America's Secret Aristocracy (42 page)

Following the Coatesville fiasco, it might be presumed that John Jay Chapman would have felt utterly defeated by life. But he was not. He went on writing letters to editors, putting out pamphlets, writing essays and poetry (paying for the publication of much of this himself), turning out his curious plays about fairy princesses, ogres, and fire-breathing dragons, translating and adapting Greek classics. He managed to meet, and be impressed by, a number of leading figures of his day, including the analyst Carl Jung and the philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. Henry James was his friend, and the novelist admired him as an American original, which indeed he was. During the 1920s, Chapman and his wife made several trips abroad, where—as an Astor and a Jay—they were welcomed at a number of stately homes, châteaux, and palazzi. In between, to be sure, there were more bouts with that undiagnosed “illness” that Chapman had always suffered from, whatever it was.

In 1933, though, when he was seventy-one, there was something at last diagnosable—cancer of the liver. He died in November of that year, with his ever-loyal Elizabeth at his side. In his final moments, his thoughts seemed to have returned to his first obsession, the violin. Half conscious, he clutched at Elizabeth's hand and said, “I want to take it away, I want to take it away!” “What,” she asked him, “the pillow?” “No,” he said, “the mute, the mute. I want to play on the open strings.”

And so, in the end, he died not defeated in his ambitions, but
by
them. He was always haunted. But that was perhaps the price one had to pay for being born a Jay. It was as though those mighty ghosts from the past that possessed Jay Farm kept rising up to say to him,
“Excel … try harder … do more … no, you STILL haven't got it right!”

John Jay Chapman's widow had already brought some peculiarly haunted characters with her into the Jay family circle, though her relatives did not display the aristocratic curse as violently as her late husband did. And Rokeby, the estate on the Hudson, had already been put to some unusual family uses before it became a sort of private sanatorium for John Jay Chapman. Elizabeth Chanler Chapman had been one of the famous “Astor orphans,” the nine great-grandchildren of John Jacob Astor who, when their parents both died young, each fell heir to roughly one million dollars. Rokeby had then been turned into a luxurious private orphanage where the children were raised by nurses and governesses and private tutors and where, since the nurses and governesses and private tutors were, in a very real sense, the employees of the children, the orphans were allowed to lay down the rules. The results of this form of upbringing were some rather unusual—to say the least—adult human beings. It is said in the Chanler family that there was nothing wrong with the blue of the Chanler blood until it became mixed with the yellow of the Astor gold. Yellow mixed with blue of course results in green, and in the case of the orphans it was not always an attractive shade of green.

John Jay Chapman's brother-in-law, William Astor Chanler, when not spouting international Jewish-Papist conspiracy theories, was fond of big-game hunting in Africa, buying and selling racehorses, and enjoying the good life in general. He had lost a leg: not in a war but, it was said, as the result of a bordello brawl. During the 1920s, he was a well-known figure at Maxim's in Paris. Entering the restaurant one day at lunchtime with a friend, he explained to the waiter that he would have to be served promptly, since he had a horse running at Longchamp that afternoon and needed to get to the track. When the service was not as speedy as he wished, African Willie, as he was known in the family, began to grumble, and presently his companion noticed him fumbling with something under the table. What emerged from below
was African Willie's artificial leg—shoe, sock, garter, and all—which he proceeded to hurl across the room at the waiter's back, shouting in French, “Now may I have your attention!”

People usually had no trouble paying attention to William Chanler's brother, John Armstrong Chanler. Known as Uncle Archie, John Armstrong Chanler always wore a pair of binoculars in restaurants to keep track of waiters. His table manners, too, were hard to ignore. He would eat a piece of fish as though playing a harmonica or he would take a dozen pancakes, douse them with melted butter and maple syrup, and then drape them behind his ears like hibiscus blooms. Uncle Archie often dressed up as Napoleon, slept wearing a saber, and carried a silver-headed cane engraved with the words “Leave Me Alone.” At length, his brothers and Stanford White, a family friend, succeeded in having Uncle Archie declared insane and placed in Bloomingdale's lunatic asylum in White Plains, New York. When Uncle Archie managed to escape from Bloomingdale's in 1900, he wrote a courtly note to the superintendent, saying, “You have always said that I believe I am the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. As a learned and sincere man, you therefore will not be surprised that I take French leave.”

