by Janny Scott
Thomas Scott’s son, my great-grandfather, had his father’s charm but none of his drive. Whether the reason was nature or nurture—I’d only be guessing. But it’s safe to say that the son’s choppy course through his abbreviated life contrasts sharply with the father’s pyrotechnic rise. The railroad king was in his late forties, and on his second wife, when the boy was born. They named him after his father’s business partner, J. Edgar Thomson—a choice that strikes me, albeit from a great distance, as peculiar. What’s it like to lug around the name of your famous father’s famous, onetime boss? Would a contemporary equivalent be Tim Cook naming a son of his Steve Jobs Cook? My own first name was plucked from my mother’s side of the family. But then the firm started by my father’s father and grandfather merged with one called Janney, with an e. Ever since the new firm took the name Janney Montgomery Scott, I’ve been distressed on occasion to discover that there are people who believe my parents named me after a stockbrokerage.
Young Edgar Thomson Scott’s opulent childhood bore zero resemblance to his father’s humble beginnings. He started off in his parents’ fifty-two-room mansion on Rittenhouse Square, a part of Philadelphia then thick with railroad, banking, and manufacturing notables. After his father died when the boy was just nine, his mother joined the exodus of adventurous Americans flocking to Paris, in the last half of the nineteenth century, for intellectual and artistic education. Under the guidance of a second cousin from Pittsburgh, Mary Cassatt, whose family was also in Paris, Anna Dike Riddle Scott began collecting Impressionist paintings. She shipped her little son off to a boarding school in England where, I’m told, lordlings wrote home on stationery engraved with their families’ coats of arms, and Edgar, denied a coat of arms by birth, invented his own, featuring a locomotive rampant. “Has apparently never been taught how to work,” his Latin and Greek teacher remarked witheringly on an early report. Three years later: “His weak points are that he never will muster the courage to face a difficulty fairly.” At fourteen, he returned to the United States and was sent to the Groton School for Boys, founded two years earlier in Massachusetts on the British model with the aim of instilling the virtues of character, leadership, and service in the scions of the Gilded Age. The headmaster, a twenty-nine-year-old minister just back from shepherding Episcopalians in Tombstone, Arizona, after the shootout at the O.K. Corral, detected immediately that the railroad heir lacked his father’s steam propulsion.
“Fair scholar but idle,” Endicott Peabody, the headmaster, noted.
It seems only fair to acknowledge that the boy’s early years had not been painless. He’d been born into a household of great wealth and privilege, but his older brother had died when Edgar Thomson was just seven. He was fatherless at nine. In the archive at Groton, I searched the headmaster’s notes on his lackluster student for some foreshadowing of what was to come. The boy was “taken ill” in his senior year, Peabody wrote; he left school for a time and studied with a tutor. He entered Harvard in 1889: “Bad record there.” Harvard sent him away after freshman year, telling his mother that he’d failed to open a book—a development that’s said to have left Edgar depressed. After more tutoring, he returned to Harvard in 1891. “Left at Easter, ill again,” Peabody wrote. He never went back and he never graduated. Perhaps he could see no compelling need to excel. But the headmaster’s repeated use of the word “ill” made me wonder: Was Peabody covering for a privileged slacker? Or was the boy somehow suffering?
Here, the story takes a singular turn. In what I’ve been told was an attempt to cheer up her dispirited son, his mother helped him acquire a steam yacht—one hundred eighty-five feet long and rigged as a three-masted topsail schooner. At age twenty-two, Edgar T. prepared for a two-year circumnavigation of the world—an unusual regimen, in any decade, for a newly fledged college dropout. From a British passenger service, he hired the commander of an ocean liner that operated along the route between Liverpool and New York. He enlisted a crew of twenty-five Norwegians, a chief steward, and a valet. He took along traveling companions including a couple of cousins, his mother, his younger sister, a German governess, a physician, a young minister from Groton, and Warwick Potter, the son of a Civil War general and Edgar T.’s closest school friend. A nephew, Hugh Scott, fresh out of Groton, went along, too.
