The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  When two daughters and Cornelius Jeremiah contested the will, William settled out of court, giving each of his sisters another $500,000. He paid his brother the income from $1 million, but not for long, since Cornelius committed suicide five years later.

  Their reputations as “robber barons” notwithstanding, William and his father had believed in improving working conditions, equipment, and service, and when New York Central employees refused to join the great railroad strike of 1877, William rewarded his trainmen and laborers by distributing $100,000 among them. An excellent businessman, he continued strengthening the New York Central with mergers and enlightened business practices, doubling his fortune in only six years to more than $200 million (about $2 billion in current purchasing power).

  Now he gave thought to cultural matters, investing in a magnificent Fifth Avenue house that he filled with paintings, sculptures, and fine furnishings. He commissioned Richard Morris Hunt, the foremost architect of the time, to design a gilded neo-Byzantine mausoleum on the highest land in New York City — eleven acres in the Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island. Only those descendants with the name “Vanderbilt” can be interred within this elegant edifice. Peripheral family are buried in adjoining plots. Did he hope to perpetuate not only the name but the success and energy of future Vanderbilts? To maintain control from the grave? In its heyday, dozens of elegant carriages waited in the cobblestone driveway of this mausoleum, which in the ’70s became a “make-out” site for teenagers, as evidenced by a Life magazine cover of the time.

  Unlike his father, William gave generous charitable gifts in his lifetime: to Vanderbilt University, St. Bartholemew’s Church, the Moravian Church at New Dorp, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He paid $103,732 to cover the cost of moving the Thutmose III obelisk (224 tons, 69½ feet high) from Egypt to Central Park. What, I wonder, did that thrusting symbol of ancient power mean to my great-grandfather? A monument more lasting than his money? A form symbolizing his virile power?

  By the time of his death in 1885, William had delegated his two eldest sons to take over his leadership of the family business. He left $10 million to each of his eight children — four sons, Cornelius, William Kissam, Frederick William, and George Washington, and four daughters, Margaret Louisa (Mrs. Elliott F. Shepard), Emily Thorn (Mrs. William D. Sloane), Florence Adele (Mrs. H. McKown Twombly), and Lila or Eliza Osgood (Mrs. William Seward Webb). To Cornelius he gave an additional $2 million and $1 million in trust for Cornelius’ eldest son, William. To his wife he left his home, the art in it, and an annuity of $200,000. More than $1 million went to institutions he had supported, plus other missions, churches, hospitals, the YMCA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More than $100 million in his residuary estate was divided equally between his two eldest sons, Cornelius and William Kissam. Thus, like his father, but less unfairly, he favored his strongest male descendants. This was probably with a view to preserving for future generations the fortune handed down from his father, in a modified version of the British tradition of primogeniture.

  Cornelius, Gertrude’s father, was the harder working of the two brothers and became, until his death, the head of the family. Hard as he worked, he found time for many philanthropic activities, as is often the case among men of third-generation wealth who seek social position as well as business success through patronage — because the Vanderbilts still represented “new money.” He was a trustee of several hospitals, including the College of Physicians and Surgeons, of Columbia University, the General Theological Seminary, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; a manager of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church; chairman of the executive committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to which his most famous gift was Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair. He founded and built the clubhouse for the Railroad Branch of the YMCA. He was a warden of and generous contributor to St. Bartholemew’s Church. And more.

  Gertrude’s mother, whose family I heard little about when growing up, was Alice Claypoole Gwynne, whose father, Abram Gwynne, was a prominent Cincinnati lawyer of Welsh descent. Alice’s great-grandfather was a Captain Abraham Claypool (the e was added later), a veteran of the Revolutionary War and an original member of the exclusive Society of the Cincinnati, who claimed descent from Oliver Cromwell and the American romantic painter Washington Allston.

  Gertrude Vanderbilt was born on January 9, 1875. Her parents had lost their eldest child, Alice, and had two sons, William and Cornelius. They were to have three more children: Alfred, Reginald, and Gladys. When Gertrude was three, the family moved from a town house at 72 Park Avenue to a French Renaissance chateau on the westerly blockfront between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets along Fifth Avenue (where Bergdorf Goodman is today), which they later renovated and enlarged.

  The Vanderbilts, although “talked of all over,” as Gertrude wrote, were not socially accepted by “old New York” until Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt’s 1883 ball to inaugurate their new mansion at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Certain she would be invited, Caroline Astor planned a quadrille for her friends preceding the ball. When Alva heard of this she told a mutual friend she was sorry she could not invite Miss Astor since her mother had never paid a call. Now, finally, Mrs. Astor called. The ball was reported on the front page of the Times and was probably the most extravagant given in New York until that time. … Gertrude’s father came as Louis XVI in a habit de cour with breeches of fawn-colored brocade, trimmed with sterling silver lace; a jabot, similarly trimmed; and a diamond-hiked sword. Her mother, as “Electric Light,” was more dazzling still, in white satin trimmed with diamonds and a headdress of feathers and diamonds. In a famous photograph taken at the ball Mrs. Vanderbilt holds an electric torch above her head, possibly parodying the Statue of Liberty, then, though three years from completion, already under construction and well known to New Yorkers. Gertrude and her two older brothers were among the few children who made an appearance — she as a rose, in pink tulle, with a satin overdress of green leaves, a waist of green satin, and a headdress of white satin, fashioned like a bouquet holder; her brothers as Sindbad the Sailor and a young courtier. Thus, two generations after the Commodore had founded their fortune, the Vanderbilts were now social as well as economic news. Four years later, when Mrs. Astor’s List was supplanted by the Social Register, the Vanderbilts were in it.

