America's Secret Aristocracy (33 page)

Then, finally, there is the little Zodiac club of New York, the most secret of them all. Aside from its once-yearly nod to spouses, women are never included at its gatherings, nor have outside guests ever been invited. With only twelve members, a member must die or otherwise be placed
hors de combat
before a new member can be taken. As a result, only about fifty men have belonged since J. P. Morgan started it more than a hundred years ago.

“Part of the fun of belonging to The Zodiac,” says John Jay Iselin, one of the club's newer members,
*
“is that nobody else knows about us and, because nobody else much
cares, they can't call us ‘exclusive.' We're just a bunch of friends who like to get together and enjoy each other's company.”

And to enjoy the company of good genes.

*
Membership is supposed to be a closely guarded secret, but who belongs can be ascertained by consulting the
Social Register
.

*
An opening slot for Iselin appeared upon the death of James Bryant Conant, former president of Harvard, later U.S. high commissioner for West Germany, and still later American ambassador to West Germany.

19

Old Guard Versus New

In New York, where money has become the main municipal product and preoccupation, members of the old-line families have responded to the often voracious social onslaughts of new wealth by collectively (and politely) withdrawing into a common protective shell such as The Zodiac. Tortoiselike, they have tucked their heads inside the carapace of family blood and family name. While leading active business lives, they have, in a social sense, become like cave dwellers in the city their ancestors built. They have gone underground. After all, they all know who each other are, and they no longer feel the need to prove or promote themselves in any public way. They cannot properly be called snobbish, because a snob is defined as a person who aggressively seeks out the company—and
only
the company—of the wealthy or well known. Faced with social climbers, the Old Guard families have tended to respond with passive, and again polite, rather than active resistance. A case in point would be the Old Guard's reaction to the arrival of the first August Belmont in its midst.

John Jacob Astor was not a social climber. August Belmont was. Indeed, he may have helped invent the term in New York. He was social climbing personified and a snob
par excellence
. He had appeared suddenly in New York in 1837, with money in his pockets, to take advantage of one of the financial community's periodic panics. Buying up stocks at bargain-basement prices and then watching them rise again, he quickly succeeded in his mission. Belmont was Jewish, but that fact alone would not have amounted to a social demerit at the time. He announced himself as the new Ameri
can representative of the European banking house of Rothschild, and the Rothschilds were by then internationally respected and in several cases bore European titles. But Belmont denied his Jewishness, and somewhere during his journey from his native Germany to America his original name of Schönberg—“beautiful mountain”—had been more or less Frenchified into Belmont.

But there was something peculiar about all this, beyond the name change. The Rothschilds almost never sent a representative to open up new banking territory who was not a family member, yet they did seem to be on very close terms with Mr. Belmont. And the rumor circulated to the effect that, in Europe, whenever a male Rothschild traveled with a lady who was not his wife, the pair would traditionally register at hotels as M. et Mme. Schönberg. Thus the possibility presented itself—though it would never be proven—that August Belmont was an
illegitimate
Rothschild, an embarrassment to the family at home but trusted sufficiently to be dispatched to conduct family business on the other side of the Atlantic. This was the enigma of August Belmont: a man who looked like a German, spoke with a precise, if stilted, British accent, had a French name, and wanted to become an American aristocrat.

Belmont had not been able, as the Astors had done, to ally himself maritally with one of the Old Guard families. But he did the next best thing. He proposed to, and was accepted by, the daughter of an American war hero. She was the beautiful—if, by some accounts, dull-witted—Caroline Slidell Perry, the daughter of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, distinguished officer in the Mexican War and the man credited with having opened Japan to the West. Her uncle was another naval commander, Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Lake Erie. The Belmonts were married grandly in the Episcopal Church.

