Helen Gould was the only one who realised he was a fortune-hunter, but as she had already meddled in family affairs with a dire effect, her opinion was disregarded. Anna could not make up her mind. ‘I don’t like foreigners and I won’t live out of America,’ she said at one point. Hoping to make Anna jealous and thus speed things up, Boni and his friend departed for Newport, where the pair gave a highly successful dinner dance and Boni’s title ensured that they were fêted by everyone. But still, nothing, although he was asked with his friend to stay at Lyndhurst, Helen’s country house, then at George Gould’s Georgian Court, both of which Boni found intensely dull and badly decorated. Meanwhile he was running out of other people’s money and soon the game would be up.
Finally, in the spring of 1895, he was considered to have courted Anna for a sufficient length of time. His probation was over and he could now propose. When he did, she accepted at once: ‘a real live count ought to be a passport for them [the Gould family] into the innermost of the inner circles, which privilege they so much crave,’ said the New York World, showing a lively appreciation of the truth that the simplest way for a family to elevate itself into the top level of New York society was through the strategic marriage of a daughter.
Boni, aware that his fiancée lacked not only looks and polish but chic, described Anna as possessing ‘what is always delightful to a man, possibilities’. As his family was facing financial ruin, it was not hard to see what these possibilities were. However, he did not hesitate, even though shaken by Anna’s response – which could, and indeed was, a disclaimer to a business deal – when he suggested she took his family’s religion, Catholicism. ‘I will never become a Catholic,’ said nineteen-year-old Anna, with a steeliness worthy of her father, ‘because if I were to do so, I should not be able to divorce you, and if I were not happy I would not remain your wife for a moment longer than was necessary.’
They married in March 1895. Every detail of the preparations, the presents, the decorations in the church, what Anna might have included in her trousseau, was discussed in the press, conscious of what its readers wanted. Anna was given a brooch by her sister with the famous Esterhazy diamond at the centre, surrounded by eleven other diamonds; from her parents’ collection she was given a ten-strand collar of pearls, held together by crosswise bars of diamonds; the bridegroom’s parents gave her a five-rope pearl necklace, to which was attached a huge emerald that dated back to 1763.
Anna’s capital (her share of the Gould fortune) was $12 million – but this was untouchable, as her father’s will had tied all the capital up in a single trust, with each child living off the income of their share, in Anna’s case almost $750,000 a year.
When the de Castellane family left for France on the steamship Bretagne, seen off by the Goulds, there were over 500 people on the pier, all intent on having a good look at them. A crowd of about a hundred fashionably dressed women boarded the ship to watch the final farewells and followed them round the deck, staring and commenting audibly on the appearances of the women of the party.
In Paris, the young de Castellanes rented the mansion of a fellow aristocrat while the house – the palace – they wanted was being built where the Avenue Malakoff met the Avenue Foch. It was a counterpart of the Petit Trianon, in pinkish stone, with carved balustrades, newel posts of silvered bronze, inlaid wood floors and a marble and gold ballroom – and the money for it had to come out of Anna’s income.
This did not stop Boni spending. Now that he had credit again he bought some priceless Gobelin tapestries, in such haste that the dealer’s floor was covered in the banknotes he pulled out of his pockets (‘I wanted to feel they were mine that very instant!’). He bought a dinner service of rare green Sèvres, Chinese vases, fine furniture and silver soup plates, he staged a magnificent fête in the nearby Bois de Boulogne to celebrate the birth of their first son, for which he ordered 80,000 Venetian glass lamps and scarlet livery for the sixty footmen needed.
The de Castellanes went yachting, they went to Moscow, they went to Deauville. For Anna it was a new and exciting world. Guided by Boni’s taste, impeccable eye and backed by her own lavish fortune, she blossomed into one of the best-dressed women in Paris, renowned for her stylishness – something that must have gladdened her heart and done much for her social confidence. It looked as though her choice had been the right one.
Unfortunately Boni’s impeccable eye for a pretty lady had not deserted him with marriage, and even more unfortunately there were plenty ready to tell Anna about them. Although she did not mind his spending her money, she did mind his infidelities.
