Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

  It was at about the same time that James Bridge, who had collaborated with both men on matters literary, took it upon himself to try to rectify a situation in which (as he wrote to a mutual friend vacationing in Egypt with Frick) two of the most prominent figures in the history of American industry were “now linked only in antagonistic memory.”

  Upon Frick’s return from Egypt, Bridge had the friend arrange a meeting in Frick’s office; he was sure that, after all these years, they could find a way to bring reason to bear. The moment that Frick discovered the true purpose of Bridge’s visit, the former King of Coke blew up. Bridge hurried from the meeting, his ears still ringing from Frick’s outburst, which he described as an out-and-out “denunciation of the man with whom he shared so much of success and fortune. I had never suspected such . . . in this usually quiet and undemonstrative man.”

  Others might not have agreed with Bridge’s characterization of Frick as “usually quiet and undemonstrative.” But no one could dispute that this undying bitterness directed at Carnegie pervaded every aspect of Frick’s existence, extending to matters far beyond the business arena.

  DESPITE HIS CONTINUED INVOLVEMENT WITH U.S. Steel, Frick realized, along with many prominent businessmen of the day, that a seriously expansive place in commerce required a base of operations in New York, at least for a significant part of the year.

  From 1902 until 1905, then, Frick rented an apartment suite in a Manhattan hotel. In 1905 he took the rather momentous step of leasing the fabulous Vanderbilt “chateau” at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Though the architect and critic Louis Sullivan had once dismissed the elaborate fifteenth-century, French-styled palace as “a characteristically New York absurdity,” it must have given Frick a jolt of pride to inhabit the grandiose home where he had first been introduced to New York “society” during a trip with Andrew Mellon nearly twenty-five years earlier.

  In 1880, during a stopover on their way to Europe, the two young men had gawked from the sidewalk at the Vanderbilt compound. Frick, still a bachelor, mused that the cost of maintaining such a place—never mind buying it—would be as much as $300,000 a year. Mellon said that sounded about right. At 6-percent interest, it would take about $5 million in the bank, Frick continued. Once again, Mellon nodded. “That is all I shall ever want,” Frick replied, and they walked on.

  By 1905, Frick had acquired his five million and twenty times more. That a lowly store clerk could have somehow come to have such a fortune and inhabit the New York mansion of William Henry Vanderbilt—it must have seemed the very incarnation of all those Horatio Alger–like dreams. At any rate, Frick and Adelaide would make this monument their home until 1914, when he was ready to make his final move.

  This time Frick would inhabit a palace of his own making on Millionaires’ Row, where he intended to move the bulk of his ever-growing art collection—even then said to be worth as much as $50 million—from the smoky, acid-laden air of Pittsburgh to quarters more properly suited to its display. With this in mind, he had in 1906 acquired the much-admired Lenox Library, a private facility that occupied most of a city block at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street. Frick commissioned first Daniel Burnham, then the firm of Carrère and Hastings (responsible for the New York Public Library), to design a structure on the library site that could not only serve as a comfortable home for Adelaide and himself, but that could be readily converted, upon their deaths, into a full-fledged museum.

  Once again, though, what might have been an undertaking of philanthropic—even visionary—character took on unfortunate overtones. Mindful of an outcry over the Lenox Library’s demolition, Frick offered to pay for its reconstruction at any suitable site in the city. But when no such site was offered, Frick decided that it was his property, in fact, and in 1911 he ordered the library demolished and his own sixty-room palace erected in its place.

  Even that action—the replacement of a private library with an even lovelier gallery-to-be, housing one of the world’s great private collections of art—could have been defended were it not for comments that Frick made during construction. Carnegie’s mansion up the street had cost only $1 million, Frick was quick to say. His home would set him back much more than that, and part of the reason was simple: Frick had never found the humor in Carnegie’s clever remarks concerning the source of funds for the purchase and renovation of Skibo, a bon mot Carnegie recycled with visitors to his impressive New York home—“just a little gift from Mr. Frick . . .” “I’m going to make Carnegie’s place look like a miner’s shack,” Frick famously told friends, and he spent as much as $5.4 million attempting to do just that.

