The Big Spenders

In the Mid-1890s--when Charles T. Yerkes, the Chicago traction magnate, hankered for a Fifth Avenue mansion to be the peer of, if not actually to improve on, the 11 sensational châteaux of the Vanderbilt family and the equally staggering residences of such Lorenzos of the age as Collis Huntington, the California railroad baron, and Montana's acquisitive Senator William Andrews Clark--times were, for the moment, bad. Yerkes' notion of home was a $5,000,000 establishment, possibly the equivalent in cost of four and a half times as much today, housing one of the most magnificent collections of old masters yet assembled in the United States.

Worried friends pointed out that at a time when banks were collapsing on every hand and unemployment was abroad, such ostentation might contribute to unrest among the lower orders of society. Especially singled out for disapproval were a pair of magnificent bronze doors from a Venetian palace which, fronting on Fifth Avenue as they did, openly flaunted the wealth of their owner.

Yerkes gave the matter his attention. He didn't want to do anything to contribute to bad feeling between the classes and, a few days later, a friend found Yerkes beaming. As a concession to the times, he reported, he had had the offending bronze concealed under a protective coating of less-opulent-appearing metal.

"What is it?" he was asked.

"Platinum!" said Yerkes proudly.

The expenditure of large sums of money in modern times, no matter how alluring a prospect it may appear to people who regularly patronize cafeterias, has not always been the easiest thing in the world. It was even more difficult in the ancient world of Rome which, for some inscrutable reason, has always been held up as the glass of extravagance and the mold of profligacy. Dancing girls, large retinues of domestics and, of course, sumptuous conduct at table were about the only outlets available to the well-heeled Roman magnifico concerned about upward mobility in the status sweepstakes. So limited were the avenues for exploration in these fields that Nero evolved the office of arbiter of elegances at his court which, in the person of Petronius, was solely concerned with discovering new ways of spending money and doing it splendidly.

Progress--if, as is maintained by a not inconsiderable school of thought, it has accomplished nothing else--has widened the field and lengthened the avenues of potentiality for getting rid of surplus cash.

"You can get all the pictures you want for fifty thousand dollars apiece," said the late Lord Joseph Duveen, the most princely picture broker in the annals of art. "But to get pictures for a quarter of a million dollars each, that wants doing!"

The old masters in which Duveen exclusively dealt were one way of spending money with a panache of elegance. So, too, are seagoing yachts, diamond necklaces, titled sons-in-law, boxes at the Metropolitan Opera, dresses by Givenchy, stylish Park Avenue addresses, A-deck suites on the Queen Elizabeth, a multiplicity of city and suburban residences, custom-built Bentleys, gold plumbing and other deluxe domestic appointments, English butlers, debutante parties and the ownership of newspapers and racing stables--all of them useful agencies for lightening the individual financial burden.

There are still private residences where only male domestics appear in the front of (continued on page 272)Big Spenders(continued from page 197) the house. Rolls-Royce stock models are available everywhere in showrooms for $25,000. The most casual art robberies in Hillsborough, the elect San Francisco suburb, run to a minimal half million. De Pinna, the ready-to-wear house of feminine fashion on Fifth Avenue, recommends an assortment of $3000 dresses for the impulse buyer who hasn't the time required for more costly selection, and Van Cleef & Arpels will be glad to show you a million dollars' worth of cabochon emeralds in a velvet tray the size of a butter plate. The election to the U.S. Senate of Robert Kennedy reportedly cost $1,500,000, a considerable increase over the going price in the Seventies in Nevada and Montana.

Yet, and despite these ever-proliferating facilities for sharing the wealth--and their catalog is practically without end--possessors of truly massive fortunes such as those of the Mellons, Fords and Rockefellers have found personal expenditures to be of no avail in stemming the tidal wave of their incomes and have been forced to seek refuge in charities, family foundations and other benevolences to take money off their hands.

In light of these melancholy revelations, it may be instructive if not actually profitable to review a few of the devices for personal gratification evoked by a generation of grandees too proud to seek cowardly sanctuary in good works and whose collective imagination transcended mere family foundations for the disposal of truly towering amounts of scratch.

