The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  In the background of this huge creation lurked Joseph Duveen. He had recommended the architect, Horace Trumbauer; the landscape designer, Jacques Gréber of Paris; and the interior decorator, Sir Charles Allom of London, who had helped George V and Queen Mary redo some of the principal rooms at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Duveen’s firm had also supplied most of the furniture, rugs, and tapestries, a collection of five hundred paintings, and monumental sculptures by Pajou, Tassaert, and Lecomte, as well as two Clodion groups whose only matching pairs were in the Louvre. One fifty-three-foot Isfahan carpet which lined the Great Hall, or ballroom, had cost Eva $90,000. Eva once said of Duveen, “I can never be grateful enough to him. He taught me how to live”—a remark that was widely ridiculed in Philadelphia, where people added, “And he also taught her how to spend.” Eva Stotesbury countered this with a little joke of her own. Admitting that she had little business sense, she said, “The only successful financial transaction I ever made in my life was when I married Mr. Stotesbury.”

  Whitemarsh Hall was opened with a great party in October 1921. The entire social and banking community of Philadelphia turned out for it, plus many guests from New York and a handsome sprinkling of titled foreigners. Forty extra footmen, it was said, had been hired to serve the party, and in the corner niches of one of the two rotundas, four bars were set up—one for cocktails, one for whiskey, one for champagne, and one for other sorts of drinks—a lavish thumb to the nose at Prohibition. Four orchestras—two seated, and two strolling—played for dancing, and, as he often did, Ned Stotesbury, who had been a drummer boy in the Civil War, took a few turns on the drums.

  Still, for all the gaiety and splendor, there were the usual sour comments. The Philadelphia aesthete Fiske Kimball, director of the Art Museum, appraising Mr. Duveen’s work, said, “The furnishings made an impression of great magnificence. One scarcely realized how few of them were actually antique.” Kimball also found fault with the flowers: “On an estate where flowers grew luxuriantly in parterres and green-houses, the roses in the drawing room … were silk, sprayed with perfume. Everywhere were English portraits, chiefly by Romney and Lawrence, which Duveen had unloaded on the Stotesburys at enormous prices.” Other details of the evening sound like canards. It was said, for example, that Eva—who was so good at attaching names to faces—moved among her guests with “a typewritten catalogue” of the paintings in her hand in order to name the artist, title, and provenance of each piece. It was also said that, at the outset of the evening, guests were paraded past glass cases where her entire jewelry collection was displayed. (Eva never displayed her entire collection of jewelry to any guest, though, as we shall see, her husband did on one occasion.)

  Not even Ned Stotesbury was spared the criticism. Philadelphian Nathaniel Burt wrote that Ned banged on the drums “when he got drunk,” and that Stotesbury was the kind of man “who would give himself a testimonial dinner and then clap at the speeches,” even though Stotesbury never did such a thing.

  Naturally, the burning question on everyone’s lips was how much Whitemarsh Hall had cost. No one could be so crass as to ask the host and hostess, and in the press the estimates varied wildly. It is also likely that Ned Stotesbury did not know exactly—it was to be his beautiful monument to Eva and her entertainments, and he had given her virtually a blank check. Perhaps the best estimate comes from Horace Lippincott, who was a close friend of Ned Stotesbury and who mentions a figure of around three million dollars, exclusive of furnishings and décor. These, of course, were pre-First World War dollars. It was a very expensive house.

  And, though Philadelphians went right on accepting Ned’s and Eva’s invitations, the Philadelphia consensus was that it was all too much. Philadelphians preferred a more restrained expensiveness. To understand what Philadelphians admired, one would have had, just a few years back, to spend an evening in rural Penllyn, not far from Chestnut Hill, with the elderly Miss Anna Ingersoll.

  Ingersolls, as they say, have been in Philadelphia forever—at least since Revolutionary times, when the first Ingersoll came down from Salem, Massachusetts, and settled there. They have produced seven generations of Philadelphia lawyers, bankers, civic leaders, and gentlemen. According to Philadelphia legend (and there is no way of ever knowing whether any of the legends occurred quite as told), Miss Anna, who was very beautiful and popular in her youth, never married because the young man she was in love with was a Jew. This made marriage out of the question, of course, and so, forbidden to marry the man she loved, Miss Anna chose to remain a spinster. (The man she loved, it is said, never married either.)

