MRS. HUNTINGTON
Collis P. Huntington had once boasted that he never spent more than $200 a year on “personal adornment.” But now that Arabella had become a permanent fixture in his life he could no longer make that claim. By 1874 the house at 109 Lexington Avenue had begun to seem a bit cramped, and New York society was abandoning Murray Hill and Gramercy Park and moving relentlessly uptown, on and just off Fifth Avenue north of Fiftieth Street. The attraction was Central Park, the magnificent rectangle of green that Frederick Law Olmsted had laid out in the heart of Manhattan and through which the fashionable regularly paraded in their carriages. That year, Catherine Yarrington paid $43,000, most of it in cash, for a residence at 68 East Fifty-fourth Street and, as was her custom, immediately turned over title to the property to her daughter.*
Three years later, Arabella sold 68 East Fifty-fourth Street to one Isaac Henderson and, in the same transaction, bought 4 West Fifty-fourth Street from him. Now she was only two doors away from Fifth Avenue, and the new William H. Vanderbilt mansion—the talk of New York—was right around the corner. The price for the Henderson house was $250,000—again most of it in cash—and within a few months Arabella also bought the two vacant properties on either side, to give her new house some elbow room.
Four West Fifty-fourth Street was Arabella’s first “important” house—not for its architecture, which was undistinguished, but for what she herself did to its interior. Her renovation was total. She gutted the house to its brick and brownstone skin, knocked out a wall, and built a new wing. Partitions were moved, rooms rearranged, and then the entire four-story structure was fitted out with rosewood paneling, brocade-covered walls, a great curving staircase at the center lit by a rooftop skylight of stained glass. An Otis passenger elevator was also installed, one of the first in New York in a private residence. On the main floor was a long grand salon, which opened into a smaller Moorish salon. Above was the formal dining room, serviced by a dumbwaiter from the basement kitchens. On an upper floor Arabella installed a complete Turkish bath. Indications of the success of her renovation and redecoration are the fact that 4 West Fifty-fourth Street later became the New York home of John D. Rockefeller, and the Rockefellers were so pleased with what Arabella had done that they hardly changed a detail; and that several of Arabella’s rooms, through a gift from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., are now on display at the Museum of the City of New York and the Brooklyn Museum. (The site of the house is now the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.)
The renovation cost her about $1,000,000.
Where did Arabella’s taste come from? She had had, as far as is known, no more than a rudimentary education. Certainly, she had the advice of a number of expert craftsmen, cabinetmakers and decorators, but the overall scheme for the house was her own. Her taste for splendor may, of course, have been inspired by the rococo opulence of Johnny Worsham’s faro parlor, but even that does not entirely explain it. The fact was that Arabella read, and studied, architectural and decorating guides, and learned from these sources what she wanted. The Moorish salon, for example, would be considered a fanciful folly today, but Washington Irving had come back from southern Spain with his tales of the Alhambra, and society folk all over the country were building Moorish salons. They were very much the fashion, and Arabella knew it.
Arabella liked to keep up with things. The newspapers and magazines of the day were filled with illustrations and descriptions of the castles of the rich. Even Marion Devereux, a generation later, filled her yards of print with word pictures of what people wore and how their homes were fitted out, with hardly a mention of what any of them had to say. In post-Civil War America, décor and appearance were all; form took precedence over substance. Arabella Yarrington Worsham, though she might, au fond, be only a rich man’s mistress, wanted to do things right.
Collis Huntington, meanwhile, cared little for art and culture. Visiting the Paris Exposition, and asked what he thought of the Eiffel Tower, which was then the pride of Europe, he replied, “American engineers could build one a mile high if they wanted to. Besides, what’s the use of it?” In time, Arabella would redo Mr. Huntington’s tastes as well.
Arabella’s house had only one drawback. She could not open it up for grand entertainments. She was still a back-street wife. In those days, to be a hostess one had to have a host. But that would also change, in time.
