MORE STATELY MANSIONS
“I stay here,” Eva Stotesbury once confided to a friend, “only because of Ned. Philadelphia is Ned’s town. I really don’t like it much.” Perhaps she felt that she had earned the city’s most imposing castle as due compensation for the way Philadelphia had treated her. Or perhaps, in the five years—from 1916 to 1921—that it took to build Whitemarsh Hall, with Eva supervising every detail, Eva was merely busying herself with a project that kept her mind off Philadelphia.
Whitemarsh Hall was six stories tall and had three basements. There were two mahogany-paneled passenger elevators, and a dozen more for freight and service. There were a hundred and forty-seven rooms scattered across a hundred thousand square feet of floor space, and if that much floor space is difficult to envision, it amounted to approximately two and a half acres. In volume, the house comprised 1,500,000 cubic feet. There were forty-five bathrooms. To communicate from one part of the house to another a commercial telephone switchboard and operator were required. In the cavernous basements were bakeries, laundries, a tailor shop, a barber shop, a carpenter’s shop, a gymnasium, even a movie theatre. Forty-five live-in servants were required to staff the house, and other full- or part-time “dailies” came in from the village. Whitemarsh Hall employed a full-time carpenter and a full-time electrician. Eva even had her own resident hairdresser and couturier, and each house guest was assigned his or her personal chauffeur. There was garage space for eighteen automobiles. Servants’ rooms were supplied for house guests’ servants. Outside, to care for the three hundred acres of formal gardens, seventy gardeners were employed.
In the background of this huge creation lurked Joseph Duveen. He had recommended the architect, Horace Trumbauer; the landscape designer, Jacques Gréber of Paris; and the interior decorator, Sir Charles Allom of London, who had helped George V and Queen Mary redo some of the principal rooms at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Duveen’s firm had also supplied most of the furniture, rugs, and tapestries, a collection of five hundred paintings, and monumental sculptures by Pajou, Tassaert, and Lecomte, as well as two Clodion groups whose only matching pairs were in the Louvre. One fifty-three-foot Isfahan carpet which lined the Great Hall, or ballroom, had cost Eva $90,000. Eva once said of Duveen, “I can never be grateful enough to him. He taught me how to live”—a remark that was widely ridiculed in Philadelphia, where people added, “And he also taught her how to spend.” Eva Stotesbury countered this with a little joke of her own. Admitting that she had little business sense, she said, “The only successful financial transaction I ever made in my life was when I married Mr. Stotesbury.”
Whitemarsh Hall was opened with a great party in October 1921. The entire social and banking community of Philadelphia turned out for it, plus many guests from New York and a handsome sprinkling of titled foreigners. Forty extra footmen, it was said, had been hired to serve the party, and in the corner niches of one of the two rotundas, four bars were set up—one for cocktails, one for whiskey, one for champagne, and one for other sorts of drinks—a lavish thumb to the nose at Prohibition. Four orchestras—two seated, and two strolling—played for dancing, and, as he often did, Ned Stotesbury, who had been a drummer boy in the Civil War, took a few turns on the drums.
Still, for all the gaiety and splendor, there were the usual sour comments. The Philadelphia aesthete Fiske Kimball, director of the Art Museum, appraising Mr. Duveen’s work, said, “The furnishings made an impression of great magnificence. One scarcely realized how few of them were actually antique.” Kimball also found fault with the flowers: “On an estate where flowers grew luxuriantly in parterres and green-houses, the roses in the drawing room … were silk, sprayed with perfume. Everywhere were English portraits, chiefly by Romney and Lawrence, which Duveen had unloaded on the Stotesburys at enormous prices.” Other details of the evening sound like canards. It was said, for example, that Eva—who was so good at attaching names to faces—moved among her guests with “a typewritten catalogue” of the paintings in her hand in order to name the artist, title, and provenance of each piece. It was also said that, at the outset of the evening, guests were paraded past glass cases where her entire jewelry collection was displayed. (Eva never displayed her entire collection of jewelry to any guest, though, as we shall see, her husband did on one occasion.)
Not even Ned Stotesbury was spared the criticism. Philadelphian Nathaniel Burt wrote that Ned banged on the drums “when he got drunk,” and that Stotesbury was the kind of man “who would give himself a testimonial dinner and then clap at the speeches,” even though Stotesbury never did such a thing.
Naturally, the burning question on everyone’s lips was how much Whitemarsh Hall had cost. No one could be so crass as to ask the host and hostess, and in the press the estimates varied wildly. It is also likely that Ned Stotesbury did not know exactly—it was to be his beautiful monument to Eva and her entertainments, and he had given her virtually a blank check. Perhaps the best estimate comes from Horace Lippincott, who was a close friend of Ned Stotesbury and who mentions a figure of around three million dollars, exclusive of furnishings and décor. These, of course, were pre-First World War dollars. It was a very expensive house.
