i.
BY 1891, WHEN he turned forty-three and moved to England for good, William Waldorf Astor had cut himself free from all but his business ties to New York and his rejected homeland. His parents were dead, and his inheritance, loosely estimated to be between $150 million and $300 million, made him, like the founding Astor, one of the richest men alive. His wife, Mamie, to whom he had been genuinely devoted, died of peritonitis in 1894, at thirty-six. When he brought her body from London back to New York for burial in the Astor vault at Trinity Cemetery, he severed a last close tie to his earlier life. The House of Astor remained so split that neither his cousin Jack nor his aunt Caroline attended the burial services.
William could now live exactly as he wished. He kept an affectionate, indulgent, but generally distant eye on his children. The daily burden of seeing after their needs and schooling fell on a staff of nannies and tutors. A widower with unlimited means, he was in vigorous good health, except for attacks of gout, the rich man’s disease thought to be brought on by rich food and flowing wines, both of which he not only enjoyed in a discriminating way but carefully ordered in daily instructions to his household staff. Fair-haired with piercing blue eyes, he was handsome, in a formal, somewhat forbidding way, attractive to women and taking pleasure in their company.
For all his advantages, this Astor scion was one of the more unmerry creatures cast up out of the boil of heredity, nurture, endowment, and accident. Often the joke was on him: his career in politics a failure, his cobbled genealogy and literary efforts ridiculed along with his anomalous position as a “former American.” Soon his missteps in British society, along with an undisguised and increasing eagerness to enter the peerage, were to make him a further butt for ridicule. The entry in the current Oxford Dictionary of National Biography writes him off as “shy, austere, and, by all accounts, unlovable…. He despised his native country and said so in print. In return, he was lampooned by the New York press.” He had never been altogether able to shed the theology of unworthiness and damnation that his parents and nursemaids had drilled into him from childhood. But along with this joyless creed, and sometimes violently at odds with it, he had also inherited an unshakable sense of being in the first rank of the blue-blood elect. His wealth reinforced this, and so did his clear superiority to most of his social peers in intellect and cultivation. He had a passion for splendor and for building, and by his hotels left his mark on New York’s architectural and social style.
He especially looked down on his younger cousin Jack, whom he regarded as a dilettante and playboy absorbed in the mindless pleasures of the very rich—clubs, yachts, racehorses, summers at Newport. Jack seemed to enjoy playing puppy dog to his powerful mother and his self-indulgent wife, the first of whom doted on him, while the other openly despised him. William’s imagination lived in a landscape of palaces, castles, great estates, domains of Tudors and the Medici; Jack’s, in his inventor’s workshop at Ferncliff, his collection of motorcars, and a future shaped by science and religion. In their social and domestic traffic with the present, both Astors suffered from inexpressiveness. William in particular had a capacity for silence and isolation along with a thickening crust of reserve and a habit of making brusque and ill-considered responses to what he saw as challenges to his dignity. But with a few men and women whom he respected he could be gentle and open. At least on his own narrowly restrictive terms he had a certain gift for intimacy. “My father was not at all hard hearted, in fact he was very sensitive,” his daughter Pauline said. “I often felt he needed help and sympathy, and yet it seemed impossible to reach him through his defenses of reserve and a certain aloofness…. His true self seldom appeared and his motives were often misjudged.”
On an Atlantic crossing aboard the White Star liner Majestic he met Amy Small Richardson, an American woman married to a Washington, D.C., doctor. Over a period of five years, as a friend of both members of the couple and with no suggestion of attempted romance with the wife, he sent her dozens of candid and relaxed letters telling about his travels, his plans for perfecting his estates, family affairs. “I have seen my new granddaughter several times,” he wrote in 1907, “and I am told she looks like me and has my ingratiating smile.” The two shared an educated passion for gardens, architecture, and Tudor history. He sent her his stories, including one about his long past but never to be forgotten Italian “love adventure.” “It will amuse you,” he told her, “to see what your fellow traveler on the Majestic was like in those remote days.” One Christmas he had Tiffany and Company in New York send her a tiny chain purse: “As it comes from Aladdin, it can never be empty,” he wrote. Aladdin also sent her gifts of books and pictures, sprays of calla lilies and violets, and at least once a sum of money for her garden in Washington. “Do not thank me for the cheque, please, it makes me feel foolish to be thanked.” At least momentarily, in such private encounters he could feel his virtually matchless wealth to be an irony of circumstance, even an embarrassment.
