Fortune's Children

by Arthur T. Vanderbilt

  “Just to teach you, you blankety-blank millionaire, not to drive around in that bloody car of yours.”

  “What’s wrong with my car? Anyone who wants it is welcome to it for three hundred dollars. It’s five years old and it has been driven over half a million miles.”

  “Our mistake I guess. We thought you was a rich guy.”

  “And if I were?”

  “All rich guys ought to be strung up.”

  “But who are you?”

  “We’re the fellows that’ll do the stringing.”183

  As Neil mingled with the hitchhikers and migrants on the highways, with the unemployed and dispossessed, their common refrain was “It won’t be long now….” A revolution seemed just around the corner. “It won’t be long now….”

  “Who is going to start it?” Neil would ask.

  “Ever been hungry?” they answered.184

  The rich clearly heard this refrain of the highways. They installed bulletproof steel shutters on the big windows of their Fifth Avenue mansions. They shipped their gold to Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, and France before President Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard. Lloyd’s of London did a brisk business selling riot and civil disturbance insurance to the rich. At the end of the 1931 summer season at Newport, many did not return to Fifth Avenue to face the hard winter, preferring to stay close to their waiting yachts, some of which, Neil found, were “kept under steam, day and night, ready for a three-thousand-mile jump on a second’s notice.”185 Others retreated to their country homes, where they hoarded enough sugar, tea, coffee, canned soups, and fruit to last for several years.

  At whatever estate he visited, he found the aristocracy preparing. “If our democracy is to survive,” one gentleman told him, “we must be prepared to handle the mob in the way the mob understands. Bullets. Machine-guns. Bayonets…As I see it, the mob is about to fire on us….If we are to retain our property—and I for one certainly do not feel like surrendering my property to a lot of hoodlums—we must begin arming ourselves.”186 And arm themselves they did. One millionaire took Neil down to the storerooms in his cellar, where there were machine guns, automatic rifles, shotguns, and wooden boxes of explosives. “If the worse comes to the worst,” he told Neil, “I will meet violence with violence.”187

  The stock of the New York Central, which had closed at a high of 2563/8 on September 3, 1929, fell to 160 two weeks after Black Tuesday. The Vanderbilt family dismissed the guards at the mausoleum on Staten Island, who had been punching time clocks every quarter hour of every day since William H. Vanderbilt had been laid to rest there in 1885.

  One morning in 1941 aboard Willie K. Vanderbilt’s oceangoing yacht, his valet, Jenkinson, knocked on his cabin door with the morning coffee and stock market quotations.

  “Central had hit 25,” a new low for the stock, Willie wrote in his diary that day. “It was time to go home.”188

  10

  MRS. VANDERBILT

  1934–1955

  1.

  “I feel deeply for poor, dear Marie Antoinette,” Grace Vanderbilt once said during the Depression, “for if the Revolution came to America, I should be the first to go.”1

  Burrowed in her self-centered world, Grace had not noticed that a revolution had already come to America—a bloodless revolution, but a revolution nonetheless. “There isn’t any New York society today any more than there is a nation called the Confederate States of America,” an old man who had known Mrs. Astor, Ward McAllister, Mamie Fish, and Harry Lehr told a friend. ‘There are survivors from each. And that is all.”2

  The two miles of millionaires’ metropolitan mansions that had lined Fifth Avenue had vanished, razed to make way for business or converted to commercial use. Only a handful of private residences remained on the avenue and only one—on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, the last of the Vanderbilt mansions on Fifth Avenue, the house William H. Vanderbilt had built in the early 1880s—was run just as it had been for decades. It was now America’s last outpost of ceremonial society: 640 Fifth Avenue, home of Grace, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt.