And, though Philadelphians went right on accepting Ned’s and Eva’s invitations, the Philadelphia consensus was that it was all too much. Philadelphians preferred a more restrained expensiveness. To understand what Philadelphians admired, one would have had, just a few years back, to spend an evening in rural Penllyn, not far from Chestnut Hill, with the elderly Miss Anna Ingersoll.
Ingersolls, as they say, have been in Philadelphia forever—at least since Revolutionary times, when the first Ingersoll came down from Salem, Massachusetts, and settled there. They have produced seven generations of Philadelphia lawyers, bankers, civic leaders, and gentlemen. According to Philadelphia legend (and there is no way of ever knowing whether any of the legends occurred quite as told), Miss Anna, who was very beautiful and popular in her youth, never married because the young man she was in love with was a Jew. This made marriage out of the question, of course, and so, forbidden to marry the man she loved, Miss Anna chose to remain a spinster. (The man she loved, it is said, never married either.)
Penllyn is something of an Ingersoll family compound, and various Ingersoll houses are scattered across the rolling hills. Driving down the long graveled drive to Miss Anna’s big old graystone house, one used to be able to see, in the rear-view mirror of one’s automobile, a gardener appear with a rake to smooth the gravel that had just been disturbed by the passing of the car.
Tea with Miss Anna in her portrait-hung drawing room (all portraits of Ingersolls, of course, nothing that had been plucked from an English Stately Home by a voracious Joseph Duveen) in that not-so-long-ago day—we are talking here of the mid-1960s—was a merry, gossipy affair: who married whom, the Coxes, Chews, Peppers, Newbolds, Morrises, Ingersolls, Cadwalladers, and Pughs. The difference between the Pughs and the Pews, the Cadwalladers and the Cadwaladers, is far more than a matter of spelling. Sitting behind her huge silver tea service, pouring tea, offering tiny watercress sandwiches, bread-and-butter sandwiches on the thinnest bread, and little English biscuits from a Fortnum & Mason box, Miss Anna was a lively octogenarian. One by one her various relatives—brothers and their wives, cousins, nieces, nephews—would drop by for an afternoon visit with Miss Anna. Without missing a beat, tea time turned into the cocktail hour, with one of Miss Anna’s brothers splashing a little domestic vermouth into the mouth of a Gilbey’s gin bottle and shaking the mixture vigorously. The result, martinis at room temperature, was then poured from the gin bottle into empty glasses held in eager hands.
Dinner was equally unpretentious. Though the silver, laid with xylophone precision about the dinner plates, was of the heaviest—three-pronged forks, pistol-handled knives—and gleamed with that special deep, creamy luster that can be achieved only in old silver that is polished after every meal, the napkins were of a ten-cent-store paper variety. Also, though the dining table was of museum-quality wood, it was possible to spot, among the heavy silver epergnes and candelabra, a ketchup bottle and a French’s mustard jar. This, after all, is Old Philadelphia. Because it knows who and what it is, it has no reason to apologize for anything.
At the mention of Eva Stotesbury’s name, Anna Ingersoll’s expression grew thoughtful—pleasantly thoughtful. “Oh, I knew Eva well,” she said, choosing her words with great care. “I liked her very much. She was absolutely charming, and she gave wonderful parties. She was so—gracious, always. But, you see … well, she married Ned Stotesbury, of course. And Eva was very … very ambitious.”
That, then, was Eva’s fatal flaw: ambition. In Philadelphia, ambition had become a pejorative term.
James Henry Roberts Cromwell, the younger of Eva’s two sons by her first marriage, was only ten years old when his father died, and since the age of eight he had attended the Fay School, a private boys’ academy in Massachusetts. It was natural, after his mother’s remarriage, that Jimmy Cromwell should call Ned Stotesbury “Father.”
As head of—among other things—the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, Ned Stotesbury had told his young stepson about a special railroad car, which was hitched on in front of the engine and was used to transport the railroad’s directors on inspection tours of coal-mining operations in the northeastern part of the state. The coal companies were some of the railroad’s most important customers, and Jimmy had begged his father to take him on one of these excursions. Finally, when Jimmy was fifteen, Stotesbury invited the boy along, saying, “Just don’t get underfoot, and make yourself as inconspicuous as possible.” And so Jimmy joined his father and the other members of the board for a trip to Mauch Chunk, the county seat of Carbon County, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the anthracite country.
“I had never seen poverty before,” Jimmy Cromwell recalled many years later. “I was horrified. I had always assumed that everyone lived in houses like Whitemarsh Hall, but here were miners living in tiny shacks. The children had no shoes or stockings. The people were in rags—unwashed and sickly. In two of the little shanties we went in, coal was stored in the bathtubs.” On the ride home, Jimmy seemed so unusually pensive that Stotesbury said to him, “What are you being so glum about?”