“I don’t like your English aristocracy,” he confided to his friend Lady Dorothy Nevill, the doyenne of London hostesses. “They are not educated, they are not serious.” Nevertheless, English aristocracy and English titles affected him like strong drink. He collected dukes, duchesses, and other titled folk—in his view the only fit company for an Astor—the way he collected art and antiquities. He had little difficulty working his way into the circle of the pleasure-loving Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. The prince was notorious for his reliance on his smart-set coterie of bankers and South African mining millionaires to get him out of debt. “I have never been directly asked to assist him financially,” Astor told Amy Richardson, “nor have I done so.” But at the very least the prince had held him in reserve. In 1896 “Wealthy Willie,” as Astor was sometimes referred to in print, was reported to be engaged to marry Lady Randolph Churchill, the recently widowed mother of twenty-two-year-old Winston Churchill. “Mr. Astor’s attentions to Lady Randolph Churchill have been so marked as to create no small amount of gossip,” Harold Frederic reported to the New York Times from London. Lady Churchill, the former Miss Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn, had many admirers, including the Shah of Persia (who cooled on the affair after deciding she wasn’t fat enough for his taste). She was dazzled by Astor’s money and social status, but nothing came of this, nor of a second rumor linking him with the Countess of Westmoreland, who proved to be companionably married to the earl. Of more consequence was to be William’s fevered, quasi-operatic romance, in 1913, when he was sixty-five, with the beautiful and sexually liberated Lady Victoria Sackville.
As a London residence for his children and himself, Astor bought 18 Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St. James’s Park. It was already celebrated as one of the most elegant private houses in London, but, in his accustomed style, he had it thoroughly refurbished, added paneling, frescoes, and tapestries, and ordered a forty-foot-long table made for the enormous dining room. He offered what was reported to be a “fabulous” sum of money to rent, for just two days, a London house on the line of the parade and procession celebrating Queen Victoria’s sixty years on the throne in June 1897. His offer astounded the noble owner, who accepted without hesitation. “Mr. Astor, in his entertaining, his residences, and his stables, is handsomely living up to the foreign reputation of Americans for extravagance,” a New York Times editorial commented. “Perhaps, also, he is vainly endeavoring to live up to his income.”
For his London business headquarters, and private retreat where he entertained casual women friends, he bought the building on Victoria Embankment at 2 Temple Place. He spent about $1.5 million converting it into a crenellated Tudor-style stronghold that assured him the maximum of isolation while serving as a private museum for his notable collection of paintings, autographs, books (including Shakespeare folios), and antique musical instruments. The interiors of Temple Place were more opulent than those of his London residence. The study in the main hall was over seventy feet long; two ornate chandeliers hung from its thirty-five-foot-high roof of hammer-beamed Spanish mahogany; Persian rugs and tiger skins softened the relative austerity of the inlaid marble floors.
“There is no more curious room in London,” a local architect wrote, “than this hall which was intended by its creator to be a sort of temple of culture and expresses in a curious way his own tastes in art and literature.” William hung a portrait of himself by Hubert von Herkomer on the wall along with portraits of the founding Astor and successors. Not an inch of door surfaces, walls, ceilings, and stairwells was left bare of carving, paneling, or other decorations. Wooden figures of the Four Musketeers stood guard on the newel posts. His writing table, carefully preserved by him over the years, was exactly as he had used it, ornaments and all, at the legation in Rome. An Italian fortune-teller had told him back then that his life was in danger. Her warning, along with the vulnerability inherent in the possession of wealth, had made him fearful of kidnappers and assassins with designs on him and his children. He kept a loaded pistol on the bedside table in his pied-à-terre and equipped the building with a security system that allowed him, by pressing a button, to lock and bar all windows and entrances (at the same time effectively, he must have recognized, keeping an intruder from escaping).
An antique New England spinning wheel stood near his desk in the office library. The main hall displayed a frieze depicting characters from The Scarlet Letter, The Last of the Mohicans, and “Rip Van Winkle,” “all old friends of mine,” he called them. He was also a devoted reader of Leaves of Grass. The weather vane was a brilliantly gilded replica of one of Columbus’s caravels. It symbolized the linking, by discovery and commerce, of the Old World from which John Jacob Astor had come and the New World where he made his fortune. As fervently as he tried to make the opposite true, to the British, and to himself as well in the depths of his consciousness, William remained naggingly an American, and perhaps his passion for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was evidence of this. Unlike most other expatriates he never lost or tried to lose his native accent, and he remained proud of New York City’s tremendous vitality. He made several return visits to favorite places in the States—Gettysburg, the Massachusetts coast, the long stretch of the Hudson downriver from Albany—that he remembered from his boyhood.
From this secure office on Victoria Embankment, said H. G. Wells, who interviewed him there for his 1906 book, The Future in America, William Waldorf Astor drew “gold from New York”—perhaps $6 million a year in rents—“as effectually as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit.” He commanded an empire of office buildings; immense apartment houses on upper Broadway; blocks of decaying but invariably profitable tenement properties; the northern half of the famous old Astor House, built by his great-grandfather and still doing business; the Waldorf half of the Waldorf-Astoria; and all of another hotel, the New Netherland, built to his specifications at a cost of about $3 million and, along with the Waldorf, opened in 1892. The Times welcomed the New Netherland as “the second of the magnificent creations of this sort which William Waldorf Astor has completed.”
