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November 1 - November 13, 2021
I do recall, however, that for weeks after our visit, I was convinced that all grandparents turned into statues when they died.
She managed to hold on to the house until she died in 1965, but her children couldn’t afford to keep it for long, and two generations after it was built, it passed out of family hands for good. In 1972 they gave much of the furniture to the Preservation Society as a gift, and sold them the house for $365,000, or about $2.3 million today. By contrast, Cornelius Vanderbilt II spent $7 million building the house in 1895, the equivalent of more than $220 million today. In its 77 years of existence, The Breakers saw the equivalent of nearly $218 million evaporate into thin air.
If our country’s mythos is based on the belief that anyone can be rich if they have enough gumption, have enough grit—or, as we shall see, have enough ruthlessness—then The Breakers is everything our culture tells us to want and promises we can have if only we are willing to work hard enough. It is arguably the most extreme expression of the loaded promises of the American dream.
The United States, a country founded on antiroyalist principles, would, only twenty years after its revolutionary burst into existence, produce the progenitor of a family that would come to hold itself up as American royalty, with the titles and palaces to prove it. But their empire would last for less than a hundred years before collapsing under its own weight, destroying itself with its own pathology.
No one could believe that the man who controlled one out of every twenty American dollars in circulation at that time could actually, finally die.
Cornelius Vanderbilt may not have been the first person to remake himself in New York City, but his rise from hardscrabble rural obscurity to a level of wealth never before seen in America, and rarely paralleled since, places him squarely within the persistent American mythology that holds that success is tantalizingly available to anyone with the cunning and discipline to seize it.
Thirty years ago workers constructing a federal office tower at 290 Broadway in Lower Manhattan uncovered intact human skeletal remains dozens of feet below the surface of the city streets. They had happened upon the “Negroes Buriel Ground,” six acres containing the remains of more than fifteen thousand people of African heritage, both enslaved and free, who had lived in colonial New Amsterdam and New York between the 1630s and 1795.
The colony that would become New York City was a well-ordered machine for the creation of profit, and profit was maximized by the maintenance of the monopoly of the Dutch West India Company. The ideology of New York City was, is, and probably always will be profit.
Hard to imagine that the man who made the Gilded Age according to his whims and who died on the cusp of the twentieth century had a great-grandfather born the same year as the Salem witch trials, but such are the long spans of generations.
In a very real way, the Commodore was part of the first generation that truly made the United States into America as we know it now, with its disorderly market culture and its thirst for competition.
But taste was only part of what the twin consuls of New York City wanted to codify. They sought to rate people according to a hierarchy as much as they wished to rank food or clothing or interior décor. To that end, Ward McAllister divided the social world along two axes: “nobs” on the one hand and “swells” on the other.
Mrs. Astor determined that for acceptance into society, one must be at least three generations removed from whoever’s hands had been dirtied in the making of money.
But with so many rich new people pouring into the city with each passing year, it was hard to tell who was in and who was out. What they really needed was a list. To that end, in 1872 McAllister founded an organization that he named the Society of Patriarchs.
Ward McAllister’s biggest triumph of branding, however, was not the institution of the Patriarchs, but the naming of a number: four hundred. Ostensibly referring to the number of people who could fit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom (a rumor that has since been put to rest), McAllister determined that New York society was led by “the Four Hundred,” no more and no less.
The most shocking costume, however, was neither an abstract concept nor a famous aristocrat lending Old World cachet to New World wealth. Writing in his memoir, Ward McAllister recalled that the most remarkable costume at the famous Vanderbilt ball was that of a young woman, Miss Kate Fearing Strong, who came dressed as a cat. Her costume consisted of a gown made of white cat tails with a bodice of skinned cat heads and was topped with a hat made of a taxidermied white cat curled up and perched upon her heaps of blond curls. Around her throat, Miss Strong wore a black velvet ribbon with a bell
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Above the forehead of each lady, in her hair, was worn an electric light, giving a fairy and elf-like appearance to each of them.” The effect of these tiny lights, in the soft glow of candles and Chinese lanterns strung between forests of lush tropical foliage, orchids, and roses, together with the cold glint of diamonds against youthful skin, would have been nothing short of magical to a nineteenth-century participant.
