by Jean Strouse
Three days later Lady Sackville called at Princes Gate, and recorded the experience in her diary. She found it “rather a shock” to be ushered into the room where Miss Linley was hung, but thought the painting had been overcleaned and “lost its mellow look, so I did not feel as miserable as I might have.” Her host kept her waiting for over an hour while he met with the Crown Prince of Sweden—he came in at one point to ask her not to be impatient, and gave her the catalogue of his Chinese porcelains to read. Finally free, he showed her into the room in which he kept his miniatures, with a view of the gardens, and settled her on a sofa. Now, he asked, why did she want to sell? The Lloyd George taxes, she explained.
Morgan: “Damn Lloyd George! What a shame to spoil a place like Knole and you who have taken so much trouble about it all. I want to help you. What have you got to get rid of?”
Lady S: “Tapestries.”
JPM: “I don’t want any tapestries; let me come down to Knole and look around.”
Lady S: “No, Mr. Morgan, we have nothing else to sell; it is a case of take it or leave it.”
He considered for a few moments, reported his guest, then said he would take the tapestries, “to help you, as I have always had the greatest admiration and esteem for you all at Knole.” How much did she want for them?
Negotiation being first cousin to flirtation, Lady Sackville was an expert. Though she had an offer of £40,000 for twenty-nine tapestries and £10,000 for two seventeenth-century carpets, she coolly informed Morgan that the figures were £45,000 and £20,000, and that she had the offer in her pocket: would he care to see it?
Morgan said, “No, I trust what you say and I’ll take your tapestries and your 2 carpets for £65,000.”
He had just agreed to pay $325,000 for objects he had not seen. He did not, however, take much risk with this purchase: the provenance of the Knole treasures was gilt-edged, and buying directly from the family avoided dealers’ prices and fees. Lady Sackville congratulated him on having made the best bargain of his life, claiming that dealers would have charged him £100,000.
When he rose to show her out, saying again how glad he was to be able to help, she asked him to put the agreement in writing. He obligingly wrote out £65,000 payable within a year (she happened to have brought stationery), but warned that he could not pay at once, as he was “quite dry.” Then he walked her to the door. There, she reported, “to my utter astonishment, he folded me in his arms and said I hope you don’t mind, but I feel such respect & affection for you. I hope you are happy now over this transaction and go home happy. I respect you so much; you have always behaved so well.”
She did not mind, and over the next few weeks this autumnal courtship blossomed. Morgan went to see the tapestries at Knole, and was delighted with a series on the Seven Deadly Sins. Victoria invited him to dinner with former Prime Minister Lord Rosebery, the art collector and critic Sir Hugh Lane, the banker Montagu Norman, Lord Northcliffe, owner of the London Times, the French ambassador, and Lady Paget (formerly Minnie Stevens of New York, the mother-in-law of Pauline Whitney). Somehow Victoria managed to escape her other guests for “a long talk with P. Morgan in the garden,” she wrote later that night: “he told me many of the bothers of being very rich, that the great thing was to have personality which he has to an infinite degree; he is very sympathique to my nature; he said I had done wonders here.” She showed him through the house—he wanted to buy several silver dogs from the King’s Bedroom and the Great Hall, and so admired a doorstop figure of “Shakespeare” that she gave it to him. “I have never met any one as attractive,” she concluded: “one forgets his nose entirely after a few minutes, as his eyes are either twinkling or full of kindness and expression; he said he will be 75 next April! He is full of life and energy, a wonderful man.”
In early August, Morgan took delivery of the tapestries and invited Lady Sackville to call on him twice more at Princes Gate. She wailed about Miss Linley in her diary but found her host “most friendly”: “I really hope I have secured a good friend in him. He does not like everybody & he seems to like me & is most kind & considerate & says charming little compliments which may come from the heart.” She resented people coming in with questions and papers for him to sign, and constantly reminded herself that she had no interest in his money.
