New York society

Because of a recent piece, a lamentation for the decline of New York society, this is a talk about what was known as New York society at the beginning of the century and at the end of it. In the year I was born, a young 21-year-old Englishman arrived in New York City, the first stopping place on his way west, where his father had sent him to take care of the family copper mine in Utah.

The father was a diplomat and he gave, as a parting gift to his son before the transatlantic trip, a pair of cufflinks, embossed on one side with the father's initials, AC, and on the other with the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs, the Russian royal family. The young man's father had received the cufflinks as a present from the Czar when he left his post as British Minister to St Petersburg.

I start the story with this grandiose flourish of titles to establish, in those pernickety days, the high social standing of the young man. He had with him one letter of introduction to a New York hostess. His father assumed that once he got out west he would be bound to mingle with some rough characters but in New York City at least, he wanted his son to be in touch with one of the few choice remaining members of old New York society. What, then, did that mean? It meant the descendants of the old Dutch, the Renslaars. the Stuyvesants, the Roosevelts, who had run the city before it was swiped by a small British naval force and changed for ever from New Amsterdam into New York.

To an upper-class Englishman, the early 1900s in New York City were a time of appalling vulgarity. Run by the robber barons and their sons, the rough, humble men who had cornered copper or steel, men like E.H. Harriman, who collected railroads as other men collected stamps and John D. Rockefeller, the young clerk from Cleveland who sniffed oil in Pennsylvania and drilled and pretty much collared all there was.

These men had coined enormous fortunes with which they built enormous mansions, feudal castles, Venetian palaces out in the country, the country being then anywhere north of 42nd Street, which was more or less where the pavement ended. So you can imagine the confidence with which the old English diplomat gave to his departing son, a letter of introduction to one of the remaining great ladies of New York society, who did not live in a great mansion, only in a modest brownstone house down on Gramercy Park, which admittedly contained over 30 rooms.

But to a class-conscious Englishman of the time she represented a rare beacon of New York society. She combined the blood of two famous lines, of Peter Stuyvesant, first governor of all the Dutch North American and Caribbean colonies, and, on the English side, back to the Revolution, the gallant Colonel Hamilton Fish, adjutant and close friend to General George Washington. She bore, in fact, the glorious name of Mrs Stuyvesant Fish.

Our young man, call him Gerald (that indeed was his name) had no sooner checked into his small hotel than he walked uptown to a little park, stopped on a corner by a capacious brownstone and rang the bell. A butler appeared, who was slightly shocked to see a young man visitor, indeed any visitor at that sweltering midsummer time of year and announced simply and crisply that I regret to say Mrs Fish is in Newport, sir. However Gerald, a determined young man, on the return from his first western adventure, called once more at 19 Gramercy Park, paid his father's compliments, was invited to tea, came to cherish the Stuyvesant Fishes and, later in life, the memory of having known the last of the old New York gentry.

Gentry, a winsome, long-gone word. Today, New York society means, as it has for 60 years or more, whoever's on top with the money. But let's not forget that in every country old money was once new money and had a devil of a time, first to rub shoulders with the old and then to replace them. The establishment of New York's Opera House is an apt and funny story.

In the 1870s the Opera House was a smallish building on 14th Street called the Academy of Music. It had 18 boxes, reserved for what had become the leaders of New York society, headed then by a Mrs Astor. The patriarch of the line, John Jacob Astor, had arrived from Germany penniless, 19, did various jobs, a baker, piano tuner, but within three years he was selling furs for the Hudson Bay Company and within 20 years had established the first American business monopoly in the fur trade. Needless to say, he was one of the wealthiest men of the century. But he'd arrived late in the 18th Century and so by the late 19th, when saloon keepers were digging up millions in silver in Nevada and an illiterate ferryboat captain, one Mr Vanderbilt, was building a vast seaside palace in Newport, Rhode Island, the Astors and their friends were just as shocked at the Morgans and Vanderbilts as the Renslaars and Roosevelts had once been at the Astors.

