There were, in fact, so many jewels that it was sometimes difficult to find a new way of wearing them. Edith Gould, wife of robber-baron railroad developer Jay Gould’s eldest son George, who owned gems valued at more than $1 million that she wore constantly, ‘changing them from day to day,’ recalled one acquaintance, never went motoring without her famous five-strand pearl necklace, bought for her from Tiffany’s for half a million dollars. Some women wore diamond chains or ropes of pearls over one shoulder and under the opposite arm, like the sash of an order; one hung a huge uncut sapphire or ruby from a long chain of pearls hanging from her waist, kicking it gently ahead of her as she walked into her box at the opera.
When France’s crown jewels were auctioned in 1887 there were further pickings. The Martins were among those who swooped down on the jeweller Tiffany’s haul, around twenty-four ‘lots’. This sale, unique in jewellery history, could have been designed to appeal to every instinct of those securing or wishing to secure a foothold in New York society, clothing the lucky winners in an invisible aura of prestige, conferring on them a touch of instant history and background and, of course, stating unequivocally that they were very rich indeed. Cornelia Bradley Martin achieved a pair of Marie Antoinette’s ruby and diamond bracelets (that could be worn together to form a dog-collar necklace) and several other spectacular pieces. Alva Vanderbilt bought a magnificent pearl necklace once owned by the Empress Eugénie and valued at $200,000; the heiress wife of a wealthy lawyer and partner in the Morgan bank acquired part of Eugénie’s emerald and diamond girdle, her ruby and diamond tiara, pendant and pair of bracelets.
The Bradley Martins’ last notable entertainment in New York was a cotillion dinner for 300 given in February 1890 at Delmonico’s, for which they retained the custom of Gilded Age New York for extravagant decoration of a party setting. Pictures, tapestries and bric-à-brac were brought from their house, palms and foliage banked the entrance to the restaurant, its dining-room walls were hung with blue silk brocade and small gilt mirrors, a Roman chandelier of orchids swung overhead instead of the usual circle of lights, small baskets of lilies of the valley scented the room and the dining tables were heaped with Gloire de Paris roses. Two bands played throughout dinner, after which the company – New York’s finest – were entertained by the performance of two cotillions.
* * *
For the Martins, it was goodbye to New York for a while – they remained abroad for the winters of 1891 and 1892 – but their lavish entertaining went on. It was estimated that the average cost of a Bradley Martin dinner dance in London was $10,000. By now they had become a staple of the social columns, with constant comments on Mrs Bradley Martin’s jewels and expenditure. ‘Mrs Martin totters under … an extraordinary head ornament that is said to have cost a hundred thousand dollars and to weigh on an iceman’s scales six pounds and a half. No chandeliers are necessary when this crown and Mrs Martin make their entrance either in the ballroom or in her box at the opera,’ wrote The Saunterer in typical sardonic vein.
Significantly, sometime along this route, their name developed that tiny symbol of social cachet, a hyphen, so that in later years they were known as the Bradley-Martins, a change that did not go unnoticed by The Saunterer’s column in Town Topics: ‘In the elevation of the socially ambitious, the service it affords is frequently as effective as Mr Ward McAllister himself.’
When they went to Scotland for the autumn months it was an equally glittering affair. Forty-odd local people were employed permanently at Bal Macaan as indoor servants, gardeners and gamekeepers. The Bradley-Martins themselves would arrive in Inverness in a specially hired train, with servants, luggage, silver plate, horses, carriages and wagons. Guests would bring their own valets, lady’s maids and loaders.
None of this was enough for the eldest Bradley-Martin son, Sherman. He had become bored with Bal Macaan and yearned for the bright lights of London and Paris. When his grandmother finally gave him the money to leave Scotland, he went straight to London, where all the things his parents must have feared, happened. He got in with a rich set, many of whom hung around stage doors, began to send expensive jewellery to a dancer named Ada Annie Nunn and finally became so entangled with this older woman that in 1889 she managed to persuade him to marry her. For the Bradley-Martins, this mésalliance came as a profound shock, almost worse when the marriage broke up a few months later, with Sherman departing for a tour of Spain.
