The Astors by Virginia Cowles

Author:Virginia Cowles [Cowles, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-07-26T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six – The First English Astors

William Waldorf Astor did not make a public statement when the cousin he disliked went down in the Titanic. He had been living in London for over twenty years and on the morning that the news broke spent his day in the usual way, barricaded behind the heavy doors of his wonderfully ornate office on Victoria Embankment.

William Waldorf was forty-two-years-old in 1890 when his father died and he stepped into his shoes as America’s richest man. He was rumoured to have inherited $300,000,000 but more conservative estimates put the figure at $175,000,000 and reckoned that even on this accounting his annual income from Manhattan rents could not be a penny less than $6,000,000 a year. A big burly fellow with brilliant blue eyes and a sweeping moustache, he seemed custom-built to revel in life – yet his looks belied his morose, shy and almost pathologically sensitive nature. Indeed he seemed devoid of all the usual Astor characteristics for he hated business and loved the arts. He was widely read and a connoisseur of beauty ranging from sculpture to women. He gave generously to charity and spent prodigious sums on restoring the wonderful old houses that he bought. He had the best chef and the best cellar in England.

Even his faults had nothing Astoresque about them but seemed to be strictly his own. He was cantankerous in a way that none of his forebears had been. Abnormally quick to take offence, he frequently imagined slights where none had been intended. He was no mean opponent, for his most impressive talent was to phrase his replies in words absolutely bound to infuriate. No doubt this came from hours of silent brooding over how to get even. When he had taken his wife and three children to live in England after his battle with Aunt Caroline in 1891, he had announced, with a throwaway line well-calculated to incense the whole United States: ‘America is not a fit place for a gentleman to live.’

Later, he made things worse by elaborating in a voice of sweet reasonableness: ‘America is good enough for any man who has to make a livelihood, though why travelled people of independent means should remain there more than a week is not readily to be comprehended.’ In the 1890s Europe was a paradise for rich men, abounding in unspoilt scenery, beautiful houses, fascinating company. The fact that William Waldorf had hit upon an essential truth seemed to upset the Americans more than the basest lie. The uproar which followed only shows how great the power of self-deception can be, how great the rivalry of the new world for the old. As Mrs Trollope had pointed out fifty years before, Americans revered money; now they were humiliated to think that their richest man, whose name was a household word, had abandoned them.

However, William Waldorf not only had a streak of perverseness but liked to tease. And on 12 July 1892 every paper in New York, except

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