by Jean Strouse
Next to the elegant figures in Junius’s eighteenth-century portrait gallery, the pictures of his Morgan ancestors looked distinctly plain. When he decided in 1887 to have his own features committed to canvas, he chose Frank Holl, an English artist whose recent subjects included the wealthy Liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain and the Prince of Wales. Holl had specialized in genre scenes before he turned to portraiture; critics complained that he painted “nothing that was not inspired by the coffin or the gallows,” and that his shapeless, colorless Academy pictures “gave everyone the creeps.” His portrait of Junius gave Jack Morgan the creeps when he saw it at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1887: Jack thought it looked “lopsided,” and did not “make Grandpa out as handsome as he really is.”
Junius liked the picture well enough to commission another, of his son, in 1888. This painting (which turned out to be Holl’s last—he died a few weeks after completing it) portrays Pierpont in black against a black background, with highlights on his head and hands. His receding hair is gray, his eyebrows and mustache still dark. His waistcoat pulls across his ample girth, and though he hooks his right arm casually over the back of his chair, he looks anything but relaxed, regarding the artist/viewer with a challenging stare.
Holl minimized what had begun, in Morgan’s early fifties, to be his most recognizable physical attribute, the disfiguring growth of his nose. The painter’s brushstrokes blur this feature slightly into shadow—a visual euphemism that makes it hard to tell shade from flesh. Pierpont liked the painting, and ordered photographs of it, by the “late lamented artist,” to give to friends.
He had always paid fastidious attention to the details of his appearance. He favored milled soaps, colognes, silver-backed hairbrushes, and all the masculine accoutrements of collars, ascots, tiepins, watch fobs, cuff links, gloves. In ordering a captain’s cap for the New York Yacht Club, he was concerned with proportion: since the size (7⅝ inches) was so large, he thought “the top should be rather full.” But no amount of grooming had been able to conceal the eruptions and flushing that marked his face in adolescence, or the disease—rhinophyma—that by 1888 was deforming his nose.† His social and professional self-confidence were too well established to be undermined by this affliction, but as he became an increasingly public figure, his brusque manner and always searching gaze took on dimensions of defiance, as if he dared people to meet him squarely and not shrink from the sight, asserting the force of his character over the ugliness of his face.
Jack, miserable in his first year at Harvard, complained to his mother, “I wish the four years were over so I could get away from here.” He had to force himself to return to college that fall: “It makes me sick to go away from home,” he wrote. “I feel more and more how entirely I hate Cambridge and everything connected with it.”
Harvard had a social hierarchy very much like that of Gilded Age New York, its upper echelons occupied by boys with large means, prep-school backgrounds, entrée to Boston society, and memberships in exclusive social clubs. Jack cheered up once he was elected to the elite sophomore “waiting” club, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and then to the Delphic, one of the “final” clubs that designated social success at Harvard. Not as prestigious as the Porcellian, the Delphic took in “stray young gentlemen not duly appreciated by their contemporaries, but interesting in themselves, some rich, others clever, still others simply agreeable,” recalled one of the “clever” ones, George Santayana (Class of ’86).
Where Pierpont as a young man had been drawn to lectures by famous men and classes with the leading scholars at Göttingen, Jack spent four years at Harvard without mentioning, in his copious letters home, professors William James, Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, Barrett Wendell, Phillips Brooks, or Francis Peabody. He was invited to lunch with the president of the college, Charles W. Eliot, in the winter of his freshman year. Eliot was transforming Harvard from a finishing school for the blue-blooded elite into a top-flight academic university, with intellectual distinction on its faculty and a new diversity among students. Walter Lippmann several years later described Eliot striding across the campus as “a little bit like God walking around.” Jack, dreading his lunch with the great man, told his mother he would “rather die than go. (Burn this letter).”
