Fortune's Children

by Arthur T. Vanderbilt

  Canfield advised each of his guests, including Reginald Vanderbilt, that if they played at the roulette wheel or the baccarat tables or at faro too long, the only winner would be Richard Canfield. It was inevitable. Those were the odds. That was how he made his money. Reggie found this advice easy to forget as Canfield’s servants laid out a magnificent buffet late in the evening, served the finest wines from the cellar, and dispersed costly cigars. By the end of his twenty-first birthday celebration, Reggie’s inheritance had been depleted by $70,000. He yawned and went home.

  To keep abreast of his studies, Reggie was tutored throughout his four years at Yale. At commencement, however, he did not receive his diploma for he had failed one of his exams. Instead, he left Yale with two things: a fiancée—the beautiful, chestnut-haired Cathleen Neilson, whom he married on April 14, 1903,1 and who gave birth the next year to a daughter, Cathleen—and a diagnosed case of cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by his immoderate fondness for brandy milk punches.

  Reggie was never employed and never did a lick of work. Somewhat at a loss when asked his occupation, he usually responded, “Gentleman.” When in the city, he lived in a drab four-story brownstone at 12 East Seventy-seventh Street, primarily distinguished by being one of the first private homes to have a fully equipped bar installed in it. Other than in having a good time, his only real interest lay in breeding show horses and polo ponies at the 280-acre estate he bought after graduating from Yale, Sandy Point Farm in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, six miles outside of Newport and a half mile from his brother Alfred’s Oakland Farm. There at Sandy Point, around a rambling colonial home with a pillared portico, were stables for fifty horses, Reggie’s pride and joy. Near the house he built a racetrack where he could watch his horses being trained, often hiring a brass band to play in the center of the ring to liven up the sessions. He built a large room overlooking the track in which he displayed all the cups, trophies, and ribbons the Vanderbilt stables had won.

  Self-indulgent, lazy, lackadaisical, Reggie had absolutely no sense of responsibility or purpose other than to keep himself from being bored. His peccadilloes made good copy, and the press reveled in reporting all of his improprieties. With his pet bull terrier seated next to him, its legs fitted with leather leggings, its back draped in a leather coat, goggles over its eyes, Reggie raced his automobile over the quiet country roads of Newport. Angry farmers threw stones at him, and the police lay in wait to hand out speeding tickets. On five separate occasions in New York City he struck pedestrians, killing two men, injuring two others, and leaving one young boy severely injured. Because he was a Vanderbilt, he was never prosecuted. There were accusations of falsifying his federal income tax returns. There were stories that he lavished invaluable jewels on casual female acquaintances. Rumors persisted that a Newport gentleman had given Reggie a severe beating for seeing his wife, and when that did not seem to get the message across, shot him—rumors that the Vanderbilt family found hard to deny when the usually gregarious Reggie was absent from public sight for several months, recuperating.

  And then there were the astonishing gambling losses at Canfield’s, $400,000 over the course of five unlucky nights, it was said. When Tammany Hall was defeated and the city began hiring a new breed of honest men, William Tavers Jerome, the new district attorney, pledged to eradicate gambling houses from the city. His prime target, thanks to Reginald Vanderbilt, was the most infamous of the houses: Richard Canfield’s.

  At eleven o’clock on the night of December 1, 1902, six of Jerome’s men leaned a ladder against the side of Number 5 East Forty-fourth Street, climbed it, and swung an ax through the window. The detectives entered the house with drawn revolvers.

  “We understand that gambling is going on here,” the detectives informed Richard Canfield, who had come downstairs to see what all the noise was. “This is a gambling house.”2

  “A gambling house?” the urbane Canfield asked in amazement. “Gentlemen, this is my private residence, and I assure you all this is needless trouble on your part. I would have been glad to have admitted you at the reception door if you had indicated a desire to enter. I assure you that there is nothing here that needs your attention. Nor do I ask you to accept my bare word. The freedom of the house is yours—though I am sorry you have broken my windows.”

