Fortune's Children

by Arthur T. Vanderbilt

  Neily was dead. Seventy-two-year-old Grace had one year left in her beloved home. The dowager empress still, she kept right on with her luncheons and dinner parties and balls and open houses, but the old magic was gone. ‘One day I went to dinner at Mrs. Vanderbilt’s and Γ11 never forget it,” a guest recalled. “It was literally impossible to have a conversation with her. She was without conversation. So, during the lull, I looked down the table and I suddenly realized that the name of every one there began with an ‘R.’ We were all obviously her secretary’s ‘R’ list. But as I looked closer I didn’t feel too badly. At least we did spill over a bit. There were a couple of ‘S’s.’ “16 Hadn’t Ward McAllister decreed decades before that “the success of a dinner depends as much upon the company as the cook. Discordant elements—people invited alphabetically or to pay off debts—are fatal’?17

  Her eviction repeatedly postponed, Grace kept on entertaining until the last moment, when, in April 1945, moving men from the Parke-Bernet Galleries arrived to take out the entire art collection, as well as many of the mansion’s most important furnishings. The collection of 183 paintings that William H. Vanderbilt had so proudly assembled in the early 1880s—his “pleasing pictures,” the “very best foreign paintings that money could buy,” which he had purchased for more than $2 million—was sold during the evenings of April 18 and 19, 1945, for a total of $323,195. An 1825 Louis XVIII Aubusson carpet went for $825, a Brussels Renaissance tapestry for $700, a Louis XV inlaid king-wood cabinet for $850. An agent from Paramount Pictures flew in and bought for $5,800 the paneling from the ballroom, dining room, and library for period set pieces.

  With new construction postponed because of the war, demolition of the Vanderbilt mansion, empty and quiet at 640 Fifth Avenue, was put off. The brownstone veneer began peeling away, revealing the underlying bricks. Rain and wind swept in through broken windows.

  Early in September 1947, workmen drilled through the basement floor to test the bedrock, and at last the destruction of the mansion began. As Neil drove to see his mother at her new home a mile up Fifth Avenue (a five-story brick and limestone mansion with only twenty-eight rooms compared to the fifty-eight rooms she had left), “I saw the wrecking crews demolishing 640. Stone by stone they were tearing down my great-grandfather’s baronial brown palace. Already my fifth-floor bedroom and Father’s handsome walnut paneled study and sound-proofed engineering laboratory had vanished. Mother’s famous pink boudoir still remained on the second floor, its undraped windows staring blindly down at the Avenue Mother had dominated for fifty triumphant years.”18

  From behind the fence that had been raised around the massive structure rose the sounds of sledgehammers and creaking timbers and the clatter of falling bricks.

  4.

  Grace Wilson Vanderbilt considered herself the Mrs. Vanderbilt, and the public did, too, but to the Vanderbilt family she was nothing but a pretender to the throne. “Honestly,” one Vanderbilt descendent said, “I can’t ever remember meeting her. I must have, of course, at some big family things and stuff, but I can’t remember it.”19 To the family, to the upper reaches of America’s aristocracy, there was one and only one Mrs. Vanderbilt, and her name wasn’t Mrs. Vanderbilt. It was Mrs. Twombly. Florence Adele Vanderbilt Twombly: daughter of William H. Vanderbilt, the Commodore’s sole surviving granddaughter.

  Her long life spanned the Gilded Age, marking its beginning and end. Longer than any other member of the family (for that matter, longer than almost any other grande dame of the Gilded Age), she led exactly the type of life of pomp and splendor the very rich were supposed to lead.

  Florence had been born in 1854 in Billy Vanderbilt’s farmhouse on Staten Island, the sixth of his eight children. When she was ten, her parents moved the family to the stone mansion at 459 Fifth Avenue that the Commodore had bought for Billy so that he could be nearby to help manage the growing railroad empire.

