Millionaires’ Row

Fifth Avenue Mansions

Touring New York in the early 1890s, the French writer Paul Bourget was stunned by “vast constructions” that lined Fifth Avenue on the east side of Central Park, seeming in their grandeur “to reproduce the palaces and chateaux of Europe.” Mrs. Astor’s own mansion at 840 Fifth Avenue was modeled after a French Renaissance chateau and was joined by neighbors emulating the styles of the French Gothic, French Renaissance, French Renaissance Revival, and French Beaux-Arts styles, in addition to the “Italian, Gothic and Oriental houses of the new millionaires.” The architects Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, and Stanford White, among others, were in high demand for their architectural sleight of hand, mixing and matching favored styles of the period in a way that nonetheless convinced clients of each one. Then, as now, the gaudy structures drew criticism as well as praise. The author Henry James (1843–1916) carped that Fifth Avenue’s mansions were “exorbitant structures” in garish “florid majesty,” while one contemporary critic of the era, the newspaper heir Ralph Pulitzer, decried the architectural scene for “palatial plagiarisms” (a cheeky potshot slung by the son of the newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer, whose mansion, designed by Stanford White, rose at East Seventy-Third Street, just off Fifth Avenue). While these Fifth Avenue mansions were the setting for parties, dinners, receptions, and balls that filled the New York social calendar, they were typically closed from the first of June to the first of October, when Society summered in Newport, Rhode Island, or Bar Harbor, Maine. During such periods, when members of the Four Hundred wanted to take a quick summer “flying trip” to the city, they took a suite at the St. Regis or other suitable hotel, aware that inside their mansions, the furniture was draped in muslin dustcovers, waiting to be plucked off by servants in advance of the return of the family for the autumn and the winter. Summertime sightseers hoping to glimpse an Astor or another of the Four Hundred were thus disappointed. Year-round, nonetheless, passersby could be awestruck by block after block of the phalanx of palaces.

For those who lived on Fifth Avenue’s golden mile, the home’s grand exterior should be matched by an opulent interior. Mrs. Astor herself was “insistent on the French note in her décors,” noted Frank Crowninshield, the descendent of a Boston Brahmin family and member of the exclusive Union and Knickerbocker Clubs in New York. Best known as the founding editor of Vanity Fair magazine and a regular guest at the Astor home at 840 Fifth Avenue, he recalled Mrs. Astor’s “small downstairs, Louis XV salon,” and attending balls in her “large ballroom—also Louis Quinze.” He also enjoyed Sunday tea time at Mrs. Astor’s home, his cup sometimes filled by his hostess, if not her storied butler, Thomas, who also dispensed alcoholic libations for the occasion. Mrs. Astor collected teacups, gold-overlaid French Limoges and English china in boundless floral patterns.

A connoisseur of the arts, Crowninshield could closely observe the interior of the Astor home—the sculpted busts of Mrs. Astor’s forebears, the gold-ceilinged drawing room, the many gold-framed mirrors, the floors with their Oriental rugs or covered with leopard or tiger skins. As a dinner guest in the dining room, he perhaps noted the black marble walls hung with tapestries portraying hunting scenes. The great stone fireplace also drew everyone’s gaze, as did the polar-bear rugs over the marble floors. Numerous vases of American Beauty roses clustered on the mantel, and the chandelier was, of course, a waterfall of faceted crystal.

Crowninshield, an unalloyed admirer of Mrs. Astor and her Society, offered no criticism of her furnishings. Others felt no such restraint. All the houses were created, the French journalist Paul Bourget remarked, by “the sheer force of millions.” Newly arrived in the city, he hired a carriage and was stunned to see the “interminable succession of luxurious mansions which line Fifth Avenue.” To his eye, the palatial scene shouted a “mad abundance.” The same “sheer force” was redoubled in Newport, where he observed the interiors of the Beaux-Arts “cottages” of Gilded Age New York, each with its distinct name: “Crossways,” “Rosecliff,” “Marble House,” “The Breakers,” “The Elms.” He also saw a “gray and stern” replica of an “English abbey in the style of Queen Elizabeth.” Bourget cast a skeptical eye on the scene: “Where does naturalness end? Where does charlatanism begin?”

