by Jean Strouse
On returning from their travels the couple settled at Douglaston, and gave Edith and Arthur Randolph a house on the estate. The Douglases named their son James Gordon, after Mr. Bennett, and their daughter Edith Sybil, for Mrs. Randolph. The Randolphs had already named their daughter Adelaide.
The Douglases joined St. George’s Church in 1883, shortly after Dr. Rainsford began drawing wealthy families back to the parish, even though they continued to live on Little Neck Bay. In 1888, they built a large summer house in Southampton, which is now the Bath and Tennis Club. Their entry in the New York Social Register for 1888 describes Mr. Douglas as belonging to the Union, Racquet, Tuxedo, and New York Yacht clubs.
Exactly when Morgan shifted his affections from Edith to Adelaide is not clear, and neither are the dynamics of the Douglas marriage. At some point, according to Adelaide’s grandson, an errant polo mallet hit Mr. Douglas in the head, after which he was never quite “right.” And gossip imputed something more than friendship to the relations between Mrs. Douglas and Mr. Bennett—rumors fueled by her son’s having been named James Gordon rather than William Proctor.
Adelaide was sixteen years younger than Pierpont Morgan in 1895—forty-two to his fifty-eight—and more like Memie than Fanny. Bright, curious, animated, and self-confident, she had no aversion to society, no trouble with her “nerves,” no puritanical disapproval of the luxe with which he liked to adorn women, no squeamishness about nudity in sculpture. More than conversant with the fine arts, she became a useful accomplice in Morgan’s collecting. Her high spirits offset his tendency toward depression, and she moved easily in his sophisticated world.
In the fall of 1896 Colonel Mann reported triumphantly on the marriage of Edith Randolph and William C. Whitney, which he had predicted. The chief obstacle to this renewed romance had been Whitney’s brother-in-law, Oliver Hazard Payne, whose own name had been all too intimately linked to the first hints of Whitney/Randolph trouble. Colonel Payne, outraged by Whitney’s 1890 flirtation with Edith—if that is all it was—remained fiercely loyal to Flora’s memory. Having no heirs of his own, he was planning to leave his large fortune to Flora’s children, and threatened to disinherit those who refused to disown their father. Two of them did side with him—Pauline, now married to the Englishman Almeric Hugh Paget, and Payne, still a student at Yale; the other two—Harry Payne, who married Gertrude Vanderbilt in November 1895, and Dorothy, who was only nine years old—remained loyal to Whitney.
In reporting on the private wedding from afar, Colonel Mann observed that “Mr. Whitney has not been able to conceal the fact of his affection for Mrs. Randolph from his intimates from the beginning of his devotion to her, and her close friends, notably Mr. and Mrs. William Douglas and Mr. Pierpont Morgan, have doubtless felt assured, for some time, that her marriage to Mr. Whitney would certainly occur.… She has been almost the idol of a small set of people at Douglaston, L.I., and Bar Harbor, for some years, and her marriage will make quite a gap in this small circle.” Mann surely knew that for two people in Edith’s “circle,” the gap had already been filled.
The ceremony took place in Bar Harbor. None of Whitney’s children attended. Mann imagined that “Secretary Whitney and his bride must have made a handsome couple, for she is quite as tall as her new husband, and her fine physique and rich brunette beauty must have made her an effective bride”—then added a sly fillip: “I do not notice the name of Mr. and Mrs. Pierpont Morgan among the guests.”
Colonel Mann dropped the subject of Morgan and Mrs. Douglas after 1896. His first broad hint about a “well-known father of a family … well acquainted with the woes of Cordage” probably amounted to a bid for money—he managed in the very next paragraph, in an unrelated story, to use the name J. Pierpont Morgan. Perhaps it was on this occasion that Morgan made the $2,500 “loan” that later came out in court testimony. Town Topics continued in the late nineties to mention the financier in its business columns, usually with praise.