Reading her diaries is a little like watching a woman make herself up in a mirror when she thinks she is alone: Lady Sackville constantly touches up unattractive spots and strikes poses to catch herself at the best angle. Yet unlike the woman in the mirror, who knows she is improving on reality, Victoria does not admit what she is up to. She lies to her own diary.
She was “really tempted” by Morgan’s amber Chinese vases, but “hardly pretended to look at them & hardly admired them, as I hate cadging & he is the last person in the world from whom I shd like to cadge, because he has been so nice & spontaneously generous about the tapestries.” Though disappointed that he had not produced the £65,000 check, she professed: “I hate talking about money with Mr. Morgan or the Stock Exchange, or anything that is not art or friendship, pure & simple.”
He was about to leave for New York. She sent him a note asking for her “Shakespeare” doorstop back (it had been a loan), and offering to buy some of his amber Chinese vases. She also asked for a photograph of him, “looking at me full face.” She wanted “no money no presents,” just “your friendship”—and promised never to become “une femme gênante [troublesome]. I know and understand your nature very well because I have so much sympathy for you and have always had it.”
He sent her a wire from the SS Olympic at Queenstown. “Ces petites choses là font plaisir,” she reflected, “venant d’un homme aussi occupé [These little things give pleasure, coming from such a busy man].”
In Paris that fall, Anne Morgan lunched with the Sackvilles and Sir John Murray Scott. Fanny had Lady Sackville to tea. By the end of the year, Morgan had paid for the Knole tapestries.
The combination of Lloyd George’s death duties, the Payne-Aldrich Act eliminating the American import duty on old works of art, and Morgan’s sense of mortality finally prompted him to begin transferring his collections to the United States. In November 1911 he told William Loeb, Jr., the chief customs officer for the Port of New York, that he planned to bring the “extensive art collection which I have been gathering during the past forty years” across the Atlantic. Since all the works were more than one hundred years old, they should be entitled to free entry under the tariff law, but he had two requests regarding procedure. First, the law required certification from sellers as to the objects’ age and value, but Morgan did not have invoices for most of what he had bought; he proposed to furnish a complete inventory, and asked that the requirement of sellers’ certificates be waived. Second, he planned to have the collections sent directly to the Metropolitan Museum. He hoped the prospect of exhibiting them all together would induce New York City officials to fund the building of a new wing. In the meantime, the objects would have to be stored indefinitely, and Morgan proposed to avoid the “almost certain loss and injury” that would result from having customs inspectors open and examine shipment cases in New York by hiring at his own expense a U.S. customs officer to inspect the art works as they were packed in London.
“I feel justified in asking that this course be taken,” he explained, “because this collection is really a matter of great public and educational interest, and a large part of the articles could not be replaced if lost or injured, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is specially concerned in having the arrangement, is a public institution upon which many millions of dollars have been spent by the city Government.… If your examiner wishes anything further than his own judgment upon the question whether these articles are over 100 years old, I suppose that after my long experience I am qualified to testify, as an expert, and my opinion would be sustained by the fact that I was willing to pay for the articles, and that in practically every case I took the advice of competent experts w
ho were satisfied of their genuineness.”
Art and legal authorities might have rejected Morgan’s offer to testify in his own defense, but for the most part he had sought the advice of scholarly experts, the objects were old, and the collection was “a matter of great public and educational interest.” Mr. Loeb reported on these proposals to Washington, and Treasury Secretary Franklin MacVeagh approved both parts of the plan. He wrote to Morgan: “I am greatly interested as a citizen in the coming of your great collections, and it will give me sincere satisfaction to render all permissible official assistance to importations by which the entire country is to be eminently benefited.”
At the end of 1911, Morgan commissioned the French art dealer Jacques Seligmann to supervise the packing and transatlantic shipping of the paintings, miniatures, furniture, silver, sculpture, and other objects from Princes Gate, the remainder of the Hoentschel collection from Paris, paintings borrowed by the National Gallery, and everything Morgan had lent to the South Kensington Museum (Queen Victoria at the end of her life had directed that its name be changed to the Victoria and Albert)—in all, several million dollars’ worth of bronzes, ivories, majolica, enamels, porcelains, metalwork, and jewelry. Though they would be sent to the Metropolitan, the collections were not designated a gift. Morgan had not decided about their ultimate disposition.
