One afternoon, two young men from out of town drove up Fifth Avenue past these new twin mansions that filled the block.
“I suppose these are really the best residences in the city,” Henry Frick commented to his companion.
“I think they are so considered,” Andrew Mellon replied.
“I wonder how much the upkeep of the one on that corner would be?” Frick asked. “Say $300,000 a year? I should think that would cover it.”
“It might,” Mellon agreed.
“That would be six per cent on five millions, or five per cent on six millions, say a thousand a day. That,” young Frick contemplated, “is all I shall ever want.”46
Vanderbilt was so pleased with the results that he commissioned a book about his house, Mr. Vanderbilt’s Home and Collection, lavishly illustrated with color plates. The fifteen copies of the gilt-edged book, printed in four volumes, which measured four and a half feet by two and a half and which together weighed one hundred pounds, were dutifully purchased by Vanderbilt’s business associates. “In these volumes,” the obsequious author began, “we are permitted to make a revelation of a private home which better than any other possible selection may stand as a representative of the new impulse now felt in the national life.” The house, with its fifty-eight rooms built around a four-story atrium, had “nothing but what a reasonable and practical family may live up to. It is as sincere a home as exists anywhere. Like a more perfect Pompeii, the work will be the vision and image of a typical American residence, seized at the moment when the nation begins to have a taste of its own…,”47
This taste fortunately never escaped beyond the walls of the typical American residence at 640 Fifth Avenue. There was a decided elegance and grandeur in the carefully thought-out period rooms of Alva’s château down the street. In contrast, the baroque interior of the home of the head of the House of Vanderbilt was a tasteless hodgepodge, ostentatiously crammed with riches. Everywhere was everything: walls of red African marble, of stamped leather; walls hung with blue silk brocade, with red velvet embroidered with leaves, flowers, and butterflies, enriched with cut crystal and precious stones; ceilings of mahogany, of bronze, of colored glass, of bamboo; wainscoting of rosewood inlaid with mother-of-pearl and brass, ebony inlaid with ivory, polished ebony inlaid with satinwood; and Grecian, Oriental, Elizabethan, English, Renaissance, French, and Victorian touches in crowded rooms bursting with bronze, stained glass, marble, mosaics, and friezes. It was a stylistic mess that cost a fortune.
Taking his cue from Alva’s ball earlier that year, William Vanderbilt proudly rolled out the red carpet on the evening of December 11, 1883, and, as Ward McAllister noted, “generously invited all who were in any way entitled to an invitation, to come and view his superb house, and join in the dance which was to inaugurate its completion.’ In the opinion of the Autocrat of the Drawing-Rooms, it was “one of the handsomest, most profuse, liberal, and brilliant balls ever given in this country.’48
But it soon became apparent to William Vanderbilt that the life Alva and Willie were leading was not the life for him, nor was this palace the home for him. He spent more and more time in a tiny corner of the library of the fifty-eight-room mansion, sitting in an old rocker that had come from his Staten Island farmhouse. He complained of feeling suffocated in the city, and sought fresh air on weekends at his farm. During the week a wagonload of milk, produce, and flowers from the farm arrived at the service entrance at 640 Fifth Avenue to remind him of the home he loved.
The one room of his mansion in which he took continuing pride was his large art gallery situated at the back. It was jammed with purchases from his frequent trips to Europe. Vanderbilt eschewed the work of the modernists—Gauguin, Cézanne, van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Renoir—which he did not understand. “It may be very fine,” he would reply to his advisers who urged him to buy one of these modern paintings, “but until I can appreciate its beauty, I shall not buy it.’49 He was determined to purchase only the very best foreign paintings that money could buy. “I like pleasing pictures,”50 he explained. Pleasing pictures meant monumental French works of art that told a story. He was partial to paintings of Napoleon’s triumphs. He also liked pastoral scenes. Constant Troyon’s portrayal of a yoke of oxen appealed to him. “I don’t know as much about the quality of the picture as I do about the truth of the action of the cattle. I have seen them act like that thousands of times.”51 Similarly, J. F. Millet’s The Sower struck him as being an accurate depiction of a farmer’s life. Some harsh critics suspected he valued his paintings by the square foot; one of the two hundred massive paintings that hung in his gallery, Attiring the Bride by Jules Lefebvre, was six feet by nine. When asked which of the paintings in his collection he liked the best, he replied, “I like them all.”52 He liked what he collected so much that he would invite his gentlemen friends to view the paintings with him, and on certain days of the week he opened his gallery to the public, until visitors began snipping flowers in his conservatory and peeping into the family rooms.
