The end of the nineteenth century was America’s Gilded Age of opulence, when great family fortunes were made and mansions that rivaled European castles were built. Mrs. William B. (Caroline) Astor ruled New York’s high society, and with help from a confidant she compiled the so-called Four Hundred—a secret list of who mattered and who didn’t in New York society. How was that number reached? It was the maximum number of guests that could fit inside Mrs. Astor’s private ballroom.
My grandfather Edward Bennett Close—Eddie—was on her list.
Originally from Yorkshire, England, the Close family had helped found Greenwich in 1640. Both my grandfather and father wore signet rings bearing the family crest and motto: Fortis et fidelis—strong and faithful.
By the late 1800s, Greenwich had become a sanctuary for New York’s wealthy. The Rockefeller brothers had built grand estates there, joining others eager to escape sweltering summers in the city. Granddad Eddie met his first wife, Marjorie, at a dance in Greenwich when he was twenty-one years old and she was only sixteen. Four days later, he secretly proposed. Because of her age, they agreed to keep their pledge secret, especially from Marjorie’s father, Charles William (C. W.) Post. It’s funny that both my father and his father each became secretly engaged to sixteen-year-olds, although, in my father’s case, he was sixteen also.
C. W. Post changed the American morning coffee habit in 1903, when he began selling an alternative to coffee, Postum, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Marjorie was his only child. Two years after meeting Marjorie, Granddad formally asked for her hand. C. W. tried to prevent the marriage but eventually gave in.
Eddie Close and Marjorie were wed on December 2, 1905. Marjorie would later tell biographers that her new husband didn’t want children. Even so, they had two daughters—my father’s half sisters, Adelaide and Eleanor—during their twelve-year marriage. My grandfather had little to do with his daughters except for a tradition that began with them and spilled over to my father and his twin: he would take them on outings, albeit infrequently, and he called those outings “beanos.” A beano would be a trip to the ice cream store or a ride in a rowboat; all beanos were great fun and remembered well.
On May 9, 1914, C. W. stuck a rifle in his mouth and squeezed the trigger, killing himself at age sixty. C. W. had been worth $33 million, which he left to be equally divided between his second wife, Leila, and Marjorie.
Marjorie felt cheated, having been told that all the family’s holdings in Postum Cereal Company would be hers based on a trust signed when her parents had founded the company. Granddad Eddie went to the cereal company’s headquarters and spent days digging through files until he found the original trust agreement. He returned to Greenwich triumphant, and on December 8, 1915, The New York Times reported that C. W.’s widow had agreed to a $6 million settlement to avoid a legal fight. Marjorie received all her father’s stock and property, which was valued at $27 million—$620 million in today’s dollars. Women didn’t run major companies at the time. A board of directors made most decisions, and Grandad became a vice president on the board.
During World War I Grandad was sent to Europe and ended up a Major on General Pershing’s staff. While he was serving in Europe, Marjorie attended a party on Long Island, where she met Manhattan stockbroker E. F. Hutton. Family legend holds that Marjorie and Hutton had an affair. When Grandad returned home in 1918 he found his wife cold and distant. Marjorie divorced my grandfather and shortly thereafter married Hutton, who helped her transform Postum into the General Foods Corporation, a move that increased her fortune to the equivalent of $3.4 billion in today’s dollars.
Only a few months after the divorce, my maternal grandparents, Charles Arthur and Elizabeth Hyde Moore, planned a double date with Granddad and a young piano and voice teacher from Houston, Texas, Betsey Taliaferro. Eddie and Betsey (Granny Close) agreed, and they all traveled into New York to attend an opera.
Shortly after this date, Eddie and Betsey married. They left immediately for France, where he took charge of the American Hospital of Paris.
My sister Tina once asked Granny Close if Granddad, then deceased, had gotten a large divorce settlement from Marjorie. Granny Close had taken a last puff on her cigarette and stamped it out in her silver Scotty ash tray. She then explained that Granddad had not accepted a single penny from his first wife. In fact, without even being asked, he’d voluntarily returned all the stock that he had collected during their marriage. Granny Close quoted my grandfather as saying, “A gentleman doesn’t take money from a woman when they are divorcing.” Too bad for us!
