When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan Read Free Book Online

He studied the lives of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Borgias, and the Sforzas and believed he could make a name for himself as an author of historical novels and stories.
    In Italy, when he was twenty-one, he had what he called “a love adventure…with a young lady of rare charm.” “She was a figure of statuesque beauty. It was a strange and delicious emotion, an intense dreaming and anguish,” he wrote in a letter in 1904 when he was fifty-six. “I became humanized and lifted out of my youthful savagery…. But the fates were unkind and we were not allowed to marry.” In all likelihood his parents summoned him home once they learned of the potential misalliance of the Astor millions with an Italian girl who was unknown to them and probably a Roman Catholic as well. But he continued to ask himself, “Had we been allowed to marry, would life have been happiness for us both?” In “A Secret of Olympus,” a story he published in his Pall Mall Magazine in November 1904, Willy wrapped his Italian love in a mantle of operatic prose. “Her dark eyes looked golden in the noonday, like yellow catseyes, and as she smiled her teeth showed white as fresh-cut ivory. Yet across her face floated a swift tinge of tragic passion—as unfathomable as the depth that lurks between the rose leaves…. I shall never again behold her; but now Time, with a thrill akin to rich accords of music, weaves for me an exquisite witchery about those happy days.” Toward the end of Willy’s story, the girl begs him to go away with her, “where none can find us.” “Our hands had met; and how often in after years…have I asked myself, would it have been well for us if that hand-clasp had been for life.”
    Who the girl was he never said, but he remained in touch with her—his “princess”—until she died in 1909. “We walked forty years in unaltered friendship, till by a singular coincidence forty years to a day from our first meeting the eyes I had loved closed forever.” With a lasting and chastening sense of regret about this road not taken, Willy returned to America, to his prescribed duties in the Astor estate office, and to an existence bounded by the conventions of his social class. In 1878, when he was thirty, he married Mary “Mamie” Dahlgren Paul of Philadelphia, a notable beauty who was endowed with the warmth and spontaneity he had never experienced with his parents. Although it may have lacked the high passion of his Italian affair, it was nevertheless a love marriage, happy and genuinely affectionate as well as socially impeccable. Willy and Mamie were to be the parents of five children (only three of whom—Waldorf, John, and Pauline—lived to adulthood). Meanwhile, they entertained grandly and generously in the house at 4 East Thirty-third Street that had been his father’s wedding gift to them, a country house on Long Island, and a rented estate at Newport. Despite Mamie’s ingrained reticence and gentleness, Willy urged her, although without much success, to enter into open competition with his aunt Caroline for New York and Newport social primacy.
    Willy’s tastes and habits did not run to horses, yachts, cards, and similar pleasures enjoyed by members of his social class. He took a different route altogether. The summer before his marriage, as he recalled, “I startled and amused my relatives by declaring my wish to stand for election to the New York State Legislature, a body endowed with infinite power for mischief.” In his letter accepting nomination, he declared his “devotion to the principles of the Republican Party, the maintenance of law and order, equal rights for all, and honest money.” His four-year sally into politics, a departure from the customary pursuits of young men of his class, took him from assemblyman to state senator and then to an unsuccessful run for the House of