When the Astors Owned New York Page 5

  “America is not a fit place for a gentleman to live,” Willy announced to his former countrymen. “America is good enough for any man who has to make a livelihood, though why traveled people of independent means should remain there more than a week is not readily to be comprehended.” Having “washed his hands of America and American methods,” he was determined “no longer to be connected in any way with that country.” William’s aggressively insulting departure from New York provoked, among other send-offs from the press, a reference to the Astor family origins in “a German slaughterhouse” and the suggestion that the Astor coat of arms should be “a skunk, rampant, on a brindle ox-hide.” Papers in the States reported that “William the Traitor” had been burned in effigy in the streets and likened to Benedict Arnold. William kept a scrapbook of these stories and often brooded over the abuse he suffered in the press.

  In all likelihood it was Astor himself, out of the same perversity that prompted his farewell message to his countrymen, who was eventually responsible for inventing or approving a story blazoned across the front page of the New York Times on July 12, 1892. It was headlined: DEATH OF W. W. ASTOR. HE SUDDENLY EXPIRED YESTERDAY IN LONDON. By swallowing whole what later appeared to have been a hoax, the Times and other American newspapers had demonstrated what Willy saw as their habitual irresponsibility, slovenliness, and, above all, hypocrisy. For now, in an obituary of several thousand words, the Times extolled the former “William the Traitor” as “an ideal American,” “a millionaire who believed in the American idea of government” and had done noble public service as legislator and diplomat:

  William Waldorf Astor was of all the Astors the one that was the most in touch with the great mass of the American people. He was an ideal American, and for a man who was brought up in an aristocratic atmosphere and in constant contact with those who would be glad, perhaps, to see a plutocracy here, he was very much of a democrat. He believed thoroughly in the American idea of government and was the only one of his family that was ever active in politics, for which he had a commendable fondness. His services to his State and his party, while they were not long continued, were such as to be a credit to him.

  The Philadelphia Public Ledger was equally unstinting and imaginative. “His nature was kindly, his manner simple, unaffected, sincere. He had many friends who admired him for his learning, his talents, and the noble qualities of heart which were his most distinguished characteristics.” While accepting the story of his death as true, the New York Tribune said it was “not an event of great and lasting significance whether in the world of action or the world of thought.”

  The Times conceded that there had been “some curiously conflicting reports” as to the authenticity of the news. Like other doings and undoings of the very rich, the news of the death of William Waldorf Astor made too good a story to be allowed to succumb to checking.

  MR. ASTOR NOT DEAD, the Times announced the next day, July 13. reported as rapidly recovering. Mr. Astor apparently enjoyed his obituaries and the gorgeous fantasy, familiar to him from his reading of Tom Sawyer, of observing mourners at his funeral and listening to his own funeral sermon. He “treated the affair with levity,” according to a spokesman, and said he was getting used to being made a ghost. Normally he would not have tolerated a prank at his expense but would have dispatched a whole posse of lawyers to pursue the offender. But this prank was grand, transatlantic, and imperial, on a scale with Astor’s ego and his fortune, and its eventual butt was not Astor but his old enemy, the American press. A threatened investigation of the hoax by British cable authorities trailed off into unsubstantiated published rumors that Astor had been mildly deranged at the time of his death notice. Perhaps, it was also rumored, he had absorbed the mystical teachings of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the late Russian soothsayer and conduit to the spirit world.

  His public career behind him, and an immense fortune at his command, William was now freer than ever to indulge his passion for collecting, the arts, and a literary career. He founded a monthly publication, the Pall Mall Magazine, partly as an outlet for his short stories and his views on literature, history, politics, and American society. Rudyard Kipling, George Meredith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Israel Zangwill, and Thomas Hardy were among the distinguished authors of the day who contributed fiction or verse to the magazine.