It was rumored that the Vanderbilt ball cost a quarter of a million dollars, about $6.4 million in today’s money. Six-point-four million dollars for a party.
These two events—Alva’s ball and the recovery of the bodies from the Diamond coal mine tragedy—shared equal space on the front page of the New York Times for March 27, 1883.
Consuelo found him smart, if a bit serious, and he was certainly attractive. But he didn’t turn her head. Alva would have to turn it for her.
Alva had determined to marry Consuelo into royalty. No American man would be good enough. Consuelo was a chip, a token that Alva would play in her never-ending quest for social influence and rank.
The Duke reserved his greatest respect for the missive from Queen Victoria. It was a wonder, Consuelo thought, that her telegram wasn’t presented on its own silver platter. For the first time, Consuelo began to understand that she had married into an ironclad social structure, one much older and deeper than the pretend aristocracy found in New York. She had thought she understood snobbishness, but she’d never seen it like this. The Duke explained to her that she would have to learn the lineage and rank of some two hundred families to which the Spencer-Churchills were connected, together with
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“In the hidden reaches where memory probes,” Consuelo would write, much later in her life, “lie sorrows too deep to fathom.”
Alva as a “valiant warrior to whom opposition was the breath of life. Nothing made her happier than the knowledge that she was pitting herself against the rest of the world.
Alva’s instinct for drama led her to hide the construction of her new summer house behind a wall, as five hundred thousand square feet of marble imported from Italy was slowly assembled into the mock Petit Trianon palace that would come to be called Marble House.
Children are much more realistic than we believe. They can accept all kinds of economies and deprivations if they are told quietly and sympathetically why they are necessary.
Reggie was fortunate to live at a time when rich kids could mow down pedestrians in the street with their automobiles and get away with an apology, as he killed at least two. He once ran over a seven-year-old boy, who fortunately survived. The papers suggested it was the little boy’s fault for getting in Reggie’s way.
hothouse flower
The 1880s had Ward McAllister, the courtly gentleman who’d burst onto the New York scene from Savannah, Georgia, and invented “the Four Hundred” out of thin air. The 1910s had Harry “King” Lehr, the court jester from Baltimore who’d picked up McAllister’s mantle after it was stripped from him in disgrace. But the 1960s had Truman Capote, the “Tiny Terror” from New Orleans with the poison pen.
One of the tall, thin, beautiful women whom Capote christened “swans” as he began to carve his path into literary and social New York was Gloria Vanderbilt.
“With Truman I kept up a front,” Gloria wrote years later, “never giving the Tiny Terror a toehold into my oh-so-secret heart.” Her friend Carol had no such compunction, unloading all her divorce frustrations on Truman’s eagerly listening ears. Gloria professed shock at Carol’s lack of caution, but then, divorce will sometimes make people do shocking things. “And Truman, sly puss that he was, lapped it up and wove it into Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Gloria wrote with some satisfaction.
“Alexander after the Battle of Issus, Napoleon after Austerlitz could not have been cockier than Truman was after In Cold Blood.
“La Côte Basque” brought both his social and literary careers to a flaming, cataclysmic end. It’s hard to imagine today something as simple as the publication of a short story in a magazine causing that kind of radioactive fallout for a writer. But no short story before or since has been quite as poisonous as “La Côte Basque.” One critic memorably called it “shit served up on a gold dish.”
“Those born to the storm, find the calm very boring,” her friend Dorothy Parker once said, and my mother’s restlessness was testament to that.
No one can make money evaporate into thin air like a Vanderbilt.
But not entirely into the ether—some of the costliest and most beautifully made furniture of the American nineteenth century was picked up at auction for cheap in 1942 by Warner Bros. Studios to use as set decorations for period films. Eagle-eyed viewers can spot Vanderbilt castoffs in film after film in the 1940s and later, as the stuff of an American dynastic fantasy was marshaled to embroider the fantasy lives of Americans all over the country.
