When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  Sixty-five in 1913, a widower for seventeen years, William contracted a grand passion. There may have been others since his Italian romance decades back, but this one left behind in its eventual wreckage a trail of love letters that showed him in an unfamiliar light. The forbidding and withdrawn William Waldorf Astor felt young again and imagined himself Faun, Aladdin, and Don Giovanni as well. He had fallen in love with Lady Victoria Sackville, a celebrated beauty and charmer. Fifty-one, she had perfect skin, captivating eyes, knee-length silken hair, and an engaging foreignness acquired at the French convent where she had been educated and also inherited from her mother, a Spanish dancer named Pepita, who had borne her out of wedlock. Victoria’s father was the British minister to the United States. As British as she was Continental, on both her father’s side and her husband’s Victoria claimed descent from a hero of the Battle of Crécy in 1346. “There is no end to your perfections…. You are an accomplished mistress in love,” one of this Circe’s long-standing captives, the British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, wrote to her. “You play with it and use it and manage it, like a seagull the wind, on which he floats but is never carried away.”

  Accustomed to being the object of fervent but often unrequited adoration, Victoria saw herself as the heroine of a popular novel, perhaps by Dumas père or Ouida. “Quel roman est ma vie!” she said. But she also had a hard head for business, especially in dealings that involved paintings and tapestries. With her talent for both love and money she would have been at home in the France of the Grandes Horizontales. She conducted serial, sometimes overlapping affairs while leading a mostly separate life from her husband (and cousin), Lionel Sackville-West, heir to a sprawling Elizabethan estate, Knole at Sevenoaks, in Kent. It had been in his family since 1603 and was now chronically strapped for cash because of new tax laws and rising labor costs to maintain its spectacular gardens. According to her grandson, Nigel Nicolson, Victoria practically cornered the market in “millionaires and lonely elderly artists.” Among her conquests were Auguste Rodin; Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, the hero of Khartoum; department store magnate H. Gordon Selfridge; and William Waldorf Astor’s immediate predecessor in her favors, Pierpont Morgan, then seventy-four.

  “He holds my hand with much affection,” Victoria wrote in her diary after a tête-à-tête with Morgan, “and says he will never care for me in any way I would not approve of, that he was sorry to be so old, but I was the one woman he loved and he would never change.” “I have never met anyone so attractive,” she wrote a few days later. She found Morgan so attractive, she said, that she managed to ignore his famous swollen nose, ravaged by acne rosacea and glowing like a railroad signal lamp. She had a business as well as a romantic relationship with Morgan, to whom she sold off some of the heirlooms at Knole to raise cash for maintenance. Soon after Morgan’s death in 1913 Victoria took William Waldorf Astor in tow.

  “A woman in the flower of her prime—like yourself—needs a romantic attachment,” William wrote to her from Marienbad, where he had gone to take the waters for his gout and rheumatism. “Without it the heart grows cold. It is as necessary as daily bread, and not even Knole and four acres at Hampstead can take its place. It is the consciousness that someone is thinking of you, desires you, longs for the touch of your beautiful body that keeps the heart young. Sweetheart, goodbye.” He signed himself “Will.” He confessed that for years when they met socially he had been afraid of her, “by which I mean fearful of displeasing you, for to have done so would have pained me dreadfully.”

  Everything between them had changed one afternoon—he called it his own “après-midi d’un faun”—when she came to see him in his “secluded retreat” at Hever Castle. “Have just come in for a walk,” he wrote after she left. “I smiled to notice the footprints, large and small, in the wet gravel at the House of the Poetic Faun…for anything I might have said and done in that splendid hour’s excitement I entreat forgiveness…. I take away with me an infinitely delightful remembrance, and I kiss your hand.” Later he added, “That momentous Saturday was the psychological hour for which you and I have unconsciously waited…. What wonderful things awaken at the meeting of the hands.” He urged her to come to him again for lunch and the afternoon. “The only suitable rendezvous I know of in England is my office, a little palace on the Embankment where I live in solitude. La ci darem la mano! Without at present attempting details I would show you how to arrive veiled and unannounced and as I alone should let you in and out, none but we could know.” Fooley, his butler-valet, he assured her, “has been with me 13 years. He has seen many things and has always been discreet.”

