43. Balsan, p. 184.
44. Ibid., p. 82.
45. Ibid., p. 28.
46. Ibid., p. 68.
47. Ibid., p. 195.
48. Ibid., p. 125.
49. Ibid., pp. 126-127.
50. Ibid., p. 77.
51. Ibid., p. 152.
52. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, pp. 229-230.
53. Balsan, p. 58.
54. Friedman, pp. 229-230.
55. Ibid., p. 218.
56. Brough, Consuelo: Portrait of an American Heiress, pp. 191-192.
57. Friedman, p. 188.
58. Ibid., p. 235.
59. Balsan, p. 239.
60. Ibid., p. 238.
61. Belmont Memoirs, p. 166.
62. Ibid., p. 141.
63. Perkins Library, Matilda Young Papers, Matilda Young to her mother, July 31, 1932.
64. Lehr, pp. 173-174.
65. Balsan, p. 287.
66. O’Connor, The Golden Summers, p. 196.
67. Decies, Turn of the World, p. 176. Alva offered to pay Sara Bard Field $1,000 a month for three months to live with her at Marble House during the summer of 1917 and to help her write her memoirs. Field needed the money and knew she would accept the offer, but wrote to a friend, “I shall pay in spiritual coin for every copper I get from her. She is a terror and I cringe at the thought of her buying me.” After working with her for several weeks, Field described Alva Belmont as “hard, flinty, brutal to her inferiors. She is a queer, smart, calculating old lady.’ At the end of the summer, she wrote, “O, I am so tired of her….She is so metallic with all her good points—so non-sensitive. I wish I were through with this job. All the money in Wall St. could not tempt me to live with her. No. No. Two hundred years from now the book [Alva Belmont’s memoirs] will, I hope, have some significance as a voice from an exterminated class…as an inditement [sic] of a monstrosity—for that is what this over-rich element are. I hate them—their ideas, their psychology. Yes, yes, they are the unfortunate results of a bad system and an evil environment—so are the smelly, diseased poor. But both are loathsome. I learned of more black, black sin—(ugly living) in those six weeks in Newport than in all the rest of my life put together.” (Huntington Library, C.E.S. Wood Collection, Sara Bard Field to C.E.S. Wood, undated [August or September, 1917], Box 280.)
68. Maxwell, R.S.V.P., p. 106.
69. New York Sun, January 26, 1933.
70. New York Herald Tribune, January 27? 1933.
71. Maxwell, pp. 108-109.
72. Schlesinger Library, Doris Stevens Papers, memorandum of Doris Stevens, Folder 285.
73. Maxwell, R.S.V.P., p. 106
74. Ibid., p. 108.
75. Decies, p. 178.
76. Ibid., p. 260.
77. Maxwell, p. 212.
78. Schlesinger Library, Doris Stevens Papers, Alva E. Belmont to Doris Stevens, April 5, 1929, Folder 292.
79. Belmont Memoirs, p. 110a.
80. Alva had sold Belcourt Castle to Oliver Belmont’s brother, Perry, in 1916, and in the early 1930s saved it from a tax sale by advancing $10,000 to Perry Belmont.
81. Schlesinger Library, Doris Stevens Papers, memorandum of Doris Stevens, Folders 285, 292.
82. Schlesinger Library, Doris Stevens Papers, Alva E. Belmont to Doris Stevens, December 8, 1932, Folder 292.
83. Maxwell, p. 110.
84. Decies, p. 164.
85. Iris Calderhead Walker, “A Tribute,” Washington News, January 8, 1933.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, p. 166.
2. New York World, October 29, 1899.
3. A year before, in April of 1899, Justice Fitzsimmons of the City Court of New York had fined Neily $100 for failing to respond to a summons for jury duty, and had given him a lecture on citizenship: “As a matter of fact, I don’t want men of young Vanderbilt’s station. What interest have they in suits for small amounts that they would have to consider here? I might want their fathers, because they earned their money and know its value.” (Friedman, p. 166.)
4. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, pp. 151-153.
