April 1895, New York
‘You know, I am a fighter, and I will fight this case if it costs $20,000.’ – MARIETTA STEVENS
As she placed her copy of The New York Times on the bedside table, Marietta Stevens sighed. The paper had covered the strike in detail, ensuring all of New York knew the Victoria Hotel was in trouble. The reporter chronicled how its opulent entrances had been besieged by chambermaids and scullery help, desperate for information on their future, increasingly despondent over whether they would secure the wages that were owed to them. It all seemed a far cry from the intoxicating and glamorous days that the hotel, situated on 27th Street and Fifth Avenue, had enjoyed just a few years earlier. Known for the very best service, the most accomplished food and lavish interiors, it had played host to opera star Christine Nilsson and President Cleveland, but now it stood on the brink of bankruptcy after failing to keep up with fierce competition from the newly opened Waldorf Hotel.
‘A lot of lampblack daubed on rough brown paper, such as one might have expected to see in the windows of a defunct grocery in payback junction, informed promenaders in Broadway and Fifth Avenue yesterday that the Victoria Hotel was “closed”,’ The New York Times informed readers on 2 April 1895. The news came after a week of feverish speculation about the hotel’s future when every detail of its finances had been pored over by New Yorkers keen to ascertain whether this iconic building would survive the year. It had been reported that the Victoria’s management owed $75,0001 in rent arrears to the Stevenses’ estate and, after many months of wrangling over lines of credit, the trustees’ patience had finally run out.
Since the whole unpleasant business had begun, Marietta had not left her home on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. The official reason for her seclusion from society was that she had caught a severe cold but the press also speculated that she was ‘completely prostrated’ with worry over the Victoria and that the anxiety over her own financial situation, which was so closely linked to the hotel’s, had caused an ‘apoplectic fit and a consequent mental depression’2.
It was true Marietta was worried, perhaps more than at any time in her life. She had known difficult times before, and since her husband’s death she had endured the financial ups and downs that accompanied a widow with a limited income who had to maintain a certain status in society. However, she knew the hotel business, and the fact that the Victoria, one of the Stevenses’ most prominent acquisitions, was now facing a very public downfall uncovered the indignant side of her personality, the side she usually kept hidden, quietly bubbling along beneath the surface. It was actually the facet of her character that drove all others and she had used this burning rage against the inequitableness of society, ironically, to lead her to its pinnacle. The newspaper had consulted an anonymous prominent local hotel manager on the reasons for the Victoria’s position. He had said: ‘There is not a better location in this city for a magnificent hotel than the Victoria.… But it is out of date. It has been allowed to run to seed. Any manager with modern ideas, who is willing to spend $250,000 in improving it and making it what a hotel in that location and with that prestige really ought to be, could make money.’ 3
Marietta had to agree; the hotel had failed to keep pace with the extraordinary rate of change that was sweeping the city. She thought about the days when Paran had been intimately involved in all of his businesses, how together they had planned the details of using their hospitality to make their hotels stand out from the crowd. Indeed, Marietta had made a living out of anticipating what New York society wanted, and now it rankled her that she had let the situation get this far out of control. Of course she blamed the trustees of Paran’s estate, her brother-in-law Charles G Stevens and her son-in-law John L Melcher, who was the husband of Paran’s daughter from his first marriage. The three of them had been engaged in a legal war of words since Paran had died in 1872, with Stevens and Melcher repeatedly disagreeing with Marietta’s handling of the hotel magnate’s fortune. Whether Paran thought that Marietta, ambitious for social success and lacking in business acumen, needed the steadying hand of two distant relatives to preserve the family’s millions for the next generation isn’t clear, but it’s unlikely he anticipated the ferocious fallout that his decision would have. His death signalled the beginning of years of legal wrangling over the estate, with Marietta keen to have more control over the fortune and the trustees continually blocking such moves. In October 1887, the New York Tribune gleefully laid bare the rifts between the Stevenses when it reported on a number of incidents between John Melcher and Marietta when the matriarch had allegedly attacked her son-in-law. ‘She had repeatedly pummelled him – once beating him over the head with an umbrella, another time striking him in the chest and breaking all the cigars in his waistcoat pockets, and on a third occasion seizing an ink bottle with intent to throw it at him, but repenting of this design and hurling strong language at him instead.’
