Those Gilded Galas

an unabashed edwardian looks back fondly on three of those panoplied parties whose splendor graced the turn of the century

In All Times and Places--excepting possibly the calorie-conscious America of the moment, where the renunciation of the good life in the midst of its overwhelming abundance is a national fetish--feasting, preferably associated with appropriate pageantry, has been a hallmark of civilized conduct. Its expression has varied from the legendary feastings of Trimalchio as recorded by Petronius down to the orgiastic gastronomy of the Lord Mayor's banquets in 19th Century London. It achieved its finest flowering in the United States just before and immediately after the turn of the 20th Century, when the financial resources of the well-to-do were matched by the national affluence. How you ate was who you were, and the attendant entertainment was as often as not an index of who you would like to be. No better evidence of this circumstance can be evoked than the three parties that are the subject of this essay.

A by-product of the moneyed times of the bon ton along Fifth Avenue and on Murray Hill was the licentious revelry that was supposed to exist on both a large and private scale among the 400. Belshazzar's Feast, the Last Days of Pompeii (a favorite site for depravity in a generation that had yet to learn about Capri and Tiberius) and the events in Nero's gardens where Christian slaves furnished illumination comparable to the Welsbach gas mantle, were favored allusions from the best pulpits in Manhattan and then-fashionable Brooklyn. Colonel Albert Mann's Town Topics conveyed in asterisks the suggestion of perfumed love nests in midtown hotels and the practically universal popularity, in private dining rooms at Sherry's and Bustanoby's, of vast meat pies from whose inner economy dancing girls emerged at bachelor dinners.

At the other end of the scale, The Police Gazette delighted a pool-room clientele from Bangor to San Diego with chronicles of high-life debauches specifically illustrated with wood engravings depicting the very things Town Topics only hinted at. In its pages everyone wore full evening dress and often monocles; silk hats served as ice buckets for cooling champagne and chorus girls in flesh tights did cakewalks on tables while wearing opera hats and whirling the canes of their escorts like drum majorettes at a Dallas football game. That the socially elect with whom the Gazette populated these Byzantine hoedowns turned out on close scrutiny to be named McGlory, O'Hoolihan and Krausmeyer was of no consequence. They wore dress suits, didn't they?

Generally speaking, the moneyed aristocrats of the period were well along in years and fairly incapable of surviving a single evening's entertainment among the senators in Quo Vadis? Only a most elastic imagination was able to envision portly Mrs. William Backhouse Astor being ridden home at dawn in a wheelbarrow, or George Gould pursuing his guests at Georgian Court with champagne magnums in the manner of fire hoses. When entertainments among the elect diverged from the conventional, they were apt to be eccentric rather than of Dionysiac dimensions, as witness the widely advertised dinner party arranged at Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's Newport villa by Harry Lehr, at which a monkey was guest of honor, and the Horseback Dinner arranged by C. K. G. Billings at Sherry's, at which the guests ate in the saddle and combined at once the grotesque with the uncomfortable. To be sure, there was a testimonial at the Lotos Club in honor of Harrison Gray Fisk, editor of the Dramatic Mirror, in which all the guests were photographed with their brows encircled with wreaths of vine leaves, but their effect superposed upon pince-nez eyeglasses, shawl-collar dinner jackets and ample beards and mustaches suggested Bloomsbury rather than Petronius.

One thing many of the most innocuous entertainments had to recommend them to the attention of posterity: Most of them, especially if given at one of the town's luxury restaurants or hotels, were both elaborate and costly; and a few were of such sensationally expensive dimensions as to attract unfavorable attention in the public prints.

It was a time that saw the emergence of what later came to be known as café society, in which conservative ladies and gentlemen of impeccable character who seldom had hitherto dined in public, save on massive occasions of civic or cultural circumstance, began appearing in ever-increasing numbers at resorts favored by well-to-do playboys, champagne salesmen, expense-account business executives with out-of-town customers, playwrights, newspapermen and the upper echelons of the musical-comedy stage and the race track. Resorts came into being to accommodate the varying degrees of taste and reticence of these cosmopolites: the restaurants of the Waldorf and Fifth Avenue Hotel, Sherry's and Delmonico's for the ultraconservative; Rector's, Bustanoby's, Shanley's and Woodmanston for gilded youth, wine salesmen, professional bridge players, Texans and the associates of Diamond Jim Brady.

Some of the lobster palaces boasted ballrooms; almost all had upstairs suites and private dining-rooms whose symbol became a hot bird and a cold bottle served by a graying waiter in sideburns who knocked discreetly before appearing with the Lynnhavens. It was the private dining rooms that lit up with pleasure the eyes of editors at Town Topics, The Police Gazette and the newly emergent American Weekly, in which Morrill Goddard was suggesting to the readers of the Hearst papers the enchanting vistas of wickedness available to the upper classes. At the height of its vogue, 30,000,000 weekly readers of this repository of gilded folklore believed implicitly that New York's social leaders went to bed in full evening dress, brushed their teeth in vintage champagne, married their daughters without exception to shady French counts and arrayed their poodle dogs in diamond tiaras. It was a cheerful image and one in which almost everybody took innocent pleasure.

Goddard, Hearst's Sunday editor--newly revised together with his complete staff from Joseph Pulitzer's New York World--presented, through the magazine pages of the Journal (of which the American Weekly was a component), a panorama of high life that was calculated to confuse and even terrify its accredited participants, but it delighted readers in less exalted brackets and created a climate in which reality inevitably came in some degree to approximate what had originally been fiction. As another member of the Hearst staff, Arthur Brisbane, was fond of saying: "Repetition is reputation" and life among the haut monde of Newport and Manhattan, like an impressionable actor, came in a measure to live up to its billing. Butlers came to assume absurd and awkward positions of attention like drill sergeants on parade; dinners that had until now foundered their participants with seven or eight courses and their appropriate wines, now found the benumbed aristocrats at table after four mortal hours of terrapin, canvasback, mousses and soufflés relieved by water-ice intermissions; eligible young ladies larded their most casual conversations with French illiteracies they imagined gave them elevated ton, and French maids until recently named Marie or Josephine all suddenly appeared to have been christened Fifine.

In another context, its own press 40 years later demonstrably conditioned the public and private lives of Hollywood stars who might naturally have been otherwise inclined into a kaleidoscope of sports cars, swimming-pool orgies and marital infidelities. The dedicated student of American mores not only in the lower and presumably impressionable ranks of society, but on Bellevue Avenue and Sutton Place South, will do well to study its image as presented in the popular press--an image to which it found itself, often enough, conforming, if only not to disappoint its public.