  Canfield led the detectives through the first two floors of the brown-stone. As they searched everywhere, there was dead silence; not the whir of a roulette wheel nor the click of dice nor the shuffling of cards could be heard. Not a patron was to be seen, for Canfield had shrewdly closed down his gambling establishment with the fall of Tammany Hall. The detectives searched on.

  “This is my own apartment, gentlemen,” he explained when they reached the top floor; “rather comfortable, I think. I use it also as my private office.”3

  Canfield cautioned the detectives not to hammer on the walls of this room since it would hurt the mother-of-pearl inlay in the mahogany panels. One of the detectives noticed that the room was not as deep as the others. Inlay or not, hammer on the wall he did. It sounded hollow. The men swung their axes into the mahogany, and with their crowbars opened up a hole. They lit a candle and thrust it into the hole, revealing a small hidden room.

  “By God!” exclaimed District Attorney Jerome. “As last we’ve got the stuff!”4

  Detectives carried out five roulette tables, three wheels, a faro layout, packs of cards, thousands of ivory chips, and the IOUs from Canfield’s safe, including one from Reginald C. Vanderbilt for $300,000.5

  “I have in my possession the names of a score of your patrons, men of prominence in this city,” the district attorney warned Canfield. “It is my intention to summon them as witnesses, unless you are willing to acknowledge your connection with this place, and assume the responsibility for its management.”6

  “I’ll stand for the house, but I’ll protect my patrons, even if it should mean some personal inconvenience to myself,” Canfield quietly responded.7

  When Canfield maintained that Jerome had conducted an illegal search and seizure, quoting from the classics of literature to support his allegations, the district attorney found it necessary to buttress his case by summoning Canfield’s wealthy patrons to testify as to exactly what had been going on at 5 East Forty-fourth Street. And the patron he most wanted to testify was Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt. This was not really something Reggie wanted to do, so he secluded himself deep within the recesses of his mother’s 137-room mansion on Fifth Avenue. When a subpoena was issued, he fled to Sandy Point Farm, outside of Jerome’s jurisdiction.

  Jerome knew that Reginald Vanderbilt would have to return to the city sometime, and stationed detectives around his mother’s home, at his town house, at his clubs, and at the home of his in-laws in order to snare him when he finally arrived. ‘This house is the residence of Mrs. Frederic Neilson, who is the mother-in-law of Mr. Reginald Vanderbilt,” the guide announced over a megaphone as the sight-seeing bus slowed in front of 100 Fifth Avenue. “Mr. Vanderbilt is now supposed to be in hiding. The crowd in front of the house is composed of District Attorney Jerome’s detectives who seek to subpoena Mr. Vanderbilt to testify about the money he lost at Richard Canfield’s gambling house.”8

  Once, on the way to a horse show in Philadelphia, Reggie stopped in New York to visit his wife’s parents. The detectives got the word that he was in the house and beefed up their vigil, just waiting for him to walk out.

  Reggie was trapped, no doubt about it.

  There was only one thing to do: call Harry Lehr. A half hour after Harry arrived, the Neilsons’ Swedish cook left the house, and a little later Harry Lehr left, but after that, all was quiet.

  After several days, the Neilsons’ butler came out and walked straight to the men who had been there day and night posing as loiterers.

  “You might as well go,” the butler told them. “He was here, but he’s gone.”9

  It was only then that the detectives realized that the stout Swedish cook had been
none other than Reggie Vanderbilt, dressed up by Harry Lehr in servant’s clothes and a wig.

  Thereafter, until January 11, 1904, when the charges against Richard Canfield were finally dropped, Reggie took the train between Newport and Philadelphia by way of Boston, Montreal, and Detroit to dodge the process servers waiting for him in New York.

