The Titanic Plan (8 page)

Nothing was asked or said about Archie’s activities that day. Nor did Archie report his encounter with Mick Shaughnessy to the Attorney General’s office.

***

On March 23, 1909, private citizen Theodore Roosevelt left with great fanfare for Africa. Over 10,000 people turned out to cheer him as he boarded the ocean liner
Hamburg
in New York harbor. Archie was there to present him with the gold ruler from President Taft. Roosevelt would not set foot on American soil again for well over a year.

CHAPTER 6

John Astor was euphoric. He was racing up the long stretch between Stamford and West Haven in his new
Pierce-Arrow
roadster, taking in the blue skies and undulating green landscape. The car bounced and skidded over the rutted dirt roadway. The blast force of wind pushed his driving goggles into his eye sockets. He looked down at his speedometer: 53 miles an hour. He was flying.

Speed was not the only reason for his unbridled giddiness. Astor had just finalized terms of his divorce from Ava. The mess of a marriage was finally ending. Two million dollars was all it took. She did try to weasel a stipend from him, but as he had such a long laundry list of her infidelities, she wisely took what she could and boarded a ship for Europe. Ava always knew the strength of her hand, which cards to hold, which cards to play, and when to finally get up from the table.

When Astor pulled into Newport that afternoon, he took his thundering roadster right through the center of town. All the townspeople noticed the gangly, mustachioed man behind the wheel. Everyone knew who he was. But no one waved or acknowledged him and he acknowledged no one in return. By the time Astor turned up a long horseshoe driveway and saw the imposing cream stucco walls of
Beechwood
, a tinge of sadness began to color his exhilaration. Not only was Ava gone, but so was his mother. And his son Vincent wouldn’t be there for weeks. A deep sense of loneliness crept over him.

The servants expected his arrival and set out a simple lunch of
foie gras
, tea sandwiches and white Rhine wine. Astor wandered through the mansion alone, finding his way to the heart of the house, the ballroom. He strode across the polished wood floor to a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows. The view onto the ocean was spectacular. It was as if the ballroom, with its gentle swirling arches and seaweed lighting sconces, was an extension of the shimmering blue ocean outside. The light flooded in. Astor closed his eyes and tried to retrieve the memory of the music and gaiety that had long filled the room. All he heard was the crashing waves. An overwhelming weariness overtook him. He went up to his bedroom and lay down for a nap. He slept till the next morning.

“
The Season,” as it was simply known in Newport, officially began the first week in July and ended the last week in August. The quaint Rhode Island town was a center of commerce during colonial times and became a cultural retreat in the mid-nineteenth century with summer visitors that included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry and William James, and Edgar Allen Poe.

August Belmont Sr. built the first “cottage” on Bellevue Avenue for his wife Caroline, who was a Newport native. No matter how large and ostentatious a Newport mansion was, it was always referred to as a “cottage.” It wasn’t until 1881, when
the
Mrs. Astor beseeched her husband, William Blackhouse Astor, Jr., to purchase the modest cottage of
Beechwood
, that the floodgates flew open and society began flocking en masse to Newport. Mr. Astor bought Beechwood for $150,000 and thought he got a bargain. The dour Mr. Astor loved bargains.
The
Mrs. Astor knew how to turn any bargain into an expensive extravagance and proceeded to hire the most famous architect of the era, Richard Morris Hunt, and pump $2,000,000 into renovating the place. A year later
Beechwood
opened and became the social hub of Newport society.

Following Mrs. Astor’s lead, new “cottages” began springing up along Bellevue Avenue like gaudy flowers. Oliver Belmont, August’s son, built a Louis XIII–style castle called
Belcourt
. Alva Vanderbilt one upped Belmont with the building of
Marble House
, a mansion entirely constructed of exquisite marble – black marble, white marble, veined marble, yellow Sienna marble, pink Numidian marble, gold leafed marble, rough hewn marble, polished marble, marble inside and out. Not to be outdone by his social climbing sister-in-law, Cornelius Vanderbilt II commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to build the grandest cottage of them all and expense be damned. Hunt created a 70 room, four-story limestone manor called the
Breakers
. With a grand entrance hall whose ceiling rose 45 feet above its floor, a kingly salon, a rococo dining room of marble and gilded bronze, music rooms, separate ladies and gentlemen reception rooms, a library whose great stone chimney was imported from a French chateau, the
Breakers
stood as the ultimate lavish expression of an excessively lavish age.

By 1909, the building frenzy had long stopped. The giants of the Gilded Age were either dead or doddering, and “The Season” had devolved into highly stylized rituals of leisure carried on by a younger generation who lacked the inspired gusto for conspicuous consumption. Yes, there were parties and polo and lawn tennis and swims at
Bailey Beach
, but the unbridled decadence and extravagant spending sprees of the new breed paled in comparison to their mothers and fathers.

The last remaining vestige, the final link to the full golden bloom of the Gilded Age was, ironically, the poorest – Mamie Stuyvesant Fish. Mamie would often crack that she and her husband “were not rich, we only have a few million.”