For it was publicity, whether of a decorous or irreverent order, and whether acceptable or embarrassing to its recipients, that shaped what Wilmarth Lewis has called "the nuances of snobbery, the discrimination and cultivation of which have been the major contribution of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to civilization."

On a fine May morning in 1893, President Grover Cleveland pushed an electric button and the flags of 47 nations broke out as one, to be whipped in a brisk wind off Lake Michigan. It was the start of the World's Columbian Exposition and it also launched Mrs. Potter Palmer, wife of Chicago's pioneer merchant prince and hotelkeeper on a public career (continued on page 100) Gilded Galas (continued from page 90) that was to last through a long and energetic lifetime. From then on, Mrs. Palmer was seldom out of the public prints, a circumstance well suited to her temperament. As president of the Board of Lady Managers of the Chicago fair, Mrs. Palmer would have had no considerable competition for public attention except for one other woman, separated from the millionairess by a wide gulf of both economics and social position. She was known as Little Egypt and she performed what was tactfully called a danse du ventre in the Midway to the music of a Zulu band.

All hell promptly broke out over Little Egypt. Women's clubs protested the demoralizing influence of her (by the standards of the time) practically naked performance. A later generation would have thought her dressed for skiing at Sun Valley. Anthony Comstock, a professional snouter of voluptuary attitudes who disapproved of almost everything, including men's athletic supporters, made an issue of it. Under great pressure from social purity groups, Mrs. Palmer, as the responsible official, was forced to suppress Little Egypt and her danse du ventre, but the accompanying publicity did nothing to enlarge the image of her worldliness or tolerance. On the other hand, it made Little Egypt a national celebrity. Although she would have been the first to deny it, and with gestures, Mrs. Potter Palmer might be considered personally to have pushed Little Egypt, nude except for a pair of black-lace stockings and high-heeled slippers, onto a tabletop in a private room at Sherry's restaurant in New York four years later, as the central figure of what was always afterward to be remembered as "The Awful Seeley Dinner."

Nobody who lived in New York in the Nineties is apt ever to forget it. Other explosions of high-proof folly, the Bradley-Martin Ball, James Hazen Hyde's costume fete, scores of Mamie Fish's infantile caprices, achieved widespread celebrity without qualifying adjectives. Only the Seeley Dinner will be remembered forever, with the crowning panache of the inseparable word "awful."

Readers of the papers in those days were as familiar with the names and profiles of Little Egypt and Captain "Whiskers" Chapman of the Tenderloin Squad as are modern readers with the names and faces of the actors in the latest and most erotic cause célèbre. Probably no event in the social history of New York, not even the extravagant Bradley-Martin Ball of Waldorf fame, ever achieved the dark renown of this memorable entertainment. The whirlwind of publicity and virtuous indignation that followed the exposure of unsuspected depravity in the highest circles shook the social fabric to its foundations, and such was the impression made upon the public mind by this unprecedented event that to this day it is remembered as The Awful Seeley Dinner. Unlike many other notorious social events in New York history, there were no anticipatory details to the Seeley Dinner; it exploded upon the public consciousness in all its awful glory.

Herbert Barnum Seeley, a grandson of P. T. Barnum, who had inherited a large share of the showman's $4,000,000 estate, had for some time been a figure in the ranks of the bright young men of the town. He had departed from West Point without a commission after two years and was a member of several of the best clubs, including the Larchmont Yacht Club and the Lotos. His brother, Clinton Seeley, was engaged to be married December 30, 1896, to Miss Florence Tuttle, one of Gotham's most eligible young ladies, and it was in anticipation of this happy event that Herbert Seeley undertook to give him an ushers' dinner on the night of December 19. The natural choice of restaurants at this time was Delmonico's. and it was here that the dinner was first scheduled to take place; but at the last minute the scene was shifted to Sherry's, where the party eventually took place in an upstairs suite. A pretty time the Seeleys had later, explaining exactly what had happened during its progress. The guests, of whom there were 20, were mostly from the socially elect and numbered among them the Seeley family physician --included, no doubt, as was delicately remarked later, "in case anyone was overcome with indigestion or nervous shock."

After the exposé had got well under way and the customary denunciations of high life had commenced, the Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst declared from his pulpit that "the public should know just what went on at this dinner," and so far as the press and the police were concerned, a very substantial effort was made in this direction.

What actually took place was as follows: Captain George Chapman of the Tenderloin Squad, generally known as "Old Whiskers Chapman," and famous for his eccentric practice of carrying an umbrella rather than a night stick, acting on a tip received earlier in the day and accompanied by detectives Walters and Craddall, descended, Assyrianlike, upon the festivities shortly before midnight. "I had reason to believe," the captain declared, "that there might be a display of immodest dancing at Mr. Seeley's party." As the raiding party entered Sherry's, displaying their badges in order to overcome any prejudice that might be aroused by their lack of evening attire, a doorman left his post and ran upstairs. "This to my mind was most suspicious," said Chapman.

The raiders marched boldly upstairs to the scene of activity, prepared to deal with any licentious revelry that might be in progress. They even spurned the pressing invitation extended by M. Flaurand, Sherry's genteel manager, to stop in the downstairs bar for a couple of quick ones. In their haste to discharge their duties, however, they mistook the door and burst valiantly into a dressing room reserved for the young ladies who were to sing and dance at intervals during the dinner. The screaming and uproar that ensued brought the dinner guests to the scene, and it was then that a Mr. Hamilton attempted the defenestration of Captain Chapman. "One of the gentlemen was so indignant that he was on the point of throwing the captain out the window," said Mr. Sherry later. This project, however, was thwarted, and after the mutual exchange of insults inseparable from an encounter between citizens and the gendarmerie, Captain Chapman withdrew his forces, convinced that his premature entry had rendered negligible the chances of detecting anyone engaged in immodest dancing.

This brief episode was the basis for the protracted clamor that followed, and if the Seeleys had been content to let it pass without further notice, the public would have been deprived of a great deal of edification; but they were not, and on Monday morning, Chief of Police Peter Conlin received a barrage of indignant protests over the conduct of his subordinate. The elder Seeley protested: the Seeley brothers protested; Mr. Sherry protested: Flaurand protested; Duchemin, the vaudeville agent who had staged the entertainment at dinner, protested: and the newspapers, with all the enthusiasm of crusaders, protested, denounced and inveighed against the ungentlemanly intrusion of Captain Chapman and his attendant sleuths.

