“How could I?” Neil asked. “1 have only twelve cents left of my weekly allowance.”
“That’s all right, just walk in the store and tell them who you are. They’ll let you charge anything you want.”
“Will they?”
“Sure thing. You are a Vanderbilt.”
Neil looked puzzled.
“Oh, go on, stop pretending. Don’t you know that your family has one hundred million bucks?”
“I see,” Neil said.
But he did not. Nevertheless, to please his friends, he went with them to the store and asked for a pound of marshmallows, laying down his twelve cents and explaining that he would pay the balance later.
“What’s the name?” the proprietor asked.
“Vanderbilt.”
“What’s the first name?”
“Cornelius. Cornelius Vanderbilt.”
“Any relation to the old lady who has that fine house on Fifty-seventh Street, in New York?”
“That’s my grandmother.”
“Take two pounds of marshmallows,” said the proprietor, “and keep your twelve cents. You’ll pay me the whole thing in a heap at your pleasure.”
Neil was dumbfounded.
“You see,” said his classmates, “you can buy the whole town if you want to. Just give your name and tell them to charge. How about your buying bicycles for us?”
“But I have only…”47
Soon Neil’s friends were riding away on their new bicycles, and soon thereafter Neil’s father was at Concord to take his son back to New York, where he was given “a sound thrashing.” His weekly allowance was reduced to fifteen cents a week until his debts were paid off.48
The same scene repeated itself some years later when Neil was at army training camp. Grace was sending her son five dollars a week.
“How about taking the boys to a swell joint and treating them to a case of Frog champagne?” one of Neil’s army buddies would ask him.
“I wish I could do that.”
“But what?”
“I’ve explained to you several times.”
“Can’t you sign a check?”
“I have no bank account.”
“Charge it then.”
“I tried it once at school and I’ll never do it again. My parents would simply refuse to pay the bill.”
“So, that’s what we get for wasting our time with a blankety-blank millionaire.”
A similar conversation took place every Saturday.
“What the hell is the matter with you rich guys?” Charlie, an Irishman who slept in the same tent, asked Neil. “You know damn well you’re as popular as ground glass in coffee and still you won’t budge an inch. Now, look: there’s six of us here. Dave worked in a tailor’s shop, Mike was a garage mechanic, Jim tended bar, Al dug sewers, I used to be a motorcycle cop. None of us was a big shot, none ever had any dough, but do we lie about our folks, do we cringe when it comes to buying drinks? Not on your life. Why, I’d rather jump in the river and say ‘here goes nothing’ than refuse the boys a drink. Am I right, boys?”
“Right, Charlie,” the others cheered.
“So far so good, my friends. Now, then, what is the name of the guy in this here tent that has more dough than Uncle Sam’s Treasury?”
“Vanderbilt!” they shouted.
“Right again. One question more and well be through. What is the name of the guy in this here tent that never bought a drink for his pals?”49
Neil’s name resounded through the camp.
On duty in France during World War I, young Neil was chosen by the commander of the American Military Jail, a man who clearly held a grudge against the Vanderbilt family, to work as his orderly.
“So, the public be damned, eh?” was his first comment to Neil Vanderbilt.
Neil stared at him.
“Don’t you know who said that?”
“No, sir, I do not.”
“Ever heard of William H. Vanderbilt?”
“Yes, sir, that’s the name of my late great-grandfather.”
“Great-grandfather to you but a blankety-blank to me. Did you bring me the money my folks dropped in the market because of him and his God damn schemes?”
“Don’t you think it would be better, sir,” Neil quietly asked him, “if you ordered my transfer to the 27th Division Headquarters Troop?”
“I’d gladly transfer you to hell but I was told to keep you here. You can bet your life though that it won’t be soft for you.”
It was not. The commander paraded Neil before all visitors. “Take a good look at this specimen,” he would say. “He might be God Almighty back home but he is just another lousy orderly here. It ain’t such a bad war, my friends, when one can have a Vanderbilt scrub his lavatory.”50
After returning home following the Armistice, Neil, without telling his parents his plans, set out to do something none of the Commodore’s other descendants had done: He set out to find a job.
