The Scarlet Sisters (10 page)

In 1851, Andrews had helped found Modern Times, a Long Island commune known as the Mother of Free Love, where marriage arrangements were “left entirely” up to the partners. “They could be married formally or otherwise, live in the same or separate houses, have their relation known or unknown.” Relationships could be dissolved informally, and it was considered impolite to question anyone about his or her private arrangements, such as “who was the husband or wife of anyone” or “who was the father of a newly-born child.”

Such radical communes were not the goal of many free lovers. Many followers were serious reformers hoping to change the contemporary institution of marriage, which they saw as “one of the pillars of the ongoing repression of women.” The sisters were among the more outspoken adherents of free love—a distinct reform movement that extolled individual freedoms, beginning with the Utopian culture of the 1820s and continuing through the battle for marriage reform in the 1870s, the fights against obscenity laws in the 1890s, and into the birth control movement of the twentieth century. The sisters’ sense of freedom included tolerance for every kind of religion, although churchgoing moralists were among the strongest anti–free love chorus, preaching that marriage was inviolate, that sex should be for procreation only, and that divorce should be forbidden.

The press castigated Andrews’s Modern Times, and he himself grew embittered when his endeavor was overrun by “fanatics and faddists,” drawn not to his philosophy but to the lure of begetting far into the night. He next attempted to create a Manhattan Utopia for intellectuals.

His brilliance was often eclipsed by convoluted ramblings, but he
remained indifferent to critics, who saw him as a “colossal,” even “diseased,” egotist and “sterile pedant.” Yet Andrews held prophetic ideas; he sought to combine original thinking and knowledge into a science he called Universology—one science of the world that “would show how all the other sciences were related to each other… Well before the days of atomic science Andrews had harkened to a subtle echo of sameness that pervaded all things.”

He envisioned a “pantarchy,” with himself as the “pantarch.” His collected philosophers would assemble in several categories—the Grand Order of Religion, Justice, and so on. The Grand Order of Domestic Revolution would work to reduce infant mortality. The only order that became a success was the Grand Order of Recreation, soon reduced to “the Club,” a carousing group who took over the upstairs of a saloon at 555 Broadway. A reporter described them as female extremists who wore baggy, ankle-length harem pants and mingled with “perfumed exquisites,” a suggestive euphemism for homosexuals. The Club was mobbed, until a vigorous police raid ended the fun in 1855.

When the sisters met Andrews in 1870 he was fifty-nine, a formidable six foot two, with a thin but penetrating voice, bulging blue eyes, and hair “addicted to disorder.” Fashionable facial foliage for men had reached topiary proportions by this period, with beards cascading into two points dribbling far down the chest or cultivated under the chin to give a furry muffler effect. (Pictures of Greeley indicate the latter.) Andrews favored the two-pronged cascading beard ending in unkempt wisps.

Just as the sisters needed Andrews to write for them, the renegade philosopher determined to make his mark through the sisters, whom he saw as invaluable celebrities able to speak his words with flair and style in lecture halls far better than he could.

The sisters were perfect blank slates for him: they were eager to stretch their minds and be known as conduits for the outer limits of freethinking. They knew that their woeful education was insufficient. One reporter archly commented, “Possibly Mr. Andrews may understand what he means to say.” Whether the sisters did remains questionable, even though
they signed as their own the articles Andrews penned for them. Still, the sisters did have definite opinions on one subject, the plight of women, and their feelings came from the heart. Andrews convinced Woodhull that he stood for free love, women’s rights, Spiritualism, and the kind of immortality she felt was her destiny. As usual, Tennie came along for the ride, herself vigorously faithful to exposing the double standard in sex, occupations, marriage, and wherever else she found it. So they gave Andrews space in the
Weekly
—far too much, critics would say.

