When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  When Isaac Sherman died in 1881 probate revealed to everyone’s surprise that he had been a very rich man. To his widow he left a comfortable annuity, but to Cornelia he left about $7 million, an amount not in the Astor and Vanderbilt league but sufficient, especially when supplemented by Cornelia’s husband’s fortune, to allow her to have nearly everything she wanted. In time this included ownership of Marie Antoinette’s crown jewels, occupancy of a hunting, shooting, and fishing estate at Balmacaan on Loch Ness, and a reputation for giving spectacular parties. Sudden wealth had the effect on Cornelia of a burr under her saddlecloth. Soon after Isaac’s funeral at All Souls’ Unitarian Church and an obligatory month of mourning she whipped herself up from a demure walk around the New York social track to a full gallop.

  She and Bradley bought the house next door to her parents’, took a long European trip, and during their absence abroad had the walls between the houses knocked down and the two converted into a mansion suitable for grand entertainments. They staffed it with an English butler, several liveried footmen, and a corps of other household servants. Cornelia’s regular presence at fashionable events began to be noted in the press. Gorgeously got up as Mary Stuart (and wearing Mary Stuart’s diamond tiara), despite her dumpiness, Cornelia was one of the more admired guests at Alva Vanderbilt’s fancy-dress ball in the winter of 1883. This was the showiest and most expensive event of its kind (estimates ran to a quarter of a million dollars) that New York had ever seen, “a walking jewelry store,” as one reporter was to describe a comparable event. LIKE AN ORIENTAL DREAM, the New York Herald headlined its story, THE WEALTH AND GRACE OF NEW YORK IN VARIED AND BEAUTIFUL ARRAY. Soon after this triumph, members of Cornelia’s circle and the gossip columns of the city’s newspapers began to hear about a new purpose she had found for her life. One day, she said, she herself would give a costume ball surpassing Alva Vanderbilt’s in dazzle and expense and thereby clinch a high place in New York’s social royalty. In one of several lavish rehearsals for her costume ball, in 1885 she roofed over the gardens of the Twentieth Street mansion and staged an evening entertainment that confirmed her place in the front rank of contenders for the crown.

  During the decade-and-a-half run-up to her climactic bid for the summit Cornelia generated yards of newspaper copy. She organized a Christmas Eve surprise party to pay tribute to Caroline Astor, undisputed leader of New York society. About a hundred celebrants drove uptown in their carriages from Cornelia’s mansion to the Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, which had been elaborately garnished, somehow unnoticed by her (or so it was claimed), with immense masses of holly, white carnations, and white violets. Even the normally aloof William Waldorf Astor, wearing a white fur-trimmed Santa Claus cap, put aside his chronic enmity to Caroline and joined her delegation this evening. A few months later he also attended Cornelia’s dinner party and cotillion for nearly three hundred blue bloods at Delmonico’s. The men that evening went home with party favors, chosen by Cornelia, of jeweled daggers and replicas of the ancient Order of the Golden Fleece. Her entertainments, said the New York Times, “have become famous in society for their lavishness of expense and richness of appointment.”

  It was at about this time, on the eve of their annual sailing to London for the social and sporting season there, that Cornelia and her husband, the couple formerly known as Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin, sprouted a hyphen in their surname, somewhat like a supernumerary nipple, and, in parallel fashion to the orthographic coupling of the Waldorf and the Astoria hotels, began to call themselves the Bradley-Martins. In a similar status uptick they followed the virtually hallowed practice of their class by acquiring for their daughter an impecunious but titled mate, the twenty-five-year-old fourth Earl of Craven. A secure room in the basement of the Bradley-Martin mansion, which had been several times a fat target for burglars, now held, it was announced to the press, some $200,000 worth of gold and silver wedding gifts.