Hugh kept a diary of the voyage of the Sagamore—that was its name—which survives to this day. It’s a novella-size journal of the expedition, which took the Scott party from Southampton, England, in the summer of 1893 to Norway, Denmark, France, Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Italy, Corfu, Albania, Greece, Egypt, Suez, Aden, Oman, India, Ceylon, the Andaman Islands, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, and Japan—with overland side trips to London, Paris, Madrid, Granada, Seville, Toledo, Olympia, Cairo, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Calcutta, Madras, Mandalay, and so on. Abruptly and unexpectedly, the trip ended in Yokohama eleven months in. With the First Sino-Japanese War looming, high-quality coal was in demand. How “the Sag” would get back across the Pacific was unclear. Edgar Thomson and company sailed home on a Canadian Pacific Railway steamer, leaving the crew to figure out what to do about the yacht.
Hugh Scott’s journal reads like a cross between Jules Verne and Evelyn Waugh, SparkNotes edition. Reindeer shooting in Norway, boar hunting in Avlona, burning corpses in Benares. Mosques, monasteries, ostrich farms, opera houses, temples, tea plantations, pagodas, bullfights, the finest brothel in Paris. “Drunk!—Drunk again—and without hilarity,” the diarist recounts grimly. Even the clergyman is occasionally unconscious. In the harbor at Copenhagen, the party encounters the yachts of Czar Alexander III, the King of Denmark, and the Prince of Wales. Prime ministers, sultans, dervishes receive them. “Women with such large nose-pendants that they have to bring a lock of hair from their forehead down and curl it around the pendant to take the strain off their noses,” Hugh notes in Karachi. Off the coast of Oman, the night sea glows with phosphorescence: “Surf breaking on shore all aflame. Can pick it up by handfuls.” At Christmas, the masts and bowsprit are decked with evergreen trees. For the costume dinner, Edgar’s mother makes her entrance as an Oxford don. She and the girls sail off up the Nile. Edgar gallops a donkey through Cairo bazaars. “Mandolinist in stateroom while we smoke and shave,” Hugh reports. In a hotel in Delhi, a sign catches his attention: “Please do not strike the servants.” Shooting clay pigeons near the mouth of the Rangoon River, “Scott’s gun goes off, tears hole in deck.” A census of the Sagamore’s passenger manifest: “Cows, polo ponies, a pack of fox hounds, a monkey, a dozen sheep, lots of geese, hens, parrots, small birds, etc etc.” In the Andaman Islands, the travelers encounter a man named Portman, sent by the British Museum, to “take charge” of the pygmies: “He tames them and teaches them. They speak English, French and Italian.” In Mandalay, Hugh reports that the Burmese had begged the English not to allow the use of liquor. A futile request, it seems: “The consequence is the Burmalese are falling off a bit in quality while the English grow richer.”
Two months into the voyage, tragedy strikes. While heading for Lisbon in rough seas, members of the party fall ill. “Potter very sick from diarrhea and sea-sickness combined. An awful night,” Hugh writes. The captain changes course and steams toward the harbor at Brest. A French doctor is summoned. “Potter gets worse and nothing much can be done,” Hugh reports. Potter’s brother hastens to the ship from Paris. Warwick rallies—but only briefly. “Poor old Warwick died at about ten o’clock in the morning without regaining consciousness,” Hugh writes. “Fearfully sad.”
“Colors are at half-mast,” he added.
American newspapers attributed the death of the general’s son to “the effects of seasickness” or “an inflammation of the stomach.” From Hugh Scott’s journal, it seems the French authorities may have suspected cholera. Edgar and the elder Potter accompanied the body back to New York on a French steamer after a service on the Sagamore’s deck. Geor
ge Santayana, the Spanish-born poet-philosopher, who’d known Potter at Harvard, was moved to write four sonnets, titled “To W. P.,” now among Santayana’s best-known works. “We shall not loiter long, your friends and I; / Living you made it goodlier to live, / Dead you will make it easier to die.”
Nine years later, Edgar Thomson Scott would name his second son Warwick Potter Scott. After Warwick Potter Scott’s death, his younger sister would name her second son Warwick. But back in 1893, Edgar T. and the elder Potter rejoined the group on the Sag. And carried on.