Seventeen stories high, promoted as the tallest hotel structure in the world and the first to have telephones in every room and its own telephone exchange, the New Netherland commanded the main entrance to Central Park at Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. In external style a gabled and turreted brown brick version of German Renaissance architecture, his new hotel was similar to the Waldorf, but it had a a different ambience altogether, one of subdued but substantial elegance. In effect a marketplace and theater, the Waldorf-Astoria enclosed a world of glitter, wealth, and fashion bathed in an unremitting blaze of publicity. The New Netherland was aristocratic, reserved, and refined, more like a private club than a public facility. Reflecting William’s distaste for what he felt was the vulgarity of American democracy and its army of journalists, the New Netherland, not the Waldorf-Astoria, was where he stayed on his occasional business visits to New York. Especially compared with the Waldorf, the New Netherland proved to be a financial disappointment and a managerial problem. At one point, embroiled in a bitter conflict with the resident “proprietor,” General Ferdinand Earle, Astor evicted him and his family for nonpayment of back rent. He ordered the hotel emptied of its over two hundred guests, stripped of the furnishings installed by Earle, and briefly shut down. Even so, despite this experience, the New Netherland was not to be the last of Astor’s innkeeping enterprises. For all his fastidiousness and snobbery he remained as passionate and knowing about luxury hotels for the American public as about Greco-Roman statuary and estates in the English countryside.
Even before 1899, when William finally renounced his citizenship to become a subject of Queen Victoria, his public career and conduct had become topics of outrage on both sides of the ocean. To his former countrymen he was a traitor who had fled to England like Benedict Arnold or Judah P. Benjamin, Jefferson Davis’s secretary of state; an ingrate who unforgivably, for all his advantages, had managed to find life in America not good enough for him; a coward who slunk away from politics after failing even to buy elective office; a would-be leader of New York society who ceded the field to his aunt, the Mrs. Astor, and her feckless son Jack. Like a burglar with a sack of family plate and candlesticks over his shoulder, he was seen to be taking American dollars abroad and, in the hope of buying himself a title, liberally bestowing them on the British. He gave millions of dollars to British universities, hospitals, and charities, and to the British army (including a $25,000 artillery battery) during the Boer War and World War I.
Apart from the buildings in New York he had put up and the rents sweated from decaying slum properties there, Astor’s wealth represented the unearned increment of Manhattan land bought for a few dollars by earlier generations of Astors and now worth many times more than what they had paid for them. The owners had done virtually nothing in the meantime to alleviate the misery and increase the value of their extensive tenement holdings beyond holding them. The Astors toiled not, neither did they spin, but an earthly father, free enterprise, and compound interest had endowed them with the glories of Solomon. The enormous surplus value vested in their property did not belong to the Astors, it could be said by single taxers, socialists, and other reform-minded thinkers of the era: it belonged to the sweated wage earners whose labors had turned a low-lying village on Manhattan Island into the de facto commercial capital of the United States. Manhattan’s elevator-served, steel-framed office and residential buildings rose to the skies from their footings in the most expensive real estate in the world. William’s departure from New York provoked, among other sendoffs from the press, a reference to his family’s origins in “a German slaughterhouse” and derisive reminders of his unavailing efforts through hired genealogists to connect his beer-swilling forebears with “persons of condition” in the Crusades.
When the news of the ex-American’s formal declaration of allegiance to Queen Victoria arrived by cable in New York, demonstrators cheered on by crowds of spectators erected and set fire to an oil-soaked life-size effigy of “William the Traitor” on the stretch of Broadway soon to be named Times Square. The police arrived and chased the crowd away, but not before the effigy had gone up in flames and left a smoking crater in the asphalt. W. W. ASTOR BECOMES A BRITISH SUBJECT: the Times ran the news on page one and pointedly juxtaposed it to an item about the military company the patriotic Colonel John Jacob Astor IV was raising to fight in the American war with Spain. William read these stories in the papers, put them in his scrapbook, pored over the clippings, and used them to stoke his undying fire of outrage at the American press.
To loyal Englishmen, William Waldorf Astor was their worst dream of an American invader who bought his way into society, bought (and rebuilt, often heedless of tradition, to suit his extravagant tastes) estates that were part of the nation’s heritage, denied the public access to them, and also bought his way into journalism. “If this sort of thing is allowed to go on,” one London journal complained, “we shall soon be governed, not by Downing [Street], but by Wall Street.” He sent his sons to Eton and Oxford, and at a time when the United States was at war with Spain, and Jack Astor was rallying to the colors to see combat in Cuba, he entered the elder of the two, Waldorf, in Queen Victoria’s Household Cavalry. William’s money, purpose, and pride eventually prevailed over all the resistance and resentment he provoked. He could outspend, outcollect, outentertain, and outbuild anyone in England.