The process of packing up and shipping the art to New York took an entire year. Morgan ordered the bronzes on loan at the V&A to go first, to delay the dismantling of his rooms at Princes Gate. In January 1912, as objects began to disappear from British exhibitions, the London press blamed the “disastrous” removal of Morgan’s “magnificent” collections on “official shortsightedness.” Hercules Read at the British Museum and the independent scholar J. H. Fitzhenry wrote letters to the Times insisting that Morgan had always intended to take his collections to New York, had made “princely” gifts to British institutions, had been completely satisfied with the consideration shown him by English authorities, and wanted to protect his heirs from the “very large sum” that would be due on his estate if he left his collections in England.
As promised, the U.S. Customs Office sent an art specialist named Michael Nathan to conduct the inspections in London—he told The New York Times that no amount of money could now buy Mr. Morgan’s collections—and the first shipment crossed the Atlantic safely in February 1912. Morgan insisted on using only White Star ships.
Everything was proceeding according to plan when Nathan unexpectedly returned to the United States at the end of March. Morgan ordered all shipments stopped, and asked Seligmann to meet him at Aix in mid-April.
On Monday, April 15, a shocking piece of news reached him at the spa. “Have just heard fearful rumor about Titanic with iceberg without any particulars,” he wired Jack: “Hope for God sake not true.” His partners kept him posted by cable. The reports were wildly contradictory at first. Everyone was saved. Everyone had drowned. The Titanic was unsinkable. The Titanic had sunk. White Star vice president Philip Franklin announced in New York Monday night that the ship had gone down at 2:20 A.M., with a “horrible loss of life.”
On Wednesday, the seventeenth, Morgan’s partners and family sent subdued greetings for his seventy-fifth birthday. He wired his thanks, “but greatly upset by loss Titanic”—“my heart … very heavy.” A New York Times correspondent sent to Aix to convey the newspaper’s respects found the financier sunburned and hale after his sojourn in Egypt, and inundated with birthday messages from royal heads of state, but “exceedingly grieved at the appalling disaster.” Morgan had no comment for the press, saying that at a moment of such public excitement he preferred to wait for an accurate report of the full story.
Anne Morgan joined the Titanic relief committee in New York, and met the survivors as they reached port. More than fifteen hundred people had died, among them Colonel John Jacob Astor; George Widener and his son, Harry; Mr. and Mrs. Isador Straus; Taft’s military aide, Archie Butt; the artist Frank Millet, executive secretary of the American Academy in Rome; and hundreds who did not have famous names. “JP has been keeping all wires hot,” Belle reported to Berenson a week after the event, “& I have gotten out of bed & dressed several nights in order to send him answers.”
The shipping trust had been a financial fiasco for years. Now it was a human catastrophe as well. Although most of the officers and crew gave their lives to save women and children, IMM president J. Bruce Ismay had jumped into a lifeboat, and his survival seemed an outrage. The Senate immediately opened an investigation. Jack cabled his father on the nineteenth: “Newspapers, which are unspeakably bad, and Congress which is worse, seem to have made up their mind … [Ismay] is to blame for whole thing.” To the elder Morgan, the treatment of Ismay sounded “infernally brutal.”
The U.S. naval expert Admiral Mahan said that Ismay could not be held responsible for the collision, but the shortage of lifeboats meant that “so long as there was a soul that could be saved, the obligation lay on Mr. Ismay that that one person and not he should have been in the boat.” Brooks Adams went further, claiming that Ismay was responsible for the captain’s reckless speed, the lack of lifeboats, the crew’s lack of discipline: “In the face of all this he saves himself, leaving fifteen hundred men and women to perish,” Adams wrote to Senator Francis Newlands. “I know of nothing at once so cowardly and so brutal in recent history. The one thing he could have done was to prove his honesty and his sincerity by giving his life. I hope that you gentlemen will make it plain that such men cannot be kept in control of passenger ships if we can help it.”
