When the Astors Owned New York Read Online Free PDF Page B

lived in the finest mansions and laved in luxury. Surrounded with an indescribably pretentious air of importance, it radiated tone, command, and prestige.”
    The New York Times and other papers routinely supplied readers with guest lists, menus, and other details of Mrs. Astor’s notoriously long and dull parties. A typical midnight supper menu in her mansion on Fifth Avenue offered, among main courses served on plates of silver and gold, terrapin, fillet of beef, canvasback duck, partridge with truffles, quail, game, and foie gras in aspic. Pyramids of hothouse fruit and banks of orchids, roses, apple blossoms, and azaleas decorated her table and dining room. As many as 125 outside caterers supported a resident staff of eighteen. The Astor servants wore court livery: green plush coats, white knee breeches, black silk stockings, gold buckles, and red whipcord vests with brass buttons stamped with the coat of arms and motto that the William Astors had awarded themselves, Semper Fidelis. (In keeping with this heraldic dignity, Caroline prevailed on her husband to drop or at least mute his middle name, Backhouse, because of its demeaning associations with privies.) Wearing a black wig to cover her graying hair, Caroline received her guests standing in front of the full-length portrait (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) she had commissioned from the fashionable French academician Emile Carolus-Duran. This was her official portrait, and she discouraged the display of other images of herself. She favored royal purple in her velvets, satins, and silks and was an indispensable source of copy for the daily papers and especially for Town Topics, Colonel William A. D’Alton Mann’s weekly gossip sheet. His genius for nosing out scandal and skating along the edges of outright extortion earned him a comfortable living and a fearsome eminence. The colonel (he had won his rank in the Civil War) made it his profession either to publish or to withhold on proper payment (for accounting purposes politely carried as a “loan”) highly spiced news items of concern to members of society.
    At her last formal reception in 1905, Town Topics reported, Mrs. Astor “wore a massive tiara that seemed a burden upon her head, and she was further weighed down by an enormous dog collar of pearls with diamond pendant attachments. She also wore a celebrated Marie Antoinette stomacher of diamonds and a large diamond corsage ornament. Diamonds and pearls were pinned here and there about the bodice. She was a dozen Tiffany cases personified.” She had a court chamberlain, Harry Lehr, a butterfly who had made his social debut in Baltimore as a female impersonator and was now a commission wine salesman on the side. Lehr said his mistress looked like “a walking chandelier.” Toward the end of her life (she died in 1908) Caroline began to bend with the more liberal times and even ventured out of her palace to make a public appearance by dining at Sherry’s Restaurant on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-seventh Street. This “event,” as the gossip pages recognized it to be, caused almost as much consternation as if she had been seen tucking into the free lunch of pigs’ knuckles and hard-boiled eggs at Steve Brodie’s Bowery Saloon. She joked that she had begun to spice up her usual dinner guest list, long on bloodlines and bloated bank accounts and notably short on wit and intellect, by inviting a few “bohemians” off the street. She said she had in mind J. P. Morgan and Edith Wharton.
    Caroline was determined to be known to society, the United States postal system, and the world at large simply as “Mrs. Astor,” sole, generic, needing no forename, and tolerating no competition for that title from her nephew’s wife, who of course was also a “Mrs. Astor.” Caroline’s husband seemed uninterested in his wife’s guests and preferred to live far away from the stupefying and