At first it had seemed as if Boni was settling down. In the summer of 1898 he was elected to the Chambre des Députés, to the great delight of his family, who were very conscious of their responsibilities as aristocrats and patriots (he celebrated at a dinner where almost everyone got deplorably drunk). Although Boni too took his new role seriously he did not let it impinge on his way of life and, still spending only on Anna’s credit, he was threatened with bankruptcy. The de Castellane debts were enormous: almost four million francs in connection with the building of their new house, six and a half million in mortgages, over four million to suppliers and banks – and Boni owed over nine million to dealers in antiques and fine arts.
Anna, alone in a strange land with a husband antipathetic to all the values with which she had been brought up, wrote to her brother George to ask his advice. He told her they must come to America, as he could not prescribe at a distance. It was not a happy homecoming as the rumours of Boni’s huge debts and unfaithfulnesses had preceded them. (When showing Elsa Maxwell, the American professional hostess, round the de Castellanes’ Paris house, he came to their bedroom and remarked laconically: ‘La chambre expiatoire.’) Now dressed with French chic in dark skirt, Persian lamb jacket and boa and muff of marten (Boni’s long blue overcoat was, typically, lined with silver fox), Anna waited by the rail, peering through the mist to see if her family had come to meet her. When she saw a woman waving a handkerchief her face lit up – until she realised it was not for her but a fellow passenger. After this had happened a second time, she burst into tears.
When they at last saw George and he learnt what they owed, he told them the answer was to raise a loan to pay off these pressing debts as the trust could not be touched. This in turn meant raising the money from the rest of the family. George also appointed himself Anna’s trustee, which meant that all debts would now be referred to him, and cut down her income to $20,000 a month – a sum she often spent on dresses alone – putting the surplus into a fund to pay off the debts. It was estimated this would take ten years.
The de Castellanes went back to Paris. Anna by now was enjoying the position in French society which Boni’s name had brought her, and her own hard-earned reputation for elegance, all of which needed more money than George’s trusteeship allowed. No longer a minor, she went to her lawyers and got this reversed, with the immediate result that Boni went back to his big spending – and also to his mistresses.
The result could have been predicted. By the end of 1905 Anna had become so fed up with Boni’s liaisons, extravagance and general way of life that even he had become aware that the end of the marriage was in sight. Gossip to this effect was swirling round Paris, but perhaps what finally made him realise his days were numbered was when at a dinner party he was asked casually how he had spent the day and replied, ‘Oh, I’ve been to the Chambre [des Députés],’ to evoke from Anna the response: ‘I don’t think so. I think he prefers a different kind of chambre’.
But he could not have foretold the coup, worthy of her father at his most ruthless and quick-witted, with which Anna would deal the final blow.
The morning of the day it happened he and Anna strolled together for a short time in the Bois de Boulogne, as they quite often did. Their conversation was cheerful and amicable, so that when Boni left their house, the Palais Rose, ostensibly to go to the Palais Bourbon on state business (he was an ardent royal
ist and missed no opportunity of putting this forward), he believed that all was well and even that Anna might be softening towards him.
When he returned that evening the house was dark. He went in, felt for the light switch and – nothing. He felt for a familiar piece of furniture – nothing. Anna had organised enough removal men and servants to strip the entire house of its furniture and furnishings in four hours, and had also seen that the electricity and telephone were cut off.
When Boni finally saw a dim light he made for it. It was a solitary candle, beside which was sitting an elderly priest, who told him that Anna and the children had gone and so had everything in the house. ‘She will never return,’ he said gently.
Anna had also been in touch with George and one of his lawyers had come to Paris to see her. The next day Boni was served with an application for judicial separation, and the wheels for a divorce were set in motion. It took place in 1906 amid much washing of dirty linen. ‘A scion of an ancient race, a man of rank and title, which, indeed, induced his wife to marry him … now stands unmasked as one of the most noxious blackguards that infest the earth and constitute malicious parodies on human nature,’ thundered the New York Times, the very paper that had so avidly chronicled his doings when he visited America.