The sisters’ grand mansion at 15 East Thirty-Eighth Street, between Madison and Fifth, was both home to a raft of Claflins and a clubhouse for “thinkers and reformers,” sustained by the sisters’ wealth. Higher than any on the block, it was chock-full of marble pillars, immense gilded mirrors, and massive gold and crystal chandeliers. Ceilings were frescoed in white, green, carmine, blue, and gold, and were painted with frolicking Cupids, seraphs, Psyches, Venuses, Bacchus, Pan, and satyrs. In one suite, purple velvet curtains hid an alcove containing a large bed, its headboard inlaid with elaborately carved ivory. Sachets, wafting perfume, were attached to each cornice. At the top of the winding staircase one of several drawing rooms opened onto a glass observatory filled with singing birds, a fountain, and exotic flowers.

The tour guide for one reporter was none other than Annie, the mother of Victoria and Tennie. The old woman who had lived in shacks with unmade beds sprawled in every room and slept in seedy hotels and at the back of creaking medicine show wagons was now a boastful connoisseur of all things majestic: “What do you think of this parlor? I don’t think there is any that can beat it… Don’t walk through the mirror, please! You think there is another room off there, but it is only the reflection… Look here,” she rattled on, “did you ever see anything more beautiful than this cupola?… it is a Capitol dome on a small scale.” Looking up from the lobby, visitors saw a stained-glass dome, surrounded by frescoed images. At night, gas jets illuminated the dome with glowing rays.

If Victoria’s spirit guide had transported them to the first home on
Great Jones Street, it was now Tennie’s turn. Annie swore that Tennie had seen this same home in a vision, and pointedly added that “one beautiful painting, Aurora,” was missing. “It cost her [Tennie] $10,000. She made Commodore Vanderbilt a present of it [a nearly nude figure] and the Commodore has hung it in his back drawing-room.” Annie quickly bragged that she herself had dined with Vanderbilt.

If the décor sounds like several interior decorators run amok, plus a brothel touch or two, one must remember that this was the era of cluttered Victorian interiors, although the mansion’s contents sound nouveau riche enough, and its occupants and guests bizarre enough, to have disgusted most upper-class Victorians.

The mansion soon glittered with an eclectic mix: financiers and senators, anarchists and abolitionists, journalists and judges, poets and politicians, including President Grant’s father, as well as Stanton, Anthony, and other “strong minded women.” Andrews compared the soirees to the “salon of Mme. Roland” during the first French Revolution—a rendezvous for “men and women of genius” afire with the ideas of “radical progress.” (Madame Roland was a slightly unfortunate analogy, as she met disastrously with a guillotine in the second phase of the Revolution.)

As was their pattern throughout life, the sisters shrewdly snared important male allies. There was little subtlety in their pursuit of handsome Whitelaw Reid, at that time the right-hand man to Greeley at the
New-York Daily Tribune
. He later became the
Tribune
publisher, U.S. ambassador to France and the Court of St. James, and the 1892 Republican vice-presidential nominee. It was not lost on the sisters that Reid’s publicity had helped make a star of abolitionist lecturer Anna Dickinson and that he was known to be one of her lovers.

Reid was a different cut from most journalists the sisters knew. With his air of confidence, good looks, and fine manners, he was in demand in New York society, which would never accept the sisters. Following a favorable
Tribune
editorial in 1870 on their Wall Street enterprise, Woodhull sent a letter to Reid indiscriminately name-dropping: the editorial,
she wrote, was “entirely satisfactory to our best friend, the Commodore.” With a directness that did not go over well, she wrote again asking Reid to “call at my apartments this evening for just a few minutes.” She noted later that he had not come. Eagerly pushing her presidential quest, Woodhull invited Reid to one of the sisters’ after-hours brokerage soirees. After that evening, Tennie sent him a suggestive letter: “I trust you rested well last night and that you find yourself refreshed there from. For myself I’m lonely today… Love without you / I sigh for one smile—which I hope to see tomorrow”—whether “a.m.” or “p.m.,” it is not clear in the original. The handwriting of both the sisters’ letters appears to be the neat penmanship of Colonel Blood, who apparently had no problem composing forward notes to men for the sisters.