Ensconced in the renovated splendor of her new house, Mrs. Arabella Worsham appeared to live a very quiet life. If anything immoral was going on at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street, her immediate neighbors had no inkling, and if Mr. Huntington came and went he managed his visits so discreetly that there appears never to have been a breath of gossip, or scandal, about either of the lovers during the years of Arabella’s residence there. “No man, for any considerable period,” wrote Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, “can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” But Arabella managed it. New Yorkers have always treasured privacy, and her neighbors awarded Arabella hers. They accepted her as what she seemed to be: a beautiful, and respectable, young widow in her mid-twenties with a well-dressed, well-behaved little boy. Whenever she went out, she was properly escorted and chaperoned by her mother.
Arabella had always made the most of her looks. Her unusual height, for example, demanded an erect and careful carriage that was almost regal, almost imperious. (Later, a disgruntled art dealer would say of her that she “allows herself manners which even the Empress of Germany cannot afford.”) To this add her distinctive speaking voice, which was soft, low-pitched, and musical, with pleasant traces of her native Virginia. She dressed quietly, with taste and care, always mindful that she was officially a “widow.” She presented herself as a cultivated mixture of southern belle and New York great lady. No actress could have performed the part more convincingly, and, all the while, Arabella was grooming herself for a much larger role.
This was finally offered to her when Elizabeth Stoddard Huntington died of cancer in October 1883. It had been a long and painful illness and, though both Huntington and Arabella were no doubt impatient for the end to come, the last months of Mrs. Huntington’s life must have been difficult for them both. Naturally, now, a “decent interval” had to be observed, and some nine months later, on July 12, 1884, Mrs. Arabella Duvall Yarrington Worsham became the second Mrs. Collis Potter Huntington. His sixty-third birthday was a few months off. She was, more or less, thirty-four. As befitted the circumstances, it was a smallish ceremony, with just Arabella’s mother, her son, and a few close friends in attendance, and the next morning the newspapers put their formal imprimatur on her utter respectability. The New York Tribune reported that Arabella’s “family and that of Mr. Huntington [are] on terms of the closest intimacy. She is wealthy in her own right. Her husband died several years ago.” (This last sentence was, by now, correct; Johnny Worsham had died in Richmond six years earlier.)
The months between Elizabeth Huntington’s death and the wedding had been busy ones for both bride- and groom-to-be, involved as they were with complicated real-estate transactions, at which Arabella was becoming quite skillful. First, she arranged to sell the lot just east of her Fifty-fourth Street house to William H. Vanderbilt, and negotiations to sell the house itself to John D. Rockefeller had already begun. Next, Arabella bought a 113-acre estate at Throgs Neck in Westchester County, overlooking Long Island Sound. Called The Homestead, it had been built by Frederick C. Havemeyer. Huntington, meanwhile, had deeded his late wife’s Park Avenue house to Arabella, and she immediately began tearing apart and refurbishing both places. The idea was that Throgs Neck would be the newlyweds’ summer place in the country, and 65 Park Avenue would be their winter address in town.
But it was becoming clear that what Arabella really wanted was a mansion on Fifth Avenue. In a trade-off deal with the Rockefellers, Arabella accepted nine lots on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street in return for 4 West Fifty-fourth. She also bought eight more lots at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-first Street. Finally, perhaps because both Eighty-first and Seventy-second streets were still considered too far uptown to be really fashionable, and because—led by the Vanderbilts—the great Fifth Avenue palaces of the era were being built in the Fifties, Arabella settled for a six-lot parcel on Fifth and Fifty-seventh, right in the heart of things. This was the property William H. Vanderbilt had originally wanted for his mansion but had been unable to obtain. Now it was Arabella’s. It would be the first house she would build from scratch.
The kindest thing that could be said of the Huntingtons’ new Fifth Avenue mansion was that it was very large. When it was finally completed in 1893, it was also very ugly. To be fair, Arabella had not been able to get the architect she wanted. She had wanted the great Richard Morris Hunt, who, among other notable residences, had designed the Vanderbilt mansion. But Hunt was not immediately available, and Arabella was impatient, and so she settled for an inferior talent, George Browne Post. Post spent months submitting sketches and schematics trying to satisfy her. First she wanted the house bigger, then she wanted it smaller. Rooms were added, then removed, then replaced in different positions. Again to be fair, Arabella had never built an entire house before and probably didn’t know what she wanted—and wouldn’t know until she saw it. At one point she tried to call in Richard Morris Hunt, who reluctantly decided that she was too far committed to Mr. Post’s basic scheme for him to successfully, and ethically, take it over.