He did go and did not die, but found the academy in Cambridge, like that at St. Paul’s, contemptuous of the life he was destined to lead. Eliot believed that a great university should stand for “intellectual and spiritual forces against materialism and luxury,” and much of the Harvard faculty regarded commerce with scorn. When one of Jack’s teachers said he was “disgusted” at the idea that the boy would go into banking after college, Jack wrote plaintively to Fanny: “I don’t know why so many people chiefly those who are engaged in tuition or some literary pursuit, seem to look upon business as if it were the general sewer in which all ambition and intelligence disappear or worse get turned to ‘money getting’ arrangements. I must confess I don’t see any harm, myself, in making a little money, provided it can be done honestly and reasonably.”
There was no question of Jack’s going into anything other than banking, although he might have preferred something else. Studying a strain of seaweed in the laboratory of the Harvard botanist William G. Farlow, he managed to prove a theory for the professor, and earned an A in natural history. A sense that other endeavors had more value than “money getting” was not unique to Harvard, and support for Jack’s interest in science came from an unlikely quarter. Egisto Fabbri, writing from Florence, hoped the boy would “nurse and develop” his scientific inclination: “A man situated as he is and will be, can do untold good,” Fabbri told Fanny, “by encouraging & following scientific pursuits, to exercise through his means and his example a most wholesome and beneficent influence and finally make for himself a far more lasting fame and page in history than the most successful business career can possibly vouchsafe.”
Men of science do win more lasting public acclaim than men of business, but that argument carried no weight with Pierpont Morgan. He had no misgivings about his own career, and would maintain the patriarchal line of succession despite his lack of interest in his son.
One Saturday he sent Jack a telegram saying he would be in Boston for a few hours that night and wanted to see him: he would arrive at 6:40 and leave at midnight. Jack worked hard all day in order to be free in the evening. When the train from New York was delayed, he waited under a railroad bridge for an hour in the rain (he told his traveling mother with uncharacteristic sarcasm), “and had the delightful opportunity of driving from the Station to the Club with [Papa] in the same carriage with Mr. Bowdoin and Mr. Depew.” His papa compounded the slight by neglecting to bring any of Fanny’s cables, and disclosing nothing about his summer plans. Jack was more hurt than angry. To Fanny he characterized the visit as “somewhat unsatisfactory. There are certainly some drawbacks to belonging to a busy man no matter how fine he may be as I believe you have sometimes found out.”
Wherever the difficulty between father and son had started, it compounded itself at every turn. Disturbed early on by Jack’s too-intimate alliance with Fanny, Pierpont had withdrawn, and the boy’s terror of his remote “Papa,” along with his self-doubts and hunger for approval, kept widening the distance between them. Pierpont’s own strongest ties had always been to the father who held him to lofty standards, sent him away to school, subjected him to decades of critical scrutiny, and taught him by relentless lecture and example what it meant to be the “right” kind of man. The negative content of Junius’s preaching had been offset by the intensity of attention he directed at his son—but attention was precisely what Pierpont withheld from his son. He seemed not so much critical as indifferent.
At Harvard, as at St. Paul’s, Jack cringed at the prospect of asking for paternal dispensations, though again, most of his requests were granted. Looking forward one February to his summer expedition in the Rockies with Dr. Rainsford, he bowe
d his head in anticipatory submission—“If Papa thinks it is too much luxury for me to spend so much every summer just on my own pleasure, I shall have to accept his idea of course.” He went to the Rockies. At the end of the summer he asked for a horse and permission to smoke, and was astounded by affirmative answers on both counts: “I cannot exactly understand [Papa’s] kindness about the horse,” he told Fanny, but guessed it was a reward for having done well at school.
The experience of another Harvard undergraduate ten years earlier offers a striking contrast. The junior Theodore Roosevelt wrote to the senior from Cambridge in 1876: “I do not think there is a fellow in college who has a family that love him as much as you all do me, and I am sure that there is no one who has a Father who is also his best and most intimate friend, as you are mine.”