This was not the first time Marietta had failed to keep her temper in check. In 1887, she was sued by a Miss Sallie Gibbons, the owner of a gallery who rented her store from the Stevens estate, for trespass and assault. According to Miss Gibbons, Marietta had used abusive language when she had visited the gallery and threatened to evict her, before assaulting her. Marietta had finally been forced to leave by the police. In court Marietta maintained that she had only entered the premises to enquire about making improvements to the property; however, the jury favoured Miss Gibbons’s account and awarded her fifty dollars plus costs.
Marietta found herself in court again in 1891 when her French chef, Desiré Schmitt, sued her for wrongful dismissal, accusing Marietta of swearing at him and telling him, ‘Go! Leave this house at once and never darken its doors again.’4 Again, she fought the case, blaming Schmitt’s drinking for his dismissal. She told the press, ‘You know, I am a fighter, and I will fight this case if it costs $20,000.’5
She was right. Despite the adverse publicity that these court cases generated, Marietta never shied away from them. She waged a two-decade war on the trustees of Paran’s estate because she believed that she knew best when it came to managing her family’s finances. Time and again her pleas were rejected in court. It appears that the justice system did not share Marietta’s views that the trustees were mismanaging the estate and withholding funds from her. It is impossible to tell whether her blind belief in fighting the trustees or the defamation of her character as propagated by Gibbons and Schmitt was because she believed herself to be on the side of the truth or whether she had to fight such accusations or they would almost certainly be considered fact, endangering the carefully crafted image she presented to society. For Marietta Stevens, her first line of defence was attack and attack she did, with utter conviction.
Such public battles would have usually rendered a lady impotent in New York society but Marietta’s complex character saved her from obscurity. Town Topics observed:
‘Whatever may be Mrs Stevens’s faults of temperament, no one can doubt either her intelligence or her courage. She has recognised for some time past that the time has arrived for New York society to be less narrow and less provincial and that the ruling out of any presentable person from fashionable gatherings, simply because he or she did not happen to be numbered with the elect… was depriving herself and friends of much perfectly lawful amusement and entertainment, which could be contributed by artists and people of intellect.’6
Marietta knew how to use her talents well, so in the face of scandal and gossip, she could maintain her hard-won place as a society matron by keeping the establishment interested and entertained. Her ability for reinvention and anticipating what the elite needed was a trick she had been using since her days in the hotel trade. It had served her well when she introduced her Sunday night musicales onto the social scene and it did so again when she delighted society with unique entertainments in her palatial residences. She invited the opera sensation, Nellie Melba as a guest of honour to a dance at a time when performers were considered not presentable enough for New York society occasions, and entertained guests at her Newport villa with a hypnotist, creating geniune excitement as to what she would dream up next. The Sunday Herald said of one occasion that it was ‘exclusively and excruciatingly select. Many have called but few were chosen to be the recipients of cards or invitations.’7 However, that is not to say that Marietta had conquered all of society. There were still elements of Old New York who would never truly accept her presence among them and although they were now forced to tolerate her, every indiscretion that appeared in the newspapers only served to solidify their opinion. She would never be one of them.