Bourget carried letters of introduction from the socialite sportsman James Gordon Bennett Jr. to the Newport elite and spent summer weeks in a “whirlwind of luncheons, coaching-parties, yachtings, dinners, and balls.” He surveilled the interiors, and his judgment was severe. “How do they furnish their houses?” he asked. “This is a new evidence of excess, abuse, absence of moderation.” He censured furnishings that Crowninshield and others admired. The halls were too high, he thought, their floors laid with “too many precious Persian and Oriental rugs.” There were “too many tapestries, too many paintings on the walls of the drawing-rooms” which were covered in “Cordovan leather,” if not satin. The guest rooms, too, failed the test of good taste. There was too much bric-a-brac (“bibelots”) and “too much rare furniture.” “On the lunch or dinner table,” he went further, “there are too many flowers, too many plants, too much crystal, too much silver,” including a sterling vase whose decorative motif featured “grapes as large as small cannon balls.” Everywhere were the “senseless prodigalities of high life.”

Bourget was taken aback by the American obsession with all things European. The upholstery silk and curtains were woven abroad, and European lathes turned the woods of the chairs, tables, cabinets, desks, chiffoniers. The rich Americans opened “full purses” to buy “the finest pictures, tapestries, carvings, and medals” of “France, England, Holland, and Italy.” Also of “Greece, Egypt, India, Japan.” Masterpieces “worthy of a museum” abounded, but the quest for yet others was relentless. When originals could not be had, copies were bought at great expense. The trophies became a mishmash of periods, styles, countries of origin. The mania for antiques was a symptom, Bourget said, of addictive marauding, a frantic, promiscuous, limitless compulsion to possess. Americans’ “hunger and thirst for the long ago” he diagnosed as the insecurity of a new country desperate to claim an ancestry.

The writer Edith Wharton (1862–1937) shared Bourget’s horror at the tangled thickets of American décor. In Wharton’s short story “After Holbein,” a thinly camouflaged Caroline Astor plays hostess in an “entertaining machine” of a house where dinners are served in “that vast pompous dining-room,” whose guests can easily imagine themselves in a “railway buffet for millionaires.” In her novel The Custom of the Country, Wharton describes the tacky “Looey suite” in an American hotel with its “florid carpet” and glossy walls “hung with salmon-pink damask and adorned with a portrait of Marie Antoinette.” At the center of the storm sits a “gilt table” topped with “Mexican onyx” and a palm planted in a basket draped with a pink bow. (The novel’s hotel occupant has no notion that this mix is murderous to good taste.)

It was not that Wharton had no notion of the French style in architecture. Like many in the Gilded Age Society to which she belonged, she was a devotée of all things French. She spoke and read the language, admired its literature, visited annually for extended periods, and took up residence there in the last years of her life. As a young newlywed, she recalled, “My husband and I decided to exchange our little house in New York for a flat in Paris,” where she wished to “see people who shared” her “tastes,” such as her friends Paul and Minnie Bourget. For two years, she sublet an apartment “in a stately Louis XIV hôtel,” meaning a nobleman’s city townhouse. What rankled in the slavish American drive to copy French forms, Wharton felt, was the distortion that debased good taste, turning culture into cartoons.

