The Great Pierpont Morgan (23 page)

Once in a conversation with that Prince of Wales who later became Edward VII of England, Gambetta remarked that if the French Republic were to make noblemen of successful business men, as did Britain, “the Duke of Rockfount would never rub shoulders with the Duke of Industry.” The phrase is apt: Morgan was by nature a duke of industry, pursuing the life of an unostentatious gentleman on a majestic scale.

His home base during these years continued to be No. 219 Madison Avenue. It was a very ample house in which his family enjoyed the ministrations of some twelve servants (including a butler, two or three other menservants, a lady's maid, a cook, two kitchen maids, two chambermaids, a laundress, and a gardener) but it was by no means palatial.
Fashionable society had for many years been gravitating farther uptown; the Murray Hill region where Morgan remained, and the house itself, represented not fashion, but rather the strict brownstone tradition of conservative Manhattan respectability. He kept accumulating property in the neighborhood: some lots on Thirty-sixth Street for houses for his children, a lot on Thirty-fifth Street for a new stable, the big brownstone Phelps Stokes house (still standing in 1948) at the corner of Madison and Thirty-seventh for a residence for his son Jack; and enough land just to the east of No. 219, on Thirty-sixth Street, for a separate lawn-surrounded building in which he could house the books and manuscripts that had long since overflowed the storage room in his basement.

Upon this Library building—definitely projected in 1900 and completed in 1906—he lavished loving pains. He chose as his architect Charles F. McKim, the leading practitioner at that time of the art of adapting classical and Renaissance designs to practical American purposes; there was no better guarantee of order, restraint, and a severe beauty quite detached from the American scene. Though brownstone was quite all right for domestic purposes, art, it was thought, deserved a more exquisite setting; and so McKim produced a one-story white marble building in early sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance style, with an arched entrance, a large central hall, a great east room lined with books to the ceiling, a small north office room, and a large west room which had the air of a gentleman's capacious and beautifully appointed living room. The white marble blocks of which the Library was built were set in place without mortar, after the ancient Greek practice, despite the extra polishing—and extra expense—which this involved. From the day the building was completed to the end of Morgan's life, he spent more and more of his time in its big west room. Its grandeur, its masculine comfort, the Florentine paintings that hung on its red walls, the statuette of Eros that stood on a pedestal by the fireplace, the other bits of choice craftsmanship that decorated it, all satisfied him completely.

There was also the Morgan country house, Cragston, at Highland Falls on the Hudson—another old-style place, in a resort progressively abandoned by fashion. Cragston embodied
simplicity on an ample scale, with half a dozen or so guest rooms, small detached cottages for the staff, cattle barns, dairy, and kennels for fifty or more of Morgan's prize collies, which monotonously carried off blue ribbons at the dog shows. Here Mrs. Morgan spent most of the time between April and mid-autumn, and here Pierpont Morgan came when the opportunity offered, which in his later years was not very often, so very widely did his activities range.

For winter holidays he had also a thousand-acre place in the Adirondacks, Camp Uncas; for less spartan intervals in the cold months, a furnished apartment in the building called “Sans Souci” at the Jekyll Island Club, on a piny island on the Georgia coast; and, for stopovers when his yacht was in Narragansett Bay waters, a small “fishing box” at Newport, with an expert cook in readiness to satisfy the palates of his guests. (He seldom if ever fished there; a picture of him, in yachting costume, sitting beside a string of remarkably large bass was staged as a joke by his friend Charles Lanier; the fish had been caught by others.)

In London his headquarters was the big double house at Prince's Gate which had formerly been his father's town residence. This, too, was unpretentious in aspect; but very few unpretentious houses contain paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Hobbema, Velasquez, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, Turner, and other artists of wide renown, or for that matter contain a special room designed to display a series of Fragonard panels. And outside London there was Dover House, a comfortable country seat so satisfactorily equipped with gardens, orchards, and a dairy farm that when Morgan ended his English visit in 1902 his special railway carriage, attached to the boat train for Southampton, was piled high at one end—according to Herbert Satterlee's account—with “the boxes from Dover House that contained melons, hot-house grapes, peaches, nectarines, and bottles of cream sufficient for the voyage,” these supplementary provisions being taken along because, in Satterlee's matter-of-fact words, “the menu of even the best transatlantic liner was much more simple then than it is today.”