So it was back to Bal Macaan, where their hospitality and the sport offered acted like a magnet. In 1892, when only fifteen, their daughter Cornelia met and became engaged to her future husband, the twenty-four-year-old Earl of Craven. Ten years earlier he had inherited from his father a total of 37,000 acres, which included the estates of Ashdown House and Coombe Abbey. A keen sporting man who loved shooting and stalking, William Craven had been the Martins’ guest for the last shoot of the season (likely to have been in October or November) – Bal Macaan was known as one of the best-stocked deer forests and grouse-shooting moors in all Scotland.1
It was then that he wooed and won Cornelia, a teenager still in the schoolroom and therefore known by sight to only a few of the Martins’ most intimate friends. As one of her descendants related: ‘One day she was playing with dolls and the next she was engaged and told she could no longer do that.’ There were mutterings in England that Craven had stolen a march on potential rivals for the hand of this young heiress by snapping her up before she had even come out, when her debutante season would have given others a chance. The Bradley-Martins were obviously equally keen to acquire an earl for their daughter or they would have urged delay because of her extreme youth; as it was, the engagement was brief – an extraordinary break with the custom of their own society, where an engagement of less than a year was considered unduly short.
Town Topics, which never missed an opportunity to mock what it saw as the pretentious, greeted the announcement with its usual acerbic wit, this time scoring both a right and a left. ‘I have no doubt that Mr Bradley-Martin (hyphenated) smoothes his chin with an affectionate hand these days,’ wrote The Saunterer, ‘and allows the opalescent light that falls through the stained-glass windows of his castle to gild and glorify his smooth and gleaming brow as he contemplates the grand coup that he has accomplished in bringing into the family a real live British earl.
‘The Bradley-Martins (hyphenated) have been for several years the most conspicuous representatives of that class of Americans who revere English culture, habits and individuals.’ He sweetened the pill by saying: ‘It is nonsense for newspapers to say that Craven stole into the nursery to get the prize. He has been visiting the Bradley-Martins (hyphenated) since he was a minor.’
The wedding was planned for April 1893 and the Bradley-Martins, together with Lord Craven and his brother, returned to New York two months earlier to prepare for it. The Saunterer was quick to point out that Mrs Bradley-Martin was putting on weight. ‘[Her] acquaintances have been obliged to welcome her home twice or thrice, as they believe she is two or three times the woman she was when she made her last visit home.’
When the Bradley-Martins arrived from England on the SS Teutonic, a ship of the utmost luxury that had won the Blue Riband the previous year, even by the standards of the Teutonic’s uber-rich passengers and even for a party of twenty-two (including servants), the luggage accompanying them seemed excessive – a staggering 128 trunks. Unsurprisingly, Customs officials became suspicious, imagining that there would be a treasure hoard on which to pay duty. Mr Bradley-Martin (by this time the hyphen was firmly in place) was interviewed by the Deputy Surveyor of the dock, but said he had brought nothing dutiable from Europe except a portrait of his son in oils, worth about $10,000, on which he then paid duty of $300. As for the trunks, Bradley-Martin stated that they contained only ‘our old clothes. We brought nothing new over with us.’
‘You could have knocked me down with a feather,’ said the Deputy Surveyor of Customs later, but recovered sufficiently to ask, ‘But ho
w about your daughter’s wedding trousseau?’
‘That’, said Mr Bradley-Martin, ‘has been left at our place in Scotland, to which she will return immediately after the wedding. All that these trunks contain is our usual wearing apparel.’
‘What about the wedding dress?’ asked the Deputy Surveyor.
‘Oh, it’s here, of course – in that trunk there,’ said Mr Bradley-Martin. ‘But it’s an old one that my daughter has worn to a ball in London and to several receptions, so that no duty can be charged on it.’ Having repeated his question and received the same answer, the Deputy Surveyor had little option but, as he said, ‘to take Mr Bradley-Martin’s word for it’.
The excitement in New York at their arrival was intense. The Earl and his brother were entertained everywhere, Ward McAllister giving a dinner for the whole family. The New York Times instructed its readers on how the Earl was to be addressed, simply as ‘Lord Craven’, not ‘My Lord’ as ‘one Anglomaniac with much money and little sense’ did; other newspapers described in minute detail everything William Craven wore, from suits and shirts to underclothes, with illustrations of ‘his most choice shirts and pants’, which they had been shown by his helpful valet.