The difficulty was dealing with the debts Boni had run up, some for women’s clothing and jewellery that Anna had never ordered, although the largest amount was, as usual, to the dealers in art and antiques. Eventually, these were settled for thirty cents in the dollar.
Anna, clearly anxious to be fair, or perhaps with the remnants of the love she had once felt, gave Boni a pay-off of around a quarter of a million dollars, as well as an annual income of $30,000 from her share of the estate. Two years later, she married Boni’s cousin the Prince de Sagan. In this case, not even the press could feel a sense of outrage: the Prince was almost as rich as Anna.
CHAPTER 11
Virginia
The beautiful young Virginia Bonynge, heiress to millions, and the blond and handsome Lord Deerhurst, heir to the Earl of Coventry, married on 10 March 1894, the brilliant sunshine seeming a symbol of this gilded young couple’s future happiness. Among the wedding guests was royalty, in the shape of Virginia’s faithful friend, Princess Christian (sister of the Prince of Wales) and her daughter Princess Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, as well as several Americans, titled and otherwise, and their husbands: the Earl and Countess of Essex, Lord Deerhurst’s cousin the Earl of Craven, his American Countess and her mother Mrs Bradley Martin, Lord and Lady Burton, General and Mrs Byron. The wedding presents were numerous and magnificent. The bridegroom’s parents gave a service of silver plate, a pearl necklace, and a pearl and diamond bracelet. Charles Bonynge presented his daughter with a diamond tiara, a diamond bracelet, a silver tea and coffee service and a handsome cheque. Virginia’s parents had got their wish: Virginia was now a member of Britain’s aristocracy.
But it was a marriage that almost did not happen, thanks to her mother Rodie’s ‘scandalous’ background and the bitter rivalry between two immensely wealthy men. Her story has all the elements of a Gilded Age fairy tale: a beautiful girl whose humble origins should have ensured that she only met the peer she married in the most menial capacity, let alone become best friend of the King’s sister. It is also an example of the kind of ferocious feud typical of the no-holds-barred life of early mining communities, and the equally ruthless social climbing of their womenfolk.
As in all good fairy stories Virginia, our heroine, was the child of a poor couple. Her father, William Daniel, born in London in 1838, had emigrated to America, where he became a gardener. Then, possibly because of the passing of the Homestead Act in 1862,1 he decided to try his hand at farming. In March 1865 he married the seventeen-year-old Rodie Stephens, born in Sacramento, the Californian capital. The couple bought 160 acres of farmland,2 hoping to put down roots and, in October 1866, their daughter Virginia was born.
But Daniel could not make a living out of the farm. He decided to turn to the mines, where fortunes were still being made from gold-mining,3 taking his small family with him. Once in California, Daniel went to work as a miner. It was a tough, rough, gun-happy community, where shootings were regular occurrences. ‘I haven’t time nor space to chronicle one tenth part of them,’ wrote one young miner, Daniel A. Jenks, in his diary. In one episode that he recounts a murder and lynching take place in just fifteen minutes ‘before the breakfast bell could ring in the camp!’
Another time, two card players jumped up to fire their guns at each other simultaneously; both missed, killing innocent bystanders at adjoining tables, but were acquitted on a verdict of ‘Accidental Death’. Murderers filled all the offices, wrote Jenks. ‘The judges, sheriffs and other officers of the law are all the most desperate of all and the city police is a gang of highwaymen and thiefs.’ In March 1851 he notes with wonderment the arrival of ‘a real live Yankee woman, with her husband and babe’, to establish a boarding house. ‘All want to see the woman and kiss the baby.’
Behaviour had not changed much in the decade between Jenks’s diary and the Daniels’ arrival. One day, so the story was put about many years later, William Daniel was involved in a fracas, in which he killed a man. He was not executed but was sentenced to life imprisonment in San Quentin, the state prison.
Soon after he was imprisoned, along came another man seeking his fortune in gold: a thirty-year-old Irishman called Charles William Bonynge. As a trooper, he had been one of the Six Hundred in the Charge of the Light Brigade, and had come out to America shortly afterwards. At first he put his experience as a cavalryman to good use by working in a livery stable in San Francisco, where he began speculating on the stock market with tips given him by some of those who hired horses or vehicles from him.
