Dark Genius of Wall Street

by Edward J Renehan Jr

  As well, Gould’s sisters and Abram each received $25,000 plus an annual income of $2,000 for life. (Sarah was to die quite soon. Abram would pass in 1899, at age 56 just like his brother, while still employed as purchasing agent for the Missouri Pacific.1 But Anna Hough, now retired to Los Angeles with her husband, and Bettie Palen, in Germantown, went on a bit longer, Anna living to age ninety.) Jay also gave Sarah Northrop the school, house, and lots in Camden that he’d long held in his name for her use. At the same time, Jay bequeathed Edwin title to the house behind 579 that George and Edith had once called their own, and in which Edwin and Sarah had recently been living.

  Not one nickel went to anyone outside the family. Not one dime went to charity. Any of Jay’s children who cared to save the world with the income from his or her share of the estate was free to do so, but Jay’s sole ambition seems to have been to gift his fortune in a secure manner to those he loved most.

  Each one-sixth share of the trust was to pass intact to blood descendants per stirpes. In other words, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of any one of Jay’s sons or daughters would benefit from, and share, the residual on just one-sixth of the estate, no matter how much any one line multiplied. The only possible exception to this rule would be if one of the bloodlines died out, in which case the core would afterward be divided into fifths, then fourths, and so on, thus increasing the percentage for each surviving line.

  All this might have worked splendidly if George had been up to the task of maintaining and enhancing the value of the core funds, and had Jay Gould’s children collectively demonstrated an ability to simply get along. George’s lack of wit, combined with his laziness, laid the foundation for his undoing. Not inclined to do homework or to spend any more time in the office than was absolutely necessary, George instead indulged himself with a massive estate at Lakewood, New Jersey, called Georgian Court.2 There, at his mansion on Fifth Avenue, and up at the large Catskills house he built on Furlow Lake called Furlow Lodge, George and Edith entertained lavishly. At Georgian Court their balls included chess games played on boards that took up the size of an entire casino room. Live chess “pieces,” decked in full regalia, walked glumly from square to square at the command of millionaire players.

  While champagne, indulgence, and ostentation ruled George Gould’s home life, the little time he spent on business was defined by inattention combined with delusions of grandeur. When he eventually overreached and engaged in battle with the brilliant, indefatigable W. H. Harriman to see who would create America’s ultimate transcontinental system, George’s surrender in 1911 cost him the presidency of the Missouri Pacific. It also lost many millions for the Gould family trust. The trust suffered more still when, two years later, George overruled everyone but the compliant Nellie and divested the two remaining cornerstone properties from Jay’s time: the Western Union and the Manhattan Elevated.

  By 1919, Anna and Frank had become so alarmed at the decline of the core that they brought suit against George for mismanagement. Their motion requested that George be removed as chief executor and trustee. It also asked that George personally render payment of $25 million to Frank and Anna to compensate them for losses suffered during the time of his control. The suit went on for eight years. By the time it was settled, in 1927, George was dead and a circus tent full of lawyers had devoured some $2.7 million in fees. The value of the trust, which dwindled down to $52 million under George’s control, had recently rebounded to $66.5 million on the tide of a booming stock market (still well below the approximately $125 million in real-world value that Jay had left on the day of his death). In the end, the courts divided the estate into six separate units (each with a base amount of a little over $11 million) to be administered by four separate trust companies (one working for Nellie and for George’s heirs, one working for Edwin, one working for Howard, and one working for Frank and Anna). These independent firms were charged with investing the principal and paying income to qualified claimants through succeeding generations.

  George and Edith Kingdon Gould’s vigorous marriage produced seven children, but by 1913 Edith’s fine figure had disappeared and she was obese. This led George to begin eyeing young female performers at various Manhattan theaters. The woman he wound up with was Irish, in her twenties. Although a humble “Gaiety Girl” dancer in a musical entitled The Girl on the Film, Guinevere Sinclair actually came from a prominent background. Her grandfather, Sir Edward Sinclair, had been Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. George bought Guinevere a large townhouse on Seventy-fourth Street in Manhattan and an even larger Tudor mansion in Rye, near the American Yacht Club, where he could conveniently visit aboard the Atalanta. A son, George Sinclair, arrived on 15 April 1915. A daughter, Jane, came along in 1917. Then another girl, Guinevere, showed up in early 1922. George was not discreet about his relationship with Sinclair or about his second set of children. His wife realized the facts, and his eldest legitimate offspring, now grown, frequently muttered darkly about “George’s bastards.”