  In one season at their well-stocked estate on Loch Ness the sporting members of the family and their guests dispatched about six thousand head of game, including fifty-five stags. During their annual stays abroad, the Bradley-Martins were said to have “equaled all previous records set by rich Americans in the entertaining line.” When the family returned to New York in December 1894 on the White Star Teutonic, they were accompanied by one servant for each member, another servant for each of the half dozen and more steamer trunks, and an additional forty pieces of luggage. Back in their mansion on Twentieth Street, Cornelia and her husband, by this time veterans of publicity and aware of its enhanced value when withheld, declined to talk to representatives of the press and had the butler turn them away at the front door. “I don’t see what there is to interview them about,” her brother-in-law, Frederick Townsend Martin, explained to a reporter who walked with him up Fifth Avenue on the way to the Union Club. “They have simply come back as any other travelers from Europe might do, and are to take up their old life here in just about the same way as they left it.”

  “Only more so,” he could have added: his sister-in-law Cornelia was soon to make her grand move and issue invitations to a fancy costume ball to take place on February 10, 1897. On her orders, the entire two lower floors of the Waldorf, crammed with flowers, mirrors, and tapestries, were to be transformed—inevitably, given the taste of the period—into the Versailles of Louis XIV and Louis XV. She asked her guests to costume themselves as aristocrats, nobles, and famous figures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This excursion into gilded history provoked a competitive display of diamonds and heirloom pieces, some of which were bought or borrowed for the occasion; others, retrieved from bank vaults, had not been seen in public since the Vanderbilt ball. Cornelia regarded the announcement of her ball to be a much-needed stimulant to trade in a depression year. It immediately drove up the price of goods and services supplied by costumers, seamstresses, caterers, jewelers, wig makers, hairdressers, milliners, shoemakers, tailors, dancing masters, florists, antiquarians, fencing masters, and even armorers. Several guests planned to wear swords, and one, Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, Alva Vanderbilt’s new husband, reportedly paid $8,000 (in 1897 dollars) for a museum-quality breastplate of steel inlaid with gold, under which he planned to wear a Henry VIII velvet costume with ruffled sleeves.

  “Future generations,” said the gossip sheet Town Topics, “will date every event in relation to the Bradley-Martin ball.” Soon after the invitations went out Cornelia’s private affair became a public event discussed not only in the clubs and restaurants of New York and London but in factories, shops, business offices, pulpits, and probably mine shafts as well. But beneath the buzz of gossip rumbles of discontent and protest began to be heard.

  William Stephen Rainsford, rector of St. George’s, a fashionable Protestant Episcopal church on Stuyvesant Square at Sixteenth Street and Second Avenue, had a well-founded although tactfully moderated liberal reputation. He gave his blessing to the labor movement, social reform, the institutional accountability of the church, dancing in the parish house, toleration of saloons as refuge and comfort of the working class, and other progressive causes. His programs enjoyed the moral and financial support of Pierpont Morgan, the church’s senior vestryman. A charismatic preacher who adored the spotlight, in late January Rainsford made one of his frequent bids for public attention. He gave an extended interview to a reporter from the New York Times; his subject, the Bradley-Martin ball. He declined to say whether he had advised his parishioners not to attend, but he conceded that such ostentatious display in a difficult time was “ill-advised,” at least for practical reasons. It was bound to furnish ammunition to “socialistic agitators,” “demagogues,” “sentimentalists,” and other such mischief makers busily and irresponsibly stirring up discontent with the existing social and economic order. Rainsford had in mind, to name two of the most prominent of these mischief makers, Pullman strike leader Eugene V. Debs, a recent convert to socialism, and William Jennings Bryan, a declared enemy of Wall St
reet. Although decisively defeated in the electoral vote in his campaign for the presidency against Republican William McKinley, Bryan, running on a platform of radical agrarianism and opposition to big business, had polled an ominous (in Rainsford’s view) six million popular votes.

  When asked whether he’d prefer to see great accumulations of wealth either hidden from public view or given to charity, Rainsford said such questions were beside the point. He concerned himself not with the morality of wealth but with its public relations. “New York is now credited by outsiders with being ostentatious, luxurious, and unpatriotic,” he explained, carefully avoiding any reference to Christian precepts against laying up treasures on earth. “I think such charges are untrue, and I think the bringing of them is injurious to the entire country and to New York…. What I may have advised any members of my congregation…is nobody’s business but mine and theirs—certainly not a matter for public discussion.”

