The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  Now, with a summer place in Maine and a winter place in Palm Beach, and with Katherine MacMullan in tow from place to place, Eva opened Whitemarsh Hall only for the late-spring and early-autumn seasons. At Bar Harbor, of course, it was assumed that the Stotesburys intended to establish themselves as the social leaders there as well. But this was something that the Old Philadelphians of Bar Harbor were not prepared to allow Eva and Ned to do. One by one, Chestons, Clarks, Lippincotts, Ingersolls, Newbolds, Morrises, and Thayers began moving out of Bar Harbor and reestablishing themselves at quieter, folksier Northeast Harbor, on the opposite side of the island. In fact, Wingwood House and the Stotesburys are often cited as the cause for the demise of Bar Harbor as a fashionable resort—though a great fire that ravaged Bar Harbor in 1947, and destroyed many of the summer mansions, also helped.

  In the 1920s, of course, it was all right to be rich. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone was, and bankers traded stock tips with their bootblacks, and the extravagant doings of the wealthy were cheerfully, almost worshipfully, reported. In the 1920s, too, it was acceptable for a rich woman such as Eva Stotesbury to assume the role of a Lady Bountiful, which Eva did. Though she was generous to her Episcopalian church and to one or two other organized philanthropies, her favorite form of charity was what she called “the personal kind.” She would, for example, personally deliver Thanksgiving turkeys to poor families of Philadelphia, and boxes of toys to their children at Christmastime. But when the Roaring Twenties ended in a roaring crash in October of 1929, and the nation awoke to a world of breadlines, being rich was no longer quite so fashionable, and women like Eva became—overnight—dreadful anachronisms. As the Depression deepened, Ned and Eva Stotesbury came under particularly vicious attack, led by a Philadelphia radio commentator named Boake Carter. In the terrible winter of 1932, Carter actually recommended over the air that a bomb be dropped on Whitemarsh Hall. The Stotesburys also heard that a band of starving citizens had been organized to besiege the house and put it to the torch. A terrified Ned and Eva, envisioning an angry proletarian mob storming their gates, immediately announced plans to close all their houses and move to Europe.

  Meanwhile, all sorts of grim rumors circulated. Ned Stotesbury’s fortune, once reckoned at $200,000,000, was now said to be down to $5,000,000. It was said that on the night before their departure all the Stotesbury servants had walked out on them while they sat at dinner. It was said that all the lights at Whitemarsh Hall had suddenly gone out, the implication being that the Stotesburys had been unable to pay their electric bill. Both stories were untrue. Fiske Kimball, visiting Ned and Eva on the morning of their sailing, found the house running as smoothly as always, the servants efficiently attending to the details of the trip, the lights working and the house electrician on duty. Looking about her magnificent estate for what might be the last time, Eva Stotesbury turned to her lawyer, Morris Bockius, and said with a certain gallantry, “Well, Morris, if we never come back we’ve had ten wonderful years of it.” Later that year, however, they were back—not at Whitemarsh, but at Philadelphia’s Barclay Hotel, where they gave their traditional New Year’s Eve party in the hotel ballroom and danced, somewhat prematurely, to the strains of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

  Fiske Kimball, meanwhile, had always assumed that the Stotesbury art collection would eventually go to the Philadelphia Art Museum, of which he was the distinguished head. Eva had often said, “We consider ourselves only the trustees of our collection for the public.” But now, with New Deal taxes and increased inheritance levies—President Roosevelt’s motto, it was said, was “Soak the rich”—eroding the fortunes of the wealthy, Kimball was apprehensive. By rights, he should have been sympathetic to the Stotesburys. An “outsider” himself, he had, like Ned Stotesbury, been rebuffed by the Philadelphia Club. (Kimball, furthermore, had made the fatal error of asking a friend to put him up for membership. When several months went by with no further word on the subject, Kimball approached the friend again. “I have tried,” was the reply.) Instead, however, Kimball’s attitude toward Ned and Eva was the fashionable one of toplofty condescension—at least when he was not in their presence. With them, of course, with his eyes on the collection, he was all smiles and flattery and blandishments. His hopes were revived in 1933, when Ned and Eva reopened Whitemarsh Hall and embarked on another season of entertaining as though unaffected by the Depression.

