At home, she liked to give garden parties, and because she often forgot just how many people she had asked, she sometimes had to entertain the overflow in a nearby field. But she was so cheerful and unworried by this that the guests did not mind either. She loved Monserrate best, though, and often went there, establishing a school in the village and sending several of the children to a convent in London.
* * *
The more colourful and scandalous incidents of the sisters’ past continued to surface, sometimes affecting their new lives in England: once, when Victoria’s husband invited them to a club dinner to which ladies were bidden, the wife of one of the other members managed to persuade all the other women that the two were not fit people to know – and next day’s papers reported that Mrs Martin and Lady Cook had been the only ladies present.
There was a distraction from the constant efforts to clear their names when Tennie’s husband was suddenly sued for breach of promise – an accusation that aroused all Tennie’s fighting spirit. Twenty-five years earlier, Sir Francis had met a lovely young woman in the train from London to Richmond and, finding her alluring and, he thought, easy-going, had asked permission to call upon her. She readily agreed, and a sexual liaison began. At each visit he gave her £5 or £10, but fairly quickly tired of her and tried to drop her, although as she continually pestered him for money he went on paying her £1 a week. Seven years after their first meeting, she married. Through Tennie and her secretary, Sir Francis, now too tired and unwell at the age of seventy-seven to speak, said that he had never had any intention of marrying her (he was indeed married at the time). The case was soon settled in his favour.
* * *
Yet until the last there clung about Tennie the aura of the dark and forbidden. When Francis Cook died in February 1901, there were rumours that she had murdered him. To counter these she asked for an exhumation, but the courts turned this down.
Sir Francis left an estate of £1,600,000, of which Tennie inherited £25,000 and an income for life from an investment of £50,000. With his property left mainly to his eldest son and the rest to his second son, Tennie, now Tennessee Lady Cook, Viscountess of Montserrate, was a wealthy widow but without a settled home. At fifty-six she began a wandering life again, travelling the world in aid of various women’s causes.
Tennie had managed more successfully than Victoria to leave her past life behind her: the days when she had averred that women who married for money were ‘legalised prostitutes, no better and no worse than streetwalkers,’ were conveniently forgotten.
She now began to make use of her title as an instrument to draw publicity and therefore audiences when she spoke out for the rights of women – at the age of sixty-four she attracted audiences of 7,000 to the Albert Hall – though not on such controversial themes. ‘Home is heaven where the father and mother work together in trust and sympathy,’ she would say; and audiences lapped it up.
She successfully used her celebrity and her title to inspire headlines in her fight for women’s rights in England, France, Italy, Portugal and the US. She was frequently the star attraction at smart parties in London, and younger people, seeing this slim, elegant, dignified figure in sapphire velvet, found it difficult to believe that she had once been mocked, thrown out of hotels and spent nights in jail.
She even managed to sit down with President Roosevelt in 1907, when she told him, in her old forthright manner: ‘By putting us on the same plane of suffrage with our servants and our former black slaves,1 you could rise to the greatest height in the world.’ But the President told her that he did not see much good had come of giving women the vote in the few places they had achieved it (Wyoming was one of the only states to allow it; in most others the idea had been voted down).
Tennie was now basking in the sun of approval for her outspokenness on the question of female suffrage. When she returned to America in 1909 a large contingent of American suffragettes came out in tugboats to greet this heroine of the movement as her ship arrived in New York harbour. ‘Lady Cook in her old Cell’ ran one headline as she took reporters to the jail where she and Victoria had been incarcerated.
She travelled, she lectured with enormous success both in the US, where she filled Carnegie Hall, and in London, where she repeated her earlier triumphs at the Albert Hall. She extolled the blessings of marriage (her fervour for free love might never have existed). She never gave up her fight for women’s rights and in old age became a revered and inspirational figure to the younger generations of suffragettes now fighting for the same cause (British women achieved limited franchise in 1918, two years ahead of their American sisters). By any standards, hers is a remarkable story.