Although extramarital liaisons were a salient feature of New York’s Gilded Age society, certain strictures applied. Edith Wharton observed in The Age of Innocence that fashionable young men who had affairs with married women emerged “with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied.” The matriarchs of old Gotham, abetting these arrangements, agreed “that when ‘such things happened’ it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman.” Wharton’s partially awakening Newland Archer suspects that “in the complicated old European communities … love-problems might be less simple and less easily classified.”
Morgan had spent much of his life in the complicated old European communities, and made no such “abysmal distinctions.” In his attitudes and behavior he had more in common with the British aristocracy—and with his father—than with the social arbiters of the American drawing room. In England, Edward Albert, Prince of Wales, had been conducting semipublic affairs for years. During his long wait to inherit the Crown—he was fifty-nine by the time Queen Victoria died—amorous adventure became his favorite form of entertainment: Henry James called him Edward “the Caresser,” and the British regent was “never happier,” wrote one of his secretaries, “than in the company of pretty women.” Pretty married women. The rules of conduct in upper-class Victorian society, and particularly in the Prince’s Marlborough House set, dictated that women remain virgins until marriage, but after they crossed that threshhold were free to carry on affairs with almost the same impunity as their husbands and brothers. At the end of the century, the Prince’s “favorite” was Alice (Mrs. George) Keppel.
The heir to the British throne stayed at the Hôtel Bristol in Paris, and put his mistress up at the Vendôme a few doors away. Morgan had been staying at the Bristol for decades. Traveling with Adelaide in the early 1900s, he installed her at the Vendôme—and, according to her grandson, had a special suite of rooms entirely redecorated for her every spring. Art dealers billed him for eighteenth-century French furniture, porcelains, and decor “to be delivered in Paris,” along with fittings, hangings, and alterations carried out in that city, every spring between 1904 and 1908; the bills were charged to a special account.
Perhaps because Fanny had spoken to him about Mrs. R., he saw Mrs. D. largely in private for several years. He took her to Cragston one July weekend in 1899 while his wife was abroad. The following spring he arranged to meet her and her daughter in London—Fanny noted that “Mrs. Douglass [sic] & Sybil” came to dinners and teas at Princes Gate—then stayed on in Europe with Adelaide and Sybil after Fanny returned to the United States.
The problem with Edith Randolph had been, at least in part, that she needed a husband. Adelaide Douglas did not. She and Mr. Douglas moved to 28 West 57th Street in 1899. Eventually they separated, and she renounced all claim to his estate, but he did not in the end hold their complicated situation against her. When he died in 1919, worth about $1 million, he left her a stipend and a third of his property, insisting that she accept them even though she “may have signed an Instrument of Agreement renouncing and releasing her dower rights in my real estate.”
Adelaide had resources of her own, and Morgan provided for her as well. In 1897 he set up trust funds for her children of $120,000 each, the interest to go to their legal guardians until they reached maturity. To Adelaide herself he gave jewelry, works of art, antique furniture, books, catalogues of his collections, clothing, a house, and a trust fund worth about $500,000. Probably for her entertainment he bought items that had belonged to royal and aristocratic Adelaides, including a missal of 1739 containing prayers written out in the hand of Louis XV’s favorite daughter, Princesse Adélaïde, and one of her beautifully bound prayer books; three prayer books used by the Duchesse d’Orléans, daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan, whose name was erroneously represented to Morgan as Louise Adelaide; and nearly two dozen letters written in the 1870s by Mary Adelaide, Duchess of T
eck.
Morgan in middle age assumed avuncular responsibility for a number of friends, among them a widow living in Vermont named Mary McIlvaine and her son, Clarence, who had graduated from Princeton in 1885 with Memie’s nephew Jonathan Sturges.† Morgan managed the McIlvaines’ finances and gave them the use of a cottage on his property near Cragston. In 1887 he recommended Clarence to Whitelaw Reid, publisher of the Tribune, as “one of the most promising young men I know,” with “strong leanings toward journalism,” but that fall, with or without Morgan’s help, Clarence took a job at the publishing house of Harper & Brothers. Three years later he moved to London to set up an English branch of Harper’s, and spent much of his free time with Jonathan Sturges. At the end of 1891 he asked Pierpont’s middle daughter, Juliet, to marry him.
