KNOWN NATIONWIDE as “the Forty-second Street Country Club,” the popular bar in Jack Astor’s Hotel Knickerbocker on Times Square became a casualty of Prohibition in 1919. When it closed, it took the hotel down with it. In May 1929, five months before the stock market crash of Black Tuesday marked the end of good times, the Waldorf-Astoria, for four decades site, symbol, and catalyst of that era, also closed its doors. By Jazz Age standards its style and grandeur were stodgy, snobbish, and out of date. Relatively remote from the stretch of fashionable New York along upper Fifth Avenue, the hotel had also been hit by ten years of Prohibition that effectively shut off a major source of income and traffic. Reflective visitors who thronged the lobby and corridors during the hotel’s last days in business recalled the dreams of wealth, luxury, glamour, and proximity to the great and famous that had been played out there. They visited for the last time the silken, velvet, and marble settings of Peacock Alley, the Turkish Salon, the Palm Court Restaurant, and the grand ballroom.
Closing-night entertainment in the ballroom was far from being one of the extravaganzas for which the hotel had been celebrated. The event was homelier, more in keeping with the coming era of the Depression: a performance by the one hundred members of the Consolidated Gas and Electric Choral Society. In the record three-week-long on-site auction that followed the closing, souvenir collectors, sentimentalists, antiquarians, and dealers bid on more than twenty thousand lots of hotel property. The auction inventory included bath mats and towels lettered “W.A.,” brass spittoons (destined to be recycled for use as fern bowls), chairs, dishes, bric-a-brac, 125 pianos, and other items down to the last spoon, finger bowl, and wine goblet. The world-famous name “Waldorf-Astoria,” which encapsulated the history of both an era and a dynasty, went for a token $1 to the builders of a new and otherwise unrelated hotel going up on Park Avenue. By February 1930 Henry Hardenbergh’s great building, one of the architectural wonders of Manhattan, had been leveled. Its two-acre site, where the parents of the Astor cousins once dwelt in their brownstone mansions, was cleared for another architectural milestone, the 102-story Empire State Building.
In a comparably radical transition from the old order to the new, the marble chateau at 840 Fifth Avenue where Caroline Astor and her son Jack had assembled the chosen in the ballroom, had also yielded to Manhattan’s inexorable tide of demolition, renewal, and social change. Torn down in the 1920s, the Astors’ mansion was replaced by Temple Emanu-El, one of the world’s largest synagogues and both symbol and assembly place of Manhattan’s new Jewish hegemony.
In 1967, along with the Metropolitan Opera House, a similar monument of a bygone era, the spectacular Hotel Astor fell to the wreckers. Workmen said it was the most difficult job of its sort they had ever known: the walls were so fortress-thick that the massive iron ball of the demolition crane often brought down nothing but chips of masonry and clouds of dust. Meanwhile, the surrounding theater district, the Times reported, had become “standee country for viewers of one of the smash hits in town—the demolition of the Astor Hotel.” A towering office building went up in its place. “Meet me at the Astor,” a New York byword, was now a whisper from the past. In 1926, on the site of William Waldorf Astor’s once-commanding New Netherland rose the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, a thirty-eight-story building more than twice as high as the one it replaced and topped with a slender spire. During the 1990s, having long since passed out of the Astor estate into corporate ownership, Jack’s St. Regis underwent what was said to be a $100 million makeover that modernized and at the same time restored it to its original gilded, bronze, and marble splendor.
Along with his villa at Sorrento, William Waldorf Astor’s Hever Castle, his “House of the Poetic Faun,” likewise passed into outside hands. In 1982 his grandson Gavin Astor put Hever up for sale (at $25 million) after a series of floods turned the property surrounding the castle into a giant moat. At last report, the current owners, Broadland Properties Limited, operate Hever as a combined conference center and theme park. Visitors can buy tickets for admission to the castle, gardens, maze of yew hedge, topiary, and the former owner’s collections of Roman statuary, arms and armor, and “historic instruments of execution, torture, and discipline” (the last a powerful attraction for the young). Hever also offers special events like a Royal Jousting Tournament, a demonstration of Tudor archery, and a festival of autumn colors. Astor’s Anne Boleyn relics are still in place, an essential element, the proprietors say, in the castle’s “homely atmosphere.” The Tudor village Astor designed to accommodate his guests and staff while he lived alone in his moated castle is now “an exclusive-use venue with twenty-five bedrooms and is used for corporate events and private dining throughout the year.” A few years after his death Astor’s office building at 2 Temple Place went to an insurance company for use as corporate headquarters. Damaged in the bombing of London during World War II and afterward repaired, Temple Place is now a conference center. The weather vane Astor designed for his London retreat, a golden replica of one of Columbus’s caravels, still turns in the wind.