The wedding, in April 1893 at New York’s Grace Church, filled with flowers and palms up to forty feet high, caused a frenzy. An excited crowd thronged the street outside waiting for a glimpse of the bride. Some of them managed to get into the church by means of forged invitation cards, which they held up to show the two struggling policemen at each door. Others, even the most well dressed, scrambled over the boundary picket fence when they could not force their way through the gates, leaving scraps of their clothing on the pickets. The entry of these uninvited guests meant that a church of which the capacity was 2,000 now held 3,000.
* * *
Inside the church it was even worse. The invited guests in the side aisles stood on the pews, and those farthest away piled hassocks on the pews and stood on those for a better view – most were women, as it was the custom among the clubmen of New York (and most of the smart set belonged to clubs) not to attend weddings. Bradley Martin’s brother Frederick, one of the ushers, literally had to force his way in, arriving with his coat nearly torn off his back, while one guest, Mrs Van Rensselaer Cruger, who watched the scramble with horror and whose dress was almost ripped from her in the crush, told a newspaper: ‘The people utterly ignored the fact that they were in the house of God. They talked in loud, vulgar voices. Ladies forgot the modesty of their sex in elbowing their way to the front, men forgot their manliness in pushing others aside, and even used the backs of the pews as a highway to reach the front.’
After the ceremony there was a near-riot when the public invaded the church, some stripping flowers off the altar until the police were called in. Afterwards, a number of the regulars at Grace Church stopped going to it and the price of the pews dropped from $200 to $50.
Inevitably, the youth of the bride, the speed of the engagement and the size of her dowry gave the gossips a field day. ‘Poor little Miss Martin looked very nervous and even miserable as she walked down the aisle with her father,’ wrote The Saunterer. ‘Nor did her aspect become more cheerful when she drove back with the pale young earl, and I heard many expressions of pity uttered by the crowd, which was evidently of the opinion that she had been more or less forced into the match, the glowing satisfaction on the rubicund face of Mrs Bradley-Martin lending weight to the suspicion.’
Nothing had been spared that would express a sense of triumph. The floral decorations at the reception at the Martins’ house outdid anything ever seen before on such an occasion. Even the champagne set a new standard: Bradley Martin had bought from London’s Café Royal over 200 bottles of a vintage never served before in America, at a cost of $50 a bottle. Cornelia’s dowry was $1 million, with a promise from her mother to make up the deficiency if her husband’s income fell short of £15,000 a year. Her future mother-in-law gave her the family emeralds, Emily Countess of Craven (the Earl’s grandmother) a magnificent diamond necklace, her mother gave her the diamond tiara once worn by the Empress Josephine, and her maternal grandmother a three-string necklace of pearls valued at over $50,000.
Not everyone viewed the couple’s marriage kindly. One paper called it ‘snobocratic’, and as Elizabeth Cameron, wife of the senator from Pennsylvania, described it to Cecil Spring-Rice: ‘The wedding of Miss Bradley-Martin, aged 16, to the Earl of Craven has been one of the most disgusting exhibitions of snobbery I have ever seen. Even New York was disgusted at such a palpable sale.’
Others condemned spending on such a scale when set against the beginnings of what became known as the Great Depression. Wheat prices had crashed – other countries were now producing wheat and cotton in quantity – and farmers in many states were encumbered with mortgages often between 40 and 50 per cent of the value of their farms, so that falling prices meant many foreclosures.
* * *
Two days after the wedding, the Bradley-Martins’ house at 22 West 20th Street was burgled. Early in the morning the sharp metal spikes that topped the high wall protecting the whole length of the house up to 19th Street had been hammered downwards. Once the thieves had entered the garden, they smashed a pane of glass in the basement window, turned the latch and crept in while everyone was asleep. From the library they took a case holding thirteen antique watches, from the dining room forty-five pieces of silver, carrying everything away in a milk float, a vehicle that would have aroused no suspicion at that hour of the morning.
