The Great Pierpont Morgan

by Allen, Frederick Lewis;

  There was also the Morgan country house, Cragston, at Highland Falls on the Hudson—another old-style place, in a resort progressively abandoned by fashion. Cragston embodied simplicity on an ample scale, with half a dozen or so guest rooms, small detached cottages for the staff, cattle barns, dairy, and kennels for fifty or more of Morgan’s prize collies, which monotonously carried off blue ribbons at the dog shows. Here Mrs. Morgan spent most of the time between April and mid-autumn, and here Pierpont Morgan came when the opportunity offered, which in his later years was not very often, so very widely did his activities range.

  For winter holidays he had also a thousand-acre place in the Adirondacks, Camp Uncas; for less spartan intervals in the cold months, a furnished apartment in the building called “Sans Souci” at the Jekyll Island Club, on a piny island on the Georgia coast; and, for stopovers when his yacht was in Narragansett Bay waters, a small “fishing box” at Newport, with an expert cook in readiness to satisfy the palates of his guests. (He seldom if ever fished there; a picture of him, in yachting costume, sitting beside a string of remarkably large bass was staged as a joke by his friend Charles Lanier; the fish had been caught by others.)

  In London his headquarters was the big double house at Prince’s Gate which had formerly been his father’s town residence. This, too, was unpretentious in aspect; but very few unpretentious houses contain paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Hobbema, Velasquez, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, Turner, and other artists of wide renown, or for that matter contain a special room designed to display a series of Fragonard panels. And outside London there was Dover House, a comfortable country seat so satisfactorily equipped with gardens, orchards, and a dairy farm that when Morgan ended his English visit in 1902 his special railway carriage, attached to the boat train for Southampton, was piled high at one end—according to Herbert Satterlee’s account—with “the boxes from Dover House that contained melons, hot-house grapes, peaches, nectarines, and bottles of cream sufficient for the voyage,” these supplementary provisions being taken along because, in Satterlee’s matter-of-fact words, “the menu of even the best transatlantic liner was much more simple then than it is today.”

  In Paris, Rome, and watering places such as his favorite Aix-les-Bains, Morgan needed no private property, for he always had his pick of accommodations; in the Hotel Bristol at Paris and in the Grand Hotel at Rome there were special suites set aside for his use whenever he came.

  2

  But the finest of his residences was none of these which I have mentioned, but the Corsair. Not Corsair II now, for that vessel had been sold to the government for use in the Spanish War, where it saw service as the Gloucester (and was hit in the mast by a Spanish shell), but Corsair III, which was completed at the end of 1898 to take her place. The new vessel was very large: 302 feet long, as against 204 for Corsair II and 165 for Corsair I. There have been larger private pleasure craft, but not many of them, and none of such regal dimensions are produced today; the Fleischmann diesel yacht pictured in Life in 1947 as the “first big luxury vessel since the war” was a mere 168-footer.

  When Morgan decided to build Corsair III, he specified to his friend Beavor Webb, who took charge of her construction, that she must be much larger than Corsair II but that her interior fittings must be identical. (Thus was conservatism combined with a love for bigness.) His insistence on close resemblance to Corsair II raised a number of difficult problems. It was found, for example, that the kind of carpets that had been bought for Corsair II were no longer made. But that did not bother Morgan; he ordered the old patterns set up on the looms and new carpets especially made for him with exactly the old design.

  The graceful black steamer served many uses. She could ferry him up the Hudson to Cragston. When he was working in Wall Street during the summer months, he could dine and sleep and breakfast aboard her between week ends. A launch would meet him and his friends at the dock at West Thirty-fifth Street and take them across the river to where the Corsair lay at anchor off the Jersey shore; in the morning they would return, after a monumental breakfast at which astonished guests would watch Morgan work his way through a menu of fruit, porridge, eggs, hash, fried fish, and sliced tomatoes. Or the party would board the Corsair at the East Twenty-third Street landing of the New York Yacht Club, and she would take them through Hell Gate to an anchorage off Great Neck in Long Island Sound; in warm weather this was pleasantly cooler than the Hudson, and in the evening the Corsair might steam slowly up and down the Sound, while the company sat in wicker chairs on the deck and conversed, Morgan perhaps dozing off as they did so, his cigar between his fingers.