He had always been interested in being a newspaperman. “What’s your ambition?” J. P. Morgan had once asked eight-year-old Neil Vanderbilt when he was visiting Grace and Neily.
“I want to be a journalist,” Neil had answered.
“That’s awful,” Morgan had growled. “A journalist usually winds up by either becoming a chronic drunkard or by remaining a journalist. I do not know which is worse.”51
Despite these discouraging words, when young Neil and his sister, Grace, were aboard the family steamship they printed the North Star Weekly, which they sold for three cents a copy to the captain and the crew of the yacht and to any guests they could corner. ‘The Empress of Germany must weigh at least sixty pounds more than her husband,” read one story in the children’s paper. “She is as big as our former wet nurse.” Another told of a trip to the kaiser’s ship and how he “cuts turkey much better than our cook in Newport. But it takes him longer. Because of his crippled right hand, he cuts the bird with his left, with the aid of a curious instrument which is a combination of a long fork and a carving knife. He serves himself first and the moment he finishes eating the footmen take away everybody’s plates. We felt hungry after dinner and Neil said he wished he could ask for a glass of milk.”52
Now, after the First World War, Neil spoke with several prominent publishers about how best to become a journalist. “Make, borrow or steal three million dollars,” one told him. “Then shop around for a good newspaper. I know of no other way for a young man to enter the publishing business.” Another advised matter-of-factly, “Bluff your parents into giving you three million dollars.”53 Still receiving a niggardly weekly allowance from his mother, Neil realized that this was out of the question. Instead, he secured a job as a reporter with the New York Herald for twenty-five dollars a week. Neil did not have to tell his parents the good news. The next morning every New York daily carried the story about a young Vanderbilt looking for work. Neil was summoned at once to see his parents. They informed him that he had twenty-four hours to resign, or else leave 640 Fifth Avenue.
Neil chose to leave home. Not only did he get no support from his family, but he also began to learn that his colleagues viewed him differently because his father was rich. There were rumors, all false, that he used a fast car to cover his beat, that a detective was with him at all times, that he had become a reporter just as a publicity stunt, that he had a ghostwriter whom he paid to draft his articles. Some editors were reluctant to give him difficult assignments; others took a special delight in sending him off on bizarre errands. He received hundreds of letters at the newspaper asking him for money; the requests for one year totaled $8,343,676.26. In addition, thousands of marriage proposals arrived by mail, most of which included photographs.
Once, while Neil was scouting a strike at the Grand Central Station, the Stationmaster asked the pesky reporter with all the questions, “Who are you, anyway?”
“I am Cornelius Vanderbilt,” Neil answered.
“And I,” responded the Stationmaster, “am P. T
. Barnum.”54
Although Grace had hoped that her son would marry an English lady, she was not disappointed when Neil fell in love with Rachel Littleton, the daughter of a distinguished lawyer. Perhaps now he would settle down and forget his foolish dream of being a newspaperman. Grace planned a typical Vanderbilt wedding for her only son. Three thousand of her closest friends attended the ceremony at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church, and the wedding presents filled an upstairs room at 640 Fifth Avenue: a bandeau of diamonds worth $300,000, a diamond necklace, cases of antique silver, gold coffee spoons, diamond bracelets and watches. Grace sent the young couple off on their honeymoon with a footman “who treated us like royalty—as Mother indeed thought we were.”55 But though this was a typical Vanderbilt wedding, Neil and his bride did not begin their lives together like typical Vanderbilts. There was one critical ingredient missing: money. Neily had given his son a check for ten thousand dollars. “All things considered we had hoped for a somewhat bigger check.”56 Ten thousand dollars was not bad for newlyweds in 1920, but certainly not enough to live in the manner that was expected of these newlyweds. Neil continued to support himself and his bride as a reporter, now for the New York Times.