The business of being a magnifico got under way in the United States in the high-rolling times that immediately followed the close of the Civil War. Enormous fortunes were being built from the opening and development of the West and from the industrial processes that had been given wartime impetus from the railroads which, from then until the turn of the century, were the principal preoccupation of the American people. Politics were more corrupt than they have ever been since. Moral standards were on a par with politics. Tastes among men and women of means were flamboyant and there were few inhibitions to their gratification. The Reconstruction period has enjoyed the conspicuous disfavor of posterity to a degree probably unparalleled by any other single period in history, unless possibly it was the reign of Nero, with which it was sometimes compared. The historical bibliography of the last half of the 19th Century bristles with the literature of specific disapproval: The Tragic Years, The Dreadful Decade, The Lords of Creation, A Certain Rich Man and the like. But those who lived at the time thought it was simply wonderful.

Perhaps symbolic of the careless attitude toward money in the years immediately after Appomattox was that of New York's most elegant gambler, a Lorenzo of the green eyeshades named John Morrissey. Morrissey's sumptuously upholstered gaming rooms on 24th Street opposite the Fifth Avenue Hotel annoyed his fastidious neighbors, who claimed he lowered the moral tone of the place and who glared their disapproval at Mrs. Morrissey, a blameless lady, when she attended opera at the Academy of Music. On a strictly to-hell-with-you basis, Morrissey forthwith ran for Congress and got himself elected by a liberal majority. Just to show it was no trick at all, he had himself re-elected by an even greater plurality and, to celebrate his vindication at the polls, ordered from Lemaire of Paris a pair of opera glasses for his wife. They set something of a record--being framed in a lyrelike arrangement of diamonds and sapphires that cost $75,000; through them Mrs. Morrissey was happy to glare right back at her social detractors with the most expensive imaginable disdain.

New York newspaper readers of the 1920s and early 1930s, as long as the celebrated Beaux Arts Ball lasted as the most spectacular charity function of the Gotham season, were from year to year kept abreast of the progress, in the direction of the next Beaux Arts Ball, of an otherwise little-publicized gentlewoman named Mrs. S. Stanwood Menken. From time immemorial, Mrs. Menken had been the floral centerpiece around which the Beaux Arts revolved. Her appearance climaxed its inevitable midnight pageant, and what she was to wear was the central theme of the publicity that surrounded the event.

Mrs. Menken's costumes for this annual event were for many years confected for her by the Brooks Costuming Company. Popular legend maintained that each year, the morning after the Beaux Arts Ball, Brooks and Mrs. Menken started working on what she would wear 364 nights from then. Throughout the ensuing months such newspaper columnists as Nancy Randolph, Helen Worden and Cholly Knickerbocker, when other inspiration lagged, reported on the progress of the creation under construction. Invariably, the official publicity releases for the Beaux Arts committee placed the cost of Mrs. Menken's one-night appearance at $25,000. The figure varied little from year to year, and her eventual appearance in feathers, furs, sequins, aigrettes, electric lights, court trains, peacock feathers, flounces, fans and diamonds did little to discredit the publicity. As long as the Beaux Arts lasted, first at the Astor Hotel and later at the uptown Waldorf, Mrs. Menken's $25,000 moment was institutional in the New York social calendar.

Thirty years after the Beaux Arts passed into history, Arthur Menken of Santa Barbara, California, was at pains to discount the reported costliness of his mother's fancy-dress attire.

"She never paid anything like the fortunes the gowns were supposed to cost," he wrote. "These sums were the dream of the press agents for the ball and the hotels where they were held. She wore and paid for nothing more costly than Florenz Ziegfeld bought for top show-girls like Irene Marcellus. Mother may have spent $10,000 on the theory that the publicity would help the Beaux Arts, which, together with the Alliance Française, was her favorite charity. The publicity probably cost my father, who was a hard-working lawyer, some of his conservative clients."

Nevertheless, the legend of Mrs. Menken is well established in the folklore of an older New York.