  As all this went on, Edith Gould made earnest, heartbreaking attempts to slim down. Her manic weight-reduction program involved massages, steam baths, and daily games of golf with her husband on Georgian Court’s nine-hole golf course. One warm morning in November 1921, as Edith and George were in the midst of a round, she suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. Edith was later found to be wearing a suffocatingly tight rubber suit beneath her golf clothes, this designed to make her appear thin. George wed Guinevere at Georgian Court six months later, after which the couple moved to a leased castle in Elginshire, Scotland. They hadn’t been married quite a year, however, when George died of pneumonia while on holiday at Mentone, France, during the spring of 1923. He was fifty-nine.

  George Gould’s mishandling of the Gould estate, combined with his squandering of his share, meant that after his death his seven children with Edith received just under $1 million apiece after taxes. Each also received a one-seventh share in the residual on George’s one-sixth stake in the much-diminished family trust. They, in turn, had children of their own. In the future, virtually all of George’s offspring had to either work for a living, make their own fortunes, or rely on money they’d married into. At the same time, “George’s bastards” received just $1 million among them. (They’d been des- tined for more, including a portion of George’s residual from the family trust, but this plan changed when George’s children by Edith contested the will wherein George formally recognized each of the three Sinclairs as his legitimate blood heirs.)

  Within a year of George’s death, Guinevere married the Viscount Dunsford, George St. Johns Brodrick, heir to the Ninth Viscount and First Earl of Midleton. Following the marriage, Guinevere bought Eastwell Park, a large estate near Ashford in Kent. George, Jane, and Guinevere were in turn adopted by the viscount, and their names changed. The elder Guinevere died in 1976, one year after divorcing her eighty-seven-year-old husband of fifty years. (The Tenth Viscount and Second Earl of Midleton promptly married a younger woman.) The last of the Sinclair “bastards” to die was George, for most of his life known as George Brodrick. He passed away at age eighty-eight in 2003 after a long and distinguished career as an Eton- and Cambridge-educated soldier, farmer, and gentleman. His three children have never met any of their numerous Gould cousins.3

  Edwin Gould fared much better in business, and in life, than did his elder brother. Through the turn of the century he worked in various capacities within Gould-controlled companies. Later on, after tiring of George’s inept authority, he struck out on his own. By shrewdly investing the bulk of his yearly residual, Edwin built a considerable personal fortune outside the family trust. Like his father, he also pursued the happiest of marriages. Edwin’s two sons–Edwin, Jr., and Frank Miller Gould–shared his passion for the outdoors and adventure. Early on, Edwin and his two boys became members of the Shattemuc Canoe Club at Ossining on the Hudson River. Then, in 1913, Edwin purchased two airplanes and learned to fly. With his sons, he hunted
and fished in the countryside near the family’s two homes: Agawam, at Ardsley-on-Hudson, and Chichota, on Georgia’s Jekyll Island.

  It was at Jekyll Island that twenty-three-year-old Edwin, Jr., died in 1917, the victim of a freak hunting accident. He thus became the first of several children and grandchildren to join Jay and Ellie Gould in the large crypt at Woodlawn. After their son’s death, Edwin and his wife, Sarah, literally abandoned their Jekyll Island home. Originally built in 1897 around a spacious swimming pool, the mansion had been purchased by Edwin in 1900. Eventually Edwin added a boat dock and boathouse. He also built for his in-laws another Italian Renaissance mansion, Cherokee Cottage, across the road during the years 1904–1907. Cherokee Cottage remains, but not Chichota. Allowed to fall into disrepair through the twenties and thirties, it was razed in 1941. Today, two carved Corinthian lions mark what used to be the front steps. Nearby lie the ruins of the swimming pool. (In 1928, Edwin’s son Frank Miller Gould built yet another home on the island, which he named Villa Marianna, after his daughter. This still stands.)