Two years later, another newspaper publisher encouraged Neil to start an illustrated daily, a penny newspaper in Los Angeles. Neil explained that he had no money for such a venture.
“Get it from your parents,” the publisher told him.
“I smiled sadly and informed him that my parents would rather see me burn in hell than publish a newspaper. In fact, I was asked by them to leave their house and was obliged to live on my meager salary for a while when they first found out that I was working.”
“I see,” said the publisher. “They are rather old-fashioned, aren’t they? But what is to prevent you from organizing a corporation and selling stock in your newspaper to your would-be readers?”57
This is just what Neil did, founding Vanderbilt Newspapers, Inc.
Running under the slogan ‘The Public Be Served”—a play on his great grandfather’s famous slip of the tongue, ‘The public be damned”—his Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News, which attacked vested interests, began with a circulation of 125,000, and within a month had climbed to 280,000. Soon Neil was expanding his chain, starting up the San Francisco Illustrated Daily Herald and then the Miami Tab, followed in short order by the Vanderbilt Weekly for Sunday readers and the Vanderbilt Farmer in Florida.
Losses caused by the collapse of the Florida real-estate boom, coupled with a loan Neil had guaranteed for printing presses that was unexpectedly called, threatened his growing newspaper empire to the point where Neil badly needed an infusion of capital. It was a critical moment. He was, in his estimation, “within a stone’s throw of success.”58
Neil had always assumed that in a pinch, he could rely on his family to help him out. He was dead wrong. ‘One of my great faults has always been counting my chickens before they are hatched. But from the time I was a little boy, my mother and father had promised me that if I didn’t drink or smoke or get involved with girls up to a certain age, and did the things they wanted me to do and left undone the things they did not want me to do, I would inherit several million dollars of my ancestors’ money. As I grew older the figures crystallized: I would have three million when I was twenty-six. The money was not left ‘in trust’; it was my share of family funds, which they would give me, more or less, as a reward for good conduct—a sort of carrot in front of my nose to keep me on the straight and narrow, as other boys are given, with similar conditions, larger allowances of pocket money than I ever had.”59
From what he could gather, Neil estimated that by 1920 his mother had inherited about $5 million or $6 million of Wilson money, and that his father, through his inventions and investments, had increased his original $7.5 million to about $20 million or $25 million. Yet Neil had reached and passed his twenty-sixth birthday and still had seen not a penny of the money he believed was coming to him.
“As much as I hated it, I had to call on my parents. I asked them to lend me what would have sooner or later become mine according to the terms of my grandfather’s will. The negotiations were lengthy and exceedingly painful for both sides….After weeks of conferences marked by a spectacular display of irritation and resentment,”60 Neil was told that he would be given $1,903,000 as a loan to be taken out of his inheritance, but only if he would hand over the operation of his papers to a New York attorney recommended by his father’s lawyers.
Neil was shocked. His parents had always treated him as a child and now again, despite his service in the World War and his successful start-up of a number of newspapers, they had no confidence in his abilities. “Of course I was very angry indeed. I was also sorely hurt and upset. I went to my room and remained there until my father asked me to come down because he and Mother wanted to talk to me. Then I went downstairs, to find both of them flushed with anger at what they considered my bad behavior, my disobedient attitude. I made a few foolish threats to the effect that they would live to rue the day and that although I’d made up on other occasions, I would leave the house next morning, never to return.
“In spite of these dramatic statements I went over to kiss Mother good night, but she brushed me off. This probably hurt worst of all. I had always felt closer to her than to Father. In her way I suppose she spoiled me; certainly she was more generous with her smaller income than Father with his larger one. It was no surprise to find him arrayed against me, but here Mother was allied with him. That was too much to take, and I said the unforgivable: ‘I wonder what you did—both of you—with my three million!’