  Construction at One East Seventieth Street began in early 1913 and continued for more than a year and a half, the pace intensifying in early 1914, when George Vanderbilt, Frick’s landlord, died, and heirs Cornelius and Grace Vanderbilt announced plans to move into their newly inherited property.

  Frick had been a taskmaster with architect Thomas Hastings from the beginning. As Hastings told James Bridge, a meeting with Frick never failed to exhaust him of “all nervous energy,” and as the October 1, 1914, deadline for Frick’s move neared, Frick became even more contentious.

  Frick had hired two different interior designers to work on the home that he privately confided would be his “monument.” The first was Britain’s Sir Charles Allom, who had recently redone Buckingham Palace and had worked in the United States for the likes of William Randolph Hearst. While Allom had responsibility for all the rooms on the first floor, along with the breakfast room and Frick’s sitting room on the second, Frick hired Elsie de Wolfe, a former actress who had proclaimed herself America’s first professional interior decorator, to be in charge of most of the rest.

  While he seemed happy with the work of all three, Frick could be maddening. To Allom, Frick wrote, “From what I see Mr. Hastings is favoring too much carving. Please impress upon him my earnest desire to avoid anything elaborate.”

  With De Wolfe, the issue was often money. While he was happy with most of her choices, he complained that she was over budget in her choice of furnishings: “I should also think you might secure better prices. Take your time—you know time is money!” Frick told her. A better capacity to bargain, he wrote, was all she lacked “to make you perfect.”

  In September of 1914, Frick was stricken with another bout of rheumatism, which confined him to his bed. From that vantage point, Frick fired off a series of angry notes to his architects and decorators. “You are very much behind on all contracts with me,” he wrote Allom. “What are you going to do about it?”

  When Allom replied that England was now engaged in a war that had diverted any number of craftsmen and their sources of supplies, Frick was scarcely mollified. “Simply outrageous unbusinesslike your dilatory manner completing contracts with me,” he shot back. “War excuse absurd.”

  Finally, however, the bulk of the work was completed. On December 16, despite the absence of locks on a number of doors and other minor oversights that Frick found deplorable, he and Adelaide moved into their new home—one that included a main gallery nearly one hundred feet long and thirty-five feet wide, with twenty-six-foothigh ceilings. In typical fashion, Frick wrote to Hastings to let him know that, while the house had ended up costing far more than anticipated, “All the same we are enjoying it, and there are many features for which we are indebted to you.”

  Not so bad, if only Frick had stopped there. Alas, he went on, “I think it is a great monument to you, but it is only because I restrained you from excess ornamentation.”

  While Frick was on shaky ground in his claim to have mentored one of the world’s great architects, there is little doubt he understood which works of art would suit his home-cum-gallery. As Charles Schwab put it, “Frick knew art.”

  Much of his appreciation came from travels through Europe, where it was said that he would often knock on the doors of prestigious estates to ask if the owners would like to sell some of their paintings. An equal amount came via his as
sociation with art dealers of the highest caliber, including Joseph Duveen, whose work with King George V at Buckingham Palace would lead to a knighthood, and Roland Knoedler. Even though it meant that his newly constructed drawing room would have to be remodeled to accommodate them, in 1915 Frick paid Duveen $1.25 million to acquire the series of huge, ten-by-seven-foot Fragonard oils collectively titled The Progress of Love from the estate of J. P. Morgan.

  In addition to the Fragonards, Frick’s collection included works by Rubens, Raphael, Bellini, Corot, Manet, Verrocchio, Turner, Constable, Piero della Francesca, Degas, Van Eyck, Goya, Gainsborough, Millet, El Greco, Hals, Hogarth, Van Dyck, Vermeer, Titian, Murillo, Rembrandt, Monet, Renoir, Rousseau, Whistler, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and many, many more. In June of 1915, Frick finally drew up his will, formalizing his intention to have his home and art collection opened to the public following the death of his wife, Adelaide. He added an endowment of $15 million for its maintenance and continued acquisitions.