5. “I shopped at Tiffany’s,” Neily wrote to Grace in 1901 while she was at Hot Springs, Virginia, “and bought a little gold watch for Sonny’s birthday and arranged with my Secretary to pay your bills. The foreign ones sum up about $13,000. Fortunately, the Β and O has had a further rise and little O’Neill is about $40,000 richer than he was two weeks ago. Of course I had this on inside information and will soon sell out of that stock.” (Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 154.)
6. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 170.
7. Ibid., p. 171.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 174.
10. Ibid., p. 178.
11. Lehr, “King Lehr” and the Gilded Age, p. 137.
12. The North Star was constructed by the shipbuilder Harreshoff, who built three other yachts that year: one for William K. Vanderbilt, one for August Belmont, and one for Harry Whitney.
13. In 1902, Neily caught typhoid. For days on end, his temperature remained at 104, and he was attended by four doctors and three nurses. Grace refused to leave his room, wiping his head with alcohol and helping the nurses wrap him in rubber sheets and cover him with blocks of ice. During this siege, Grace’s honey-blond hair turned white. For twenty-one days his fever persisted. Reports on his health were issued hourly by his doctors and reported in the papers, but Neily’s mother, Alice Vanderbilt, saw no reason to return from her stay in Europe. When his temperature reached 105, the New York Times reported that if he could make it through that day, he would recover. When Alice Vanderbilt finally returned from Europe, she was asked at the dock about the possibility of a reconciliation with Neily and Grace. “No comment” was her only reply, as she headed straight to her mansion, never stopping to visit her son.
14. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 211.
15. Ibid., p. 214.
16. Ibid., pp. 216-217.
17. The Vanderbilts had purchased the mansion for $450,000 in 1904.
18. Croffut, The Vanderbilts and the Story of Their Fortune, p. 306. When a book publisher bought the mansion next to the Vanderbilts’ home at 677 Fifth Avenue in 1912 and planned to build a twelve-story building there, Neily and Grace decided to move farther up Fifth Avenue, purchasing a lot between Seventy-first and Seventy-second streets for $700,000. Their intention, as reported in the press, was “to build on it one of the most elaborate homes in the city.” (New York Times, February 19, 1912.) Those plans were aborted when Neily inherited 640 Fifth Avenue.
19. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 240.
20. New York Times, August 20, 1916.
21. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 285.
22. Ibid., p. 287.
23. Belmont, The Fabric of Memory, p. 106.
24. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, pp. 78-82.
25. Vanderbilt, Man of the World, p. 337.
26. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 3.
27. Ibid., pp. 193-198.
28. Ibid., pp. 296, 298.
29. Ibid., p. 172.
30. Ibid., p. 281.
31. Ibid., p. 239.
32. Ibid., p. 220.
33. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, p. 7.
34. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 165. ‘The President is downstairs,” Grace told her children when family friend Theodore Roosevelt stopped in for a visit. “You will shake hands with him but you are not to annoy him with your silly questions.” (Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, p. 13.)
35. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, p. 10.
36. Ibid., p. 11.
37. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 248.
38. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, pp. 20-21.
39. Ibid., p. 23.
40. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 167.
41. Vanderbilt, Man of the World, p. 7.
42.
Ibid.
43. Ibid., pp. 14-15.
44. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 254.
45. Vanderbilt, Man of the World, p. 11.
46. Ibid., p. 75.
47. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, pp. 18-19. It was at boarding school that Neil was first introduced to the wider world. Neily took his son to New Hampshire on the train with many of the other New York City boys attending the preparatory school. Neily insisted that, as usual, he and his son dress formally for dinner. They then made their way to the public diner. “I thought I detected a few snickers as we strolled into the crowded dining car full of business-suited New Englanders and noisy small boys,” Neil recalled. ‘The steward, however, snapped to attention immediately and ushered us past a long line of waiting people. ‘Good evening, Mr. Vanderbilt. This way, sir.’
“‘Look at the limey,’ I heard a boy remark loudly across the aisle. ‘And listen to him,’ he hooted, imitating the broad English ‘a’ I had been taught to use since childhood, ‘I cawn’t make up my mind, Fawther, what to have for dinnah.’ “(Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 222.)