In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the character of Mrs Lemuel Struthers, the rather brash shoe-polish queen, is based on Marietta. When Madame Olenska is introduced to Mrs Struthers, it becomes obvious where Wharton discovered her inspiration:
‘“Of course I want to know you, my dear,” cried Mrs Struthers in a round rolling voice that matched her bold feathers and her brazen wig. “I want to know everybody who’s young and interesting and charming and the Duke tells me you like music… Well, do you want to hear Sarasate play tomorrow evening at my house? You know I’ve something going on every Sunday evening at my house – it’s the day when New York doesn’t know what to do with itself, and so I say to it: ‘Come and be amused!’”’8
Of course Wharton knew Marietta very well indeed, as Marietta’s only son, Harry, had been engaged to Edith in 1882. In many ways, Harry Stevens was a catch. He was attractive, sporty, charismatic, ‘one of the most popular men in society’9 and due to inherit a large fortune that Paran Stevens had left when he died. Edith Jones, as she was then, began her courtship with Harry Stevens in 1880 and an engagement was announced in the Newport Daily News on 19 August 1882. Unusually, the groom’s name appeared in the announcement before the bride’s, perhaps indicating Marietta’s hand in the engagement notice. By now, as an expert in managing the newspapers, she knew the value of the Stevens name taking prime position. Harry was said to be ‘desperately in love’ with the intelligent and quick-witted Edith, who, as a Jones, came from the kind of Old New York stock that would render the Stevenses’ transfer from nouveau riche to part of the establishment complete. From society’s point of view, it appeared to be the perfect match, but it seems that not all of the respective families were in agreement.
There are conflicting accounts of who was to blame when the engagement was eventually broken off a few months later. Edith’s family accused Marietta of being behind it all, surmising that she was looking for a bride with more attractive prospects than Edith for her only son. Helen Rhinelander, Edith’s cousin, wrote in a letter to her brother Tom, ‘It is evidently Mrs S’s fault, or rather she is the cause… I doubt Pussy [Edith] and H have changed in their feeling for one another, but that Mrs S is at the bottom of it all.’10
For their part the Joneses let it be known that they thought that Marietta would make an ‘impossible mother-in-law’ and still harboured suspicions that the social-climbing Stevenses were not quite good enough to be associated with their name. Indeed, the friction between the two families could be traced back to Marietta’s first foray into entertaining, when the matriarch of the family and Edith’s great-aunt, Mary Mason Jones, had categorically refused ever to entertain Marietta in her house on account of her Sunday-night musicales. The influential society leader had steadfastly clung to her view of Marietta as unworthy of the inner sanctum of New York society, so it is unlikely she would have supported the match. Town Topics had its own opinion on why the engagement had been broken off, citing ‘an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride. Miss Jones is an ambitious authoress and, it is said that, in the eyes of Mr Stevens, ambition is a grievous fault.’11
Marietta may have had her own reasons for not supporting Harry’s choice. According to the terms of Paran Stevens’s will, she controlled her children’s inheritance until they were twenty-five or married and, with Harry only twenty-three years old, Marietta may have been keen to hold on to her financial control for as long as possible. Another possible explanation is that she knew what everyone else did not. Harry Stevens had tuberculosis and, despite attempts to improve his health with lengthy trips abroad, she knew that he would almost certainly not be the husband that Edith had imagined for herself. Is it possible that Marietta was simply trying to protect Miss Jones from life as a young widow?
Whatever the causes of the split, Edith retreated to Europe with her mother before returning to New York anxiously for the Season the following year, braced for the inevitable stares from society’s matrons. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton doesn’t mention her engagement to Harry Stevens, airbrushing it out of her own personal history. Two years later, she would be married to Teddy Wharton. During the summer of the same year, 1885, Harry Stevens died in Newport. In a decision that illuminates just how intrinsically linked the press had become with the Stevens family’s fate, Marietta made public the results of an autopsy conducted by three prominent New York doctors that she had ordered. The New York Times had reported the arrival of Harry and his mother at Newport the previous month, noting that his condition was serious but the reason was unknown. Whether Marietta genuinely didn’t know the cause of her son’s death or whether she wanted to silence speculation over its links to Edith’s recent marriage is unclear, but the publication of Harry’s cause of death as being from a cancerous stomach tumour provoked by too violent exercise at athletics was highly unusual and seems unlikely, given his previous tubercular diagnosis.
