by Jean Strouse
* Auguste Toulmouche (1829–1890), who depicted the lives of elegant Parisians, was quite popular in America after the Civil War and known as “the painter of boudoirs.” Pierpont had bought a canvas called Waiting.
† Cooper had built the country’s first locomotive, the Tom Thumb, for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1830. In 1859 he founded Cooper Union on New York’s Lafayette Street just below Astor Place, to provide a public forum and education in art and technology for working people. Lincoln gave the speech that won him the Republican nomination at Cooper Union in 1860.
‡ McCulloch had been comptroller of the currency in 1863–64, and worked closely with Jay Cooke, who was selling government bonds to national banks. On leaving the Treasury in 1869, McCulloch had gone into partnership with Cooke, and continued their London business alone after Cooke failed in 1873.
§ The syndicate’s work with the Treasury on this loan went so smoothly that the bankers rewarded a key government official for his “kind offices.” Compensating useful civil servants was clearly not a new idea. Drexel, Morgan & Co. told J. S. Morgan & Co. in September that the syndicate had saved large amounts of money through the exertions of Daniel Baker, chief of the Treasury’s Loan Division, and suggested that a “suitable return should be made to him”—particularly since other government officials had “received such large sums heretofore.” The syndicate set aside $10,000 of its 0.5 percent commission “for distribution among various parties in the Dept. who have done so much to facilitate the working of the Syndicate Account.”
‖ The agreement for Great Britain, Ireland, and parts of the dominions, signed on December 31, 1878, provided for the bank to assign and manage Edison’s patents in those areas at its own expense for five years. Drexel, Morgan would reimburse Edison for prior expenses on British patents, and if it had not disposed of the principal patents after three years Edison could demand their return. By “have secured one third whole thing” Morgan may have meant the terms on which his bank contracted for the business in Portugal, New Zealand, and parts of Australia in March 1880: Edison would get 65 percent of the net proceeds, and Drexel, Morgan 35 percent, with Lowrey taking one third of the bankers’ share.
a Lionel de Rothschild’s title was Austrian—he had refused a baronetcy from Queen Victoria. His son, Nathan Mayer, became the first Lord Rothschild, and the first Jewish member of the House of Lords, in 1885.
Chapter 11
FAMILY AFFAIRS AND PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
Women had been letting Pierpont down all his life. Before he finished school his mother had withdrawn from the family into depression and reproach. Death had deprived him of Memie in his early twenties, inscribing her forever in his memory as an image of stolen promise. He had begun his marriage to Fanny with exhilaration and sober warnings about inevitable sorrow; fifteen years later, the couple were finding more pain than joy in each other’s company.
For a wedding one summer Pierpont ordered dresses from Worth’s for his wife and daughters. He and Fanny quarreled the day before the event. In revenge, she appeared with the girls in well-worn clothes, leaving the Paris designs in the closet. “He was powerless to protest before so many guests,” recalled one of Fanny’s nieces, “and he simply glowered all day and puffed his eternal cigar—his childlike pleasure absolutely ruined, and deeply hurt. She had a real talent for wounding him, though she probably had … ample provocation.”
In the spring of 1879 he took Louisa, now thirteen, along on his annual trip to Europe. While they were gone Fanny came down with “nervous” headaches. “Felt forlorn all day,” she wrote in her diary, and as the days went by: “Still forlorn.” “Very miserable—bed at 8 with sick headache.” Pierpont closed a letter to her from London (he had dropped her nickname), “Good bye Frances dear—I love you dearly. Perhaps you don’t know it but it’s true.”
Louisa had always been his favorite child, and she now became his preferred traveling companion. She did not have to conform to any schedule but his, since all the girls were tutored at home. He loved her sunny temper and unquestioning adoration. Unlike her mother and his own, she never demanded anything of him, nor did she retreat the way they did into illness and finding fault. Part child, part woman, part him, she seemed effortlessly to understand his moods and desires. She was constantly available—and she knew when to leave him alone.