  In both the United States and England, however, Rainsford’s ethical gymnastics made him a source of amusement: here was a clerical dude who played to the grandstand and ended up making the ball an event of much greater consequence than it might have been if he had kept his mouth closed. But at least he stirred up earnest discussion about whatever obligations the rich had to the poor and to their own salvation. Not quite ten years earlier Andrew Carnegie had told readers of the North American Review that it was a disgrace for a rich man to die rich instead of giving his money away to libraries, foundations, and other good causes. On the other hand, was it possible that extravagant spending and ostentatious display could actually be good deeds? They stimulated the economy, created jobs, and trickled money down to the pockets of the working poor. At least this was the reasoning that shielded the Bradley-Martins from any pangs of conscience.

  ii.

  FEARING PROTEST demonstrations and possible violent acts by anarchists, the Waldorf management ordered workmen to board up the windows on the lower two stories. The night of February 10 perhaps two hundred police, some in plain clothes, surrounded the building, lined the sidewalks from Fifth Avenue to Broadway, and barricaded the street in front of the hotel, all these measures taken over public protests against unwarranted protection of the rich and blocking of free access to the streets. Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the board of police commissioners, said all such complaints of unfairness and inconvenience were “nonsense” and claimed he would have ordered the same sensible measures if the occasion had been instead “a clambake or picnic on the east side.” Ten of his tallest men flanked the narrow passage from the curb to the draped doorway of the Waldorf on Thirty-third Street. The Bradley-Martins, who were reported to have received death threats, arrived at their party accompanied by two bodyguards. The United States Marine Band, brought in from Washington, sounded a fanfare and played through the long evening, occasionally relieved by Victor Herbert’s band and a Hungarian Gypsy ensemble.

  Gowned as Mary Queen of Scots, festooned with Marie Antoinette’s crown jewels, including a massive ruby necklace, and seated on a throne as she received her guests, Cornelia could have been a model for Sir John Tenniel’s picture of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. Her husband, dressed as Louis XV, stood at her side. He wore a suit of pink and white brocaded satin, knee breeches, white silk hose, low red-heeled shoes with diamond buckles, and a powdered wig. Jack Astor, appointed king of the ball by Cornelia, came in a relatively modest courtier’s costume, but he carried a sword with a jeweled hilt and had a jeweled chain around his neck. (His absent cousin, William Waldorf Astor, was long since settled in England with his family.) Jack’s wife, Ava, came as Marie Antoinette. In a velvet dress copied from a Van Dyck portrait, Caroline Astor, Jack’s mother, wore a carapace of diamonds that flowed down her front from scalp to stomach.

  By rough count, among the other costumed guests were ten Mmes. De Pompadour, eight Mmes. De Maintenon, three Catherines the Great, several other Marie Antoinettes, and dozens of Watteau women and Dresden figurines. Almost one hundred men came as Louis XV, and there were a Richelieu or two, a Dutch burgomaster à la Rembrandt, several toreadors, a sprinkling of sheikhs and mandarins, and a number of others in three-cornered hats, apparently the leavings of the city’s costume shops. Pierpont Morgan’s spirited daughter Anne came as Pocahontas, in a feathered dress made for her by American Indians. A young Mr. Cushing of Boston, rumored to be an artist, came as an Italian falconer of the fifteenth century: under a short jacket he wore white tights that left little to the imagination and drew stares and polite giggles. The revelers did not include impersonators of Charlotte Corday, the unfortunate Louis XVI, or any such grim reminders that many of these historical figures, and perhaps their impersonators as well, danced on a volcano.

  As the long evening of dining, drinking, dancing, and posing for formal portraits stumbled toward four in the morning, several courtiers tripped over their swords and as a last resort tucked them under their arms. Stanford White was seen in lecherous and drunken pursuit of a young beauty named Mrs. Starr. In addition to generous quantities of whiskey, brandy, and still wines, Cornelia Bradley-Martin’s guests consumed sixty cases of a Moët & Chandon champagne that a local historian recalled as “the most expensive sparkling wine known in the United States in 1897.”