At home, Jimmy mentioned the experience to his mother, who quickly said, “You must speak to your father about this.” The boy did so, and, after closing the study door and sitting the young man down, Ned Stotesbury began a long and rambling lecture that was as serious—and ultimately as confusing—as any parental explanation of the facts of life. “I want to explain this,” Stotesbury began. “What you have seen is the price of competition. For example, in our coal business we’re having trouble competing with oil as a fuel. Oil is cutting into our business, cutting into our profits.…” On and on he went for the better part of two hours, Jimmy Cromwell remembered, outlining his own capitalist theories on the American free enterprise system.
Later, Eva took her son aside and asked, “What did he tell you?” As best he could Jimmy Cromwell recounted what his father had said to him. “There is something I would like to add to that,” his mother said at last. “Great wealth carries with it great responsibilities. It is the best part of the Christian ethic to take care of the underprivileged and less fortunate. Don’t forget that if you don’t, you may lose all your luxuries, because revolution is an indictment of the ruling class.” It was an era, after all, when concepts like “wealth,” “responsibilities,” and “class” could all fit comfortably in the same sentence. Then Eva added, “Perhaps this will inspire you to devote your life to some form of public service.”
Several years later, Jimmy Cromwell was dancing at the Washington’s Birthday costume ball in Palm Beach, which officially marked, in those days, the end of the winter season. His fancy was caught by a young lady who had come dressed as a ballerina and who, he could not help noticing, had lovely legs. He presented himself to her. She was Delphine Dodge, the only daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Horace Dodge of Detroit, who were in the automobile business. A romance and courtship followed, and a wedding was announced for June 20, 1920.
The marriage was spectacular news: two enormous American fortunes were joining hands, and the union seemed absolutely dynastic—at least on the surface. Actually, the Dodges had no real social position in Detroit, and did not rank with such pre-internal combustion families as the Joys, Newberrys, and “old” Fords, no kin to Henry. Horace Dodge was a self-taught, self-made man, and his wife, Anna, was the daughter of a rough old Scottish sailor. Both Mr. and Mrs. Dodge had trouble speaking the King’s English correctly, and Anna Dodge used to startle acquaintances by saying, “I helped make this fortune, too. I used to get up at six in the morning to fix Dad’s breakfast and pack his lunch pail.” Mrs. Dodge always called her husband “Dad,” and he called her “Mother.” Needless to say, the Dodges were overjoyed at the prospect of their daughter’s union with not one but three important American families, the Cromwells, the Robertses, and the Stotesburys.
Naturally, Eva and Ned were invited to visit Rose Terrace, the Dodge estate in Grosse Pointe on the shore of Lake St. Clair. The house was large and the grounds were extensive, but Anna Dodge had had no Joseph Duveen to guide her hand and shape her taste. The furniture was heavy and ugly, the paintings on the walls were still-life reproductions, and the rooms were cluttered with pretentious bric-á-brac and a great deal of Tiffany glass. Next, Eva and Ned invited their future in-laws to Whitemarsh Hall, where the Dodges were goggle-eyed at what they saw. Horace Dodge, in particular, was impressed with Eva’s jewelry, and begged to be shown it all. Ned Stotesbury—who even before meeting Eva had begun collecting precious stones—thereupon produced tray after tray of glittering gems.
Not long before the wedding Mr. Dodge took his future son-in-law aside. “Jim,” he said, “I’m worried about Mother.” “What about her?” Cromwell wanted to know. “Well, Mother doesn’t have the kind of pearls your mother has. In the church, people are going to notice that sort of thing. Where does your mother buy ’em?” Cromwell mentioned Cartier. “Never heard of him,” Dodge said. “But get me an appointment with this fella.” And so Cromwell arranged a meeting between Pierre Cartier, Horace Dodge, and himself.
At the meeting, Cartier—whom Mr. Dodge persistently called “Mr. Car-teer”—produced several trays of pearl necklaces. “No, no, Mr. Car-teer,” said Mr. Dodge. “I want something bigger than that for Mother. Something to match Mrs. Stotesbury’s pearls.” Finally Cartier said, “Monsieur Dodge, I do have one very fine set. They belonged to the Empress Catherine.” “Never heard of her,” said Mr. Dodge, “but let’s see ’em.” Cartier then brought out a magnificent strand of pearls the size of robin’s eggs. “That’s more like it,” said Mr. Dodge. “How much?” “Ah, Monsieur Dodge,” said M. Cartier, “that necklace is one million dollars.” “I’ll take it,” said Dodge, pulling out his checkbook and writing a check for $1,000,000.
Meanwhile, Anna Dodge had been carefully studying Whitemarsh Hall. Later she would hire Eva’s architect and decorator and transform Rose Terrace in the image of the Stotesbury house.
Throughout the 1920s Eva and Ned Stotesbury entertained like mad. Eva liked to say that she had taught her husband “how to play,” another comment that was greeted sneeringly in Philadelphia; the term “playboy” had come into fashion, carrying derisive overtones, and the image of a millionaire in his seventies cavorting across an endless series of ballrooms made Ned Stotesbury seem something of a caricature of the type. And it was true that, though Ned was at his office at Drexel’s every morning at eight, most of the Stotesburys’ evenings were spent in some form of fun. The wardrobes of jewels, furs, and gowns increased, and both Ned’s and Eva’s names now appeared regularly on “best-dressed” lists.
