New York - The Novel

her. And when she did, it was to groan.
    “Even after ten years,” she now declared, waving her gloved hand toward a sumptuous building, “when I think of the scandal, and my poor, dear Mrs. Astor, I can’t bear to look at it. Can you?”
    For they were passing the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

    There were several Astor wives of course, but throughout Rose’s childhood and youth, by common consent, and whatever her official titlemight have been, it was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor who had been
the
Mrs. Astor. The divine Mrs. Astor. Rose’s heroine, mentor and friend.
    She was very rich indeed. That went without saying. She and her husband had occupied one of two huge Astor mansions on the site. But if the Astor family had become rich and established enough to assume New York’s social leadership, Caroline, through her Dutch Schermerhorn ancestors who went back to the founding of the city, could claim it as a birthright. And with all this power at her disposal, Mrs. Astor had undertaken a labor worthy of Hercules. She was going to polish New York’s upper class.
    By chance she had a helper, who encouraged her to do it. Mr. Ward McAllister, a Southern gentleman who’d married money and toured Europe to observe its aristocratic manners, devoted his life to these things. He declared Mrs. Astor, who was short, swarthy and somewhat plump, to be his inspiration, and together they set about giving New York a higher social tone.
    Not that America was a stranger to class. Boston, Philadelphia and other fine cities, including New York, were trying to establish a more permanent order by compiling Social Registers. In New York, the ancient Dutch landowners and old English merchants with their boxes at the Academy of Music had known how to be snobbish. When Mr. A. T. Stewart, the store owner, had made his fortune and built a mansion on Fifth, they didn’t think he was a gentleman, and ignored him so cruelly that he left in despair.
    But New York had a particular problem: it had become the big attraction.
    With its banks, and its transatlantic connections, it was so much the money center of the continent that every big interest needed to have an office there. Copper and silver magnates, railroad owners, oilmen like Rockefeller from Pittsburgh, steel magnates like Carnegie, and coal barons like Frick, from the Midwest and the South and even California, they were all flocking to New York. Their fortunes were staggering, and they could do anything they wanted.
    Yet surely, Mrs. Astor and her mentor argued, money alone was not enough. Old New York had always been about money, but it was not without grace. Money had to be directed, tamed, civilized. And who was to do that, if not the old guard? At the apex of society, therefore, thereneeded to be a cadre of the best people, the old money crowd, who would let in the new-money families slowly, one by one, after a period of exclusion during which they must show themselves worthy. McAllister set the opening barrier at three generations. In short, it was what the English House of Lords had been doing for centuries.
    Exceptions could be made. The Vanderbilts were new, and the old Commodore, who had a fouler mouth than a bargee, never gave a damn about society. But the next generation was very rich, and very determined, and even before they’d got a duke in the family, they’d been let in. One had to be practical.
    Yet who was to select this inner circle? Ward McAllister already led a committee of the region’s greatest gentlemen that decided who was eligible to attend the yearly Patriarchs’ Ball. Once he had Mrs. Astor beside him, she became the queen of the event and gave the list her regal stamp. And how many guests should there be? It varied, but not more than four hundred. That, McAllister declared, was the total number of people in the great metropolis who would not feel or look awkward in a ballroom. If one considered the thousands of people in New York who were well accustomed to dances, and who had probably been to as many grand resorts as McAllister, this last claim might have seemed a little specialized. But it pleased Mr. McAllister, and so four hundred it was.
    It had to be said that Mrs. Astor’s lists were quite remarkable for their consistency. There were the newer families of massive wealth, of course, from the Astors themselves to the most recent Vanderbilts. There were the solid old-money families of Otis, Havemeyer and Morgan, and eighteenth-century gentry like