Fortune's Children

by Arthur T. Vanderbilt

  “Have you a good pair of legs?”

  “Aye, that I have! But at times they are a little groggy. Covering they must have.”

  “Ah, my boy, we will fix you. Buckskin will do your business. With tights of white chamois and silk hose, you can defy cold.”

  That evening as McAllister dressed for the ball, one of his friends entered his room and saw “two sturdy fellows on either side of me holding up a pair of leather trunks, I on a step-ladder, one mass of powder descending into them, an operation consuming an hour.”

  “Why my good sir,” McAllister’s friend remarked, “your pride should be in your legs, not your head!”

  “At present,” McAllister replied, “it certainly is.”87

  Early in the evening, a crowd of millionaire-watchers began to gather on Fifth Avenue by Fifty-second Street. The spectators staked out space at the corner or on the steps of houses across the street, each selecting a spot that would offer the best vantage point to spy on the guests arriving at the ball.

  The evening was almost mild. It had been one of those winter days that threatened to snow but ended warm, almost springlike, with a hint of showers on the northeast breeze.

  The light pouring from every window of the four stories of the Vanderbilt mansion brilliantly illuminated the white limestone château against the darkness. The gathering crowd stared at the magnificent flight of stairs to the main entrance on Fifth Avenue, where workmen were busy erecting a double canopy. Above the doorway was a deep, recessed balcony, and to the left of the entrance rose that wonderful slender turret, carved with fleurs-de-lis, capped by a conical top and finial. Perched on the blue slate roof, watching the scene below, was an almost lifesize statue of a seated stonemason in apron and cap, holding a chisel and mallet. That’s a statue of Richard Hunt, the architect of the mansion, someone in the crowd remarked.

  What’s going on behind those enormous windows? the onlookers wondered. What is life like within? Which room is Mrs. Vanderbilt’s? What’s in the tower? What does it cost to run a house like that? How many people does it take to clean it? What does it cost to heat it? How many people do you think are coming to the ball? Do they all have to wear costumes?

  Perhaps some who stood in the crowd outside 660 Fifth Avenue that evening were neighbors who lived within a mile or two of the mansion in what was another city, a city of poverty-stricken immigrants living in run-down tenements in the slums on the West Side and the Lower East Side, properties owned by the Astor, Rutherfurd, and Schermerhorn families. Below Fourteenth Street was what one writer called “a wretched quarter, which extends westward to Broadway and almost indefinitely in other directions…. Drunken men, depraved women and swarms of half-clad children fill the neighborhood, and even the ‘improved tenement houses,’ as viewed from the outside, seem but sorry abodes for human beings.”88 Privies filled the empty lots around them. A reporter for the New York Tribune described the life of these poor in 1879: ‘The bedrooms were small and dark with windows 13 by 15 inches in size for ventilation. These opened on stifling hallways and admitted an atmosphere almost as bad as that within…A sick child lay in a rear room gasping for breath while its mother stirred up a fire, the heat of which made the atmosphere terrible…. The yard was unclean as were the closets which gave forth terrible stenches…. The apartments could not be fouler. The walls were cracked and blackened and there was a squalor visible that was revolting.’89

  If these Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish neighbors from the tenements stood outside the Vanderbilt mansion that evening, it is likely that they saw their dreams come to fruition in the vision before them. It is even likely that they believed that if they were diligent and worked hard enough a similar mansion could be theirs, for the deepening social inequalities of the day had yet to be clearly recognized. If all this could arise from a young man plying a ferryboat back and forth across the harbor from Staten Island to the Battery, what future palaces might result from their own menial labor? The white limestone castle before them sparkling in the night held the infinite promise that they, too, could go from rags to riches.

  Suddenly, the front doors slid open to either side, slipping into recesses. Out came a group of footmen dressed in maroon knee breeches, buckled shoes, and powdered wigs, unrolling a maroon carpet from the door of the mansion across the sidewalk right down to Fifth Avenue. The crowd gasped. Paying no heed to the hundreds of people watching them, the footmen straightened and smoothed the carpet, pushing out every wrinkle, then went back into the mansion and slid shut the front doors.

  The crowds milled about the street, some peering under the double canopies, others feeling the rich thickness of the red carpet. At nine o’clock, a squad of police officers had arrived to hold back the curious. An express wagon rattled over the cobblestones of Fifth Avenue to deliver eight horse costumes to the mansion; the police directed them to the service entrance.