“Do you think,” Grace wrote to her son during his second term at St. Paul’s, “you would be more comfortable if I got you a short jacket lined with sheepskin and corduroy knickers lined with leather like the workmen I saw in Concord? I asked where I could get them and they said in Boston. Surely none of the boys would jump on you for this, as they are American and workmen’s things….” (Ibid., p. 237.)
48. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 229.
49. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, p. 35.
50. Ibid., pp. 38-40.
51. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, p. 8.
52. Ibid., p. 127.
53. Ibid., p. 53.
54. Andrews, The Vanderbilt Legend, p. 371.
55. Vanderbilt, Man of the World, p. 34.
56. Ibid., p. 34.
57. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, p. 56.
58. Andrews, p. 373.
59. Vanderbilt, Man of the World, p. 37.
60. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, pp. 68-70.
61. Vanderbilt, Man of the World, p. 42.
62. Vanderbilt, Farewell to Fifth Avenue, p. 10.
CHAPTER NINE
1. As usual, the wedding gifts from members of the Vanderbilt family were extraordinary. Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt gave a tiara and collar of diamonds; Miss Gladys Vanderbilt, a chain of diamonds and rubies; Mr. and Mrs. Alfred G. Vanderbilt, a stomacher of diamonds; Mr. and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, a diamond and emerald pin; Mr. and Mrs. Frederick W. Vanderbilt, a ring set with diamonds and emeralds; Mrs. Elliott F. Shepard, a set of twenty-four gold dessert plates; Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Twombly, a pair of silver candelabra; Mr. and Mrs. George Vanderbilt, a set of massive silver dishes. (Friedman, p. 146.)
2. New York American, December 2, 1902.
3. Andrews, The Vanderbilt Legend, pp. 379-380.
4. Gardiner, Canfield, p. 222.
5. Ibid., p. 208.
6. New York American, December 3, 1902.
7. Andrews, p. 381.
8. Gardiner, p. 305.
9. Hoyt, The Vanderbilts and Their Fortune, p. 392.
10. Cathleen sued for divorce in 1919; Reggie did not contest.
11. Alfred had been a professional horseman, breeding one hundred Thoroughbreds at his Oakland Farm stables, which included regulation-size polo grounds. He held the New York-Philadelphia record for coaching, racing between two points in a hansom coach with fresh teams of horses waiting at various stops. In addition to Oakland Farms, he also built an estate in the Adirondacks, Sagamore Lodge, which included fifteen hundred acres around Sagamore Lake, and while in New York stayed in a suite of rooms on the top floor of The Vanderbilt, his hotel on Park Avenue.
He had married Miss Elsie French in 1901. His wife sued for divorce in 1908, alleging that Alfred had been unfaithful. The allegation was that he had taken Agnes O’Brien Ruiz, the wife of a Cuban diplomat, aboard his private railroad car, The Wayfarer. In 1911 he married Margaret McKim, the daughter of the man who made a fortune with Bromo Seltzer.
On May 1, 1915, Alfred Vanderbilt sailed for England aboard the Lusitania to work for the British Red Cross. ‘The Germans would not dare to attack this ship.’ Alfred told newsmen as he boarded the Lusitania. ‘They have disgraced themselves and never in our time will they be looked upon by any human being valuing his honor, save with feelings of contempt. How can Germany, after what she has done, ever think of being classed as a country of sportsmen and of honor on a par with America, England and France?” On the afternoon of May 7, 1915, off the coast of Ireland, Germany dared to attack the ship, ramming it with several torpedoes.
“Find all the kiddies you can, boy,” Alfred directed his valet after the first explosion, as he helped the women and children to the lifeboats, giving his own life belt to a female passenger. Alfred Vanderbilt went down with the liner.
“Vanderbilt was absolutely unperturbed,” a survivor remembered. “He stood there, the personification of sportsmanlike coolness. In my eyes he was the figure of a gentleman waiting for a train.” (Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 243.)