Outraged virtue and the defenders of civil liberty, not to mention the opponents of the Administration, banded together to make a swift end of "Old Whiskers Chapman." Chief Conlin promised a speedy trial and the execution of justice as soon as specific complaints were filed and signed. Things had come to a pretty pass when a gentleman, and a member of the Union League at that, couldn't give a private party in a private room without the gendarmes bouncing in and waving umbrellas at him.

The forces of morality and reform also took advantage of the occasion to denounce the degeneracy of the times and declare that the purple ways of high society could end in nothing good. Pompeii, it would appear, was at this period the classic example of license and depravity, for the Reverend A. H. Lewis likened "reports we have heard of (continued on page 186) Gilded Galas (continued from page 100) a scene in this city to the most licentious periods of Pompeii," and continued to the effect that "when the police recently made a raid on Fifth Avenue, they lifted only a corner of the curtain that hides the prevalent iniquity. They gave us but a glimpse of what transpires in the highest circles." For the further moral instruction of the public, the papers carried column upon column of the more recherché details daily. The real sensation of the case was still to come to light, however.

During the trial of Captain Chapman before a police board, to which all the guests of the dinner had been summoned as witnesses, it was discovered that a dancer known as Little Egypt had been in the building during the raid, secreted in an upstairs room, and that she had performed to the satisfaction of everyone after the departure from the scene of Captain Chapman and his detectives. The exact nature of Little Egypt's entertainment has never to this day been discovered by students of Manhattan history, but that she participated in the first ballet in modern Gotham in which the Dance of the Seven Veils was enacted is the most nearly authenticated surmise.

This announcement, with its attendant descriptions of Little Egypt attired, at least at the start of her performance, in "gauzy and diaphanous apparel," convinced the purer-minded element of the community that there was a great deal of agreeably dubious detail that had not yet been brought to light. Those in charge of Captain Chapman's trial at once dedicated themselves to remedying this oversight. A theatrical agent named Phipps and a dancer, Anabelle Whitford, were promptly unearthed, or rather, made a dramatic entry of their own accord, with a fine tale to the effect that Miss Whitford had been approached and offered the sum of $20 to appear at the performance in something less than the gauzy and diaphanous garments at first affected by Little Egypt. Anabelle, it appeared, had scornfully rejected the offer and had told Poppa. "Poppa was very angry," she testified. "He swore terrible and wanted to go after Mr. Phipps," but as it was the scantiness of the offer rather than that of the costume suggested that had aroused Poppa to a pitch of moral frenzy, he had finally been calmed and prevailed upon not to molest the vaudeville agent.

An interesting side light on the reluctant Anabelle's testimony was supplied by the discovery that at some time between the dinner and the trial, she and Captain Chapman had exchanged photographs. But the captain was equal to the occasion and deposed as follows: "I saw Miss Whitford in Chief Conlin's office when he was making his investigation. I told her I was proud to know a woman who was so guarded of her honor and that I would protect a woman's honor with my life if it were necessary. She gave her photograph to me as a token of her esteem on condition that I should give her mine, a gracious act which I reciprocated some days later."

Captain Chapman's trial dragged interminably on and the Seeleys found themselves achieving an almost international prominence. It seemed that everyone in New York was called as witness.

Miss Whitford had been assured that everyone would be so far gone in wine that they wouldn't notice what she wore or didn't wear. It was testified that gentlemen had made attempts to snatch at Little Egypt's ankles as she danced on the tabletop, that gentlemen had been free of the lady's dressing room on the night in question, that Phipps had approached other dancers with proposals of an interesting nature, that Sherry had attempted to lock his doors in the faces of the raiders.

Somehow in the midst of it all, the Seeley-Tuttle nuptials were solemnly celebrated, and as disclosure upon disclosure was made, the Grand Jury handed down an indictment against Seeley, Phipps and one Theodore Rich on charges of "conspiring to induce the woman known as Little Egypt to commit the crime of indecent exposure." The trial was postponed upon various occasions and was finally lost track of in the manner of so many legal processes, but its threatened appearance could not have added to the peace of mind of the Seeley guests.

At last the charges against Captain Chapman were dismissed, but not before every shred of evidence in the case had been heard thrice over. It was really the participants in The Awful Seeley Dinner who were on trial. Captain Chapman received a vote of thanks from the National League for the Promotion of Social Purity and another from the Woman's Purity Association. A bill was introduced into the legislature to compensate him for the expense of defending himself before the trial board, and he was generally lionized by the forces of morality and uplift. As for Little Egypt, she was at once billed in an elaborate vaudeville performance at a salary in keeping with her generally admitted artistic abilities, and for years thereafter topped the bill of all houses as Little Egypt, the star of The Awful Seeley Dinner.

If anything, after the echoes of The Awful Seeley Dinner had died away, were needed to call attention to New York's by-now well-established legend of social debacle, it was the selection a few weeks later of the ballroom of the Waldorf as the setting for one of the two most celebrated balls in New York history, both of which, like that of the Duchess of Richmond on the eve of Waterloo, were a prelude to disaster and eventual exile for their principal instigators.

The Seeley Dinner took place, as has been recounted, in the closing weeks of 1896. It was the merest curtain raiser to the Bradley-Martin Ball of February 1897 which was to prove the most written about, denounced, defended and generally dismayingly successful gesture of self-publicization in the annals of Manhattan, at least until the advent of café society and Brenda Frazier more than three decades in the unforeseeable future.

It was not as though Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin, well-heeled parvenus from Troy, New York, who moved to town and perpetuated "the slow growth of an imaginary hyphen" as an adjunct to social aspiration, didn't have warning well in advance of their downfall. For weeks before the appointed night, the public prints had been filled with the details of the forthcoming extravagance "reluctantly released to the society departments of the New York dailies through the agency of Western Union messenger boys on bicycles." There were to be "five mirrors on the north side of the ballroom richly but not heavily garlanded in a curtain effect by mauve orchids and the feathery plemusa vine; garlands will be hung irregularly across the mirrors to loop onto the capitals of the columns separating the mirrors; the chandeliers on each column will be decorated with orchids and suspended from each chandelier will be a Rosalindlike pocket filled with Louis XVI roses and ferns. Roses will fall in showers over the balcony and will festoon the columns; not a space on the balcony, wall or column that will not be festooned, banked, showered with bride. American beauty and pink roses, or lilies of the valley or orchids. The profusion of mauve orchids will stream carelessly to the floor, like the untied bonnet strings of a thoughtless child." This was the merest sampling of the lyric gems that found their way to city and society desks throughout the lower city and, in large measure, were reprinted just as they came from the inspired hand of the Bradley-Martins' social secretary, who had evidently been a student of Swinburne.