Still, Jack found compensations in being Pierpont Morgan’s son. In the summer of 1887 he visited his grandfather in England with his cousin Junius, the son of Sarah and George. Crossing on the White Star’s Germanic, he told Fanny that the name he shared with his father “causes all the stewards to be most attentive and obliging.” He guessed this solicitude indicated “a desire for fees,” but was “not disagreeable.” Not disagreeable, either, was being treated by the Dover House servants as his grandfather’s “heir presumptive,” while his cousin, “being only a daughter’s son is comparatively left out.”
Insecure, snobbish, and shy, Jack displayed none of his father’s early avidity for the opposite sex. At twenty he reported to Fanny that he had kept clear of the one young woman on board the Germanic who could be called a “belle,” because “she struck me as being common. I can fancy Louisa turning up her nose … and saying I am stuck up but I do like girls to seem ladylike.”
In the fall of his senior year, Jack found a young woman who did measure up to his standards. She was Jane Norton Grew, called Jessie, the seventeen-year-old sister of his St. Paul’s and Harvard classmate Edward Grew. He called often at her family’s house on Beacon Street in the winter of 1888–89, and told his mother that Miss Grew seemed responsive to his attentions.
Terrified of what his father would think, however, the status-conscious young lover added: “Tell Papa the Grews are very nice people. If he wants genealogy it is as follows. Mr. Grew belongs through his mother to the great Sturgis tribe here in Boston.… Mrs. G. was a Miss Wigglesworth, a great name in Cambridge and Boston both. So you see they have an inherited right to be nice if they want to.” He had been attracted by the “tone of their family line” on his visits to Ned, he assured Fanny, well “before any other feeling came in.”
His “other feeling” was soon so strong that he wanted to marry Jessie, and early in March, with Fanny abroad, he went to New York to discuss the situation with his father. Pierpont was in Washington when Jack arrived, and did not get home until three in the morning. Over breakfast a few hours later, the young man took a deep breath and “managed to blurt out the trouble I am in.” He told Fanny that his “Papa” seemed “naturally very much surprised, I fear not agreeably so”—but “did not laugh at me” or seem “angry at my having let myself go.” After “getting at a few facts” over breakfast, the elder Morgan promised to discuss the situation further that night.
Jack waited all day “in fear and trembling for the half hour before dinner,” he continued to his mother. “I shall try to obey him in what he advises if possible.” The more he saw of Jessie, the surer he was of his “wise choice,” and though he hesitated to say so in writing (he said in writing), he was “becoming more hopeful of final success.”
Pierpont was about to leave on his annual spring trip to Europe. In the half hour before dinner that night he promised Jack he would go to Boston after he returned, to “see what is to be done.” Not quite believing that the fateful moment had passed so easily, Jack proffered Jessie’s pedigree to strengthen his case. The senior Morgan, less given than the junior to bloodline worship, said, “I am quite willing to take her fitness and fineness for granted,” and concluded simply, “I’ll help you.”
Jack was delirious. “Nothing could have been sweeter or more tender than his management and treatment of the whole matter,” he told his mother: “my head and heart are both so full of it that I can think and write of nothing else.” He was hoping to go to Europe with Ned Grew after graduation to study French and German, and found the encouraging “attitude of Grew père on the subject … most pleasant … [and] flattering. I am afraid I care more for approval than is right.”
Accustomed as he was to sharing all his troubles and pleasures with his mother, Jack assumed she would be thrilled by his romantic prospects. He was wrong. On receiving these letters, Fanny confessed to Louisa her “sickening disappointment” when she realized that “the son who has been so much to me, has passed out of my home life forever!” She could not imagine that Jessie would refuse him. Generalizing her dismay, Fanny said she disliked “these young attachments,” yet felt that Jack was “not like other men in these matters—and I think this is a deeply serious matter with him.”
Jack graduated from Harvard in June of 1889 with an honorable mention in natural history, then did go abroad with Ned Grew. When he returned late that fall, he went to work as an apprentice to Junius’s former partner Jacob Rogers. He and Jessie announced their engagement in the winter of 1890, and were married in Boston’s Arlington Street Church at the end of the year.