  Penllyn is something of an Ingersoll family compound, and various Ingersoll houses are scattered across the rolling hills. Driving down the long graveled drive to Miss Anna’s big old graystone house, one used to be able to see, in the rear-view mirror of one’s automobile, a gardener appear with a rake to smooth the gravel that had just been disturbed by the passing of the car.

  Tea with Miss Anna in her portrait-hung drawing room (all portraits of Ingersolls, of course, nothing that had been plucked from an English Stately Home by a voracious Joseph Duveen) in that not-so-long-ago day—we are talking here of the mid-1960s—was a merry, gossipy affair: who married whom, the Coxes, Chews, Peppers, Newbolds, Morrises, Ingersolls, Cadwalladers, and Pughs. The difference between the Pughs and the Pews, the Cadwalladers and the Cadwaladers, is far more than a matter of spelling. Sitting behind her huge silver tea service, pouring tea, offering tiny watercress sandwiches, bread-and-butter sandwiches on the thinnest bread, and little English biscuits from a Fortnum & Mason box, Miss Anna was a lively octogenarian. One by one her various relatives—brothers and their wives, cousins, nieces, nephews—would drop by for an afternoon visit with Miss Anna. Without missing a beat, tea time turned into the cocktail hour, with one of Miss Anna’s brothers splashing a little domestic vermouth into the mouth of a Gilbey’s gin bottle and shaking the mixture vigorously. The result, martinis at room temperature, was then poured from the gin bottle into empty glasses held in eager hands.

  Dinner was equally unpretentious. Though the silver, laid with xylophone precision about the dinner plates, was of the heaviest—three-pronged forks, pistol-handled knives—and gleamed with that special deep, creamy luster that can be achieved only in old silver that is polished after every meal, the napkins were of a ten-cent-store paper variety. Also, though the dining table was of museum-quality wood, it was possible to spot, among the heavy silver epergnes and candelabra, a ketchup bottle and a French’s mustard jar. This, after all, is Old Philadelphia. Because it knows who and what it is, it has no reason to apologize for anything.

  At the mention of Eva Stotesbury’s name, Anna Ingersoll’s expression grew thoughtful—pleasantly thoughtful. “Oh, I knew Eva well,” she said, choosing her words with great care. “I liked her very much. She was absolutely charming, and she gave wonderful parties. She was so—gracious, always. But, you see … well, she married Ned Stotesbury, of course. And Eva was very … very ambitious.”

  That, then, was Eva’s fatal flaw: ambition. In Philadelphia, ambition had become a pejorative term.

  James Henry Roberts Cromwell, the younger of Eva’s two sons by her first marriage, was only ten years old when his father died, and since the age of eight he had attended the Fay School, a private boys’ academy in Massachusetts. It was natural, after his mother’s remarriage, that Jimmy Cromwell should call Ned Stotesbury “Father.”

  As head of—among other things—the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, Ned Stotesbury had told his young stepson about a special railroad car, which was hitched on in front of the engine and was used to transport the railroad’s directors on inspection tours of coal-mining operations in the northeastern part of the state. The coal companies were some of the railroad’s most important customers, and Jimmy had begged his father to take him on one of these excursions. Finally, when Jimmy was fifteen, Stotesbury invited the boy along, saying, “Just don’t get underfoot, and m
ake yourself as inconspicuous as possible.” And so Jimmy joined his father and the other members of the board for a trip to Mauch Chunk, the county seat of Carbon County, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the anthracite country.

  “I had never seen poverty before,” Jimmy Cromwell recalled many years later. “I was horrified. I had always assumed that everyone lived in houses like Whitemarsh Hall, but here were miners living in tiny shacks. The children had no shoes or stockings. The people were in rags—unwashed and sickly. In two of the little shanties we went in, coal was stored in the bathtubs.” On the ride home, Jimmy seemed so unusually pensive that Stotesbury said to him, “What are you being so glum about?”

