Florham was always run the way great estates were meant to be run. Each member of the staff had an individual assignment. One white-wigged footman did nothing but open the huge mahogany front door. Several others devoted their days to taking the silver—pure silver, never sterling—from the walk-in vault and polishing it to perfection. Another was hired to care for the sand on the barn floor and to rake it into “interesting patterns.” A scullery maid did nothing but prepare vegetables.
During World War II, a guest remarked to Mrs. Twombly that many of her footmen must have been drafted. She sat silently and then sighed, “This week we lost four from the pantry alone.”29
When her grandson announced his marriage in 1935 to Flobelle Fairbanks, the niece of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Mrs. Twombly was anxious to attend the ceremony but not quite sure how to get to California. Her private railroad car had long been sold; the siding tracks at Florham had rusted. She would never use a public train, and at eighty-one, she was not about to try flying. The only way to get there would be by automobile, but in the midst of the Great Depression, she was concerned that her maroon Rolls-Royce would be too conspicuous and might be stopped by robbers or kidnappers. She hit upon a solution. She dressed as her maid and sat in the front seat of the Rolls next to her chauffeur. Her maid rode in the backseat, dressed as Mrs. Twombly.
At the wedding, she viewed with mild interest the large group of Hollywood celebrities, and then turned to a relative from New York. “In my day,” she remarked quietly, “we had the celebrities. Now, if you please, the celebrities have us.”30
And so it went, year after year: spring at Florham, followed by an imperial procession of Mrs. Twombly’s fifteen maroon Rolls-Royces taking her and Miss Ruth and the servants to Vinland for the summer, back to Florham for the fall, and then to the seventy-room town house on Fifth Avenue for the winter season. On and on, until August 26, 1947, when Mrs. Twombly was injured in an automobile accident in Newport, which left her bedridden. On April 11, 1953, at the age of ninety-eight, the last surviving granddaughter of the Commodore passed away.
“When Grandma died,” her grandson reflected, “so did Florham. I wondered what would happen to the three men who did nothing but rake the gravel drives; to McFadyen, the head gardener, and his thirty men who nursed the orchids and manicured the grounds; to the man who always chased me and then snitched to my mother when I stole strawberries; to Allen, who was in charge of the farm, and his twelve men, who fed and milked and washed and polished the prize herd of thirty guernsey cows until they shone like gold: to Frederick, the head butler, who always greeted us at the front door at Florham; to the two men that did nothing but polish silver, and the man that washed dishes all day, and the four footmen who woke you up, served you breakfast, lunch and dinner, pressed your clothes and drew your bath; to the eight maids who cleaned and dusted the forty bedrooms and twenty-five bathrooms with woodburning fireplaces, the two dining rooms, and four living rooms, and that long hall that had no end. What would happen to Monsieur Donon, chef par excellence, culinary artist of the century, and his four assistants? What would happen to the full-time painters, bricklayers, and furniture repairmen who kept Florham looking like new; to the twelve men who watched over Vinland and the wonderful Belgian grapes they raised there; to Grandma’s chauffeur and footman, who opened and closed the door when Grandma got in or out of the car; to Aunt Ruth’s chauffeur and footman; to the man who did nothing but wash their cars? What would become of them? Then there was Miss Curry, Grandma’s housekeeper, who tried to keep one hundred and twenty-six employees happy.”31
The rising costs of fuel and labor, escalating taxes, the shrinking supply of servants: Who could afford to live in a 110-room house on a thousand-acre estate that required a staff of more than a hundred to maintain? Who in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States would want to try? It was over. The life Mrs. Twombly had lived for almost a century was no longer possible. She left a gross estate of $22 million, but taxes took so much out of that—$18,359,807—that after other legacies were paid, not enough remained to make the gifts of $320,000 she had designated for various churches and hospitals.
Miss Ruth died a year and a half later on September 1, 1954, at the age of sixty-nine.