Vanderbilt often commissioned French artists to paint a particular scene that he wanted to add to his collection, paying them more than the fee quoted, telling the artists he wanted them to do their very best work. Interviewing the French artist Rosa Bonheur through an interpreter, Vanderbilt gave her a commission for two paintings. She replied that she would have one completed within a year, but that the other would take two or three more years. ‘Tell her,’ Vanderbilt said to his interpreter, “I must have them. I’m getting to be an old man, and want to enjoy them.’53 The artist laughed, for she was the same age as Vanderbilt, and completed both paintings that year.
More and more, Vanderbilt’s thoughts turned to death. Between 1879 and 1885, his lawyers redrafted his will nine times. He quietly gave money to help out his father’s old friends, and provided $100,000 to be distributed among employees of the New York Central, always with the stipulation that those who benefited by a gift should say nothing of it. On October 17, 1884, he delivered to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York the deed for twenty-nine lots that he had purchased for $200,000, and a check for $300,000 “to form a building-fund for the erection [on the lots] from time to time of suitable buildings for the college.”54
With an inner sense that time was getting short, in December 1884 he drove with his two oldest sons, Cornelius and Willie, to the old Dutch cemetery at New Dorp, on Staten Island, where the Commodore was buried. He said he wanted to build a family mausoleum there. The Commodore had donated fifty acres to the cemetery and William had just paid for a new chapel there, but the trustees of the Moravian Cemetery would agree to sell him several acres for the family mausoleum only at “Vanderbilt prices.’ He refused to pay, and purchased fourteen acres on a hilltop adjoining the cemetery, with a view of the farms of New Dorp spread out below. Aware now that Alva’s and Willie’s architect was more accomplished than his own, William Vanderbilt commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to design a mausoleum to be built on this hilltop.
Hunt assumed that William Vanderbilt would be as responsive a client as his favorite patron, Alva Vanderbilt, and confidently presented his sketch, a plan that rivaled the most magnificent mausoleums in Europe.
“No, Mr. Hunt,” said Vanderbilt shaking his head, “this will not answer at all. You entirely misunderstood me. We are plain, quiet, unostentatious people, and we don’t want to be buried in anything so showy as that would be. The cost of it is a secondary matter, and does not concern me. I want it roomy and solid and rich. I don’t object to appropriate carvings, or even statuary, but it mustn’t have any unnecessary fancy-work on it.”55
The architect redrew his plans, eliminating all unnecessary “fancy-work” for these unostentatious folk, while leaving the crypt roomy, solid, and appropriately rich looking. A Romanesque chapel patterned after the Chapel of St. Gilles at Aries in the south of France won Vanderbilt’s approval. Construction of the gray granite temple began early in 1885. It would be embedded in the hillside o
n three sides, with commanding views from its front steps all around Staten Island and of every steamship coming into New York Harbor. Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park, was hired to direct the landscaping of the site.
At the end of the year, on December 3, 1885, Vanderbilt visited his old farm, telling the resident farmer that he had just given it to his youngest son, George, adding, “I have enjoyed more peace of mind and quietness here than I ever have in the big city yonder.”56 Driving in his carriage back to New Dorp, he visited the old Moravian Cemetery, walking up the hill to check on the construction of the mausoleum, already half completed, with twenty tons of bronze gratings being installed to protect the cells from intruders.