  By 10:30, reporters noted carriages slowly driving by, their occupants “peering surreptitiously under the curtain to see if others were arriving.’90 No one wanted to make the mistake of being first.

  A half hour later, elegant carriages and hired cabs with liveried coachmen and footmen were stopping in front of 660 Fifth Avenue. Through the carriage windows, the eager lookers-on in the street were able to catch glimpses of “flashing swordhilts, gay costumes, beautiful flowers, and excited faces.’91 The maids and valets of the partygoers helping their mistresses alight from the carriages were told by the Vanderbilt ushers that they were not allowed to enter the mansion, which caused some grumbling among the arriving guests. But these were Mrs. Vanderbilt’s rules tonight, and the ushers insisted that these orders were “imperative.’92

  By 11:15, the police were no longer able to control the flow of the hundreds of carriages arriving in front of the mansion. Too eager to wait, some guests left their carriages in adjacent streets and walked through the crowds to the canopied entrance of the Vanderbilt home. “Pretty and excited girls,” their costumes covered by shawls, and “young men who made desperate efforts to appear blasé”93 left their carriages with orders to return at four o’clock that morning. The crowds “caught a glimpse of bright color, or the flash of diamonds, or heard the clank of a sword striking the stone steps,”94 as the guests walked the red carpet, up the ten steps, into 660 Fifth Avenue.

  Passing through the front doors, they entered another age, another world, a fantasy, a dream. It was too much to absorb at once. The massiveness of the interior, the intricacy of workmanship, the lavishness and richness of materials, took their breath away.

  Handsome maroon-liveried footmen with white silk stockings and gilt buckles on their shoes, and pretty maids dressed in French peasant costumes ushered them on a course designed to take them through many of the rooms of the house.

  Ahead of them, like a Gothic cathedral with its arches and vaulted ceiling, was the main hall, sixty feet long, twenty feet wide, brightly lit with a series of crystal chandeliers that sparkled on the floor of polished luminous marble. The first seven feet of the walls was carved Caen stone, which had taken foreign artisans two years to complete,95 above which hung magnificent Italian tapestries. The ceiling, sixteen feet above them, was of elaborately beamed and paneled oak. And everywhere were roses. The famous French émigré florist Charles Klunder, with his small army of assistants, had been scurrying about the house since Saturday, filling every room with vases and gilded baskets of large dark-crimson Jacqueminot roses and deep pink Gloire de Paris and pale pink Baronne de Rothschild.

  Halfway down the hall on the left, great logs blazed in an enormous stone fireplace. Across from it, the grand stairway of intricately carved limestone rose slowly to the second floor, a stairway that had been called “not only the finest piece of work of its kind in this country, but one of the finest in the world.’96 The “endless upward sweep” of this “long and terrifying” staircase frightened the Vanderbilts’ six-year-old daughter, Consuelo, as she climbed to her room every night, “leaving belo
w the light and its comforting rays. For in that penumbra there were spirits lurking to destroy me, hands stretched out to touch me and sighs that breathed against my cheek. Sometimes I stumbled, and then all went black, and tensely kneeling on those steps, I prayed for courage to reach the safety of my room.”97 Tonight, the enormous house was cheery and warm, teeming with the laughter of hundreds of guests, and the spirits were nowhere to be seen as the costumed ladies and gentlemen climbed in safety to the second floor.

  There the ladies left their wraps in Mrs. Vanderbilt’s boudoir and admired Boucher’s erotic The Toilet of Venus, painted for Mme. de Pompadour in 1751, as well as the enormous bathroom with marble wainscoting, marble fixtures, mirrored walls, and a bathtub carved for $50,000 from a solid block of flawless Italian marble. The procession then continued up to the third floor of the mansion. At the head of the stairway, grouped around monumental columns on each side of the hall, were tall palms whose trunks were surrounded by masses of ferns and ornamental grasses, with strings of multicolored Japanese lanterns suspended above the columns.

