The Interpretation Of Murder (7 page)

    New York society in the Gilded Age
was essentially the creation of two very rich women, Mrs William B. Astor and
Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, and of the titanic clash between them in the 1880s.

    Mrs Astor, nee Schermerhorn, was
highborn; Mrs Vanderbilt, nee Smith, was not. The Astors could trace their
wealth and lineage to New York's Dutch aristocracy of the eighteenth century.
To be sure, the term
aristocracy
in this usage is a bit of a stretch,
since Netherlandish fur traders in the New World were not exactly princes in
the Old. European ladies and gentlemen may not have read their Tocqueville, but
the one difference between the United States and Europe on which they all
agreed was that America, to its misfortune, lacked an aristocracy.
Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, the fabulously monied Astors
would be received at the Court of St. James and would soon have their
aristocratic claims confirmed by English titles of nobility, which were far
superior to Dutch ones, had there been any Dutch ones.

    By contrast, a Vanderbilt was a
nobody. Cornelius 'Commodore' Vanderbilt was merely the richest man in America
- indeed, the richest man in the world. Being worth a million dollars made one
a man of fortune in the mid- nineteenth century; Cornelius Vanderbilt was worth
a hundred million when he died in 1877, and his son was worth twice that a
decade later. But the Commodore was still a vulgar steamship and rail magnate
who owed his wealth to industry, and Mrs Astor would call on neither him nor
his relations.

    In particular, Mrs Astor would not
set foot in the home of the young Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, wife to the
Commodore's grandson. She would not even leave her card. It was thus
established that the Vanderbilts were not to be received in the best Manhattan
houses. Mrs Astor let it be known that there were only four hundred men and
women in all New York City fit to enter a ballroom - that number being, as it
happened, the quantity of guests who fit comfortably into Mrs Astor's own
ballroom. The Vanderbilts were not among the Four Hundred.

    Mrs Vanderbilt was not vindictive,
but she was intelligent and indomitable. No penny would be spared to break the
Astor ban. Her first measure, achieved with a liberal dose of her husband's
largesse, was to procure an invitation to the Patriarchs' Ball, a significant
event in New York's social calendar, attended by the city's most influential
citizens. But she was still excluded from Mrs Astor's more rarefied circle.

    Her second step was to have her
husband build a new house. It would be located on the corner of Fifth Avenue
and Fifty-second Street and like no house yet seen in New York City. Designed
by Richard Morris Hunt - not only the most famous American architect of the
time but a welcome guest of the Astors - 660 Fifth Avenue became a white
limestone French chateau in the style of the Loire Valley. Its stone entry
foyer was sixty feet long, with a double-height vaulted ceiling, at the end of
which rose a magnificent carved Caen stairwell. Among its thirty-seven rooms
were a soaring dining hall lit by stained-glass windows, an enormous
third-and-fourth-floor gymnasium for her children, and a ballroom capable of
holding eight hundred guests. Throughout the house were Rembrandts,
Gainsboroughs, Reynoldses, Gobelin tapestries, and furniture that once belonged
to Marie Antoinette.

    As the mansion neared completion in
1883, Mrs Vanderbilt announced a housewarming party, on which she would
eventually spend some $250,000.The cleverest use of her wealth, by far, lay in
securing in advance the attendance of a few notable but purchasable guests not
beholden to Mrs Astor s rules, including several English ladies, a smattering
of Teutonic barons, a coterie of Italian counts, and one former United States
president. Dropping hints of these advance bookings, as well as of sumptuous
and unheard-of entertainments, Mrs Vanderbilt issued a total of twelve hundred
invitations. Her anticipated ball became the talk of the town.

    One especially eager little partygoer
happened to be Carrie Astor, Mrs Astor's favorite daughter, who all summer long
had been preparing with her friends a Star Quadrille for Mrs Vanderbilt's ball.
But of those twelve hundred invitations, not one had gone to Carrie Astor. All
Carrie's friends had been invited - they were already excitedly planning the
gowns they would wear for their quadrille - but not the tearful Carrie herself.
To everyone who would listen, Mrs Vanderbilt expressed sympathy for the poor
girl's plight, but how
could
she invite Carrie, the hostess asked the
world, when she had never been introduced to the girl's mother?

    So it happened that Mrs William
Backhouse Astor took to her carriage one afternoon in the winter season of 1883
and had her footman, clad in blue livery, present her engraved card at 660
Fifth Avenue. This gave Mrs Vanderbilt an unprecedented opportunity to snub the
great Caroline Astor, an opportunity that would have been irresistible to a
less farsighted woman. But Mrs Vanderbilt immediately responded by delivering
to the Astor residence an invitation to her ball, as a result of which Carrie
was able to attend after all, accompanied by her mother - in a diamond bodice that
cost $200,000 - and the rest of Mrs Astor's Four Hundred.