  In 1936, when 38 percent of United States families had incomes of less than $1,000 a year—and when the Bureau of Labor Statistics had placed the poverty line at $1,330—the stock market suddenly enjoyed a sharp comeback. Capitalists cheered the fact that the Depression seemed at last over. Early in 1937, however, the market tumbled so precipitously that the crash of 1929–30 seemed almost minor. That winter, Eva—who Fiske noted waspishly “had been a very inactive member of our Committee”—invited Fiske and the members of the museum board to Whitemarsh Hall for lunch. Before sitting down, Kimball was alerted to the situation by one of Eva’s secretaries, who murmured something about “these awful taxes, this awful Roosevelt, and the collection.” During dessert, Eva sadly gave Kimball the bad news. Ned’s will had had to be rewritten; in it, the collection was directed to be sold. “The collection may have to be my bread and butter,” she said quietly.

  Horace Dodge had died not long after his daughter’s marriage to Jimmy Cromwell, and his widow had been devastated, seemingly unable to function without her husband at her side. Eva went immediately to her rescue, and for the better part of a year Anna Dodge lived with the Stotesburys at Whitemarsh Hall. If Philadelphia’s reception to Eva had been frostily superior, it was as nothing compared with the way the city’s worthies received the humbly bred and humbly spoken Mrs. Dodge. “But my mother simply didn’t give a damn,” says Jimmy Cromwell. “Mother was not a snob. She felt it was her duty to help take care of Anna.” (It was a kindness which would one day be well repaid.) “Besides, Mother wasn’t the only woman in Philadelphia who knew how to be a real lady. Two of her dearest friends in the city were Mrs. Alexander Biddle and Mrs. Alexander Van Rensselaer—who were hardly out of the bottom drawer. Both of them remained devoted to her to the very end.” Jimmy Cromwell, who had started his business career with his stepfather’s Drexel and Company, now turned his attention to the affairs of the Dodge Corporation. Among other things, he helped Anna Dodge orchestrate the sale of her Dodge stock, from which she realized $160,000,000. Eventually—though for a rather brief duration—Anna Dodge married a man named Hugh Dillman, and then embarked, throughout the Depression, on a career of spending that made anything the Stotesburys had done seem like child’s play.

  Jimmy and Delphine Dodge had been divorced in 1928, to his mother’s sorrow, but the families had remained friends. Then, in 1935, Jimmy Cromwell made an even more spectacular marriage, to Doris Duke, whose father, James Buchanan Duke, had peddled tobacco with a team of two blind mules and parlayed this modest enterprise into the American Tobacco Company. Doris was only thirteen when her father died, and she inherited $70,000,000 along with a private railroad car named Doris. At the time of her marriage to Cromwell, she was twenty-three and, thanks to the shrewd management of her mother, Nanaline Inman Duke, Doris’s fortune was worth $250,000,000.

  Jimmy Cromwell had also, rather belatedly—he was thirty-six—embarked upon the career of public service his mother had envisioned for him. To the horror of his stepfather, Cromwell had become an ardent New Dealer and an active campaigner for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his programs of social and economic reform. Not surprisingly, there were arguments between the two men on this subject. “Roosevelt was anathema to him,” Cromwell recalls. “I tried to point out to him that he should be grateful to Roosevelt. Few people realize how close the country was to revolution when the banks closed.” One afternoon as stepfather and son sat in the study at Whitemarsh Hall, Ned Stotesbury put down his newspaper and said, “Jim, I have something to tell you. It’s a good thing you married the richest girl in the world. Why? Well, yo
u’re not going to inherit anything from me. Your deity, Franklin D. Roosevelt, is ruining free enterprise. He’s destroying my firm. I made all this myself. FDR is not going to waste it for me. I am.”