The Senate’s investigation, and another by the British Board of Trade, found an appalling series of human and technical errors, but brought no charges against Ismay or the IMM. Shipowners in the United States and Britain were protected by limited liability laws, and private damage claims against White Star amounting to $16 million were eventually settled out of court in 1916 for $664,000. Ismay had been planning to retire before the loss of the Titanic. Now, he wanted to stay on and fight back, but he had become an unlimited liability. That fall, the Morgan partners firmly eased him out.b
The Treasury Department sent a customs agent named Lorenzo Chance to replace Mr. Nathan, and the packing and shipping of Morgan’s art collections, supervised by Seligmann, resumed. By the end of the year, 351 cases had been stored, unopened, in the Metropolitan basement.
Morgan stayed at Aix longer than usual that spring. He went to Venice at the end of April for the dedication of a new Campanile di San Marco, which he had helped pay for (the old one collapsed in 1902), then returned to the spa for an additional fortnight. In mid-May he traveled up to London and phoned Lady Sackville as soon as he arrived—she was thrilled. He asked her to call on him the following day.
Sir John Murray Scott had died in January without, in the end, cutting Victoria out of his will. He left her £150,000 in cash, various valuable objets, and the contents of his house on the Rue Laffitte in Paris, estimated to be worth £350,000. His family was contesting the will, charging the Sackvilles (whom they called “the Locusts”) with having used undue influence to alienate his affections. The case would not come to trial until 1913. If she won the lawsuit, Lady Sackville would have Seery’s Paris collection to sell, but in the summer of 1912 she was still in financial straits.
She told her diary when Morgan phoned in May that she hated “to appear nice and friendly to get things out of him, as I don’t really want to. He respects me & I like being a friend of his & to know well such a great & clever man.”
When she arrived at Princes Gate on May 20, he was in the midst of meetings about the China loan, but set aside half an hour for her. “He came in like a whirlwind & crushed me,” she reported breathlessly, “saying he had longed for this moment to see me again … he had told nobody of his return but wanted to see me at once. Nothing could be more affectionate than the welcome he gave me, and I went away with mixed feelings of friendship & apprehension of what may follow from this gr
eat friendship, as I am so straight.”
At home, she told her husband she was thinking of putting a stop to the whole thing, but “L. made me change my mind,” saying it would be unkind to a man who had asked her “to become the friend of his old age.” Since Morgan was seventy-five, both Sackvilles apparently thought him “safe,” and Victoria had deftly secured Lionel’s permission for another lucrative dalliance. “So now le sort en est jeté! [the die is cast],” she exclaimed: “I can think of nothing else; that man has such marvellous personality & attraction for me.”
Two days later, Morgan called on her in Mayfair punctually at five, “beaming with joy to be quietly alone with me.” He told her several times (she reported) that he had cared for her “for ever so long” but had not dared tell her. He remembered all the occasions on which they had met, and referring back to their talk in her garden the previous July, said “how much he was in love that day & that I must have seen it or guessed it (but I really did not!).” He promised to care for her even if she got “ill, ugly, or an invalid”—and he talked of Memie. As he recalled that he had only been married to her for sixty days (actually, four months), “two great tears came in his kind eyes.”
Then without missing a beat—although it is not clear whether the elision is an artifact of Morgan’s narrative or Victoria’s—“He said there was nothing in the world like the sort of affection he had for me & he felt I cared for him not for his money or things and he had watched that for a long time in me. (How true it is, as it is the man himself who attracts me so.…)” Intimacy established, he made himself at home, smoking (with her permission) a big cigar, and taking “a little snooze.” He told her he was “very very shy with strangers (on acct of his poor nose, which I do not mind a bit),” asked her about Lionel and Vita and Seery, and made a date to bring Senator Aldrich to see Knole. After he left, Victoria reflected on how “touchingly loving” he had been: “I can’t get over his rough gentleness & his affectionate little ways.… Rue Laffitte subject [i.e., the lawsuit over Seery’s estate] hardly discussed today.”