Hesketh Pearson

by The Marrying Americans

  The last years of his life were sad and lonely. He had failed in his ambition to be Prime Minister, and his domestic existence gave him no solace. He was suffering from phlebitis as well as his old enemy sleeplessness, and could not sleep at all if so much as a ray of daylight entered his room. Insomnia is usually a sign of division in a nature; and Curzon would have liked to be a great writer as well as a famous statesman, but never rose above the composition of those imposing phrases which politicians mistake for fine literature. The division could only be resolved by his death, which took place on March 20, 1925.

  Grace outlived him by thirty-three years. She lost much of her fortune in South America, and as most of his money was in trust for the male heir she had to sell their London house, though she occupied Hackwood Park for the next ten years. From the middle of the 1939-45 war she lived at Bodiam manor house as tenant of the National Trust to which her husband had willed the castle, but for some years before her death at the age of eighty she rented a small house at Tilmanstone in Kent. The duty on her estate amounted to £215, a sum that might just have covered the cost of the champagne at one of her parties in the early twenties.

  CHAPTER 6—Money for Fun

  Anna Gould and the Marquis of Castellane

  Having been introduced to a woman whose money was spent on her husband’s palace, and another whose money made easy her husband’s position, we may turn our gaze on a third whose dollars were squandered on her husband’s frivolity.

  When Cornelius Vanderbilt, the “Commodore,” began to dabble in railway stocks, he was up against some pretty cunning customers, perhaps the craftiest being Jay Gould, whose daughter was destined to marry a titled Frenchman a few months before the great-granddaughter of Cornelius married a titled Englishman. Jay Gould was over forty years younger than the Commodore, having been born in 1836. He grew up to be a physically weak, undersized fellow whose air of sadness made people take pity on him until circumstances compelled them to take pity on themselves. He had no intimate friends, and his single virtue was a lack of humbug: his operations were naked and shameless. Having done some surveying work as a young man, he went into a tannery. The first person who confidently financed him was ruined and committed suicide. Jay soon made money and began to gamble in railway stock. A clever lad, he got to know Daniel Drew, who was looking for “the two smartest young men in New York” to fight the Commodore and gain control of the New York and Erie Railroad Company. He found them in two brisk youths, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, who were soon at grips with Cornelius, but his experience at the game enabled him to obtain an order for the arrest of Drew, Fisk and Gould. However, they were a little too quick for him, and after a period of bribing legislators and public officers they got control of the Erie Railroad. Among other methods of avoiding legal action they took refuge for a time in New York’s Grand Opera House, which they successfully barricaded. They tried to bribe President Grant in their efforts to corner the gold market, but he was not disposed to assist them and Congress investigated matters. They failed in their object, though Fisk had the consolation of feeling that “nothing is lost save honour.”

  During these negotiations Gould, aged thirty-three, was suffering from tuberculosis, which, instead of warning him to make peace with God, spurred him on in the service of Mammon. His agreeable partner Jim Fisk was shot dead at the Grand Central Hotel in January 1872 by his mistress’s pimp, who had been blackmailing him. Shortly after this Gould received a million dollars by resigning from the board of the Erie, and like everyone else who had financial dealings with him, Drew was ruined. A financial crash in ‘73 stunned pretty well everyone except the resilient Jay, who turned the panic to good account and picked up much more money than he dropped, soon gaining control of the Union Pacific Railroad by buying its stock at rock-bottom prices. He added other railroads to his collection and ran a newspaper, The World, which supported his gambling ventures. In this manner he was able to smash the credit of the Western Union and buy up its stock when made almost valueless. By the time his old antagonist Cornelius Vanderbilt was on his deathbed, no one disputed that Jay Gould stood alone at the art of manipulating stocks and converting other people’s money into his own. With a fine impartiality he bankrupted friends and enemies alike, and was often in danger of losing his life. Assaulted in the street on at least two occasions, he at last employed a number of guards to protect him day and night. But his nature displayed a softer side in his love of orchids.

  In later years he suffered from insomnia, not, we may be sure, due to a pricking conscience, but owing to his further schemes for relieving people of the burden of their wealth. Added to this anxiety he had pains in the chest and frequently spat blood, a condition which forced him to spend many hours of the night walking up and down outside his Fifth Avenue house, with guards on the alert. But he never ceased to scheme, and one of his last acts was to attack the Manhattan Railway Company in his paper, depress the shares, buy them, gain control of the company, and then boost it. Opposition papers described him in opprobrious terms; and when the President of the Manhattan, Cyrus W. Field, found himself bracketed in The New York Times with a well-known plunderer like Gould, he made amends to the public conscience as well as his own by reducing the fares from ten to five cents. This struck Jay as cowardly, and no doubt another night’s insomnia was spent in taking counsel with himself. Freshened up by pleasant thoughts, he urged Cyrus to buy Manhattan stock, and as soon as his friend was loaded up with it Jay resorted to his usual publicity methods, devalued the stock by a half and ruined Field. They appear to have been remarkably innocent, these eminent men of business, because Jay found money-making as easy as smiling.