  Ned Stotesbury died at Whitemarsh on May 21, 1938, at the age of eighty-nine. Reportedly, he died with curses on his lips against Roosevelt and the New Deal, which he blamed for all the world’s woes. Still, the Stotesburys had not spent the early 1930s in much discomfort, and, when Ned’s estate was examined, it turned out that he had been true to his word. In the five years between 1933 and his death, it seemed, Ned Stotesbury had withdrawn from his account at Drexel’s some $55,000,000 in cash—or more than $10,000,000 a year. How this extraordinary sum was spent, or wasted, is anyone’s guess. It can only be assumed that $10,000,000 a year was the figure required to maintain the Stotesburys’ standard of living. In light of these huge withdrawals, it was even more surprising that his estate ended up amounting to as much as $5,000,000, which was the figure finally placed on it. Looked at another way, he died with barely enough capital for another six months’ expenses, and if he had lingered on until November he would have died penniless. The division of the money was straightforward. Two thirds was to be divided equally between the two daughters by his first marriage. One third, along with the houses and their contents, went to Eva. As he had promised, nothing went to any of Eva’s three children. And it took Eva’s lawyers only a moment to realize that the annual income from her inheritance would amount to less than a quarter of what it cost to maintain Whitemarsh Hall, not to mention the other houses.

  In 1937 an advertisement for Whitemarsh Hall appeared in Fortune, listing all its splendors. No price was mentioned, and there were no takers. Oil-rich Arab sheiks would not discover America for another generation. Similarly, the Palm Beach and Bar Harbor houses were put up for sale, with similar results. In a little over a decade’s time, all Eva’s properties had become costly white elephants. A discouraged Eva was advised that the Whitemarsh property might be more salable if the building itself were demolished. It would cost almost as much to tear it down as it had to build it. She could not afford that, either.

  Next, Eva turned to the sale of her art collection. From London, Duveen, her old friend and mentor and the man who had pocketed so much Stotesbury money in commissions and inflated prices over the years, reported that he was too ill to come to America to help her dispose of all the acquisitions he had helped her acquire. Knoedler’s in New York was then turned to, and their report was equally gloomy. The art market was as depressed as everything else. Eva’s paintings were mostly English, including many Romneys, and English painting was now out of fashion. Once more Fiske Kimball was invited to Whitemarsh Hall, where Eva told him, “I thought I must sell the sculpture, but, at the figures I am offered, I would much rather give it to the museum in memory of Ned.” Fiske made his selections: four stone statues by Pajou, a marble by Tassaert that had once belonged to Frederick the Great, and the two Clodion groups whose only likes were in the Louvre. Fiske also asked for two sets of four plaster female figures bearing torches, which had stood in each of Whitemarsh Hall’s two great rotundas, even though their authorship and provenance were unclear. (Later he would discover that at least one of the sets had decorated the inaugural ball of Madame du Barry at Louveciennes in 1771.)

  Not until 1943 was Eva able to sell Whitemarsh Hall—to the Pennsylvania Salt Company for use as a research laboratory. The reported price was $167,000, including twenty acres of land. The following year, two auctions—one in Philadelphia and one in New York—attempted to sell the rest of Eva’s art and furnishings. The Philadelphia auction was attended mostly by curiosity seekers. The New York auction was, in Fiske Kimball’s words, “a butchery.” One Romney, The Vernon Children, brought $22,000, but that was the highest price achieved in the sale. Nothing else brought more than $10,000, and the magnificent Isfahan carpet, for which Ned Stotesbury paid Duveen $90,000, was sold for only $5,000.

  Through all these vicissitudes Eva remained cheerful and optimistic, never losing her well-bred composure and, if she was ever frightened or disheartened, never letting on. “There was never any bitterness, not even the sense of the stiff upper lip,” says Jimmy Cromwell. “She was sweet and fun-loving as always, poking gentle fun at the vagaries of people—people’s little peculiarities always amused her.” Through it all her two “top-drawer” Old Philadelphia friends, Mrs. Biddle and Mrs. Van Rensselaer, remained supportive and close, even though, it might be added, neither came forth with any offers of material assistance. That was left to plain old Anna Dodge, who came straight out of the bottom drawer to announce that she had a large and elegantly decorated house on Garfield Street in Washington which she never used. It was called Marly. Eva, she pointed out, knew and liked Washington and had lived there for several years. Why didn’t Eva move to Washington and live in Marly? The rent would be nominal, just a token to make it all legal. Eva moved back to Washington not long after Ned’s death. Anna Dodge also privately bought some pieces from Eva’s art collection, for undisclosed prices.