But from that point onward August Belmont began doing everything on almost
too
grand a scale, which left New Yorkers more aghast than impressed. He and his new wife established themselves in a new house on lower Fifth Avenue that was bigger and more elaborate than anything the Astors had ever owned. It was the first house in New York to have, among other things, its own ballroom, a room set aside solely for the annual Belmont ball. As Edith Wharton commented later, in her novel
The Age of Innocence
, this room “was left for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year to shuttered
darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag.” The Belmonts were also the first couple in New York to have their own red carpet, to be rolled down the marble front steps and across the sidewalk, for parties, instead of renting one from a caterer along with the gilt chairs.

Everything the Belmonts did seemed larger than life, and so naturally it was talked about and written about. August Belmont may have been New York's first, and was certainly its most ardent, publicity seeker. When he imported a French chef from Paris, the news made the papers. August Belmont's art gallery was the first in the city to be lighted from a skylight in the roof, and the collection of art it housed was remarkable, including works by Madrazo, Rosa Bonheur, Meissonier, Vibert, and—truly scandalous—an assortment of voluptuous and oversize nudes by Bouguereau. Most scandalized by the last was an Old Guard New Yorker named James Lenox, who lived directly across the street from the Belmonts. Learning of Mr. Lenox's objections to the Bouguereaus, Belmont defiantly hung the largest and most explicit of the nudes just inside his front door so that it would be in full view of the Lenox front windows every time the Belmont front door was opened, which, in light of the amount of entertaining Belmont did, was often. Mr. Lenox would become almost apoplectic at the mention of the Belmont name, and according to Lucius Beebe, when Lenox was told that Belmont spent twenty thousand dollars a month on wines alone, Lenox collapsed of a heart attack and died.

The press happily chronicled the extravaganza of Belmont's high living. Two hundred people could be comfortably seated at table in the Belmont dining room, with a footman behind each chair, to dine off the Belmont gold service. Belmont had taken up the sport of kings, and the regal Belmont racing colors—scarlet and maroon—had been established. The livery of Belmont's coachmen and footmen consisted of maroon coats with scarlet piping and silver buttons embossed with the Belmont family crest (which, it was said, Belmont had himself designed after studying various royal European coats of arms), along with black satin knee breeches, white silk stockings, and patent-leather slippers with silver buckles. All his carriages were painted maroon with a scarlet stripe on the wheels. His chief steward, it was said, was required to go through five complete changes of uniform each day.

At the same time, there were some decidedly odd stories that also circulated about August Belmont. It was said that he washed, combed, and set his wife's hair, and chose all her dresses from her dressmaker. It was said that, despite his stable of Thoroughbreds, he himself could not sit a horse. It was said that he eavesdropped on his servants and blackmailed them into accepting the lowest wages in the city. Heroism had not made Commander Matthew Perry wealthy, and when Mrs. Belmont's father came to live with the Belmonts, it was said that August Belmont treated his father-in-law like a servant, giving him menial household chores to perform and sending him out on petty errands. These activities did not sound like those of the kind of gentleman August Belmont seemed to want to be.

In
The Age of Innocence
, Edith Wharton presented a thinly veiled portrait of August Belmont in the fictional character of Julius Beaufort, a man whom, as one of Mrs. Wharton's characters put it understatedly, “certain nuances” escaped. As Mrs. Wharton wrote:

The question was, who
was
Beaufort? He passed for an Englishman, was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and witty. He had come to America with letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson Mingott's English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, and his antecedents were mysterious.

Like Caroline Belmont, Julius Beaufort's wife (who “grew younger and blonder and more beautiful each year”) always appeared at the opera on the night of her annual ball “to show her superiority to all household cares.” To explain why she accepted invitations to the Beauforts' dinner parties, one of Mrs. Wharton's characters said airily, “We all have our pet common people.” But, Mrs. Wharton added, “The Beauforts were not exactly common; some people said they were even worse.”

