Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt by Arthur T. Vanderbilt

Author:Arthur T. Vanderbilt [Vanderbilt, Arthur T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New York, Nonfiction, Family & Relationships, 19th Century
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1989-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

2.

Even after his marriage, Mrs. Astor continued to fawn over Harry Lehr. “Kind motherly Mrs. Astor,” Bessie noted, “would smile her approval: ‘So nice to see young people so much in love. I am so glad to see dear Harry with such a charming wife.’” “47 And Alva Vanderbilt was very fond of him. Both ladies asked Harry to help them select their clothes, for which he had a special knack. “I went to Wetzel’s,” Harry wrote in his secret diary one day when he bought a new suit, “and had my clothes fitted on. I did the very best I could to hide how it bored me. Oh, if only I could wear ladies’ clothes,” he drooled in his diary, “all silks and dainty petticoats and laces, how I should love to choose them. I love shopping even for my wife.”48

“How could anyone take me seriously, dear lady?” he would ask Mrs. Astor or Alva Vanderbilt. “I’m only your fun-maker, your jester.”49 Never were there two more kindred spirits than Harry Lehr and his best friend and fellow jester, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish.

Mrs. Fish had married well. Her husband, the president of the Illinois Central Railroad, was a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. Yet she was an unlikely candidate to be one of high society’s leaders. She could barely read or write. By the standards of the Gilded Age, her husband’s fortune of just “a few million,’50 as she described it, was little more than what Ward McAllister would call “respectable poverty.” She was heavyset, of stern visage, with piercing black eyes and high-arched eyebrows; some were unkind enough to say that like her friend Harry Lehr, she sometimes pretended she was a woman. But from this corseted grande dame of aristocratic bearing came a constant stream of chatter, punctuated by her hoarse macawlike laugh and bursts of caustic comments, which in their directness and unexpectedness were the delight of a bored society.

“Can I get you something for your throat, my dear?” Stuyvesant Fish asked his wife, who was in the midst of a coughing fit.

“Yes,” she sputtered, “you can get me that diamond and pearl necklace I saw today at Tiffany’s!”51

Mrs. Fish was as much a part of the frivolous society that migrated between Fifth Avenue in New York City and Bellevue Avenue in Newport as anyone. Yet she liked nothing better than to poke fun at the superficialities and pretensions of her world.

She delighted in the stinginess of some of the wealthiest society matrons. Once she dropped in unannounced at lunchtime at the home of one society leader. “We had a slab of nondescript cold meat,” she later complained to her social secretary, “and fried potatoes and tea. Of course all this would be served with great style by a butler and two footmen in bright liveries. It’s a shame. I should have told her I was coming so the poor woman could have had a square meal.”

Later in the afternoon, the lady took Mrs. Fish into her drawing room and summoned her servants to bring in the tea.

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