By 1897, when the combined Waldorf and Astoria hotels went into full operation and hosted the Bradley-Martin extravaganza, William had already established himself as being among London’s premier hosts. That year one of his receptions and concert evenings at Carlton House Terrace counted among the guests the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess Michael of Russia, Prince Alexander of Teck, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, and, the papers reported, “a host of English dukes, earls, and counts, with their duchesses and countesses…. The display of jewels was simply prodigious, and the house was a mass of flowers.” Two celebrities, the Australian soprano Nellie Melba and the Polish piano virtuoso Ignace Paderewski, were among the performing artists.
These glittering events, high points of the London social season, inevitably began to attract party crashers. Cursed with a low boiling point of indignation and a towering sense of lordship, William decided to do something about these affronts and make an example of the next interloper. “It angered me, perhaps unduly,” he confessed to Amy Richardson long after the event, “that my house should be regarded as a place of public amusement…. I allowed my temper to carry me beyond the bounds of moderation.”
Captain Sir Berkeley Milne, a distinguished British naval officer, arrived at a concert evening at Carlton House Terrace in July 1900. He escorted one of William’s invited guests, Lady Orford. Unaware of the lady’s sponsorship of Milne, William found an occasion to assert both principle and authority as host. He confronted the captain, refused to shake hands with him, and demanded to know his name. He then sent the captain packing with the promise that all of London would soon know of this infraction of good manners. The next day, still possessed by what he considered justifiable outrage, William published an item in his newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette. “We are desired to make known that the presence of Captain Sir Berkeley Milne of the Naval and Military Club, Piccadilly, at Mr. Astor’s concert last Thursday evening was uninvited.”
William learned right away that he had kicked over a hornet’s nest. Protégé and intimate of the Prince of Wales, Milne was the former commander of the royal yacht Osborne, a future admiral, and on all counts the wrong man to boot out of the party. Lady Orford and her friends responded to what was construed as an insult extending far beyond her injured sensibilities and those of Captain Milne to the entire British navy, from first lord of the admiralty to Jack Tar thirsting for his daily dipper of grog. Milne’s patron, the Prince of Wales, reportedly regarded the incident as unpardonable and intended to have William ejected from the royal circle at Marlborough House. With all of London talking, even the aged queen, who had reigned for almost seventy years, was said to have “interested herself in the matter.” William finally published a grudging apology in his paper, but it was a while before the dust settled. An affair of negligible specific gravity had mutated, if not into a tiny reprise of the War of 1812, at least into a farce that managed to make everyone look silly, especially its hot-tempered instigator. One noble earl called William “a purse-proud American, whose dollars could not save him from the contempt of his countrymen.” Further incurring the royal wrath by snubbing Mrs. George Keppel, Edward’s mistress (“a public strumpet”), William had to wait until 1916, by which time both Victoria and Edward VII were dead, before his wealth and strategically placed benefactions eased his way to the peerage.
“Congratulations are due to the English people, already pretty well occupied with many serious questions,” a New York Times editorial commented on the Milne affair from across the Atlantic, “upon the breaking up of a storm center at home that threatened for a few moments to add to the worries of the English speaking and reading race…. We beg to renew to our British brethren the assurances of our continued sympathy and esteem. You may forgive; if you are magnanimous you will forget. You may do both, but do not send him back.” That editorial, too, went into William’s scrapbook.
ii.
WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR’S grandest English acquisition was Cliveden, a 376-acre estate of spectacular gardens, lawns, and woodlands along a serpentine stretch of the Upper Thames, twenty-six miles from London. All the spectacular beauty of “England’s green and pleasant land” seemed to have been concentrated, with jewel-like brilliance, in this one place in Buckinghamshire. In 1893 he had rented Cliveden for five months from its owner, the Duke of Westminster. At the expiration of the rental term he bought the place outright for a reported sum of $1.25 million, but not without a bitter dispute with the duke over ownership of the visitors book that contained signatures going back to the seventeenth century. The great estate, and the history that came with it, satisfied Astor’s seigneurial imagination and gave a transplanted American at least a probationary place in the English tradition. The original Cliveden main house had been built in 1666 by the Duke of Buckingham, a sometime favorite of King Charles II and famously satirized by poet laureate John Dryden:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by starts, and nothing long:
But in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.
In a duel there, Buckingham killed his mistress’s husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury. Cliveden had also been the residence of a British military hero, the Earl of Orkney, and of Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III. The composer Thomas Arne had his “Rule, Britannia” performed for the first time at Cliveden in 1740, about fifty years before the original house burned down. Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament, replaced it with a baroque-style building that had a certain dominating and chilly grandeur but none of the esprit of the water tower, with a gilded clock face, that looked out over the entire estate. Queen Victoria had visited eight times. “It is a perfection of a place,” she wrote in her journal, “first of all the view is so beautiful, & then the house is a bijou of taste.” Cliveden had royal, aristocratic, and historical associations enough for the scholar, antiquarian, collector, and Anglophile in Astor. He was a time traveler like his cousin Jack, but his destination was a past securely in the grip of the old order.