In Paris, Rome, and watering places such as his favorite Aix-les-Bains, Morgan needed no private property, for he
always had his pick of accommodations; in the Hotel Bristol at Paris and in the Grand Hotel at Rome there were special suites set aside for his use whenever he came.

2

But the finest of his residences was none of these which I have mentioned, but the
Corsair
. Not
Corsair II
now, for that vessel had been sold to the government for use in the Spanish War, where it saw service as the
Gloucester
(and was hit in the mast by a Spanish shell), but
Corsair III
, which was completed at the end of 1898 to take her place. The new vessel was very large: 302 feet long, as against 204 for
Corsair II
and 165 for
Corsair I
. There have been larger private pleasure craft, but not many of them, and none of such regal dimensions are produced today; the Fleischmann diesel yacht pictured in
Life
in 1947 as the “first big luxury vessel since the war” was a mere 168-footer.

When Morgan decided to build
Corsair III
, he specified to his friend Beavor Webb, who took charge of her construction, that she must be much larger than
Corsair II
but that her interior fittings must be identical. (Thus was conservatism combined with a love for bigness.) His insistence on close resemblance to
Corsair II
raised a number of difficult problems. It was found, for example, that the kind of carpets that had been bought for
Corsair II
were no longer made. But that did not bother Morgan; he ordered the old patterns set up on the looms and new carpets especially made for him with exactly the old design.

The graceful black steamer served many uses. She could ferry him up the Hudson to Cragston. When he was working in Wall Street during the summer months, he could dine and sleep and breakfast aboard her between week ends. A launch would meet him and his friends at the dock at West Thirty-fifth Street and take them across the river to where the
Corsair
lay at anchor off the Jersey shore; in the morning they would return, after a monumental breakfast at which astonished guests would watch Morgan work his way through a menu of fruit, porridge, eggs, hash, fried fish, and sliced tomatoes. Or the party would board the
Corsair
at the East Twenty-third Street landing of the New York Yacht Club, and she would take them through Hell Gate to an anchorage off Great
Neck in Long Island Sound; in warm weather this was pleasantly cooler than the Hudson, and in the evening the
Corsair
might steam slowly up and down the Sound, while the company sat in wicker chairs on the deck and conversed, Morgan perhaps dozing off as they did so, his cigar between his fingers.

The
Corsair
also could be packed with guests for a cruise of the New York Yacht Club, of which Morgan was commodore in 1897–99, and for whose new clubhouse in West Forty-fourth Street he had donated the land; and it was from her decks, in 1901 (the year when he formed the Steel Corporation), that Morgan watched the first of the races for the America's Cup between Sir Thomas Lipton's
Shamrock II
and the American defender, the
Columbia
. Morgan had a special concern over this contest because he himself had headed the syndicate which had built the
Columbia
and thus the lovely racing yacht was virtually his personal property. But he couldn't see the later races because he had to take a special trainload of bishops and other guests to the San Francisco Convention of the Episcopal Church—a convention during which his attention was from time to time divided between the ecclesiastical debates and a series of telegrams recording the leg-by-leg progress of
Shamrock II
and
Columbia
as they raced off Sandy Hook, with
Columbia
winning.

Morgan could also use the
Corsair
from time to time as a conveyance and a haven on his travels abroad, for she was seaworthy enough to cross the ocean, albeit uncomfortably, and thus could serve him as a floating residence in the quiet waters of the Mediterranean. And if he himself never ventured to make the crossing in her, that mattered hardly more than the fact that she could not ascend the Nile. In the last years of his life he engaged Thomas Cook and Sons to build for him a private all-steel Nile steamer, the
Khargeh
, with paddle wheels; and as for his voyages across the Atlantic, in a sense he had his own ships for those too. For did he not nearly always travel by the ships of the White Star Line, and was not the White Star Line a part of the great ship combination, the International Mercantile Marine, which he himself organized in 1902? And was he not therefore treated on board the
Oceanic
or the
Germanic
almost exactly as if he were the owner of the line and of all the ships that carried her flag? (It was said, for example, that before the ill-fated
Titanic
had even been built, he had been shown the plans and had picked out which was to be his suite aboard her.)