For two days in June 1955 before the Parke-Bernet Galleries of New York held an auction on the premises, Florham was opened to the public, its rooms filled with fresh flowers from the greenhouses as if Mrs. Twombly were presiding. Thirteen thousand sightseers from five states parked along the two-mile drive to the house and on the lawns, come to see how life had once been lived in the Gilded Age. As dealers hurried from room to room, turning over vases, examining paintings with magnifying glasses, measuring rugs, the curious sat down in chairs covered in silk brocade and felt the tapestries. They turned the solid silver knobs on the mahogany doors, tried out the bell system that once had summoned the servants, and wandered through the gardens and around the grounds, peering into the orangery, the playhouse, the stables. Who could resist a peek at how life once had been?
And then the auction.
The magnificent set of tapestries, which had hung in the Barberini Palace for 250 years and at Florham for 58, were sold as a group for $15,000. Who had a wall on which a tapestry fourteen feet high and fourteen feet wide could be displayed? Who had a home that could take a set of seventeen? How about the cut crystal palace chandelier that had graced the ballroom, eight feet high, six feet wide? Fifteen hundred dollars. The marble busts of Roman emperors perched on Siena marble pedestals looking over the great hall were sold for $225 each. A Savonnerie carpet from the great hall, twenty-seven feet long and sixteen feet wide, for $2,000. The twenty-six Regency carved mahogany dining chairs covered in crimson silk damask, for $95 each. The total contents of Florham brought $141,415, with an earlier sale of the contents of the Twombly town house on Fifth Avenue netting $110,260.
And then the massive gates set in the high brick wall by the gatehouse were closed. Save for the birds and the sound of the wind in the perfect trees, Florham was still, the mansion empty and dark. “When Grandma died, so did Florham.” And so did a way of life.
5.
For all that remained, the Gilded Age might just as well have been a lost civilization, evident only to archaeologists digging and sifting to discover traces of a long-forgotten past.
The Commodore’s porticoed mansion on Staten Island with its commanding view of the Upper Bay was demolished in the 1930s. The Harbor Isle Chevrolet agency now occupies the site.
The Empire State Building stands where Mrs. Astor received the Four Hundred in her brownstone at 350 Fifth Avenue.
Sixty-four years after Alva Vanderbilt’s housewarming fancy dress ball on March 26, 1883, not one of the Vanderbilt family mansions that had dominated Fifth Avenue remained: 459, 640, 642, 660, 666, 680, 684, 742–746, 871, each had been demolished.
Where once expectant guests entered Alva’s “little Chateau de Blois” stands the forty-one-story Tishman Building, filled with such businesses as Air France, B. Dalton, Botticelli Shoes, the Seaman’s Bank, and Bantam Books, surmounted by the Top of the Sixes restaurant. In 1987, Sumitomo, the large Japanese bank, bought the building for $500 million, half a billion dollars, at that time the second-highest price ever paid for a Manhattan office building.
Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s block-long 137-room château at 1 West Fifty-seventh Street made way for Bergdorf Goodman.
The stronghold at 640 Fifth Avenue of Grace Vanderbilt, who died of pneumonia at the age of eighty-three in 1953, is now a fifteen-story building housing branches of the Bank of Ireland and Citibank.
An apartment building stands at the site of Florence Vanderbilt Twombly’s seventy-room mansion at 1 East Seventy-first Street.
Some shards of the Vanderbilt mansions remain.
Two limestone relief panels carved for the carriage porch of Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s mansion were placed across the street in the Fifth Avenue entrance of the S
herry-Netherland Hotel. And the ornate wrought-iron gates that once guarded their mansion now form the entrance of the five-acre Conservatory Gardens in the northeastern corner of Central Park.
Where Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s mansion stood on 871 Fifth Avenue is a tall apartment building; in a corner of its lobby is her small bronze sculpture of the goddess Daphne.
