MRS.
ASTOR'S NEW YORK:
Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age,
by Eric Homberger
Yale University Press. 336 pages. $29.95
"At
the end there was little more than the boundless civility of a
hostess," reads Eric Homberger’s eulogy for Caroline
Webster Schermerhorn Astor, doyenne of New York society at the
last turn of the century.
In
fact, in the end there was something more akin to the last days
of Mrs. Haversham. Following her "severe nervous breakdown"
in 1906 Mrs. Astor continued to shop, "but at the instructions
of her family the goods were never delivered." She continued
to entertain, making copious arrangements right down to the menus,
the flowers, and the handwritten invitations—but these, "however
closely planned, were quietly placed aside" by her servants.
This
sort of caretaking sounds likely to have driven a disturbed person
completely around the bend, and Homberger goes on to note that
Mrs. Astor spent her afternoons "nodding to imaginary acquaintances"
in Central Park and receiving "a constant and agreeable flow
of visitors, all old friends, all in Mrs. Astor’s imagination…"
Sporadically,
though, she was clearminded enough to give interviews denouncing
the base displays that had overrun society, such as the Clewses’
"Servants’ Ball," where all the guests dressed
up like their servants (quel drole!) or Alva Belmont’s breakfast
"in honor of Consul, a chimpanzee dressed in a frock coat."
The
efforts of the old dowager and her late flunky, Ward McAllister,
to curb such exercises in conspicuous consumption and create the
society "Four Hundred," is the grand climax to Homberger’s
work, which is nothing less than an attempt to trace the evolution
of "society" across the whole span of nineteenth-century
New York. This is a hugely ambitious endeavor—a story of
wealth and family, social-climbing and snobbery; of intricate
ritual and display; of the value of things, if not so much of
people and, not least, as with everything having to do with Manhattan,
it is a story of real estate.
For
the most part, Homberger succeeds brilliantly. Just why anyone
should feel the need for an official society may be inexplicable
to the modern reader. Certainly, creating one in New York seems
a Sisyphean endeavor. This is, after all, the most polyglot city
on earth, incorrigibly democratic and dedicated to the making
of a buck, and it has been so since the beginning when one of
its most respectable citizens, the pirate William Kidd, helped
build the first Trinity Church.
"New
York was quite literally a city of nobodies," Homberger writes.
"The immigrants brought brass candlesticks and goose-down
quilts with them, along with their guttural languages and folk
traditions."
Worse
yet, they kept making money, throwing up mansions, buying family
crests, stuffing the hired help into livery. How was one to know
who the "good" people were?
This
ceaseless, upward movement was often literal, starting at the
bottom of Manhattan. "Aristocratic Neighborhoods" is
a chapter unto itself in Mrs. Astor’s New York, as might
be expected from Homberger, the author of the gorgeous and indispensable
Historical Atlas of New York. His narrative becomes an almost
comical one, the rich desperately trying to stay one step ahead
of the brawling, booming, noisome city of commerce as it slithers
up the island after them like a gigantic snake, constantly shedding
its skin and remaking itself. Mrs. Astor herself started life,
in 1830, amongst the already trembling manses of the Bowling Green;
by the time she was a young lady the family lived on Bond Street,
and married life took her to Lafayette Place, then 34th Street,
then it was up to Fifth and 84th for her last, mad days.
It
happened so quickly that, for all of our conservationists and
preservationists, we barely know what we have lost. How many New
Yorkers have even heard, say, of St. John’s Park, a development
financed by the grasping vestrymen of Kidd’s old church?
It 1807 it was an empty lot; by 1830 it was among the most fashionable
neighborhoods in the city, and a model for Gramercy Park; by1866
it had been largely demolished for a railroad freight depot. It
rests now beneath the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, our own
Atlantis, buried under countless layers of steel and concrete,
asphalt and brick.
Building
mansions wasn’t enough to keep the rabble out; neither was
money. What was left? Well, there were manners, and ritual, and
there were things, above all things. Homberger takes us through
a Borgesian labyrinth of houses and furniture and clothing, and
the relentlessly pedestrian paintings the elite favored. He provides
fascinating disgressions on how the purchase of everything from
opera boxes to church pews could be used as a status symbol.
He
tries as well to put a human face on all this acquisition, giving
us amusing or poignant vignettes of various social climbers or
arbiters. There is a pair of country sisters, down from Connecticut,
trying to pick up some city ways; Melville’s striving parents,
their upper-class aspirations coming to rack and ruin; those marvelous
society toadies, McAllister and Isaac Brown, the immense, meddling
sexton of prestigious Grace Church, known always to his masters
simply as "Brown." Other case histories become a little
wearying, particularly when Homberger tries to show us just how
interconnected the world he is dealing with could be. Hence: "John
Duer, who lived at 20 Bond Street in the 1830s, was the son of
Lady Kitty and Colonel William Duer and was a brother of the president
of Columbia College. He successfully defended Alexander Slidell
Mackenzie in the Somers cas in the 1840s (one of the central figures
in the trial was Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort, a nephew of Maria
Melvill)…" One takes his point, but after awhile such
passages simply run together.
In
the end, when all else failed, they tried dancing. Mrs. Astor
and McAllister made the most vigorous effort yet to define society,
through the Patriarchs’ balls, restricted to just 400 invitations.
The dance itself was a social weapon, as Homberger shows, recounting
how it became more and more complex throughout the century, until
balls in Mrs. Astor’s heyday featured incredibly intricate
versions of the quadrille; massive, highly disciplined group efforts
that required skilled leaders and which, not coincidentally, served
as microcosms of just how a proper aristocracy was supposed to
be run.
Even
this failed. Homberger reveals that Mrs. Astor herself ended up
entertaining, at one event or another, some 800-1,000 people.
The whole idea of a rigorously formalized society would come apart
altogether shortly after her death, and why not?
There
was, after all, something inherently absurd about a society whose
main pillars were the Astors and the Vanderbilts, only a generation
or two removed from a coarse German fur trapper and a Dutch ferryman.
The aristocracy they had made was generally anti-Semitic, and
racist as a matter of course; it frowned upon taking much interest
in much of anything, and encouraged its young women to cultivate
"an air of hauteur and rudeness". Mrs. Astor herself
seemed barely able to stand up under it. Homberger reports that
in her later years she stayed at the grand balls at her own man
sion only long enough to speak a few words to each guest, retiring
thereafter to her bedroom for the rest of the evening. Perhaps
it all just collapsed under its own weight.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novel Paradise Alley, about
the
Civil War draft riots, to be published this fall by HarperCollins.
©
Copyright The
New York Observer 2002