The result was a huge, three-story (plus basement and attics) pile of rough-cut Indiana limestone that was a strange cross between Romanesque, French Château, and German Renaissance. In fact, the house was of no particular style or period. Great mansard roofs were dotted with dormers, cupolas, and finials. There was a squat square tower perched at one corner, and there were a great many massive chimneys. Some windows were arched, and some were rectangular. Balustrades, pediments and crenels abounded. The building was wrapped round with a threatening-looking fence of wrought-iron spears. At one end of the house a protuberance that looked rather like a view of Chartres Cathedral extended from the rear. Everything about the house was ponderous, heavy, and it seemed to possess enough weight to send it plunging through the sidewalks.
Oddest of all, the house seemed to have an expression. The huge central entrance archway looked like a gaping mouth ringed with jagged, fanglike teeth. Two arched windows just above looked like flared nostrils, and the big paired windows above and to either side of the nostrils looked like enormous, baleful eyes. Viewed from the street, the house seemed literally to be snarling at the spectator. Its whole appearance was dark, grim, and forbidding. Worst, perhaps, it didn’t look like a house at all. It looked like a public building. One might have entered it expecting to find a post office or a library or a police station, a strictly run girls’ school or a correctional institution. How much Arabella had to do with the final design, and how much of it was Post’s doing, is no longer known, since the house underwent so many revisions right up to, during, and after the groundbreaking. Nor is it clear how much Collis Huntington may have had to say about his Fifth Avenue monstrosity. But in The Big Four, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis pointed out that in his railroading days Huntington was responsible for putting up railroad stations in “hundreds of towns and cities in the West,” and that these were “notable examples of unmitigated ugliness.” In New York, wags could not resist pointing out that Mr. Huntington’s new house looked like a railroad station run amok.
Rumors have long circulated that Collis Huntington refused to spend a night in his new house, that he was superstitious about it and believed that men only built new houses to die in them. Probably, however, he stayed in the Fifth Avenue house when he was in New York, but it was true that, while the house was being built, he had acquired two other residences which he preferred. He had bought the “Italian palace” Colton mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco for Arabella—which, with her customary thoroughness, she began completely remodeling and redecorating—and he had also bought a mountain retreat called Pine Knot Lodge on Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks. But the Fifth Avenue house seems to have perfectly satisfied Arabella at the time, and she immediately began filling its rooms with furniture and art. Four top-flight muralists of the day—Elihu Vedder, Edwin H. Blashfield, H. Siddons Mowbray, and Francis M. Lathrop—were commissioned to decorate her walls (Arabella’s murals are now at Yale), and by 1884 she had even succeeded in interesting her rough-hewn husband in art.
Whether she actually educated her husband’s artistic tastes is unclear, but he certainly became infected with the excitement of the art marketplace. Auction fever, that emotional rush that speeds the pulse beat of the heavy bidder, consumed him, and the cloak-and-dagger aspects of the world of big-time auctions—the undercover scouts and agents, the secret bids, the use of private signals and code names—appealed to his gambler’s instinct almost as much as adding imaginary mountains to California’s map had done. Soon he and Arabella had an important collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings. At the then-record $1,250,000 art sale of the Mary Jane Morgan collection in 1886, there were gasps when Jean Georges Vibert’s The Missionary’s Story went under the hammer for the then-heart-stopping price of $25,500. The buyer, it later turned out, was Collis P. Huntington. The Vibert, though not regarded as a masterpiece today, became Mr. Huntington’s personal favorite—probably not for its merit, but for the fact that he had paid the biggest price at what had been the country’s biggest sale.
Arabella also got her husband to attend the opera. At the opera, he confessed, he didn’t always understand the “stories,” but he soon learned to enjoy the music.