Edith Wharton took up the subject herself. Soon after her marriage to Edward (“Teddy”) Wharton in 1885, she hired “a clever young Boston architect,” Ogden Codman Jr., to plan the renovation of the couple’s small Newport house, Land’s End, and also asked him to “decorate” the interior. This was an unusual request, as Wharton knew, for “architects of that day looked down on home decoration as a branch of dress-making,” and interior design was left “to upholsterers, who crammed every room with curtains, jardinieres of artificial plants, wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gew-gaws, and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing tables.” Codman shared her dislike of “these sumptuary excesses”—the bric-a-brac, the drapery, and the lambrequins that draped over the edges of shelves and window casings—and the two agreed that “interior decoration should be simple and architectural.” Together they compiled what was to become Wharton’s first book. In The Decoration of Houses, published in 1897, Wharton laments that the century of the Gilded Age had fallen victim to the upholsterer, resulting in “heterogeneous ornament, a multiplication of incongruous effects.” Wharton and Codman split readers into two camps: those who decorate “by a superficial application of ornament” and those who understand “architectural features . . . inside as well as out.” The authors combed history in quest of “architectural proportion” and “wise moderation,” citing a weighty list of books on architecture from the 1600s (principally French). Chapter by chapter they unrolled blueprints for the proper “Entrance and Vestibule” to “The School-room and Nurseries” to “Gala Rooms: Ball-room, Saloon, Music-room, Gallery.” They tutored readers on halls and walls, floors and doors, ceilings, windows, fireplaces. They issued ringing pronouncements: “Proportion is the good breeding of architecture” or “The glow of open fires is preferable to the parching atmosphere of steam.” Offensive furniture was censured, including pianos “disfigured by clumsy lines.” No detail escaped their judgment, including “the outward appearance of books” in the private library.

The Codman-Wharton guideline was sized for Fifth Avenue of the Gilded Age and took direct aim at its social doyenne, whom Frank Crowninshield called “the undisputed Hera of the social heavens.” The Decoration of Houses fired its salvo to bring Mrs. Astor and the Four Hundred down to earth. Its blast: “The vulgarity of current decoration has its source in the indifference of the wealthy to architectural fitness.” That said, Edith Wharton turned her energies to producing best-selling literature. Her pen endorsed interiors that met her standard and savaged those that failed. She built and furnished her own country house, “The Mount,” in Lenox, Massachusetts, far from Fifth Avenue and Newport. In the meantime, Mrs. Astor and the Four Hundred, expressed no qualms whatsoever about their “architectural fitness” as they summered and wintered, traveled, and collected and displayed their de trop objets d’art.

After Edith Wharton had issued her challenge, the house-decoration relay passed next to the somewhat unlikely Elsie De Wolfe (1859[?]–1950), a stage-actress-turned-designer. The change began improbably in Newport in 1902 during a summertime dinner conversation when Daisy Harriman (Mrs. Borden J.), née Florence, mentioned an upcoming “flying” trip to New York and voiced her plan to stay overnight at the Waldorf-Astoria—whereupon Borden Harriman forbade his wife to ever stay by herself at a New York hotel. Daisy recalled that “he laid his disapproval down like family law” and that she immediately determined to organize in the city a women’s club where a woman might stay, assured of comfort and safety. Men had the Union Club, the Knickerbocker, the Players, and a raft of others. Women needed rooms of their own. “As casually as that, the Colony Club began.” By summer’s end, plans were under way, “consecrated to the cause of making the Club a ‘go.’” The prominent architect Stanford White was chosen to design the building at 122 Madison Avenue. Daisy Harriman revered the finished building for its blend of the harmonious features reminiscent of New England, Renaissance Italy, and “grand French days.”

As for the building’s interior, White advised the ladies to employ Elsie De Wolfe. A few in Daisy Harriman’s circle would have recalled the name. Ella Anderson De Wolfe had been reared and educated in Edinburgh and New York, presented at Queen Victoria’s court, introduced to London Society—but was left in financial straits when her father died. From amateur theatricals, she segued to the legitimate stage. She needed the money.

While the Whartons were renovating their Newport home, De Wolfe was on the stage and then managing a theater company into the early 1900s (sometimes dubbed “the Naughty Oughties”). For Mrs. Astor and the Four Hundred, no respectable woman, much less a member of Society, became an actress, the word often a code term for prostitute. Yet the word of Stanford White, the gold standard in Gilded Age architecture, brought Elsie De Wolfe into the Harriman fold.

The results were spectacular. “Elsie De Wolfe was like a witch sweeping the cobwebs out of the sky,” Daisy Harriman recalled. De Wolfe was intent that “no remnant of Victorian influence should make stuffy the air of the Colony Club.” There were azalea-colored walls and white Italian porcelain set off with green earthenware, plus a “ceiling hung with an arbor of glass grapes through which the yellow light streamed like late afternoon in Palermo,” eliciting “‘Ohs’ and ‘Ahs’ of delight from the Club members when they saw what she had brought together.” Concluded Harriman, “Every feature of the club had been planned with imagination and perfect taste.”