  No matter what Reggie did—lose hundreds of thousands of dollars at the gambling tables, run over pedestrians, or take his wife of nine years and his eight-year-old daughter to Paris in 1912 and sail back to the United States without telling them or leaving them a note or any money10—whatever trouble Reggie got himself into, his mother, Alice of The Breakers, always forgave him. Reggie, her youngest son, was her favorite child. Bill was dead, and Neily might as well have died by marrying Grace Wilson. Now, with the tragic death of her son Alfred, who went down on the Lusitania on May 7, 1915,11 Reggie was the new head of the House of Vanderbilt. The family portraits of the Commodore and William H. Vanderbilt were now his, and along with them all the responsibilities as head of the dynasty, whether or not he chose to assume them. Stern, straitlaced, righteous Alice Vanderbilt could forgive her son any indiscretion, but she was concerned about him. “Regi had been upsetting her,” Harry Whitney wrote to his wife, Gertrude, Reggie’s sister. “Regi was drunk & apparently is most of the time.”12 Alice Vanderbilt went to Chauncey Depew for help. “Don’t worry, my dear lady,” the faithful family adviser assured her. “Young men sow wild oats. All of them do.”13

  Such was the life being led by Reginald Vanderbilt from his college days at Yale to his desertion of his wife and daughter in 1912, to his divorce in 1919, to that day in 1922 when at age forty-two, as society’s best-known bachelor, he met seventeen-year-old Gloria Morgan. Gloria was one of the “Magical Morgans,” as Maury Paul, who signed his well-known society column in the New York American as Cholly Knickerbocker, labeled her and her twin sister, Thelma. Gloria and Thelma were identical twins, so similar in appearance and personality that often their parents—Harry Hays Morgan, the American consul in Switzerland, and his wife, Laura, whose mother had been born in Chile and who traced her ancestry back to the grandees of Spain—couldn’t tell them apart. The girls had grown up in Switzerland, Amsterdam, Spain, and Germany as their father, a career diplomat, received new assignments. “You had both better marry rich men,” Mamma would tell the twins. “You’re extravagant, you know. You never save. You give everything away. If you want to play at being Lady Bountiful, you had better marry someone who can give you what you need.”14

  When they were sixteen, the precocious twins somehow convinced their parents to let them return to the United States, where they rented a small apartment at 40 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. Maury Paul saw that these two beautiful, vibrant young ladies, living alone in New York, would make good copy, and frequently wrote about them. When Thelma, at age seventeen, married James Vail Converse, the grandson of the founder of Bell Telephone and a relative of J. P. Morgan’s, Maury Paul took Gloria under his wing, referring to her as “Glorious Gloria” in his columns, and set out to find her a suitable husband.

  On a snowy evening in January 1922, Reggie attended a small dinner party given by Thelma at the Café des Beaux Arts. Gloria arrived late because of the storm and was directed by her sister to her appointed table. As she approached, an older heavyset man, with a moustache and dark brown hair just turning gray, rose from the table.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “This beautiful girl must be Thelma’s twin sister. I’ve never seen two people so much alike. I’m Reggie Vanderbilt.”

  He looked at Gloria with what she perceived as “rather bored and weary eyes.” His eyelids were heavy and turned up at the corners, which gave him a sleepy, nonchalant appearance, but there was also about him the demeanor of someone who knew he had the power to get whatever he wanted. Gloria appeared to Reggie a statuesque, glamorous beauty, a bewitching blend of European sophistication and wistful American innocence that stirred his imagination. He had no idea that she was younger than his own daughter.

  Reggie began to talk to her about his horses, especially his prize horse, Fortitude. Gloria knew nothing about horses and had never heard of Fortitude, but she had heard about Reginald C. Vanderbilt and “I pretended to be enormously interested.”15

  “Do you have to do that, or do you think it intriguing?” he asked her after several minutes.

  “What?” she asked him.

  “Stammer. It is very charming, you know.”

  As he spoke, he realized that Thelma had the same speech impediment, a sort of breathless whispering voice. “We speak French like Spanish and Spanish like French, and English like—well, like something I can’t mention,” Gloria later explained.16

  “I apologize,” he said, laughing.17

  Soon he asked Gloria to dance.

  “Would you mind very much if we don’t just yet?” she said. “I’ve been dashing all day, and I’m starved.”

  Reggie breathed a sigh of relief. As it turned out, he hated dancing.