He indulged her extravagantly on the 1879 trip, abandoning all the rules of home. As they crossed the Atlantic she dined with the adults and stayed up late. In London he took her to concerts, art museums, and flower shows. When she couldn’t find a hat she liked, he ordered one made up from parts of several he liked best. In Paris he showed her the Opéra, the Louvre, and the Palais Royal, bought her dresses at Worth’s, and hired a carriage to let her explore the city with a friend. “I wish you could see the very fascinating way Louisa carries herself & the very pleasant impression she makes in all quarters,” he told Fanny proudly. The girl took after both parents in one respect: she weighed 142 pounds at age thirteen.
When Pierpont took his second daughter, Juliet, abroad the following year, he wrote to Louisa: “Everything that I have seen and done recalls to my mind our trip of last year so that you are constantly in my mind to say nothing of my heart & at times it is very difficult to realize that you … must not very soon be coming into the room.” He enlisted her in his battle with her mother over style, hoping she would like the dresses he had bought “altho’ I fear the displeasure of the head of the house for getting them of Worth.” Crossing to Europe late one December alone, he imagined the family getting ready for Christmas without him, and told Louisa, “it makes the tears come into my eyes that I cannot be with you in person but you know that I will in spirit.… How my heart aches to see you – I have had many sad hours since I left you on the dock.”
He had no such special fondness for his son, whom he found awkward, difficult, shy—and inordinately attached to Fanny. In the fall of 1879, twelve-year-old Jack had an illness that kept him out of school for several weeks, and former Rhode Island governor William W. Hoppin (Fanny’s sister’s father-in-law) invited the boy to Providence for a change of scene. Pierpont in his own sickly adolescence had gone to stay with his maternal grandfather in Medford, then off to lonely exile in the Azores. He told Governor Hoppin in 1879 that he was “touched” and flattered by “your loving solicitude in the boy,” but feared the sojourn would be “quite impracticable”—first, because Jack was almost ready to go back to school, and secondly, “because his Ma! is scarcely willing to have him out of her sight.” Pierpont had wanted to send his son abroad, to strengthen his character and “give him for a few years the advantage of the English schools,” but had “cheerfully” renounced that desire in the interests of family peace: “In order to escape a domestic imbroglio I have abandoned years ago all attempts to separate Mother & Boy.”
From the first the Morgans had formed these intense father-daughter, mother-son pairs. The younger girls, Juliet and Anne, had more freedom to fend for themselves.
In the early winter of 1880 Fanny seemed unusually well. She began giving teas at 6 East 40th Street, and was disappointed when only one hundred people came to her first reception; to her relief, 246 showed up a week later. She went with friends to lectures and plays, and sat behind W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan at a Mendelssohn Glee concert. Her reading included George Eliot’s just-published Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia, Phillips Brooks’s Influence of Jesus, letters of Horace Walpole and Prosper Merimée, and several novels by Henry James—The Europeans, The American, and An International Episode. She noted the titles in her diary, without comment.
By February she was exhausted. When eight-year-old Anne came down with scarlet fever, Pierpont insisted that her mother, who had never had the disease, go to Florida for a rest. Fanny took Jack along. The girls stayed with their father, a nurse, and a new governess named Florence Rhett. Morgan kept his wife up to date
on their lives by mail. He had been out to dinner so often he had had no chance for “tête-à-tête larks” with Miss Rhett “as yet but the time will come.” The older girls were thriving, Anne convalescing nicely, and household affairs proceeding “à merveille.” He closed with a joke about his already famous reticence: “Don’t tell any one I have written so long a letter—it would hurt my reputation which you of all others should hold most dear.”
Three weeks later Fanny sent him a surprising piece of news: she was pregnant. He fired off an exultant telegram—“Jubilate”—and followed up by mail: “I can scarcely yet make myself believe that it is not a false alarm.” He was forty-two, his wife thirty-seven. He loved having children, and also the idea of himself as paterfamilias with a large, clean, well-mannered brood tumbling around in town and country houses. Besides, he wanted another boy. His own parents had had three daughters and two sons.