  On November 21, 1877, Florence married Hamilton McKown Twombly, a proper young Bostonian who had parlayed a modest inheritance into a fortune in railroad holdings and whose financial acumen the Vanderbilt family tapped in managing its railroads and personal finances. The wedding took place in the midst of the trial over the Commodore’s will, at a time when society viewed the Vanderbilts as a collection of rich vulgarians. An offensive account of the wedding in the New York Times reflected this sentiment, THE MOST COSTLY WEDDING DRESS EVER WORN ON THIS CONTINENT, read the headline of the article, which described how several thousand invitations had been issued; how St. Bartholomew’s Church was besieged by “an immense and exceedingly unruly crowd”; how “two rough individuals shouting ‘Tickets!’ “collected the invitations that admitted the guests to the church, and if a guest, like one personal friend of William Vanderbilt’s, was dilatory in producing them, the pair caught the offender by the neck and flung him “backward over the curb.” As a result, “men and women in evening attire were squeezed and jostled, their costumes disarranged, and their persons bruised.” The Times noted that in the church, packed almost to suffocation, “a large number of Wall Street brokers and members of German banking houses were prominent. There were also many women of a class that would not be expected to receive invitations.” The bride, the article concluded, wore silk stockings “that cost $120 the pair.”20

  That was just about the last time the public ever read anything in the papers about Hamilton and Florence Twombly.

  At the time of their marriage, the combined net worth of bride and groom was $70 million, producing an annual income of $3.5 million, or $70,000 a week. In addition to their mansion at 684 Fifth Avenue, which William Vanderbilt had given to his daughter and son-in-law, and Vin-land, the large English Tudor summer cottage they had purchased in Newport, next to The Breakers of Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Twomblys wanted a country house for the spring and fall seasons. They retained the prominent architectural firm McKim, Mead and White to design their home. “Twombly wants a house on the order of an English Country gentleman,” architect William Mead told his partners. “I don’t think he knows exactly what he means, and I am sure I don’t, but as near as I can gather, his idea is that it shall be a thoroughly comfortable house without the stiffness of the modern city house. Twombly is the sort of man, who, if he gets what he wants, is willing to pay liberally for it.”21 What he wanted was the appropriate house in the appropriate setting for a family of the American nobility.

  They purchased the setting in 1891, twelve hundred acres in the countryside of Morris County, New Jersey, an area where more than a hundred other millionaires had built country estates to enjoy the beauty and peace and fresh air of these quiet surroundings. Frederick Law Olmsted was called upon to site the mansion and to landscape the several hundred acres of formal gardens and lawn that would surround the house. “You have a sweep of landscape to an infinitely remote and perspectively obscure background, an appropriate and well-proportioned foreground and middle distance being perfectly within your control, as much so as if you owned the State of New Jersey…” Olmstead wrote to Twombly. “You have everything screened that is desirable to be screened. Everything within twenty miles is as much under your control, so far as concerns the fitness, propriety and becomingness of the situation, as if you had the free use of it. The grand landscape is yours and nobody can interfere with your possession of it.”22 The estate would be completely secluded from public view.

  Construction began in 1893, and the family first occupied Florham—its name derived from the first syllables of the Twomblys’ first names, Florence and Hamilton—in the spring of 1897.

  A two-mile drive winding through parklike grounds led to the imposing formal mansion of brick trimmed with Indiana limestone, whose exterior matched to scale one wing of Henry VIIPs’’ Hampton Court, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. The 110 rooms of Florham were filled with antiques and artworks, including a set of seventeen monumental tapestries executed in the royal ateliers of Paris in 1640 and presented by King Louis XIII to the cardinal-leg
ate Francesco Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII. The tapestries, woven from the finest shaded wools richly highlighted in silk, depicted the romance of the crusader Rinaldo and the beautiful Saracen princess Armida, and had hung in the Barberini Palace in Rome for two and a half centuries, until purchased for the Twomblys for $179,000 and hung in the great hall and ballroom of Florham.

