2

The Art of Discretion

January 1895, New York

‘His cult of snobbishness was so ardent, so sincere, that it acquired dignity; it became almost a religion.’ – ELIZABETH DREXEL LEHR

The first Patriarchs’ Ball of the new year was held on 14 January 1895 at Delmonico’s. The fashionable restaurant on Fifth Avenue and 26th Street had long been established as the preferred location for Ward McAllister’s exclusive entertainments. McAllister, self-appointed arbiter of New York society, had, as usual, carefully selected the guest list, agonised over the invitations and ensured the menu and wine list reflected the expensive tastes of the elite. Everything had been arranged with the precision and care that was symbolic of the Patriarchs – but something was amiss.

McAllister, a pompous Southerner who had married an heiress and then fortuitously secured the friendship of Mrs Astor, the doyenne of New York society had sensed for a few Seasons that his influence was on the wane. He longed for the days when all of New York society looked to him to set the tone and provide guidance on the right way to behave. In the frenetic social jostling between Old New York’s Knickerbockers and the new millionaire Swells in the years that followed the Civil War, McAllister and Mrs Astor had stood tall and led the way. They set the rules and declared through their guest lists who was in and who was out. They navigated the minefield that lay between the acceptance of vast new wealth and the preservation of the old order, and ensured that the social battles that dominated Fifth Avenue ballrooms were conducted in a proper and decent manner.

In the early 1870s, McAllister and Mrs Astor had realised that New York society was in a state of flux. The rise of the Swells was becoming impossible to ignore and the sheer wealth they commanded gave them a presence that constantly challenged the high society of Old New York. As always, it was down to them to manage an acceptable transition, allowing in just enough of the upstarts to maintain stability. In an attempt to bridge the gap between the two groups, McAllister had founded the Society of Patriarchs, a collection of gentlemen that represented both old Knickerbocker families, otherwise known as Nobs, and successful speculators who had sufficiently proved themselves socially to be of the right stock for McAllister’s vision of a new American aristocracy. The Patriarchs included McAllister, John Jacob Astor, William Astor, Lewis M Rutherfurd, Lewis Colford Jones, Alex Van Rensseler and William C Schermerhorn. In total there were twenty-five Patriarchs, whose position enabled them to use their superior judgment to invite four ladies and five gentlemen each to events. McAllister later explained in his book, Society as I Have Found It: ‘Patriarchs were chosen solely for their fitness; on each of them promising to invite to each ball only such people as would do credit to the ball.’¹

In addition, McAllister, with the approval of Mrs Astor, could extend fifty additional invitations to those he deemed socially acceptable, enabling him to bring certain Swells into the fold. They had become a social force that was impossible to ignore, so with his typical pragmatism, McAllister decided that if he could not push the Swells to the sidelines, it would be prudent to hand-pick them instead. In the creation of the Patriarchs, he had provided a benchmark that indicated to high society, the press and the wider world, who had really made it. It gave those in the inner sanctum the power to make or break reputations, and those whose star and bank balance was on the rise something to aspire to. McAllister wrote, ‘… the whole secret of the success of these Patriarch Balls lay in making them select; in making them the most brilliant balls of each winter. In making it extremely difficult to obtain an invitation to them and to make such invitations of great value; to make them the stepping-stone to the best New York society.…’²

Of course, McAllister positioned himself at the centre of this social manoeuvring, taking responsibility for selecting unrivalled food, drink, musical accompaniments and even who would take part in the increasingly elaborate cotillions that were favoured at such social occasions. Elizabeth Drexel Lehr – wife of another wannabe social arbiter, Harry Lehr, who came to prominence in the 1890s – commented on McAllister’s reverence for society in her memoir, King Lehr: ‘His cult of snobbishness was so ardent, so sincere, that it acquired dignity; it became almost a religion. No devout parish priest ever visited his flock with more loyal devotion to duty than did Ward McAllister.’³

McAllister, whose family had traded Savannah, Georgia, for California to make their fortune practising law in the heady days of the Gold Rush, had married an heiress and then spent several years touring Europe, where he studied the culture and trappings of the aristocratic Old World with a judicious zeal. These early years refined his tastes and perfected his conduct, ensuring he was equipped to bring his own brand of pretentious etiquette to an American elite floundering in the face of an invasion of arrivistes. However, Mrs McAllister, the former Sarah Taunter Gibbons, did not seem to share his love of entertaining and suffered from poor health, so McAllister formed an enduring alliance with a distant relative through marriage, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, otherwise known as the Mrs Astor, a nod to her total domination of the New York elite.