  The mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue had become a shrine to a bygone century, a forgotten world that was so remote and foreign it might have been life as lived on another planet. “Her house on Fifth Avenue,” Bessie Lehr recalled, “was the perfection of taste, yet in my fancy it seemed to be resisting something. It was like a citadel of another age. The ever-encroaching skyscrapers around it, the nearby Radio City were an advancing army. Modernity on the march.”3

  Nothing seemed to awaken Grace Vanderbilt to the fact that the world had changed around her; not Prohibition with its speakeasies and nightclubs, which occupied many of the buildings in the neighborhood; not the blasting of bedrock across the street with the construction of Rockefeller Center in the 1930s; not the shadowing of her home by skyscrapers on every side; not the shoppers, commuters, vendors, secretaries, and businessmen hurrying along the sidewalk outside her front door or the congested traffic on the streets around her home.

  Guests ascended the ceremonial red carpet always unrolled for them on the sidewalk in front of 640 Fifth Avenue, walked up the stone steps and through the bronze doors, leaving behind the skyscrapers, the rushing shoppers and commuters, the noise and clatter of a busy city, and entered a world of footmen in livery, of a towering Caen stone hall with walls hung with seventeenth-century tapestries, of polished marble floors and rock crystal chandeliers, of Venetian velvet curtains, of French Regency chairs covered in raspberry-red silk, of fires blazing in fireplaces with green-veined marble mantels, of library tables covered with framed autographed photographs of the Queen Mother and King George VI, President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, King Alfonso and Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, President Theodore Roosevelt, the duke and duchess of Kent, Queen Elizabeth and King Albert of Belgium.

  And there in the midst of this otherworldly setting stood Grace Vanderbilt, dressed to the nines, sporting her jeweled bandeau and diamond stomacher.

  Who did she think she was? Why, Mrs. Vanderbilt. These days it was rather easy to assume the title. There was no competition.

  2.

  Back in 1923, seventy-eight-year-old Alice of The Breakers had invited her two sons, Reggie and Neily, to dinner with their wives, Gloria and Grace.

  After Neily had defied his parents’ wishes by marrying Grace Wilson, and after Alfred’s death aboard the Lusitania, Alice had always considered Reggie the rightful head of the House of Vanderbilt. That evening at dinner, she expressed these thoughts aloud.

  “When I die, you will step into my place as Mrs. Vanderbilt,” she solemnly told Gloria.

  “How can you say that?” Grace Vanderbilt broke in. “Cornelius is older than Reggie and when that time comes I’ll be the next Mrs. Vanderbilt “

  Neily shook his head in disbelief. “Really, must we quarrel about such a ridiculous subject? You are all Mrs. Vanderbilts here.”4

  Since the morning of September 12, 1899, when her husband had died of a stroke, Alice of The Breakers, the reigning Mrs. Vanderbilt, had been in mourning, wearing nothing but black, living in the past, spending her days alone in her fortress of a mansion on Fifth Avenue and in The Breakers at Newport, visiting only with her family, never seen in public.

  An editorial about her husband in the New York World had been quite certain that “our great fortunes are now so great that it is hard work for the owners to spend the income, and only the wildest extravagance, folly and incompetence could destroy the principal.”5 This did not prove to be the case. Cornelius Vanderbilt II had built two homes befitting the head of the richest family in the world, homes that required a commensurate fortune to maintain. When his estate was divided up, the portion left his wife, Alice, in time proved insufficient.

  Several years after her husband’s death, everyone noticed that Alice never opened The Breakers and the palace on Fifth Avenue the same year. So expensive had it become to run the two that Alice would use one home one ye
ar, and the other the next. The $7 million trust fund that her husband had left her produced income of $250,000 a year, which in a decade or two was just enough to pay the taxes on the two houses. The taxes on The Breakers were $83,000 a year. The taxes on the Fifth Avenue mansion, which had been $38,446 in 1899, had risen to $129,120 by 1925, the highest of any city residential property. In addition, the costs of maintaining The Breakers and the Fifth Avenue mansion were staggering. To run The Breakers took thirty-three servants, thirteen grooms, and twelve gardeners. Each winter its boilers consumed 150 tons of coal to keep the drafty rooms warm enough to safeguard its art treasures. The costs of maintaining the 137-room city house occupying a block on Fifth Avenue were even greater. When Gloria and Reggie went there to visit Alice Vanderbilt in 1922, Gloria felt that it ‘looked shabby and old, like a very great and elaborately mannered personage who had fallen on evil days.”6 Something had to give.