"I'll never forget the year she appeared in an outfit that resembled the feathers of a peacock in full fan formation," wrote Eve Brown many years afterward, "and then, at the height of the pageant which was held on a huge stage in the Astor ballroom, she pressed a button and her entire person promptly burst into blazing glory like a Times Square electric sign. The result was beyond Ziegfeld's wildest dreams."

The idea of lighting up like a Times Square electric sign might not seem completely irresistible to Mrs. Gloria Guinness, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney or any of a later generation of New York and London hostesses notable for the opulence of their personal attire, but the basic reality of expensive radiance is still valid. It is virtually impossible for a woman to spend really important money for clothes and not get some sort of return on her investment.

Being a well-dressed woman has always been a preoccupation. Being a best-dressed woman is a career. Most of the women who annually make the lists of the internationally best-dressed are known for little else. Clothes are the essence of their being, a way of life and a professional attitude. A secondary aspect of making the best-dressed lists may be that of a status symbol for husbands, one that is so well recognized that it has a bidding price, although there is no record of a transaction being consummated. Eleanor Lambert, who annually compiles the accepted list of the ten best-dressed women in the United States, has declined offers as high as $50,000 to include the name of an aspirant, which puts at least a tentative value on the nomination, or perhaps a point from which to start bidding.

Sometimes it turns out that the simplest pleasures are the most expensive of all. Witness Paul D. Cravath's personalized brook. Many a countryman living in Maine, Vermont or Pennsylvania, where small brooks are commonplace, has built his home astride a modest stream for the pleasure of living near running water. Cravath, an eminent New York corporation lawyer of the 1920s who added social prestige to his professional réclame, built himself a $300,000 country place on the North Shore of Long Island, only to find, after it was completed, that he had neglected a detail. He wanted a nice lively brook running through his living room.

"What kind of a brook do you want?" inquired the Cravath architect when summoned to resolve the crisis. "One that mutters, babbles, murmurs or purls? The last one costs more than the others."

"I'll take all four," said Cravath, and got them. The bill was another $75,000.

Oversight also figured in the construction of Mrs. Richard Cadwalader's Savarona, the largest private yacht in the world. Savarona, built at Kiel, was 408 feet long--half as long as the Queen Mary--and included in its decorative economy half a mile of gold-plated plumbing and a house organ two stories tall. It cost $5,000,000. When it came time for Mrs. Cadwalader to accept delivery, it appeared that through some oversight there had been no elevators included in its design. That a Philadelphia Main Line Cadwalader should be forced to walk between decks was unthinkable.

There was a hitch, however, when it appeared that installing elevators in a seagoing vessel was somewhat more complicated than in a grounded home. There were structural considerations, stresses and strains. In short, the project was ill-advised. No matter: Mrs. Cadwalader wanted elevators, and back went Savarona to the shipyards at Kiel. When delivered at long last, it had elevators, and the total bill was $6,000,000 instead of $5,000,000.

Obviously almost illimitable vistas are open to what Henry Sell, himself a debonair magnifico in a minor key, calls expensive cheerfulness in the fields of real estate and fine art. The late Andrew Mellon, while Secretary of the Treasury, purchased in a single lot a cool $21,000,000 worth of paintings from the Russian government's inexhaustible supply at The Hermitage in Leningrad.

When Addison Mizner built at Palm Beach the pied-à-terre known as El Mirasol for E. T. Stotesbury, the Philadelphia partner in Drexel and Company and New York partner in Morgan & Co., a premises that topped by a liberal margin the conventional or basic $1,000,000, he was so forgetful of moneyed matters that he neglected to send Stotesbury a bill. Stotesbury had to look him up and ask for an accounting. Even when submitting the accounts for the main structure of El Mirasol, Mizner contrived to forget to charge for a 40-car garage that had been included at the last minute.

The Palm Beach hideaway of oilman Joshua Cosden called Playa Riente--built by Mizner at a cost of $1,800,000--boasted a $500,000 carpet in the currency of 1923, which might well be figured at three times as much today. Mar-a-lago, the Palm Beach cottage of Mrs. Edward F. Hutton, included as the merest detail of its decor a marble-and-gold dining table costing $1,000,000 but which inconvenienced its owner by requiring a fixed number of guests, just 36, and being unavailable to either expansion or diminution. One of the plumbing fixtures of the Long Island residence of Mrs. Clarence Mackay, whose husband had at one time owned Postal Telegraph, was a sunken bathtub carved from a single block of rare off-yellow Carrara marble at a cost of $25,000.