  After the ball was over, it would have been reasonable to ask if anyone had a good time, and there were relatively few after-the-event reports on that point. But the evening left a general impression, according to the papers, that the great ball did not live up to its billing either in the degree of general happiness that prevailed, the number of guests (only about seven hundred) who actually attended, or how it stacked up against the Vanderbilt event. Nor was there either then or later any agreement on how much the whole thing had cost hosts and guests as a group. Cornelia’s direct bill from the hotel for drink, food, and music came to a bargain $10,000, but this probably reflected a concession from the management and did not include trees and shrubs, Versailles panels and backdrops, banks of hothouse flowers, and pyramids of hothouse fruit. More significant, it did not even begin to reflect the sums Cornelia and her guests laid out for gowns, costumes, wigs, hairdos, jewels, accouterments, liveries for footmen and waiters, and the like.

  “Half a million dollars gone up in frippery and flowers,” wrote the fire-breathing iconoclast William Cowper Brann, but the “bedizened gang” at the Waldorf did not, he claimed, have half the fun a cow yard of hayseeds would have had at a taffy pull or corn husking. “Mrs. Bradley-Martin has triumphed gloriously,” Brann went on, “raised herself by her own garters to the vulgar throne of Vanity.” The evening’s aftermath was a long collective hangover, a mood of glumness, ennui, and dull resentment only briefly relieved by a burlesque of the “Bradley Radley Ball” staged by the showman Oscar Hammerstein.

  The great event had proved to be so blatant and heartless in its abdication of taste and social conscience that public opinion, along with a punitive doubling of their tax assessment, eventually pushed the Bradley-Martins into exile or, as they thought of it, preferred residence in England. Two years after the ball they emptied their house on Twentieth Street and shipped the furnishings to London. In the last of their several farewells to New York society they gave a banquet for eighty-six of their friends at the Waldorf-Astoria. The guests consumed green turtle soup, timbales of shad roe, and mignons of spring lamb while the hotel orchestra played Spanish melodies and popular black songs, among them a particular favorite of those in attendance, “If You Ain’t Got No Money, You Needn’t Come ’Round.”

  Wearing a gold-trimmed brocade-and-velvet suit and a powdered wig, Bradley-Martin’s brother, Frederick Townsend Martin, had been a favored and apparently compliant guest at the ball. Clubman, cosmopolite, connoisseur, and confirmed bachelor, he had attended and kept track of many comparable events and knew what he was talking about when he rated them. In 1911 he published his observations in an alarmingly titled book, The Passing of the Idle Rich. It went over with the public and was
so visual in its anecdotes that it lent itself to vaudeville burlesques and satiric dramatizations on the stage. In the intervening years he had become—or at least, as a published author, found it profitable to appear to be—a reproachful observer of the social scene, a combination of the Prophet Jeremiah and Banquo’s ghost. It was clear from the thrust and texture of his argument that he had also read and absorbed The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen’s profoundly subversive analysis of the manners of the upper-class “barbarians” (as Veblen called them) who led American society.

  One sentence of Veblen’s about the leisure class could have served as a motto for Frederick Martin’s book and an epitaph for his sister-in-law’s carnival: “Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability.” The Passing of the Idle Rich served up vivid instances and dire predictions about the fate of a social class which, Martin said, had “sunk to the level of the parasite” and was “condemned to death.”* He included the fashionable practice of dining out at great hotels among the many dreary schemes “devised to keep us from being bored to death by the mere fact of living.” Among his dozen or so instances of colorful and indicative behavior on the part of the idle rich were Chicago gas company heir C. K. G. Billings’s dinner served on horseback on the fourth floor of Sherry’s Restaurant with waiters dressed as grooms; a birthday dinner for a black-and-tan dog, among whose presents was a diamond collar worth $15,000; Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s dinner honoring a monkey in a full dress suit; a millionaire who had his dentist drill two rows of diamonds into his teeth; several “Jack Horner” dinners, one hosted by Stanford White, another served in tribute to Diamond Jim Brady: greeted by drunken applause a small flock of canaries and nightingales emerged from a giant pie, followed by a naked girl.