Arabella had also come under the familiar influence, if not spell, of that wiliest of art dealers, Joseph Duveen. Rich women did not have to work hard to meet Mr. Duveen. He sniffed them out like a bear in search of a honey tree. He magically appeared in their grand salons, witty and urbane and charming in his beautifully English-tailored suits, with his cultivated Continental accent and his carefully self-advertised taste and expertise, and showered them with blandishments, cajolery, and flattery. Arabella Huntington, he would point out, was unquestionably one of the most beautiful women in the world, a woman of undoubted culture and elegance and exquisite refinement. Surely she deserved to live surrounded by equally beautiful and important things, such as paintings by Hals, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Vermeer, Reynolds, Lawrence, Romney, and Corot, all of which Duveen could supply. But she must be quick, because Mrs. Vanderbilt, or Mrs. Belmont, or Mrs. Astor had her eye on them as well. The technique worked with Arabella as it had worked with most of the others. It worked even better, because Arabella had more to spend than most of the others and an adoring husband who supported her every whim.
In the summer of 1900, vacationing at his Pine Knot Lodge in the Adirondacks, Collis P. Huntington died, two months shy of his seventy-ninth birthday. If Arabella was in fact born in 1850, she was then fifty; whatever her age, she was, according to the hyperbole of the press, “the richest woman in the world.” It may even have been true, because Arabella’s share of her husband’s fortune was $150,000,000. But there was more. A third of Huntington’s estate was left to his favorite nephew, Henry Edwards Huntington, son of the brother with whom Collis got his start in an upstate dry-goods store. Henry E. Huntington had become the closest thing to a real son Collis Huntington ever had, and for years he had managed his uncle’s railroad interests in California. (Collis’s “stepson” Archer Worsham seems never to have filled the bill, since he was mainly interested in poetry and Hispanic studies, and Collis left him out of his will entirely.) Only a million dollars was left to Collis’s “daughter,” Clara, who was actually his niece. Clara had displeased Huntington in 1889 by marrying Prince François-Edmond-Joseph-Gabriel Vit de und von Hatzfeldt Wildenbourg, son of the German ambassador to Great Britain, and thereby attaining the longest name in the Social Register. Arabella had approved of the match. After all, it was nice to have European nobility in the family. But Collis had grumbled because, in return for taking Clara’s hand in marriage, the Prince had demanded, and got, $5,000,000.
To complicate the Huntington family tree somewhat further, nephew Henry E. Huntington had married Clara’s sister, Mary Alice Prentice. Though the two were technically first cousins, it was pointed out at the time that it was all perfectly legal because they were not “blood cousins,” both Clara and Mary Alice being the daughters of Collis Huntington’s first wife’s sister. In the meantime, Arabella’s son, Archer Worsham, had become transmogrified into Archer Huntington in the same informal way that Clara Prentice had become Clara Huntington.
When the details of Collis Huntington’s will were read, Mary Alice Prentice Huntington was unhappy—not about her husband’s generous share of the estate, but about her sister’s relatively tiny one. This issue would soon create unpleasantness in the Henry Huntington household.
Now, with a vast fortune at her command, Arabella embarked on an enormous art-buying spree. With Duveen solicitously at her elbow, she toured the salons, ateliers, galleries, castles, and auctions of Europe, purchasing every Old Master in sight. Her buying reached a frenzied zenith one afternoon in Paris in 1907 when she and Duveen snapped up, for who knew how many millions, most of the Rudolph Kann Collection, one of the greatest in Europe. A year later she bought her own palace in Paris—the fabled Hôtel de Hirsch at 2 rue de l’Elysée, the most splendid hôtel particulier in the city and the former residence of Baron Maurice de Hirsch de Gereuth, the famous Jewish financier and philanthropist who established the Baron de Hirsch Fund. Again, because the French press was not meticulous about reporting prices, who knew how many millions of francs this mansion cost her? As was her wont, she immediately gutted the place, renovated it, redecorated it, and filled it with paintings, furniture, and Beauvais tapestried walls, all furnished by the helpful Mr. Duveen. This acquisition gave Arabella five houses: Paris, Fifth Avenue, Throgs Neck, the Adirondacks, and San Francisco.