  Several of Astor’s own pieces in the magazine turned out to be its chief weak points and aroused both consternation and hilarity in his readers. As if inaugurating a brand-new line of inquiry, he entered the debate over the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare. “Even the staunchest adherents of the Stratford man admit the existence of a few awkward facts which cannot be explained away,” Astor wrote. “Let us glance, briefly, at some of them.” The historical Shakespeare, a butcher’s son (like old John Jacob Astor), a sometime stage carpenter and actor, had terrible handwriting: “Fancy a play traced in such barbarous characters!” “He was reputed intemperate; he was whipped for poaching; he married Anne Hathaway under circumstances discreditable to them both. At sixteen he is said to have been apprenticed to a butcher, after which he becomes a dealer in wood.” This thoroughly inadequate creature spent the last decade of his life, Astor wrote, in a “dirty and soulless little village,” and he died of a fever resulting from a drinking bout “of exceptional length and severity.” “Is this,” William concluded with a triumphant flourish, invoking the examples of Columbus, Napoleon, Luther, Newton, Galileo, Goethe, Richelieu, and Dante, “consistent with a great man’s nature?” Astor’s article became “a universal target for chaffing and ridicule,” the New York Times correspondent, the novelist Harold Frederic, reported from London. “The second syllable of his name is clearly superfluous.”

  Following another line of scholarly inquiry, Astor tried to plumb the secret of the witty and beautiful Madame Juliette Recamier, object of the emperor Napoleon’s “amorous advances,” and concluded she had been married to her own father. In another much-quoted article he described London’s famous fog, the city’s chronic pall of mist and greasy coal smoke, as “an enveloping goddess in operatic raiment.” He was unswayed by ridicule.

  iii.

  THE SENIOR, more thoughtful and brooding of the two Astor cousins, William Waldorf appointed himself family historian and defender. “I am glad my Great Grandfather was a successful trader,” he wrote in his sixties, “because in all ages Trade has led the way to Civilization. I have studied his life, seeking to learn its aims, grateful to him for having lifted us above the ploughshares of Baden and bent on continuing his purpose.” One result of these studies was a ten-thousand-word essay in which he reviewed his ancestor’s allegedly maligned career and posthumous reputation. Willy concluded that the offending party in this systematic libel had been American democracy itself. Originally “the poor man’s country,” the United States had been undermined and betrayed in national purpose by envy, resentment, and a misguided hatred of wealth, distinction, and achievement. His great-grandfather’s “life and character,” Willy wrote, “have been distorted and caricatured until only an odd travesty survives. He has been continually derided and reviled with that spirit of pure malignity which pursued the successful man. It is not democratic to climb so high.” Contrary to Willy, during the 1890s, and probably at any other time as well, so far from reviling and deriding rich people, the American public could hardly get enough of them—except, of course, for a few people who might be described by guardians of the social order as malcontents, radicals, and other ideological levelers embittered by envy and their own inadequacy. According to Mark Twain, the appetite for news of the moneyed classes and their doings could be satisfied even by a page-one headline RICH WOMAN FALLS DOWN STAIRS, NOT HURT.

  Willy believed that it was the American press that led the vendetta against old John Jacob Astor. Journalists and popular biographers like James Parton deliberately transformed a man of “patient courage and masterful resolve: of forethought and suggestiveness and common sense” into an o
gre about whom practically anything to his discredit could be believed.

  In 1896, nearly half a century after old Astor’s death, a Chicago lawyer named Franklin H. Head invented and put into circulation a brilliantly elaborated hoax. According to lawyer Head’s compelling story, the source of John Jacob Astor’s fortune, the acorn of his oak forest, was a rusty iron box, bearing on its lid the chiseled initials “W.K.” and long buried in a cave on an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. The box supposedly contained the fabled treasure that the British pirate Captain William Kidd had squirreled away against his old age. In 1701, before he was able to retire from piracy and enjoy his wealth, Kidd’s countrymen hanged him, but not before he managed to leave Mrs. Kidd a cryptic note giving the location of his treasure chest. The search for this Monte Cristo trove of gold and jewels had been teasing the public imagination ever since Kidd’s fateful date with the hangman. It drove the plots of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and now lawyer Head’s almost thoroughly credible tale.