As one of these White Star liners, bringing Pierpont Morgan home from Europe, approached New York, the
Corsair
would steam down the bay to meet her, festive with pennants from stem to stern, while Morgan responded to her salute by leaning over the rail and swinging a handkerchief from side to side; then after the liner had been warped into her dock, the yacht would take him on up the river to Cragston. What grander welcome could there be to one's native shores?

There was one occasion when it was not Pierpont but Mrs. Morgan who was arriving, and he not only went out in the
Corsair
to meet her liner, but climbed into a launch as the liner paused at Quarantine, and then—as soon as the health officer had gone down the liner's side by rope ladder—swung his launch alongside the great ship, grabbed the ladder, and climbed up the full sixty perpendicular feet to the liner's deck—a cigar in his mouth and a straw hat on his head. At this time he was sixty-two years old and entirely unaccustomed to exercise, and the long climb was difficult for him. “The time was long enough,” says Satterlee, “for the sporting element on the decks of the
Oceanic
to make bets as to whether he would ever reach the rail. If he should fail, there was very little chance of doing anything for him in that tideway. When his face, dripping with perspiration, appeared over the rail, and he got where he could throw his leg over it, he waved aside all the outstretched hands and asked, ‘Where is Mrs. Morgan?' and without pausing followed the steward down to her cabin.”

A frequently quoted remark of Morgan's about the proprietorship of a great pleasure vessel like the
Corsair
deserves repetition here despite its familiarity. Some successful man who was thinking of buying a steam yacht asked him about the cost of maintaining it. Said Morgan, shortly: “Anybody who even has to think about the cost had better not get one.”

When traveling within the United States, Morgan customarily used a private car. He did not own one; he would simply use one of those owned by one of the railroads in which he was influential. And on occasion he used a special train, as when he took the large party of bishops and laymen
and other guests to the San Francisco Episcopal Convention in 1901, putting them up for the duration of the convention at the large Crocker residence, to which he had sent in advance Louis Sherry and a catering staff; and afterward conveying them home by a roundabout route which included a stop at Seattle, where Morgan took his guests to a fur store and invited them to pick out fur rugs or fur collars or gloves as keepsakes from him. On another occasion, some years later, he was in a hurry to get back from a business trip to Chicago and made the trip home by New York Central special train with the track cleared ahead; time from Chicago to New York, sixteen hours and three-quarters, which in 1908 was pretty sensational.

The wife of a Morgan partner said, much later, that her most vivid recollection of a trip she made on a Morgan private car was of the entranced expression on the porter's face when the banker tipped him with a hundred-dollar bill.

3

Morgan once remarked that he could do a year's work in nine months, but not in a year; and after he reached the age of sixty he was usually absent from the office routine for some three or four months of each twelve. Usually he would leave New York for England in March or thereabouts, and from then until June or July would divide his time between London—where he kept in touch with the office of J. S. Morgan & Co.—and the Continent. Wherever he was, whether at Prince's Gate or Dover House, or at the Bristol in Paris, or at Aix-les-Bains, or at the Grand Hotel in Rome, or journeying about to inspect works of art, or taking a look at the excavations conducted in Egypt by the Metropolitan Museum, he was in touch with his office by coded cable; either he would be accompanied by a secretary with a code book, or he would rely upon J. S. Morgan & Co. or Morgan, Harjes & Co. to decode the messages that came from New York, usually several a week. A message might say, for example, something like, “We have concluded a Burlington bond issue on such-and-such terms and unless we hear from you to the contrary will proceed,” and he would cable his assent. But on these holidays he liked to throw off responsibility, leaving the conduct of affairs wholly to his associates; it was seldom that his return
message counseled caution or delay. Part of the time in London he might be busy with banking consultations, but much the largest part of his time was given to the art dealers who day after day besieged Prince's Gate or his suite at the Bristol, bringing paintings or porcelains or miniatures or rare books or manuscripts for his inspection. After his return to New York there might be a few other interruptions of the working routine—a voyage up the coast in the
Corsair
, a Yacht Club cruise, a church convention trip, or during the winter a few days in the Adirondacks or at Jekyll Island.