August Belmont had gone a long way toward going too far with New York society, but he had not yet made his final, fatal step. That was yet to come. For years, the most important social event in New York had been the annual Assembly, held at Delmonico's. And, for years, invitations to the Assembly
had been rigidly based on the standards of “birth and breeding.” An invitation to the Assembly was the ultimate proof of social rank. Year after year, August Belmont had dropped broad hints to various of the all-male members of the Assembly Committee that he and his wife would like to be invited. The hints had been politely ignored.

Finally, August Belmont decided to pull out his heavy artillery. He appeared before several members of the committee and stated firmly that this year the Belmonts expected an invitation. The men replied that they were sorry, but that it was quite impossible. Belmont then allegedly told the committee members, “I think it's not only possible, it's also extremely probable. I have been investigating the accounts of you gentlemen on the Street. I can assure you that either I get an invitation to the Assembly this year, or else the day after the Assembly each of you will be a ruined man.”

The Belmonts received their invitation, but the story of the means by which it had been procured got around. The following year, the Belmonts were also prominent guests at the Assembly. They were particularly prominent because nearly everyone else who had been invited stayed home. The Assembly was never held again.

Thus did the Old Guard deal with climbers, not by battling them but simply by withdrawing from the arena. Of course the result would be that the climbers had the arena to themselves. But the Old Guard would never view this as weakness on their part, or as a signal of abdication or defeat. On the contrary, they saw it as a kind of victory of principles over sheer power. Was there any other gentlemanly or ladylike way to deal with social ruffians?

Margaret Trevor Pardee grew up next door to August Belmont's son, August Belmont, Jr. Her father's big house took up half the block on Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street, and the Belmont house stood on the other half. “Mother told us that of course we were to be civil to the Belmonts,” she says, “but we were not to get involved with them.” The tiny nonagenarian with twinkly blue eyes and auburn hair (“I give it a little help from a bottle”) recalls a turn-of-the-century New York girlhood and upbringing quite different from that of her neighbors. “Goodness, I couldn't tell you how many servants Mother had as opposed to the Belmonts,” she says. “They were hard to count, because we children were not
permitted in the kitchen. This was not for a snobby reason. It was because we were told that we would be underfoot and in the way while the kitchen staff had important work to do. Of course, when Mother was out, we'd sometimes sneak in. But we didn't count because we were taught that it wasn't nice to talk about how many servants one had. It would be like boasting, and it was bad manners to boast.”

The strictures of Margaret Trevor's girlhood read a bit as though they were taken from a Renaissance manual for the training of a princess: You are to rule your kingdom, but to be served you must also know how to serve. “Everybody we knew was taught the same thing,” she says today. “We were taught never to ask a servant to do something you wouldn't be perfectly willing and able to do yourself. You might never have to scrub a toilet, but it was important that you know how to do it. You might never have to change a tire on an automobile, but that didn't mean you weren't taught to do it properly. My children were taught the same things, and now their children are teaching
their
children.

“Of course, a lot has changed. Mother started her day early, with her breakfast brought to her on a tray in bed. While she ate, she and the cook went over the day's menus together. Then she read and answered her mail, and paid the bills that had come in that day. Then she rose and bathed, and went out visiting or shopping. My children and grandchildren can't get that kind of service today, but I'm happy to say they still observe the rules that my mother laid down to me. Two of them were: Never leave your house until all the day's bills have been paid; and, a lady isn't a lady if her bed isn't made by noon.”

Like others in her circle, Margaret Trevor was raised by governesses and educated by private tutors until she was twelve years old. “The governesses were usually English, and
very
strict on manners. The chauffeurs were usually Scotsmen—don't ask me why—and the maids were Irish. It sounds extravagant, I know, but in those days it wasn't—it just wasn't. There was a steady supply of Irish girls who were eager to get the work, who were clean and honest and loved children, and who would work for very little—seven days a week, with an hour off on Sunday to go to mass—just to have a roof over their heads. They didn't act as though we were exploiting them—they felt we were
helping
them! In those
days, every lady had a personal maid as well. Oh, my, it all seems so long ago!