  Following the sound of the orchestra’s music, the guests entered what looked like a vast tropical forest. Here, in the mansion’s gymnasium, a room so enormous that the Vanderbilt children used it “to bicycle and roller skate with our cousins and friends,”98 the florist Klunder had created his masterpiece. The walls of the gymnasium were completely hidden by an impenetrable thicket of fern above fern and palm above palm; from the branches of the palms hung a profusion of orchids, displaying a rich variety of color and an almost endless variation of fantastic forms. In the middle of the room was a giant palm surrounded by small dinner tables covered with damask cloth, gold service, and crystal. Fragrant flowering vines trailed from the ceiling, all but covering it. Each door was a solid mass of roses and lillies of the valley. And in the corners of the room bubbled beautiful fountains.

  “I have decorated the houses of princes and ambassadors,” commented the usually supercilious but now obviously awestruck Charles Klunder, “but never have I seen floral embellishments on a scale of such regal grandeur. Mr. Vanderbilt gave me carte blanche.”99

  Here in this tropical forest, the one hundred special guests who would dance in the six quadrilles had gathered. The previous Saturday, the six ladies in charge of the quadrilles had drawn lots to determine the order in which these formal French square dances would be performed. Now, to the music of John Lander’s twenty-five-piece orchestra, which was hidden by a canopy of roses, the ladies and gentlemen who would dance the hobbyhorse quadrille formed a line and, followed by those who would dance in the other quadrilles and then by the other guests, began to move in a glittering processional down the grand stairway and through the hall. None complained of their circuitous journey through the house, for the secret goal of each guest was to see everything, without appearing to be staring and without giving any indication that the splendor that surrounded them was any different from that of their own homes.

  Down the Caen stone staircase swirled a crowd of princes, monks, cavaliers, Highlanders, queens, kings, dairy maids, bullfighters, knights, brigands, and nobles.

  Again on the first floor, the guests filed into the Francis I parlor at the front of the mansion, which was wainscoted in carved French walnut and hung in dark red plush, and then proceeded into the white and gold Louis XV music salon paneled with gilded wainscoting wrested from an old French château. Few noticed the three priceless Gobelin tapestries illuminated by glowing candelabra, the black and gold lacquer secretaire and commode that rivaled those in the Louvre’s collection, or the circular ceiling painting that represented the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, for there in regal splendor, standing directly beneath her portrait, just as Mrs. Astor received the Four Hundred beneath her lifesize portrait, was Mrs. William Kissam Vanderbilt, greeting her guests as the butler called out their names.

  Thirty-year-old Alva looked very young and she looked very rich. She was dressed as a Venetian Renaissance princess, her costume prepared by a Parisian couturier, copied from a painting by Alexandre Cabanel, noted for his Birth of Venus. Her gown was of white and yellow brocade, shading from the deepest orange to the lightest canary, with figures of flowers and leaves outlined in gold stitching and white iridescent beads, and with sleeves of transparent gold tissue. The train was light blue satin embroidered in gold and lined with Roman red. The gown was cut low, and looped around her neck, dropping to her waist, were strand after strand of pearls, the pearls Willie had given her that once had belonged to Catherine the Great of Russia and Empress Eugénie of France. On her head was a Milan bonnet covered with gems that outlined a peacock, a splendid complement to the long brown curls flowing to her shoulders.

  Receiving the guests with Mrs. Vanderbilt was Lady Mandeville, seated near the doorway of the salon.

  I’d like you to meet Viscountess Mandeville. This is Lady Mandeville. Lady Mandeville. The name certainly had a royal ring to it, as Alva introduced her best friend to each of her guests. Lady Mandeville’s costume, the papers noted, provided a “most fortunate contrast with the toilet of Mrs. Vanderbilt.’100 Lady Mandeville wore a black gown copied from a painting by Vandyke of the princess Marie-Claire de Croy: black velvet ornamented with heavy jet embroidery, large puffed sleeves, and a stand-up collar of Venetian lace. Her blond hair was crowned by a black Vandyke hat set with jewels.

  Nearby stood obedient Willie, dressed as the duc de Guise after a painting in his father’s art gallery. The duc de Guise, Willie explained to his guests, had been stabbed to death in the chambers of Henry III in the Château de Blois in France, and his spirit still haunted that French château after which the Vanderbilt’s town house had been fashioned. If Willie was a little self-conscious in his yellow silk tights, yellow and black trunks, yellow doublet, black velvet cloak embroidered in gold, black velvet shoes with silver buckles, and white wig, he dared give no sign of embarrassment, at least not in Alva’s presence.