  The Corsair also could be packed with guests for a cruise of the New York Yacht Club, of which Morgan was commodore in 1897–99, and for whose new clubhouse in West Forty-fourth Street he had donated the land; and it was from her decks, in 1901 (the year when he formed the Steel Corporation), that Morgan watched the first of the races for the America’s Cup between Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrock II and the American defender, the Columbia. Morgan had a special concern over this contest because he himself had headed the syndicate which had built the Columbia and thus the lovely racing yacht was virtually his personal property. But he couldn’t see the later races because he had to take a special trainload of bishops and other guests to the San Francisco Convention of the Episcopal Church—a convention during which his attention was from time to time divided between the ecclesiastical debates and a series of telegrams recording the leg-by-leg progress of Shamrock II and Columbia as they raced off Sandy Hook, with Columbia winning.

  Morgan could also use the Corsair from time to time as a conveyance and a haven on his travels abroad, for she was seaworthy enough to cross the ocean, albeit uncomfortably, and thus could serve him as a floating residence in the quiet waters of the Mediterranean. And if he himself never ventured to make the crossing in her, that mattered hardly more than the fact that she could not ascend the Nile. In the last years of his life he engaged Thomas Cook and Sons to build for him a private all-steel Nile steamer, the Khargeh, with paddle wheels; and as for his voyages across the Atlantic, in a sense he had his own ships for those too. For did he not nearly always travel by the ships of the White Star Line, and was not the White Star Line a part of the great ship combination, the International Mercantile Marine, which he himself organized in 1902? And was he not therefore treated on board the Oceanic or the Germanic almost exactly as if he were the owner of the line and of all the ships that carried her flag? (It was said, for example, that before the ill-fated Titanic had even been built, he had been shown the plans and had picked out which was to be his suite aboard her.)

  As one of these White Star liners, bringing Pierpont Morgan home from Europe, approached New York, the Corsair would steam down the bay to meet her, festive with pennants from stem to stern, while Morgan responded to her salute by leaning over the rail and swinging a handkerchief from side to side; then after the liner had been warped into her dock, the yacht would take him on up the river to Cragston. What grander welcome could there be to one’s native shores?

  There was one occasion when it was not Pierpont but Mrs. Morgan who was arriving, and he not only went out in the Corsair to meet her liner, but climbed into a launch as the liner paused at Quarantine, and then—as soon as the health officer had gone down the liner’s side by rope ladder—swung his launch alongside the great ship, grabbed the ladder, and climbed up the full sixty perpendicular feet to the liner’s deck—a cigar in his mouth and a straw hat on his head. At this time he was sixty-two years old and entirely unaccustomed to exercise, and the long climb was difficult for him. “The time was long enough,” says Satterlee, “for the sporting element on the decks of the Oceanic to make bets as to whether he would ever reach the rail. If he should fail, there was very little chance of doing anything for him in that tideway. When his face, dripping with perspiration, appeared over the rail, and he got where he could throw his leg over it, he waved aside all the outstretched hands and as
ked, ‘Where is Mrs. Morgan?’ and without pausing followed the steward down to her cabin.”

  A frequently quoted remark of Morgan’s about the proprietorship of a great pleasure vessel like the Corsair deserves repetition here despite its familiarity. Some successful man who was thinking of buying a steam yacht asked him about the cost of maintaining it. Said Morgan, shortly: “Anybody who even has to think about the cost had better not get one.”

  When traveling within the United States, Morgan customarily used a private car. He did not own one; he would simply use one of those owned by one of the railroads in which he was influential. And on occasion he used a special train, as when he took the large party of bishops and laymen and other guests to the San Francisco Episcopal Convention in 1901, putting them up for the duration of the convention at the large Crocker residence, to which he had sent in advance Louis Sherry and a catering staff; and afterward conveying them home by a roundabout route which included a stop at Seattle, where Morgan took his guests to a fur store and invited them to pick out fur rugs or fur collars or gloves as keepsakes from him. On another occasion, some years later, he was in a hurry to get back from a business trip to Chicago and made the trip home by New York Central special train with the track cleared ahead; time from Chicago to New York, sixteen hours and three-quarters, which in 1908 was pretty sensational.