In keeping with the liberal philosophy of the Palm Beach Twenties, there remains today as a museum owned by the state of Florida across from Key Biscayne the whim of an heir to the Deering harvester fortune who undertook to build Villa Vizcaya out of what had until then been a mangrove swamp. This palatial caprice was forwarded without regard to expense by Burrill Hoffman, a Beaux Arts graduate from Paris who created gardens filled with classic statuary, balustrades, courtyards, waterways and canals overhung with trailing orchids, through which guests floated aboard electrically powered gondolas imported from Venice.

Deering had suggested at the initial stage of the project that perhaps $4,000,000 might be regarded as the target sum to cover construction, but somewhere along the way money ran out and the architect submitted a revised estimate of $6,000,000. Deering batted no eye, but said to be sure there were plenty of parrots and orchids in the swamp, and it might be a good thing to wire Venice for another hundred electric gondolas.

Obviously, the advent of the motorcar offered lush potentialities for ostentation where once the horse and his attendant vehicles and amenities had been sumptuous status symbols. No stables could have pretensions to style with fewer than 20 types of carriage available to every possible social and practical contingency. In the stables of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the names of the occupants of mahogany box stalls were inscribed in raised letters of 14-kt. gold. The O. H. P. Belmont horses who, at Newport, lived under the same roof with their owner, occupied stables designed by the celebrated architect Richard Hunt and at night were bedded down on Irish-linen sheets with the Belmont coat of arms hand-embroidered in the corners. Harnesses with solid-silver fittings were a commonplace and ladies' vanities in the more luxurious turnouts supplied by Tiffany could run to $5000.

The golden age of automobile ostentation was in the years before mass production robbed individual marques of the custom-built elegance and cachet of social distinction. The most costly Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Hispano-Suizas, Isotta-Fraschinis and Duesenbergs had price tags up to $25,000, or the equivalent of $75,000 in today's inflated currency. In a valiant attempt to outprice and upstage Rolls-Royce, Ettore Bugatti, an Italian perfectionist, designed a car to be known as La Royale, whose chassis alone sold for $30,000, so that a finished car with fittings and bodywork couldn't be had for less than $40,000. The bonnet dimension from windshield to radiator was an even seven feet, and a lifetime guarantee of free service went with each car, of which only seven were eventually outshopped.

While all other great luxury cars have fallen before the onslaughts of time and the assembly line, Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Mercedes-Benz have continued to supply an outlet for patrons who prefer a car costing upwards of $20,000.

The most expensive car ever shown in California and one which, in world comparatives, ranked as the peer of Andrew Mellon's $40,000 land yacht (built exclusively of the products of Mellon enterprises) and Sir Bernard Docker's $35,000 gold-plated Daimler was recently exhibited at the annual Pebble Beach concours d'élégance at Del Monte Lodge. It was a Phantom V Rolls-Royce owned by Martin Martyn of Beverly Hills, a son-in-law of Spyros Skouras, which had cost its owner a tidy $54,000. The body was designed by Osmond Francis Rivers, who for many years had been chief designer to the house of Hooper and architect of many cars used by the British royal family. The two-tone black-and-beige body was built by the Paris firm of Henri Chapron, one of the last great bespoke bodybuilders still in business. It required more than a year to complete and, to supervise the work, three trips to the Continent were made by Rivers, and as many from the United States by Mrs. Martyn. A working bar was furnished with drinking tools from Van Cleef & Arpels and glasses and decanters by Baccarat. There was an air-conditioned humidor for the owner's Upmann specials, radio reception controllable from each seat and a locked compartment for the owner's binoculars and parasol on race days. "It has an English soul and a French body," said Mrs. Martyn, dusting around with a small dustcloth sewn from matched minkskins.