In the 1920s, however, one began to sense a note of hysteria, of barely controlled desperation, in Ned and Eva’s social activities. It was as though they had seen that they had gone too far, but it was now too late to turn back, and all they could do was go even farther. The Stotesburys built another huge villa in Palm Beach, where “for lack of competition”—as Philadelphia chronicler Nathaniel Burt rather snidely put it—the Stotesburys became the winter colony’s acknowledged social leaders and where their El Mirasol (The Sunflower) was the resort’s largest house. (The name struck some people as odd and inappropriate; El Mirasol was the name of the Albuquerque hotel where Eva and her first husband had spent their honeymoon.)
In 1925 the Stotesburys decided to move on to the summer colony of Mount Desert Island, Maine, where Bar Harbor had long been a favorite resort for Old Philadelphians, and here Eva’s behavior drew even more criticism. The house they bought had belonged to Alexander Cassatt, who had been president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, but when she toured her new acquisition Eva announced that it wasn’t big enough. There were only fifteen servants’ rooms; she needed forty. So she ordered the house torn down and a larger structure erected in its place, instructing her architect to have the place ready for occupancy the following summer. But when she returned in 1926, to find the place completed and furnished to the last detail, she walked through the result and it still wasn’t big enough. Her husband, it seemed, wanted her to live on an ever-grander scale. “It won’t do,” she said. “Tear it down and build it over again, and this time I’ll stay here and see that it’s done properly.” In the end, what was achieved was Wingwood House, the largest example of Colonial-style architecture in the State of Maine.
It was curious, because this sort of thing was not at all what Eva had originally said she wanted—“a cozy little retreat,” “a cottage,” where she and Ned could relax and enjoy each other’s company away from the heavy social duties of Palm Beach. Instead, she had built another palace. But once again the éminence grise behind her actions was Joseph Duveen. Duveen had acquired roomfuls of English furniture from a titled Britisher and had succeeded in selling it all to the Stotesburys. Another expanded house was the only solution to where to put it.
“Of course Duveen overcharged her outrageously,” Jimmy Cromwell, a tall, spry man in his eighties, says today. “But at least my mother knew she was getting good goods. I don’t think Father ever read a book in his life, but Mother was always researching. If she was buying English furniture, she would read every book she could find on the subject. If she was buying a particular painter, she would dig up everything she could find on him. I used to tease her and call her the American Clipper, because she usually had a pair of scissors in her hand to cut out clippings from newspapers and antique and art magazines. Mother loved to create things. But what a lot of people who criticized her for being ostentatious never realized was that it wasn’t she who insisted on living on that magnificent scale. It was he. Father was the show-off—not my mother. He was of a generation of men who wanted to show the whole world how important they were. And of course his firm was making so much money that—well, today it would be downright embarrassing. His theory was: If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”
Now, with a summer place in Maine and a winter place in Palm Beach, and with Katherine MacMullan in tow from place to place, Eva opened Whitemarsh Hall only for the late-spring and early-autumn seasons. At Bar Harbor, of course, it was assumed that the Stotesburys intended to establish themselves as the social leaders there as well. But this was something that the Old Philadelphians of Bar Harbor were not prepared to allow Eva and Ned to do. One by one, Chestons, Clarks, Lippincotts, Ingersolls, Newbolds, Morrises, and Thayers began moving out of Bar Harbor and reestablishing themselves at quieter, folksier Northeast Harbor, on the opposite side of the island. In fact, Wingwood House and the Stotesburys are often cited as the cause for the demise of Bar Harbor as a fashionable resort—though a great fire that ravaged Bar Harbor in 1947, and destroyed many of the summer mansions, also helped.
In the 1920s, of course, it was all right to be rich. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone was, and bankers traded stock tips with their bootblacks, and the extravagant doings of the wealthy were cheerfully, almost worshipfully, reported. In the 1920s, too, it was acceptable for a rich woman such as Eva Stotesbury to assume the role of a Lady Bountiful, which Eva did. Though she was generous to her Episcopalian church and to one or two other organized philanthropies, her favorite form of charity was what she called “the personal kind.” She would, for example, personally deliver Thanksgiving turkeys to poor families of Philadelphia, and boxes of toys to their children at Christmastime. But when the Roaring Twenties ended in a roaring crash in October of 1929, and the nation awoke to a world of breadlines, being rich was no longer quite so fashionable, and women like Eva became—overnight—dreadful anachronisms. As the Depression deepened, Ned and Eva Stotesbury came under particularly vicious attack, led by a Philadelphia radio commentator named Boake Carter. In the terrible winter of 1932, Carter actually recommended over the air that a bomb be dropped on Whitemarsh Hall. The Stotesburys also heard that a band of starving citizens had been organized to besiege the house and put it to the torch. A terrified Ned and Eva, envisioning an angry proletarian mob storming their gates, immediately announced plans to close all their houses and move to Europe.