A number of the Astor orphans and their descendants remained in the vicinity of Rokeby, in the village of Barrytown, New York, where they had the advantage of living in a community of townsfolk who were used to them and took the family's eccentricities in stride, while Rokeby itself—once one of the statelier Hudson River mansions—began to show the signs of benign neglect. For years the official manager of Rokeby has been Richard Chanler Aldrich, a grandnephew of Uncle Archie and a grandson of Margaret Livingston Chanler Aldrich, who fought for the establishment of the U.S. Army Nursing Corps in World War I. Ricky, as he is called, has two principal hobbies. One is collecting and restoring antique iceboats. The other is studying Serbian, Croatian, and Polish grammar, an intricate and time-consuming occupation. Ricky actually studied in Poland for a while. Ricky's other, and most legendary, characteristic is that he rarely bathes. Ricky is much loved in Barrytown, where it is often said, “Ricky would give you the shirt off his back, but who would want it?”

Then there was John Jay Chapman and Elizabeth Chanler
Chapman's son, Chanler Chapman, who was Ricky Aldrich's first cousin once removed. In Barrytown, Chanler Chapman invariably wore bib overalls and carried a slingshot. When asked to explain his slingshots, Chanler Chapman would reply, “They don't make any noise.” He had been using ball bearings for ammunition but found them too expensive. So, for four dollars, he bought six hundred pounds of gravel. Armed with his slingshot and his gravel, he enjoyed taking aim and inflicting dimples on the bodywork of various of his relatives' automobiles. Actually, the townspeople were relieved when Chanler Chapman converted to slingshots from guns. He at one point had a collection of 115 of these and liked hunting. But few of his neighbors cared or dared to go out hunting with him because of his habit of firing at anything that moved, even if it was another hunter. Fortunately, Chapman was a poor shot, and so a number of hunters' lives were spared.

For years, Chanler Chapman published the monthly
Barrytown Explorer
, a journal that most people in the village bought since it sold for only twenty-five cents an issue, cost four dollars for a year's subscription, and was full of surprises. Chapman was the
Explorer
's publisher, editor, and principal contributor, and you never knew what you might expect to read in the
Explorer
, whose slogan was “When you can't smile, quit.” Readers would be treated to Chapman's salty, if a little hard to follow, opinions such as, “You can abolish rectitude, you can abolish the laws of gravity, but don't do away with good old American bullshit.”

Each issue of the
Explorer
usually contained a sampling of Chapman's output of poetry, which always gave the place and date of each composition—e.g., “Kitchen, Sept. 13, 7:15
A
.
M
.” What might be called an advice column was another regular feature of the paper, where readers might encounter such a nugget as this: “Close the blinds at night, and lower the chances of being shot to death in bed.” Chapman was inordinately fond of W. C. Fields and ran photographs of the comedian in the
Explorer
from time to time for no particular reason other than as tributes to the star.

Chanler Chapman's first wife was the former Olivia James, a grandniece of Henry and William, and a son of this union, Robert Chapman, lives in Italy where, for a time, he lived in a cave and made kites, becoming the first troglodyte in the
Social Register
. Another son, John Jay Chapman II, graduated
from Harvard and then went to Puerto Rico, where he became a mailman. In Puerto Rico he met and married a black woman by whom he had several children. When one of his daughters was ready for boarding school and had applied to St. Paul's, which had recently gone coeducational, Chanler Chapman ticked off the list of reasons his granddaughter was bound to be accepted: “She's a she, she's a Chapman, she's a Chanler, and she's black.”

In 1972, John Jay Chapman II returned from Puerto Rico to his hometown of Barrytown and became a mailman there. Said cousin Winthrop Aldrich—known as Winty—to Chanler Chapman of his son's chosen occupation, “Isn't it remarkable—Edmund Wilson called your father the greatest letter writer in America, and now your son may be the greatest letter carrier!” Chanler Chapman was not amused. “Winty knits with his toes,” was his only comment.