  Old Astor was said to have acquired the box in a characteristically underhanded way through one of his French Canadian trappers. Until then, according to Head’s review of the bank records, Astor had been “simply a modest trader, earning each year by frugality and thrift two or three hundred dollars above his living expenses, with a fair prospect of accumulating, by an industrious life, a fortune of twenty or thirty thousand dollars.” But his acquisition of the box and subsequent sale of its contents to a London dealer in coins and precious stones coincided with a jump of about $1.3 million in his account, $700,000 of which he used to buy property in the city of New York.

  Head’s readers learned that in 1699 Winnepesaukee, head sachem of the Penobscot tribe, had deeded the island to Cotton Mather Olmsted, an Indian trader and ancestor of the distinguished landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Central Park. The place had remained in the family ever since. Frederick Law Olmsted, its eventual heir and a close friend of Head’s, allegedly sued the Astor estate for $5 million (the original $1.3 million plus accrued interest). Having been refused, he then demanded all the property in New York that John Jacob Astor, in effect a receiver of stolen goods, had purchased with the valuables Captain Kidd had taken from his victims and that more or less rightfully belonged to the Olmsteds. So much for the fruits of what William Waldorf Astor had memorialized as “patient courage and masterful resolve.” The hoax was so credible, especially since it was reinforced by the long-standing Astor reputation for rapacity, that until he died in 1903, Olmsted repeatedly denied he had pursued a claim on the estate.

  “None knew better how to make the utmost of opportunity,” William wrote at the end of his long essay about his great-grandfather. “In the midst of indefatigable industry, a vein of sentimental sadness, of which his private papers give repeated indication, tinged his thoughts with a strange and retrospective pathos. Perhaps this was but a trace of the reverie of one who, grown meditative as the shadows lengthen, and passing the joys and loves and triumphs of a lifetime in review, catches beneath a thousand memories their inevitable undertone of tears.” Old Astor had long continued to grieve over the death of his wife. John Jacob Astor II, their first son, was feebleminded, an imbecile in the terminology of the time, “a confirmed lunatic,” according to Whitman. Three other Astor children had died in infancy.

  Even after detailing such humanizing events William was not satisfied with his attempt to reconcile greatness, fame, and wealth with his ancestor’s “peasant” origins and his “forlorn boyhood” spent in the “humble surroundings” of the family butcher shop. Some vital, infusing element was missing from the Astor story, some aristocratic spark and genetic link that would account for what was perhaps a uniquely American phenomenon: John Jacob Astor, “a poor German lad…born in a peasant’s cottage,” had “sprung fresh from the people,” as William wrote, but his heirs only one or two generations later were blue bloods bestriding the summit of the social heap. From an unimaginable height they looked down on “the people”—that is, if they were even aware that the people existed except to serve them and yield up tribute in rents. So they must have been blue bloods all along.

  During the 1880s, while serving as U.S. minister to Italy, William had hired a firm of London genealogists—Janson, Cobb, Pearson and Company—to mouse around in French, German, and Spanish villages and search local histories and parish records for the name “Astor.” Their five years of expensive digging dead-ended in a Baden butcher shop owned by “Jacob Ashdor,” father of John Jacob Astor. The genealogists had better luck, William believed, in tracking a somewhat similar name, “d’Astorga,” that belonged to a dynasty going back to Count Pedro d’Astorga of Castille, a Crusader killed at the siege of Jerusalem in 1100 while locked in mortal combat with the Saracen “Yusuf Tashafin, King of the Almoravids of Morocco.” Some years earlier, the researchers reported, an unnamed “Spanish Queen” had granted to one of Pedro’s ancestors “the arms of a Falcon, Argent, on a gloved hand, Or, in acknowledgment of the recapture of her favorite Falcon. The recipient adopted as his name the Spanish word Azor (The Goshawk).” Among more recent Astor forebears, according to this account, was “Jean Jacques d’Astorg,” a French Huguenot of noble descent who had fled to Germany “upon the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685” and died near Heidelberg in 1711. Some twenty generations of blood allegedly linked John Jacob Astor of Waldorf, who died in New York in 1848, with the Christian warrior who died in Jerusalem in 1100.

