by Jean Strouse
Lady Victoria Sackville, with whom Morgan had a romantic skirmish late in his life, wrote in her diary: “I have never met anyone as attractive; one forgets his nose entirely after a few minutes, as his eyes are either twinkling or full of kindness and expression.… He is … a wonderful man.” That he was also a rich and powerful one added immeasurably to the appeal.
Edith Randolph apparently forgot his nose as well. She became very much part of his life in the early 1890s, dining at 219, visiting Cragston, joining the parties on his yacht, while Morgan kept his wife on the other side of the Atlantic. In February 1891 Juliet escorted Fanny abroad. She complained of the chore to Louisa, but reflected, “it isn’t as bad as if she were at home with all the rest of the scrimmage going on outside,” and begged: “Oh Isa, do get Papa to telegraph a little more often. Mother gets into such a [state] not hearing, and he needn’t say anything more than—all well love—only it makes a great difference to her.”
Fanny stayed in Europe all that spring and summer. She wrote from Germany that she was storing up “big supplies of health for the home-life and duties, when they come again,” and worried about her husband in New York’s summer heat. Hearing in July that he had been to two Hartford funerals, then gone off on the yacht with Edith, she hoped he “enjoyed his visit with Mrs. Randolph after his hard days at Hartford.” Edith’s father had recently died, and Fanny continued to Louisa: “You do not tell me whether her father’s death leaves her any better off, in money matters—and you know that subject of people’s means of support is my besetting curiosity!”
Her curiosity was somewhat misplaced. Having been banished to Europe for nine months with no idea when she would be summoned home, she learned her fate in October: “Cable from Pierpont deciding that we must stay over here all winter.”
Jack told her “it hurt us all to have the cable go,” but he feared New York “in the gay and busy season would undo all the great gain you have … made,” and urged her not to feel that “we love you … any the less because we are driven to the opinion which Father expressed in his cable.”
Pierpont engineered a change of companions a month later, bringing Louisa to join Fanny for the winter and taking Juliet home. He could not, however, consign his wife to permanent exile. When she finally returned to New York in the autumn of 1892, after nearly two years abroad, the discord in their marriage was an open secret. Jack told his brother-in-law Ned Grew that a recent dinner party had been “quite a success.… Papa & Mamma are behaving with strict propriety”—which implied that often they did not.
In New York, Fanny recorded Edith’s visits in her diaries, but said nothing about the fact that “P.” constantly arrived and left with his beautiful friend. Everyone was treating the presence of Mrs. Randolph with studied equanimity, and Morgan included enough other people in his parties to muffle the truth.
Divorce was not an option. Like his father, Pierpont regarded marriage as permanent, no matter how difficult. Not only religious vows but professional utility and social propriety bound the Morgan men to their wives. Divorce would shatter a banker’s image of conservative decorum, and in the upper reaches of their late-Victorian world, a divorced woman would be an object of scandal even if she had done nothing wrong. Pierpont had too strong a sense of duty to abandon his wife to that fate and too much sense of entitlement to his own pleasures to abandon his extramarital pursuits.
People in their circle did get divorced. Alice Mason, ostracized for her “outrageous” behavior by puritanical Boston, had removed herself to Europe. And Fanny’s old friend Adele Stevens—who so admired Pierpont’s “grand noble scale”—left her husband in 1886 to travel in France with the Marquis Charles Maurice Camille de Talleyrand-Périgord. She sold her Newport and New York houses, and divorced Fred Stevens on grounds of nonsupport—an odd claim, as she had brought the fortune to their marriage. (Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne bought the Stevens mansion at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue for $600,000, and gave it to his sister, Flora Whitney.) The Marquis divorced his inconvenient spouse—another American heiress, the former Elizabeth Curtis—and married Adele in January 1887. His father, the third Duc de Dino, conferred his title on the groom at Adele’s request, perhaps because Bessie Curtis insisted on remaining the Marquise de Talleyrand-Périgord.†
Americans from Cape May to Bar Harbor cut Adele off, and most of her former friends sided with her first husband. Fanny told Louisa in April that Fred Stevens had not been out in society since the “bad news” of Adele’s remarriage, and she was giving him a dinner: “I am glad to be the person to break the ice for him.” She also stayed in touch with Adele’s daughter, her namesake, and urged Louisa to see the girl in Paris, but “do not accept any invitation to lunch or dinner or anything from her Mother.” Louisa replied, “Of course I should not think of going to Aunt Adele—even if Papa allowed me to. I doubt if she asks me though.”