Statistics vied with these impressive dithyrambs. There would be a grand total of between 5000 and 6000 orchids, each clump or cluster of which would be illuminated by a cunningly concealed electric bulb of candle power so low as not to damage the fragile blooms. The 22nd Regiment Band of 50 musicians would be one of several orchestras. Supper, to be served from 12 to 2:30 by waiters in royal livery with knee breeches and powdered wigs, would include whole roast English suckling pig with the conventional trimmings. There would be an ample buffet available until the last guest left the premises. Mrs. Bradley-Martin had thoughtfully ordered 400 two-horse carriages from O'Toole the liveryman to obviate the inconvenience to her guests of keeping their own coachmen up until all hours.

Importunate letters were arriving from out-of-towners implicitly relegated to the status of social climbers by the Bradley-Martin secretary, asking to be invited to what was obviously going to be the most stately social occasion at least since Caligula married his horse in the Roman forum. Such intrusive tactics were resented by the Bradley-Martins as unworthy of serious consideration. Inevitably, these sneak previews of beatification also drew an advance barrage of criticism and metaphorical dead cats. The country was suffering one of its recurrent depressions and, almost as voluminous as the out-of-town letters soliciting invitations were more anonymous ones threatening red revolution in the streets, social upheaval of the most menacing sort on a widespread scale that would end with the entire capitalist system in the trash bin and the Bradley-Martins looped to the nearest lampposts by their own feathery plemusa vines. More temperate voices from the pulpits and social workers suggested that the estimated $200,000 to be spent on the rout might be put to better use.

The Bradley-Martins had an answer to that one. The very ostentation they were sponsoring gave remunerative work to hundreds of dressmakers, florists and other artisans involved. It was, on close inspection, nothing but a spread-the-wealth project of almost pure benevolence. A great many seamstresses, waiters and flower growers wrote in to the newspapers championing this viewpoint and hailing the Bradley-Martins as selfless benefactors. One clergyman was so stirred by this aspect of the affair that he told his congregation in ringing tones: "The public be damned; let the Bradley-Martins spend their money as they please."

The Bradley-Martin Ball was a public controversy of a major order, pre-empting politics and international affairs from the columns of the New York newspapers, before the first fiddle sounded or the first errant forkful of terrapin Maryland landed on a boiled shirt. When the well-publicized night actually arrived, scores of police extras patrolled Fifth Avenue outside the Waldorf under the personal supervision of Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant New York City Police Commissioner. Scores of plain-dress detectives closely scrutinized the bidden guests as they arrived, in the hope of detecting a sedan chair laden with dynamite or a known anarchist disguised as Henry VIII. None turned up, and contrary to the doomsday voices of the Cassandras, the crowd that began assembling outside the hotel as early as seven o'clock, far from being ugly or threatening, was delighted with the whole occasion and cheered the appearance of especially spectacular arrivals.

Most of the guests came in closed carriages and their finery was only briefly visible as they scurried across the sidewalk under George Boldt's porte-cochere; but one participant, never identified in the papers, attired as a Sioux Indian chief in full-feathered headdress, was unable to find a carriage to accommodate his attire and arrived bolt upright and alone in the back seat of an open victoria. He rated a cheer from the onlookers and made a stately entry bowing right and left with palm upraised and saying "How!"

The only real casualty of the evening was the Metropolitan Opera on the other side of town, whose performance of Martha played to a half-empty house with only gallery seats occupied, since regular box holders and lesser luminaries, who would in the ordinary course of events have occupied the orchestra, were all footing it to the Bradley-Martins done up as Mme. Pompadour, George Washington and Ninon de Lenclos.

Whatever dead cats of envy or recrimination might be thrown afterward, the Bradley-Martin Ball did, in actual fact, attract the cream of New York society. Nobody who received an invitation wanted for a moment to miss what might be the onset of the revolution and certainly the most extravagant entertainment ever, until then, held outside a private home. Elaborate dinners were given in advance by Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Mrs. Ogden Mills, Mrs. Henry Sloane and Mrs. Livingston Ludlow, all of whom, it may be presumed, did well by their guests with the then-requisite ten courses including terrapin, canvasback and foie gras, even though, as advertised, there was to be roast English suckling pig at midnight, when they could start eating all over again.

The costumes were almost incredibly elaborate; it was a time when society women and some men started planning months ahead what they were going to wear, thus anticipating 30-odd years later the career of Mrs. S. Stanwood Mencken who every year, the morning after the annual Beaux Arts Ball, would start planning her next season's appearance.

Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont appeared attired as one of the more sartorially resplendent French queens of history; the reporter for the World never found out exactly which one. Harry Lehr, in a gorgeous Louis XV outfit shimmering with jewels borrowed for the occasion from Tiffany, dazzled all beholders. Schuyler Livingston Parsons wore the old Dutch costume of one of his own patroon ancestors. There were no fewer than three George Washingtons, each bitching the authenticity of the attire of the competition. Frederic de Peyster came as a Knight of Malta with red tights and shoes and a shirt of authentic mail surmounted by a white boat cloak. Mrs. T. J. Oakley Rhinelander was Marie Antoinette and Mrs. T. Suffern Tailer wore a Gainsborough gown "of great magnificence."

Mrs. Bradley-Martin herself went, somewhat prophetically, since she was shortly to take one-way passage for Scotland, as Mary Stuart, wearing what were variously estimated as $60,000 and $100,000 worth of diamonds. The conservative Times reported the lesser figure; the sensational and anti-Bradley-Martin World, the greater. By the time the affair was taking double-truck spreads in the Sunday supplements a few weeks later, the figure had risen to $250,000. By then the Bradley-Martins were past caring.

The World's uncharitable attitude toward the whole affair was reflected in its next day's chronicle of the fete in which its reporter described Mrs. Bradley-Martin as "a short, stout woman with cold blue eyes, a square determined face and a nose that looked as though it intended to tilt but stopped short. She wore a train 20 feet long, a crown on her brow and $100,000 worth of diamonds on her stomacher, which looked like a waistcoat. It was perfectly astonishing how Mrs. Astor managed to find a place for so many jewels; they covered her like a cuirass. She was gowned as a Venetian lady in a dark-blue velvet costume. It was laden with $200,000 worth of jewels. The supper, at which the guests behaved like children afraid of mussing their clothes, consisted largely of champagne with a few things thrown in like bouillon, truffles and duck. There was no stint in the champagne, like the usual stingy one quart to a person at most New York balls."