Mrs Astor had Old New York running through her veins. As a member of the Schermerhorn family, who could trace their lineage back to the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam (later to become New York), she had made a desirable match in 1853 by marrying William Backhouse Astor Jr, whose father had made his fortune in the fur trade before moving on to New York real estate. The Astors had five children before Mrs Astor, concerned by the pace of social change incurred by the expansion of New York City after the Civil War, began to define the parameters of social acceptance. Through complex rules and etiquette, she sought to preserve the establishment against the threat of the new industrialists and speculators who were eroding all that the Knickerbockers held true, such as family lineage and tradition, while having an innate understanding that the time for change was coming. Accepting that her husband was more interested in business and spending time at his gentlemen’s club than policing society, she enlisted the help of McAllister, and together they began to create a new social order that didn’t ignore the changes but instead contained them. They became a power couple whose iron grip on society throughout the 1870s and 1880s kept the undesirables out and those who were accepted permanently on their toes. ‘For years, whole families sat on the stool of probation, awaiting trial and acceptance and many were then rejected, but once received you were put on an intimate footing with all,’⁴ said McAllister when describing the long and arduous road society hopefuls were required to tread to gain admission.

McAllister quite clearly adored Mrs Astor, calling her his ‘mystic rose’, referring to Dante’s Paradise, and using any opportunity to pay deference to her. When planning a Patriarchs’ Ball he would constantly seek her approval, noting, ‘Whenever we required advice and assistance on or about them, we went to her, and always found ourselves rewarded in so doing.… Quick to criticise any defect of lighting or ornamentation, or arrangement, she was not backward in chiding the management for it.’⁵

No stranger to entertaining, Mrs Astor had established her lavish annual ball, given on the first or second Monday of January, as one of the New York Season’s most coveted events. Guests were greeted by the hostess in her drawing room, where she stood resplendent under a huge portrait of herself. She glittered in a profusion of diamonds, which clustered around her neck, snaking up to a dazzling tiara embellished by diamond stars atop her black pompadour. She performed her duties with consummate skill, watching her guests from one end of the ballroom perched on a red velvet banquette that could accommodate six carefully chosen ladies. Those chosen to sit on the ‘throne’ could receive no greater honour; their position was assured. A decadent sit-down midnight supper would follow and then the hostess would simply retire for the night. Mrs Astor did not dance. Mrs Astor did not deign to mingle with her guests for hours while Lander’s orchestra played from the balcony. In fact Mrs Astor did not dine out in public, give interviews to society reporters about her many entertainments or let herself be photographed. She knew that her success depended on creating a majestic superiority that ensured she was just far enough removed from her subjects to maintain her mystique. ‘Always dignified, always reserved, a little aloof. She gave friendship but never intimacy. She never confided. No one ever knew what thoughts passed behind the calm repose of her face.’⁶ McAllister was in awe of her, declaring, ‘She had the power that all women should strive to obtain… calling forth a loyalty of devotion such as one imagines one yields to a sovereign, whose subjects are only too happy to be subjects.’⁷

Securing an invitation to Mrs Astor’s ball became a Gilded Age obsession, preoccupying old and new money alike, with many families putting in months and years of groundwork to ensure their name was on the list. If they were denied, ‘life could hold no more bitter mortification’⁸. Families went to great lengths to hide the humiliation of not being invited to the ball from friends and acquaintances, knowing that such a slight would inevitably encourage gossip. Instead, they would enlist the help of sympathetic doctors who would recommend immediate trips for their patients to the nearby Adirondacks as a cure for ailments that did not exist. Alternatively, ‘maiden aunts and grandmothers living in remote towns were ruthlessly killed off to provide alibis for their relations.’⁹ For society, there was no greater disappointment. It was far preferable to be out of town, however spurious the reason, than be forced to admit that an invitation had not been forthcoming from Mrs Astor.