Juliet reported the proposal to Louisa on New Year’s Day, 1892: “Of course I don’t care for him in that way at all, but I am very fond of him and hate to hurt him.” Not inexperienced in affairs of the heart, the prettiest of the Morgan girls wondered why men must “always go and spoil a nice comfortable friendship by perfectly unnecessary sentiment.” She told Clarence that she was much too fond of him ever to fall in love with him—which can’t have cheered him up—and added to Louisa: “I’d make him miserable in two years if I did marry him.”
Clarence’s ill-fated attachment had no apparent effect on Juliet’s father, who wrote to him six months later about financial and family matters (“I left your mother this morning looking finely”), and urged, “keep me advised from time to time how things are progressing—above all things do not break down—as a lever, do not smoke cigarettes—Excuse my saying this but I feel very deeply the necessity of cautioning you on that point.”
Instead of making Clarence miserable, Juliet brought another banker into the family. In April 1894 she married a descendant of Alexander Hamilton named William Pierson Hamilton. The ceremony took place at St. George’s Church and the wedding breakfast at 219, with flowers by Thorley and catering by Louis Sherry. Pierpont gave her a house in Tuxedo Park—the six-hundred-acre private community northwest of Manhattan created by Pierre Lorillard in 1886—and an income of $10,000 a year. He also took her husband into his firm.
Adelaide Douglas, like Edith Randolph, belonged to the intimate circle of friends who had protected Annette Wetmore between her divorce and her marriage to Jim Markoe. The Markoes moved in 1897 to 12 West 55th Street—the house was probably a gift from Morgan, as were a sedan chair and a suit of armor that stood in the front hall. Annette expected a baby that fall.
Morgan stopped to see the Markoes almost every day after work. He would arrive in the late afternoon, head straight back to his doctor’s home office on the ground floor, and take a seat on a sofa. After the two men finished their informal medical appointment, others joined them for drinks—Charles Lanier, George Bowdoin, the lawyer Lewis Cass Ledyard, the Lying-In’s architect Bob Robertson. Later, more friends would come for dinner, among them Adelaide Douglas, Bessie (Mrs. Stanford) White, Edith and William C. Whitney, Mrs. Ledyard, Adelaide’s sister Emily Woodbury, and Edith’s sister Alice with her yacht-designer husband, J. Beavor-Webb.
These friends saw aspects of Morgan few outsiders did. He had “a very feminine streak in his nature,” recalled Annette Markoe: “his tenderness and sympathy, his emotional nature, his love for beautiful things and pretty clothes were as intense as a woman’s.” According to the Markoes’ daughter, “he loved to trade stories and make everyone laugh, but had no patience with people who bored him, and could be wickedly funny about anyone he found puritanical or pompous.” He found his daughter-in-law, Jessie, boring and puritanical: he called her “cold roast Boston.” She no doubt disapproved of his philandering—Jack was an entirely faithful husband—and Pierpont generally gave the younger couple wide berth.
Annette Markoe held her own in the otherwise all-male afternoon gatherings on West 55th Street. She never hesitated to challenge Morgan: “They argued madly about the Bible,” continued her daughter—“he considered himself a great authority, but she matched him, chapter and verse. They’d bet on who was right before they looked something up.”
Morgan spent far more time at the Markoes’ house than at his own. He also took the couple on Corsair cruises and trips abroad—often with Adelaide—sent them art objects and antique furniture from Europe, lent them his car and driver when he went away, and provided them with a country house called Ondaora just north of Cragston. The rumor mill churned out gossip: people who didn’t subscribe to the theory that Morgan built the Lying-In Hospital to accommodate all his mistresses’ accouchements said the gift was a form of payment for his attentions to Markoe’s wife.
If Morgan took a romantic interest in Annette Markoe, it appears not to have been reciprocated. The talk of a love affair between the financier and his closest friend’s wife may have derived from her beauty and from the amount of time the Markoes spent first with Morgan and Edith Randolph, then with Morgan and Adelaide Douglas, supplying companionship and cover for his unorthodox social life. The gossips were not wrong about his womanizing, but probably, in this case, about its object.