  In spite of the violent attacks in the press by men who wished they could clear the till as easily as Jay Gould so frequently did, the pirate sailed valiantly ahead and died in 1892 at the age of fifty-six, his fortune being assessed at seventy-seven million dollars, though perhaps an equivalent sum had been salted away from public gaze. His funeral was attended by several unprejudiced financial wizards, among them J. Pierpont Morgan, who had not been one of Jay’s victims and so could take an unjaundiced view of the dead man’s genius.

  There is no stronger craving in the world than that of the rich for titles, except perhaps that of the titled for riches, and the two appetites caused the union between Jay Gould’s daughter Anna and Boniface, Marquis of Castellane, who belonged to an ancient family from Provence. “My ancestors,” he said, “exercised the prerogative of coining money,” but he was destined to spend someone else’s money. Born in 1867 and brought up at the eighteenth-century château of Rochecotte in the Loire Valley where his people lived, he had a strong sense of his own importance and a pride in the aristocratic tradition of his family, which led to his becoming a rather attractive ass, conceited, affected, amusing to those who liked him, absurd to those who did not. In the spring of 1894, when twenty-seven years old, he met Anna Gould in the Parisian flat of Fanny Reed, who did not take to Boniface (Boni, for short), her attitude being implied by his statement that she was ugly, that she had no taste in clothes or anything else, and that her singing gave him a pain in the neck. Miss Reed’s dislike of him was due, he said, to the fact that he brought light into the dullness of her existence. His favorable view of Anna was doubtless influenced by his knowledge of her fortune, but he appraised her shortness of stature, her slight build, her black eyes, her small hands and feet, her shyness and childish malice, and decided that she had charm—above all, possibilities.

  “I thought that it would be fascinating to complete her education in the best finishing school—marriage—and afterwards to present her to an admiring world.”{14} Put in another form, he felt sure it would be fascinating to present himself as a man of taste to an admiring world with the aid of Anna’s dollars. To this end he paid her assiduous attention, wrote to her constantly, sent her bouquets, and displayed himself on horseback beneath her windows. Thinking that if he went to America, she would follow him, he went there, and
she did; but no doubt he had heard that she was going there before he decided to lead the way.

  After a spell in England he arrived penniless in New York, but as he put up at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel we can only assume that the cabman who drove him was paid by the reception clerk. He quickly got into touch with a friend, Charles Raoul Duval, who “put me at once in the way of making money, and I had no cause to worry over the immediate future.” We may make what we like of this, but the probability is that Duval financed him on the strength of his marital expectations. He went to Newport, where millionaires and their families disported themselves, and as he was an authentic count, innumerable dinners, fetes and picnics were given in his honor. But the pleasures, ideas and customs of the place jarred on his sensibilities, and the cooking displeased his palate.

  Anna duly arrived in New York and sent a letter asking him to meet her at the Horse Show. Liking horses, he obeyed, but found that she did not manifest as much enthusiasm for him as he did for her. Undaunted, he called at her sister Helen’s house on Fifth Avenue where she was staying. Helen was rather forbidding. She seemed to be making up for her father’s delinquencies by coming to terms with Heaven, and though Boni found this irksome he solaced himself with the feeling that in such a moral atmosphere he would at least “possess a wife who had been kept absolutely unspotted from the world.” Indeed Anna illustrated her spotlessness by saying that she would never marry him, as she disliked foreigners and declined to live outside America. Fortunately for him, Helen’s religious gloom got on Anna’s nerves; and when Boni, to make her jealous, paid attention to other women, she obligingly manifested jealousy. Also her brother George was friendly, asking Anna and Boni to join a holiday party for an excursion to Canada. They accepted the invitation and for the first time Boni traveled in one of the latest creations of Mr. Pullman.

  At Quebec they attended High Mass in the Cathedral. Afterwards, “still under the mystical influence of my Faith, I unveiled my inmost soul to Miss Anna Gould, and I asked her to become my wife. She accepted without hesitation.”

  Her previous coolness may have been due to a suspicion that he was already well-provided with mistresses, but his reverent behavior in the Cathedral no doubt dispelled such thoughts. Having thanked God for making him happy, he next implored her to make him doubly blessed by adopting his religion. But on this point she was adamant, shocking him with the statement that she would never become a Roman Catholic because it would prevent her from divorcing him, and she would not remain his wife if she were unhappy with him. He was “dumfounded,” unable to realize that American girls could think of divorce in connection with marriage. However, he felt that as her husband he would be able to mold her character, and it took him a long time to wake up to the fact that “the idea of divorce was ever present in the mind of Miss Gould from the day of our marriage until that of our final parting.”

  Anna was nineteen years old when they were married on March 4, 1895, by the Catholic Archbishop of New York, Monsignor Corrigan, at the Gould house on Fifth Avenue. In his memoirs Boni says that they passed a happy honeymoon at Irvington, the old home of the Goulds, and that Anna’s charming companionship made him hope that after he “had helped to complete her soul education” he would find in her the perfect helpmate. But as he records that they left New York for England and France on March 6th, his honeymoon reflections cannot have been exhaustive.