One man whom the sisters did strategically corral was Congressman Benjamin Butler, one of the most powerful politicians in America, who soon became a fixture at mansion soirees. The controversial politician collected an army of friends and a battalion of enemies, and was considered one of the most picturesque and commanding people who “ever figured in American history.” Louisianans who lived under his Civil War occupation forever referred to the Civil War Yankee general as “Beast Butler.” He won undying enmity when he issued an order that “Confederate women of all social stations” who showed contempt for occupying Yankee soldiers shall be “treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” Even the British and French governments protested, to say nothing of New Orleans prostitutes, who pinned pictures of Butler on their privies. When one matron pointedly turned her back on Butler, he said loudly, “These women evidently know which end of them looks best.”

The sisters’ circle could not have been more opposite than those occupied by most of their neighbors in fashionably wealthy Murray Hill. To espouse any one of their ideas was unthinkable to Manhattan’s upper class. As Edith Wharton said of her set, they did not encourage “literary leanings”; beyond the “small and slippery pyramid” that comprised their world lay
another “inhabited by artists, musicians, and ‘people who wrote.’ ” The sisters collected the bohemians, radical writers, politicians, poets, and thinkers.

Mark Twain’s 1873 novel,
The Gilded Age
, satirized the corrupt glitter of the era, which changed the social scenery as “old money” circled the wagons while nouveau riche Civil War profiteers usurped center stage with their millions and their corrupt political might. The sisters’ ostentatious salon and companions such as salty Butler were the epitome of what established Victorians viewed as nouveau-riche repugnant—partly because they themselves were not far removed from the same sort of antecedents. The upper crust shuddered at reminders of how their own riches were acquired. Manhattan’s ultimate snob, Caroline Astor, resembled a walking chandelier when decked out in cascades of diamonds and pearls, some once owned by Marie Antoinette. She loathed newspaper reminders that the Astors were descended from German hog butchers or that the patriarch was a fur trader skilled at fleecing Native Americans. She tried hard to obliterate the usage of her husband’s middle name, Backhouse, so redolent of the term for a privy, and to ignore the fact that William Backhouse Astor Jr. carried on the grand Astor tradition as one of Manhattan’s major slumlords. Her breathtakingly rich nephew William Waldorf Astor tried to invent an ancestral knight killed in Jerusalem during the Crusades, only to be laughed at by a leading genealogist who revealed that—horror of horrors, in America’s anti-Semitic blue-blood circle—the Astors might have, in fact, been descended from Jews.

Nonetheless, Caroline Astor soldiered on, vowing that the new rich would never enter her mansion. Her tediously dull soirees were a must for the four hundred so designated as the Only Society That Counted (not, as it has been claimed, the number of them who could fit in her ballroom). Most fell into stupefied boredom after a repast of oysters, canvasback duck, terrapin, partridge with truffles, quail, and stultified conversation; wit was seldom found amid the “indescribably pretentious” trappings, which included mountains of flowers, and white-gloved footmen done up in knee breeches, plush green coats, silk stockings, and vests. It took
a member of this premier set, novelist Wharton, to satirize the wealthy Victorian American caste system that aped the courts of Europe and England’s aristocracy: valets and maids dressed them as if they were infants.

Countess Olenska, the nonconformist in Wharton’s
Age of Innocence
, set in the sisters’ era, mocked the “blind conformity… It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country… Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?”

The lowborn sisters spoke often with contempt about the uselessness of idle, rich young women whose only purpose was to make a proper marriage within “the tribe,” as Wharton termed it. Balls, dinners, and parties were all launched by a mother for this sole reason. Few in this set ventured into the suffragist or any other movement. Within the “tribe,” hypocrisy ruled: Wives looked the other way at mistresses and at their husbands’ trips to the fashionable brothels that, disarmingly, resembled their own mansions. Rippling the social waters with public scandal, rather than enduring a philandering or abusive husband, was out of the question. When Wharton’s Countess Olenska plans to divorce, her lover tells her to think of the family and the “vileness” of publicity. “It’s all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can’t make over society.”

The sisters felt the opposite: that they
could
make over society. They saw chinks in the armor of social decorum and made it their goal to attack this hypocrisy. But in order to change anything, they reasoned, women must be enfranchised. To that end, Victoria and Tennie eyed Washington, planning a suffragist raid on the all-male nation’s capital.

CHAPTER SIX