  Victoria declined the invitation, but teased him with the prospect of a chaperoned and chaste meeting in Switzerland, what she called “a picnic without refreshments.” Resigned to her proposed regimen of “iced love-making,” he said he would be happy, nevertheless, “to take your dear hand in mine again…. I shall have no other thought than to please you in all things.” In his love-struck Aladdin mode he had prevailed on her to accept from him “a little gift” of £10,000 in banknotes for the garden at Knole.

  By the end of the winter of 1913–1914, though, Astor had been replaced in Victoria’s affections by a former lover, a Swedish baron, whom she ran into in Perugia on her way to visit Astor in Sorrento. The baron had unexpectedly resurfaced in her life after an absence of thirty-two years, exerted his old powers, and “won me again entirely,” she wrote in her diary. Traveling by her chauffeured Rolls-Royce, she then proceeded south to Sorrento to break the news to Astor. After a weekend at Villa Sirena, the affair with him that she had managed with discretion and restraint—always “careful not to be talked about”—was pronounced dead, having suffered internal injuries on the way there. “He seems disappointed in me. What else can I do?” Victoria wrote in her diary. “We are parting perfectly good friends, but things have changed, alas.” From then on her loving “Will” signed his letters to her “W. W. Astor.” “He has become so hard on everybody,” she wrote in her diary, “even against his own children, and so self-centered and unfeeling about everything.”

  For a year he had set aside his old self, and when his affair with Lady Sackville was over he began to shut down as if in preparation for his demise. He divested himself of his publishing enterprises. He conveyed to his sons, Waldorf and John Jacob V, all of his holdings in Manhattan real estate. Assessed at about $70 million, they included the northern part of the Broadway frontage formerly occupied by his ancestor’s Astor House, the Waldorf section of the Waldorf-Astoria, the Hotel Astor, the Astor Theater, the Astor Court Building, the Astor Apartments, and the New Netherland Hotel, along with a number of office buildings and apartment houses that without blazoning the Astor name nevertheless asserted the Astor primacy on Manhattan Island.

  The driving force in William’s final years remained the determination to win a place in the British peerage. He made no secret of his ambition, even at the cost of inviting ridicule. Once, without having received any signal to justify his confidence that the day of his elevation was at hand, he appeared at a party wearing a peer’s ermine-and-velvet robe. What he believed was the holy grail of a title, more down-to-earth and realistic folk recognized as being in many cases a crass recognition of successes in commodities such as beer, soap, and cereal, and of generous contributions to party coffers. In the spirit that drove his quest he had more in common with his former countrymen than he would have liked to acknowledge: instead of comporting themselves like citizens of a democracy that had shaken off aristocratic distinctions, Americans were notorious for becoming virtually unhinged with borrowed glory when they found themselves shaking hands with a duke. Even more than the cooked-up genealogy William had commissioned, the prospect of becoming Lord Astor was a preemptive way to at least mitigate the fact of his descent from the soil of Baden.

  Before 1914, when England entered the war, and especially after, he made large gifts to the Conservative Party that were duly noted by the dispensers of royal f
avor: he also gave $250,000 to the universities, and during the war $275,000 to various charities and hospitals, $200,000 to the Red Cross, and $175,000 to a public fund for the wounded. Counting in his “war loans” and outright personal gifts, he may have given away as much as $5 million. “It must have been a great deal more fun to make money and spend most of it on the public, as Mr. Carnegie did,” the New York Times commented when Astor finally achieved his peerage, “than to be born rich and then try to make your way to other distinctions.”

  After a decade of benefactions bolstered by direct and indirect politicking, William was at last named a peer of the realm on King George V’s New Year’s Day Honors list in 1916. Two weeks later, robed as Baron Astor of Hever Castle, he made a twenty-minute pro forma appearance in the House of Lords. He reappeared there the following year when he was upped a notch to viscount. Meanwhile he carried on an extensive correspondence with the College of Arms and the editors of Debrett’s Peerage on the subject of the heraldic device to replace the one on his pre-peerage flag. After drafts and redrafts he settled on the motto Ad Astra and the emblem of a falcon surmounted by an eagle and three stars and flanked by two standing figures, an American Indian and a fur trapper, altogether a conflation of Astor family history, both true and imagined.