  On the heels of Edwin, Jr.’s death, Edwin, Sr.–despite his age (fifty-one) and his millions–volunteered for duty in the U.S. Army during World War I. Edwin served as a supply sergeant. His son Frank also enlisted. Taking a sabbatical from Yale, Frank began a reserve career that would continue into World War II and earn him a captaincy. Edwin himself remained active in the National Guard after the war. Other Goulds filling the U.S. ranks in World War I included two of George’s sons: Jay Gould II, who volunteered as a machinist’s mate first class in the navy, and Kingdon Gould, one of the first 1,000 privates to get their training at Fort Dix. Kingdon rose through the ranks to corporal, sergeant, staff sergeant, and battalion sergeant major, but eventually turned down a chance to attend officers’ training school on the grounds that he’d prefer to stay with his unit. George Gould, Jr., attempted to enlist but was found to be 4-F. Both Edwin and Nellie, meanwhile, were major contributors to the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps for which, ironically, Henry Villard’s grandson–yet another Henry Villard–served as a driver along with his friend Ernest Hemingway.

  At the end of World War I, Edwin sold his Ardsley estate and built a new mansion on Long Island at Oyster Bay. Thereafter, working out of an office in Manhattan, he occupied himself with investments (match companies, New York City real estate, and railroads). At the same time, he became a pillar of New York philanthropy, establishing homes and charitable relief organizations for underprivileged youngsters under the umbrella of the Edwin Gould Foundation for Children. Edwin named the organization not after himself, but his lost son. Previously, even before young Edwin’s death, the father had been active in various endeavors to help young people, chief among these being Camp Woody Crest, in which he partnered with Nellie. In all these activities, Edwin gave more than money. “The thing that fascinates me,” says Michael Osheowitz, recent president of the Edwin Gould Foundation, “is the personal interest that he took in the kids that he was helping. Here’s a guy of immense wealth and privilege who had an interest in helping these kids and got to know and mentor many of them.”4 Demonstrating a devotion similar to that which Jay exhibited in his administration of the Northrop family, Edwin personally worked in and around the grounds of the foundation’s various schools and orphan homes and came to know many of the children on a first-name basis.

  Upon his death in 1933 at the age of sixty-seven, Edwin Gould left one-half of his considerable fortune to his foundation, which continues to this day. The other half, along with a much smaller amount constituting Edwin’s residual share of the Jay Gould fortune, went to Edwin’s sole surviving son, Frank Miller Gould, who had two children.5

  Nellie rivaled Edwin in the doing of good works. She made numerous generous gifts to church mission societies and other devout organizations worldwide. She likewise supported one of her father’s favorite institutions: the University of the City of New York, renamed New York University four years after Jay’s death. In this connection Nellie commissioned none other than Stanford White to design the stunning Gould Library, along with other buildings (including a Hall of Fame for Great Americans) at NYU’s Bronx campus, now the Bronx Community College. (Among those employed at the Bronx campus at the turn of the century was Dr. Charles Henry Snow, Ph. D., Dean of the School of Applied Science, whom Alice Northrop married in 1897. Like her brother Frank, who studied at NYU under Dr. Snow, Nellie herself was an NYU alumna of sorts. During the 1890s she funded and attended several informal, noncredit law seminars for women conducted at the all-male NYU Law School.)

  Just as Nellie’s interest in NYU arose from her father’s habit of giving to that institution, so, too, did another of Nellie’s charitable endeavors stem directly from Jay. Shortly before his death, Jay had promised to help rebuild the Reformed Church of Roxbury, recently destroyed by fire. After Jay died, his children, led by Nellie, moved to make good on his commitment. Built at a cost of $100,000, the Jay Gould Memorial Reformed Church stood complete by mid-1894. Two years later, Nellie–who already possessed life use of both Lyndhurst and 579–purchased a small old house next to the church, which she substantially enlarged to incorporate twenty-two bedrooms, fourteen baths, twelve maids’ rooms, six dens, a large kitchen, two dining rooms, and a dining porch. Thereafter she called her home Kirkside.

