After several years, McAllister left the firm and married an heiress, the granddaughter of Thomas Gibbons, the steamboat entrepreneur who had once employed Cornelius Vanderbilt. Sarah Gibbons was as retiring as McAllister was outgoing, and was more than happy to sit at home and let her husband use her dowry of about a million dollars to fund his avocation of living well. From then on, McAllister’s world consisted of a steady round of formal dances, dinners, and cotillions.
The McAllisters bought Bayside Farm, a modest estate in Newport, Rhode Island, which, in the 1870s, was a fashionable seaside resort for wealthy southern planters escaping the summer heat and fever of the Carolinas and Georgia. There Ward went to work entertaining “the most charming people of the country [who] had formed a select little community there.”32 No doubt about it, he was a lot of fun. He liked nothing more than organizing elegant champagne picnics, fêtes champêtres as he called them, for the idle rich of Newport, at which they “frolicked…to their hearts’ content.”33 He explained how his picnics would come about: “Riding on the Avenue on a lovely summer’s day, I would be stopped by a beautiful woman, in gorgeous array, looking so fascinating that if she were to ask you to attempt the impossible, you would at least make the effort. She would open on me as follows:
“‘My dear friend, we are all dying for a picnic. Can’t you get one up for us?’
“‘Why, my dear lady,’ I would answer, ‘you have dinners every day, and charming dinners too; what more do you want?’
“Oh, they’re not picnics. Any one can give dinners,’ she would reply; ‘what we want is one of your picnics. Now, my dear friend, do get one up.’
“This was enough to fire me, and set me going. So I reply:
“‘I will do your bidding. Fix on the day at once, and tell me what is the best dish your cook makes.’
“Out comes my memorandum book and I write: ‘Monday, 1 P.M., meet at Narragansett Avenue, bring fillet de boeuf pique, ‘ and with a bow am off in my little wagon, and dash on, to waylay the next cottager, stop every carriage known to contain friends, and ask them, one and all, to join our country party, and assign to each of them the providing of a certain dish and a bottle of champagne. Meeting young men, I charge them to take a bottle of champagne, and a pound of grapes, or order from the confectioner’s a quart of ice cream to be sent to me. My pony is put on its mettle; I keep going the entire day getting recruits; I engage my music and servants, and a carpenter to put down a dancing platform, and the florist to adorn it, and that evening I go over in detail the whole affair, map it out as a general would a battle, omitting nothing, not even a salt spoon; see to it that I have men on the road to direct my party to the farm, and bid the farmer put himself and family, and the whole farm, in holiday attire.”34
McAllister “did not hesitate to ask the very crème de la crème of New York society to lunch and dine at my farm or to a fishing party on the rocks,”35 and through this entertaining “formed lifetime intimacies with the most cultivated and charming men and women of this country.”36 What he meant was that he came to know the very rich.
“These little parties were then, and are now, the stepping-stones to our best New York society…. Now, do not for a moment imagine that all were indiscriminately asked to these little fetes. On the contrary, if you were not of the inner circle, and were a new-comer, it took the combined efforts of all your friends’ backing and pushing to procure an invitation for you. For years, whole families sat on the stool of probation, awaiting trial and acceptance, and many were then rejected, but once received, you were put on an intimate footing with all. To acquire such intimacy in a great city like New York would have taken you a lifetime.’37
McAllister was an unlikely candidate for the appellation of “Autocrat of the Drawing-Rooms” with his paunch, thinning hair, wispy moustache and Vandyke beard, and ill-fitting, although expensive, clothes. But he was unfailingly courteous, charming, and socially suave. And who else devoted every waking hour to studying etiquette and genealogy, devising guest lists, and planning balls? McAllister’s special passion was fine wines and foods, about which he offered Olympian pronouncements to all who would listen. “My dear sir, I do not argue, I inform.”38