  At home, Jimmy mentioned the experience to his mother, who quickly said, “You must speak to your father about this.” The boy did so, and, after closing the study door and sitting the young man down, Ned Stotesbury began a long and rambling lecture that was as serious—and ultimately as confusing—as any parental explanation of the facts of life. “I want to explain this,” Stotesbury began. “What you have seen is the price of competition. For example, in our coal business we’re having trouble competing with oil as a fuel. Oil is cutting into our business, cutting into our profits.…” On and on he went for the better part of two hours, Jimmy Cromwell remembered, outlining his own capitalist theories on the American free enterprise system.

  Later, Eva took her son aside and asked, “What did he tell you?” As best he could Jimmy Cromwell recounted what his father had said to him. “There is something I would like to add to that,” his mother said at last. “Great wealth carries with it great responsibilities. It is the best part of the Christian ethic to take care of the underprivileged and less fortunate. Don’t forget that if you don’t, you may lose all your luxuries, because revolution is an indictment of the ruling class.” It was an era, after all, when concepts like “wealth,” “responsibilities,” and “class” could all fit comfortably in the same sentence. Then Eva added, “Perhaps this will inspire you to devote your life to some form of public service.”

  Several years later, Jimmy Cromwell was dancing at the Washington’s Birthday costume ball in Palm Beach, which officially marked, in those days, the end of the winter season. His fancy was caught by a young lady who had come dressed as a ballerina and who, he could not help noticing, had lovely legs. He presented himself to her. She was Delphine Dodge, the only daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Horace Dodge of Detroit, who were in the automobile business. A romance and courtship followed, and a wedding was announced for June 20, 1920.

  The marriage was spectacular news: two enormous American fortunes were joining hands, and the union seemed absolutely dynastic—at least on the surface. Actually, the Dodges had no real social position in Detroit, and did not rank with such pre-internal combustion families as the Joys, Newberrys, and “old” Fords, no kin to Henry. Horace Dodge was a self-taught, self-made man, and his wife, Anna, was the daughter of a rough old Scottish sailor. Both Mr. and Mrs. Dodge had trouble speaking the King’s English correctly, and Anna Dodge used to startle acquaintances by saying, “I helped make this fortune, too. I used to get up at six in the morning to fix Dad’s breakfast and pack his lunch pail.” Mrs. Dodge always called her husband “Dad,” and he called her “Mother.” Needless to say, the Dodges were overjoyed at the prospect of their daughter’s union with not one but three important American families, the Cromwells, the Robertses, and the Stotesburys.

  Naturally, Eva and Ned were invited to visit Rose Terrace, the Dodge estate in Grosse Pointe on the shore of Lake St. Clair. The house was large and the grounds were extensive, but Anna Dodge had had no Joseph Duveen to guide her hand and shape her taste. The furniture was heavy and ugly, the paintings on the walls were still-life reproductions, and the rooms were cluttered with pretentious bric-á-brac and a great deal of Tiffany glass. Next, Eva and Ned invited their future in-laws to Whitemarsh Hall, where the Dodges were goggle-eyed at what they saw. Horace Dodge, in particular, was impressed with Eva’s jewelry, and begged to be shown it all. Ned Stotesbury—who even before meeting Eva had begun collecting precious stones—thereupon produced tray after tray of glittering gems.

  Not long before the wedding Mr. Dodge took his future son-in-law aside. “Jim,” he said, “I’m worried about Mother.” “What about her?” Cromwell wanted to know. “Well, Mother doesn’t have the kind of pearls your mother has. In the church, people are going to notice that sort of thing. Where does your mother buy ’em?” Cromwell mentioned Cartier. “Never heard of him,” Dodge said. “But get me an appointment with this fella.” And so Cromwell arranged a meeting between Pierre Cartier, Horace Dodge, and himself.