  One by one, the thousand guests stepped forward to greet their hostess. Alva was amazed “at the perfection and fidelity of the fancy dress in which each guest appeared.”101 There was Joan of Arc with helmet and gauntlet of solid silver mail, a barefoot monk with hood and sandals, a Spanish muleteer, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” wearing a yellow satin skirt trimmed with silver bells and cockleshells, Bluebeard, the young duc de Morny in court dress of plum velvet embroidered with rubies and with buttons of diamond, Mme. le Diable in a red satin gown with a black velvet demon embroidered on it, the entire gown trimmed with a fringe ornamented with the heads and horns of demons, and the Daughter of the Forest, wearing a green velvet dress trimmed with real ferns, ivy, wild roses, and shells, with ferns and butterflies in her hair and a necklace of jeweled lizards.

  Onward they came to greet Mrs. Vanderbilt: King Lear, a Persian princess, a Dutch maiden, an Arab sheik, the goddess Diana, Egyptian princesses, a Hungarian Hussar, courtiers of Louis XV and XVI, Christopher Columbus, a Gypsy queen, the Evening Star.

  Everyone was there: Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Mr. and Mrs. August Belmont, Mr. and Mrs. D. Ogden Mills, Mr. and Mrs. J. R. Roosevelt, Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Goelet. All of society, all of the Four Hundred, had come to Alva’s party.

  Here was Miss Amy La Farge dressed as the Huntress, wearing a tiger skin lined with red satin, clutching a bow, a quiver of arrows hanging on her back and on her hair a crescent of diamonds.

  And there was Senator Wagstaff as Daniel Boone, in a suit of leather, with leggings, moccasins, and a coonskin cap with protruding porcupine quills, a bowie knife stuck in his belt.

  As Ward McAllister, costumed as the Huguenot comte de La Môle, lover of Marguerite de Valois, embraced Alva, Alva thought that his arrival was a good omen. With the Autocrat of the Drawing-Rooms in attendance, surely Mrs. Astor could not be far behind.

  “Mrs. Pierre Lorillard!” the butler announced.

  A phoenix! Dressed in a Worth gown of gray silk bordered by an irregular band
of crimson cashmere on which leaping flames were embroidered, bedecked in diamonds and rubies, Mrs. Lorillard, the wife of the tobacco and snuff manufacturer who had made his fortune “by giving them that to chew which they could not swallow.’102 walked up to greet Alva, scattering tinsel sparks and ashes represented by bits of fluffy gray down.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt the Second!”

  There was Cornelius dressed in fawn-colored brocade trimmed with lace of real silver, with a jabot and ruffles, and bearing a diamond-hilted sword: King Louis XVI of France, a fitting costume on this Gallic evening for the man who considered himself the heir apparent as head of the Vanderbilt family. If the Commodore could have seen his grandsons now! Cornelius’s wife, Alice, the former Sabbath morning instructress of the children of St. Bartholomew’s Parish, came as that new invention the Electric Light torch, dressed in white satin lavishly trimmed with diamonds and with her head, Ward McAllister noted, “one blaze of diamonds.’103 With the couple were their three children, one dressed as a rose, one as Sinbad the Sailor, and the third as a little courtier.

  “Miss Ada Smith!” One of Alva’s sisters stepped forward, wearing a peacock costume of blue satin, the front of her dress, her cap, and train covered with peacock feathers.

  And here were several of Willie’s sisters: Mrs. Seward Webb as a hornet, wearing a waist of yellow satin, a brown velvet skirt, and brown gauze wings, with antennae of diamonds; Mrs. W. D. Sloane as Bo-Peep, with jeweled poppies; Mrs. Hamilton McKown Twombly in a pale blue brocade gown embroidered with pink roses, with leaves of gold and silver, and quilted with diamonds.

  “Mrs. Arthur N. Welman!”

  Even Alva gasped when she looked up at this well-known young society lady dressed as a cat. Her skirt was made entirely of genuine white cats’ tails sewn on a dark background, with the bodice composed of rows of genuine white cats’ heads. Her cap was a stiffened white cat’s skin, with the cat’s head hanging down over her forehead and the tail hanging behind. In case anyone didn’t understand, a blue ribbon with PUSS inscribed on it, from which hung a bell, graced the young lady’s neck.