Applying his educated taste in architecture and landscape, William set out to rescue Cliveden from what he charged was “the neglect and abandonment into which that dreadful old creature, the Duke of Westminster, had allowed it to sink.” He took out of storage in Rome the immense stone balustrade from the Villa Borghese garden that he had bought years earlier during his tenure as U.S. ambassador and installed it below the house. His collection of Roman sarcophagi and funerary urns found a resting place on the great lawn. He also installed an ancient mosaic floor and a grand staircase in the main hall. For the dining room he ordered an ornate ceiling, painted under his supervision; a suite of eighteenth-century gilt wall paneling; and a table and other principal furniture that, along with the paneling, had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. To face the front entrance of the house, about midway on the grand avenue from the main gate, he commissioned Thomas Waldo Story, son of the renowned sculptor William Wetmore Story and himself a favorite in Britain, to create the alarmingly large white-marble-and-volcanic-rock Fountain of Love. Writhing nudes disported themselves atop a giant scallop shell. “The female figures,” Astor wrote in an interpretive note on the composition, “are supposed to have discovered the fountain of love, and to be experiencing the effects of its wonderful elixir.” His taste in sculpture and painting remained as stubbornly antimodern as his politics and his devotion to the England of absolute monarchy. Bringing his life full circle, he moved into the Cliveden rose garden his Wounded Amazon, the statue, admired by George Templeton Strong, that he had made in his twenties, before duty to his father compelled him to put aside art in favor of real estate. Looking ahead, in a similar gesture of closure, he designed a resting place for his ashes in Cliveden’s Octagon Temple, an eighteenth-century architectural conceit with a commanding view of the countryside and the winding Thames below. The structure had originally been a summer house; he had it made into a high church family chapel with an altar, a domed ceiling, and glass mosaics depicting the Annunciation, the Temptation of Eve, and scenes from the life of Christ.
For a century before William became its master, Cliveden had been open to visitors and sightseers, one of several showplaces in England that were in effect, and by long tradition, public parks maintained at private expense. The new owner enclosed Cliveden within a high wall topped with broken glass, forbade access to a spring of water that had been a local pleasure site, and erected a blank wall to replace the iron grille gate that had allowed a sweeping view up the long driveway leading to the forecourt of the house. By his order, boating parties were forbidden to land and picnic on Cliveden’s riverbanks. Unlike neighboring estates in the Thames Valley, Cliveden was now closed to the public, evidence, as it was seen by indignant neighbors, of the arrogance of a rich American who scorned local custom and good manners and asserted his right to privacy at any cost. When in residence Astor had his personal flag with armorial bearings raised over the main house at 9 a.m. and lowered at sundown. “Cliveden was a court,” his grandson, Michael Astor, recalled, “ruled over with a majestic sense of justice by a lonely autocrat who was obsessed by highly personal notions about convention. Everything in the house ran exactly to time. William Waldorf had a mania about punctuality.” He demanded from his guests inflexible conformity to schedule, decreeing, for example, precisely when they should write their letters, stroll about the grounds, or ride into the village. On his orders the clocks at Cliveden were set an hour behind English summer time, a recent reform that he considered silly. A cartoonist in a London newspaper renamed Cliveden “Walled-off Astoria” and depicted its owner as a strutting eagle, a British flag tied to his tail, standing on a ground covered with bags of dollars. A sign, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, hung on the by-now famous glass-studded wall. The cartoon showed William’s twenty-one-year-old son, Waldorf, dressed in his Household Guards uniform, doing sentry duty on the battlements.
One of William Waldorf Astor’s never-ending battles with the press took the form of a $5,000 libel suit against the London Daily Mail. Citing him as the source, the paper had published a frivolous article, headlined MR. ASTOR’S STRANGE DINNER PARTY: allegedly, he had bet a certain General Owen Williams $2,500 that the trunks of some California redwood trees were large enough when sliced transversely to make a table around which two dozen and more people could dine in comfort. To win the bet, the story went on, Astor ordered a sequoia slab sawed to his order in California, had it shipped to Cliveden, and there, on his new table under a tent on the grounds, he served an elegant dinner to the general and twenty-four other guests and won his bet. At worst this was just another mildly satiric tale about rich Americans—Kentucky colonels, Montana cattle barons, Chicago meat packers, Pittsburgh steel masters, California railroad magnates—who were often caricatured as braggarts trumpeting the wonders of their country while proudly infesting England’s castles and stately homes.