De Wolfe’s secret? She approached interior decoration from her loathing of the dark Victorian interiors of her childhood and determined to rid them of dark furniture, heavy draperies, clutter, and gloom. She worked from her years of experience in stagecraft and saw a house as the theatrical setting of its occupants. “When I am asked to decorate a new house,” De Wolfe wrote, “I study the people who are to live in this house . . . as thoroughly as I studied my parts when I was an actress.”

Her book The House in Good Taste arrived in 1913 at the tail end of the Gilded Age, the year before the outbreak of the First World War. By then, however, De Wolfe had already served an elite clientele for at least a decade. Like Wharton and Codman, she preferred sunshine and fireplace warmth to steam heat and was equally horrified that “the most comfortable room in the house” was choked by “a bastard collection of gilt chairs and tables, over-elaborate draperies shutting out both light and air, and huge and frightful paintings.” Like them, she found people to be “swamped by their furniture, . . . all sorts of things of all periods in one heterogeneous mass.” She deplored draperies “with elaborate dust-catching tassels and fringes that mean nothing.” She offered her advice in chapters on walls and halls, on the “Drawing Room,” the “Living Room,” “the Sitting Room and Boudoir.” At every point, she urged a blend of light and color. The “small house” was as much her specialty as the large, and she gave herself the starring role in her book. We hear her deliver lines: “How many rooms have I not cleared of junk?” “I wanted to prove . . . that it was possible to take one of the darkest and grimiest of city houses and make it an abode of light and sunshine.” “I tore away the ugly stone steps.” “I planned. . . . I paneled. . . . I introduced.” So she goes, her reader playing the role of both audience and companion. “When I began my work as a decorator of houses,” De Wolfe recalled, “my friends [were] astonished and just a little amused at my persistent use of chintz.” For her exuberant tastes, “the chintz decorator” was both celebrated and, as fashion changed, eclipsed—perhaps inevitably so. But De Wolfe’s A-list clients, including Amy Vanderbilt, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Clay Frick, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, sought her services well into the twentieth century. From the interiors of Mrs. Astor’s Gilded Age circle, De Wolfe beckoned the new Four Hundred and a widening circle of the public to follow her to the Jazz Age and beyond.

Servants and Their Duties

Gilded Age Society looked to England for its social cues. One admired the “Emerald Isle,” for its aristocracy, its impeccable taste, its country-house grandeur, love of sport, and devotion to stately ritual.

And its peerless servants.

The Gilded Age Four Hundred copied and poached them whenever possible. A full retinue for Mr. and Mrs. Astor and their circle extended to households in the city and Newport (while a few of their set summered in Bar Harbor, Maine). The servants’ roll call included his valet and her lady’s maid, each with gender-appropriate duties. In the master’s suite, the valet supervised his gentleman’s wardrobe, laid out each ensemble of clothing for the day (including putting studs in shirts), ran his master’s bath, assisted in dressing, and perhaps stropped the razor and performed tonsorial duties. The lady’s suite was served by a lady’s maid who kept her mistress’s voluminous wardrobe in order, assisted in her dressing, and was skilled at hairdressing.

In the morning, milady’s boudoir was the headquarters for orders issued to her personal maid, her housekeeper, and possibly her chef, all of whom would relay the instructions to their subordinates. Below, the cooks and kitchen maids, known as “sculleries,” would stir with preparations for lunch and dinner. On the upper floors, numerous uniformed footmen, adorned in frogged tailcoats in the colors of the household, polished the silver, cleaned the dining room, moved furniture, carried wood for the fireplaces, and undertook numerous spur-of-the-moment duties. The aproned parlor maids in their dust caps tended the library and drawing rooms (and occasionally the telephone), while the housemaids were responsible for the bathrooms, dressing tables, and bedrooms. The nurse oversaw the nursery, while outdoors a cadre of gardeners, grooms, and chauffeurs tended the grounds, the stables, the carriages, and the motor cars. The Four Hundred were significant employers, noted the novelist and muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips in The Reign of Gilt (1905), for “the housekeeper has her staff, the chef his, the butler his, the head coachman his, the captain of the yacht his.” The “monthly pay-roll,” he added, totaled $1,700 to $2,000 ($49,000–$58,000 today).