One of the most accessible avenues to big spending, although somewhat in abeyance in a lean and calorie-conscious generation, has been that of sensational gastronomy. It began with Trimalchio, the Roman grandee who expressed surprise when his steward informed him that he had recently purchased the Island of Sicily, and lasted at least through the age of Diamond Jim Brady; American practitioners of expensive eating and drinking need take a back seat to none in the souffléed record.

Perhaps the first practitioner of 14-kt. entertaining in New York was August Belmont, the town's foremost Lorenzo of the post--Civil War era and American representative of the House of Rothschild. Belmont entertained spaciously at his palatial mansion on lower Fifth Avenue, and an index of his sumptuous and baronial manner has survived in the item that his wine bill alone was $20,000 a month, perhaps the equivalent of half a million dollars a year in today's currency. Even more notable than his cellar was the distinguished character of the wine butler, who was none other than Belmont's father-in-law, Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who had opened the ports of Japan to foreign trade. "Won't you be a good fellow and bring up another dozen of the Rapid Madeira," Belmont would address the retired hero if the footmen were otherwise engaged. "Try and not shake them on the stairs." And the good-natured old gentleman would shortly reappear, laden with bottles and happy to help empty them.

No less splendid a host was an equally resounding grandee in the person of William Collins Whitney, founder of the Whitney family fortunes and perhaps the most dazzling and cultivated spender of his time. When he was Secretary of the Navy in the Cleveland Administration, he enlivened a Cabinet meeting that was prolonged into the luncheon hour by having sent in from Harvey's, a notable Washington restaurant of the time, a light collation consisting of 200 gallons of terrapin Maryland and 80 cases of Moët et Chandon champagne. Whitney entertained on a scale that was breath-taking even in a New York well indoctrinated in Babylonian devisings of luxury; and when he achieved the ultimate zenith of a gentleman's ambition of two continents and his horse Volodyovski won the English Derby, his delight was made tangible 5000 miles away. From London he commanded that all drinks of any sort and all meal checks for the evening at the clubhouse at the Saratoga track back home should be charged to him. It was a $12,000 gesture.

Gastronomy and ostentation often went hand in hand, never more demonstrably than when the Bradley-Martin family departed New York to self-imposed exile when the city raised their taxes after the excitement caused by their now-celebrated costume ball at the Waldorf. On the eve of their departure for England, the Bradley-Martins entertained 86 guests at a dinner where, according to the New York World's contemporary account, the total wealth of the 40 gentlemen present "was more than most men can grasp." There were at least a dozen guests worth better than $10,000,000 each and twice as many who were estimated to be worth $5,000,000 each on the metaphorical hoof. "There were necklaces worth $100,000 each on several throats (Mrs. George Gould was obviously not present) and enough diamonds to fit out all the crowned heads of Europe and have some left over for Asia and Africa."

What Oscar of the Waldorf served at this "delirium of wealth and idyl of luxury and magnificence" isn't recorded, but the amount of the bill has survived. The Bradley-Martins departed on a note of assured affluence, their last supper having cost $116.28 a plate. The year was 1897, when the dollar was worth four and a half times what it is today.

Keeping up with the Joneses, gastronomically speaking, in these heroic times required aspirants for recognition in the spending sweepstakes to put their best foot forward. Perhaps maddened with jealousy of the Bradley-Martins, Randolph Guggenheimer, president of the New York Municipal Council, soon thereafter staged a rival dinner to which were bidden 40 members of the Tammany elite and their wives. It, too, was held at the Waldorf, where, although the weather outside was so cold that the Hudson River was frozen over and cab horses were being felled by scores on the icy pavements, the guests were divested of their furs amidst clustering hothouse roses in a bower where summer prevailed. Hothouse grapes depended from an overhead network of vines artistically interwoven at $10 a bunch, while song-birds trilled from golden cages. A pool in the center of the tables was banked in rare blooms from the shop of Wadley & Smythe, the Fifth Avenue florist: orchids, acacias, American Beauty roses with prodigiously long stems, and lilies. Souvenirs from Tiffany, inseparable from any consequential dinner party of the era, were elaborately jeweled matchboxes for the gentlemen and equally gem-encrusted perfume vials for the ladies.