CHAPTER 17
The River of Gold
By the late 1890s spending had become more than just a mark of status, a weapon for rising in society, a wish to be surrounded only by the best, a form of self-aggrandisement or even a way of giving pleasure to others, but simply an end in itself and even a validation of identity – I spend, therefore I am.
Gilded New York was pouring out its money in an endless cornucopia of extravagance, on houses, horses, clothes, paintings, marbles, yachts, cigars, wine, jewels and trivia. Bathtubs were cut from solid marble, waterfalls installed in dining rooms, vanloads of roses or orchids filled houses for the most ‘informal’ evenings. Hostesses used wonderful Sèvres, Dresden or Meissen china that museums would have leapt at. Around these tables sat women festooned with jewels, some of which had last been worn by a queen; later, the cigarettes passed round would be rolled, not in white paper, but in a 100-dollar bill with the initials of the host engraved in gold letters.
For the Vanderbilts, a family picnic meant two footmen, a maid and a couple of grooms going ahead in a carriage and setting up a table with a white linen cloth, silverware and china ready for when the family arrived on horseback. Fleets of lorries came up from the South to bring orchids to decorate a ballroom; cotillions offered diamond bracelet favours for the women, sapphire cravat pins for the men; at one ball an enormous papier-mâché watermelon was dragged in, out of which sprang a little Negro boy to distribute gold cigarette cases and enamel watches to the guests. Rivalry could now be measured in cash terms.
Frivolity ruled. ‘The newspapers take much more interest in international matters than in Congress,’ wrote the British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice to his sisters in March 1895. ‘When Miss Gould married a Frenchman there were whole sheets of vivid description for days … and one paper is prosecuting another for stealing pictures of the bride’s underclothing.’
Social crazes became wilder and wilder – one woman drove down Bellevue Avenue in her victoria with a monkey on each shoulder and a pig beside her – and wealth was splashed in ludicrous, almost obscene, ways. The wife of one rich Westerner owned a pet monkey that had its own room, its own valet (to dress it in a selection from its wardrobe of clothes), its own dining table and solid-silver service, its own special carriage and trotting horse. The cotillion favours given at dances grew increasingly more expensive: engraved cigarette or card cases from Tiffany, ivory shirt studs, jewelled cufflinks, delicately painted fans, watches, brooches, golf balls inlaid with gold and vouchers to buy antique furniture.
Above all, there were parties, parties, parties, each more extravagant and outré than the last.
The most famous stag party of the day served dinner to white-tied guests on horseback in a hotel ballroom – they ended the evening playing polo. One party-giver hired Sherry’s restaurant for the evening, turning its upper ballroom into a scene from the garden of Versailles at a cost of around $200,000, importing statues from France, framing them in orchids and covering the floor of the supper room in orchids. Mamie Stuyvesant Smith, one of the social queens of Newport, hosted parties with her court jester Harry Lehr at Crossways, her Newport ‘cottage’, that got sillier and sillier: a dinner where everyone had to speak baby talk and bring dolls and, at Harry Lehr’s ‘cottage’, a three-course dinner party for 100 dogs, some d
ripping in diamonds (Mamie’s wore a diamond collar worth $15,000), in honour of Mrs Lehr’s Pomeranian, Mighty Atom. The gifts for Mighty Atom were said to be worth $25,000 and the night to have cost some $50,000.
To the rich of America everything, even a potential grand family background, seemed buyable. The jewellers Tiffany had opened a ‘blazoning, marshalling and designing of arms’ department so that the wealthy could provide themselves with an ancient-seeming coat of arms. You went in, recorded Elizabeth Drexel, and said: ‘I want armorial bearings in the name of Smith. Show me a large selection, please.’ A massive book was produced, with illustrations of the arms of every known English family, and opened at the section headed ‘Smith’. ‘Which Smiths would you prefer – the Herefordshire Smiths or the Yorkshire Smiths?’ the assistant would ask.