  Gertrude, then, was the eldest daughter of the eldest son of the richest American family. Although the men controlling the family business and fortune were now custodians of their fortune rather than risk-taking entrepreneurs, Gertrude’s identity was grounded in her father’s, grandfather’s, and great-grandfather’s energy and drive. As Friedman says, “To their Dutch Protestant tradition of industry and piety there had already been added a sense of Puritan prudence and social service. … Having inherited ‘success,’ she would spend much of her life attempting to redefine it as a woman”

  Gertrude’s awareness of power came early.

  “One of the first things I remember,” she wrote in “My History,” “was how I longed to be a boy. I was four years old when unable to resist the temptation longer. I secreted myself in my mother’s room and proceeded to cut off my curls. This it seemed to me was what distinguished me most from my brothers; they said only girls had curls, so mine were sacrificed and all I gained was a severe punishment.”

  Yes, many doors were closed to women, especially those having to do with money and business, which brought the power that Gertrude came to desire.

  “I am not going to tell you much about myself until I was eighteen,” she continued, “because my childhood passed almost without incident.” Clearly, her education didn’t include Freudian theory, but then neither did my mother’s or mine. We were supposed to suppress or overcome by willpower whatever inadequacies, puzzlements, or depressions we felt — not by the remedies resorted to by less privileged, therefore weaker, folk. In Gertrude’s letters,
journals, and fiction a picture emerges of a young girl whose growth and self-confidence are constantly undermined by family and societal regulations. This young girl was forever questioning her heritage, wanting to be loved for herself and not for her wealth.

  “That I should be courted and made a friend of simply because I was who I was, was unbearable to me. I longed to be someone else, to be liked only for myself, to live quietly and happily without the burden that goes with riches.”

  In a short story called “Arabella’s Two Proposals,” she wrote revealingly about Arabella, the daughter of the “strictest of mothers,” who decided to “make the most of being a girl and be very undignified, not a bit sedate, although Mama, I know, thinks dignity a prime factor.”

  Alice and Cornelius: respected community leaders, benefactors, pious worshippers of their God. What were they like as parents? My impressions come from two sources in addition to Gertrude herself. Gertrude’s sister Gladys’s oldest daughter, Sylvia Szapary, adored her grandmother. “Syvie” wouldn’t hear the slightest criticism of her. Apparently, Alice was a perfect mother to Gladys and her other children, and a wonderful grandmother too—loving, teaching them by example to be responsible and caring people.

  I heard a different story from my mother, who had been sent with her sister Barbara to stay with her grandmother one summer when her parents were in Europe. Here are bits of my mother’s journal from that year, 1912, when she was nearly fifteen:

  “July 21. We got to Newport a little after 12 o’clock. Went to Grandma’s house. Barby and I are going to stay there all summer. It rained all day. For lunch there was Grandma, Aunty, Uncle, Mamma, Papa, Cousin Ruth, Aunt Florence, Mabel Gerry, Larry, Barbie and me. It was the horridest lunch I was ever at. They gossiped and talked stupid things all the time. Oh how I wish we were back in New York.

  “July 22. I had dinner alone with Grandma and after we each took turns reading a book. It was a horrid evening. The book is nice.”

  My mother was used to a less regimented life than she led at the Breakers, her grandmother’s home. Her grandmother, she told me many years later, often summoned her to the formal drawing room to reprimand her for some infraction of rules she wasn’t even aware of. For instance, when she sprained or broke her ankle and couldn’t walk down stairs for a few days, she invited her friends, including a male cousin and some of her brother’s friends, to visit her. Horrors! Boys in her room? Terrible, shocking. She was bad! Her own parents’ rules were more casual, and Flora rebelled against her grandmother’s strictness and lectures by sneaking in and out of windows and enjoying herself as best she could.

  Although she undoubtedly didn’t always feel so alienated from Alice, and later they became close, I can imagine Gertrude’s early frustration with her mother. In her journals and letters, a cold, critical, and fearful mother emerges, who didn’t seem to appreciate her daughter’s accomplishments in school, her liveliness and imagination, or her outreach to new friends. Gertrude wrote, for example, in her journal of January 17, 1896:

  “I shall put it down in black and white or die — I hate her. Her! Who? My mother. Yes, ha ha, I have never allowed myself to say it, to think it scarcely before. Now I know it is true and say it, I would say it to her if she gave me the chance. I am happy, am I not — oh yes, living in an atmosphere of worldiness and suspiciousness — no matter. … Oh God, riches make more unhappiness than all the poverty in the world. Keep me from being suspicious. … There is no more sympathy between us than there is between the table and myself … and I am young and longing and dying for sympathy, for feeling, for human love, and there isn’t any for me — none — none.”

