Howard’s marriage to the spoiled, tempestuous Kathrine proved unhappy. It was for her that he built the elaborate Castle Gould on lands that today comprise the Sands Point Preserve of Long Island’s North Shore. After the castle’s completion in 1904, Kathrine declared the place unsuitable. Trying to please, Howard immediately set about converting Castle Gould into stables and servants’ quarters, at the same time commencing work on yet another home a few hundred yards away. By 1912, when the Tudor-style Hempstead House with its forty rooms and eighty-foot tower finally stood finished, Howard and Kathrine had already been separated four years. Howard sold the estate to Daniel Guggenheim in 1917. Then he relocated to a rural mansion in England, where, after twenty years of bachelorhood, he remarried in 1937, only to divorce again ten years later. Howard died in 1959 at age eighty-eight, after deliberately taking not even the slightest precautions to shelter his enormous fortune. The British government devoured $52 million of Howard’s $67 million in net worth. His eighty-eighty heirs, the children and grandchildren of his brothers and sisters, wound up getting approximately $170,000 apiece. Not a bad sum, but with just a little planning they could have had much, much more. Howard just didn’t care.
Self-consumed and self-indulgent, Anna Gould was not yet twenty when she abruptly broke off an engagement to Oliver Harriman, nephew to George’s future nemesis E. H. Harriman. Anna’s new suitor, seven years her senior, was a penniless womanizer and adventurer, the Count Marie Ernest Paul Boniface de Castellane, known as Boni. According to Boni, he found Anna to be “excessively shy . . . childish, and a trifle malicious; but she possessed charm, and–what is always delightful to a man–possibilities.” Boni added that “Miss Gould’s fortune played a secondary part in her attraction for me.”7 Astonishingly, George approved of this match, along with Anna’s necessary conversion to Roman Catholicism, the latter being more a matter of form than of faith. The couple were married at George’s Fifth Avenue mansion in March 1895. During the ten years that followed, Boni ran through Anna’s money at a pace that astonished and outraged even the free-spending George. Making matters worse, Boni devoted no small amount of the cash to entertaining other women. Finally, in 1905, after bearing Boni two sons and a daughter, Anna left him. Eventually her lawyers settled Boni’s multitudinous debts at thirty-five cents on the dollar.
Later on, after purchasing an annulment from the Vatican, Anna married one of Boni’s cousins, the Duc Hellie de Talleyrand-Perigord. Hellie was not only rich in his own right but devoted. This happier union produced two more children, a boy and a girl. Anna’s first husband, Boni, passed away in 1932, fifteen years after succeeding to his title and becoming the Marquis de Castellane. The Duchess de Talleyrand’s three children from her first marriage all died relatively young, although the eldest son, Boni, Jr., lived long enough to come into the title of marquis. He married a beautiful half-American woman named Yvonne Patenotre. When he died at age forty-nine in 1946, he left a daughter, Elizabeth, who married Jean Comte de Caumont La Force. With La Force, Elizabeth had three children: two boys and a girl (Anna’s great-grandchildren), who in turn married and had children. Elizabeth’s half uncle–Anna’s third son, Howard, born of Anna’s second marriage–died by his own hand in 1929 after the collapse of a love affair with an older woman. Anna’s second husband, Hellie, passed away in 1937. And Anna’s lone surviving child from her second marriage, a daughter, married Count Joseph de Pourtales, with whom she had children. Thus Anna’s descendants today remain entirely French in their language, sensibilities, and allegiances.
The champagne-sipping, irreverent Anna had avoided the teetotaling and devout Nellie for some thirty years, but she rushed back to the United States on the heels of Nellie’s death to buy Lyndhurst from the estate. During World War II, Anna divided her time between Lyndhurst and a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Then, after returning to France in the autumn of 1945, she made the castle on the Hudson her summer residence. There, every July and August, she slept in the tower bedroom she had used as a child. Anna died in 1961 at the age of eighty-six. In her will she gave Lyndhurst to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, together with a fund for its upkeep. After Anna’s French heirs contested the will, the National Trust forfeited the fund but kept the house. Today the estate (severely reduced to just sixty-seven acres from Jay’s five hundred), the mansion, and the remains of Jay’s wondrous greenhouse remain open to the public.