Together, and also in competition with each other, the two Astor cousins had enriched hotel life, social life, and even civic life on the American continent. In doing this they had asserted personal pride and an unshakable sense of superiority derived from great wealth and the loose definition of aristocracy that Americans have always favored. Even though he had made a gift of it to his son, it was the estate at Cliveden that closed the circle on William’s own life and on a career, like his cousin’s, as innkeeper on an imperial scale. William’s statue of a wounded Amazon, emblem of his youthful ambition to escape the family countinghouse, still stands in the rose garden he commissioned. He had brought over to Cliveden and installed above the parterre the monumental stone balustrade from the Borghese garden in Rome acquired during his term as American minister. Impassive and commanding, William Waldorf Astor himself looks out from Von Herkomer’s portrait in oils that hangs above the marble mantelpiece in the dining room. His ashes are buried beneath the chapel floor. Even after the radical changes in style and atmosphere that his daughter-in-law had ordered, Cliveden bears his signature and expresses his determination to reconstitute himself as a Briton and commemorate himself by possessing one of the stately homes of England.
Cliveden’s subsequent history would have dismayed William. In the fall of 1937 Claud Cockburn, a member of the British Communist Party and editor of the influential single-sheet news bulletin the Week, wrote a story about what came to be known as “the Cliveden Set.” According to Cockburn, this was a clutch of highly placed Britons, some of them prominent in public life, who supported Hitler, favored accommodation to the Third Reich, and hoped to shape their own government’s policy accordingly. In effect (or at least intention) Cliveden had become the seat of “Britain’s second Foreign Office.” According to Cockburn, members of this cabal met on long country weekends at the Astor estate and laid their plans there with Hitler’s representatives. (The British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day presents a highly colored version of these conferences at Cliveden, renamed “Darlington Hall.”) During the anxious months before German tanks rolled into Poland, the notion of a “Cliveden Set,” however much it had been a product of Cockburn’s flair for the sensational, captured the public imaginings and provoked alarming news reports. “Friends of Hitler strong in Britain,” the New York Times reported from London. “The apparent strength of Germany’s case in this country comes from the fact that Germany’s best friends are to be found in the wealthiest ‘upper crust’ of British life.” In all likelihood, according to a recent study (Norman Rose, The Cliveden Set [London, 2000]), Cockburn’s sinister “Cliveden Set” was a more or less harmless think tank composed of amateurs, misguided do-gooders, and busybodies who were, as Ishiguro’s novel suggests, “out of their depth.”
Cockburn’s story and its sequels left a permanent smudge on the reputations of Nancy Astor and her husband, Waldorf, hosts and organizers of the Cliveden weekends. Otherwise outspoken chiefly on the subject of racehorses, Astor published a long letter to the Times of London in which he denounced Cockburn’s article as “a Communist fiction,” “a myth from beginning to end.” He charged that it maliciously conflated a well-intentioned policy of exploring avenues to peace with active support of Adolf Hitler. But the damage had been done: Cliveden, William Waldorf Astor’s retreat in the English countryside, was to be remembered as a nest of vipers. For his part, Cockburn was delighted by the immediate and lasting currency of the phrase he coined. “People who wanted to explain everything by something and were ashamed to say ‘sunspots,’” he wrote in his memoirs, “said ‘Cliveden Set.’”
In the early 1960s, during the cold war between the West and Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, the name Cliveden gained further notoriety. A private poolside party there was the source of a scandal that involved an alleged breach of national security and caused the eventual fall of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government. Possibly inspired by the Fountain of Love statuary group William Waldorf Astor had installed along the grand avenue leading to the house, a teenage call girl named Christine Keeler shed her clothes, danced naked about the Cliveden pool, and engaged the fancy of two party guests in particular. Each of them, concurrently, became her lover. One was John Profumo, Macmillan’s minister for war, and the other was Captain Eugene Ivanov, a Soviet intelligence agent whose official cover was military attaché. Guilty of lying about the affair to the House of Commons, Profumo left his cabinet post in disgrace. “Profumo Affair” became as firmly fastened to Cliveden as Cockburn’s unsquelchable phrase.
Britain’s National Trust now owns the Cliveden property and its 375 acres of lawn, gardens, and woodland. During the 1970s the trust leased Cliveden to Stanford University, and subsequently to the University of Massachusetts, for use as an overseas study center for undergraduates—as it turned out, an awkward experiment in disparate living styles. The manor at Cliveden now operates as a luxury hotel that outdoes the prototypical New York establishments of more than a century earlier. Including butler, footmen, housemaids, and cooks, the hotel at Cliveden claims to employ a staff of four for each of its thirty-seven bedrooms. It’s the right place for those who, like its former owner, wish to live like a lord and can afford it.