“Did he wish to give it up [the seat assigned to him on the lifeboat] to someone else, or was he glad that fate had taken out of his hands the predicament of living,” one of his friends wondered, “that daily, self-made fabrication of occupations and pleasures, that dreary, desperate difficulty of touching reality at any point, which has wearied so many of the very rich into forms of unconsciousness a good deal less clean than death?” (Strange, Who Tells Me True, pp. 134-135.)
12. Goldsmith, Little Gloria…Happy at Last, p. 229.
13. Knickerbocker, “The Vital Vanderbilts,” February 1940, p. 84.
14. Vanderbilt and Furness, Double Exposure, pp. 20-21.
15. Ibid., p. 82.
16. The New Yorker, November 8, 1934, p. 36.
17. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 88.
18. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 83.
19. Ibid., p. 84.
20. Ibid., p. 89.
21. Ibid., p. 87.
22. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 92.
23. Vanderbilt and Furness, pp. 90,96; Brown, Champagne Cholly, p. 106.
24. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 93.
25. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 93.
26. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 93.
27. Ibid., p. 94.
28. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 94.
29. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 93.
30. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 95.
31. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 95.
32. Ibid.
33. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 97.
34. Ibid., p. 98.
35. Ibid., p. 99.
36. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 12.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., p. 11.
39. Ibid., p. 115.
40. Ibid., p. 117.
41. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 113.
42. Ibid., p. 136.
43. Ibid., p. 137.
44. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 126.
45. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 137.
46. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 126.
47. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 153.
48. Vanderbilt, Once Upon a Time, pp. 3-4.
49. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 155.
50. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 132.
51. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 156.
52. Goldsmith, p. 497.
53. Ibid., p. 128.
54. Margetson, The Long Party, p. 228.
55. Ibid.
56. Goldsmith, p. 155.
57. Ibid., p. 276.
58. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 149.
59. Goldsmith, p. 497.
60. Friedman, p. 586.
61. Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 179.
62. Ibid., p. 180.
63. Goldsmith,
p. 31.
64. Ibid., pp. 142-143. Grandmother Morgan did everything she could to interfere with their relationship. Once Gloria left Paris for a trip to Biarritz with Prince Hohenlohe. When they arrived, there was a message from her mother waiting at the hotel. The baby had developed tuberculosis and was dying. There was no night train back to Paris, so Gloria hired a car and had the driver race to Paris. She arrived back at her apartment early in the morning and found her daughter’s room empty. Panic stricken, she was sure little Gloria had been taken to a hospital.
“Well, you’re back,” her mother called from down the hall.
“Where is Gloria, Mamma?”
“Why, in the park with her nurse,” her mother answered without emotion. “Where else would she be at this time of day?”
“But you told me she was dying.”
“She is better,” her mother replied. (Vanderbilt and Furness, p. 208.)
65. Vanderbilt, Once Upon a Time, p. 12. One night little Gloria opened the door of her mother’s room and saw “there on the bed, the long arms and legs of praying mantises battling one with the other.” (Ibid., p. 15.)
66. Vanderbilt and Furness, pp. 222-223.
67. Ibid.
68. Vanderbilt, Once Upon a Time, p. 22.
69. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 164.
70. Grandmother Morgan lived very frugally and complained constantly that she was destitute, but under the bed in a wide chest she kept an ermine cape that she was saving for the right occasion, which never came, and in her jewel box was a tiara of emeralds. When she died in 1956, she left assets of $542,677.
71. Vanderbilt, Once Upon a Time, p. 28.
72. Vanderbilt, Without Prejudice, p. 329.
73. Goldsmith, pp. 189-190.
74. Ibid., p. 190.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., p. 192.
77. Ibid., p. 145.
78. Friedman, p. 66.
79. Ibid., p. 93.
80. Ibid., p. 160.
81. Ibid., p. 157.
82. Ibid., p. 158.
83. Once when stopped for speeding, going eighteen miles an hour on Central Park West, Harry Whitney was asked his occupation. “I don’t know what name to give that,” he replied. (Friedman, p. 207.)
84. Friedman, p. 188.
85. Ibid., p. 158.
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