  With Marly to live in, and with the eventual sale of her properties and possessions—including most of her jewelry, though she refused to sell Ned’s wedding pearls—she was able to live quite comfortably. The Bar Harbor house was eventually sold to a junk dealer for about $5,000; he tore the house down to salvage the lead in the plumbing, and then sold the waterfront property for a ferry dock, where thousands of tourists from Canada now seasonally disembark. Far away from touristy Bar Harbor, in the quiet remove of Northeast Harbor, Old Philadelphians, when they bemoan what has happened to Bar Harbor, still seem to be saying, “But we told you so.”

  Whitemarsh Hall still stands, more or less. After acquiring the house, the Pennsylvania Salt Company decided it would be prudent to sell the copper roof, which consisted of several tons of metal. With the copper roof gone, the weather came in. In the wake of the weather came the vandals. The gold-and-white paneling, the carved porticos, pediments, chimney pieces, and capitals have been ripped away. The draped statue that stood at the entrance has been beheaded. Only the façade of the great house remains, a silent and ghostly presence staring through broken windows at a banal array of middle-income suburban housing developments which have replaced the vast formal gardens. At the time of Eva’s death, only El Mirasol in Palm Beach remained unsold, her last white elephant. Eventually that property was sold too, and the house razed.

  And so there is only the shell of Whitemarsh Hall to provide a reminder of an era when to be a great hostess, to give glorious parties, to wear beautiful gowns and splendid jewels, to remember every guest’s name, was—well, enough. Or almost enough, though not quite enough for Philadelphia, which would never forget that Eva was not a Philadelphian, that Stotesbury’s was a twentieth-century fortune, and that Eva had more money than anyone else. “My private theory is that the strongest force in the world is the green-eyed monster, that it’s the cause of all the evil we see around us,” says Jimmy Cromwell. “And of course Philadelphia is a particularly stiff-necked place. It’s why I came to New York as quickly as I could. Why should I sit around in Philadelphia waiting to be asked to join the Philadelphia Club, when my grandfather was a founder of the Union Club in New York? My second daughter was born in New York, which makes her a ninth-generation New York Cromwell. The Philadelphia caste system has, I know for a fact, hurt the city in terms of attracting commerce and industry. Many talented business executives refuse to relocate in Philadelphia because they know that they and their wives will be snubbed by the Old Guard. Philadelphia can’t stand successsful outsiders.”

  But the final hypocrisy was that Philadelphia panted for invitations to Eva Stotesbury’s parties. She may have been encouraged and abetted in her extravagances by her husband, but she was also encouraged by Philadelphia, where she was given no real competition, where she was permitted to have the field to herself. No one even attempted to outdo her; she was given free rein. Philadelphia’s only g
rand parties were Eva’s parties. And in the process she lifted Philadelphia entertaining to heights which it—and most other cities—had never seen and may never see again, far more imaginative and festive than anything ever achieved under the rigid and boring reign of Caroline Astor and her “Four Hundred.” If the thousands of Philadelphians who accepted Eva’s hospitality and were fed and wined at her table are any indication, she filled, for a while at least, a definite local need. Philadelphia would have been a much duller place without her. In a way, she was a rare municipal asset.

  Eva’s gifts were subtle ones, but they were at least two—that sense of personal theatre, and the gift of enjoying beautiful things. Trying to make the point that a great designer cannot create great designs without the support of a great patron, one of the designers from Lucien Alavoine et Cie, the Paris decorating firm that helped Eva with many of her most ambitious projects, despaired of trying to define Eva’s talent and said simply, “Well, the point is … she was a great lady.”

  And she also had charm. In all the gossip about Eva Stotesbury that has survived, there is nothing connecting her with an unkind deed or word. “It’s true,” says Jimmy Cromwell. “Outside of the privacy of her own bedroom, about which I have no knowledge, I never heard her say anything that was disagreeable. She used to say, ‘I try to make it a rule, and I try to abide by it, that if I can’t say something nice about someone I don’t say anything.’ To my knowledge, she and Father never quarreled. I never heard them raise their voices to one another. They were an ideal couple. She had a pet name for him—‘Kickapoo.’ Sometimes when he’d grumble about business or market conditions, she’d laugh and tweak his ear and say, ‘Now, Kickapoo … we have a pleasant life, don’t we?’”