Willie Vanderbilt left ten of his paintings that had hung at 660 Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including a Rembrandt, a Gainsborough, and what has been called the “deliciously erotic” Toilet of Venus by Boucher, which had hung in Alva’s bedroom, as well as a gold and black lacquer Louis XVI secretaire and commode bearing the cipher of Marie Antoinette, which are comparable to pieces in the Louvre’s collection and which are still acclaimed today as “the finest” in the Metropolitan.32 And an eight-foot-high Demidroff vase of green malachite, which had stood in the center of the great hall of 640 Fifth Avenue from the day in 1883 when William H. Vanderbilt moved in until the day Grace Vanderbilt was forced to move out in 1945, was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art after her death.
The two massive black iron eagles that once perched on the Grand Central Depot were taken to flank the entrance to Willie K.’s Center-port, Long Island, estate, Eagle’s Nest, and today greet the visitors to this public museum and garden.
The only remaining Vanderbilt building in New York City is, in fact, Grand Central Station, rebuilt in 1903 to replace the original structure the Commodore had erected.
The New York Central itself, for years the bluest of the blue chips, an investment as safe and secure as government bonds, has also disappeared. After peaking in the late 1920s, the freight being carried by the Central declined steadily through the years as trucks, barges, airplanes, and buses cut into its business and as the great established industries of the East grew less vigorously than those in other parts of the nation. Much of the railroad’s equipment became obsolete. Any profits the Central did show were usually the result of its nonrailroad investments.
The Commodore had left control of the Central to his son Billy, and Billy had left it in the hands of his two oldest sons, Cornelius and Willie. All of Cornelius’s sons had died—William, Alfred, Reggie—except Neily, who would have nothing to do with the Central. Willie and Alva’s older son, Willie K., did serve as president of the Central for one year, 1918–1919, but found that he could have more fun aboard his $3 million diesel yacht, the Alva. (He died in 1944 at the age of sixty-six.) His younger brother, Harold, served as a director of the Central for four decades, but devoted his real efforts to defending the America’s Cup successfully three times and to originating contract bridge.
Through a proxy battle in 1954, opposed by management in a defense led by Harold Vanderbilt, Robert Young seized control of the Central with the promise of its revitalization and higher dividends. In January 1958, after a particularly disastrous year during which its stock dropped from 49 to 13, the directors of the Central suspended its quarterly dividend. Five days later, Young, suddenly aware that the eastern railroading business might never recover, shot himself in the billiard room of his Palm Beach mansion.
The only solution to the Central’s problems seemed to be a merger with another line. A union between the New York Central and its arch rival from the days of the Commodore and William Vanderbilt, the Pennsylvania, was first proposed in 1957. After years of hearings and investigations by the Interstate Commerce Commission (whose mandate was that every railroad consolidation be “consistent with the public interest,” a provision in the Interstate Commerce Act that might well have been a legislative reaction to William Vanderbilt’s ill-advised “public be damned” remark), the merger was approved in 1968, creating the Pennsylvania New York Central Transportation Company: the Penn Central, for short.
The consolidation of the two railroad giants created the thirteenth-largest company in the United States, with assets of $5 billion, annual revenues of $1.5 billion, 21,000 miles of track crisscrossing 14 states and Canada, 4,000 locomotives, and 100,000 employees. Studies had shown that the economies and operating efficiencies that could be achieved by combining the railroads would yield savings within several years of $100 million. This did not prove to be the case. The merger of two failing roads created a larger failing company. The New York Central’s earnings in 1967 plunged from the $43 million of the year before to $1 million; the Pennsylvania’s from $45 million to $14 million. In its first year of operation as the Penn Central, the company lost $100 million. By 1970, the foundering giant had filed for bankruptcy. All of its railroad property was transferred to the government’s Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail).
The Fifth Avenue mansions, gone. The New York Central, gone. And the country homes, how did they fare? Idlehour. Marble House. The Breakers. Belcourt Castle. Biltmore. Beaulieu. Wheatley Hills. Vinland. Florham. Not one was used by the next generation.
