At Home - Bill Bryson [119]
The Vanderbilts were the richest family in America, with an empire founded on railroads and shipping by Cornelius Vanderbilt, “a coarse, tobacco-chewing, profane oaf of a man,” in the estimation of one of his contemporaries. Cornelius Vanderbilt—“Commodore” as he liked to be known, though he had no actual right to the title—didn’t offer much in the way of sophistication or intellectual enchantment, but he had a positively uncanny gift for making money. At one time he personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States. The Vanderbilts between them owned some twenty thousand miles of railway line and most of what rolled along it, and that provided them with more money than they really knew what to do with.* And Richard Morris Hunt became, in the nicest possible way, the man who helped them spend it. He built houses of exceptional grandeur for them on Fifth Avenue in New York, in Bar Harbor in Maine, on Long Island, and in Newport. Even the family mausoleum on Staten Island was, at $300,000, as costly as many an outsized mansion. Whatever architectural whims fluttered through their brains Hunt was there to satisfy. Oliver Belmont, husband of Alva Vanderbilt, was crazy about horses. He had Hunt design for him a fifty-two-room mansion, Belcourt Castle, in which the whole of the ground floor was stables, so that Belmont could drive his coach straight through the massive front doors and into the house. The horses’ stalls were paneled in teak with sterling silver fittings. The living area was above.
In one of the many Vanderbilt mansions, a breakfast nook was adorned with a Rembrandt painting. A children’s playhouse at the Breakers was larger and better appointed than most people’s actual houses; it came complete with bell pulls connected to the main house so that servants could be summoned if a child suddenly required refreshments, needed a shoelace tied, or suffered some other crisis of comfort. The Vanderbilts grew so powerful and spoiled that they could get away, literally, with murder. Reggie Vanderbilt, son of Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt, was a notoriously reckless driver (as well as insolent, idle, stupid, and without redeeming feature of any type) who ran through or over pedestrians on five occasions in New York. Two of those he flung aside were killed; a third was crippled for life. He was never charged with any offense.
The one member of the family who seemed immune from the urge to be extravagant or revolting was George Washington Vanderbilt, a member of the clan so painfully shy that people sometimes assumed him to be simple-minded. In fact, he was exceedingly intelligent and spoke eight languages. He lived at home well into adulthood and passed his time by translating modern literature into ancient Greek and vice versa. He had a collection of over twenty thousand books, giving him probably the largest private library in America. When George was twenty-three, his father died, leaving a fortune of some $200 million. George inherited $10 million of that, which doesn’t sound a huge amount, but that’s equivalent to $300 million in modern money.
In 1888, he decided finally to build a place of his own. He bought 130,000 acres of wooded retreat in North Carolina and engaged Richard Morris Hunt to build him something suitably comfy. George decided he wanted a Loire château—but grander, of course, and with better plumbing—and so he built more with Biltmore (though he seems never to have noticed the pun). Closely modeled on the famous Château de Blois, it is a rambling, gloriously excessive mountain of Indiana limestone, comprising 250 rooms, a frontage 780 feet long, and a