The butler was indisputably the household CEO (though in consultation with the housekeeper). An imposing figure in a midday swallow-tail coat and striped trousers, he was found by six o’clock in a dress suit that varied from the gentlemen’s only in detail (e.g., no braid on the trousers).

The reliance of the Four Hundred on the expertise of their staff made us familiar with a number of these servants. Mrs. Astor’s Thomas poured alcoholic beverages for guests at teatime in her Fifth Avenue home. The newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer relied on his butler, Mark, to fetch a quart of Mumm’s champagne for a gentlemanly drinking challenge. J. P. Morgan’s Biles, Newbold Morris’s Slattery, E. J. Berwind’s Wildgoose, and Herman Oelrichs’s Herbert were all poached from British households.

Likewise, Bradley Martin’s “James” had “occupied a similar position in a British household of indisputable standing,” and he unfailingly steered the Martins and their Dollar Princess daughter, Cornelia, in “matters of etiquette and precedence,” lest they succumb to the “social errors” to which they were “prone.” If a matter outstripped their prior experience, such as hosting a ball at the Waldorf Hotel, Mrs. Martin would turn to James and ask his opinion, according to the memoirist Albert Stevens Crockett. “And what James said, went.”

But if the long-settled hierarchy of social class in England served the system well, not so in America. An American housekeeper took pains to train “the most ignorant of the lower classes of foreigners,” lamented Richard Wells in Manners, Culture and Dress of the Best American Society (1891), “only to have them become dissatisfied” and flee. Acknowledging that servants might harbor resentment that “fortune” had “undeservedly” elevated the heads of the household from the hirelings who served them below (“It is more their misfortune than their fault”), Manners suggested a few rules that might help:

1. Treat your servants always with kindness—but at the same time with firm respect for yourself.

2. On no account be familiar with them.

3. Do not scold your servants. . . . When they need reproof, give it in a calm, firm, and dignified manner.

4. Never entertain your visitors with any narratives of your servants’ improprieties.

5. Never cease to exercise a system of supervision.

6. Never allow servants to treat anyone disrespectfully.

Manners warned against fraternization between the servants and the children of the family. The Gilded Age socialite Blanche Oelrichs proved the point. In girlhood, she found her family’s servants to be childhood’s welcome contrast to the “arid politeness and bored evasions of her better-bred elders.” “I found servants interesting,” she wrote, “because in talking with them . . . there was a degree of heat, of getting at something . . . in their sudden and sometimes coarse outbursts of laughter.” (She recalled her crush on the family’s “swaggering Irish coachman,” who blew her a kiss when, arms outstretched, she sang him a love song from her bedroom window: “O My Dolores, Queen of the Eastern Sea.”)

Manners and most other etiquette guides were meant for affluent Americans whose households employed a few to several servants, including a butler who might carve at the dining table. Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society (1878) recommended “one waiter to four persons” as “sufficient.” (It also advised that servants wear “thin-soled shoes, that their steps may be noiseless.”) However, the social arbiter Ward McAllister’s Society as I Have Found It speaks to the magnitude of Gilded Age New York at its height, when Mrs. Astor reigned and ideas of value “leapt boldly up to . . . one hundred millions” and “the necessities and luxuries followed suit.” Fashion now demanded “that you be received . . . by five or six servants . . . in the hall of the house where you were to dine” and that a bevy of men in livery, including powdered wigs and knee breeches, serve the dinner on gold service, with each course “evidencing the possession by the host of both money and taste.”

However, not everyone among the Four Hundred relished these occasions. Some found the formality “ghastly” and said so: “With no warming cocktail, forty stuffy men and women sat before gold plates for two hours while ten flunkies with knee breeches and paste buckles hovered stiffly about them.” Ghastly for some, divine for others, the social occasion ran on course, each servant a gear wheel in the grand machinery of Society.