If Thomas Scott rarely took a vacation, his son almost never held a job. “Principal occupation: None.” That’s how I found his employment history summed up in alumni records in the Groton archive. “Occupation: None at present.” An exception occurred briefly in his late twenties when he worked for two years in the United States embassy in Paris as second secretary under an ambassador whom it seems likely the family knew from railroading circles. There, the second secretary occupied an eight-bedroom apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement, capacious enough to have an office de maître d’hotel—a butler’s office—and a room called a froisserie, apparently devoted to the polishing of shoes. But in June 1899, in a letter to the secretary of state, the second secretary announced he was taking a leave of absence and would be resigning upon its expiration “for urgent family reasons.” Before and after that fleeting period of gainful employment, his life was one of vigorous leisure. He raced sailboats, owned horses and carriages, bought speedboats and the latest automobiles. He was a champion racquets and tennis player. He belonged, at one time or another, to eighteen private clubs. He drank a lot. He enjoyed women. (“Poor Ma,” his daughter Anna would sigh to her children.) I had to admire the resourcefulness of the headline writer who, called upon to sum up the railroad heir’s life’s work for the one-column head on his obituary in the Philadelphia Bulletin, settled on “Athletic Clubman.”
The ghost of the athletic clubman, like that of his father, may also have stalked his descendants. Otherwise, how to explain the silence? It was not until my late twenties that I heard anything about my father’s paternal grandfather—and, even then, it wasn’t much. My father and I were in Ireland that summer, bicycling south to north. One evening, in a place called Kesh, I badgered him over dinner to tell me stories about his relatives. Eventually, the conversation turned from Montgomerys, some of whom I’d known, to his Scott grandfather, who’d never crossed my mind. He’d died eleven years before my father’s birth. But my father said his own father had never spoken to his sons of their grandfather. When I pressed my uncle, years later, to explain how that could be, he told me, “The subject just didn’t come up.”
Edgar T. Scott, you’ll have detected, was not a devotee of the simple life. Like Colonel Montgomery, he craved a grand country seat. And, like the Colonel, he turned to Horace Trumbauer, the architect of the moment, to build him a humongous house. The house was to be built on the Lansdowne property where the railroad baron had kept a relatively modest rustic abode, but it was to be “of a size suitable for an American plutocrat of the era,” as Michael C. Kathrens puts it. The house, called Woodburne, was in the style of a late-eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century American house—differing, Kathrens says, only in “its enormous size.” Visitors entered through a high-ceilinged vestibule leading into a “gallery” the length of a basketball court. Off the gallery were a living room, drawing room, dining room, and library. French doors opened onto a four-columned portico and an oceanic lawn. The floor plan, come to think of it, resembled that of Ardrossan. Upstairs, there were eight large bedrooms, with adjoining bathrooms, for family members and guests; there was a nursery and playroom on the third floor. The “service wing” rivaled the main part of the house in size: In addition to a kitchen, butler’s pantry, china pantry, walk-in safe, elevator, dumbwaiter, and so on, there were sixteen bedrooms for servants. Edgar T.’s sensible wife, Maisie, found the house oversized and pretentious. But he soon sold the Rittenhouse Square house, where the family had been living. In 1913, a syndicate bought and razed it, clearing the way for a fifteen-story apartment house, the first skyscraper on the square.
The house in the photograph given to me by my father’s aunt Anna on her visit to my apartment wasn’t Woodburne. It was yet another huge house, the athletic clubman’s summer palace. If Ardrossan was the Montgomerys’ Taj Mahal, this one was the Scotts’—except that, instead of a mausoleum for a dead wife, this mahal began as an inducement to marriage. Edgar T. Scott had spent summers in Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island in Maine, a place that had once appealed to “rusticators” with an appetite for simple living. But, by the 1880s, Bar Harbor was transforming itself into an alternative to Newport, Rhode Island. Wealthy families from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago began building palatial “cottages,” accessorizing them with hanging gardens, heated swimming pools, a motorized dining-room table. There, the railroad president’s son took an interest in the youngest daughter of a high-minded widow from Philadelphia, a Unitarian of Boston Brahmin stock. It was an unlikely pairing—the dashing socialite with lavish appetites and intemperate habits, and the disciplined bluestocking, whom Warwick Potter had considered the Platonic ideal of woman. Edgar pursued Maisie Sturgis unsuccessfully for years. Finally, in the mid-1890s, he bought fourteen acres of wildwood and swampland on the water—Vanderbilts to the north, Pulitzers to the south. There, he told Maisie, he’d build a house where, if she refused to marry him, he’d retreat from the world and think only of her. He’d call it Chiltern—an allusion to an esoteric procedure, called “taking the Chiltern Hundreds,” for resigning from the British House of Commons. Maisie surrendered. Nine days after their marriage in 1898, the newlyweds sailed for France. Over the next two years, while they lived in their eight-bedroom apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement, their summer “cottage” took shape above the rocky crescent of beach at Cromwell Cove.