Now, as Marietta sat in her sumptuous bedroom, surrounded by a riotous assortment of antiques, in the very house that used to belong to Edith’s great-aunt, she must have reflected on the whole sorry business with the Jones family. Everyone’s reputations had been damaged by the affair, and of course there was poor Harry, who had never really recovered. Still, she had weathered the storm, as she had always done, and had moved onwards and upwards despite the challenges. Perhaps the Joneses’ had been right all along, she was an ambitious upstart; she had a temper and an unconventionality that meant she created drama and complications for herself, which forced her to be equally creative to smooth them over. This was perhaps her most useful skill: she could adapt, she could identify and capitalise on opportunities – hadn’t that been her greatest asset? And then there was Minnie. Dear Minnie. Her greatest accomplishment. How she had travelled so much further, armed with the drive and intelligence her mother had engendered in her, bolstered by wit, culture and an innate sense of knowing her rightful destiny. Together they had passed the daughters of the nouveaux riches through their hands and positioned them in the most influential places of society. Biographer Joan Hardwick noted that Marietta was ‘well known for arranging marriages between wealthy young American girls and European titled aristocracy’,12 before emphasising that ‘any girl she took on had to have money’.13
Marietta thought about Ward McAllister. They had helped each other, he understood her and she understood him. In many ways they were cut from the same cloth, both outsiders employing all their guts and guile to get into society and using the fortunes of the more desperate arrivistes to stay there. She felt unnerved when she thought about how his life had ended. He’d died from an attack of flu only two weeks after his glittering last Patriarchs’ Ball on 31 January 1895 at the age of sixty-eight, never fully regaining the trust of the elite he had betrayed.
McAllister would have expected a large funeral with the pomp and ceremony that a stalwart of New York’s social scene demanded. However, although the Vanderbilts turned out in force for their most loyal social sponsor and Marietta Stevens was of course in attendance, the inner sanctum stayed away. Only a handful of the Patriarchs attended. There was no Mrs Astor, who was busy preparing for a dinner party she was giving that evening. At Grace Church the crowds came, but it was a crowd of ordinary New Yorkers desperate to see the last journey of a notorious figure once so elevated but lately, in many quarters, lampooned and ridiculed. Afterwards, the crowd wrestled the police for floral mementoes of the great man, but the leaves were already wilting and, like McAllister’s sweeping proclamations on the Four Hundred, would soon fade away completely.
Now, the same New Yorkers walked past the Victoria Hotel, some reading the closed notices on the doors with interest, some picketing the streets outside, hoping that the woman who owned this vestige of Old New York hospitality would do the right thing by the common people. Was she Marietta the chambermaid, the grocer’s assistant, the Lowell girl done good or Mrs Paran Stevens, the money-grabbing social climber, who discharged every threat in her path? Marietta herself didn’t know. In this ever-evolving New York it was difficult to know where you belonged. All she knew, was that for the first time she didn’t want to fight any more.
On 5 April 1895, the Waldorf Hotel gave a musicale. The venue had been changed at the last minute due to the untimely death from heart failure on 4 April 1895 of Mrs Marietta Stevens, the occasion’s social sponsor. In the obituary section of The New York Times two days later, a reporter wrote of Marietta: ‘When… she knocked on the door of exclusive fashion, there was much rolling up of the eyes and much whispering within. Admittance was denied. Stories, creations of gossiping old women were circulated… but undaunted, socially ambitious, she pursued her course until those who had rolled their eyes and spoken in whispers felt themselves honoured to be invited to her house.’
For Minnie, who was on the way to New York on the Lucania, there could be no greater tribute to her mother. New York had seen Marietta Stevens for what she was and through her guile had been forced to accept her anyway. Society had been transformed from the days of McAllister, Mrs Astor and the Four Hundred and the pace of change continued, an unstoppable force, reminiscent of Marietta herself. There was a creeping sense among the elite that the guard was changing. Who would be next to step into the breach, because it was simply unthinkable that new leaders wouldn’t take their long-awaited places and fill the vacuum? Society would continue to march on as it always had.
‘What struck me so much was that these deaths seemed hardly to leave any impression upon society, although the dead had slaved and devoted themselves to its service,’ wrote socialite Frederick Martin. ‘Everything went on as usual; one heard parrot cries of condolence, the stereotyped remarks suitable to the occasion and then the world smiled again.’14
As for Marietta’s beloved Victoria Hotel, it too underwent a transformation. It was soon remodelled and redecorated and opened its doors once more, but this time under new ownership and without its fiercest champion.