After Idlehour, Willie and Alva’s eight-hundred-acre property in Oakdale, Long Island, was purchased from Willie’s estate, the plans of the new owners to convert it into a country club went awry. It was sold at foreclosure to the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians, which renamed it Peace Heaven. Among other activities, the metaphysicians adopted a five-month-old baby girl whom they planned to make immortal. Peace Heaven was purchased, again at a foreclosure sale, in September 1941 by a member of the New York Cotton Exchange, who, also finding it too big to manage, offered it in 1945 to help relieve the apartment shortage in New York City and later as a center for the “improvement of international and human relations.” The estate later became the research center for the National Dairy Products corporation. Finally, in the 1960s, it was purchased for $1 million (substantially less than its asking price, $1,750,000) for Adelphi University’s Suffolk campus. The mansion is used for administrative offices, while the carriage house, which at one time held one hundred automobiles, is the gym and theater, and the powerhouse is now a performing arts center.
What of those great Newport summer cottages, Marble House, The Breakers, Belcourt Castle? Writing back in 1907, Henry James had called Newport a “breeding-ground for white elephants,” referring to the elephantine summer cottages that lined Bellevue Avenue. “They look queer and conscious and lumpish—some of them, as with an air of the brandished proboscis, really grotesque—while their averted owners, roused from a witless dream, wonder what in the world is to be done with them. The answer to which, I think, can only be that there is absolutely nothing to be done; nothing but to let them stand there, always, vast and blank, for a reminder to those concerned of the prohibited degrees of witlessness, and of the peculiarly awkward vengeance of proportion and discretion.”33
He had, of course, been right; there was absolutely nothing to be done with these cenotaphs of the Gilded Age.
Marble House had been built for a world that no longer existed, if ever it did anywhere other than in Alva’s imagination. In the sure knowledge that there would always be footmen to open the front door, the ten-ton steel and gilt-bronze entrance grille had been built without outside handles. The one-of-a-kind seventy-pound bronze dining-room chairs could be moved only with the help of a valet. In 1963, seven years before his death, seventy-nine-year-old Harold Vanderbilt, in memory of his mother, Alva, gave the Preservation Society of Newport County funds to purchase Marble House from the Frederick H. Prince Trust. Since then it has been open to the public, visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists each year.
Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt’s youngest child, Gladys, the widow of Hungarian Count Szechenyi, in 1948 leased The Breakers to the Preservation Society of Newport County for one dollar a year. She maintained an apartment on the third floor of the mansion, which once had housed the servants, and there she stayed for several weeks each summer, unseen as she watched the tourists walk through her parents’ summer home to ‘View the remains,” as she termed it.34 Gladys died in 1965. In 1972, the Preservation Society purchased The Breakers from her heirs for $365,000. Today,
her daughter, Countess Anthony Szapary, the granddaughter of Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt, still lives during the summer in the apartment on the third floor of The Breakers with her son, Paul, and daughter, Gladys. “I used to feel embarrassed when people asked where I lived,” said her son. “But as I got older I felt proud. It’s no longer my home…but I feel a strong sense of continuity. The Breakers is full of happy memories. Living here was a blast. It was a great place to play hide-and-seek.”35
Alva Vanderbilt, Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, had sold Belcourt Castle to her brother-in-law, Perry Belmont. The mansion stayed within the Belmont family for several years and then changed hands several times. It was purchased in 1956 by Harold B. Tinney, and is now used by his family as a private residence. It is open to the public, with tours given daily by costumed guides.
After George Vanderbilt’s death in 1914, part of the vast Biltmore estate was sold to the government for the Pisgah National Forest, another part became homesites, and another was used for a section of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Since 1930, the estate, now a national historical site, has been open to the public, with a dairy and a winery, in addition to the admissions, defraying the maintenance expenses.36
Beaulieu, Grace Vanderbilt’s forty-four-room brick mansion in Newport, set on nine acres of property by the sea, was sold by her son Neil in 1955 for $30,000. It is still a private home, though the property has been subdivided. (Several of Grace Vanderbilt’s lavishly beaded and embroidered Worth dresses are occasionally exhibited by the Preservation Society of Newport County to raise money to maintain its collection of “white elephants,”) Neil, who spent his life trying to live down the fact he was a rich man’s son, was into his seventh marriage when he died in 1974 at seventy-six.
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