Chiltern, where my grandfather and father would spend childhood summers, was built to last. The ground-floor stonework resembled, as one newspaper put it, that of a modern fort. The cellars and foundation were blasted out of solid rock beneath a clearing that sloped to the water. Granite hauled from a nearby quarry was cut into squared blocks and fitted into place by thirty masons. The windows were mullioned, panes leaded; the upper stories were shingled. Inside, there were two living rooms; a dining room; a study; an octagonal, glassed-in porch; thirteen big bedrooms, and twenty-two smaller ones for servants, servants’ servants, and the servants of guests. At a time when most American homes were lit with gas or candles, Chiltern had four hundred fifty electric lights—not to mention an interior telephone network, a state-of-the-art security system, and a room devoted to flower arranging. “Chiltern was a landmark in Bar Harbor, with the highest budget, if not the most creativity, of Longfellow’s designs in Maine,” Margaret Henderson Floyd observed coolly in a book on its architect, A. W. Longfellow, the poet’s nephew. The house was intended to look, as one newspaper put it, “as old as the Mount Desert hills.”
Even the landscape designer had a pedigree. To create a garden, Edgar Thomson Scott enlisted a niece of Edith Wharton, Beatrix Jones—who, under her married name, Beatrix Farrand, would become known as the first American woman to break into landscape architecture. The latest in a line of five generations of gardeners, Jones was hired, at twenty-four, to conceive and plant a ten-acre garden for the Scotts. Out of the spruce and birch forest, she and a hundred-man crew cleared an oval canvas on which to paint. They created a circular lawn with grass paths approaching from three directions, separating drifts of summer flowers in washes of color—scarlets, yellows, and blues on one side; purples, crimsons, pinks, and white on another. The planting plan looked like a quilt with nearly one hundred seventy patches of flowers: columbines, black-eyed Susans, heleniums, and on and on. “I set myself to work out a scheme of color, absolutely by instinct,” she wrote later. She designed a semicircular bench and a table, for aft
ernoon tea overlooking a small pond. Evergreens enclosed the garden. Only the chimneys, gables, and roofline of the house were visible above the tops of the trees. “It is, in a way, the most original garden I have tried and it has been a success,” Jones wrote. Patrick Chassé, a landscape architect who’s written about Farrand’s work, calls it an Alice in Wonderland garden, “dwarfing the visitor to childlike proportions.”
The family would arrive from Philadelphia by train—parents in one car; children and French governesses in another; horses in a third. There were sailing races, tennis tournaments, moonlight picnics in places like “the ballroom”—a mountain plateau where yet another Scott once hosted a dance, orchestra included. There was an annual children’s pageant, too, in the garden. In a photograph, a cluster of tiny cousins costumed as winged creatures—dragonflies or fairies, maybe—cast shadows in the grass, ringed by billowing beds of flowers. A photo of a Sturgis family reunion in 1913 shows twenty-nine members of three generations—men in boaters, boys in sailor suits, girls dressed in white. In the back row—identified as “inlaws” in a handwritten key on the back of the photograph—Edgar Thomson Scott stands, sporting a dark mustache, his face having thickened in the years since the picture taken that first Chiltern summer. In the middle row, among the “original” Sturgises, I find Maisie in a broad-brimmed hat. In the front two rows—identified as the nineteen “descendants”—my grandfather, age fourteen, sits cross-legged, a faraway look in his eye.
They’d named him Edgar, after his father, but he took after his mother. He shared her passion for literature, poetry, and the theater. How, his sporty père is said to have wondered aloud, could any son of his have ended up so athletically inept? On sojourns in Paris, Maisie Scott took my grandfather and his three siblings to La Comédie-Française. The year Anna turned twenty, the books shipped to Bar Harbor for her summer reading included Dante, Molière, Racine, Proust. Years later, Susie, the youngest, would amuse her sons by reciting all seventy stanzas of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Horatius at the Bridge” from memory. She and my grandfather, in middle age, were overheard fencing over a line from a classical French tragedy. The encounter, her son Rick recalls, went something like this: “Remember that wonderful line of Polyeucte’s?” Susie asked, rattling it off. “I remember the line, but it’s Pauline’s,” Edgar answered. “Polyeucte,” she insisted. “Pauline!” he countered. Act two, scene three! Act four, scene two! “Do you remember act two, scene three?” Susie asked. Of course, he answered. “Then let’s go through it,” she dared him. Which they did.