  If the name Carnegie is commonly associated with libraries, the name Frick has an analogous association with art, as in “The Frick” (which is how his art collection and museum are commonly known). Always a reader and a proponent of education as a means of self-betterment, Carnegie’s prodigious endowment of libraries seems a natural choice. But why did Frick go to such lengths to align himself with art?

  Certainly, Frick had seen other men of means point with pride to their fine-art holdings, and understood that an appreciation of such work was the mark, if not the obligation, of the cultured soul. But the degree to which Frick devoted himself to the enterprise went far beyond mere obligation or ostentation.

  Martha Sanger proposes that many of Frick’s acquisitions were prompted by a deep-seated urge to find earthly objects that would, in their beauty and inspirational nature, compensate for the loss of his two beloved children. But the truth is that Frick (“a little too enthusiastic about pictures” from his first days in coke) had demonstrated an interest in art long before either of his children were born.

  Another theory is that Frick experienced his vast and impressive collection as a kind of microcosm of the world—a world, moreover, that was firmly under his control.

  Whatever the reason, after Adelaide’s death in 1931 there began a four-year process of renovation on One East 70th Street, during which the furnishings, paintings, and various objets were wrapped and stored in a sealed vault, while architect John Russell Pope converted the home into a museum. In 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, the Frick Collection was opened to an appreciative public and has remained so since, its creator’s initial endowment having grown to upward of $300 million and its holdings having increased by more than a third.

  Collecting art was one of the few endeavors in Frick’s later life that seemed entirely unconnected to his old nemesis, Carnegie. Although Carnegie possessed no small amount of art, he had never been especially passionate about acquiring it, and Frick had never been heard to brag of putting Carnegie to shame in this regard. (Ironically, Carnegie’s 91st Street mansion has become a museum as well, housing the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, a transformation that took place in 1976, long after its former inhabitant had anything to say about it.)

  Nor did Carnegie seem consumed by thoughts of Frick. If he rankled at Frick’s building of a Pittsburgh office tower to dwarf his own and cast it in eternal gloom, he made no public comment. And he had no retort to Frick’s boast that One East 70th Street would make the Carnegie mansion look like a hovel. (He did admit to friends that Charles Schwab’s new “chateau” at 72nd Street and Riverside Drive—four stories, ninety bedrooms, a sixty-foot pool, a bowling alley, and an on-site power plant—put his own home to shame: “Mine is a cottage by comparison,” Carnegie was reported to have said.)

  And though Frick’s continued role in the affairs of the mighty corporation that had once been his must have rankled Carnegie, he did his best to ignore past slights. By all appearances, the principal occupation of “the richest man in the world” from the moment of his retirement was giving all his money away.

  While he had long been building libraries around the nation and the world, and had, as early as 1892, provided $2 million to build Carnegie Hall (originally named the New York City Music Hall), the “wee Andra” now threw himself into philanthropic activity with a zeal that had never before been witnessed among mighty American industrialists. Although entire volumes have been written on Carnegie’s philanthropy and on individual Carnegie foundations, a thumbnail overview might convey just how much $327 million can accomplish:

  The endowment of nearly three thousand public library buildings around the world accounted for some $60 million of his total giving. While some communities were put off by Carnegie’s failure to provide stipends for books, and others were hard pressed to come up with funds to maintain the facilities, few acts of philanthropy have enjoyed such universal, enduring recognition; nearly a thousand of the buildings are still in use as libraries to this day, more than thirty in the boroughs of New York City alone.

  Some cities, particularly those seen as strongholds of labor, were not pleased at the prospect of a Carnegie library, though there is no truth to the rumor that Carnegie insisted on a consistency of design or that his name adorn the buildings. The objections ran deeper than that.