Already fancying himself as British as any duke and with as much dignity to maintain, William wrote a heated letter to the London Times accusing the Daily Mail of libeling him as “a foolish and ridiculous person” by publishing “a deliberate and mischievous fabrication.” He testified to that effect in open court before the lord chief justice. Through his distinguished counsel, formerly the queen’s solicitor general, Astor complained that from time to time since settling in England he had been the subject of similar “personal and offensive paragraphs.” The aftermath of the suit that he brought was as demeaning as that of his injudicious ouster of Captain Milne. Hearing the case, the lord chief justice had some fun at Astor’s expense and, contrary to customary decorum, even invited raucous laughter in the courtroom. He himself had been the butt of such American-style pleasantries, his lordship said. He cited a London newspaper story to the effect that as president of the divorce court he himself had pronounced his own divorce from his wife. “We are not divorced,” he said, “and I am not the president of the divorce court.” He suggested that Mr. Astor, who (as everyone knew) had enjoyed similar experiences with the press back home in the States, should by now have been hardened to such nonsense. Advised by counsel against letting his grievance go to a jury, Astor accepted an apology from the Daily Mail and withdrew from legal combat. While it lasted, “the W. W. Astor Libel Suit,” another chapter in the misadventures of a transplanted American Croesus, made good copy in both England and the States.
In 1906, having rescued Cliveden from decay and restored it to his exacting taste, Astor turned his drive to build and indulge his historical imagination to an even larger and more expensive enterprise than Cliveden. Mogul emperor Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, and mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, builder of fantastic castles along the Danube, would have recognized the impulse. William bought Hever, a manor house estate in Kent, southeast of London. Once the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, it later passed into the hands of Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. William spent four years and an estimated $10 million to make Hever conform to his historical imaginings and, in effect, regress it four hundred years. He had a surrounding ditch excavated into a moat and filled with water, built a new drawbridge and portcullis, and repaired the battlements. Hever now had a deer park, fountains, a boating lake, and, among modern improvements, a power-generating plant and waterworks.
At one point Astor employed 840 workmen of all trades inside and out to create for him, in the heart of twentieth-century England, a self-sustaining and self-contained medieval domain. Guarded by a wall twelve feet high, its 640 acres comprised a model farm; a 50-acre man-made lake, in spots sixteen feet deep, dug out of marsh and meadowland; two bridges to span the winding river that ran through the estate; newly planted forests; a deer park; walled gardens and a fountain; and barbered grounds surrounding a maze of yew hedge. To houseguests, servants, and estate workers Astor built an entire thatched-roof Tudor village separated from the castle by the moat, drawbridge, and double portcullis. An eight-man security force patrolled the gates and kept out automobiles, uninvited visitors, cameras, and especially the press. A poster at the local railway station informed the public that Hever, long one of the local attractions, was no longer open to visitors.
In an article Astor commissioned and published in his Pall Mall Magazine the writer, Olive Sebright, described Hever in terms that explain part of its appeal to the new owner. Hever was “a haunt of ancient peace,” she wrote. “When we cross the bridge and pass under the double portcullis, we leave the world of to-day behind us, and in the old half-timbered courtyard, lose all sense of surprise and speculation. Life becomes a dream of tranquil simplicity, and the fitness of it all fills and satisfies our restless spirit.” Lordship of Hever Castle, surrounded there by artifacts of an era of absolute monarchy, gave Astor not only a private retreat from the present but a solitude in which to enjoy his treasures and the illusion of living in another time.
He dwelled alone in the ancient manor house that he had converted into a one-bedroom medieval castle furnished with skillfully adapted modern conveniences such as indoor plumbing and electricity. However anachronistic, he made such comforts the dominant note in his bedroom. “I should not like to live in a museum,” he told Amy Richardson.
DRAWBRIDGE RISES FOR ASTOR ENTRY: newspapers ridiculed his improvements and accused him of “ruining” Hever just as (in their view) he had ruined Cliveden. But, just as he had done at Cliveden, he imposed his will and wealth on his property. When in residence at Hever Castle he flew his personal flag over the battlements. It displayed the coat of arms that supposedly linked the Astor butchers and rabbit skinners to a Franco-Spanish line of noble descent going back to the Crusades. He furnished Hever’s great hall and minstrels’ gallery with shields, banners, tapestries, pennants, halberds, swords, suits of armor, instruments of torture and punishment, and vanloads of museum pieces from the shops and warehouses of Regent Street and Bond Street dealers in antiquities. Established in such surroundings he enjoyed the prospect of one day entering the peerage as Baron (later Viscount) Astor of Hever Castle. Through agents and advisers he assembled a notable art collection at Hever that rivaled Henry Clay Frick’s in New York: it included Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Titian’s Philip II, Clouet’s Edward VI, and Cranach’s Martin Luther. He liked to believe that Hever was haunted by the ghost of Anne Boleyn, sent to the headsman’s block by her husband, who accused her of incest and adultery. Her prayer book and bed were among the relics Astor acquired and installed at Hever. According to local legend, the headless queen, accompanied by a headless black dog, nightly walked the castle’s dark passageways and windswept battlements. Making an exception to his ban on allowing strangers to penetrate his feudal fastness, Astor invited ghost hunters from the British Society for Psychical Research to keep a vigil at Hever. They reported no sightings.
iii.