Everybody, even the World, admitted the superlative quality and unending quantity of the wine. It afterward proved to have been purchased the year previous by Mr. Bradley-Martin at a favorably priced sale in London and shipped across the Atlantic where it occupied the entire hold of a small freighter. The management of the Waldorf, miffed at not serving its own champagne, charged $1.50 corkage on every bottle. Since Mumm's and White Seal then sold for $3.50 at the table, the saving to the Bradley-Martins was not so much.

Revolution failed to materialize, and at an early hour Assistant Commissioner Roosevelt left the scene, assured that anarchists or other antisocial intruders who had contrived an entry to the Waldorf ballroom were by now being humanized by the Bradley-Martin roast suckling pig and champagne. Favored members of his police force, in any event, were wiping their constabulary mustaches in the hotel kitchens and finding no fault at all with the supper or its subsequent buffet.

Even in the light of the inflammatory reportage of the World and other sensational New York papers, the ball appears in retrospect to have been decorous to the point of ennui. The reverend clergy took a disparaging look at the whole affair, however, and called upon a just heaven to avenge what it widely hailed as an affront to the Almighty in person. "God pity the shivering, starving poor these days and send a cyclone of justice upon the ball of selfishness," proclaimed the occupant of a Brooklyn pulpit, impervious to the fact that the party was over with no manifestation of displeasure from heaven. The Reverend Madison Peters, in a sermon on "The Use and Misuse of Wealth," said: "Sedition is born in the lap of luxury--so fell Rome, Thebes, Babylon and Carthage." The cities of antiquity got quite a workout from other divines, with Rome the all-time favorite as a conspicuous consequence of depravity.

"The guests freely used cosmetics in making up for the ball," pondered Truth in London. "An estimate of the material so used ran to more than 500 pounds of rouge and blanc de perle, impalpable powder (a popular basic cosmetic), two and one half flour barrels, powder puffs that would make a bouquet ten feet high and six feet wide. The sermons that will be preached, the morals to be pointed, the tales to be adorned from the material here furnished would certainly fill 83 issues of the great Sunday World."

The Herald and the Times gave over most of their front pages to the ball, and a reprint of the Herald's account was, of course, cabled at James Gordon Bennett's express order to the Paris edition, where it aroused premature hopes in American exiles and unemployed European royalty that at long last the United States was about to renounce democracy and become a monarchy. "It seemed exactly like a stately court function in one of the capitals of Europe," wrote the Herald, "even to the liveried lackey who stood at the foot of Mrs. Bradley-Martin's dais and announced every guest by name, character represented and historical period in a loud tone."

Allowing for the transatlantic time lag, readers of The London Daily Mail were told over their morning kippers and tea, "Mrs. Bradley-Martin, we have every reason to believe, is dressed at this very moment in a train of black velvet lined with cerise satin, and a petticoat, if it is not indiscreet to say so, of white satin embroidered with flowers and arabesques of silver." The London Chronicle ponderously wrote: "We congratulate New York society on its triumph. It has cut out Belshazzar's feast and Wardour Street and Mme. Tussaud's and the Bank of England. There is no doubt about that." Oscar Hammerstein burlesqued it at the Olympia with a skit called "The Bradley-Radley Ball."

Confronted with the printed evidence that August Belmont appeared in a full suit of gold-inlaid steel armor from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art worth $10,000 and that Mrs. Bradley-Martin, in addition to her disputed $60,000 or $100,000 diamonds, wore a massive ruby necklace that had belonged to Marie Antoinette and was valued at $75,000, The London Chronicle asked innocently: "Were all the costumes ticketed with the price?"

Regardless of the value of the various diamond, ruby, pearl and emerald necklaces, bracelets, dog collars and stomachers worn by their guests, the final bill for the Bradley-Martins' big evening came to $369,200, with the unforeseen result that the New York City tax authorities immediately doubled the lawyer's tax assessment. In a magnificent huff at this churlish ingratitude for their benevolence, the Bradley-Martins removed themselves permanently to England and Scotland, pausing only long enough en route to the steamer to give a farewell dinner for 86 persons which cost $116.28 per plate. The World, still unreconciled, estimated that at least a dozen of the gentlemen present at this stylish Last Supper were worth more than $10,000,000, while twice that number were worth $5,000,000 and that among their ladies there were worn "enough diamond crowns to fit out all the crowned heads of Europe and have some left over for Asia and Africa."

The Bradley-Martin Ball is remembered to this day with mixed emotions by social commentators and historians, but one aspect of New York journalism that emerged as a firmly fixed precept of the profession was, in reporting the extravagances of the upper crust, invariably to quote the price of everything. Hereafter, the price of the consommé at supper, the boutonniere in the best man's lapel and the cost of cabs for the participants was a part of reporting anything even vaguely connected with the 400.

• • •

The most significant aspect, at least for social historians, of the James Hazen Hyde Ball of Tuesday, January 31, 1905, was not its voluptuousness, for it cost a mere $200,000, nor any indecorum, for its conduct was on a scale of unimpeachable propriety. What made it a bench mark in social history was the fact that it was the first gold-plated romp to be extensively covered by the modern technique of photography. And while the photographs themselves depicted no thinkable departure from the most formal conduct, they were, nevertheless, instrumental in bringing about the eventual exile of the host almost exactly as the Bradley-Martins had been forced into exile back in 1897. It was a very peculiar business, indeed. Until young Mr. Hyde took it into his head to give a ball on a theme of unabashed Francophilia, photography of these events had been conducted on a very abated scale and the candid camera of such practitioners as Jerome Zerbe, the yet unborn silver-bromide jongleur of café society, was in the unforeseen future. Hosts often had photographers in to take still pictures of the setting for their more opulent sarabands. Table settings for dinners, the floral decorations for balls and weddings were pictured as a matter of record, but not for publication in the periodical press, if only because the halftone process was as yet imperfect, and until the middle Nineties illustrated weeklies such as Leslie's and Harper's relied almost exclusively on wood engravings made by staff technicians from photographic originals.

Guests, too, at galas, especially costume routs where their attire represented great outlays of effort and money, were privately photographed, usually at their costumer's or at home before seting out for the evening. Nobody before Mr. Hyde had ever conceived of complete photographic coverage of a party by professionals retained by the host and afforded every facility for the exercise of their professional expertise. It was to have resounding repercussions.

At the age of 28 James Hazen Hyde had inherited from his energetic father, Henry Baldwin Hyde, the control and absolute direction of the affairs of the far-flung Equitable Life Assurance Company of New York. With this position of authority vested in the title of first vice-president, honoris causa, went directorates in no fewer than 46 allied or subsidiary corporations or those doing business on a considerable scale with Equitable. Hyde had an enviable estate at Bay Shore, Long Island. He also owned a private Pullman car named Bay Shore whose home railroad was the lordly Union Pacific in Omaha. An ardent partisan of the Coaching Club whose membership averaged a far more advanced age, Hyde maintained one of the best stables and some of the handsomest turnouts in Manhattan, a habit he was to follow, with necessary modifications, until his death.