When the Markoes’ baby, Annette, was born in November 1897, the couple chose as her godparents Adelaide Douglas and Pierpont Morgan.
In the aftershock of Anthony Drexel’s death in the summer of 1893, Morgan had postponed reorganizing his partnerships until the economic crisis and his own sorrow had subsided. The net earnings of Drexel, Morgan & Co. in 1892 had reached $1.6 million, but the year of the panic yielded $1.1 million in losses. Profits recovered in 1894, to almost $1.3 million, and by October Morgan had decided what to do.
He invited all ten of his Philadelphia and New York partners to dinner at the Metropolitan Club. The group included Edward T. Stotesbury and George C. Thomas from Philadelphia, and the New Yorkers Charles Coster, J. Hood Wright, George Bowdoin, and Jack. Bowdoin’s son, Temple, a lawyer and bank accountant, had been made a partner in the New York firm at the beginning of 1893. Tony Drexel’s son, Anthony Jr., who had more interest in society than in business, had retired a few months after his father died. The bankers met in a private dining room with a marble fireplace and clustered milk-glass chandeliers. Jack later said it was the first time all the American partners had been in one room at the same time. After the dishes were cleared, the senior Morgan outlined his plans for the future.
The two American houses would reorganize under a new partnership agreement at the beginning of 1895. The name of the New York firm would change to reflect what it had in fact been for some time—J. P. Morgan & Co. Philadelphia’s Drexel & Co. would keep its name, but there would be no Drexel among its partners. Morgan would head both banks, and hold their combined capital in New York. The Paris house, renamed Morgan, Harjes & Co., would have Morgan as its senior partner and an infusion of new capital. The London house alone, presided over by Pierpont in conjunction with Walter Burns since Junius’s death, would remain for the time being unchanged, and would not share the profits and losses of the other firms.‡
The partners filing out into the night through the Metropolitan Club’s colonnaded courtyard in October of 1894 faced a new kind of future. Between 1871 and 1890, Junius Morgan and Anthony Drexel had shared jurisdiction over their affiliated houses. On January 1, 1895, Pierpont took single-handed charge of the dynasty his predecessors had established, and consolidated its leadership in his own hands.
Among investment banking houses, Morgan’s in the 1890s had a reputation for driving its partners harder than most. Charles Coster was chronically exhausted from overwork, and in November 1894, just a month after the meeting at the Metropolitan Club, J. Hood Wright dropped dead. He was fifty-eight—exactly Pierpont’s age.
Jack did not figure in the inner councils at 23 Wall Street. Entrusted with neither the firm’s secrets nor its lethal workload, he often had to appeal to others for information about what was going on. His father, perpetually on the lookout for professional heirs, offered
a partnership in the fall of 1894 to an attractive young Harvard graduate named Robert Bacon.
At the time, Bacon was working with the Boston bankers Lee, Higginson & Co., and Morgan had probably met him during the organization of General Electric. Harvard Class of ’80, Bob Bacon had starred as an undergraduate in football, baseball, track, boxing, and crew, graduated in the top third of his class, and made a lifelong friend of his classmate Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Everyone liked this affable and extraordinarily good-looking young man. A Yale athletic rival never forgot his freshman encounter with the “tall crinkly haired blond giant, handsome as an Adonis.” According to Roosevelt, Bacon was “the handsomest man in the Class and … as pleasant as he is handsome.” The lawyer and politician Elihu Root later compared the pleasure of seeing the physically “superb” Bacon to looking “upon any natural object which approaches the perfection of beauty.” Railroad baron James J. Hill, in a bizarre compliment, considered the younger man so trustworthy that one could “go to sleep with one’s thumb in his mouth.” One of the Morgan partners said that Pierpont had simply “fallen in love.” Bacon and his wife, Martha, spent a weekend at Cragston in June of 1892, and another in October 1893.