  Alice bravely tried something new. She decided to economize. When she was at The Breakers, she closed off the entire mansion except one wing where she lived. She did the same in New York, living in a suite of rooms on the second floor. In later years, when she returned to New York from Newport, she didn’t even bother opening her Fifth Avenue mansion, choosing instead to live at the St. Regis.

  By 1925, when she was eighty, Alice Vanderbilt had concluded that she could not afford her city house: ‘The property is not a suitable place of residence for me in view of the changed character of the neighborhood, and the expense of its maintenance has become a real burden to me.”7 Indeed, once in the midst of New York’s most fashionable residential district, the mansion had been engulfed by business. When the Cornelius Vanderbilts had acquired the land in the 1880s, it had cost $375,000 and the house $3 million more. Their new mansion had been hailed by the press as “a private house which must for a century or two elevate the standard of such houses, and tend, at least, to the improvement of domestic architecture.”8 Now in 1925 the land, a prime site for business development, was assessed at $4.7 million and the house, worthless as a private residence, unsuitable for business, was assessed at but $100,000.

  This unusual home was on the market for several years. A syndicate’s contract of sale for $7.1 million fell through, as did plans to take the mansion apart, stone by stone, and rebuild it as the Harbor Hills Country Club at Sands Point, Long Island. In 1927, a real-estate operator offered $6.6 million and the deal was quickly closed. The site at 742–746 Fifth Avenue would be occupied by the new Bergdorf Goodman department store.

  On several cold winter days in January 1926, with the mansion covered with snow and every window agleam with lights, Alice opened her house for tours to benefit the tuberculosis committee of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Tens of thousands of people who for years had walked by this imposing French château on Fifth Avenue wandered through its rooms, marveling at the great winding stone staircase rising from the hall; the walnut-paneled living room on the second floor; the Moorish smoking room designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, with its rare mosaics and glass dome; the wardrobes the size of bedrooms, bedrooms as big as ballrooms, and bathrooms, one visitor noted, with enough room for a taxi to turn around.9

  And then came the disassembling. Alice presented a mantelpiece carved by Augustus Saint-Gaudens to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Theater tycoon Marcus Loew purchased the colonial room and Moorish smoking room and stored them in a warehouse, proudly announcing his intention to put them to use at his new Midland Theater in Kansas City. Daughter Gertrude rescued the massive gates from the ornate iron fence that surrounded the property, later giving them for the entrance to the Conservatory Gardens in Central Park.

  And then the wreckers went to work. It was weeks before the mansion, built to last for centuries, had been torn down to street level so that pedestrians could get a full view of the plaza from Fifty-sixth Street.

  Alice moved ten blocks up the avenue, purchasing for $800,000 the former residence of Jay Gould’s son at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street, a six-story white marble mansion with eight master bedrooms, fourteen servants’ rooms, two elevators, and rooms for the grand entertainments she would never give. And there she stayed alone, rarely going out, until on April 23, 1934, at the age of eighty-nine, she passed away.

  Her net estate of $10,184,587, including $1,247,252 in cash, various railroad securities, and real estate, was divided into three equal parts. Gertrude received the money that had been set aside from the sale of the Vanderbilt mansion. Gladys was given The Breakers and about two thirds of the $7 million trust fund Cornelius Vanderbilt had left for his wife. Neily was left the Gwynne Building in Cincinnati, which was leased to Procter and Gamble. Reggie’s young daughter, little Gloria, was left $1 million. Servants received $1,000 for each five years of employment. And Alice left her grandson Neil, the publisher of those nasty newspapers, nothing but a photograph of herself.

  3.

  When Alice of The Breakers died, sixty-one-year-old Grace immediately ordered new calling cards, inscribed MRS. VANDERBILT. Her time had come. She now reigned solitary and supreme.

  Unhappy with the table at which she had been seated at Ciro’s in Monte Carlo, Grace imperiously summoned the maître d’hôtel.

  “Why have you given me this table? Let me have that one over there.”