Her “Papa” would probably have allowed her to see Adele. Like his own father, he took a more European view of other people’s private lives than many of their compatriots did, and had little use for bourgeois convention. Both Morgan men carried on substantial affairs outside their marriages, and were not overly concerned with Old Testament Thou Shalt Nots.
Whatever strictures Pierpont imposed on his associates had to do not with morality but with discretion. In a famous, probably apocryphal anecdote that nonetheless captures the essence of his attitude, he is said to have called a young partner at the bank into his office one day and reproved him for having been caught in an adulterous affair.
“But sir,” objected the sinner in surprise, “you and the other partners do the same thing yourselves behind closed doors.”
“Young man”—Morgan shot him an icy stare—“that is what doors are for!”
He had the resources to close all the doors he liked—on his yacht, in European hotels, at the houses of friends—and he surrounded himself with people he trusted not to talk. A hundred years later, the nonagenarian offspring of his confidants refuse to discuss this aspect of his life. Smiling discreetly, they honor the code of silence required for his friendship with their parents. If he tried to reconcile his religious beliefs with his violations of the Seventh Commandment, reflects one, it would have been “with his tongue in his cheek—amused at the fact that he could do naughty things and still be part of the church. He felt perfectly justified in whatever he chose to do.”
Still, people who were not bound to him by friendship did talk, others wrote things down, and Morgan himself left traces he never thought anyone would find. Given his growing prominence and the curiosity of the public and press, it would have been impossible to conceal his affairs altogether. And though he firmly shut the doors, there was nothing furtive in his conduct.
Gossip exaggerated his exploits. People talked of illegitimate children, prostitutes in Westchester apartments, an affair with the actress Maxine Elliott.‡ One legend, crediting him with Priapean prowess, said he built New York’s Lying-In Hospital to take care of all the pregnancies he was responsible for—which probably amused him: there was a less lurid explanation for his connection with the Lying-In.
Edith Randolph introduced him to several of her friends in the early 1890s, among them an attractive obstetrician named James W. Markoe. Morgan had always taken a special interest in maternity and childbearing—when Fanny was miserable at the beginning of her unwanted fifth pregnancy, he had wished “I could do it for you.” He quickly made a friend of Dr. Markoe, who had earned his MD at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, trained in surgery at New York Hospital, and studied obstetrics at Munich’s Frauenklinic.
At P&S, as at other American medical schools, obstetrics students attended didactic lectures and “never came within a mile of touching a patient,” recalled one of Markoe’s associates. Most never even witnessed childbirth as part of their training. Midwives handled nearly half the births in New York in the eighties, and Markoe had learned obstetrics on manikins. In Germany in 1887
, however, he and a colleague, Samuel W. Lambert, went into women’s homes to observe and assist at deliveries, and returned to New York determined to make experience with childbirth mandatory for American obstetrical students.
When P&S rejected their proposal to set up a clinic for outpatient care and physician training, Markoe and Lambert went ahead on their own. In 1890 they opened a midwifery dispensary in a tenement at 312 Broome Street in lower Manhattan for immigrant women who had no access to medical care. They raised the initial money themselves, and studied the example of the Boston Lying-In.
