Real Lace (20 page)

When Evalyn McLean's son, Vinson, was born in 1909, both she and the baby nearly died. The following year, Tom Walsh painfully died of cancer, driving his daughter to renewed bouts with drugs. Little Vinson, whom the press christened “the hundred-million-dollar baby,” was the subject of repeated kidnap threats, and the McLean house bristled with guards and burglar alarms. Although Mrs. McLean often complained that her husband was “spoiled,” she did her thorough best to spoil her own children. Because Ned McLean had had a Negro playmate as a child, it was
decided that little Vinson should have a black friend too. “We could not buy a colored boy, of course,” she commented, “although it was our habit to buy anything we wanted.” She did, however, make arrangements with his parents to hire a five-year-old named Julian Winbush to live with the family, and Julian's parents agreed to relinquish all control of him for ten years. The experiment was not a complete success. There were awkward moments with Pullman porters traveling to Palm Beach in those Jim Crow days—even on Ned McLean's private train, which went everywhere with the whistle blowing at full blast. And as for little Vinson, he could not have cared less. “So far as he was concerned,” Mrs. McLean wrote, “I would have done as well to have borrowed a playmate from the zoo.”

At the age of twenty, Vinson was run down by an automobile and killed. Ned McLean had, meanwhile, taken up with Marion Davies's sister, and the affair went on for months all over the United States and Europe. Evalyn McLean's brother Vinson was also killed in an automobile accident, in which she herself was seriously injured. At the age of twenty, Evalyn McLean's daughter married fifty-seven-year-old Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina, and later died of an overdose of sleeping pills. Still, Evalyn Walsh McLean continued to mock the story of the curse of the Hope Diamond, even lending it to Army brides married at her home during World War II. But in the end, her body racked by drink and drugs and malnutrition—her habit completely destroyed her appetite for food—she died with a scream as awful as the sound of the thunderclap that shook Monsignor Russell's church so many years before.

Money, as Grandpa Murray used to point out, can divide a family. It can also destroy one.

Chapter 13

MR. RYAN'S FORTUNE

The Ryan family in America has long considered itself quite superior to such families as the Dohenys of California, as well as to the Murray-McDonnell-Cuddihy family axis in New York. The Ryans, in fact, if asked which was the First Irish Family in the entire United States, would answer that without question it is the Ryans. Their feelings in this matter are based on the fact that there have been Ryans on these shores longer than almost any other Irish-American family. The Ryans did not, as the others did, emigrate to America as a result of the potato famine, nor did they come directly from Ireland. The first American Ryan, Philip, went from Ireland to England during the reign of James II and then, after some unrecorded difficulties with the Crown, made his way to the Colonies, where he first appeared in Virginia around 1690. Philip Ryan married a girl named Whitehead, whose father is said to have been a ship's captain, and the Ryans settled in Lynchburg, where a number of Ryans—not rich—can be found today.

Those Ryans today who
are
rich very much resent having the founder of the family wealth, the appropriately named Thomas Fortune Ryan (his mother's maiden name was Fortune), described as having started out in life “penniless.” Cleveland Amory, for example, in
Who Killed Society?
has stated that Thomas Fortune Ryan “was left orphaned and penniless at fourteen,” and that he “walked the streets” as a youth. Not so, counter the Ryans, who point out that an early Lynchburg business directory lists Thomas Fortune Ryan's father's occupation as “tailor,” and that the family was probably respectably prosperous—though they may have lost some money at the time of the Gvil War. Also, though Thomas Fortune Ryan was indeed an orphan at age fourteen, he did not take to the streets but, rather, went to live with his maternal grandparents, the Fortunes.

But at the age of seventeen, in 1868, Thomas Fortune Ryan did indeed leave home, as Ed Doheny had done, and made his way to Baltimore. Baltimore was even then known as one of America's “Catholic cities”—the others being New Orleans, St. Louis (both French Catholic), San Francisco (Spanish Catholic), and St. Paul, Minnesota (Scotch-Irish). Baltimore alone was of English Githolic origin. The first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, one of the most powerful of all the colonial governors, had embraced Githolidsm early in the seventeenth century, and both he and the city had taken the name from a tiny fishing village of Baltimore on the southern coast of Ireland because it was considered “the Catholic parish closest to America.”