Mrs Astor’s carefully crafted image was threatened when the man she had placed her faith in succumbed to the overtures of the press. The increasingly popular newspapers laid siege to an upper class far removed from the tenement slums so many New Yorkers called home and began to tread a fine line between denouncing the elite for their frivolity and celebrating them for their splendour. McAllister opined that there were ‘only about four hundred people in fashionable New York society’¹⁰ and later admitted that four hundred was indeed the capacity of Mrs Astor’s fabled ballroom. This rather indiscreet comment marked the beginning of the press’s fascination with a group which they termed The Four Hundred, and saw a growing obsession among everyone from the elite to the New York masses with who was in and who was out.

For Mrs Astor, who prided herself on discretion, McAllister’s hand in creating the myth of The Four Hundred was a grave mistake. She had credited him with impeccable taste and breeding, and now he had overstepped the mark. He became known not only as the arbiter of New York society, earning the mantle ‘despot of the Patriarchs’¹¹, but also as an eager informant for newspapermen, with whom he was ‘constantly in touch’¹².

McAllister’s self-assured proclamations on the great and the good and his absolute belief in his own social position were further confirmed when he published Society As I Have Found It in 1890, much to the horror of the elite, who valued their privacy and did not appreciate the realities of their social struggles and triumphs being laid bare for the world to ridicule. The reviews for this social handbook poked fun at The Four Hundred’s self-styled leader and his pompous and convoluted set of rules. McAllister appeared in a cartoon entitled ‘Snobbish Society’s Schoolmaster’ in Judge magazine in November 1890, depicted as an ass lecturing Uncle Sam on how to be a gentlemen. For Mrs Astor the embarrassment that McAllister had caused was too great. Their friendship cooled and the partnership that had once ruled society was no more. The New York Times later wrote that McAllister had ‘acquired the habit of writing what he thought, and his social set had punished him somewhat severely for it’¹³. Society highly valued discretion, so much so that when socialite Eleanor Belmont confided to a friend that she hoped to write a book entitled The Outlaws and In-Laws of Society, she was wisely advised to forget such a scheme. She reported her friend’s cautionary words in her memoirs: ‘“If you don’t tell the truth, there would be no point in it – if you told the truth, the points would make you and everyone else uncomfortable,” and she quoted a saying attributed to Mark Twain, “A little truth is a dangerous thing; a great deal is fatal.”’¹⁴

If it was not shocking enough for McAllister’s revelations to lift the veil on the complex social manoeuvres that were the very lifeblood of the upper classes, he had also incurred the wrath of those who were in society but did not appear to be part of The Four Hundred. For those society ladies who had almost fifteen hundred names on their ‘at home’ calling list, McAllister’s proclamation took away their air of exclusivity. For those firmly ensconced in The Four Hundred, the undercurrent of ill feeling created by McAllister’s actions indicated that his tenure was coming to an end.

An alternative to the Patriarchs’ Ball, the Assembly Ball, was introduced by some leading matrons who, concerned at McAllister’s influence over society, sought to take away some of the Patriarchs’ cachet. By creating the Assembly Balls, purported to be even more exclusive than the Patriarchs’, female society leaders showed they were closing ranks and making the notion of The Four Hundred obsolete. If you really belonged to the inner sanctum, you were graced with an invitation to the Assembly Balls; if you were simply a member of the elite, then you were more likely to receive the call to the Patriarchs’.

Rumours also abounded that McAllister had received compensation for including names on his guest list. These were confirmed when the newspapers ran a story about McAllister and the railway tycoon Collis P Huntington. Huntington had agreed to pay McAllister $9,000 for an invitation to the Patriarchs’ Ball and an introduction to Mrs Astor, but had reneged on the deal and only offered $1,000 after the event. McAllister was furious and poured the whole story out to a journalist friend, only to be mortified when the scandal appeared in print.

By November 1894, The New York Times was openly telling its readers about the type of service that McAllister provided. ‘For introducing rich persons into “society”, there are “society leaders” in the United States of whom like things are darkly said. But these things are mostly done in corners.’¹⁵ Although these kinds of services weren’t only provided by McAllister – in fact they were an open secret in society – it was increasingly felt that, for him, the game was up. He had pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable too far, and had failed to act with the discretion that was required to live and operate among the elite.