The burglary was discovered by a housemaid at 6.00 a.m. Fortunately for the newlyweds, none of the wedding presents was stolen. ‘Thank goodness,’ said Mrs Bradley-Martin when, swathed in a black velvet cloak, she emerged from the house that morning for her drive in Central Park, ‘the wedding presents were in a place of safety.’ Everything gold or silver was in fact locked in a safe.
The burglary did not stop the return of the young couple and the Bradley-Martins to England and Scotland respectively. Whether or not the Earl was in need of money, as believed by many, once in possession of Cornelia’s dowry he immediately began the renovations and refurbishments to his main home, Coombe Abbey, in Warwickshire, that he could not afford before. Coombe, famous for its collection of paintings that had belonged to Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, who married a Lord Craven and left him her pictures, needed restoration of the fabric of the building, a partial re-roofing and improvements to the servants’ quarters; later, electric light was installed. There is little doubt that without Cornelia’s money Coombe would have passed out of the family far earlier than it did.2
In contrast to her husband, known as rather a dandy (‘He wore turn-ups on his trousers!’ breathed one New York paper in tones of awe; ‘he is said to sport the longest cigarette holder in London!’ noted an equally transfixed London journal), Cornelia was to begin with a rather staid dresser. She made her first public appearance in an iridescent black and violet shot-silk dress – to open a bazaar in Coventry – described even by the loyal local paper as ‘rather matronly’. But she quickly adapted to the grand life, and the young couple were seen at all the smart social events and at fashionable watering holes abroad, Cornelia’s success during her first London season even finding its way back to New York.
Much of their time was of course spent at Coombe, which Cornelia took to at once, though after her upbringing in a house made comfortable by her American parents, she complained bitterly of its lack of warmth. ‘The house is so cold,’ she told her mother, ‘that the only time I take my furs off is when I go to bed.’
The year after the Cravens were married, the Bradley-Martins took a house in London, launching themselves with a cotillion ball, where favours were distributed by two small black boys carried in a floral sedan chair. They returned to New York that winter. ‘It is confidently expected that Mrs Martin will devise … some novel form of entertainment that will keep her in the public eye this winter,’ wrote The Saunterer.
‘Since her last coup in the marriage of her youthful daughter to the Earl of Craven Mrs Martin has been, for her, very quiet … Now do the caterers smile, now do the florists laugh.’ But it was not to be. In December 1894 Sherman died, and after his funeral the Bradley-Martins returned to Bal Macaan to grieve and to pass their months of mourning there.
By now many other Americans had discovered the joys of a Scottish sporting estate, so that by the early 1900s there was a strong American presence in the Highlands. Or as the New York Times put it: ‘How refreshing it is while crossing English moorland or traversing Scottish glens to come suddenly upon some handsome shooting lodge or to see in the distance some splendid old castle flying the Stars and Stripes and to be told that these houses are peopled by Americans.’ Mary Theresa Leiter, the American mother of both the Marchioness of Curzon and the Countess of Suffolk, had rented Tulloch Castle, while Henry Phipps, the steel magnate from Pittsburgh, was ensconced in Glenoich, near Inveraray.
Such visits usually lasted several weeks, as they involved a long train journey to Scotland, then a much slower one on a Highland railway, followed by a drive often of many miles across the moors. The Bradley-Martins asked so many that they usually rented a nearby hotel for the overflow. Most people spent all day in the open, walking with the guns and enjoying the luxurious shooting lunches – game or meat dishes kept warm by hot water, sweets, ices, fruit, claret, champagne cup and liqueurs.
There was constant entertaining, with Highland reels, flings and jigs after dinner to the sound of the pipes. Not all the American girls staying there as guests had mastered these – the Duchess of Roxburghe (née May Goelet), although she had taken lessons from an old piper in Dunbar, had not yet dared to dance – but Cornelia Craven was noted as ‘dancing the reels very gracefully’. Her mother, Cornelia Bradley-Martin, gave an annual ball, with Loch Ness lit up by carefully placed lights. If the evening was warm enough, a romantic alternative to sitting out was to be rowed on Loch Ness in the moonlight by kilted oarsmen who played the pipes.
The Husband Hunters Page 24