As the customer brooded over whether to adopt the Yorkshire or Herefordshire version of the armigerous Smiths, his eye might be caught by the arms of a duke or marquis and he would decide to include part of that in his own creation. The resulting shield, half-Herefordshire Smith and half-ducal, would be installed over his front door or perhaps in the stained-glass window of the ballroom. ‘He had a coat of arms a very grand one, Bran-new besides, and not a second-hand one,’ wrote William Allen Butler of a parvenu millionaire. Before he left for England, William Waldorf Astor had commissioned a family tree that traced his bloodline back to the crusader Count Pedro d’Astorga of Castile, a crusader killed at the siege of Jerusalem in 1100 by the Saracen King of Morocco.
Fifth Avenue and Newport’s Bellevue Avenue were lined with huge, ornate mansions built by the new plutocrats that offended the old-school upper crust. When one of these nouveau hostesses announced, ‘And this is my Louis Quinze salon!’ Mamie Stuyvesant Fish, a woman noted for her rather acid frankness, responded, ‘And what makes you think so?’
Yet little seemed to change the established social pecking order. Much of the serious in-fighting took place in Newport where, despite its rigid protocol, there was more scope for the unexpected coup.
Here Caroline Astor reigned at Beechwood, one of the oldest Newport mansions, in which she had had the architect Richard Morris Hunt build a ballroom large enough for her ‘400’. Here, for over two decades, she gave her famous Summer Ball. Next door was Beaulieu, on the sea cliffs, where lived Mrs William Waldorf Astor, Caroline’s niece and only serious social rival. It was surrounded by acres of green lawn, tall copper beeches and gardens, and had sixteen bedrooms and thirteen bathrooms. Later it was bought by Grace and Neily Vanderbilt.
The smart set’s joker was Harry Lehr, well connected and well educated, who from early on made a success first in Newport society, then in New York, solely by dint of keeping people amused. He was a protégé of Mrs Astor, who would reserve a seat for him in her box at the opera, and the particular pet of Mamie Stuyvesant Fish, who could be startlingly rude when she felt like it. ‘Mrs Roosevelt dresses on $300 a year and looks like it,’ she remarked of the President’s wife. Mamie was one of those who battled constantly to keep her lofty place in society but who at the same time was often bored by its stuffiness and insistence on protocol. Only occasionally was she out-manoeuvred.
Her devoted husband Stuyvesant Fish, from a family at the heart of Knickerbocker society, was also president of the Illinois Central, a railroad in which Ned Harriman, a highly successful railroad-owner, held substantial interests. One day in 1906, the acid-tongued Mamie made some critical comments about Mrs Harriman at a ladies’ tea at Crossways, the vast Fish ‘cottage’ on Bellevue Avenue – and Mrs Harriman overheard them.
She told her husband, and war to the knife was declared. ‘I’ll make those people suffer!’ he told her. He laid his plans carefully; the most crucial step was the suborning of Fish’s chief ally in his own company, a man whom he had raised up and befriended. At the board meeting a few days later, Stuyvesant Fish’s protégé launched his attack. Fish, a big, powerful man who never wasted words, sat there stunned for a moment, then swung round and with one blow of his fist felled the man to the floor. But although the meeting was sympathetic he found himself no longer president of the Illinois Central.
Her defeat did not stop Mrs Fish exercising her sharp and often cruel wit even against those she counted as friends. She even stood up to the formidable Alva, a close confidante, when Alva accused her of telling all their friends that she, Alva, looked like a frog. ‘No, no!’ cried Mamie, ‘not a frog! A toad, my pet, a toad.’
No one was repelled more firmly than New York’s Jews (though later, gradually, the ban was lifted). Although husbands did business with them, often lunched with them, regarded many as friends and frequently begged their wives to entertain a favoured Jewish friend or colleague, the answer was invariably No. And as New York society was run entirely by women, and no New Yorker dared stand up to his wife, No it was. ‘These women are never crossed, never made to obey,’ said the (American) author Price Collier, adding that though American men were not easily bullied by other men, they were entirely subordinate to their women. Because his wife Grace thought showers unsmart, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, who preferred them to baths, was not allowed one in any of the bathrooms in their home (which, naturally, he had paid for), so had to go to his club when he wanted one.