While all this was going on, the American press seemed at a loss to comprehend Arabella’s activities. The New York World reported that “her tastes are quiet and her mode of living has been rather reserved.” But the American Register noted that, while waiting for the work on the Hôtel de Hirsch to be completed, Arabella was staying at the Hotel Bristol, “where she always occupies the royal suite,” and that, to the many amenities of her Paris house, she was adding fourteen additional bathrooms. Quiet and reserved indeed!
In the meantime there were numerous trips back and forth to the United States, and, in 1905, there were disturbing hints that someone, somehow, had uncovered part of the riddle of Arabella’s ambiguous, secret past. The sensational libel trial of Colonel William D’Alton Mann had just got under way in New York, and Arabella’s name was about to get dragged into it. Colonel Mann published the widely read weekly Town Topics, which was the National Enquirer of its day, but with a difference. If one of Colonel Mann’s staff of scouts got whiff of a wind of scandal involving some prominent man or woman, he would go to the individual, tell him what he knew, and suggest that the story need not be printed, provided the individual purchased some advertising space in Town Topics. Or, if that person did not happen to own a product which could be advertised, a little “loan” would do. Mann’s extortion and blackmail racket had been working successfully for years, and Mann had become very rich.
Now he was about to be brought to earth and put out of business, thanks, in part, to the high-mindedness of a quiet New York woman named Mrs. Emily Post, who, not many years later, would spring to prominence as America’s arbiter of etiquette. Mrs. Post’s husband, it seemed, had committed a “dalliance,” Colonel Mann’s reporters had learned of it, and Mr. Post had been invited to make the customary contribution. The dollar amount suggested was small. It usually was with the Colonel, at least the first time around. Once Mann had found a willing blackmail subject, he invariably came back for more. Confronted with this situation, Post manfully decided to consult his wife, even though this meant confessing the affair. Emily Post immediately told her husband to go to the police, which he did, and the blackmailer was arrested in a public toilet—the venue chosen for the transaction—as Post handed over the money. Later, the Posts quietly divorced.
Now, as the trial progressed, it turned out that among the people who had “lent” the Colonel money was Mrs. Collis P. Huntington. Her loans amounted to at least $15,000, and she was to be subpoenaed to testify about the matter. Naturally, the last thing Arabella wanted was to give court testimony on how and why she had been blackmailed. Alerted by her lawyer, she escaped from her Throgs Neck house moments ahead of the process server and boarded a ship for Europe.
In 1910, suddenly and without explanation, not even two years after she had finished remodeling it and redecorating, she announced her intention to sell the Hôtel de Hirsch. She no longer wanted to live in Paris, and was returning to the United States. Though she had refused to dignify them with comment, rumors about her had been circulating for some time to the effect that she had a new American romantic interest.
She and her husband’s nephew, Henry, had long been quite close. They were the same age, and Henry Huntington of course had known her from the days when she was young and beautiful. In the months following Collis Huntington’s death, he had helped her with the details of the enormous estate, and he had smoothly overseen for the widow the lucrative sale of the Huntington railroad interests to E. H. Harriman. In the meantime, the arguments between Henry and Mary Alice Huntington over what she considered the mean treatment of her sister Clara had become bitter and rancorous. By 1902 the couple had become estranged, and in 1906 Henry gave Mary Alice an uncontested divorce.
Rumors circulated that Arabella Duval Yarrington Worsham Huntington was about to become Arabella Duval Yarrington Worsham Huntington Huntington. Collis Huntington had once warned his nephew in a letter: “Belle, as you know, is exceedingly particular.” Still, it was obvious to anyone who saw them together that the two were fond of each other. And a union made sense. The two principal parts of Collis’s fortune, separated by his death, would join hands again.
* One way to translate 1870s dollars into their 1980s equivalent is to multiply by ten; it was close to half a million dollars that Mrs. Yarrington pulled out of her purse.