  At the meeting, Cartier—whom Mr. Dodge persistently called “Mr. Car-teer”—produced several trays of pearl necklaces. “No, no, Mr. Car-teer,” said Mr. Dodge. “I want something bigger than that for Mother. Something to match Mrs. Stotesbury’s pearls.” Finally Cartier said, “Monsieur Dodge, I do have one very fine set. They belonged to the Empress Catherine.” “Never heard of her,” said Mr. Dodge, “but let’s see ’em.” Cartier then brought out a magnificent strand of pearls the size of robin’s eggs. “That’s more like it,” said Mr. Dodge. “How much?” “Ah, Monsieur Dodge,” said M. Cartier, “that necklace is one million dollars.” “I’ll take it,” said Dodge, pulling out his checkbook and writing a check for $1,000,000.

  Meanwhile, Anna Dodge had been carefully studying Whitemarsh Hall. Later she would hire Eva’s architect and decorator and transform Rose Terrace in the image of the Stotesbury house.

  Throughout the 1920s Eva and Ned Stotesbury entertained like mad. Eva liked to say that she had taught her husband “how to play,” another comment that was greeted sneeringly in Philadelphia; the term “playboy” had come into fashion, carrying derisive overtones, and the image of a millionaire in his seventies cavorting across an endless series of ballrooms made Ned Stotesbury seem something of a caricature of the type. And it was true that, though Ned was at his office at Drexel’s every morning at eight, most of the Stotesburys’ evenings were spent in some form of fun. The wardrobes of jewels, furs, and gowns increased, and both Ned’s and Eva’s names now appeared regularly on “best-dressed” lists.

  In the 1920s, however, one began to sense a note of hysteria, of barely controlled desperation, in Ned and Eva’s social activities. It was as though they had seen that they had gone too far, but it was now too late to turn back, and all they could do was go even farther. The Stotesburys built another huge villa in Palm Beach, where “for lack of competition”—as Philadelphia chronicler Nathaniel Burt rather snidely put it—the Stotesburys became the winter colony’s acknowledged social leaders and where their El Mirasol (The Sunflower) was the resort’s largest house. (The name struck some people as odd and inappropriate; El Mirasol was the name of the Albuquerque hotel where Eva and her first husband had spent their honeymoon.)

  In 1925 the Stotesburys decided to move on to the summer colony of Mount Desert Island, Maine, where Bar Harbor had long been a favorite resort for Old Philadelphians, and here Eva’s behavior drew even more criticism. The house they bought had belonged to Alexander Cassatt, who had been president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, but when she toured her new acquisition Eva announced that it wasn’t big enough. There were only fifteen servants’ rooms; she needed forty. So she ordered the house torn down and a larger structure erected in its place, instructing her architect to have the place ready for occupancy the following summer. But when she returned in 1926, to find the place completed and furnished to the last detail, she walked through the result and it still wasn’t big enough. Her husband, it seemed, wanted her to live on an ever-grander scale. “It won’t do,” she said. “Tear it down and build it over again, and this time I’ll stay here and see that it’s done properly.” In the end, what was achieved was Wingwood House, the largest example of Colonial-style architecture in the State of Maine.

  It was curious, because this sort of thing was not at all what Eva had origina
lly said she wanted—“a cozy little retreat,” “a cottage,” where she and Ned could relax and enjoy each other’s company away from the heavy social duties of Palm Beach. Instead, she had built another palace. But once again the éminence grise behind her actions was Joseph Duveen. Duveen had acquired roomfuls of English furniture from a titled Britisher and had succeeded in selling it all to the Stotesburys. Another expanded house was the only solution to where to put it.

  “Of course Duveen overcharged her outrageously,” Jimmy Cromwell, a tall, spry man in his eighties, says today. “But at least my mother knew she was getting good goods. I don’t think Father ever read a book in his life, but Mother was always researching. If she was buying English furniture, she would read every book she could find on the subject. If she was buying a particular painter, she would dig up everything she could find on him. I used to tease her and call her the American Clipper, because she usually had a pair of scissors in her hand to cut out clippings from newspapers and antique and art magazines. Mother loved to create things. But what a lot of people who criticized her for being ostentatious never realized was that it wasn’t she who insisted on living on that magnificent scale. It was he. Father was the show-off—not my mother. He was of a generation of men who wanted to show the whole world how important they were. And of course his firm was making so much money that—well, today it would be downright embarrassing. His theory was: If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”