  Subsequently, more than one annual gathering of local Mores and Goulds was held on the grounds abutting Nellie’s home. These eleven acres were ones on which Nellie, with the help of Ferdinand Mangold from Lyndhurst, created a beautiful park (Kirkside Park) for the enjoyment of townspeople. (Today the opulent fields and woods, recently restored and embracing a picturesque portion of the East Branch of the Delaware, remain gems. Helen’s Kirkside, meanwhile, survives as a retirement home.) In addition to creating the park for the town, Nellie–encouraged in part by Jay’s old friend John Burroughs, who now summered in Roxbury–funded the creation of a public library in the home on Elm Street (now Vega Mountain Road) once owned by John Burr Gould. Then, in 1911, she built a beautiful Greek Revival structure next door to the library to house the town’s YMCA. (Today the old YMCA serves as the Roxbury Arts Center, home to the Roxbury Arts Group. As for John Burr Gould’s tin shop on Main Street, that is today a local center of contemporary fine art: the Enderlin Gallery.)

  Once Nellie and George established summer homes in the Catskills, it was just a matter of time before other family members returned as well. Alice Northrop, whose marriage to Charles Henry Snow took place in the Jay Gould Memorial Reformed Church, purchased a residence for summer use right across Main Street from the church and Nellie’s Kirkside. It was here, working with her son Henry Nicholas Snow, that Alice wrote her book of the early 1940s, The Story of Helen Gould. She died in 1947. Thirteen years later, her daughter Helen Gould Snow bought a place on Roxbury’s Lake Street. As well, Anna Palen, a daughter of Bettie and Gilbert Palen and therefore another niece of Jay Gould, lived at Roxbury for several decades before dying in 1944. Her house was close to Alice Snow’s, across from Nellie’s Kirkside on Main Street. There she was followed by her brother, Dr. Gilbert J. Palen, a Philadelphia ear, nose, and throat specialist who’d once owned a farm outside the village and who died in the house on Main Street in 1958, aged eighty-eight. (His son, Dr. Gilbert M. Palen, grandnephew to Jay Gould, spent most of his adult life in the Catskills. This Dr. Palen founded the Margaretville Hospital and then pursued private practice in Walton before dying in 1986 at the age of seventy-three.) Meanwhile, though he did not live in or frequently visit the community, Frank Jay Gould nevertheless demonstrated a persistent interest. At one point he purchased a large bell for the tower of the Roxbury High School. On another occasion, in 1948, he underwrote a new furnace for the Jay Gould Memorial Reformed Church.

  Nellie was forty-four when, in January 1913, she surprised her family, the world, and perhaps even herself by taking a husband. Finley J. Shepard was a handsome, debonair executive with the Missouri Pacific. The son of a mini
ster, he shared Nellie’s passions for Scripture, anticommunism, and the defense of besieged Victorian values. As it happened, he was also a Burr descendant: a seventh cousin to the Goulds. Too old to have children of their own, Nellie and Finley instead adopted three (Finley Jay Shepard, Helen Anna Shepard, and Olivia Margaret Shepard, the latter destined to marry John Reed Burr, close kin to Finley, Sr.). The couple also became legal guardians for another orphan, Louis Seton. All four were raised personally by Nellie and Finley in a manner that was quite loving but also tedious in its constant piety.6 All four went to the best schools. And all four played with their father and mother on the private nine-hole course Nellie eventually built on lands adjacent to Kirkside Park. The course, which includes a manmade lake and a stone clubhouse, remains in use to this day as a private facility open to the public.

  Nellie died in late 1938 at age seventy. Finley passed away in 1942. Some of their adoptive descendants remain in the neighborhood of Roxbury at this writing.

  Howard Gould–who like Edwin and Frank was much sharper than their older brother–nevertheless continued after Jay’s death to work for a time under George, with whom he co-owned Vigilant, the Herreshoff-designed America’s Cup defender for 1893. But tensions arose when Nellie, with the support of George, shut down Howard’s attempt to marry an actress. Howard subsequently became incensed when Edith Kingdon Gould, who should have known better, denounced yet another actress as completely unacceptable. This time Howard hit back. He married the second woman, Viola Kathrine Clemmons, known as Kathrine, in 1898, not caring that in his rebellion he effectively cut his portion of the estate in half. At the same time, Howard broke away from George in business and set about building a fortune of his own, investing much of the yearly residual on what was now a one-twelfth share.