The younger Morgan girls, Juliet and Anne, were more rebellious than Louisa or Jack and more independent of their parents. Louisa described Anne to their father as “irresistibly funny, in spite of her naughtiness.” Jack found Anne baffling: he told Louisa that she seemed “hard to get at and yet has ideas and thoughts hidden away somewhere, which come out at unexpected moments, in the most extraordinary way.” He thought time might improve her, and hoped it would hurry up.
With Pierpont monopolizing Louisa at home and abroad, Juliet filled in with Fanny—warming her mother’s slippers at night, listening to her confidences, sympathizing with her “blues.” She took a more sardonic view of the job than her predecessor did, reporting from London one night that Fanny had gotten herself “sort of worked up and excited and generally in a stew”—“she’s been lying awake ‘thinking things over’ and you know what the result of that is!” Juliet escaped into her own social world as soon as she could, and as she slipped away, Fanny turned to Anne, “who has never had the same chance with me that the rest of you have had” (she told Louisa)—“so I want her, before she grows altogether away from me, to be with me, dependent on me as I on her, and it will be good for us both.”
The Morgan girls were not beauties. Louisa had a tranquil sweetness in her face and Anne carried herself well, but they both inherited Pierpont’s square jaw and their parents’ tendency toward amplitude. Juliet was the prettiest of the three, with a slim waist and large, dark eyes. She joked about her diminutive physique, which was not the Victorian ideal: being a “ready-made size” had its consolations, she told Louisa—“I really am very inexpensive, you’ve no idea what a difference it makes.… I don’t have to do half the trying on I shld otherwise.”
Louisa, as the eldest, should have been the first to marry. She was twenty-four when Jack announced his engagement to Jessie. Her mother took her to balls and dinners expressly for the purpose of meeting eligible men, which resulted in a couple of eminently resistible proposals. Gossip linked her name to bachelors in America and Europe, and English newspapers referred to her as “Miss Pierpont Morgan,” emphasizing her potential net worth.
Mr. Pierpont Morgan showed little interest in promoting her marital prospects. For all his fondness and material indulgence, he did not seem to imagine that his special girl might want a life of her own. He appreciated her value to him—as traveling companion, confidante, surrogate wife—and probably convinced himself, if he thought about it at all, that she derived as much benefit from the arrangement as he did. Making the social rounds with him in London one spring, Louisa plaintively told F
anny that she felt “like the heroine of a novel only that there is no sign of a hero!” and, “I sometimes think at these parties that I would like to meet some of the young men—they are so good-looking! This sounds ungrateful, and is entre nous.”
Her father’s standards did not ease the task of finding a hero. In the spring of 1889 Louisa was amused to hear rumors of her engagement to two different men, Fred Freylinghuysen and Charles Dickey. “The funny part” was that the gossips “should have hit upon the two men who would suit Papa if it were true—the only two so far as I can judge.”
Pierpont had clear preferences among his siblings as well as his children. He saw his eldest sister, Sarah, and her husband, George, more out of duty than pleasure—they lived on East 40th Street in New York, and had a large summer “cottage” in Lenox, Massachusetts. His youngest sister, Juliet, living on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, was almost as troubled as her mother. Erratic and emotionally unstable, she indulged in such extravagant spending sprees that Junius put her on an allowance, just as he had his wife. Fanny found Juliet’s “untruthfulness” to be “rather a want of perception than anything more serious … perhaps a part of the general consequence of her mind.”
The “general consequence” of the Lord/Pierpont genes seemed to be mood disorders. Pierpont Morgan medicated himself with hard work, ocean voyages, spa cures, and frenetic social activity, but was never able to stave off the depressions that alternated with his periods of equanimity. His mother and this sister cycled through more incapacitating extremes. Juliet’s husband, the Reverend John B. Morgan, rector at the American Episcopal Church in Paris, did not play much part in the extended family. One spring Sunday Louisa described his sermon in Paris as “awful”: “Uncle John is trying to preach extemporaneously.… It reminded me of nothing so much as Old Mother Hubbard.… Papa read the hymnal all the time.”