  The general manager of the estate, a Harvard graduate and former congressman, oversaw the operations of this self-contained dukedom: the stables with sixty teakwood stalls for sixty Thoroughbred horses and thirty more for carriage horses; an orangery for growing the oranges, nectarines, grapes, and figs that Mrs. Twombly loved; the palm house for tropical plants; the ten large greenhouses devoted to the cultivation of orchids and chrysanthemums (the greenhouses were supervised by Queen Victoria’s former head gardener, whom the Twomblys had been able to lure away to Florham). The estate had a power plant to supply electricity and steam heat for the mansion and all its outbuildings; a spring-fed 3,300-gallon water storage tower, two 1,700-gallon storage tanks, and a backup pond holding 7.3 million gallons; and a private railroad siding in a distant field on the estate, used for bringing coal to feed the generating plant and guests in private railroad cars to fill the twenty-five guest bedrooms and some of the twelve master bedrooms. On the property, Hamilton Twombly established Florham Farms for his son as a nine-hundred-acre working farm designed to be run on scientific principles, just as George Vanderbilt was doing at Biltmore. The farm included 160 Guernsey cattle, 24 of which won prizes at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 and brought Mr. Twombly recognition as the premier Guernsey breeder in the United States; another 400 cows that produced annually more than a million gallons of milk, which, when sold in the neighboring towns from an expensive wagon drawn by a pair of Thoroughbreds in gold-mounted harnesses, netted the estate $40,000 a year; and 100 sheep, tended by shepherds, to keep the lawns trimmed. Flowers and vegetables grown on the estate produced another $25,000, and two-day-old calves were sold for as much as $2,000 each.

  Unlike other members of the Vanderbilt family, the Twomblys never courted publicity. Breathless accounts of the magnificence of Florham never appeared in the press. The papers never even published a photograph of it. The golden couple were so secure in their social position that they scorned newspaper mention. Florham was for their four children—Alice, Florence, Ruth, and Hamilton—to give them a healthy outdoor life away from the city.

  The Twomblys’ lives fell into a pleasing routine. Florham was their home in May and June when the azaleas and rhododendrons and wisteria and formal Italian gardens were at their peak. They traveled to Vinland in Newport for July and August, back to Florham to enjoy the autumnal splendor of the countryside in September and October, and finally to their town house on Fifth Avenue for the winter season.

  The royal life the Twomblys had created for themselves was shattered, hit in the only spot where it was vulnerable: by tragedies that money could not deflect.

  Sixteen-year-old Alice died of pneumonia on the eve of her society debut in January 1896.

  On July 6, 1906, the Twomblys received word at Vinland that their eighteen-year-old son, Hamilton Jr., who had just graduated from Groton in June and intended to enter Harvard in the fall, had drowned in Big Squam Lake in New Hampshire while in charge of a summer camp for younger boys. The Twomblys were devastated by his death. Hamilton Twombly lost interest in everything; he withdrew from his business enterprises and social activities, resigned from his various directorships, and stayed away from Florham for two years, letting Florham Farms fall into disrepair. On January 10, 1910, at the age of sixty-one, he died of tuberculosis of the larynx; his friends said that he had never recovered from the shock of his son’s death.

  Alice gone. Hamilton Jr. gone. Hamilton gone. Daughter Florence married to William Burden. Fifty-six-year-old Mrs. Twombly and Miss Ruth, her twenty-five-year-old unmarried daughter, became recluses at Florham, far from the public eye. Their lives settled into a regular pattern, so set and formal that the servants knew just what they would be doing on any particular day of the year, years in advance.

  In 1925, Florence Twombly sold her mansion at 684 Fifth Avenue and purchased the northeast corner of Seventy-first Street and Fifth Avenue as the site for a new home. There, at 1 East Seventy-first Street, at the age of seventy-one, she constructed a seventy-room palace, run by a staff of thirty, and she began again to entertain at her three homes.

  A weekend house party—Mrs. Twombly gave five every spring and five every fall—was a formal ritual that began with the arrival at Florham of a special train from New York with private cars carrying fifteen or twenty guests. The guests arrived at the railroad siding on the estate in time for tea on Friday afternoon and a formal dinner that evening. A lady who had dined at Florham recalled that during the dinners of beluga caviar and terrapin and Mrs. Twombly’s favorite dessert—Coeur à la Crème, a piece of homemade cream cheese in the shape of a heart, drenched with Florham’s fresh strawberries—“Mrs. Twombly talked exactly so many minutes to the gentleman on her right, turned and gave exactly the same attention to the one on her left. Other guests, who had been surreptitiously watching her, did exactly the same. I suppose it looked like a ping pong match in slow motion.”23

  The next day the guests might play golf at the Morris County Golf Club, which Mrs. Twombly had founded, or swim or play tennis in Florham’s playhouse, stroll around the Italian gardens and manicured grounds enjoying the flowering shrubs in the spring and the avenues of blazing Japanese maples in the fall, or take motor trips around the country roads in one of the estate’s maroon Rolls-Royces. Saturday night dinner was a special occasion to which scores of wealthy Morris County neighbors would be invited to join the weekend guests and indulge in a nine-course dinner.