• “Decant all your clarets before serving them, even your vin ordinaire. Stand up both wines the morning of the dinner, and in decanting, hold the decanter in your left hand, and let the wine first pour against the inside of the neck of the decanter, so as to break its fall.’39
•Avoid at all costs “the fatal mistake” of “letting two white or brown sauces follow each other in succession; or truffles appear twice in that dinner.”40
•Start the meal with a soup “which is attractive to the eye, and, if well made, at once establishes the reputation of the artist, satisfies the guests that they are in able hands, and allays their fears for their dinner.”41
• “The man who gives salmon during the winter, I care not what sauce he serves with it, does an injury to himself and his guests.”42
•“Sorbet, known in France as la surprise, as it is an ice, [can] produce on the mind the effect that the dinner is finished, when the grandest dish of the dinner makes its appearance in the shape of the roast canvasbacks, woodcock, snipe, or truffled capons, with salad.”43
• “Properly frappé champagne” so that “when the wine is poured from the bottle, it should contain little flakes of ice” but “none but a very rich, fruity wine should ever be f rapped. “44
• “In going in to dinner, there is but one rule to be observed. The lady of the house in almost every case goes in last, all her guests preceding her, with this exception, that if the President of the United States dines with you, or Royalty, he takes in the lady of the house, preceding all of the guests.’45
During the 1870s, New York’s new rich were uncertain of themselves, socially inept. It was an age that spawned a host of etiquette books warning dinner party guests against “shaking with your feet the chair of a neighbor,” instructing ladies who were traveling to “avoid saying anything to women in showy attire, with painted faces, and white kid gloves,” and cautioning “the rising generation of young elegants in America…to observe that, in polished society, it is not quite comme il faut for gentlemen to blow their noses with their fingers, especially when in the street.”46 When the wealthy encountered Ward McAllister, who spoke with such authority in his affected British accent, his conversations punctuated with “jolly well,” “right you are,” “frightfully,” “don’t you know,” “don’t you see,” “do you understand,” and “I hope you catch the point,” and sprinkled with references to his intimates among the British gentry and America’s oldest families, they were relieved to let this fop assume the role of arbiter of good taste and to obey his precepts blindly.
“We here reach a period,” Ward McAllister noted of the decade of the 1870s, the beginning of the Gilded Age, “when New York society turned over a new leaf. Up to this time, for one to be worth a million dollars was to be rated as a man of fortune, but now, bygones must be bygones. New York’s ideas as to values, when fortune was named, leaped boldly up to ten millions, fifty millions, one hundred millions, and the necessities and luxuries followed suit.”47 Now, McAllister proclaimed, “a fortune of only a million is respectable poverty.”48
New York society had always consisted of what McAllister termed its “nobs” and its “swells.” The nobs were the old-money families, the Stuyvesants, Van Cortlandts, Van Rensselaers, De Lanceys, and Morrises, the aristocrats of America by virtue of their hereditary wealth; the swells were those with new money, trying to break into society. A pleasing mixture of nobs and swells, McAllister felt, was good for society. The trouble was that now, with great fortunes being made overnight, society could easily become dominated by whoever at the moment had the most money. That would never do. “We thought it would not be wise to allow a handful of men having royal fortunes to have a sovereign’s prerogative, i.e., to say whom society shall receive, and whom society shall sh
ut out.”49
Nothing, Ward McAllister always believed, could solve society’s problems so well as a ball. In the winter of 1873 McAllister organized what he called the Patriarch Ball, an event to be attended only by New York’s upper crust. He assembled a group of twenty-five “Patriarchs,” chosen “solely for their fitness; each of them promising to invite to each ball only such people as would do credit to the ball.”50 McAllister defined fitness as being a gentleman, and it naturally took “four generations of gentlemen,” a pedigree of four generations, “to produce a gentleman.”51 The twenty-five chosen leaders included Astors, Livingstons, Schermerhorns, Rensselaers, Rutherfurds, and, of course, Ward McAllister.