  Carnegie might have explained that he was only trying to live up to one of his more famous dicta: “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.” But as one spokesman put it when the city of Detroit turned down the offer of a library in 1902, “Carnegie ought to have distributed his money among his employees while he was making it.” And Detroit was not the only community to remember Homestead, where workers had grumbled, “What good is a book to a man who works twelve hours a day?”

  Even more ubiquitous than his libraries were the organs he had given to churches. This was a program that had begun almost by accident, after Carnegie gave an organ to a church in Allegheny City, his first American home. Before it was over, Carnegie, an agnostic who said he continued the practice because it “lessened the pain of the sermons,” had given away nearly eight thousand organs, at a cost of over $6 million.

  Though Carnegie was highly sought after as a donor by institutions of higher learning, he resisted most such requests, quite possibly because he had never attended one himself. In 1902, he did donate $32 million to endow the Carnegie Institution of Washington, a still-extant think tank for advanced research in the sciences. At about the same time, he established the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland with a gift of $10 million, something of a slap at the superior attitude manifested by their cousin institutions at Oxford and Cambridge.

  In 1895, Carnegie dedicated the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, an imposing, 300-foot-long structure made possible by a grant of $1 million. By the turn of the twentieth century, the library had become the centerpiece of the still-standing Carnegie Institute, a monument to culture that included art and science museums and a concert hall. Ultimately, Carnegie’s original $1 million investment would grow to more than $25 million.

  At a Pittsburgh dinner in late 1900, Carnegie announced that he was offering the city a $1 million endowment to build a technical school as an adjunct to the Institute. He would later add another $6.5 million. First called the Carnegie Technical Schools, then the Carnegie Institute of Technology, it was merged in 1967 with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (founded by Andrew Mellon in 1913) and is known today as Carnegie Mellon University. (Noting that all the broad hallways in Carnegie Mellon’s original “old main” slope steeply from one end to another gives modern-day visitors to the campus first-hand exposure to Carnegie’s ever pragmatic mindset. Just in case the college notion didn’t work out, it is said, Carnegie had the building designed for quick conversion to a foundry where hand cars could zip easily down the stations of a production line.)

  Another major gift to education came in 1905, when Carnegie, prompted by a visit to Skibo
from Henry Pritchett, the president of MIT, gave $15 million to create the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The foundation went on to found such programs as the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and the Educational Testing Service. It still operates worldwide.

  In 1911, somewhat overwhelmed by the task of giving away money, he made his single greatest gift, endowing the Carnegie Corporation of New York, formed for “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge,” with $125 million. The corporation was to oversee many of the projects already undertaken, as well as to create a board of trustees that would assume the burden of determining worthy recipients for the remainder of Carnegie’s fortune, which totaled about $180 million. Today the Carnegie Corporation’s endowment is valued at about $1.8 billion and continues its work in teacher education, urban school development, the improvement of the economy, and increased participation of the citizenry in the political process.

  Carnegie’s gifts supported a wide range of projects, many still in operation, including the Carnegie Hero Fund ($5 million), designed in 1904 to recognize extraordinary acts of peacetime bravery and compensate those injured while performing those acts of heroism. While such creations as the Hero Fund continue to affect the lives of citizens worldwide (the fund made a significant number of awards in the wake of the September 11 tragedy), some of Carnegie’s other undertakings were less well conceived.

  In 1906 he came up with the notion of a Simplified Spelling Board, charged with promulgating the use of a phonetic version of English, including such variants as thru, tho, prolog, and dropt. Though the project was widely ridiculed—the New York Times suggested that “the Bored of Speling” begin the project by revising the spellings of all members’ names, starting with “Androo Karnege”—Carnegie stuck with it doggedly for nearly ten years, until one day in 1915, when he wrote that he had finally “had enuf.” He had better uses for $25,000 a year, he declared, casting much of the blame for the project’s failure on an ineffectual board of trustees. “A more useless body of men never came into association,” he wrote to the publisher Henry Holt.