  (Joseph Donon, Mrs. Twombly’s French chef, whom she had hired away from the Carlton in London for the unheard-of sum of $25,000 a year, ‘lives the ordered existence of a man of substantial means,” the Herald Tribune reported. “At Newport…he has a separate villa of his own, his own staff of personal servants, and his own sailing boat, in which he enjoys fishing during the summer season in the reaches of Buzzard’s Bay. When Mrs. Twombly entertains, and she does it frequently, there is no nonsense about economy, and the tradesmen’s vans are days in advance, delivering hodsful of foie gras and whole greenhouses of orchids. There are seldom fewer than twenty for dinner, and M. Donon records that the regular daily delivery of lobsters never runs under fifty pounds.”24)

  After dinner the guests would enter the ballroom, one hundred feet long, lit by three enormous chandeliers, each with two hundred lights, for music and dancing, followed at midnight by a light supper of lobster and champagne, before the houseguests retired to the thirty-seven bedrooms, each with a private bath and a room for a maid.

  After a Sunday morning service at the Grace Episcopal Church several miles away, the houseguests enjoyed a five-course Sunday lunch. They were then given a little free time to prepare for Sunday evening, which started with a dinner to top Saturday’s, after which the guests were escorted by liveried footmen to the great hall, 150 feet long, lined with the busts of twelve Roman emperors on marble pedestals and hung with the famous Barberini tapestries. There they were seated to hear a recital by the famed organist Archer Gibson, who for $750 would come to Florham and play the $85,000 organ, which, with its eight thousand pipes ranging in length from a small pencil to sixteen feet and its thousands of miles of wiring, was bigger than the organ at Radio City Music Hall. While the great hall was awash in organ music, Mrs. Twombly invariably sat in the throne chair directly to the left of the organ. Later in the evening she would nod slightly to the organist, who would begin to play one of her favorite selections. At this point, like a queen, she would rise and ascend the white marble staircase to the second floor. The party, the weekend, was officially over.

  Some guests invited to Florham over one Labor Day weekend were surprised to find that early on Monday
morning a servant had packed their bags and piled them in the great hall near the door.

  “Surely Mrs. Twombly doesn’t expect us to leave today,” one guest questioned the butler. “This is Labor Day, a legal holiday, and all of our offices are closed.”

  The butler bowed slightly and left to convey this news to Mrs. Twombly.

  “Begging your pardon, Sir,” he announced upon his return, “Mrs. Twombly says to tell you she has never heard of Labor Day.”25

  There must have been a time, millions and millions of years ago, when the last surviving dinosaurs wandered the face of the earth. So there was a time, deep into the twentieth century, when the last two survivors of the Gilded Age continued to live, through two world wars and the Great Depression, as if life had never changed.26

  Twenty-five house servants ran Florham for these two elderly ladies, Mrs. Twombly and Miss Ruth, including the English butler who, in formal attire, looked like a visiting dignitary as he greeted guests and bade them farewell, the footmen, the French chef, two cooks, two scullery maids, a housekeeper in charge of all the maids, chambermaids, parlor maids, first- and third-floor maids, and Mrs. Twombly’s and Miss Ruth’s personal maids. One hundred more servants maintained the grounds, the greenhouses, the farm, and the stables. Every house servant was dressed in formal attire at all times. Each footman wore black shoes with buckles, black stockings, black velvet knickers, a maroon vest, and a black jacket with sterling silver buttons. Five chauffeurs and coachmen dressed in maroon livery were on duty to tend to the fifteen maroon Rolls-Royces Mrs. Twombly kept in her carriage house, including her favorite, which sported a gold and emerald vanity installed by Cartier.

  “There is hardly a household left in America for a first-class butler…” Stanley Hudson, an English butler, once commented. “Why these days we’re even supposed to dust the furniture!”27 Such a shocking state of affairs would never occur at Florham. One Morristown matron interviewed a maid formerly employed by Mrs. Twombly. The maid asked for the outrageously high salary of $125 per month. The matron was astounded. “But I understand Mrs. Twombly only paid you $65 a month.” The maid drew herself up with dignity. “But that,” she said, “was Mrs. Twombly!”28