WHILE WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR completed his transformation into an Englishman of the highest rank, his patriotic cousin Jack entered upon a military career of sorts. It had had its beginnings in 1894 with a largely ceremonial appointment. Jack’s Rhinecliff neighbor New York governor-elect Levi P. Morton, a Republican banker who had been Benjamin Harrison’s vice president, chose Jack, and half a dozen other rich and socially prominent civilians, to serve on his military staff as aides-de-camp. This granted Jack the rank of colonel, the duty of escorting the governor on public occasions, and the right to carry a sword and wear a gold-braid aiguillette on a dress uniform tailored for him at great expense.
Jack’s appointment to a position of honor and display rather than valor and discipline did little to redeem his reputation from years of providing entertainment for newspaper and gossip-sheet readers. But he was soon in harmony with the war fever against Spain that was to sweep the United States. He had firm and outspoken convictions about the destiny of Cuba, which, he believed, was to be liberated from the grip of Spain and annexed to the United States. With the destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898, the idea of a war with Spain came to a boil in the minds of President William McKinley, Secretary of State John Hay, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Jack moved with purpose and vigor to win for himself a place in the army. He wished to be “Colonel Astor” as fervently as William wished to be “Viscount Astor.” Putting aside his normally unshakable Astor pride, he lobbied, wheedled, and politicked in Washington, applied pressure and influence in the right quarters, and, in effect, engineered for himself a commission as army inspector general with the rank of lieutenant colonel. His appointment to the volunteer army, the Times noted dourly, had been made “without relevancy to the good of the service.” The notion of Jack Astor strapping on a sword and mounting a neighing battle steed aroused hilarity in the general public as well as resentment among more qualified warriors who were also seeking a commission.
Mr. Dooley, satirist Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional Irish saloon philosopher, had Jack and his ilk in mind when he announced his views of the war in a nationally circulated column in the Chicago Journal. Mr. Dooley depicted a freshly minted officer in mufti, wearing an English suit and accompanied by his valet, as he explained to President McKinley why he was unable to leave immediately for the front in Cuba: “Me pink silk pijammas hasn’t arrived.” “Wait f’r th’ pijammas,” McKinley tells this would-be Alexander the Great. “Thin on to war…an’ let ye’er watchword be, ‘Raymimber ye’er manners.’” Dooley predicted, “We’ll put th’ tastiest ar-rmy in th’ field that iver came out of a millinery shop.” Special correspondents from Butterick’s Patterns and Harper’s Bazaar, he said, would soon be following onto the field of combat in Cuba the most fashionably dressed military force that ever creased its pants.
Jack gave good value for his appointment. He lent the navy his refurbished 250-foot, 745-ton yacht Nourmahal and offered free passage for troops and volunteers on his Illinois Central Railroad. He raised, equipped, and trained at his own expense—$75,000 and much more, as needed—the Astor Battery, a regiment of mountain artillery for service in Cuba and the Philippines: six rapid-firing Hotchkiss field guns served by 102 enlisted men with the words “Astor Battery” stamped in gold letters on uniforms, hats, and knapsacks. Brass buttons on their tunics bore the letter A and an eagle. Jack accompanied his Astor Battery to Cuba. Himself properly kitted out in field uniform and campaign hat, and with binoculars slung around his neck, Astor stood with the artist Frederic Remington within rifle and artillery range of the Spanish fortifications on San Juan Hill. Before they were ordered to move out of “this hellspot,” as Remington called it, they witnessed the uphill charge that was in effect Rough Rider colonel Theodore Roosevelt’s dramatic first step toward the presidency.
Jack returned from a month in Cuba unscathed except for a touch of fever contracted in the field (and a shrapnel wound to his horse). On furlough after delivering dispatches to the War Department, he was reported to be planning to rejoin the army and his Astor Battery in the Philippines. An accompanying news item reported that the Nourmahal, back in its owner’s hands after uneventful service with the navy, had remained true to form: it had run hard and fast aground in the Hudson off Haverstraw, some twenty-five miles downriver from Ferncliff.
For the rest of his life, and posthumously as well, Jack was “Colonel Astor,” patriot, war hero, and gallant gentleman. He had stood “ready to answer any call his country may make upon him,” as he told a reporter from the New York Times, and he was outspoken in his scorn for his renegade cousin William Waldorf Astor. He even played the genealogical card against his cousin. Unlike William, he could cite descent on his mother’s side from patriots of the Revolutionary period. “I have the blood in me of my grandmother, who was a sister of Colonel Henry Armstrong and a daughter of General Armstrong. They were both true Americans and the Armstrong blood is strong in me.” Although somewhat eroded by his exemplary war service, Jack’s old reputation as playboy and dilettante remained nearly impossible to shake. When the Murray Hill Republican Club proposed him for Congress (on a ticket with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt as governor), Tammany boss Richard Croker effectively shot down the idea. “I will stick to it that Astor is an ass,” he declared. “And that an ass even though an Astor has no business in the Congress of the United States.”