Frank graduated from NYU in 1898 with a degree in engineering. Thereafter, following a familiar pattern, he worked briefly for George. But in time, like his brothers before him, he came to disagree with George’s handling of affairs. So he, too, pursued his own personal and quite successful program of investments. Frank’s marriage to his first wife (the socially prominent Helen Kelly, granddaughter of one of Jay Gould’s early Wall Street allies) broke down in 1904. After that, Frank gained custody of his two daughters, married a showgirl, and purchased a chateau on the French coast at Normandy. No one knows what caused Frank to suffer an emotional breakdown some ten years later, but his behavior became destructive and erratic throughout the years of World War I. During this period, Frank drank heavily and became a regular at Parisian bordellos. His second wife left him in 1918. Four years later he met the woman who would prove his savior.
Frank married Florence La Caze, a strong-willed former actress from San Francisco, in 1923. He was forty-six, she twenty-eight. Florence dried him out and turned him back toward business. Frank invested in casinos and hotels at Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, Nice, and Vagnoles-de-l’Orne, establishments frequently visited by his high-rolling sister Anna, to whom he remained close. Although Frank eventually became known as the “king of croupiers,” he in fact concentrated only on the real estate aspects of his enterprises, leaving the details of casino, nightclub, and hotel management to others. (For example, Frank built his Palais Mediterranee in Nice at a cost of $5 million; then he licensed the building to the Monte Carlo Company for thirty years at $1 million per year, during which time he enjoyed a healthy run-up on the value of the property while also collecting the hefty rent.) By 1930 Frank’s holdings on the Riviera alone were worth more than $20 million. Florence, meanwhile, founded a literary salon at Juan-les-Pins, where she hosted the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jean Cocteau.
Frank remained in France throughout World War II. In his sixties and in poor health, he was viewed by the Nazis not as an enemy alien but rather a benign, elderly Frenchman. Seven years after the conclusion of the war, Frank gave New York University $1.5 million with which to build a student center. Two years later, in 1954, the seventy-seven-year-old Frank–prompted by his cousin-in-law and former dean, the ninety-one-year-old Charles Henry Snow–presented the university with yet another $1 million, this to be followed in 1956 by the deed to an estate at Ardsley-on-Hudson that Frank had not visited in years.
Charles Henry Snow died in 1957 at age ninety-four. Frank Jay Gould died at Juan-les-Pins in 1958, aged eighty-one. The bulk of Frank’s substantial estate went to his wife, Florence; his two married daughters; and his daughters’ children. Florence went on to help found the International Jazz Festival. This world-renowned event has been held annually ever since 1960 at Juan-les-Pins in the amphitheater of the Frank Jay Gould Pine Grove. Florence, who died in 1983, also founded the Florence Gould Foundation, an organization that supports French cultural events (such as art exhibitions and music concerts) throughout the United States. In September 2003, by way of recognizing the foundation and its founder, the Cultural Services Division of the French embassy in New York dedicated a new Florence Gould Garden at its headquarters, 927 Fifth Avenue.8
George Gould’s second eldest son by Edith, Jay II, became a champion at court tennis, the ancient sport of kings transacted on a walled court. In twenty years of top-level competition, Jay II lost only once in singles and once in doubles. He won the U.S. amateur championship for the first time in 1906, when he was only seventeen, and he held this title through 1925 except for 1918 and 191
9, when there was no tournament and Jay II was in the service. Gould also won a gold medal in the 1908 Olympics, where his sport was called jeu de paume on the official program. In 1914, he became the first amateur ever to win the world championship. Subsequently, he and various partners won a total of fourteen national doubles championships. Jay died relatively young, at age forty-six in 1935, leaving children who in turn had children.
