At Home - Bill Bryson [126]
As for the rectory, it is impossible to say when the telephone first came to the house, but its installation was almost certainly an event of great excitement for some early-twentieth-century rector and his family. The niche today is empty, however. The days when houses had a single phone at the foot of the stairs are long gone, and no one now wants to talk in such an exposed and comfortless place.
III
For many people, the new age of enormous wealth in America meant being able to indulge slightly peculiar whims. George Eastman of Kodak film and camera fame never married. He lived in an enormous house in Rochester, New York, with his mother, but kept many servants, including a house organist, who woke him—and presumably quite a lot of the rest of Rochester—with a dawn recital on a giant Aeolian organ. Eastman’s other endearing quirk was that he had a private kitchen in the upstairs of the house where he liked to go and put on an apron and bake pies. Rather more extreme was John M. Longyear, of Marquette, Michigan, who, upon discovering that the Duluth, Mesabi & Iron Range Railroad had won the right to lay tracks to carry iron ore right past his house, had the entire property dismantled and packed up—“house, shrubs, trees, fountains, ornamental waters, hedges and drives, gatekeeper’s lodge, porte-cochere, greenhouses, and stables,” in the words of one admiring biographer—and had the whole transferred to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he replicated his previous tranquil existence down to the last flower bulb, but without trains running past his windows. By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side—one to live in, one to decorate over and over—seems admirably restrained.
For pure commitment to spending, it would be hard to beat Mrs. E. T. Stotesbury—Queen Eva, as she was known. As an economic entity she was a wonder. She once spent half a million dollars taking a party of friends on a hunting trip simply to kill enough alligators to make a set of suitcases and hatboxes. On another occasion, she had the whole of the ground floor of El Mirasol, her Florida home, redecorated overnight, but neglected to inform her long-suffering husband, who, when he awoke the next morning and came downstairs, was for some time not at all certain where he was.
The husband in question, Edward Townsend Stotesbury, made his fortune as an executive in the banking empire of J. P. Morgan. Though a distinguished banker, he didn’t have a lot of presence: he was, in the words of one chronicler, “a dignified hole in the atmosphere, the invisible hand that wrote the checks.” Mr. Stotesbury was worth $75 million when he met Mrs. Stotesbury in 1912—she had recently exhausted the goodwill and bank balance of her first husband, Mr. Oliver Eaton Cromwell—and with dizzying efficiency she helped him spend $50 million of his fortune on new houses. She began with Whitemarsh Hall in Philadelphia, a house so big that no two accounts ever describe it in quite the same way. Depending on whose figures you credit, it had 154, 172, or 272 rooms. All agree that it had fourteen elevators, considerably more than most hotels. It cost Mr. Stotesbury nearly $1 million a year just to maintain. He employed forty gardeners and ninety other staff there. The Stotesburys also had a summer cottage at Bar Harbor in Maine (with a mere eighty rooms and twenty-eight baths) and an even more palatial Florida home, El Mirasol.
The architect of this last-named extravaganza was Addison Mizner, who is now almost entirely forgotten