* * *
The extravagant party-giving rose to a final crescendo at the turn of the century; and ended by causing such public revulsion that several of the party-givers either left for Europe or spent more time abroad. This kind of needless ostentation was also a sign that the reign of Mrs Astor was drawing to a close and that she herself was losing her tight grip on the society that had for so long orbited her. In her heyday, she would never have countenanced this stepping over the line that separated limitless expenditure on whatever was considered the best from mere spending for frivolous spending’s sake.
Already the would-be successors to her throne were jostling for position, with Caroline Astor and Mrs William Waldorf Astor as the two main contenders. When The Saunterer began denying that there was a rift in the Astor family but concluded ‘that the words “In peace, prepare for war” just about covers the case’, everyone knew that the battle would soon reach a climax.
Though William was desperate for Mamie to outdo Caroline with dinners, parties and general entertainment, she was a gentler personality and did not have the stomach for such a fight. William on his own was unable to snatch the crown from Caroline, even when he had his own huge house in New York, next door to hers, pulled down and the Waldorf Hotel built on its site in his efforts to dislodge her. Caroline was indeed so infuriated and upset by this that she moved away from the neighbourhood; but nothing seemed to shake her grip on the social world and eventually, in 1891, William Waldorf gave up the struggle and moved with his family to England.
By now Newport had split into a series of cliques, presided over by the ruling queens, to offend whom was social disaster but who were united in their determination to reinforce the barriers. At the same time too many parties, too little exercise, too much rich food and little else to think about meant that quarrels often broke out between them. Underlying these squabbles was an intense rivalry as to who would become the next reigning monarch, all contenders prepared to battle for it down to their husbands’ last dollar.
Eventually, it fell to Grace Vanderbilt, wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt III and a woman to whom the social life was all. She began her campaign with her great Fête des Roses, in August 1902. ‘There was a harvest moon hanging low in the sky,’ wrote her son Cornelius, ‘fireworks cascaded down in gold and silver, airy lamps lit the velvety lawns and red roses were everywhere, their fragrance drifting through the house and filling the night air.’ Grace had had a theatre constructed in the grounds and hired the entire cast and sets of Red Rose Inn from New York for two nights, perforce closing the theatre in New York for forty-eight hours.
It was fairyland, a glittering, glamorous confection of delights. All that was lacking was content. As Price Collier, accus
tomed to English drawing rooms where politicians, writers, leading ecclesiastics, diplomats and distinguished soldiers would be entertained by the great hostesses, asked: ‘[But] where were the statesmen, the soldiers, the men of letters, the men who are making America move, so to speak?… The best society of Europe is success enjoying an idle hour or so; the best society here is idleness enjoying its success.’
Grace was well equipped for the position she aimed to occupy. Her house at 640 Fifth Avenue was huge, run by thirty-three servants imported from abroad; her wardrobe was immense. She had 500 pairs of shoes, wore dresses by Worth and Paquin, some so heavy with gems that they could not be hung up but lay on twelve-foot shelves; there was a queen’s ransom of jewels, said to be worth more than $1 million – one was a rose the size of a peony made entirely from platinum and diamonds. ‘I hear that all the Italian papers speak of me and my jewels,’ she wrote to her sister May Goelet. ‘I wore my tiara, my emerald collar, my pearls with the emerald piece Belle gave me, my diamond fringe [this was three inches long and hung from shoulder to shoulder] across the front of my gown (they admire that extravagantly) and my other emerald piece, all this with my yellow and silver gown looked very pretty.’
She was thirty-two when she brought off the stunning coup that outflanked all her rivals and even Mrs Astor herself. New York, in the winter of 1902, was abuzz with the news that Prince Henry of Prussia, the forty-year-old popular younger brother of the German Kaiser, would be paying the city a visit – and who would have the honour of entertaining him? Everyone, herself included, believed that it would be Mrs Astor, who had even postponed going abroad in this confident expectation.
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