The balance of George and Edith’s offspring led widely varied lives. Their eldest, Kingdon Gould, attended Columbia, became a business executive, and enjoyed a happy marriage to a former family maid. George and Edith’s middle daughter, Vivien Gould, married an Irish nobleman–John Graham Hope De La Poer Horsley-Beresford, Fifth Baron Decies–in 1911. She died in 1931. (Her son, Arthur George Marcus Douglas de la Poer Beresford, Sixth Baron Decies, passed away in 1992. Her grandson, Marcus Hugh Tristram de la Poer Beresford, Seventh Baron Decies, born 1948, is a Dublin attorney.) George Gould, Jr., George and Edith’s fifth child and third son, became a stock broker, married, and had two sons: George Jay Gould III and Maugham Carter Gould, about whom little is known. George, Jr., and his wife divorced when the boys were still small.
Marjorie, the eldest of George and Edith’s daughters and their third child, married Anthony Drexel of the banking family. (It was Anthony who gave George, Jr., his brokerage job at the firm Liggett, Drexel & Company.) As for Edith, George and Edith’s third eldest daughter and fifth child, she led a brief life of dissipation, during which she squandered much of her small inheritance, divorced her first husband (Carroll Livingston Wainwright, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant by whom she had three children), and remarried before dying at age thirty-six. (Her son, Stuyvesant Wainwright II, served as a Republican member of Congress from a district in eastern Long Island from 1953 through 1961.) Gloria, George and Edith’s youngest daughter, suffered a similar fate to Edith’s. After years of unhappiness and alcoholism, she drowned while swimming drunk at her home near Phoenix in the 1940s, leaving a daughter.
If there is one among the current generation of Goulds who most closely resembles Jay in most things, it is great-grandson Kingdon Gould, Jr. This Gould is the holder of two Purple Hearts and two Silver Stars earned while serving with the U.S. Army during World War II. He is also a Yale-educated attorney and a longtime developer of real estate in the Washington, D.C., area, an endeavor which has proved enormously profitable. Kingdon spends his summers at George Gould’s old Furlow Lodge by the trout lake on Dry Brook Road not far from Roxbury, where he is surrounded by several other Gould homes (one of them owned until recently by his sister Edith Gould Martin, who passed away in the summer of 2004).
Kingdon is the first son of a first son of a first son after Jay. In addition to his career in business, he has served with distinction as U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg (1969–1972) and the Netherlands (1973–1976). A former chair of the John F. Kennedy International Field Hockey Tournament and a presidential counselor at Johns Hopkins University, Kingdon speaks five languages, is an avid sportsman, and serves on numerous boards. He is also a devoted family man. Kingdon and his wife, Mary–who together were founders of the prestigious Glenelg Country School in Howard County, Maryland, which marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2004–boast nine children, twenty-eight grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren. The couple, both amateur actors, sometimes perform Love Letters–A. R. Gurney, Jr.’s romantic comedy–for the benefit of worthy causes. In May 2004 they gave one such performance for the Roxbury Arts Group in the building Nellie built so many decades ago as a gift to Jay’s old hometown.
What would Jay think of Kingdon’s keen talent and perseverance in business combined with his love of family and his sensitivity to the Goulds’ Catskills heritage? One imagines that he would find it all quite satisfying.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My friend and agent, Chris Calhoun, was the first person, after my wife, Christa, and myself, to have faith in this project. He was quickly followed by my even older friend, but new editor, Bill Frucht. Both Chris and Bill–together with Chris’s capable assistant Diana Thow and Bill’s equally estimable associate David Shoemaker–have proven wonderful accomplices. I would also like to thank Joe Bonyata, the Perseus Group’s director of editorial production, for invaluable support.
Many thanks to the good people at Lyndhurst and the New-York Historical Society. I’m also grateful to the special collections staffs at the University of Rhode Island, New York University, Boston University (Mugar Library), the Library of Congress, the University of Michigan (Clements Library), Rutgers University (Alexander Library), the Morgan Library, Clemson University, the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (Baker Library), the Denver Public Library (Western Historical Collection), and the Newberry Library.
