A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (17 page)

Henry Burden had invented a machine that enabled its operator to make a horseshoe from an iron bar in four seconds. It was used by the federal armies during the Civil War, and was so envied by the confederates that Jeb Stuart instructed his raiders to be on the lookout for Burden horseshoes and pick them up wherever they could.

After Henry Burden's death in 1871 dissention over control of the company broke out between his two older sons, and one of them retained Joseph H. Choate as counsel. The great lawyer came up from New York to reconnoiter the situation and wrote gloatingly to his wife in 1889: "The Burdens are famous for protracted lawsuits. The father of these men had one about spikes that lasted for twenty years. And why should this one about horseshoes come to an untimely end?"

It didn't. The Burden ironworks continued, but on a steadily declining scale as late as the 1920s. The two grandsons of Henry Burden who reconstituted his fortune but not his business, James A. Jr. and William A. M. Jr., had the glorious good looks and athletic builds to aid them in their entry through marriage into the Vanderbilt clan in the 1890s. The company was finally liquidated in 1940. Soon only an abandoned office building remained like the "vast and trunkless legs of stone" of Ozymandias's statue, as a witness to past splendor.

His wife, Adele, however, was no compliant Victorian spouse. She loved her handsome husband but she did not for a minute believe that fate had endowed her with Vanderbilt millions to pine away in dreary Troy where he insisted on living while steadily losing money of which she had no need. She would get Whitney Warren to build her a mansion on Ninety-first Street that needed twenty-six servants to keep it up and Delano & Aldrich to do another for her on Long Island with a famous garden. Both are still standing, the New York house as part of the Sacred Heart School and the Long Island one as a golf club. James, however, continued with the family stubbornness or loyalty to occupy the Burden mansion and office in Troy several days a week while his wife and children stayed in New York City. She also had a house in Paris. As she told me once in her old age: "Some of my cousins were embarrassed to have so much more money than other people. I knew it was there to be enjoyed, and I enjoyed it." She was lively and charming, a first-class horsewoman, devoted to fox hunting, an imaginative hostess and a wonderful friend. But her marriage was certainly under the constant strain of a frequently divided residence. Years after the premature death of her husband she remarried, in her sixties, Richard Tobin, an old bachelor San Franciscan, president of the Hibernian Bank there and our minister to the Netherlands. She adored him and proved a more compliant wife, for she was converted to his Catholic faith and even spent her winters in California. But when she died at eighty-eight, she surprised her family by leaving instructions that she was to be buried in the Burden mausoleum in Troy. Was it repentance? Her children were chagrined to find the neglected marble mausoleum in such bad shape it had to be expensively repaired to receive her remains.

Adele left a diary covering her early twenties and first marriage that nobody had read and that I instantly saw as a document of some historical importance. With the family's consent I took it to Jackie Onassis at Doubleday, with whom I had already worked on several publications. I soon convinced her that almost everything written about the opulent New York society of the 1890s was trash, and that here was the real thing: a bright and observant heiress of the richest and most famous clan describing the daily doings of that extravagant era. I also had family albums showing the individuals and mansions involved. George Vanderbilt, for example, had had the tower on Biltmore photographed every day of its construction and I could show it as it was on the very day the diarist came to visit.

But Jackie refused to be bound by my severe limitation of the illustrations to the dates and events described in the diary. When I would object to her including in the published book the picture of some great lady in fabulous fancy dress, pointing out that the party had been given after the diary ends, she would say, "Do we have to be so technical?" And then I learned that when you have as an editor a former first lady of the United States, you lose those arguments. And Jackie was right, too. The book was the portrait of an era.

S
TUART PRESTON,
who died at ninety, an expatriate president of Paris, is a name that one encounters not infrequently in the diaries and memoirs of noted society and literary figures, both French and English, of the 1940s and '50s. By the 1960s he was largely forgotten in the smart circles that he had frequented. It was not because people in the least disliked him or even disapproved of him; he was always kind and amiable and asked nothing of life but to be accepted by charming people who lived charmingly. He was certainly an elegant guest who fit comfortably and easily into the elegant homes where he was welcome. Why then was he more or less dropped by so many of the great ladies who had picked him up?