  The wife of a Morgan partner said, much later, that her most vivid recollection of a trip she made on a Morgan private car was of the entranced expression on the porter’s face when the banker tipped him with a hundred-dollar bill.

  3

  Morgan once remarked that he could do a year’s work in nine months, but not in a year; and after he reached the age of sixty he was usually absent from the office routine for some three or four months of each twelve. Usually he would leave New York for England in March or thereabouts, and from then until June or July would divide his time between London—where he kept in touch with the office of J. S. Morgan & Co.—and the Continent. Wherever he was, whether at Prince’s Gate or Dover House, or at the Bristol in Paris, or at Aix-les-Bains, or at the Grand Hotel in Rome, or journeying about to inspect works of art, or taking a look at the excavations conducted in Egypt by the Metropolitan Museum, he was in touch with his office by coded cable; either he would be accompanied by a secretary with a code book, or he would rely upon J. S. Morgan & Co. or Morgan, Harjes & Co. to decode the messages that came from New York, usually several a week. A message might say, for example, something like, “We have concluded a Burlington bond issue on such-and-such terms and unless we hear from you to the contrary will proceed,” and he would cable his assent. But on these holidays he liked to throw off responsibility, leaving the conduct of affairs wholly to his associates; it was seldom that his return message counseled caution or delay. Part of the time in London he might be busy with banking consultations, but much the largest part of his time was given to the art dealers who day after day besieged Prince’s Gate or his suite at the Bristol, bringing paintings or porcelains or miniatures or rare books or manuscripts for his inspection. After his return to New York there might be a few other interruptions of the working routine—a voyage up the coast in the Corsair, a Yacht Club cruise, a church convention trip, or during the winter a few days in the Adirondacks or at Jekyll Island.

  So accustomed was he to vacationing on this generous scale that it was not always easy for him to understand that such a life was not possible for a great many people. When one of his young partners-to-be, preparing to enter the firm, said he would like to be able to manage his work so as to get three months off each year, Morgan was all affability: “Why certainly. Of course. Let’s see: you’re coming in January first—why don’t you pick up your family on February first and take them up the Nile? Have you ever been up the Nile?” The young man demurred. He and his wife had young children. He doubted if this would be possible. (Privately, of course, he was meanwhile wondering what sort of impression it would make in the Street if he went off on a long holiday at the end of his first month at the Corner.) But Morgan made light of his doubts. “Nonsense. Take a couple of nurses. Take a doctor if you want to.” It was all very simple to him and he was cordial and enthusiastic, planning a trip which—as the young partner later said—“of course never came off.”

  4

  Morgan was very loyal to family ties and family rituals—the Sunday-evening hymn singing (at which he loved to hear, and sometimes to sing in a voice of uncertain pitch, old favorites such as “Blest Be the Tie That Binds,” “The Church’s One Foundation,” “Rock of Ages,” or “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”); the family Thanksgiving dinner (with four kinds of pie); the Christmas festivities (a tree for the grandchildren, an expedition in a cab to leave presents at friends’ houses, and a big Christmas dinner with the choir of St. George’s Church to sing for the company, with the famous Negro baritone Harry Burleigh as soloist). When he was at breakfast at No. 219, he liked to have one of his daughters, usually Louisa Satterlee, with him, because Mrs. Morgan had her coffee upstairs; and nothing pleased him more than to have one or two small grandchildren playing about in the dining room. With Mrs. Morgan he was always affectionate and deferential. But she was seldom with him on the Corsair or on the European trips of his later years; when she traveled abroad, she went separately. Being shy, domestic by taste, and in increasingly uncertain health, she became increasingly settled in the habit of remaining behind at No. 219 and at Cragston while he with his overpowering energy and hunger for human society roamed widely.