  Astor’s elder son, Waldorf, was already well launched on a career in politics as member of Parliament for Plymouth. He did not welcome his father’s elevation to the peerage. For him a hereditary title in the Astor family, far from being a desirable distinction, was a disaster, even a stigma to be passed on by law from father to son: by law, on William’s death Waldorf would have to resign his elected seat and, against his will, move to the relatively ineffectual House of Lords as the second Viscount Astor. Displaying a remarkable lack of empathy, he demanded that William renounce his hard-won title. That failing, he threatened to find a legal way to relinquish it when it passed to him. In his father’s view all this was not only an impossible demand but an unpardonable insult. “I am sorry that Waldorf takes my promotion so bitterly hard,” William wrote to his daughter-in-law, Nancy. “I cannot think that what has happened is in any sense a decadence and the course of advancement is as open to me as to him…. The love of success is in my blood, and personally speaking I am delighted to have rounded these last years of my life with a distinction.” “I have never gone in pursuit of this honor,” the first Viscount Astor added, possibly having convinced himself, while in the grip of denial, that this was conceivably the case. “In all things the honor should come to the man and not that the man should go stalking the honor.” He banished Waldorf, and during the three years before William’s death, they never spoke to each other.

  William’s relationship with Waldorf’s sister, Pauline, was equally contentious and as brutally terminated. She had tried to mediate the quarrel over title and succession only to be similarly banished as a party to her brother’s insulting behavior. Even much later, although suffering from progressive heart disease and chronic gout and declining into invalidism, William rejected an offer from Pauline to nurse and companion him. “I told you three years ago,” he wrote, “that I did not wish to see you again. There is no reason for me to change my mind.” “I pity my father from the bottom of my heart,” Pauline said, “and think it’s almost impossible for us to realize the emptiness and the misery of the life he has made for himself.” Viscount Astor was now alienated from two of his three children. He had given over Hever to the third, John Jacob V, recuperating there from war wounds and the partial amputation of his right leg.

  Soon after his elevation to viscount and his move from Hever, Astor went into seclusion in a house at Brighton, on the Sussex coast. He had long been fond of this favored resort of royalty and believed the sea air would act as a cure. Recently redecorated for him in the Astor manner, the last of his houses was an otherwise undistinguished two-story Regency building at 155 King’s Road, almost across the way from the Edward VII memorial. Occupied by a reclusive millionaire, a famous former American recently raised to the peerage, Astor’s silent retreat became one of the mysteries and curiosities of Brighton. A high board fence surrounded the property and blocked views from the outside. Astor’s butler and a private detective patrolled the perimeter and guarded the front gate, turning away anyone who applied for admission. Not even the borough surveyor was permitted to enter to exercise his official function.

  On the evening of October 18, 1919, Astor sat down alone to his customary four-course dinner prepared to his orders by a resident cook and accompanied by wines from his cellar. After taking coffee and port he withdrew behind the closed door of his lavatory and died there. The cause of his death at the age of seventy-one and a half was probably congestive heart failure. London and New York papers the next day were skittish in accounting for the precise location of his demise, it being more in keeping with both journalistic decorum in dealing with the dead and the dignity of the dead viscount to report that he had died in bed instead of on the toilet. After simple services in London attended by Astor’s three children and their spouses the body was cremated, and, following standing instructions, the ashes were buried under the marble floor of the private chapel he had prepared at Cliveden.