Meanwhile, all sorts of grim rumors circulated. Ned Stotesbury’s fortune, once reckoned at $200,000,000, was now said to be down to $5,000,000. It was said that on the night before their departure all the Stotesbury servants had walked out on them while they sat at dinner. It was said that all the lights at Whitemarsh Hall had suddenly gone out, the implication being that the Stotesburys had been unable to pay their electric bill. Both stories were untrue. Fiske Kimball, visiting Ned and Eva on the morning of their sailing, found the house running as smoothly as always, the servants efficiently attending to the details of the trip, the lights working and the house electrician on duty. Looking about her magnificent estate for what might be the last time, Eva Stotesbury turned to her lawyer, Morris Bockius, and said with a certain gallantry, “Well, Morris, if we never come back we’ve had ten wonderful years of it.” Later that year, however, they were back—not at Whitemarsh, but at Philadelphia’s Barclay Hotel, where they gave their traditional New Year’s Eve party in the hotel ballroom and danced, somewhat prematurely, to the strains of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
Fiske Kimball, meanwhile, had always assumed that the Stotesbury art collection would eventually go to the Philadelphia Art Museum, of which he was the distinguished head. Eva had often said, “We consider ourselves only the trustees of our collection for the public.” But now, with New Deal taxes and increased inheritance levies—President Roosevelt’s motto, it was said, was “Soak the rich”—eroding the fortunes of the wealthy, Kimball was apprehensive. By rights, he should have been sympathetic to the Stotesburys. An “outsider” himself, he had, like Ned Stotesbury, been rebuffed by the Philadelphia Club. (Kimball, furthermore, had made the fatal error of asking a friend to put him up for membership. When several months went by with no further word on the subject, Kimball approached the friend again. “I have tried,” was the reply.) Instead, however, Kimball’s attitude toward Ned and Eva was the fashionable one of toplofty condescension—at least when he was not in their presence. With them, of course, with his eyes on the collection, he was all smiles and flattery and blandishments. His hopes were revived in 1933, when Ned and Eva reopened Whitemarsh Hall and embarked on another season of entertaining as though unaffected by the Depression.
In 1936, when 38 percent of United States families had incomes of less than $1,000 a year—and when the Bureau of Labor Statistics had placed the poverty line at $1,330—the stock market suddenly enjoyed a sharp comeback. Capitalists cheered the fact that the Depression seemed at last over. Early in 1937, however, the market tumbled so precipitously that the crash of 1929–30 seemed almost minor. That winter, Eva—who Fiske noted waspishly “had been a very inactive member of our Committee”—invited Fiske and the members of the museum board to Whitemarsh Hall for lunch. Before sitting down, Kimball was alerted to the situation by one of Eva’s secretaries, who murmured something about “these awful taxes, this awful Roosevelt, and the collection.” During dessert, Eva sadly gave Kimball the bad news. Ned’s will had had to be rewritten; in it, the collection was directed to be sold. “The collection may have to be my bread and butter,” she said quietly.
Horace Dodge had died not long after his daughter’s marriage to Jimmy Cromwell, and his widow had been devastated, seemingly unable to function without her husband at her side. Eva went immediately to her rescue, and for the better part of a year Anna Dodge lived with the Stotesburys at Whitemarsh Hall. If Philadelphia’s reception to Eva had been frostily superior, it was as nothing compared with the way the city’s worthies received the humbly bred and humbly spoken Mrs. Dodge. “But my mother simply didn’t give a damn,” says Jimmy Cromwell. “Mother was not a snob. She felt it was her duty to help take care of Anna.” (It was a kindness which would one day be well repaid.) “Besides, Mother wasn’t the only woman in Philadelphia who knew how to be a real lady. Two of her dearest friends in the city were Mrs. Alexander Biddle and Mrs. Alexander Van Rensselaer—who were hardly out of the bottom drawer. Both of them remained devoted to her to the very end.” Jimmy Cromwell, who had started his business career with his stepfather’s Drexel and Company, now turned his attention to the affairs of the Dodge Corporation. Among other things, he helped Anna Dodge orchestrate the sale of her Dodge stock, from which she realized $160,000,000. Eventually—though for a rather brief duration—Anna Dodge married a man named Hugh Dillman, and then embarked, throughout the Depression, on a career of spending that made anything the Stotesburys had done seem like child’s play.
Jimmy and Delphine Dodge had been divorced in 1928, to his mother’s sorrow, but the families had remained friends. Then, in 1935, Jimmy Cromwell made an even more spectacular marriage, to Doris Duke, whose father, James Buchanan Duke, had peddled tobacco with a team of two blind mules and parlayed this modest enterprise into the American Tobacco Company. Doris was only thirteen when her father died, and she inherited $70,000,000 along with a private railroad car named Doris. At the time of her marriage to Cromwell, she was twenty-three and, thanks to the shrewd management of her mother, Nanaline Inman Duke, Doris’s fortune was worth $250,000,000.