Shortly after the dispensary opened, Markoe invited local policemen in for supper. They thought he was running an abortion clinic and looking to pay them off, but once they heard his plans and toured the facilities, they sent neighborhood women for free obstetrical services. Except in complicated cases, the births still took place in the women’s homes, with doctors and students attending. The dispensary treated 199 patients its first year, 955 the next, and 2,582 in 1892, when it expanded into a second building next door. Just as Markoe and Lambert had hoped, it also succeeded as a training facility: in 1893, 360 students completed its two-week course in clinical obstetrics.
Edith Randolph helped run the dispensary kitchen, giving out milk, cereal, bread, coffee, and tea to young mothers, most of them unmarried. At some point she brought Morgan to meet Dr. Markoe. The two men liked each other immediately, and before long the obstetrician agreed to become the banker’s personal physician. Since medical specialties were just being established in the late-nineteenth century, doctors who treated diseases “peculiar to women” often had general practices on the side. Markoe saw male patients, including New York City firemen, in his private office after hours at home.
One night in 1893, Markoe arrived late at a dinner party uptown, having spent most of the day performing a rare Caesarean section. Morgan questioned him about the operation in detail. Markoe was less concerned about the surgical procedure than about the woman herself, who had no money and needed more sophisticated care than the dispensary could provide. Morgan told him to get her whatever she needed: he would pay the bills.
In the wake of this incident, doctor and financier agreed that the work of the clinic ought to be expanded, and Morgan made an extraordinary offer: You give up your private practice, he told Dr. Markoe, and I’ll pay for a new hospital and your salary. That way, you can give your time entirely to the hospital and to me. “Mr. Morgan could be very domineering,” recalled Dr. Markoe’s daughter, rubbing an imaginary point under her thumb in illustration, “and Pa was devoted to him.”
Morgan lent Markoe $90,000 in 1893 to buy land for a hospital site at Second Avenue between 17th and 18th streets, a block from St. George’s Church. Four years later he gave $1 million for the new building, then $350,000 more, and sent Markoe abroad to study hospital construction. After the New York Lying-In opened its doors in 1902, Morgan contributed roughly $100,000 a year to its operating costs, and made up the annual deficit for the rest of his life. Someone with a sense of humor installed a sign over the maternity hospital’s entrance that said PUSH.
The bargain was vintage Morgan: he chose a highly competent, activist expert, and backed him unconditionally. Both parties got what they wanted. Markoe had a first-class modern hospital, which consolidated women’s healthcare services under one roof, united the previously separate fields of obstetrics and gynecology, and provided women with the best available treatment, while giving medical students and obstetrical nurses excellent training and facilities for research. Moreover, by helping establish childbirth as the province of (male) doctors rather than (female) midwives, he was part of a larger movement to professionalize obstetrics, raising its stature in the medical world. Morgan, for his part, had the pleasure of endowing a project that fascinated him and observing its progress at firsthand; he also secured the exclusive professional care of an intimate friend. He addressed the doctor in letters as “My dear Jim,” and signed himself “Devotedly yours.”
Markoe treated Morgan’s depressions as well as his head colds. According to the doctor’s daughter, “whenever Mr. Morgan achieved something tremendous, he felt simply great—at the absolute top of the world. Then at other times he would go into these terrible blue slumps, and Pa was the only person who could cheer him up. A call would come, often late at night or early in the morning, for him to go down to see Mr. Morgan. In the early years, a carriage would be sent to fetch him, later a car and chauffeur. Pa would go down to 219 and work on [Morgan], tell him stories, make him laugh. I remember him coming home one day saying, ‘Whew! That was a session!’ ” The content of these “sessions” remained private.
Markoe probably provided his eminent patient with contraceptive expertise and perhaps on occasion with abortions. Edith Randolph was young enough to bear more children in the 1890s, and she managed not to.§
Morgan turned to various kinds of men for help over the years—business colleagues, lawyers, nautical experts, art dealers, scholars, clergymen, physicians—but Dr. Markoe was the one he came to rely on most intimately. Like Dr. Rainsford, Markoe was devoting his primary professional energies to the poor—people whom Morgan, according to his son-in-law, “really did not understand.” The banker had more personal interest in Markoe’s pregnant mothers than he did in Rainsford’s urban slum dwellers: taking care of women, especially sick women (pregnancy at the time was considered a kind of illness), had been a constant theme in his own life, and in a curious way he identified with women’s suffering—he had experienced Memie’s symptoms when he went abroad a few years after her death, and had always been, like his mother and Fanny, vulnerable to physical ailments and depression. Markoe’s work, however, dealt with the miraculous business of childbirth, not with the “nerves” and consumption that had caused such pain in the Morgan family.