Five days later, on Tuesday, December 8, 1885, William Vanderbilt sat in his favorite rocker in his library, looking out on Fifth Avenue. He was talking with Robert Garrett, the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, the son of its founder whom the Commodore once had called “the rotten apple in the barrel” of railroading.57 Young Garrett was interested in bringing a new trunk line into New York City through Staten Island and wanted Vanderbilt’s help. In the middle of the afternoon, a servant came in to light a brisk fire in the hearth, and in the fire’s glow, Garrett noticed that Vanderbilt’s face appeared flushed. Later, it seemed to Garrett that Vanderbilt was slurring his words, and he leaned closer to listen to him more carefully. Suddenly, without a sound, William Vanderbilt toppled to the floor, struck dead by an apoplectic stroke.
All evening long, newsboys cried, “Extra! Extra! Death of William H. Vanderbilt!” as carriages stopped in front of 640 Fifth Avenue bringing members of the family to the darkened home.
Three days later, the mourners gathered at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue in Manhattan where William Vanderbilt had been a vestryman. There was nothing that indicated that this service was for the richest man in the world. The only decorations were the low black catafalque in front of the chancel and a cross of white roses. There was no pomp, no glitter, no ostentation. It was a service Billy would have liked, simple and brief. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,” chanted the pastor. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. We brought nothing into the world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”58
Afterward, twelve pallbearers carried the casket to the hearse. Within sight of the church, trains rumbled in and out of the New York Central’s depot, adding to the world’s greatest fortune. A funeral cortege of one hundred carriages made its way down Fifth Avenue to the wharf at the end of Forty-second Street. There, the old ferryboat Southfield, the very one that had carried home the body of the Commodore eight years before, waited.
The pilot rang his bell at 11:40, and the boat left its slip and steered over toward the New Jersey shore, and then headed straight down the river to Staten Island. In the bright, cold December afternoon, the pallbearers carried the casket up the winding road, within sight of Billy’s old farmhouse, past the bare fields and leafless woods, to the cemetery.
By two o’clock, all the mourners had left. The casket had been placed in the Vanderbilt vault near the Commodore’s until the mausoleum was finished. There remained only the guards the family had hired, who would stay there, twenty-four hours a day, punching a time clock every fifteen minutes, for the next fifty years.
Late that Friday afternoon, as the Pinkerton guards paced around William H. Vanderbilt’s grave waiting for body snatchers, his four sons and four daughters, who had returned to 640 Fifth Avenue, were pacing around the library, waiting for news of the will. There was no mystery about the size of their father’s fortune as there had been in January 1877, when the Commodore died. William Vanderbilt had publicly stated just how much he was worth, though few could understand the meaning of his words, “two hundred million dollars.’ “The ordinary human mind fails to grasp the idea of such a vast amount of wealth,” wrote one of the Vanderbilt family bankers. “If converted into gold it would have weighed 500 tons, and it would have taken 500 strong horses to draw it from the Grand Central Depot to the Sub-Treasury in Wall Street. If it had been all in gold or silver dollars, or even in greenbacks, it would have taken Vanderbilt himself, working eight hours a day, over thirty years to count it. If the first of the Vanderbilts had been a contemporary of old Adam, according to the Mosaic account, and had then started as president of a railroad through Palestine, with a salary of $30,000 a year, saving all this money and living on perquisites, the situation being continued in the male line to the present day, the sum total of all the family savings thus accumulated would not amount to the fortune left by Wm. H. Vanderbilt….”59
No. There was absolutely no question about the size of William H. Vanderbilt’s estate. In eight years, the son in whom the Commodore had no confidence, the son whom he had ridiculed as a “blatherskite,” a “beetlehead,” a “sucker,” had more than doubled the fortune his father had left him. William Vanderbilt had made as much money in eight years as it had taken his father a lifetime to accumulate. How proud the old Commodore would have been! Not only had his son proved himself a fitting successor to the archetypal robber baron, he had told off the public, too!