Each Patriarch had the right to invite four ladies and five gentlemen to each ball. According to McAllister, “we then resolved that the responsibility of inviting each batch of nine guests should rest upon the shoulders of the Patriarch who invited them, and that if any objectionable element was introduced, it was the Management’s duty to at once let it be known by whom such objectionable party was invited, and to notify the Patriarch so offending, that he had done us an injury, and pray him to be more circumspect. He then stood before the community as a sponsor of his guest, and all society, knowing the offense he had committed would so upbraid him, that he would go and sin no more. We knew then, and we know now, that the whole secret of the success of these Patriarch Balls lay in making them select; in making them the most brilliant balls of each winter; in making it extremely difficult to obtain an invitation to them, and to make such invitations of great value; to make them the stepping stone to the best New York society, that one might be sure that any one repeatedly invited to them had a secure social position, and to make them the best managed, the best looked-after balls given in this city.”52
The motto of the Patriarchs was nous nous soutenons, which translated as “we stand by one another,” but which really meant, “we keep out profiteers, boors, boorish people, people with only money.”53 The Patriarch Balls would keep the parvenus in their place, and identify who was a part of society and who was not, thereby eliminating many troubling dangers, for as Ward McAllister warned, “You can never be absolutely certain whether people are society or not until you see them at four or five of the best houses. Then you can make advances to them without the danger of making a mistake.’54
It was during that winter of 1873, the winter of the first of the Patriarch Balls, that Mrs. Astor, who had several daughters for whom she wished to find suitable husbands, first took an active role in New York society.
Mrs. Astor, a nob, had been a part of society “by divine right,” as Ward McAllister would decree.55 When she, Caroline Schermerhorn, had married William Backhouse Astor, Jr., twenty years before, she was convinced she had bestowed on the Astor family an extraordinary gift. For she was a Schermerhorn, of an old Knickerbocker line that traced its roots directly to the original Dutch settlers of Manhattan and so to every prominent New York family. Her husband was an Astor, the grandson of a coarse German immigrant. That immigrant, John Jacob Astor, the son of a butcher who had sailed to New York in steerage, a man who “wrote a wretched scrawl, setting spelling and grammar equally at defiance.’56 a man who never lost his thick German accent, had died in 1848, a penny-pinching octogenarian who happened to be the richest man in the United States, leaving his family a real-estate fortune of $20 million, a figure that the newspapers found “as incomprehensible as infinity.”57 But Caroline Astor believed it was her distinguished Schermerhorn lineage that brought honor and social acceptance to the Astor name.
Here was a woman whose thoughts about society, about nobs and swells, were just like McAllister’s. “Society,” McAllister believed, “must have its leader or leaders. It has always had them, and will continue to have them. Their sway is more or less absolute.”58 That winter of 1873 McAllister was brought in contact with this grande dame for the first time, and “at once recognized her ability, and felt that she would become society’s leader, and that she was admirably qualified for the position.”59
She was admirably qualified not only because her views on society matched McAllister’s to the letter, but also because she was admirably rich and because her husband was admirably absent. William Astor couldn’t have cared less about the world of society into which his wife tried to propel him, and retreated more and more frequently to Ferncliffe, their country estate on the Hudson, or to his yacht, the Ambassadress, for prolonged voyages. Mrs. Astor had the wherewithal to fund extravagant social entertainments, and she obviously needed a male escort, social adviser, and confidant. Enter Ward McAllister. It did not bother him one whit that Mrs. Astor, upon being escorted to a dinner, would leave him to fend for himself while she went to sit with the honored guests, or that he would not see her again until the end of the evening when she expected him to take her home. Nor did it bother Ward McAllister that Mrs. Astor treated him like her servant and social secretary, expecting him to organize all the details of her parties. For Mrs. Astor was his entrée into the highest reaches of society, which he, living in “respectable poverty” with “a fortune of only a million,” would otherwise never see.
“All admired her,” Ward McAllister said of Mrs. Astor, “and we, the young men of that period, loved her as much as we dared. All did homage to her…. She was, in every sense, society’s queen. She had the power that all women should strive to obtain, the power of attaching men to her, and keeping them attached; calling forth a loyalty of devotion such as one imagines one yields to a sovereign, whose subjects are only too happy to be subjects.” McAllister was only too happy to be a subject of the queen he called his “Mystic Rose,” for as her court chamberlain, he found he had the influence over high society that he so long had craved. “I well remember being asked by a member of my family, ‘Why are you so eager to go to this leader’s house?’ My reply always was, ‘Because I enjoy such refined and cultivated entertainments. It improves and elevates one.’”60
Together, Mrs. Astor and her faithful subject defined who constituted society. Their desire to establish in America a society patterned after the European aristocracy was “so ardent, so sincere that it acquired dignity,” a contemporary noted; “it became almost a religion.”61 The annual Patriarch Balls became but a dress rehearsal for the great social event of each year: Mrs. Astor’s Ball, which was held on the first or second Monday of each January.