Fanny was decidedly less rapturous. She believed no mother had enough attention for more than four children—a theory drawn from experience, since her own mother had seven. Moreover, she did not like being pregnant. Pierpont commiserated by mail and tried to cheer her on: “I dread for you the inconveniences and uncomfortable feelings, aches & pains. However darling if it is to be so let us remember that everything has always gone well—that the children have always been wonderful specimens & an unceasing joy & delight—and if it should be a boy—just think what a satisfaction.”
Shortly after his wife returned from Florida, Pierpont left for Europe with his daughter Juliet. As the British White Star Line’s SS Germanic pulled out of New York Harbor, he sent Fanny a note: “… I felt very badly to go off & leave you feeling so down & so forlorn – it made my heart ache.” Yet he apparently did not consider rescheduling his trip. Disconsolate as Fanny might be at the prospect of bearing him another child (and since she did not really want it, this one did seem to be uniquely his), he could/would not vary his routine.
Hoping to infuse her with some of his own excitement, he had a tender if impracticable idea on the subject of childbearing: “I only wish I could do it for you—I should be only too happy.” And he urged his wife to concentrate on “what is at the end of the journey – won’t it be lovely. Just think of a duplicate of Jack or Louisa – it’s worth days of discomfort I only regret that the discomfort cannot be more equally divided – but I think my heart aches quite as much for you & I love you dearly for it all.”
Juliet had cried a little as they left New York, but quickly turned “quite chippy,” running about the deck “joyful at the idea of being my escort.” They were traveling with the Charles Laniers and David Eglestons, and a maid for Juliet. Morgan had met Lanier shortly after he moved to New York. The same age and in the same business—Winslow, Lanier, founded by Charles’s father, specialized in railroad finance—they had been friends ever since. Egleston worked in the iron trade, and his sister, Sarah, was married to Lanier. Pierpont’s forty-third birthday took place on the Atlantic. Sarah Lanier gave him a little gold Tiffany compass for his watch chain at breakfast on April 17. At lunch the entire dining room applauded as the steward presented him with a bouquet of vegetables. That evening there was another public salute when the chef brought out an immense cake with “JPM 43” written in pink icing.
Morgan loved this kind of attention to personal detail, and the luxurious SS Germanic, crossing the ocean in eight days, was as great an improvement over the bark Io he had taken to the Azores thirty years earlier as plush Pullman Palace cars were over the rickety Hartford & New Haven trains he had ridden as a boy with his father. He and his friends “enjoyed ourselves to the utmost,” he told Fanny, “& all came to the conclusion that the only way to go to sea was by White Star Steamer.”
In London he found his father well but his mother so ill with stomach trouble, headaches, and “neuralgic spasms” that he was afraid to let her namesake see her and stayed at a hotel. He took little Juliet to Aïda (“which also gave me great pleasure”) and visited various London friends, then went to Paris. There he stayed as always at the Bristol—he had the Prince of Wales’s rooms this time—with the Laniers, Eglestons, Jim Goodwins, Walter and Mary Burns, and George and Sarah Morgan. He ordered maternity dresses at Worth’s, and reported to Fanny that the entire Morgan family was rejoicing at the news of child “No. 5—I told you so!”
Fanny alone was not rejoicing, and on April 29 she had a miscarriage. Her mother cabled Pierpont the news. His own sorrow was at first “swallowed up in my anxiety about your dear self,” he wrote to his wife. Only after learning by cable from Fabbri that she was cheerful and out of danger—and that she did not want him to cut his trip short—did he talk of his feelings about losing the child: the “disappointment I feel will increase from day to day with no end. It is a new experience for both of us & we must accept it as for the best altho it is hard so hard.” He wanted to know what had caused the miscarriage—a question that was never answered.
Still, he was enjoying the Paris spring. Lanier gave a dinner for the entire party at the Café Lion d’Or, and Pierpont gave another at the Café Anglais. Driving out to Bourg-la-Reine just south of the city one day, he ordered roses for Cragston. Juliet seemed in “seventh heaven” with Burns and Morgan cousins to play with and a cascade of dresses ordered by her papa: “they are … extremely becoming to the puss,” he told Fanny. “I have all varieties – some very plain to gratify your maternal instincts & some a little more elaborate to please my own vanity.” In closing, he returned to their loss: “And darling now good bye. I am so sorry not to be with you at this time but you know how I love you & how I sympathise with you in your disappointment even if it is not as great as my own.”