In the meantime, Uncle Archie, gone from the lunatic asylum but not forgotten by the New York State police, who had a statewide warrant for his return, had gone to Philadelphia for a while, where he had himself examined by his relative by marriage William James in an effort to get himself declared sane in New York. The results of the psychological tests were mixed, and Uncle Archie then moved to an estate in Virginia called Merry Mills, changed his name to Chaloner, and continued his fight to be pronounced legally sane. In Virginia, he was just as noticeable as he had been elsewhere. Like many of his relatives, Uncle Archie loved horses, and managed to unearth an obscure Virginia statute that required automobiles to “keep a careful look ahead for horseback riders.… If requested to do so by said rider [said driver] shall lead the horse past his machine.” To enforce this law, Uncle Archie, dressed in an Inverness cape, patrolled the roads outside Merry Mills on horseback. A green umbrella was affixed to the cantle of his saddle, a horn was attached to the pommel, and a revolver was tucked in Uncle Archie's belt. After dark, he had port and starboard running lights hung from his stirrups, and what amounted to a riding light hung from the girth. To unobliging motorists, the horn was his warning. The revolver was his ultimatum.

In 1909, Uncle Archie shot and killed an intruder at Merry Mills—a man who had a long local record as a wife beater. To memorialize his feat, Uncle Archie had a silver plaque sunk in the floor of his house, marking the spot, which was
inscribed with the cryptic message “He Beat The Devil.” This was not long after Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, and the
New York Post
noted, “The latest prominent assassin has taken the precaution to have himself judged insane beforehand.” Uncle Archie, not amused, promptly sued the
Post
for libel. The lawsuit dragged on for nearly ten years, but, in the end, Uncle Archie won it, and he also won his battle to have himself declared sane in New York State.

Chanler Chapman admired his uncle Archie for his spunk, and he also admired his uncle Bob, Robert Winthrop Chanler, another of the colorful orphans. Uncle Bob ran for, and was elected, sheriff of Dutchess County. On the job, Uncle Bob wore cowboy suits and ten-gallon hats, and he hired Richard Harding Davis as his deputy. After divorcing his first wife, Uncle Bob declared that he was going to marry the most beautiful girl in the world. He went to Paris and married an opera singer named Lina Cavalieri, who, if she was not the most beautiful girl in the world, was certainly one of the most calculating. After a week of marriage, Lina left Uncle Bob to live with a lover, whereupon it turned out that Uncle Bob had signed over his entire fortune to her. Asked by the press to comment on his brother's plight, Uncle Archie—still in the midst of his sanity fight—delivered a much publicized quote: “Who's loony now?”

Uncle Bob, however, managed to get most of his money back. He returned to New York, bought three adjoining East Side brownstones, threw them together, and created what he called a House of Fantasy, filled with parrots and other tropical birds, where he held orgies. Invited to one of Uncle Bob's parties, the young actress Ethel Barrymore said, “I entered his house one evening an innocent girl, and left the next morning an old woman.”

But despite the vagaries of his various uncles, it was Chanler Chapman who was proud to lay claim to the title of the most eccentric man in America. He had embarked on this career early, at St. Paul's, where his antics quickly earned him the nickname Charlie Chaplin. At St. Paul's, among other things, he collected a $100 purse for throwing a clandestine prizefight in which he was knocked out. He would do anything on a bet—such as hurling himself into an icy pond. He charged 50 cents admission for a show in which he took a mouthful of kerosene, lit a match, held the match close to his mouth, and shot flames across the room. On the side, he dealt
in firearms, selling the same Smith & Wesson .32 over and over again. It inevitably jammed after a few rounds, and so Chapman would buy it back from the purchaser at a reduced price. Entering Harvard in 1920, at the outset of Prohibition, he quickly set himself up as a bootlegger and was soon bringing in $300 to $400 a week selling liquor to students at Groton, St. Mark's, St. Paul's, and other elite boarding schools in the area.

When his uncle Archie returned to Barrytown, Chanler Chapman was one of the first to welcome him back into the family fold and to insist that the other relatives do likewise—and to politely pretend not to notice Uncle Archie's new diet: ice cream and grass clippings. Uncle Archie had the back half of his Pierce Arrow limousine converted into a field kitchen, and he and his nephew went on many pleasant outings to New York City, where they enjoyed riding from one end of Manhattan to the other and back again, with ice cream stops along the way. Uncle Archie had passed out of his Napoleon phase and now declared that he was the reincarnation of Pompey and had plans to take over the world. He was already in control of New York City's traffic system, an important first step. Whenever his chauffeur came to a red light and stopped, Uncle Archie would furiously rub his big emerald ring for several seconds. Then he would cry, “See? It turned green!”