  He soon perceived that Anna was extremely self-satisfied: “She was the pathetic victim of the Gould tradition that the sun rose every day on purpose to hear the Goulds crow!” whereas, he might have added, all right-minded people knew that it rose on purpose to hear the Castellanes crow. She appeared to be utterly unimpressed by rank, disregarding it completely: a female Gould was sufficient unto herself.

  They had a joyful reception at the château on the Loire, with cheering crowds, rousing music, hearty songs, resplendent decorations, and a huge village fete. “I looked at Anna, hoping for some expression of pleasure. None was forthcoming—she was unmistakably bored!” From that date, he avers, “Anna disliked Rochecotte with an ever-smouldering hatred.” When introduced to the family circle “she entered our world of traditions from out of a world absolutely destitute of them.” In his opinion she made no more attempt to understand the French temperament than she did to understand him, and this he thought unfair: “If American wives endow us with their wealth, we, for our part, give them in exchange, besides a name, something which their money is powerless to purchase—a tradition and a taste which their superficial education does not give them the power of obtaining for themselves.”

  At any rate he intended to make the most of the wealth which he had received in exchange for his title, tradition and taste; and he started to buy all sorts of artistic objects for the house he wished to erect in Paris. “I don’t appreciate money except to spend,” he said; so he rushed about purchasing Gobelin tapestries, pictures by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Vandyke and Rembrandt, period tables, carpets, clocks, Sèvres china, spending millions of francs “without any trouble.” He carefully points out that Anna retained full control of her fortune and “allowed me to spend her money of her own free will.” It is interesting to note that nearly all the things he bought eventually found their way into Pierpont Morgan’s collection, a fate which, had he been conscious of it, would have made Jay Gould more than usually sleepless.

  While their own mansion was being constructed in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the Castellanes occupied another house in the Avenue Bosquet, where their first two sons were born. In honor of Anna’s twenty-first birthday the Marquis planned a fete which he intended “should equal any given in the glorious days of Versailles.” It was held in the Bois de Boulogne and invitations to 3,000 people were sent out, a dinner party of 250 intimate friends preceding the fete. But although the woods were lit with innumerable lamps, the dining marquee was decorated with red roses, the guests represented the bluest blood of France, the lake reflected the many-colored lanterns, eighty picked coryphees danced in the ballet, and an orchestra of 200 emitted sweet music—in spite of all this, Anna remained unimpressed, and Boni had to console himself with the reflection that, apart from the poetic feelings the fete had inspired, “such entertainments are good for trade” and no one should be blamed for spending money “on such a praiseworthy object.”

  Certain domestic misunderstandings did not help to make their lives harmonious. For instance, the nurse engaged for their infant was discovered to be a bad lot, and Boni was attacked in a paper as the cause of her indiscretions. He challenged the journalist to a duel, which took place on the road to Neuilly close to the Seine. He was dressed in immaculate white. “It was soon over and in a couple of minutes I had settled my account by wounding him in the forearm”; after which he put his tongue out at a friend whose dismayed expression before the encounter had irritated him. The result of the affray brought a shower of compliments from admirers, among others the ex-Empress Eugénie, upon whom he took his wife to call, finding it “impossible to deny the deathless attraction of this Empress of many sorrows....She was a beautiful and pathetic wreck!”

  He bought a 1,600-ton yacht, which was manned by a crew of eight officers and over ninety men. In 1897 they took a sea trip to Norway with a few aristocratic friends. The then Emperor of Germany, William II, was also cruising in Norwegian waters, but as a good patriot Boni kept out of his way. Then they went up the Baltic and it became clear to him that Anna was losing interest in yachting, as she spoke peevishly of their guests. It did not occur to him that she could be bored with his well-bred friends. They found the Russian Grand Dukes hospitable, but Boni, like many men a sound ex post facto prophet, “sensed the catastrophic ending of the Imperial regime.” By the end of the trip all the passengers were sick of the sight of one another, and “each of us had begun to hate his neighbour.” All the same they risked another cruise, this time in the Mediterranean, the high spot being the audience granted them by Pope Leo XIII. Once Boni gave a luncheon to
various celebrities on board his yacht, at the conclusion of which he proposed a short voyage. Alas! a storm came on, and “instead of returning thanks for our hospitality our guests most unthankfully returned us their lunches.”

  He now entered upon what he called “the decorative duties of life,” and their carriages, their postillions with eighteenth-century wigs, provoked comment. His ideas of decoration made no appeal to his wife, who was a real “home-bird” and something of a masochist, kicking up a fuss over his early love affairs. “She ignored the fact that the majority of men are ‘widowers’ on their wedding day, since until then most lives are shared by unofficial wives.” She would not allow him to choose her gowns though his taste was impeccable and whenever she dressed according to his whim she became in his eyes “super-elegant.” He carried his artistic sense even to the field of sport, the drag-hunts which he instituted at Rochecotte being aesthetically satisfying, while his domiciliary taste insisted that his footmen should wear clothes that did not clash with the architecture and furniture of a house.