When Thomas Fortune Ryan arrived in Baltimore, he was not himself a Catholic. But he did go to work for a dry-goods commission merchant named John S. Barry, who was a Catholic. Ryan promptly fell in love with Mr. Barry's daughter, Ida, and, in Horatio Alger fashion, married her. This undoubtedly was one factor in his conversion to Catholicism, but Ryan himself always claimed that his interest in the Church was first sparked by a man he met
who was a line manager on the Southern Railroad and who gave him his prayer book to read.

From Baltimore, young Ryan and his bride—backed with a small dowry from her father—made their way to New York, where Ryan worked for a while on a newspaper and then as a clerk in a brokerage house. It was here, in the mid-1870's, that Ryan had the good luck to meet William C. Whitney, the transit entrepreneur. Whitney was so impressed by the young man that he eventually made him his partner, and, while still in his twenties, Ryan was able to purchase his own seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

Thomas Fortune Ryan was a strikingly handsome man, tall—over six feet two—and with intense and burning eyes, who could exercise, when he wished, enormous personal charm. The “Ryan charm,” in fact, has become a family trait. But he could also be withdrawn and quiet and austere, and when the Irish smile faded from his lips, it was possible to glimpse the strength of the will behind the easygoing façade. He was, according to Whitney, “the most adroit, suave, and noiseless man that American finance has ever known.” Others have spoken of the power of Ryan's “silences,” which conveyed worlds of meaning, and Bernard Baruch, with whom Ryan also became friendly and with whom he was also soon working on elaborate Wall Street deals, has written of Ryan's imposing presence, combined with “the softest, slowest, gentlest Southern voice you ever heard. When he wanted to be particularly impressive, he would whisper. But he was lightning in action and the most resourceful man I ever knew intimately in Wall Street. Nothing ever seemed to take him by surprise.” Baruch concedes that “Many people spoke harshly of him as ruthless and not to be trusted.… Still, I found him exact in all his transactions with me.”

It wasn't long, working with men like Whitney and Peter A. B. Widener, before T. F. Ryan's affairs were a complicated—but hugely successful—network of railroads and street railroads,
lighting systems and coal companies, life insurance companies and diamond mines. With Whitney, he consolidated and soon controlled the New York City transit system, and presently Ryan was ready to invade the tobacco empire of James Duke. Duke was no easy man to tangle with, but, using men like Baruch as his chief lieutenants, Ryan embarked upon what became known on Wall Street as “The Great Tobacco War.” Ryan put together a syndicate which purchased the National Cigarette Company. National Cigarette was then artfully merged with the Union Tobacco Company, which, though independently chartered and organized, was actually controlled by Ryan, Whitney, Widener, and Anthony N. Brady. By 1898 Liggett & Myers remained the only tobacco company in the country not controlled by either Mr. Duke or Mr. Ryan. Ryan had ordered Baruch to “get Duke,” and at one point became so alarmed at the possibility that he would actually succeed that he rushed into Baruch's office, saying, “I want to annoy them, not ruin them.” (“But I knew he was pleased,” Baruch commented.) The result of the “Tobacco War,” with stocks in the various companies being driven up and down by the two opponents and their hired manipulators, was that both Duke and Ryan ended up making huge profits, and
both
men were pleased. “As hard as I fought the dissolution of the Tobacco Trust,” Duke commented cheerfully afterward, “I'd fight even harder any effort to put it back together again. We made more money after we were broken up and had competition.” In fact, it was rumored at the time that there had been no real war at all, and that Duke and Ryan had acted in secret collusion to achieve just such a result—more money. If true, it was a successful strategy for both operators.

Ryan's operations went on to extend into coke, coal, oil, lead, and typewriters. His activities spread from New York City to Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and Illinois, and into the Belgian Congo, where he was asked to reorganize the diamond mines by none other than King Leopold of Belgium himself. By 1905
Thomas Fortune Ryan, at the age of fifty-four, was worth fifty million dollars. A few years later, he was worth a hundred million. In 1924 he paid $791,851 in income tax—the tenth largest in the country. He built a huge mansion on Fifth Avenue, in which an area equal to one-third of a city block was devoted entirely to statuary—mostly busts of himself, three of them by Rodin—and in which almost as much acreage was given over to his private chapel. He was a heavy contributor to the Democratic Party and to the Catholic Church (giving the Church, all told, some $20,000,000, including New York's Church of St. Jean Baptiste). Like Estelle Doheny, Ida Ryan was made a Countess of the Holy Roman Empire by Pope Pius X.

