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. (The studio, in deep financial straits, auctioned them off again in the 2000s.) Some Herter furniture possibly chucked out of Billy Vanderbilt’s mansion even appears, fleetingly, in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Tool over to Madison