  Two years before he died, Astor had printed for himself and a few friends a seventy-six-page book of reminiscences, Silhouettes: 1855–1885. There he recalled his boyhood in New York; his parents’ stifling religious orthodoxy from which, at the age of eighteen, he liberated himself; his training at the Astor estate office; his careers in politics and diplomacy; and, most poignant of all his memories, the Italian girl—“the Princess of my fairy tale”—whom he had not been allowed to marry. For all his contrary and agitated nature, he even managed to claim for himself the achievement of “a peace the classics knew,” a peace that was surely unsuspected by his children and others who had run up against his will. Turning to the literature of his native country, and to perhaps its most passionate celebrator of democracy, nativism, and solitude, he prefaced his book with a passage from Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman’s lines spoke as well for William’s own longing for equanimity:

  I think I could turn and live with animals; they are so placid and self-contained;

  I stand and look at them long and long.

  They do not sweat and whine about their condition;

  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.

  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.

  TEN

  End of the Line

  KNOWN NATIONWIDE as “the Forty-second Street Country Club,” the popular bar in Jack Astor’s Hotel Knickerbocker on Times Square became a casualty of Prohibition in 1919. When it closed, it took the hotel down with it. In May 1929, five months before the stock market crash of Black Tuesday marked the end of good times, the Waldorf-Astoria, for four decades site, symbol, and catalyst of that era, also closed its doors. By Jazz Age standards its style and grandeur were stodgy, snobbish, and out of date. Relatively remote from the stretch of fashionable New York along upper Fifth Avenue, the hotel had also been hit by ten years of Prohibition that effectively shut off a major source of income and traffic. Reflective visitors who thronged the lobby and corridors during the hotel’s last days in business recalled the dreams of wealth, luxury, glamour, and proximity to the great and famous that had been played out there. They visited for the last time the silken, velvet, and marble settings of Peacock Alley, the Turkish Salon, the Palm Court Restaurant, and the grand ballroom.

  Closing-night entertainment in the ballroom was far from being one of the extravaganzas for which the hotel had been celebrated. The event was homelier, more in keeping with the coming era of the Depression: a performance by the one hundred members of the Consolidated Gas and Electric Choral Society. In the record three-week-long on-site auction that followed the closing, souvenir collectors, sentimentalists, antiquarians, and dealers bid on more than twenty thousand lots of hotel property. The auction inventory included bath mats and t
owels lettered “W.A.,” brass spittoons (destined to be recycled for use as fern bowls), chairs, dishes, bric-a-brac, 125 pianos, and other items down to the last spoon, finger bowl, and wine goblet. The world-famous name “Waldorf-Astoria,” which encapsulated the history of both an era and a dynasty, went for a token $1 to the builders of a new and otherwise unrelated hotel going up on Park Avenue. By February 1930 Henry Hardenbergh’s great building, one of the architectural wonders of Manhattan, had been leveled. Its two-acre site, where the parents of the Astor cousins once dwelt in their brownstone mansions, was cleared for another architectural milestone, the 102-story Empire State Building.

  In a comparably radical transition from the old order to the new, the marble chateau at 840 Fifth Avenue where Caroline Astor and her son Jack had assembled the chosen in the ballroom, had also yielded to Manhattan’s inexorable tide of demolition, renewal, and social change. Torn down in the 1920s, the Astors’ mansion was replaced by Temple Emanu-El, one of the world’s largest synagogues and both symbol and assembly place of Manhattan’s new Jewish hegemony.

  In 1967, along with the Metropolitan Opera House, a similar monument of a bygone era, the spectacular Hotel Astor fell to the wreckers. Workmen said it was the most difficult job of its sort they had ever known: the walls were so fortress-thick that the massive iron ball of the demolition crane often brought down nothing but chips of masonry and clouds of dust. Meanwhile, the surrounding theater district, the Times reported, had become “standee country for viewers of one of the smash hits in town—the demolition of the Astor Hotel.” A towering office building went up in its place. “Meet me at the Astor,” a New York byword, was now a whisper from the past. In 1926, on the site of William Waldorf Astor’s once-commanding New Netherland rose the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, a thirty-eight-story building more than twice as high as the one it replaced and topped with a slender spire. During the 1990s, having long since passed out of the Astor estate into corporate ownership, Jack’s St. Regis underwent what was said to be a $100 million makeover that modernized and at the same time restored it to its original gilded, bronze, and marble splendor.