Jimmy Cromwell had also, rather belatedly—he was thirty-six—embarked upon the career of public service his mother had envisioned for him. To the horror of his stepfather, Cromwell had become an ardent New Dealer and an active campaigner for Franklin D. Roosevelt and his programs of social and economic reform. Not surprisingly, there were arguments between the two men on this subject. “Roosevelt was anathema to him,” Cromwell recalls. “I tried to point out to him that he should be grateful to Roosevelt. Few people realize how close the country was to revolution when the banks closed.” One afternoon as stepfather and son sat in the study at Whitemarsh Hall, Ned Stotesbury put down his newspaper and said, “Jim, I have something to tell you. It’s a good thing you married the richest girl in the world. Why? Well, you’re not going to inherit anything from me. Your deity, Franklin D. Roosevelt, is ruining free enterprise. He’s destroying my firm. I made all this myself. FDR is not going to waste it for me. I am.”
Ned Stotesbury died at Whitemarsh on May 21, 1938, at the age of eighty-nine. Reportedly, he died with curses on his lips against Roosevelt and the New Deal, which he blamed for all the world’s woes. Still, the Stotesburys had not spent the early 1930s in much discomfort, and, when Ned’s estate was examined, it turned out that he had been true to his word. In the five years between 1933 and his death, it seemed, Ned Stotesbury had withdrawn from his account at Drexel’s some $55,000,000 in cash—or more than $10,000,000 a year. How this extraordinary sum was spent, or wasted, is anyone’s guess. It can only be assumed that $10,000,000 a year was the figure required to maintain the Stotesburys’ standard of living. In light of these huge withdrawals, it was even more surprising that his estate ended up amounting to as much as $5,000,000, which was the figure finally placed on it. Looked at another way, he died with barely enough capital for another six months’ expenses, and if he had lingered on until November he would have died penniless. The division of the money was straightforward. Two thirds was to be divided equally between the two daughters by his first marriage. One third, along with the houses and their contents, went to Eva. As he had promised, nothing went to any of Eva’s three children. And it took Eva’s lawyers only a moment to realize that the annual income from her inheritance would amount to less than a quarter of what it cost to maintain Whitemarsh Hall, not to mention the other houses.
In 1937 an advertisement for Whitemarsh Hall appeared in Fortune, listing all its splendors. No price was mentioned, and there were no takers. Oil-rich Arab sheiks would not discover America for another generation. Similarly, the Palm Beach and Bar Harbor houses were put up for sale, with similar results. In a little over a decade’s time, all Eva’s properties had become costly white elephants. A discouraged Eva was advised that the Whitemarsh property might be more salable if the building itself were demolished. It would cost almost as much to tear it down as it had to build it. She could not afford that, either.
Next, Eva turned to the sale of her art collection. From London, Duveen, her old friend and mentor and the man who had pocketed so much Stotesbury money in commissions and inflated prices over the years, reported that he was too ill to come to America to help her dispose of all the acquisitions he had helped her acquire. Knoedler’s in New York was then turned to, and their report was equally gloomy. The art market was as depressed as everything else. Eva’s paintings were mostly English, including many Romneys, and English painting was now out of fashion. Once more Fiske Kimball was invited to Whitemarsh Hall, where Eva told him, “I thought I must sell the sculpture, but, at the figures I am offered, I would much rather give it to the museum in memory of Ned.” Fiske made his selections: four stone statues by Pajou, a marble by Tassaert that had once belonged to Frederick the Great, and the two Clodion groups whose only likes were in the Louvre. Fiske also asked for two sets of four plaster female figures bearing torches, which had stood in each of Whitemarsh Hall’s two great rotundas, even though their authorship and provenance were unclear. (Later he would discover that at least one of the sets had decorated the inaugural ball of Madame du Barry at Louveciennes in 1771.)
Not until 1943 was Eva able to sell Whitemarsh Hall—to the Pennsylvania Salt Company for use as a research laboratory. The reported price was $167,000, including twenty acres of land. The following year, two auctions—one in Philadelphia and one in New York—attempted to sell the rest of Eva’s art and furnishings. The Philadelphia auction was attended mostly by curiosity seekers. The New York auction was, in Fiske Kimball’s words, “a butchery.” One Romney, The Vernon Children, brought $22,000, but that was the highest price achieved in the sale. Nothing else brought more than $10,000, and the magnificent Isfahan carpet, for which Ned Stotesbury paid Duveen $90,000, was sold for only $5,000.