At one time, it was his whim, following exalted examples in the British peerage and within the Coaching Club itself, to maintain a coaching service from the front of the Holland House, a resort of conservative fashion, to George Gould's incredible Georgian Court at Lakewood, New Jersey, a distance of 78 miles. Halfway between the terminals, at New Brunswick, Hyde purchased a wayside inn which he had redecorated with commendable restraint as an old English coaching tavern where patrons of his service could have lunch off Melton Mowbray pie, stilton cheese and Alsopp's draft lager before continuing their journey. The stockholders of Equitable, although they didn't know it at the time, picked up the tab for that one, too.

There was also, back in 1902, the dinner party Hyde had given in honor of the French ambassador to the United States. The check in the sum of $12,600 had been paid by the Equitable stockholders and nobody had said a word. It wasn't that Hyde couldn't afford these things out of his own pocket. His salary as first vice-president of a $400,000,000 corporation was a tax-free $100,000 a year, but he felt that Equitable ought to pick up the tab now and then. It was only good public relations.

A guest at one of the intimate supper parties that Hyde had given at Bay Shore remembered their exquisite details of culinary hospitality, after which "ladies donned old postilion hats or bullfighters' bonnets and blew hunting horns while everybody did the cakewalk."

Above all, Hyde's interests lay in the direction of things French: French art, French literature, French fashions, French history, food, actresses, formal society--in a word, anything and everything that was French. While other college youths of his gilded generation at Harvard sought the rowdier delights of the Folies-Bergère and Maxim's, where they could encounter such notables as the Grand Duke Cyril and James Gordon Bennett in their more relaxed moments, Hyde spent his time in art museums and among the châteaux of the Loire or in fluent conversation with old ladies in airtight salons whose memories went back to the Empress Eugénie and the coaches of the Third Napoleon dashing up the ramp to the Paris Opera. He brought home memories of these delightful excursions into golden yesterdays with which to regale intimates at supper parties that were remembered by their participants long after the last soufflé had been consumed and the last drop of Comet Year cognac inhaled from a balloon glass.

From these modest supper parties and theater parties it was no very great elevation of Hyde's sights to a grand gala deluxe that would pop the eyes of his social peers and show the world how that sort of thing should be done. The theme, of course, was to be French of a sufficiently dated period to make costumes mandatory, and an exponent of French savoir-vivre was at hand in the person of Mme. Gabrielle Rejane, a Parisian actress of mediocre talents but attractive personality who was playing in a French version of Ma Cousine at the Liberty Theater.

Hyde took thought with the management of Sherry's and the result was all that an imaginative young man and a stylish restaurateur could wish in terms of $200,000 of somebody else's money. For when the dust had settled and a New York attorney general named Charles Evans Hughes had sifted it with a fine mesh, it appeared that the stockholders of Equitable Life had been the real hosts and that Hyde was, in effect, only their impresario. This made a profound impression on the stockholders, most of whom inclined to be narrow-minded about the whole business.

The theme of Hyde's ball was, as Walter Lord had remarked, almost inevitably the Court of Louis XV, for which he had employed the fashionable architect Whitney Warren to convert Sherry's ballroom into a reasonable facsimile of a wing of the Palace of Versailles. As in the case of the fatal Bradley-Martin Ball of only a few years previous, roses were present in almost overwhelming abundance. They formed barricades around the edge of the ballroom floor. Lattices, screens, arbors, trellises, canopies, arches and blankets of roses were hung, festooned, draped and emplaced wherever a blossom could be accommodated and some where they manifestly couldn't. Again, "cunningly concealed electrical lamps" peeped coyly through the encircling forest of roses. The host's preoccupation with flowers seemed to some to be positively psychopathic. It was an aspect of the evening which didn't bother Wadley and Smythe, the florists, whose rose bill alone came to $28,500.

The guests, rising nobly to the occasion, for the most part were reluctant to let down their host or his architect and arrived in attire to match the florid opulence of the setting. Hyde, flanked by a niece whom he had hastily recruited to serve as the nominal guest of honor, wore his French beard, knee breeches with silver-buckled pumps and the handsome dark-green evening tailcoat of the Coaching Club, with the various decorations with which a grateful French government had seen fit to invest him.

Startling everybody by her prompt appearance, since her reputation for tardiness was well established, among the first to make her bow was Mamie Fish, who rode herd on a contingent of 60 dinner guests rendered docile to the point of subservience by 12 courses including quail in aspic and a bombe Moscovite eaten from the solid-gold Fish table service. They were to cat three more meals that evening. Mrs. George Gould, wearing all her diamonds and most of her pearls, but not all, since one of her minor necklaces worth a mere $150,000 was being restrung at Cartier's, impersonated Marie, Queen of France and wife of Louis XV, with a long train of green velvet lined with white satin and trimmed with gold and emeralds. The private detective whom George Gould retained to follow his wife whenever she wore more than $250,000 worth of anything, spent an uncomfortable night of it prowling the outer lobby in full evening dress amid tide rips of courtiers dressed for another era and attended by shoals of small Nubian slaves. Major Creighton Webb, an individualist if ever there was one, refused point-blank to get himself rigged out as a bogus marquis and appeared in a Spanish bullfighter's outfit left over from another masquerade. Louis XV would have had a bullfighter or two around if he was any sort of king, was the way he put it.

Most pathetic of the guests because she had gone to inestimable trouble and expense for the occasion, was Mrs. Clarence Mackay, wife of the Atlantic cable and telegraph tycoon whose mother-in-law had been Louise Hungerford who, until she had married Bonanza Mackay of Virginia City, had taken in gentlemen's sewing and mending in the mining camps of the mother lode. Now the second-generation Mrs. Mackay had made up her mind to represent Adrienne Lecouvreur, an 18th Century actress, in her starring role of Phèdre, for which Mrs. Mackay was so burdened with watered silk, cut velvet, looped and ball-fringed like Pullman portieres, stayed in whalebone and invested with various heavy properties including a gold scepter, that she was unable to move more than a few steps at a time without sinking down from exhaustion. When she was able to move at all, two small Nubians in pink-brocade court attire carried the ends of her 16-foot satin train.