  In a devastating article in the New York Sun, Lothrop Withington, dean of American genealogists, pronounced the Astor tree pure moonshine, a “fabrication” riddled with inaccuracies and phoney dates. A real-life Comte d’Astorga living in France dismissed it as “an appalling mixture of facts, some of them actually turned upside down.” No evidence whatsoever supported any connection between the Spanish Crusader who fell at Jerusalem and a clan of beer-swilling, hog-butchering Germans in the village of Waldorf, duchy of Baden. There was, however, the remote but mortifying possibility, as Withington pointed out, that the putative founder of the Astor dynasty, if one could be found, had not been a Crusader but a Jewish doctor of Carcassonne named Isaac Astorg, who died in 1305.* William’s London researchers warned him that the Astorga/Astor connection was at best an exercise in the optative mood. But he was so pleased with this genealogy that, dismissing all doubts and objections, he reproduced it as a full-page illustration in his great-grandfather’s biography.

  In point of authenticity, the Astorga/Astor connection scarcely differed from other fanciful lineages that American plutocrats were buying by the yard, along with needy dukes and lords as mates for their daughters. Referring to William as “an eminent semi-American,” a New York Times editorial said, “Everybody knew before that ‘family trees’ were delicate vegetables, soon to be shaken to pieces by the wind of investigation.” As always William refused to be shaken by either ridicule or revelation. His Spanish Crusader was the central actor in his version of what Sigmund Freud was to call “family romances,” daydreams about replacing forebears with “others of better birth. The technique used in carrying out phantasies like this…depends upon the ingenuity and the material which the child has at his disposal.” The adult William had plenty of both. When he became a British subject in 1899 he adopted a personal coat of arms, a silver goshawk perched on a gold-gloved hand. He displayed it along with shields, banners, and other heraldic furnishings at Cliveden, his great estate in the Thames Valley, and at Hever Castle, his moated retreat in the Kent countryside.

  Eventually, reflecting on what he claimed was the implacable American resentment of Astor greatness, William gave up, at least privately, the battle to claim a noble ancestry. “I do not believe,” he wrote to an American friend, Amy Small Richardson, in 1905, “that anything would avail to change the ordinary acceptation in America of my great-grandfather’s life and character. He will go down as a ‘Dutch sausage peddler,’ and my fate p
romises to be the same if the American press can make it so.” He consoled himself with the hope of one day being elevated to the British peerage.

  THREE

  Inventor and Novelist

  i.

  FROM CHILDHOOD John Jacob Astor IV was an unlikely counterpart to his powerful older cousin, William Waldorf Astor. Pampered by his mother and his four older sisters, neglected by a distant, dissipated, and frequently absent father, he was socially and physically graceless. A long beanpole body and relatively small head made him look as if he had been assembled from mismatched parts. He seemed dreamy and affectless, someone almost to be pitied despite his wealth, position, and flashes of seigneurial authority. A lonely and awkward adolescent, he was sent away to prep school at St. Paul’s, in Concord, New Hampshire, after which he spent three years at Harvard as a special student. He enrolled in science courses and left without taking a degree. After a year or two of travel in Europe, India, and Egypt, in 1887, at the age of twenty-three, he returned to New York to take his place as scion of the cadet branch of the Astors. Like a debutante, he was formally introduced to society at an eight-hundred-guest reception his mother, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, gave in his honor at her house on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street. The scandal sheet Town Topics hailed young Astor on his entrance into the mating market as “one of the richest catches of the day,” and added, “It is very questionable whether, were he put to it, he could ever earn his bread by his brains.” He was not put to it to any extent until after his father died five years later and left him, at least nominally, in charge of a staff of lawyers, accountants, and managers who, along with several trustees, were responsible for administering his share of the Astor estate.