Through all these vicissitudes Eva remained cheerful and optimistic, never losing her well-bred composure and, if she was ever frightened or disheartened, never letting on. “There was never any bitterness, not even the sense of the stiff upper lip,” says Jimmy Cromwell. “She was sweet and fun-loving as always, poking gentle fun at the vagaries of people—people’s little peculiarities always amused her.” Through it all her two “top-drawer” Old Philadelphia friends, Mrs. Biddle and Mrs. Van Rensselaer, remained supportive and close, even though, it might be added, neither came forth with any offers of material assistance. That was left to plain old Anna Dodge, who came straight out of the bottom drawer to announce that she had a large and elegantly decorated house on Garfield Street in Washington which she never used. It was called Marly. Eva, she pointed out, knew and liked Washington and had lived there for several years. Why didn’t Eva move to Washington and live in Marly? The rent would be nominal, just a token to make it all legal. Eva moved back to Washington not long after Ned’s death. Anna Dodge also privately bought some pieces from Eva’s art collection, for undisclosed prices.
With Marly to live in, and with the eventual sale of her properties and possessions—including most of her jewelry, though she refused to sell Ned’s wedding pearls—she was able to live quite comfortably. The Bar Harbor house was eventually sold to a junk dealer for about $5,000; he tore the house down to salvage the lead in the plumbing, and then sold the waterfront property for a ferry dock, where thousands of tourists from Canada now seasonally disembark. Far away from touristy Bar Harbor, in the quiet remove of Northeast Harbor, Old Philadelphians, when they bemoan what has happened to Bar Harbor, still seem to be saying, “But we told you so.”
Whitemarsh Hall still stands, more or less. After acquiring the house, the Pennsylvania Salt Company decided it would be prudent to sell the copper roof, which consisted of several tons of metal. With the copper roof gone, the weather came in. In the wake of the weather came the vandals. The gold-and-white paneling, the carved porticos, pediments, chimney pieces, and capitals have been ripped away. The draped statue that stood at the entrance has been beheaded. Only the façade of the great house remains, a silent and ghostly presence staring through broken windows at a banal array of middle-income suburban housing developments which have replaced the vast formal gardens. At the time of Eva’s death, only El Mirasol in Palm Beach remained unsold, her last white elephant. Eventually that property was sold too, and the house razed.
And so there is only the shell of Whitemarsh Hall to provide a reminder of an era when to be a great hostess, to give glorious parties, to wear beautiful gowns and splendid jewels, to remember every guest’s name, was—well, enough. Or almost enough, though not quite enough for Philadelphia, which would never forget that Eva was not a Philadelphian, that Stotesbury’s was a twentieth-century fortune, and that Eva had more money than anyone else. “My private theory is that the strongest force in the world is the green-eyed monster, that it’s the cause of all the evil we see around us,” says Jimmy Cromwell. “And of course Philadelphia is a particularly stiff-necked place. It’s why I came to New York as quickly as I could. Why should I sit around in Philadelphia waiting to be asked to join the Philadelphia Club, when my grandfather was a founder of the Union Club in New York? My second daughter was born in New York, which makes her a ninth-generation New York Cromwell. The Philadelphia caste system has, I know for a fact, hurt the city in terms of attracting commerce and industry. Many talented business executives refuse to relocate in Philadelphia because they know that they and their wives will be snubbed by the Old Guard. Philadelphia can’t stand successsful outsiders.”
But the final hypocrisy was that Philadelphia panted for invitations to Eva Stotesbury’s parties. She may have been encouraged and abetted in her extravagances by her husband, but she was also encouraged by Philadelphia, where she was given no real competition, where she was permitted to have the field to herself. No one even attempted to outdo her; she was given free rein. Philadelphia’s only grand parties were Eva’s parties. And in the process she lifted Philadelphia entertaining to heights which it—and most other cities—had never seen and may never see again, far more imaginative and festive than anything ever achieved under the rigid and boring reign of Caroline Astor and her “Four Hundred.” If the thousands of Philadelphians who accepted Eva’s hospitality and were fed and wined at her table are any indication, she filled, for a while at least, a definite local need. Philadelphia would have been a much duller place without her. In a way, she was a rare municipal asset.
Eva’s gifts were subtle ones, but they were at least two—that sense of personal theatre, and the gift of enjoying beautiful things. Trying to make the point that a great designer cannot create great designs without the support of a great patron, one of the designers from Lucien Alavoine et Cie, the Paris decorating firm that helped Eva with many of her most ambitious projects, despaired of trying to define Eva’s talent and said simply, “Well, the point is … she was a great lady.”
And she also had charm. In all the gossip about Eva Stotesbury that has survived, there is nothing connecting her with an unkind deed or word. “It’s true,” says Jimmy Cromwell. “Outside of the privacy of her own bedroom, about which I have no knowledge, I never heard her say anything that was disagreeable. She used to say, ‘I try to make it a rule, and I try to abide by it, that if I can’t say something nice about someone I don’t say anything.’ To my knowledge, she and Father never quarreled. I never heard them raise their voices to one another. They were an ideal couple. She had a pet name for him—‘Kickapoo.’ Sometimes when he’d grumble about business or market conditions, she’d laugh and tweak his ear and say, ‘Now, Kickapoo … we have a pleasant life, don’t we?’”