With no position in the Congress or any other public body, the demobilized warrior devoted his energies to Caribbean cruises aboard the Nourmahal, his collection of about sixty motorcars, his laboratory and workshop, his stable of Thoroughbreds, and two principal residences: Ferncliff, one of the largest country estates in America; and 840–842 Fifth Avenue, the white marble double mansion he shared with his mother. He belonged to more than forty clubs in New York, Tuxedo, Newport, Paris, and London. European travel, visits to Palm Beach, and, for shooting, to Aiken, South Carolina, were among other pleasures and distractions in what was generally recognized as a life without a significant focus aside from the mainly titular management of his business interests.
As head of the American branch of the Astor estate he controlled immense business and residential realty holdings all over Manhattan, including his half of the Waldorf-Astoria and the old Astor House. He had a seat on the boards of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, the Illinois Central Railroad, New York Life Insurance, Niagara Falls Power, Western Union Telegraph, several banks, and at least a dozen other companies. Fast trains between Albany and New York City made special stops for him at Rhinecliff to accommodate his business trips to the Astor estate office on West Twenty-sixth Street.
Together with eighty-five other “representative men,” in 1905 Colonel John Jacob Astor was a subject of virtual canonization in a mammoth (twelve-by-eighteen-inch) gilt-edged, opulently bound and illustrated album, offered to subscribers at $1,500 a copy: Fads and Fancies: Representative Americans at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, Being a Portrayal of Their Tastes, Diversions, and Achievements. The creator of this ultimate vanity book was the longtime gossip journalist and shakedown artist Colonel William D’Alton Mann, publisher of Town Topics. With Fads and Fancies, a grotesquely mild title for a hagiography of American capitalists and firebooters, Colonel Mann hoped to cash in on a lifetime of work.
Some of the subscribers the colonel recruited were agreeable to having considerably more than the nominal $1,500 extracted from them as the price of admission to his hall of heroes. The widow of railroad builder and robber baron Collis P. Huntington, for instance, insisted that her husband deserved a more ample treatment in Fads and Fancies than relative nobodies such as match manufacturer Ohio C. Barber; Isaac F. Emerson, a former drugstore clerk who invented Bromo-Seltzer; society sportsman Foxhall Keene; and asphalt millionaire A. L. Barber. She paid $10,000 for eight pages instead of the meager three or four allotted to other eminent corporate operators like Thomas W. Lawson, Boston stock plunger, market manipulator, and author of Frenzied Finance; traction magnate and convicted embezzler Charles T. Yerkes, whose “ruling passion” was his love of “all beautiful things,” especially rugs and tapestries; Julius Fleischmann of Cincinnati, heir to the family yeast and vinegar works; and Reginald “Reggie” Vanderbilt, boozer and man about town, whose great-grandfather, the implacable Commodore, was credited in passing with having radiated “pure sunshine in his life and character.” (“I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow,” Vanderbilt once told a former business associate. “I’ll ruin you.”)
Given four pages, Colonel John Jacob Astor was among the more conspicuous of the men immortalized in the folio pages of Fads and Fancies. He clearly cooperated with the publisher and contributed a dozen or so pictures from private albums to go with his write-up. Among them were photos of himself in civilian clothes and in military uniform, armed with a cavalry saber and mounted on his horse. Other pictures displayed his yacht and launches; his Ferncliff mansion, gatehouse, and tennis court; one of his automobiles; and the battery of howitzers he had given to the U.S. Army.
“Of the typical American gentlemen of the first years of the Twentieth Century,” Jack’s chapter began,
the “Master of Ferncliff” affords as admirable an example as a wide knowledge of men and the times can choose. Born with the proverbial silver spoon, yet inheriting the tastes of the scholar and the traveler rather than that of the Sybarite, together with a strong but bravely tolerant patriotism, his equipment for the role was at once liberal and promising. In his country’s recent conquests in the West Indies and the South Pacific he has played a worthy part, and his personal services, as well as his riches, were placed at his nation’s command in her time of need.
In his ability to combine recreation with a painstaking attention to the many duties that of necessity devolve upon the conscientious man of millions, Colonel Astor possesses a rare and valuable gift. To the average observer he must appear as a gentleman of careless leisure; nevertheless, Colonel Astor personally oversees the conduct of the Astor estate in every particular. Clear-headed and keen-witted, no detail escapes him. Surrounded by capable lieutenants who have been trained to his methods, he has reduced this labor to a matter of a few hours a day in a few days of the year.
Among the colonel’s recent ventures with claims on his attention during these few business hours had been two new hotels in midtown Manhattan.