    By the turn of the century, New York
society had been transformed from Knickerbocker bastion into a volatile amalgam
of power, money, and celebrity. Anyone worth a hundred million could buy his
way in. Society gentlemen mixed with showgirls. Society ladies left their
husbands. Even Mrs Vanderbilt was Mrs Vanderbilt no longer: she had obtained a
shocking divorce in 1895 in order to become Mrs Oliver H. P. Belmont. Mrs
Astor's own daughter Charlotte, the mother of four children, ran away to
England with another man. Three sons and one grandson of the multimillionaire
Jay Gould took actresses for wives. James Roosevelt Roosevelt married a
prostitute. Even the occasional murderer could be lionized, provided he was of
the right breed. Harry Thaw, heir though he was to a modest

    Pittsburgh mining fortune, would
never have achieved celebrity in New York had he not killed the renowned
architect Stanford White on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906.
Although Thaw shot the seated White full in the face in plain view of a hundred
diners, a jury acquitted him - by reason of insanity - two years later. Some
observers said that no American jury would convict a man for murdering the
scoundrel who had bedded his wife, although, to be fair to White, his liaison
with the young lady in question occurred when she was only a sixteen-year-old
unmarried showgirl rather than the respectable Mrs Harry Thaw. Others opined
that this jury was especially disinclined to convict, having received too great
a sum from Thaw's attorney to feel free, in conscience, to reject his closing
plea.

    In the summers, Manhattan's rich
repaired to marble palaces in Newport and Saratoga, where yachting, horsing,
and cardplaying were the principal occupations. In those days, the leading
families could still demonstrate why they were their country's finest. Young
Harold Vanderbilt, who grew up at 660 Fifth Avenue, would successfully defend
the America's Cup three times against British assault. He also invented
contract bridge.

    As September approached in 1909, a
new season was about to begin. Everyone agreed that the crop of debutantes that
year was among the choicest in recent memory. Miss Josephine Crosby, the
Times
observed, was a particularly handsome girl, gifted with a beautiful
singing voice. The shapely Miss Mildred Carter had returned with her father
from London, where she had danced with the king. Miss Hyde, the heiress, was
also to debut, as were Miss Chapin and Miss Rutherford, who was last seen as a
bridesmaid to her cousin, the former Miss White, at the latter's marriage to
Count Sheer-Thoss.

    The inaugural event of the season was
a charitable ball, thrown by Mrs Stuyvesant Fish on Monday night, August 30, to
raise funds for the city's new Free Hospital for Children. It had become
fashionable at that time to hold parties at the city's grand hotels. Mrs Fish's
party was to take place at the Waldorf-Astoria.

    That grand hotel on Fifth Avenue and
Thirty-fourth Street stood on the spot where Mrs Astor had lived a quarter
century earlier, when she was bested by Mrs Vanderbilt. By comparison with the
gleaming Vanderbilt mansion, the Astors' fine old brick townhouse had suddenly
looked small and drab. Therefore Mrs Astor unceremoniously razed it and built
herself a double-sized French chateau - not in the Loire style but in the more
dignified Second Empire fashion - thirty blocks north, with a ballroom big
enough for twelve hundred. On the land vacated by Mrs Astor, her son erected
the world's largest and the city's most luxurious hotel.

    Society entered the Waldorf-Astoria
through a wide, three-hundred-foot-long corridor off Thirty-fourth Street,
known as Peacock Alley. On the occasion of a fancy ball, blue-stockinged doormen
would greet the carriages as they drew up, and Peacock Alley would be lined
with hundreds and hundreds of spectators, an audience of groundlings for the
procession of wealth and importance making its stately way inside. The Palm
Garden was the Waldorf's massive domed and gilded restaurant, walled in glass
to ensure continuing visibility to the outside world and paneled everywhere
with full-length mirrors to ensure that the ladies and gentlemen of the inner
world saw even more of themselves than outsiders could. To accommodate her
party, Mrs Stuyvesant Fish had booked not only the Palm Garden but also the
Empire Room, the outdoor Myrtle Room, and the entire orchestra and company of
the Metropolitan Opera.

    It was the strains of this music that
greeted Stratham Younger as he strolled the length of Peacock Alley, his arm in
the grasp of his cousin Miss Belva Dula, a half hour after his European guests
had departed for their dinner at the Brills'.