The entertainment matched the elegance of Mrs. Mackay's costume, but it, too, to the frivolous-minded, might have appeared attenuated, ponderous and fatiguing. To begin with, there had been an overture danced by eight debutantes and eight reluctantly recruited college youths in Pierrot suits, who nervously performed a gavotte to the music of the Metropolitan Opera's only slightly overpowering 40-piece orchestra led by Nathan Franko. They had been followed by something more professional when the entire corps de ballet from the Metropolitan went through the complex routine of an ensemble number that may or may not have had its origins in the court of the Louis of the evening. Their professional dexterity did nothing to comfort the amateurs who had preceded them.

At midnight there arrived on schedule the pièce montée of the evening in the person of Mme. Rejane herself, carried to the middle of the dance floor in a richly upholstered and historically correct sedan chair by four stalwart footmen. After a few well-chosen words of welcome from the host, Mme. Rejane stepped onto the rose-embowered stage and took part in an innocuous bedroom farce, specially written for the occasion, in words of one syllable so that everyone might understand, called Entre Deux Portes. Some of the gentlemen, spelling it out with their lips, concluded that it meant Between Two Doors.

After this was over, a corps of trumpeters led the by-now slightly perspiring 350 guests to a lower floor, where Whitney Warren transported them to a different wing of the same Palace of Versailles for supper. Before the service of the clear turtle soup, Mme. Rejane was again called into service to recite a short poem, also specially written for the occasion in easy French, hymning the enlightened joys of Franco-American amity and, presumably, a reduction of the tariff on articles of French import such as the White Seal 1898 champagne which was served immediately after the applause had died down.

Everybody who could make it now made their stately way upstairs again, where there was dancing until three o'clock, when the staff of Sherry's had reset the tables on the lower floor and it was time for a second seating, with this difference from the custom as it then obtained on ocean liners--that the occupants were the same ladies and gentlemen who had just gotten up from the first sitting. This made the third full meal since eight o'clock the previous evening for Mamie Fish's 60 veterans, who now faced les médaillons de foie gras en timbale à la gelée de porto and Pol Roger in magnums, like participants in a retreat from some gastronomic Moscow. Now they formed a hollow square to resist the combined assault of fresh troops of pastry chefs, flying squadrons of wine stewards and artillery fire from flanking batteries of Veuve Clicquot and Mumm's Extra. Their heroism under this final attack was noted by everyone. Napoleon, it was felt, had he been there, would have handed out field marshals' batons right and left.

At length it was six o'clock and the battered troops, still in possession of their colors but showing traces of an arduous engagement, were making their adieus to their still radiant host.

"Don't you think it's time for a little breakfast?" suggested Mrs. Joseph Widener to Hyde.

"Coming up," or words to that effect and Hyde snapped his fingers for a waiting maître d'hôtel. Everybody then sat down to New England fish cakes before staggering out into the cold Fifth Avenue dawn.

Last to leave, as the waiters were sweeping out the wilted roses and discarded handkerchiefs, fans and odd gloves in the hope of finding a fugitive diamond from Mrs. Potter Palmer's tiara, were the five tired members of the Byron photographic staff. The photographs taken by the industrious Byrons between eight in the evening and six the next morning required the continuous activity of five cameramen and plate holders. The plates themselves, no fewer than 189 11 x 14 glass negatives, required an enormous outlay of physical exertion to be manhandled into a huge view camera and returned to their wooden compartmented carrying cases. As a concession to the wishes of their host and employer, the Byrons were attired in formal evening dress topped by hooded gowns vaguely suggesting the witches in Macbeth, Act I, unaccountably in tailcoats and boiled shirts.

Among the finished prints was a stately solo of Mme. Rejane leaning regally on a long ribboned cane while a servitor in full court livery with white silk stockings emptied ashtrays in the background. Hyde himself was photographed posed benignly beside the Countess de Rougemont, nee Edith Clapp. In another group were Mrs. James A. Burden, Stanford White, Mrs. Sydney Smith and James Henry "Silent" Smith--the ladies in full court turnout with powdered hair, fans and opera-length gloves; the gentlemen having settled for formal evening attire with Court of St. James black-silk knee breeches and silver-buckled pumps. There were several groups in which appeared, of all people. Edward H. Harriman, toughest railroad mogul of his time, looking embarrassed in hunting dress with knee pants and a pained expression. Harriman, incidentally, was a director of Equitable and figured largely in the lurid scenes behind closed doors that were to be the consequence of the photographs in which he figured.

For, through some connivance or theft, a number of the Byron photographs found their way into the hands of editors of Joseph Pulitzer's still-rampaging and egalitarian New York World. Pulitzer himself, a blind sybarite with extravagant personal tastes, viewed with alarm the gilded ways of high society until his son married a Vanderbilt, which brought the hitherto obstreperous World into line with practically the speed of light.

Not that the photographs reproduced by the now fairly reliable halftone process were in themselves anything incriminating. The whole business reflected rectitude to the verge of dullness, but there was considerable discussion in the accompanying letterpress of the cost of the Hyde ball. Was it, as rumored, really $200,000, and if so, just who had paid the check? Newspaper readers got the wrong impression somehow that behind the entirely decorous façade of well-mannered boredom there had been scenes of riot and abandon. It was even rumored that the corps de ballet from the Metropolitan had performed a cancan in the advancing hours of the morning. The very notion of E. H. Harriman figuring in a setting of Roman riot and proconsular debauch was hilarious to businessmen who knew him and were privately of the opinion that it had been necessary to drug him in order to assure his presence there at all.

Schism, however, raised its head inside the councils of Equitable Life itself. A dissident faction of the management there had long cast disapproving looks at Hyde's extravagant ways and especially at the publicity they garnered in the sensational press. Notoriety was the word they used and here was a radiant example of it. Inevitably, newspaper-headline writers were making puns about "High Life Insurance" and public reaction wasn't good.

A faction in the inner councils of the company, which included E. H. Harriman, inclined to a charitable view of Hyde's perfumed escapades. Insurgents, led by Judge William Cohen, after toying with various stopgap compromises, flatly demanded Hyde's ouster and a complete reorganization of the company's internal economy. If Hyde were not replaced, they said plainly, they would ask for an investigation by grand jury and New York State officials. Breaches in Equitable's security arrangements leaked details of the controversy to the World, and the schism became a full-blown public scandal, not without its overtones of comedy on a very elevated financial plane. During one of the directorial meetings behind presumably closed doors, Harriman became so incensed as to be for some moments incoherent, during which time he was able to utter only the words: "Wow, wow, wow," Judge Cohen remarked blandly: "Mr. Harriman, that is an aspect of the matter which until now has escaped my attention."