Numerous individuals have offered various brands of support. Carolyn Bennett, probably the world’s leading authority on Gould’s mentor and early business partner Zadock Pratt, read and commented on key slices of the manuscript. Peg Ellsworth, official historian for the town of Roxbury, New York, did the same and spent time with me in Jay’s natal village. William A. Cormier, official historian for Salem, New York, helped me track down Jay Gould’s early railroad venture on the Vermont–New York border and also put me on the trail of Jay’s previously lost brother, Abram, who married a Salem native and lies buried in that hamlet. Another previously lost remnant of the Goulds–the late George Brodrick, illegitimate grandson of Jay Gould–jovially welcomed inquiries from a stranger and willingly filled me in on essential details concerning the latter days of his father, George Jay Gould. Debbie Allen of Black Dome Press–who published my biography of Jay Gould’s great friend from boyhood, the naturalist John Burroughs–and her soulmate Bob Hoch offered encouragement, contacts, and shelter in the Catskills. Chris Bentley read my first draft manuscript from stem to stern, offering essential criticism. Other interested parties–among them John Perry Barlow, Doug Brinkley, Eileen Charbonneau, Ben Cheever, John Gable, Arthur Goldwag, Phil Roosevelt, and Artie Traum–cheered and offered needed encouragement from the sidelines. Tweed Roosevelt, true to form, provided shelter in his guestroom during research forays to Boston.
I’m also thankful to Richard Snow, who allowed me to write about America’s robber barons for the October 2004 edition of American Heritage.
As usual, my wife, Christa, and our two children–Bill and Katherine–have tolerated my distractedness, my preoccupation with a century other than that in which we find ourselves, and my hours locked away in the study. I hope they find the result to be worthwhile.
EDWARD J. RENEHAN, JR.
Wickford, North Kingstown, RI
9 December 2004
NOTES
PREFACE
1. Gould and Rockefeller held each other in high regard. Gould once commented that Rockefeller possessed America’s “highest genius for constructive organization.” Rockefeller, in turn, categorized Gould as the greatest businessman he had ever met. What was more, the two shared similar lifestyles as devoted family men. Rockefeller would not think nearly so highly of Gould’s eldest son and chief heir, George Jay Gould, a self-absorbed dilettante and poor financial tactician by whom Rockefeller eventually lost approximately $40 million in bad investments during the first decade of the twentieth century.
2. New York Tribune. 14 December 1892.
3. Gustavus Meyers. History of the Great American Fortunes. London: Stationer’s Hall. 1909. 115.
4. Matthew Josephson. The Robber Barons. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace. 1995. 126.
5. Two other worthy books, though not full biographies, focus on key slices of Jay Gould’s story: Kenneth Ackerman’s The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869. (Dodd-Mead, 1988) and John Steele Gordon’s excellent The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Erie Railway Wars, and the Birth of Wall Street (Grove Press, 1988).
6. Robert Riegel. The Story of the Western Railroads. New York: Macmillan. 1926. 231.
7. New York World. 4 October 1891.
8. Robert I. Warshow. Jay Gould, or The Story of a Fortune. New York: Greenberg. 1928. 47.
9. Michael Klepper and Richard Gunther. The Wealthy 100: A Ranking of the Richest Americans Past and Present. New York: Carol. 1999.
CHAPTER 1: THE MYSTERIOUS BEARDED GOULD
1. New York Times. 6 December 1892.
2. Giovanni P. Morosini. “Memoir of Jay Gould.” Helen Gould Shepard Papers, New-York Historical Society. (Hereafter HGS.)
3. New York Herald. 3 December 1892.
4. New York Times. 3 December 1892.
5. New York World. 3 December 1892.
6. New York Times. 5 December 1892.
7. New York World. 4 December 1892.
8. New York World. 3 December 1892.
9. Henry Adams and Charles Francis Adams, Jr. Chapters of Erie and Other Essays. Boston: James Osgood. 1871. 31.
10. Giovanni P. Morosini. “Memoir of Jay Gould.” HGS.
11. New York World. 4 December 1892.
12. New York World. 14 January 1889.
13. Alice Northrop Snow and Henry Nicholas Snow. The Story of Helen Gould. New York: Fleming H. Revell. 1943. 196.
14. New York Times. 7 December 1892.
15. New York Tribune. 13 June 1874.
16. Julia Pratt Ingersoll. Diary Note. 9 December 1892. Ralph Ingersoll Papers, Mugar Library, Boston University. (Hereafter Ingersoll.)
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