Granny told us that on their honeymoon, Grandad stated he didn’t want any more children. She begged and he relented, but told Granny she could only have one. Certainly not to be outdone by Marjorie, Granny was able to present Eddie with twin boys: my dad, Billy, and his brother, Ted. Twins were her revenge.
I always felt that Granny was a sad woman who thought, deep down, that her husband didn’t really love her. Within the family, we believed that Grandad never got over Marjorie.
As intriguing as my Close family history may be, it is my mother’s side that contains the most likely genetic link to my own mental illness.
Grandmother Moore, my grandmother, was the eldest daughter of Seymour J. Hyde and Elizabeth Worrall Hyde, members of another prominent Greenwich family. The Hydes had been farmers in New Hampshire and eventually established a highly successful dry goods manufacturing business, A. G. Hyde and Sons, famous for Heatherbloom Petticoats.
In February of 1915, Seymour J. Hyde fell from his horse and cracked his skull while riding in Greenwich. He died a few hours later, leaving behind an estate worth $2 million—about $46 million in today’s dollars. His namesake son, Seymour Worrall Hyde, took charge of the family business and soon found himself caught in a scandal that was reported on February 1, 1918, page 1 of The New York Times under the headline:
INSANE LIEUTENANT
KIDNAPS FOUR MEN
—
Soldiers Tell of Spending a
Night of Terror in Home
of Seymour Hyde
DETAINED AT PISTOL POINT
A Times reporter wrote that Seymour W. Hyde (my grandmother’s brother) had taken four men hostage at gunpoint in Manhattan during what appeared to be a mental meltdown. He forced two of his hostages to undress and put on purple gowns. He then had his chauffeur transport his hostages to his father’s Greenwich home, where he’d proceeded to beat one man and force him to dance until he could barely stand by threatening to shoot him. He then pulled a hot poker from the fireplace and threatened to brand another helpless hostage. During this entire episode, Hyde kept claiming to be a German spy. Two of his hostages slipped away and notified the police, who were met with pistol fire when they arrived at the Hyde property. When Hyde ran out of ammunition, the police broke inside, placed him in a straitjacket, and announced that he was clearly “insane.” His mother told reporters that Hyde was simply suffering from fatigue brought on by the pressures that came from running the family business.
For a short period, Hyde was institutionalized, but he eventually returned to Greenwich, where some viewed him as completely mad. He was known to have gone riding naked on horseback through the hills, which actually sounds like a lot of fun to me…
Seymour Worrall Hyde may have been mentally ill, but he was one of the few multimillionaires to withdraw all his money from the stock market shortly before the crash of 1929. He eventually established a Hyde family trust, which still pays benefits to my mother, my siblings, and me, although through my grandmother Moore.
What all this means is that my dad, William “Billy” Close, and my mother, Bettine Moore, came into their marriage with some baggage. My dad had a father—Granddad—who had not wanted children. My mom had an uncle who had been institutionalized for a severe mental illness. Now that we know about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we can also wonder if Seymour Hyde, who fought in World War I, was afflicted with that terrible syndrome.
Given their privileged upbringing, what was really surprising about my parents was how little either of them cared about social status and money. It’s possible they were that way because they grew up with social status and money. Having something as your birthright and turning it down is easier than not having it at all. We can only ignore what we have. But if anything, my dad and mom made a point of teaching us kids that social rank didn’t define a person. This was particularly true of my mother. She grew up in a thirty-room home with servants. Yet she never felt that she was better than they were; they were her world.
My mother remembers a time when her parents came in very late from New York City, and the cook had waited up with a hot meal. Her father told him offhandedly, “We’ve already eaten.” Suzanna Mannagotter, who helped in the kitchen, had heard the cook swear under his breath, “They won’t be singing that tune when the revolution comes!” Mom heard the servants talk about Communists and revolution and understood the disparity between them and her family. Mom told me, when I asked her about this, that years later Suza told Grandmother Moore what the chef had said and Grandmother was horrified. She found out where he lived and apologized to him in a letter.
But rather than instilling feelings of superiority in them, that disparity caused my mother and, I believe, my father to feel a special obligation to help others less fortunate than they, true altruists.
That said, none of us can escape our childhoods. And my father, in particular, would pass a ghost from his past to all of us.