When he returned to London in mid-May, his mother had an “attack” that left her unable to speak or use her left arm—possibly a mild stroke. Though the symptoms cleared up quickly and the doctors seemed optimistic, she often failed to recognize her son, who feared he might not see her alive again.
Heading home with his daughter on the White Star’s Britannic at the end of May, he caught a vivid glimpse of his own mortality. As the ship crossed the Atlantic the water temperature plunged from 56 degrees to 40 to 34. Pierpont, on deck under the bridge one evening in a dense fog, heard the first mate suddenly shout “Hard a port!” and as he felt the liner veer off course he saw looming up out of the mist a hundred feet ahead an enormous iceberg, “green as an emerald,” he told Junius—he could “easily have tossed a biscuit” onto its surface. This huge floating mass was as tall as the ship’s funnels: “had we hit it … little would ever have been heard of the ‘Britannic.’ ” The ship stopped for the night, and the next morning her passengers saw an even larger iceberg two hundred feet away, its height obscured in the fog.
Shortly after Pierpont reached home in June, Fanny took the children to Newport to visit her pregnant sister, Mary, now married to Alfred Pell; his family owned the land between Cragston and the Tracys’ Stonihurst, called Pellwood. Pierpont went to Cragston by himself midweek, and told his wife he felt like “loneliness personified when I opened the door”—“silence reigned supreme.” They had argued just before she left, possibly about the miscarriage, and he apologized for not having been “more agreeable”: “I certainly had no idea of making any criticisms – I only desired to ask questions for my information. I thought afterwards I should probably have been more acceptable in my absence than presence.”
On the subject of Mary Pell’s pregnancy, he trusted that Alfred would be “spared the bitter disappointment I experienced” and Mary “the harrassing illness which you experienced.” He hoped his wife would have a “merry” time at Newport, and “come back to the sorrows and trials of home invigorated & courageous.” That fall, Fanny’s account books began to list purchases of opium and morphine.
Pierpont was now making well over half a million dollars a year—his 45 percent share of Drexel, Morgan’s net earnings in 1880 came to $800,000, roughly equivalent to $12 million in the 1990s. For 18
79 his profit share was $672,000, in 1881, $948,000, and in 1882, $739,000. He had other income as well, from the associate firms and private investments.
He had been renting 6 East 40th Street for a decade, and was ready to buy a house of his own. Both he and Fanny wanted to live in Murray Hill, which extended from 34th to 40th Streets between Madison Avenue and Third. With its spacious brownstones, brick carriage houses, and quiet, tree-lined streets, the neighborhood had an understated elegance. Most of the Morgans’ close friends lived in the vicinity. The Sturgeses and Osborns had moved in 1871 to twin brick town houses faced with stone on Park Avenue just south of 36th Street, designed for them by Richard Morris Hunt. Jim Goodwin and his wife owned 45 West 34th, although they spent most of their time in Hartford. George Baker of the First National was building on Madison near 38th. The Laniers lived at 30 East 37th, the Eglestons at 8 East 35th, Morris K. Jesup at 197 Madison, Frank Payson at 45 West 36th. The neighborhood might as well have been called Morgan Hill.
When Pierpont first arrived in New York in 1857, he had made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps, who lived on the corner of Madison at 36th. Early in 1880 he decided to buy the Phelps mansion, one of three Italianate brownstones that took up the east side of the block between 36th and 37th streets, and wired his father for permission.* Set on a 67- by 175-foot lot, the house would cost $225,000—which Pierpont acknowledged might be a “little high but we think situation unequalled. Cable your views.”
Junius cabled negative views. Pierpont replied, “I certainly am not willing to undertake anything unless you think it wise,” and put the negotiations on hold. Two months later, when he visited London, he secured his father’s “entire approval” of the purchase. He wrote to Louisa as Fanny recovered from her miscarriage: “Tell Mama that I have cabled Mr. Phelps today that I would take his house on the N.E. corner of Madison Avenue & 36th Street so you will have room for your dog & cat—and the rest of the Museum of Natural History.”