  The maître d’ apologized and explained that that particular table was reserved by Prince Danilo of Montenegro.

  “Well, then I will have that one in the corner,” Grace pressed.

  The maître d’ was apologetic. That table was kept for an English duchess.

  “Then see that you give me a better table than the Duchess’s in the future,” Grace ordered.

  She turned to an Englishman she knew who was seated at the next table. “It is only here in France,” she explained, “that I am treated in this way. In America I take a rank something like that of your Princess of Wales.”

  “Oh?” the Englishman responded. “Then who is your Queen?”10

  The expense associated with maintaining her rank, whatever it was, which entailed entertaining ten thousand guests each year, was taking its inevitable toll.

  The daily centerpiece of fresh flowers for the dining room cost $75, the other five vases of fresh flowers on the long dining table were filled for $35 each, and the five fruit bowls were kept full of $200 worth of fresh fruit. To stock the candy dishes cost $300 each month. Grace was spending $250,000 each year to entertain her friends and maintain her position as Mrs. Vanderbilt, $125,000 more each year than her and Neily’s annual income. The expenses of running 640 Fifth Avenue and of paying taxes for the privilege of having a home on a piece of the world’s most expensive urban real estate amounted to over $1,000 dollars a day. Her principal was dwindling at a rate of several hundred thousand dollars each year, yet the most she could bring herself to do to meet the crisis was to cut the number of servants in half, from twenty to ten.

  Neily had been offered $9 million for 640 Fifth Avenue when it was being considered as a site for Rockefeller Center. Though he was strapped for cash, Grace had been adamant that the offer be rejected. Now the end was in sight. The fairy tale could not go on much longer. In May 1940, Neily sold the house to the William Waldorf Astor estate for $1.5 million, retaining the right for Grace to continue to live there, paying rent, until one year after his death.

  “What a fool your father was to forfeit a fortune for a pretty face,” William Randolph Hearst once told young Neil Vanderbilt.11

  Neily Vanderbilt long before had come to the same conclusion himself. A pretty face didn’t last very long, and when it was gone, when Grace grew older and put on weight from all the French cooking she consumed at her perpetual entertainments, what was left was two incompatible people.

  “Why don’t you get a divorce?” Neil would ask his mother or father when he had one of them alone.

  “People in our position do not get divorces,” Neily answered.

  “B
ut I love your father!” was Grace’s response.12

  As Grace continued her leading role in society, Neily, bored as always by her social affairs, horrified by the money she was spending, which was depleting their fortune at an alarming rate, became increasingly introspective, seeing himself as a failure. “Every Vanderbilt son…has increased his fortune except me,” he once remarked, remembering the business success of his father, Cornelius, and his father’s father, William.13

  Tall, thin, his face emaciated from chain-smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, disillusioned, cynical, bitter, Neily became a wanderer, a nomad, living aboard his yacht.

  At the outset of the First World War, he had donated the North Star to the British Red Cross to be used as an auxiliary floating hospital.14 He later bought from Vincent Astor the Winchester, a 225-foot steam yacht that looked like a navy destroyer and could attain speeds of over thirty knots. It cost $7,000 a month just to keep the Winchester tied up at the dock, and at least twice that much on long cruises, so Neily lived at dockside. Occasionally his mother would help him with the Winchester’s expenses. “Dear Neily,” Alice of The Breakers once wrote to her son in the early years of the Depression, “I would like to give you a present for the summer and it would be such a pleasure to me if you will put the Winchester in commission for three months. I know how you enjoy her and want you so much to have her this summer. Love, Affly yrs. Mother.”15 And sister Gertrude also found ways to give money to Neily to help cover the costs of using his yacht. But more often than not he could be found tied up at the Miami Yacht Basin, far away from Fifth Avenue and Newport, and there he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 2, 1942, at the age of sixty-nine.

  Neily’s death was significant to his wife primarily because it triggered the countdown to her departure from 640 Fifth Avenue. (It was Neily’s sister Gertrude, not Grace, who made it to Florida to be with him the day he died, and it was Gertrude, not Grace, who paid for his body to be taken by private railroad car from Florida to New York.)