  “What a bore you must think I am,” he remarked later that night. “I’ve been talking your ear off, and I haven’t given you a chance to say a word. But promise me you’ll let me take you out to see Fortitude one day, and then you’ll see why I’m so proud.”

  Gloria told him that she would love to see Fortitude.

  “Bully!” Reggie exclaimed.18

  A friend of Gloria’s came over to ask her to dance. “Well, Gloria,” he whispered as they tangoed, “I see you have charmed the most eligible bachelor in town.”19

  The next day, Reggie invited Gloria to the theater.

  “Don’t go home,” he begged her afterward, “please don’t go home—let us go out somewhere. I have so much I want to say to you.”

  “I’m so sorry, I can’t,” Gloria told him. “I have to get up very early. Thelma and my mother sail for Europe tomorrow.”

  “I’ll meet you tomorrow noon on the boat,” he told her.20

  But at noon the next day, Reggie Vanderbilt was not in the crowd of well-wishers. Well, that was that, Gloria thought. What she did not yet realize was this was Reggie, as careless as ever.

  When she returned to her apartment, a great box bursting with orchids and every type of flower of the season awaited her. The phone rang.

  “Gloria, this is Reggie. I’m so sorry,” he apologized, making some excuse for failing to appear at the ship. “Darling, just to show me I’m forgiven, please have lunch with me. I don’t care how many engagements you have to break—break them all. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

  He hung up.

  “Well!” Gloria said to herself. “When this Reggie Vanderbilt wants something, there’s no doubt about it, he wants it; and, what’s more, he probably gets it.”21

  For the next several days, Reggie would not leave Gloria alone, taking her to lunch, to dinner, to parties, to the theater. This was a heady, dreamlike time for a seventeen-year-old intent on marrying a rich man.

  Four days after they had met, Reggie asked Gloria to marry him. Gloria accepted his proposal without hesitation, though Reggie was more than twice her age.

  The following afternoon, Reggie called Gloria and asked her to come to his house for dinner, telling her that his good friend Maury Paul would be there.

  Reggie seemed preoccupied and solemn as the threesome sipped drinks in the oak-paneled den.

  “Maury, you know both Gloria and I value your friendship. What I am about to tell you Gloria has already heard from me.”

  “Please, darling,” Gloria interrupted.

  “No, dearest. I want Maury to know that you are entering this marriage with your eyes wide open—and what you may be letting yourself in for.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “Most of the inheritance left to me outright by my father has long since gone. I now derive my income from a five-million-dollar trust, which, after my death, must go to Cathleen and any other children I might have. And there may
well not be other children. The chances are you would be a Mrs. Vanderbilt with no money. Do you understand exactly what I am saying to you?”22

  What he was saying was that he had squandered his fortune.

  Since the age of twenty-one, he had not only been spending the income from his inheritance, $775,000 each year, he had, in addition, been spending the principal. Gone was the $7.5 million he had received from his father, gone an additional $2.5 million received in 1907 from his father’s estate, gone $3 million from other kind relatives’ bequests, gone $500,000 he had received when his beloved brother Alfred died. Gone, all gone. And nothing to show for it. No great house. No yacht. No art collection. Nothing. It is doubtful that Reggie could even remember where it had all gone. His senses dulled by a steady consumption of brandy milk punches, the betting, the gambling, the women—it had all blurred into one perpetual party that had lasted for two decades.

  “As my wife, you will have a big name but little money to live up to it. I’ve spent every cent of my personal fortune…. As long as I live, you will be taken care of, but I am an ill man. Should I die, the $5,000,000 trust fund goes to my daughter by my former wife, Cathleen. Your only chance of financial security in the future would be to have a child who would then share the trust fund with Cathleen. Your chance of having a child by me is one of those 100 to 1 shots, for my doctor doubts that I can become a father again.”

  With Reggie showering expensive gifts on her and promising her that “Π1 buy you the whole of Paris” on their honeymoon, and with a nice chunk of the Vanderbilt fortune watched over by Reggie’s elderly mother, a portion of which would someday replenish Reggie’s depleted coffers, it was a little hard for seventeen-year-old Gloria to understand just what he was telling her.