Inevitably, politicians latched onto a heaven-sent opportunity for self-advancement in the specious name of the general interest. Charles Evans Hughes, then a rising young lawyer with the highest imaginable aspirations, was retained by a legislative committee to give a thorough sifting of the evidence of interlocking interests, rebates and reciprocal financial favors among the directors. He discovered political corruption, nepotism and a scandalous laxity of general business morality in the entire fabric of Equitable and, by implication, the other giant insurance companies of the land. But by this time James Hazen Hyde was beyond caring. He had taken passage aboard La Lorraine of the French Line, denying to the last that he had any intention of living abroad; but it was nearly 40 years before he returned, and during that time he had become one of the most celebrated of all fixtures in the colony of American expatriates in Paris.

Whatever moral, if any, may be drawn from the Bradley-Martin Ball and James Hazen Hyde's fatal entertainment, it certainly is not one that paints New York society at the turn of the century as the new Babylon or another Imperial Rome far gone in carnality and voluptuary riot. The Awful Seeley Dinner had confirmed for some Americans, preconditioned to the worst and hoping not to be disappointed, the belief that the upper classes lived not only in blizzards of extravagance but on a level of personal morality and licentiousness comparable to that of Petronius' Satyricon in its franker moments. The lamb potpie laden with emergent chorus-line beauties in diaphanous attire or none at all became the ultimate symbol of enviable sensuality, and the pages of Mr. Hearst's American Weekly, under the management of Merrill Goddard, were gladdened with the image of a dress-suited playboy, often invested with monocle and opera hat for good measure, mounting a banquet table with a dripping champagne bottle in hand to pursue a nymph in the thicket of hothouse blooms that formed the centerpiece.

It was a gratifying image and sold incalculable numbers of Sunday papers, where it was a staple of bourgeois outrage as late as the 1920s, after which other rich disorders occupied its space. But neither the Bradley-Martins nor Mr. Hyde contributed to it in any appreciable degree. The participants in these revels were little more than overfed to stupefaction and, like Mrs. Clarence Mackay, overdressed into immobility.

Nor, in actual fact, were the Bradley-Martins or young Mr. Hyde "driven" into exile. Public opinion generally couldn't have cared less, and their flights must be attributed either to uncommonly thin-skinned timidity or to an entire willingness to dramatize themselves as martyrs on an altar of Strasbourg foie gras. There is evidence that both the Bradley-Martins, who had a married daughter in England, and Hyde, who had frequently and articulately yearned for the good life of France where art was truly appreciated, had contemplated permanently removing themselves from the American scene before their own poor judgment hastened their departures. The pulpit denunciations and rolling eyes of the clergy meant nothing in their lives, still less the editorial ah-has of the World and the penny press generally. The by-now well-established legend of Hyde and the Bradley-Martins being "driven into exile by public opinion" is simply part of the great body of American social mythology. All concerned made exits of varying magnificence and theatricality and took passage more willingly than, say, Napoleon embarking for Elba.

The expenses involved in the two celebrated fetes--$360,000 for the Bradley-Martin Ball and $200,000 of the Equitable stockholders' money for Hyde's guests--were indeed considerable and, translated into the dollar value of the 1960s which would multiply them by three or four times, fairly astronomical. As late as 1912, the George Jay Goulds spent the sum of $200,000, say $800,000 in today's depreciated currency, on a coming-out party for their daughter Marjory. As a comparative bench mark of extravagance, when Henry Ford II in 1939 gave a $100,000 ball at the Detroit Country Club for his daughter Charlotte, it was universally hailed as "the party of the century." Translated backward in terms of currency to the Bradley-Martin era, it would have been nothing more glamorous or remarkable than a $25,000 supper party peopled with the business associates of the host.

That hypocrisy, or at least a singular divergence between practice and preachment, was characteristic of most of the sensational newspaper publishers of the late 19th Century and opening decades of the 20th cannot be denied.

Joseph Pulitzer, whose editorialists held up horrified hands in holier-than-thou attitudes about almost all the capers of the well-to-do, including both Hyde and the Bradley-Martins, himself was given to grandiose gestures of phenomenal extravagance, such as importing the New York Symphony Orchestra in its entirety to Bar Harbor to play for guests at a private dinner party and building a yacht deliberately calculated to establish the owner on a footing of equality with Morgan's giant Corsair and Vincent Astor's Nourmahal. While the World was chiding the idle rich of Murray Hill and Fifth Avenue on the Babylonish extravagance of their entertainments, the Society Grocery at Bar Harbor in a single shipment loaded $5600 worth of out-of-season strawberries and Scotch grouse aboard the Liberty where, if Pulitzer's guests tired of gastronomy, there was also a music room and a gymnasium comparing favorably in magnitude and equipment to that at the New York Athletic Club.

A notable inhabitant of glass houses himself, James Gordon Bennett in the columns of The New York Herald once denounced Saratoga Springs as "a seraglio of the prurient aristocracy" at a time when the major part of the Herald's revenue, and his own income as a result, derived from the advertising of parlor houses that at length got it barred from the mails. Bennett's own personal reputation was such a scandal in his lifetime that he was justified in remarking: "American society largely consists of people who don't invite me to their parties."

Perhaps the most notorious of all stone-shiers among the greenhouses was William Randolph Hearst who, in the early days of his political ambitions and before it was apparent that he couldn't get himself elected dogcatcher on Bannerman's Island in the Hudson River, was a professional champion of the workingman and peepul's friend in editorial stances suggesting the barricades. His professions of egalitarianism and blood brotherhood with the working stiff continued long after he was paying $250,000 each for Cellini saltcellars and having Spanish monasteries knocked down and transported in their entirety to a California mountaintop.

In the case of Hearst, a large segment of the American public felt that the most accurate journalistic reflection of his personality was in the Sunday pages of The American Weekly, where everybody wore silk hats to bed with heiresses and brushed their teeth with a light moselle. Nor did the master of San Simeon command an altogether respectful hearing when he denounced society divorces and bon ton lechery while conducting a marathon affair with Miss Marion Davies, to whom he was demonstrably not married.

Other manifestations of palatial hospitality, as the echoes of the three parties recorded here subsided, were in the-then-unforeseen future: the half-million-dollar debutante parties of the 1920s, the dinners of A. Atwater Kent at Bar Harbor and of Mrs. E. H. Hutton at Palm Beach. But at none of them, it is safe to say, did both the guests and the uninvited public participate with such appreciative gusto as they did when the Seeleys, the Bradley-Martins and James Hazen Hyde represented knighthood in its finest flower. The years of the ortolans vanished with the ortolans themselves and a generation of men and women who knew what ortolans were for.