I think it was because they ultimately feared not that other people might associate them with Stuart, i.e. think they were like him—they were mostly too independent to care what others thought—but that they might begin to think so themselves. In other words, that his superficiality might be somehow catching. It was not a thing really dangerous, but it might be well to avoid, like a friend's head cold. Or it may be that they just tired of poor Stuart. Snobbishness can become tiresome, and a love of ancient titles and historic homes, however disguised (as in Proust) as a passion for history, always contains an element of snobbishness.

It was, however, undeniable that some of Stuart's most famous friends came to treat him with a bit of a sneer. Once when I reproached Nancy Mitford for a nasty remark she made about him, telling her I had thought Stuart was such a friend of hers, she had retorted: "Friend? Never forget, my dear, that we're a nation of warriors and don't number among our close friends young men who spent the war having tea with Sibyl Colefax." And Evelyn Waugh records in his journal of a New York meeting with Stuart: "Bald and waxy eyed. I suspect he drinks."

Despite what Nancy said about the war it was that great conflict that brought Stuart his greatest success. He came to London as an obscure American sergeant in the intelligence force, surely no social recommendation to a congregation of warriors accustomed to meet only commissioned officers, and was stationed there for several years with apparently very little to do. An English friend arranged to make him the guest of honor at a grand dinner celebrating the centennial of Henry James, casting him as the "Passionate Pilgrim," and somehow it took on. Stuart became the rage, known throughout the swellest London society as the "Sarge." He appears as "The Loot," an uncomplimentary picture of him in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy.

He was a lifelong friend of mine and my family's, and I have never known quite how to assess his remarkable popularity and its equally remarkable collapse, his appeal to all sorts of brilliant men and women and his fading from the scene, always in good humor. He had been very handsome; the poet Stephen Spender called him the handsomest man he had ever known, but he lost his looks with age and baldness. He was gay, but very discreetly so. In all the years I knew him, we never discussed the matter.

A death notice gives an idea of his vogue.

His high moment of fame came when he was confined to a hospital with jaundice in March 1943. "The whole of London congregates around the Sergeant's bed," wrote Lees-Milne. "Like Louis XIV he holds levees. Instead of meeting now at Heywood Hill's shop, the intelligentsia and society congregate in public ward No. 3 in St. George's Hospital. When a visitor arrived late to see George VI, the King said: 'Never mind. I expect you've been to St. George's Hospital to see the Sergeant.'"

Stuart stemmed on the paternal side from obscure but respectable old New York stock, but his maternal grandfather was an Irish emigrant who became an important judge and millionaire and launched his vast tribe into society. The fortune ultimately disappeared in multiple divisions, but Stuart's small portion sufficed for him to live decently as a prudent bachelor. For some years he worked as a junior art editor, reviewing the minor shows perceptively, but never importantly. He tried to write books, but his attention span was too brief. His forte was the
mot juste,
the brief
apercu.
If you went to a gallery with him, and he was the perfect companion for this, and he brought something to your attention, it was apt to be funny or significant. I recall his nudging me to read this conscientious ticket under a vase in the collection of the duke of Wellington: "1817: Given to the first duke by Louis XVIII, King of France and Navarre. 1854: Smashed by Bridget Murphy, housemaid. 1855: Repaired by..."

Stuart died loved by those who appreciated what he had to offer, less so by the majority who always wanted more. Yet he resented nothing. His acceptance of life was perfectly cheerful.

T
OWARD THE END
of her life my mother—like my father—made no secret of the fact that I was her favorite child, explaining half-jokingly that I was the only child who realized that she, too, had once had a mother. A truer explanation would have been that I understood her better as the only offspring who had been through psychoanalysis.

John's early and extreme devotion to her had been soured in his later years because of her futile but persistent disapproval of his retirement at age fifty from the State Department and his choosing to live, however happily and comfortably, on the large fortune of his loving and beloved wife. Mother could never stop reproaching him in her mind for giving up a useful career, even when he was past sixty, and he and his wife were always conscious of this. "I detested your mother," Audrey told me after Mother's death.

