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

sculpture, drawing, and studies in Italian art and history.
    He wrote a novel about Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, Valentino: An Historical Romance of the Sixteenth Century in Italy, published by Scribner’s in 1885. “In Rome, on a crisp December morning in the year 1501,” it began, “Monsignor Roccamura, Governor-General and Prelate of the Castle of St. Angelo, stood at the rampart of that fortress gazing upon the eddying Tiber at his feet, upon the houses opposite, and upon the Alban hills stretching away southward in varying tints of verdure.” Four years later he followed this romantic effusion with a similarly atmospheric costume drama, Sforza, a Story of Milan, set in 1499 and also published by Scribner’s. “At the half-finished Duomo, the people streamed in and out, pausing in the cool, incensed air of the aisles to touch a finger in holy water.” Contrary to his expectations, neither book, for all their fashionable romantic lushness, made him a name as a popular novelist.
    In a discriminating, informed, and also wholesale way, using the almost limitless wealth at his disposal, William had begun what was to be a lifelong career as collector on an epic scale. Over the years he amassed books, manuscripts, autographs, Pompeian relics, coins, tapestries, armor, crossbows, halberds, classical and Renaissance statuary and sculpture, ecclesiastical vestments, Shakespeare folios. Instead of the French impressionists American millionaires were beginning to take back home with them, he bought paintings by early masters such as Holbein and Clouet. Among his miscellaneous artifacts were a seventeenth-century New England spinning wheel and a hat once worn by Napoleon, one of his heroes, along with the princes and condottieri of Renaissance Italy. He planned in time to install his collections in palaces of his own: the cream-colored chateau he was soon to put up next door to Collis Huntington’s mansion on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, the fortresslike townhouse office at Temple Place in London, Cliveden in what was then Buckinghamshire, Hever Castle in Kent, Villa Sirena in Sorrento. His largest single purchase, an entire balustrade from the Villa Borghese garden, including statues and fountain, he bought while serving as American minister in Rome and kept in storage until 1893, when he acquired the estate of Cliveden from the Duke of Westminster. In purchases ranging in size from coins to stately homes William Waldorf Astor may have been the grandest (as well as one of the most knowledgeable and scholarly) of the American grand acquisitors who gathered in the spoils of Europe in the late nineteenth century.
    When President Arthur’s term came to an end in 1885, Willy had to resign his post and return to New York. After his mother’s death in 1887 and his father’s in 1890, he assumed a senior position in the management of the Astor interests. He also resumed in earnest the old battle for social primacy with Caroline Astor, his cousin Jack’s mother. Pride, primogeniture, and custodianship of the Astor family plate dictated, he believed, that his wife, Mamie, not the imperious Caroline, should be the publicly acknowledged head of the House of Astor. He urged Mamie to compete with her rival in the grandeur, frequency, and exclusiveness of her New York and Newport entertainments. Caroline Astor, however, was a much more formidable competitor in the social arena. She dismissed her nephew William as a nuisance, “a prickly sort of person,” altogether unlike her adored and docile playboy son, John Jacob IV, and had as little to do with him as possible, which was agreeable to Willy. Caroline made a preemptive strike in her campaign for primacy by changing the wording on her calling card from “Mrs. William Astor” to “Mrs. Astor.” She thereby relegated Willy’s wife to second place and launched what amused observers on both sides of the Atlantic were