him. But they are things which stick in a child’s mind and make him think, foolishly no doubt, that the parent doesn’t love him.”42
Young Neil tried hard to be close to his father. Once Neily told his wife that he had to go to a directors’ meeting and would therefore have to miss her dinner party that evening. Grace did not believe him. Neil heard his mother telephone and hire a private detective to follow her husband.
Seventeen-year-old Neil wanted to warn his father that trouble was on the way, and tracked him to an apartment next to the New York Yacht Club. Some of his young friends at the yacht club told him that inside the apartment a group of men were watching belly dancers. There, outside the apartment, was the detective his mother had hired. Neil tried to get the detective to leave by giving him the several dollars he had in his pocket. When this didn’t work, he knocked at the apartment door.
“Is Colonel Vanderbilt in there? I’m his son.”
After considerable rustling inside, a woman came to the door.
“There must be a mistake,” she told Neil. ‘There’s nobody by that name here.”
“I just want to tell my father that he’s being followed. My Mother hired a detective and he’s outside the door here.”
The woman closed the door in his face.
The next morning, Neil was called
to see his father. “When I went down to his bedroom, his neck was the color of a turkey gobbler’s and he demanded to know what the hell I was doing following him. My father’s room and my mother’s were separated by their two bathrooms, but I knew that she could be listening, and so I said only that Mother had had him followed and I’d tried to tip him off.”
“Well, for your information,” Neily snarled at his son, “I wasn’t in that apartment; I never go to those things. But I want you to know that I’m going to stop your allowance for the next six months because I don’t like my son following me whether I’m going out on business or on pleasure.”43
Neil found as he grew up that his father “seemed to grow progressively cooler toward me, until finally he seemed as prickly as a porcupine. Almost everything I said and did seemed to irritate him, and more than once he ordered me out of the room because he said I made him nervous.”44 Ironically, “there were times when I liked my father after he had been drinking better than when he had not.”45 Even as his son became a teenager, Neily still treated him like a simple child. When there was something serious to discuss, Neily would dismiss him with a remark such as ‘Tour mother and I want to discuss the price of peas in Denmark, so why don’t you go out, Neil, and run around the block.”46
The lives of Grace and Neily’s two children were at once worldly and cloistered. Escorted everywhere by detectives, not allowed to mingle with other children, Neil until the age of twelve believed that every family lived just the way his did, with mansions and servants and yachts. Yet his parents gave him an allowance of only twenty-five cents each week, and he had no understanding that their wealth had anything to do with him.
It was not until he was away from home at prep school at St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire, that he began to understand what an unusual life he had lived. Several of his classmates asked him to buy them some candy.
Fortune's Children Page 38
