At Home - Bill Bryson [118]
Many of the nouveaux riches traveled to Europe and began buying up fine art, furniture, and whatever else could be crated up and shipped home. Henry Clay Folger, president of Standard Oil (and distantly related to the Folger’s coffee family), began collecting First Folios of William Shakespeare’s plays, usually from hard-up aristocrats, and eventually acquired about a third of all surviving copies, which today form the basis of the great Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Many others, like Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon, built up great art collections, while some simply bought indiscriminately, none more so than the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who bought treasures so freely that he needed two warehouses in Brooklyn to store them all. Hearst and his wife were not evidently the most sophisticated of buyers: when he told her that the Welsh castle he had just bought was Norman, she reportedly replied, “Norman who?”
The new rich began to collect not just European art and artifacts, but actual Europeans. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it became a fashion to identify cash-starved aristocrats and marry one’s daughters off to them. No fewer than five hundred rich young American women elected to do so. In almost every instance the event was not so much a marriage as a transaction. May Goelet, who stood to inherit $12.5 million, was wooed by a Captain George Holford, who was rich and had three great houses. “Unfortunately,” she noted wistfully in a letter home, “the dear man has no title.” So she married the Duke of Roxburghe instead and thereby got a rotten life but a terrific title. For some families, marrying rich Americans wasn’t so much a habit as a syndrome. Lord Curzon married two Americans (serially, of course). The eighth Duke of Marlborough married Lily Hammersley, an American widow who was not hugely attractive (one newspaper described her as “a badly dressed woman with a moustache”) but was fabulously wealthy, while the ninth duke wed Consuelo Vanderbilt, who was good-looking and came with $4.2 million of railway stock. Meanwhile, his uncle, Lord Randolph Churchill, married the American Jennie Jerome, who didn’t bring the family as much money but did produce Winston Churchill. By the early twentieth century, 10 percent of all British aristocratic marriages were to Americans—an extraordinary proportion.
At home, the newly wealthy of America built houses on a grand scale. Grandest of all were the Vanderbilts. They built ten mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York alone. One had 137 rooms, making it one of the largest city houses ever built. But they had even more palatial homes outside the city, particularly at Newport, Rhode Island. In possibly the only example ever of the super-rich being ironic, they called their Newport homes “cottages.” In fact, these were houses so big that even the servants needed servants. They contained acres of marble, the most glittery chandeliers, tapestries the size of tennis courts, fittings heavily wrought from silver and gold. It has been estimated that if built today the Breakers would cost half a billion dollars—rather a lot for a summer home. The ostentation of these properties generated such widespread disapproval that a Senate committee for a time seriously considered introducing a law limiting how much any person could spend on a house.
The architect responsible for much of this was a man named Richard Morris Hunt. Hunt grew up in Vermont, the son of a congressman, but at nineteen went to Paris and became the first American to study architecture at the École des Beaux Arts—in effect, was the first American to be formally trained as an architect. He was charming