In taking care of people he liked, most of what Morgan could provide was material. What he wanted in return was of another order. The two men to whom he was closest had chosen professions—one medical, the other spiritual—that tended to human suffering. In exchange for being able to depend on Markoe and Rainsford in his own moments of need, he underwrote their attentions to others.
A fourth member of the Morgan-Randolph-Markoe circle in the early 1890s was a slender beauty with sculptured cheekbones named Annette Wetmore. She had married one of her cousins, William Boerum Wetmore (which made her Annette Wetmore Wetmore), but he turned out to be a “bad lot,” recalled one of her daughters—a gambler, idler, and bully. Annette left her husband in the early nineties, taking their three children to the Shelburne, Vermont, farm of Lila (Vanderbilt) and William Seward Webb. In 1892 she divorced Wetmore, whom the family referred to from then on as “the unmentionable.”
Even under these extreme circumstances, New York society frowned on divorce, and Mrs. Wetmore took refuge among a few close friends. Morgan gave her financial advice and loans. Many people said he fell in love with her as well. Perhaps he did, but in 1894 Annette Wetmore married James Markoe.
* A series of political letters published in London’s Public Advertiser between 1769 and 1772, under the pseudonym Junius, had attacked George III and other members of the British aristocracy. Speculation attributed the identity of the exceedingly well-read and articulate author to, among others, Gibbon, Burke, Lord Temple, Lyttleton, and William Gerard Hamilton, but Macauley claimed he was Sir Philip Francis—Gibbon’s schoolteacher, later a foreign service officer in India, and assistant to Burke in the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of British India. Macauley’s identification of Francis as “Junius” was later endorsed by William E. Lecky and Leslie Stephen, but did not end the controversy.
† The New York Times on January 27 described society’s “utmost sensation and surprise” at Mrs. Stevens’s desertion of her family for “a Frenchman of no particular attractions, being short and rather stout and decidedly ordinary looking, and being moreover supposed to be deeply in debt.” Not quite as inconse
quential as the Times made him sound, Adele’s Duke was the author of several books, a discerning collector of armor, and a descendant of comte Edmond de Talleyrand-Perigord, nephew of the statesman-diplomat Talleyrand.
‡ Morgan allegedly built her a theater and gave her financial advice, while she made him redesign the rooms on his yacht. Given the resistance Mr. Tams encountered to altering Corsair, this last detail is difficult to credit. Maxine Elliott’s niece/biographer found no evidence of the reputed romance, and Morgan himself left none. When Lady Sackville asked him about the stories in 1912, he denied even knowing Miss Elliott: he had, he said, spoken to her exactly twice. In public, he told the press: “The only interest I have in Maxine Elliott’s theatre is that I’d like to get a free ticket on opening night.”
§ For all the Malthusian talk about self-control and “moral restraint” in the nineteenth century, contraceptives had been available to people with access to medical information for a long time. In the nineteenth century B.C., an Egyptian papyrus listed three prescriptions for vaginal contraceptive suppositories, and artificial means of preventing conception were discussed by medical writers in ancient Greece and Rome. Prophylactic sheaths made of linen, animal intestines, and skins were said to have been invented by an English Dr. Condom (or Conton) early in the eighteenth century. The American inventor Charles Goodyear vulcanized rubber in 1839, and five years later took out a patent on a contraceptive for men. By 1850, adults in the United States and Europe could buy rubber condoms and pessaries. Morgan would have had recourse to medical advice, books, and birth control technology all his life.