My other brother, Howland, the youngest and most independent, was much less close to Mother, and his wife equally so, and my sister's lifelong struggle with manic depression created too tight a dependence on Mother not to lead to an ultimate resentment.

Certainly a part of the bond that united Mother and me was our extreme congeniality. We had similar tastes and laughed at the same things. I could tell simply by looking at her what she was thinking about a topic. I remember once when she wanted to show me a perfect example of her theory of how a miser fumbled when he had to open his purse, she excitedly poked me and pointed to the fumbler at the risk of self-betrayal. It was one of those instances when we seemed alone against the world.

In the early years of my marriage, my wife had some trouble accepting my closeness with my mother. But she soon and wisely made her own friendship with Mother, and at the latter's death she told me: "In some ways I'll miss her more than you will."

The painful split between Mother and me, which took some years to heal, was, as I have explained, over my writing. There was no avoiding it because my writing meant everything to me. If she could only have left me alone! But no. She was afraid that I was just slick enough to get my toe on the publishing ladder and would ruin my life and happiness as a hack. She felt it her duty to save me from such a disaster.

When Scribner's rejected my first novel and I foolishly resolved to write no more, and even to leave Yale without a degree and study law, she heartily encouraged me, riding roughshod over my father's sensible objections. Was it subconscious jealousy that made her seek to abort a literary career in her son which she, just as talented, had never allowed herself? Sometimes it seemed that she believed the province of the arts was not meant for the men of her family, that they were doomed, like my father, to law or business or medicine. Later on she strove successfully to abort a career in music for my brother and encouraged him to be the good doctor that he became. In that case, however, she was probably right. But she certainly never hesitated to interfere.

Mother was not a snob, though she tended to avoid those she considered the vulgar new rich, particularly in Bar Harbor—she did not seem to encounter them in New York—though it cost her children invitations to the more expensive junior parties. She had however a certain tribal loyalty to the sober and diminishing brownstone society of her parents, and this included a goodly number of highly fashionable families. This group was a bore to be in, as Oscar Wilde so ably put it, but a tragedy to be out of.

Mother could actually be astonishingly naive about society. She insisted that people were kinder than one was apt to find them. She assumed that a noted Bar Harbor hostess would understand when she got out of a large formal dinner by pleading that it was too lovely an evening not to take the children on a picnic. The hostess regarded this as a near insult.

Much worse was something she did to Father's partners. My brother John in 1941 was being married to Audrey Maynard, whose widowed mother, Eunice, was quite awesomely richer than we. She lived in a splendid Ogden Codman French chateau on Long Island full of magnificent furniture and embellished by a great garden. Mrs. Maynard was old and ill and probably felt that her daughter's wedding reception was the last party she would witness (which it was) and wanted to have it particularly fine. In drawing up her guest list she exhibited a novel kind of snobbery. "No, I don't want Margaret Sloan," she was heard to observe. "She'll wear that ghastly green hat she's been sporting. It won't go with the house."

Mother constantly gave in to Mrs. Maynard where her own list was concerned, but trouble came with Father's twenty-some partners of whom Mrs. Maynard wished to include only John W. Davis, as he had been, as explained, a presidential candidate, and Frank L. Polk, a former assistant secretary of state. "I don't want my daughter's wedding to be an outing for the bar association," she observed. This was made more embarrassing by the fact that the groom was an associate in the firm.

My mother's solution of the problem made matters much worse. She hadn't the nerve to insist on the sanctity of her own list—after all it was Mrs. Maynard's house and party. But she thought if she wrote privately to the more important of the partners, explaining to them it was a small wedding, which it wasn't, and asking them, if they happened to find themselves in the neighborhood at the time, to stop in and drink the health of the bride and groom. She hoped that Mrs. Maynard would never notice a few extra faces in the crowd. Nor did she for there weren't any. The partners did not feel that they had received an invitation that would justify their intruding themselves on Mrs. Maynard's hospitality.