  Gertrude’s father? There are few clues. But when his son Cornelius announced his intention to marry Grace Wilson, a slightly older woman who had perhaps been secretly engaged to Cornelius’s older brother, William, he and Alice did everything possible to prevent him. They threatened young Cornelius, or “Neily,” and Grace’s parents with dire results, telling them that the marriage would “alter his prospects,” meaning that Neily’s father would disown him. Which is just what Cornelius did: when he died in 1899, he left his namesake $500,000 and the income from a $1 million trust fund — from an estate of $70 million. (Alfred, the principal beneficiary, equalized this sum with that of his other siblings from his own inheritance.) Gertrude thought that the affair had caused her father’s paralytic stroke in 1896, and much as she loved her brother, she sympathized with her parents in this matter. As she wrote to her cousin Adele Burden: “Neily knows it is his behavior that gave Papa his stroke, he refused to see him. Never took the trouble to walk across the hall & ask how he was. When he was told Papa’s life depended on it he would not say he would even put off the wedding.” Loss of “face” was so very important to these parents. A matter of life and death, in this case. Cornelius never really recovered and died in 1899.

  Gertrude, from early childhood, was kept busy through an extremely full schedule. Perhaps her mother felt that lessons and other occupations might preclude the dangers she imagined lay in waiting for her lively, charming, and talented daughter. Men, primarily Fortune hunters.

  “I really have so much to do, with school, and studying, and music, and drawing, and walking, and Christmas things, and dancing, and writing, and thinking, that I feel as though I had no time to spare and if for a minute I find myself idle I feel it is a waste of very precious time. I have not been able to read one book since I have been here and do not intend to till the Christmas holidays, then I can feast on them.”

  This urge to use every minute stayed with Gertrude all her life. Many years later, she even used the hour-long drive from New York to her home in Old Westbury, Long Island, to crochet blankets for her grandchildren, to read, and even to write. Her energy and her will never weakened.

  Despite the many absences caused by her family’s European travels and their stays in Newport through October and often November, Gertrude did very well in school, especially in writing. She wanted to do well; she desired and needed the recognition that came from accomplishment. But when she received praise — when, for example, her much admired English teacher read her composition aloud in class — she denigrated it, writing, “You must not think too much of it. … Conceit.” Her self-esteem wasn’t helped by incidents like this one from a later notebook she entitled “Beginning of Autobiography”:

  “I was frightfully shy. At school this failing had caused me great suffering. No matter how well I knew my lessons when it came to being called on to answer questions every thought went out of my head. By fits and starts I studied hard but even this did not help me much. One day, it was the beginning of the month and we had just been handed our monthly reports, a group of us were sitting around together comparing our marks. My mark in English was considered to be above my deserts and inspired a good deal of criticism on the part of the others. A red-headed girl who had a sharp tongue and who consequently always got the best of me remarked: ‘If you weren’t a Vanderbilt you would never have gotten an A.’ There was a pause, during which all I remember was that I felt horribly guilty, and one of the other girls took up the subject. ‘My father told my mother,’ she looked straight at me, ‘that your great-grandfather sold matches.’

  “I had no idea if it was true or not. But I looked her in the eye and, as I was told later, shook my head of curls at her. ‘If he did,’ I said, ‘they were the best matches in the world!’”

  Gertrude also reproached herself for what she considered weakness — caring, for instance, about the boys who attracted her and were paying her court:

  “You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking about [boys] at all. A girl of your age and so little able to control her thoughts. … I am ashamed of you, yes, do you hear, you have not the control and what is more you have not conquered but have been conquered. You have not grown, not by any means, you are weak, foolish and young, so there. Remember this, read it every day. When you think yourself attractive look in the glass.”

/>   What did she look like, at about eighteen?

  Five feet eight inches tall, Gertrude was slim and graceful, her back straight as she’d been taught — though she’d been spared the steel rods that enforced her cousin Consuelo Vanderbilt’s posture. Her brown hair curled softly over a long mobile face, with large green eyes set far apart above a long straight nose and wide sensuous lips. Although not classically beautiful, Gertrude projected a combination of eagerness, vulnerability, and reserve that was mysterious and compelling. She was elegant, with a bold and original style of dressing, and had a captivating charm beyond looks or easy definition.

  At nineteen, “coming out” in society, she was still questioning her friends’ sincerity. Her future husband, Harry Whitney, was at that time one of the few she trusted, partly because his family, if not as rich, had a longer lineage than hers. She wrote him an unmailed letter (a recurring habit) with a theme she returned to again and again in journals, fiction, and letters:

  “I am an heiress — consequently I know perfectly well there are lots of men who would be attentive to me simply on account of that. When I first fully realized that to be the case I was terribly unhappy and wished I might be a poor girl so that people would only like me for myself. Now I have become used to the thought and I face it boldly, as I must, and try to make the most of it. What I want to know is this — do you think it possible for anyone to love me for myself entirely? That the money would — no, could — make no difference? That anyone in all the world would not care for the money but would care as much as his life for me?”