“Gracious” is an adjective that meant more to Eva’s generation than it did to later ones. Eva was always gracious. Hers were talents that did not transplant easily to Philadelphia, nor did they translate well into the 1930s and 1940s, but that was not her fault.
“If there was one person my mother ever really hated,” says her son today, “and I even hate to use the term, it was Doris.” During the Second World War, President Roosevelt appointed James H. R. Cromwell United States Ambassador to Canada, but Doris Duke Cromwell did not care for life in Canada and went to Hawaii, where she embarked upon the building of her famous estate, Shangri-La. After the war, Jimmy Cromwell decided to run for the United States Senate from New Jersey, where Doris Duke also maintained a large place. It was at this point, in the middle of his Senate campaign, that Doris Duke chose to return to the continental United States—pregnant, and accompanied by a new gentleman friend. “Officially, of course, the baby was mine,” says Cromwell, “but everyone knew we’d been separated. Anyway, she lost the baby, but the incident ruined my campaign. I really believe that Doris shortened my mother’s life by what she did. Mother would have loved to see a son in the United States Senate. But Doris saw to it that it didn’t happen. That was the end of my campaign.” The Cromwells were divorced in 1948.
“Of course the divorces saddened Mother,” Cromwell says. “In my generation we became a particularly divorce-ridden family. She was especially upset by my sister’s divorce from Douglas MacArthur.” Louise Cromwell MacArthur, who is now dead, would go on to be divorced from three more husbands. James Cromwell’s older brother, Oliver Cromwell, Jr., who lives in Switzerland, has been married and divorced twice. Jimmy Cromwell’s third wife, the former Maxine MacFettridge, died. He now lives with his fourth wife, the Paris-born Germaine de Baume, in New York. “Mother always thought Doris was a cold person,” he says. “She didn’t approve of the way Doris treated her own mother. When Doris and I were leaving on our wedding trip, she said good-bye to her mother with a little peck on the cheek. And it was Nanaline who was responsible for tripling Doris’s fortune! Of course Mother took our side in all the divorces, but they saddened her terribly, and the Doris thing shortened her life.”
In the spring of 1946, in the middle of the “Doris thing,” Eva Stotesbury had a heart attack at the Palm Beach house. Her doctor telephoned Jimmy Cromwell and urged him to plead with his mother to stay in bed until she had recovered. Eva wanted to be up and about. Cromwell hurried to Palm Beach to remonstrate with her, and he found her, even at the end and bedridden, perfectly groomed and coifed, the Stotesbury pearls looped at her throat, a gracious, regal Presence. “Just as I never saw her angry, never saw her lose her temper, I never saw her let her hair down,” Cromwell says. In appearance she had not changed much from the Douglas Chandor portrait of her, painted in 1926—the same wide eyes, winglike eyebrows, smooth skin, dimpled cheeks, the slightly upturned nose and the pleasantly crooked, almost mocking smile.
Cromwell urged her to follow her doctor’s orders. With a smile she said, “My dear son, I am yearning for my quiet grave. I don’t want any part of your world, Mr. Roosevelt’s world, or Mr. Stalin’s world.” Twelve hours later, on May 31, 1946—little more than eight years to the day after Ned’s death—Eva died. She was eighty-one.
At the time of her death, some of her old acquaintances wondered what Eva was doing in Palm Beach so far out of season. (By then the Palm Beach season had been “officially” extended from February 22 to April 1.) But of course Eva herself—and she surely knew it—had gone out of season. Out of season, too, were the values and concepts she lived by: duty, responsibility, noblesse oblige, character, kindness, dignity, politeness, graciousness, grandeur, luxury, patronage of the arts, serenity, splendor, formality, gaiety. It was a season which would perhaps never pass across the American landscape again, and its fading had left Eva behind, an anachronism. Soon, El Mirasol would crumble before the wrecker’s ball. The Washington house, Marly, Eva’s last real home, would become the Belgian Embassy, all business.
Eva Stotesbury had made only one trip back to Philadelphia between Ned’s death and her own. This was in 1939, to view the installation of the Stotesbury Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She had arrived from Washington twenty-seven years earlier in Ned Stotesbury’s private railroad car. Now she was conveyed northward from the capital in an ordinary Pullman chair. On Fiske Kimball’s arm she toured the Collection and pronounced herself satisfied with its new home. The two reminisced briefly about the glorious epoch of Whitemarsh Hall. No, she did not want to be driven out to see the house. She thanked Fiske Kimball for past kindnesses. Then she glanced at her watch. It was time to catch the train back to Washington. “This will be my last visit to Philadelphia,” she told Kimball. “I never want to see it again.”
And she kept that promise. Her will directed that she be buried in Chicago, with her parents and the other Roberts relatives.