  Usually on his voyages abroad it was a daughter who accompanied him—again most likely Louisa; and since he loved to have many people about him and had at his disposal big houses, a very big yacht, and almost unlimited means, he was accompanied wherever he went by considerable parties of friends. Once he remarked that no man who did not number among his close associates several men who would be willing to spend much time with him, ought to consider having a yacht: otherwise he would find it the loneliest place in the world. The frequent presence of attractive women in the party on his trips abroad or on the Corsair caused systematic gossip, especially as he liked nothing better than to escort one of them to the jewelers’ shops in the Rue de la Paix and ask her to choose what she liked. Exactly how much fire there was behind the smoke of continuous rumor is a matter of conjecture; without doubt there was some. But as I have already remarked in a preceding chapter, it must be remembered that in a puritanical society rumor always puts the most extreme construction upon any companionship that looks at all unorthodox, especially if a man of note is involved.

  Naturally, too, Morgan’s lamentable nose was attributed by some people to high living. As a matter of fact, he drank very moderately: ordinarily nothing before dinnertime (it was before the era of the inevitable cocktail); some wine at dinner and perhaps a cordial afterward; nothing in the evening. He smoked perpetually; or rather, there was usually a cigar between his lips or between his fingers from breakfast until bedtime, though it was often unlighted for considerable intervals. He breakfasted hugely, but lunched lightly; in the office he would have a chicken or turkey sandwich and perhaps a slice of pie set out for him in the back room, where he ate it alone; or perhaps, in summer, nothing but a plate of sliced peaches which he would bury in sugar. No coffee, no milk; just a glass of water. In his last years, when he came to the office only briefly, he would sometimes arrive about half-past twelve and join the partners for lunch in the building; on one or more such occasions, a partner recalls his choosing a somewhat startling, if small, repast—a dozen raw oysters and a slice of mince pie.

  But if his lunch was usually light, he enjoyed dining largely and well; and dining largely and well, during the first decade of the twentieth century, was among people of means a formidable thing indeed. Those were the days of multi-course dinners—six or eight or ten courses. Morgan belonged to a small dining group who called themselves the Zodiac Club; they met from time to time at the house of one or another of the members, or at a
club, and vied with one another in offering sumptuous meals. Here is the menu of one Zodiac dinner, given at the University Club; Satterlee, from whose book I quote it, swears that it was devised to be eaten right through from start to finish, though he imagines that most members preferred to let one or more of the dishes pass untasted:

  Amontillado Sherry

  Cotuit oysters

  Bisque of crabs à la Norfolk

  Consommé de volaille Sévigné

  Hors-d’oeuvres variés

  Rhine Wine, 1893

  Soft clams à l’ancienne

  Château-Latour, 1878

  Saddle and rack of spring lamb

  Mint sauce

  Peas à la Française

  Bermuda potatoes rissolées

  Moët & Chandon, 1893

  Terrapin, Maryland Club

  Grapefruit au Kirsch

  Clos-Vougeot, 1893

  Canvasback ducks

  Fried hominy

  Celery à l’université

  Parfait noisettes

  Cheese

  Fruit

  Coffee

  Cognac, 1805

  5

  Whatever Morgan did, he did in a big way, whether it was organizing a party or buying masterpieces. When Herbert Satterlee and Morgan’s daughter Louisa were about to be married in 1900, their first idea was that they would prefer a modest service in the little church at Highland Falls, followed by a reception at Cragston. But Morgan took over the planning, and the result was that the ceremony was held at St. George’s in New York, with cards of admission because the church would hold only fifteen hundred people; for the reception, Morgan had a large ballroom temporarily erected behind No. 219 to hold the twenty-four hundred guests who came. As for his purchases of art, they were made on such a scale that an annual worry at 23 Wall Street at the year end, when the books of the firm were balanced, was whether Morgan’s personal balance in New York would be large enough to meet the debit balances accumulated through the year as a result of his habit of paying for works of art with checks drawn on the London or the Paris firm.