There was little doubt that McAllister’s American aristocracy was casting him aside, and even Mrs Astor, who had for so long been his most formidable ally, now supported the matrons. By the early 1890s he faced a challenge to make the Patriarchs great again. Society still came – after all, there were twenty-five influential families represented at every occasion and they still had the power to give and withhold invitations. Society families wisely reasoned that to sustain their position they simply must be invited to and attend all of the key functions during the Season, as well as be seen at the opera on Monday and Friday nights, host lively dinner parties and continue the round of monotonous afternoon calls. However, the prestige of the Patriarchs had undoubtedly diminished. After almost two decades at the pinnacle of society, McAllister was under intense pressure, although one newspaper noted, ‘Mr McAllister has been a great deal maligned by some of those who criticise him. There is no more genial host, entertaining guest, or “jolly good fellow”, as he has often been voted by his many friends.’¹⁶

And so it was amidst this atmosphere that the best of New York assembled again on that Monday night in January 1895. Despite his experiences, McAllister had clearly not learnt the art of discretion and had gleefully informed reporters of the details of the Patriarchs’ Ball. They had congregated at his house at 16 West 36th Street, sitting expectantly around the dining table, pen and paper in hand. McAllister had been in his element, at ease in a revolving office chair, comfortable carpet slippers and a desk-worn sack coat, plying the press with titbits of gossip and details about the menu, the decorations and the guests they could expect to see. At the beginning of the Season he had predicted another influx of nouveaux riches: ‘… there are a host of new people cropping up among us, don’t you see?… I think a good many have been living in seclusion right in this city. They have suddenly or gradually made money, and are now entertaining every one and being received everywhere. Look at some of those in the opera boxes, for instance. The other night I cast my eyes from box to box, and bless me, if there weren’t at least a dozen “new” people receiving a vast amount of attention and admiration.’¹⁷

However, he had responded by closing ranks. This ball was to be more exclusive than previous Patriarchs’, limited to 275 guests. McAllister had thought it prudent to ensure only the very best of society graced the ballroom at Delmonico’s. The first guests would arrive after the opera and he had directed the renowned Hungarian Band to play as soon as they appeared in the red anteroom. They would then make their way through the smaller red ballroom, which he had instructed would be adorned with spectacular flower garlands of yellow roses, daffodils and acacias, draping over every mantel and mirror. The corridor leading to the main ballroom would be massed in green with great palms standing in the corners and the walls covered with Southern clematis interspersed with the soft mauve of the Cattleya orchid. Finally, the main ballroom would be festooned with fourteen cone-shaped baskets overflowing with great white lilies, pink roses and vines tumbling over the edges. He could almost hear the audible gasps of wonder from the debutantes as they took in the display. It was not the grandest decor he had ever put together, but it was stunning and tasteful and just might remind society how he alone would continue to set the tone for all to follow, despite their doubts.

McAllister must have been gratified to see that Mrs Alva Vanderbilt and her debutante daughter, Consuelo, would be in attendance, along with Mrs Marietta Stevens. Both women were subscribers to the Assembly Balls, but were savvy enough to be seen at all the fashionable entertainments. Of course there had been rumours swirling around them for months. Alva Vanderbilt was contending with gossip about the state of her marriage to Willie K while simultaneously launching her only daughter onto the social scene, and Marietta Stevens was said to be having money trouble again. However, neither woman had ever been the type to shy away from scandal. In fact, like McAllister, their ability to play the game had seen them rise from Swells to grandes dames with terrifying speed. Now, as they all faced threats to their positions, it occurred to McAllister that maybe they could use their tenacity and each other to stay on top. Of course McAllister and Marietta already had much in common and had helped each other before in their endeavours. Both had come to the aid of the nouveaux riches languishing on society’s sidelines many times, for a little fee of course. Yes, they understood each other well, and Alva Vanderbilt, with her ascent from nobody to somebody, knew what it took to get on in their world.

So tonight was the perfect opportunity for McAllister to bask in the triumph of another magnificent social occasion while a few complimentary words from Alva and Marietta to their extensive network of friends would ensure that his name was once more associated with the highest levels of decorum and taste, and the tawdry newspaper business would be forgotten. In return, McAllister would use his press connections to dispel the unseemly fabrications about the women that were gracing the pages of every newspaper in town because, as he had learnt to his detriment, in New York only the right kind of publicity would do.