“Then I turned and walked to the door, and downstairs and out of the house without hat or coat.”61
Neil had nowhere else to turn. Assistance from his grandmother, Alice of The Breakers, was unthinkable. Neil had been sending complimentary copies of his newspapers to his grandmother until he received a note from her secretary. The note read: “Mrs. Vanderbilt instructed me to write to you and ask you to discontinue mailing your disgraceful newspapers to her address. She is neither amused nor interested.”62
And so, though he “ranted and raved,” he had no choice but to consent to his parents’ terms. Within a year after the new management was in place, the papers had gone out of business, and Neil’s inheritance had been surrendered to the creditors of Vanderbilt Newspapers, Inc.
Neil was shattered. For $40 a month he rented a two-room apartment over a Fifth Avenue toy shop across from his grandmother’s 137-room mansion; the “chateau-annex,” the newspapers dubbed it. He testified in 1931 in answer to a lawsuit that he was worth exactly $120. Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, the Commodore’s namesake, his great-great-grandson, was broke.
9
REGGIE
1901–1934
1.
The days of Vanderbilts as railroad kings were past. The days of Vanderbilts as builders of monuments to the family fortune were also over. Now the days of decadent hedonism had begun.
Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, born in 1880, the youngest of the four sons of Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt, was raised in a curiously mixed-up world of privilege and piety. At his parents’ block-long mansion on Fifth Avenue, and at The Breakers in Newport, he was surrounded by the most conspicuous extravagance of the Gilded Age. Amid this overwhelming opulence, his humorless, puritanical parents read to him from the Scriptures and preached the virtues of a stern morality.
A lot was expected of Reginald. He was, after all, a Vanderbilt, the son of a man dedicated to hard work, the grandson of the world’s richest man, the great-grandson of the famous Commodore. But early on Reggie sensed that he just didn’t have what it took to compete in a family of achievers. He was not an all-round golden boy like his oldest brother, Bill, whose tragic death from typhoid fever while a senior at Yale devastated the family. Nor was he as inventive as his brother Neily, who had graduated from Yale with honors. He certainly wasn’t blessed with his brother Alfred’s athletic
prowess or good looks, having inherited more of the round, homely Gwynne features of his mother. The only way Reggie could distinguish himself was to live the life of a rich playboy. And this he did with dedication and consummate skill.
Like his brothers, he went to St. Paul’s and then on to Yale, where he stayed in Vanderbilt Hall, given by his parents in memory of his brother Bill. At Yale he learned that he could be popular simply by playing polo with the horses he brought from home, leading his classmates on drinking sprees and romantic adventures with ladies of the evening, and betting on college sporting events. He thought it great fun when he lost $3,500 on the Yale-Harvard game.
On December 19, 1901, his twenty-first birthday, Reggie inherited $7.5 million outright under his father’s will, plus $5 million from another trust fund. To celebrate, he invited a group of his classmates to dinner in New York City, and then took them to Number 5 East Forty-fourth Street for some adventure.
Behind the green columns and rich bronze doors of the brownstone at Number 5, one door down from Delmonico’s and a hundred feet from Sherry’s, the city’s most fashionable restaurants, stood the city’s most elegant gambling house, patronized by a clientele of multimillionaires. The bronze entrance doors opened electrically, admitting the guests to a vestibule barred by another massive door. The first doors then swung shut and locked. If, after inspection through a peephole, the doorman found that the visitors passed muster, the second set of doors opened. A Vanderbilt always passed muster, and young Reggie and his friends were admitted instantly.
The house was designed to make its wealthy visitors feel right at home, with teak floors and walls of white mahogany inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The opulent rooms displayed antique Chippendale furniture, magnificent works of art, bronzes and Chinese porcelains. It looked like an exclusive men’s club or a wealthy New Yorker’s home, except for the hickory roulette wheel, the baccarat table, and the faro boxes in the big room on the second floor. It was, in fact, the home of Richard Canfield, a heavyset, florid-faced, big-jowled gentleman who also operated exclusive gambling establishments in Newport and Saratoga. Always immaculately attired in formal evening clothes, the dress required of all his patrons, Richard Canfield, who could trace his descendants back to the Mayflower, usually retired to his study on one of the upper floors to read the classics while his guests gambled the night away.
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