The pair spent weeks winnowing through the rosters of New York’s finest colonial families in order to fashion a guest list. They subscribed to the theory that a ball that was exclusive would make invitations sought after by everybody. ‘The man of fashion,” Ward McAllister reminded Mrs. Astor, “should have no business,”62 so of course tradespeople and all those who actually had to work for their living were excluded from the invitation list, though it was not so long ago that John Jacob Astor had been running advertisements in the local papers offering “guitars, fifes and pianofortes”; that the Manhattan land baron Peter Goelet, selling saddles and pewter spoons, had advertised a special: “a consignment of playing cards”; and that Isaac Roosevelt had been pushing his “loaf, lump, and strained sugar” to the townsfolk. In considering her next-door neighbors on Fifth Avenue, the department store tycoon A. T. Stewart and his wife, who had built a mansion that far outshone the Astors’, Mrs. Astor noted that “I buy my carpets from them, but then is that any reason why I should invite them to walk on them?”63 Although only those who enjoyed a moneyed leisure could be invited to the balls, excluded also were the dreadful nouveaux riches like the Vanderbilts. Mrs. Astor did not approve of railroad money.
The ballroom of Mrs. Astor’s brownstone at 350 Fifth Avenue at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street could hold four hundred people. Therefore that became the magic number that constituted the cream of New York society. “Why, there are only about 400 people in fashionable New York Society,” McAllister patiently explained. “If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else m
ake other people not at ease. See the point? These people have not the poise, the aptitude for polite conversation, the polished and deferential manner, the infinite capacity of good humor and ability to entertain or be entertained that society demands.”64 McAllister concluded that society really was but “twenty score of well bred persons, called the world.”65
Standing before a full-length portrait of herself, Mrs. Astor greeted the chosen Four Hundred once a year. Like Goya’s devastating painting of the family of Charles IV, which revealed the Spanish royal family as an assembly of dim-witted grotesques but whose splendor apparently so dazzled them that they never noticed what Goya had done, so did the portrait of Mrs. Astor capture a plump plain woman of bovine countenance, bedecked in a lavish gown and imposing jewelry. “She was really homely, no looks at all.’66 recalled one of Mrs. Astor’s nieces. Yet dressed in a Worth gown, weighed down with her jewels, a diamond tiara set in her dyed black hair, she appeared more regal ruling over her Four Hundred than Queen Victoria ruling over the British Empire.
Every once in a while, one of her guests who had heard gossip of the wild parties William Astor was throwing aboard his yacht would work up the courage to inquire how the absent Mr. Astor might be that fine evening of the ball. “Oh,” Mrs. Astor would invariably reply with calm dignity, “he is having a delightful cruise. The sea air is so good for him. It is a great pity I am such a bad sailor, for I should so much enjoy accompanying him. As it is I have never even set foot on the yacht; dreadful confession for a wife, is it not?
“Dear William is so good to me…” she would add, touching one of the ropes of diamonds around her neck and looking over “the spoils of civilization,” as Henry James called the treasures of antiquity that adorned her home. “I have been so fortunate in my marriage.”67
After being greeted by Mrs. Astor, the four hundred guests moved into her large art gallery, which served as her ballroom. There, on an enormous divan set on a raised platform, Mrs. Astor and a few specially favored guests settled for the evening to watch the dancing. Mrs. Astor’s friends groveled for a year to win one of the few spaces on the divan for the evening of the ball. Once Mrs. John Drexel, upon discovering that none of the red silk cushion seats of the divan had been alloted to her, ran sobbing through the ballroom and seized Mrs. Astor’s daughter.
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