The Waldorf chef, Xavier Keunsmeier, had gone all out for elegance. The menu began with a variety of ornate hors d'oeuvres, followed by Lynnhavens in cocktail sauce. Then came a clear turtle soup with generous infusions of sherry, and the fish course was the then-new and very fashionable lobster newburg. Purists might have caviled at three fish dishes in succession, but not the Guggenheimer guests, who went on to a columbine of chicken, mountain sheep with chestnut puree, diamonback terrapin à la Baltimore and canvasback duck roasted by a secret recipe the Waldorf had procured from the estate of Uncle Sam Ward, the prince of gastronomes. There followed, as a coda, fresh hothouse strawberries, a great triumph in 1898, bonbons, fruits and coffee. Wines of superb vintages had been served with each successive course, and the cognac was a Grande Fine with the magic comet year date of 1811.

It was no secret by the time the demitasses were filled that Guggenheimer had topped the Bradley-Martins. His dinner assayed out at $250 a plate.

But if it were possible to top William C. Whitney, Randolph Guggenheimer and the Bradley-Martins, the man to do it was Diamond Jim Brady, the railroad-equipment salesman and uncontested big eater and big spender of the lobster-palace era at the turn of the century. Singlehandedly, Brady could have kept any one of the gilded traps of Broadway in business; but he spread his patronage around, and the Waldorf, Shanley's, Rector's, Martin's, Bustanoby's, Sherry's, Delmonico's and the Gilsey House basked in the refulgence of his approval.

When it became, for a variety of reasons, prudent for Brady to close his racing stable, he summoned 50 representatives of the stage and sporting worlds to say farewell to his favorite horse, Gold Heels. Instead of imitating the widely ridiculed C. K. G. Billings "Horseback Dinner," where the guests had dined in the saddle and waiters attired as grooms had passed the champagne in saddlebags, Brady wisely had Gold Heels present at dinner in a rose-garlanded, life-size effigy so lifelike that many of the guests petted it throughout the evening.

The dinner was held on the Holland House roof and lasted from four o'clock on Sunday afternoon until nine the next morning, when some of the guests had to go to work. More than 500 bottles of Mumm's were consumed, which averaged out at close to a case per guest on the assumption that some of those present, like their host, didn't drink at all. The favors were diamond-studded stop watches for the men, with which to clock their favorites at Belmont, and diamond brooches for the ladies. The 50 trinkets contributed $60,000 toward the stunning over-all cost of dinner, which was a certified $105,000.

Most of the expenditures of money listed in this brief survey were made in the direction of tangibles and/or their incidental servicing and achievement. Few lavish outlays seem to be in the record for the gratification of abstractions, and surely none surpasses in costliness the piece of his mind that was spoken by Allan Ryan, son of Thomas Fortune Ryan. The elder Ryan's first wife, Allan Ryan's mother, died in 1917--whereupon Thomas Fortune, who was then 66, remarried only 17 days after his first wife's death. The romance did not commend itself to Allan Ryan, who said for the record that it was "one of the most disrespectful, disgraceful and indecent things I've ever heard of."

The older Ryan at once rewrote his will, cutting Allan off from his $135,000,000 estate with a bequest of nothing more than two black-pearl evening studs. Ryan's sentiments had cost something more than the rate charged by either Western Union or Postal Telegraph at the time: $10,000,000 a word for 13 words.

In taking leave of this select but gallant company of men and women (who had heedful regard for Gene Fowler's aphorism: "Money is something to be thrown off the back platform of moving trains"), let us pause to salute Montana's peerless Senator William Andrews Clark. Emerging from the wars of the copper kings many times a millionaire, Clark was wishful of the toga. It was a time when the United States Senate was the most desirable rich-man's club in the world and membership was highly prized by the gold and silver nabobs of Montana and Nevada. As a precaution at electiontime, Clark undertook to furnish free drinking whiskey for the entire population of Butte, a city of 45,000. A misplaced comma in Clark's thinking provided whiskey not for 45,000 but for a population of 450,000. It was said to be an unforgettable occasion.