Not all of his operations, of course, may have been entirely within the law. After William Whitney's death in 1904, and an investigation into the pair's consolidation and complete takeover of New York's rapid transit system, and the accompanying collapse of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, a grand jury found that with such tactics as stock-watering and franchise-buying Mr. Ryan had done “many things deserving of severe condemnation … dishonest and probably criminal.” Still, as so often happens after investigations into the affairs of rich American businessmen, no action was taken against Mr. Ryan.

He was less fortunate in his efforts to take over the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, “Protector of the Widow and Orphan,” and the largest insurance company in the country. The company became suddenly very much a Wall Street plum in 1908 following the death of its founder, H. B. Hyde, and its inheritance by his son, James Hazen Hyde. Young Hyde found himself, at the age of twenty-three, the custodian of a billion dollars' worth of life insurance policies and the savings of over 600,000 individuals. At the time of his father's death, Equitable had more than $400 million in its treasury, and James Hazen Hyde received a 51 percent controlling interest of it.

It was quickly apparent that young Hyde cared little and knew less about running an insurance company. An aesthete and a dandy, James Hazen Hyde was more given to extravagant dress and elaborate party-giving. When he drove his private hansom cab down Fifth Avenue, matching bunches of fresh violets were tucked behind his horses' ears, sprouted from his coachman's hat, and bloomed from young Hyde's lapel. He tossed huge costume galas at his Long Island château, and once hosted a
bal masqué
at Sherry's that cost him $200,000. Here, the ballroom was transformed into an exact replica of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Fond of all things French, Hyde imported chefs from the greatest restaurants of Paris and Lyons and stationed them in his favorite Manhattan eating places, where they had nothing at all to do but wait until their employer took a notion to drop by and order some favorite dish. One day, just for the fun of it, Hyde and his friend Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I drove a team of seventy-eight drag horses from New York to Philadelphia to see how long the trip would take them. In addition to the horses, a considerable retinue of humans was required, including a carriage expert, a photographer, and a valet. On their return, the young men proudly announced that the journey to Philadelphia had taken exactly nine hours and twenty-five minutes. They had stopped in Philadelphia six minutes, and were back in New York in another ten hours and ten minutes. Seven cases of champagne had been consumed. Such carryings-on made Hyde and his friends the darlings of the press in that golden era, but Wall Street took a more practical view. Hyde, Wall Street decided, needed help running his company to make sure that it “did the right thing” for the widows and the orphans. In their quietly determined way, the giants of the Street moved in to take over Equitable.

The two leading contenders for control were the principal Jewish investment house, Kuhn, Loeb & Company, headed by Jacob H. Schiff, and the leading Protestant banker, J. P. Morgan. Morgan already had a large interest in another insurance company, the
New York Life, and Morgan's plan was to acquire Equitable and merge it with New York Life; Morgan's client and ally, James J. Hill, believed that Equitable's half-billion-dollar treasury would be a handy source of capital for Mr. Hill's railroad ventures. Schiff, and
his
pet client, E. H. Harriman, had much the same thought in mind with regard to Harriman's railroads. What neither Schiff nor Morgan realized was that a Roman Catholic financier was also working quietly behind the scenes, and it was therefore something of a shock to both to learn that James Hazen Hyde had suddenly and without explanation sold all his Equitable stock to “that Irish upstart”—as Morgan put it—Thomas Fortune Ryan.

Perhaps young Hyde had succumbed to Ryan's famous charm. But when the price Ryan had paid—$2.5 million for controlling interest in a half-billion dollar company—was revealed, things looked very fishy indeed. They looked even fishier when it turned out that the dividend income on this amount of stock was only $3,514 a year. The reason for this, Ryan explained, was that the company's charter stipulated that all profits except 7 percent of the $100,000 par value of the stock should go to Equitable policy-holders. (The stock could, of course, be used as a massive borrowing tool for whoever controlled it.) All this was too much for Mr. Morgan, who was, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the foremost financial power in America and who ran what amounted to his own Federal Reserve System before a real one was invented. By 1908 the financial community had become so thoroughly “Morganized” that literally nothing could be done that did not meet with Morgan's approval. (The only reason Morgan tolerated Schiff was that he respected Schiff's ability, and found him useful in dealing with other Jewish houses.) A year earlier, Morgan had forced another upstart, John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates out of the Tennessee Coal & Iron Company, and now, marshaling all the power at his command, Morgan set out to accomplish the same thing with Ryan.