What concerned William Vanderbilt’s eight children and their spouses was just how that $200 million would be divided. It was the Commodore’s known wish that one member of each succeeding generation be endowed with the bulk of the family fortune. And it was well known that William Vanderbilt, like his father, favored primogeniture as a means of perpetuating the family dynasty. It was also known that one of the last wills William Vanderbilt had executed left the vast majority of his estate to the eldest son of the eldest son of the Commodore: Cornelius. “The opinion is universal among Mr. Vanderbilt’s friends,” the papers noted, “that he has bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to his eldest son, Cornelius.’60
Judge Charles Rapallo, who had drawn up the last will of William Vanderbilt, walked into the hushed library to read the document dated September 25, 1885, to the attentive family members. The reading of the will, typewritten on nineteen pages of foolscap, began:
“I, William H. Vanderbilt, of the City of New York, do make and publish my last will and testament as follows.’
To his “beloved wife, Maria Louisa,” he left his mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue, an annuity of $200,000 a year, and all his works of art, “except the portrait and the marble bust of my father, which I have bequeathed to my son Cornelius.’
To Alva, this was a bad sign. It looked as if Cornelius was being recognized as the new head of the House of Vanderbilt.
His four daughters received the houses on Fifth Avenue he had constructed for each of them.
To his trustees he gave $40 million of United States bonds and bonds of his railroads, to be divided into eight equal lots of $5 million each, the income from each lot to be paid to each of his four daughters and four sons. Outright to each of his eight children was bequeathed $5 million of bonds and stocks of the Vanderbilt railroads.
The thirteenth clause also struck Alva as ominous: “I bequeath unto my son, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the sum of $2,000,000 in addition to all other bequests to him in this will contained.” Again, a special provision for the eldest son. And then another, a clause that gave his grandson, William H. Vanderbilt, “son of my son Cornelius,” $1 million to be paid when he reached the age of thirty, with the income going to him immediately.
After a host of small gifts to various relatives, a bequest of $200,000 to Vanderbilt University and other charitable bequests to churches, hospitals, and museums, Judge Rapallo read the twenty-second provision:
All the rest, residue and remainder of all the property and estate, real, personal, and mixed, of every description and wheresoever situated of which I may be seized or possessed, or to which I may be entitled at the time of my decease, I give, devise, and bequeath unto my
two sons, Cornelius Vanderbilt and William K. Vanderbilt, in equal shares, and to their heirs and assigns to their use forever.61
The rest, residue, and remainder came to $130 million. Willie and Cornelius II would each receive $65 million.
Only after his own death had William Vanderbilt dared disobey the father he feared: He had split up the family fortune.
Why? He had made clear his belief that the fortune was too great a burden for one man to assume. And he was not about to precipitate another battle over a will. But there was another important reason. “We have money enough for ourselves and for the husbands and wives you will marry,” William Vanderbilt once told Willie and his other children, “but we haven’t respectability enough, for no family has any to lend.’62 Alva. Alva alone had given the Vanderbilt family respectability, a respectability that both the Commodore and his son William had discovered money alone could not buy. Alva had won the heart of her father-in-law. He had therefore changed his will and divided the bulk of his estate between Cornelius and Willie, rather than leaving it all to Cornelius.
When Alva’s father had died two weeks after she married Willie, William Vanderbilt had taken her by the hand and said: “My dear, you have lost your Father. You are now my daughter. I want you to come to me on any and all occasions of need.” From that day on, Alva recalled, “we were boon companions.” Alva’s father-in-law, she once reflected, “was a great friend of mine, ever kind and generous to me.”63 Indeed he was.
Someone casually asked Judge Rapallo, as if it was the last thing on his mind, how soon the estate would be distributed. The legacies would be paid before the first of January, he told the attentive children.
Sixty-five million dollars in two weeks! Finally, Alva’s dreams were so close she could reach out and touch them.
3.
The average human mind might have failed to grasp what so many millions of dollars meant, but Alva’s mind regarding sums of money was anything but average.
Fortune's Children Page 17