Anyway, came the day in the late 1870s when Mr Vanderbilt and a new rich banker, Mr J. P. Morgan, applied for membership in the Academy of Music. Vanderbilt offered $30,000 for his own box. The Astors and company were outraged by such vulgarity. They did not want riffraff invading their sacred concert hall. So Vanderbilt and Morgan decided to buy a big plot of land way up town and build their own Opera House, on a much grander scale.

The plans went forward, the Astors and their breed held a panicky board meeting and decided to forestall this grand design by offering to add 26 boxes to the Academy of Music. All is forgiven, they cried to the Morgans, the Vanderbilts. You are (deep swallow) one of us. It was too late, the Metropolitan Opera House was built, became the American La Scala and before very long, the Academy of Music having quietly folded, the Astors and the other top families who'd had those exclusive boxes, were now buying boxes in the new, splendid Opera House, built by those awful Vanderbilts and Morgans.

And who do you think has today the special, the most private box of all? Mrs Astor, an old vigorous lady of 94, a small town girl from New Hampshire who married into the Astor millions and today spends all her time disposing of those millions in imaginative ways. She stands alone, mourned the New York Times. No visible train of inheritors worthy of her grandeur. But wait, who is this lean, handsome young woman, with her hair tied back, whose picture has started to be printed in the fashion magazines? She is a small town girl from Arkansas, who has recently married a smart broker worth 300 millions. Her ambition, she says, it's to become the leader of New York society. Only a small town girl from Arkansas could think any such institution exists.

By the end of the First World War, old money and new old money kept to themselves and left the social rush to a young generation, whatever its origins. It was known as the Flapper Age or the era of wonderful nonsense, the flaming '20s, the Jazz Age. The conspicuous society figures were no longer conspicuous for wealth, but for youth, beauty, flippancy, a willingness to shock the neighbours. They were known as café society and today nobody except small town arrivals on the make think of a reigning society.

The prominent people are what Tom Wolfe called the masters of the universe. The young men in the '80s, they were all young, who made routine killings on Wall Street. They were approved or lamented as apostles of greed and the '90s are the '80s writ large. The difference is they now disturb us because the unbelievable prosperity has gone on for so long, it begins to frighten people, if not to make them ashamed. We live again, this editorial writer mused, in the heedless 1920s.

More like, I should say, the 1890s, when flashing your wealth was the fashion. In the new movie, Titanic, the rich people are perfectly awful and the poor are simple and noble, which was never our human life, except as it was routinely portrayed in the former Soviet Union, Once again we have a society where parading your gold is the thing, a society deplored only by professors, scholars, the left wing and the very old Dutch English families, who've retired into the shadows, the shadow of death of course and whom nobody now remembers.

So whatever happened to the Stuyvesant Fishes that our young 21-year-old visited in 1908 and their 37-room brownstone in Gramercy Park? Well, in the crash of '29, they lost most of what they had. They contracted their living quarters and let the rest of the house off as apartments. They couldn't afford to pick and choose and the ground floor apartment, for instance, went to a roly-poly young man, who long after the fashion had passed, affected a grey or brown bowler hat, a high-collar, four-button suit.

He was a Broadway press agent, getting the names of actors into gossip columns at $2 an item. He was smart and he was wily. He grew very fast into public relations and in 10, 15 years was representing a famous tea company, an international steel firm, a movie company and able to practise his new-found hobby of antique English furniture. He couldn't, of course, house it in his three-room apartment at 19 Gramercy Park, so he rented a warehouse.

During the Second World War he prospered more exceedingly and he thought of a much more attractive place to store his furniture. Why not 19 Gramercy Park itself? He made the suggestion to the Stuyvesant Fishes. They were delighted, he bought the whole house and now could stack the 37 rooms with 17th and early 18th-century English furniture, more glorious and exquisite than in any American museum, certainly. The day he bought 19 Gramercy Park was just 32 years since he'd landed in the United States, come through Ellis Island, a 12-year-old Russian immigrant, penniless, his mother in a shawl, both of them speechless, so far as the English language was concerned. You could say that he rescued the Stuyvesant Fishes and they were grateful to him. Not at all, he often had them to tea.

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