When he had built up a certain amount of capital he went to Virginia City, where he first worked in the mines and dealt in mine shares as a ‘kerbside broker’, then in the 1860s set up as a stockbroker. Here he met Rodie Daniel, fell in love with her and, eventually, persuaded her to divorce her convict husband and marry him (in 1869), promising to bring up four-year-old Virginia as his own child.
By now Bonynge had made a huge fortune; meanwhile, so the story goes, Daniel was eating his heart out in a prison cell, ignorant of the fact both that his wife had divorced him and married another man, and that his daughter, last seen by him as a baby, was being brought up by the couple as the child of both of them. The Bonynges moved to San Francisco, where Bonynge became broker to the Bonanza King John William Mackay – the other party in the bitter feud that later developed.
Mackay was an Irishman, born in Dublin in 1831 and taken to New York City when his family emigrated in 1840. Two years after they arrived, his father died and he had to leave school and find work. After two or three jobs, he was drawn by the prospect of doing well in the California Gold Rush and went there in 1851. He was strong, determined, tough and twenty, and with his possessions in a knapsack on his back set off across the Rockies for California. It was a journey both arduous and extremely dangerous, partly from the threat of hostile Indians (‘Short naps, with my hand on my six-shooter … quiet my nerves,’ wrote one traveller that year), but chiefly from dehydration, lack of food and above all the infectious diseases that plagued travellers, such as cholera. With thousands travelling along the same watercourses these diseases, carried by the bodily waste of those ahead, were swept downstream to infect those following – and drinking from the same streams.
Once in California, Mackay worked in the diggings for eight years. Unlike many of the other miners, he did not carry firearms but relied on his ready fists. In 1859, a rich seam of silver, known as the Comstock Lode, was discovered in Nevada. Silver was then considered the equal of gold for coinage and the US government bought it all (later this wealth financed much of the Union side in the Civil War when it broke out two years later), so was equally attractive to miners. With his savings, Mackay moved in 1860 to Nevada’s rapidly expand
ing Virginia City, then a town of flimsy wooden huts, some held vertical only by perpendicular wooden props, that had sprung up overnight on the eastern slopes of Mount Davidson, where the Comstock Lode had been discovered. Beneath the town, 6,200 feet up the mountain, amid the stunted cedars and yellow-flowering sage, ran the intricate tunnels and shafts of the new mines.
Mackay, determined not to continue as an ordinary miner, sank his money into forming a mine-contracting business, servicing various mines by organising the driving and shoring-up of tunnels, and taking shares in them in lieu of cash payment. It was a far-sighted move: as the mines expanded,4 so his shares rose in value and gradually he became a rich man.
About three years after he arrived in Nevada, Mackay met a pretty, dark-haired young woman with deep blue eyes called Marie-Louise Bryant, well educated and musical. Her mother was French, her father Daniel Hungerford had been a barber in New York before serving in the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War (after which he always called himself Colonel Hungerford). Her parents, taking their daughter with them, had emigrated to Downieville, California, where, at fifteen Louise, as she now called herself, had married a doctor called Edmond Bryant. Both Bryants were drawn by the possibilities in the rapid growth of Virginia City, so Bryant took his wife and small daughter Eva there. Once in Virginia City he set up a clinic, but the temptations of the pharmacy cupboard proved too much and in 1863 he died of alcohol and drug abuse. Twenty-year-old Louise was now stranded with her small daughter in a shanty town surrounded by rough miners, penniless and alone. To earn a pittance, she sewed and took in washing, but it must have been a nightmare.
Her unenviable position became known to Virginia City’s Catholic priest, himself a former miner, a kindly man who determined to do something for the young widow. Knowing of John Mackay’s good heart, he got Mackay to raise a cash subscription for her among the miners, which Mackay took round to her one evening after work – he was by now the superintendent of a mine. Soon he was visiting her constantly, visits that quickly turned into courtship.
The Husband Hunters Page 18