On the evening of July 23, 1909, the now 58 year-old Mamie was hosting her annual ball at her cottage,
Crossways
, a relatively modest dwelling for Newport – only 37 rooms and a manicured lawn that rambled over an acre to a dramatic view of the ocean. The theme of the ball was “Mother Goose.” Everyone attending was to dress up as a nursery rhyme character. Mamie was Mother Goose, in a blue bonnet and carrying a long staff, which she’d occasionally goose her guests with.

John Astor hated these parties, but as the only Astor left in Newport, he was obliged to go. In tow was his son Vincent. At 17, Vincent was the spitting image of his father. Long and gangly, with a thin, bony face and an awkwardness that was compounded by adolescence, Vincent shuffled through life with his eyes cast shyly down. Ava despised her son for looking like the husband she hated, and constantly berated the boy. Vincent was dressed as an owl, in a feathered suit, with a beak and huge round glasses. Astor came as the pussycat.

Mamie approached Astor and Vincent as they strolled into the grand living room. “Ah, Mr. Pussycat, been munching on canaries?” she asked.

“
How are you, Mamie?” Astor muttered.

“
That’s Mother Goose to you. And to answer your question: my life is a fairy tale!” Mamie cackled at her own joke.

“
That’s good, Mamie.”

“
I heard you and Ava are divorcing. I’m sorry about that.”

“
It’s not quite official yet. But yes, we are ending our marriage.”

“
Plenty of songbirds here tonight, Jack,” Mamie said, pointing toward a collection of middle-aged women in their nursery rhyme costumes.

“
Umm,” Astor hummed as Mamie turned away to greet Humpty Dumpty, who was waddling toward them. Astor made his way to the
hors d’oeuvre
table with Vincent walking a pace behind. “Excuse me, ladies,” he said, cutting through a knot of teenaged girls. “Meow, I recognize some of you, yes. You’re Mary and I bet you’re quite contrary. And you’re Little Red Riding Hood. But who are you, m’dear?” he asked a fresh faced blond girl who was wearing a yellow dress cut low to reveal an eye-catching
décolletage
.

“
Chicken Little,” she said. “And you?”

“
I am the Pussycat and my son here is the Owl.”

“
Are you being a good puss this evening?” Chicken Little asked.

“
I haven’t eaten any of your feathered friends, if that’s what you mean.”

The girl playfully cuffed Astor across his snout. “Good,” she said. “A puss like you should behave himself.” She giggled and so did her friends, all of whom turned away from Astor.

He moved down the table and spooned some caviar on a small plate.

“
Dad, those girls were my age,” Vincent said.

“
I was just having a little fun. No harm.”

Vincent looked over at the girls. Chicken Little’s eyes caught his. She smiled. Vincent turned red behind his beak and glasses.

For Astor, the dinner was a dreary affair. He was seated next to Tessie Oelrichs, who was dressed as Cinderella, though at age 66, Astor thought she more resembled the wicked stepmother. Tessie prattled on about the good old days with
the
Mrs. Astor. “Now that was a time of magnificence,” she said to Astor, “and your mother, god rest her soul, she knew how to maintain the necessary boundaries of society.”

If that was the case
, Astor thought,
how did she let you in?
As Tessie kept chattering, Astor glanced to Vincent, who had the good luck to be seated next to Chicken Little. Astor noticed his son being swept up by her flirtatious charms. He watched how she pursed her lips and pushed close to Vincent, brushing her young breasts against his arm then pulling back with a seductive tilt of her head. He wished he were the one sitting there.

Two hands suddenly clapped him on the shoulders. Astor whirled to see a grinning fox. “Do I know you?” Astor asked.

“
If you don’t, you should,” the fox replied.

It was George Vanderbilt. “I’ve been looking for you, Jack. I need someone who I could have a smoke with. You up for a little stroll?”

The evening sky was splashed with magenta, dimly lighting a pussycat and a fox as they ambled over the long lawn of
Crossways.
Both puffed on cigarettes. They tried to make small talk, but neither was very good at it. Astor finally broached the subject he’d been bursting to talk about with Vanderbilt for months.

“
So, what did you really think of that book I sent you?” Astor asked.

“‘
The future,’ as you called it, Jack?”

“
Yes, ‘the future.’”

“
I told you. I thought it was absolutely batty. That fellow Gillette should stick to razor blades.”

“
You didn’t see the potential in it?”

“
Good god, no. One giant city where everyone would live? What a nightmare!”

“
That’s not it,” said Astor. “Gillette was way off there. But his idea of having a new type of city is brilliant. Just brilliant. Look at New York. It’s a jumble of shops and people and slums. It’s ugly and smelly. There’s no efficiency to it.”

“
Spoken like a true engineer, Jack.” Vanderbilt was humoring him and Astor was a little frustrated trying to make Vanderbilt see his vision. Then he noticed a croquet game set up over the lawn. He ran toward a cluster of the wooden balls.

“
Don’t you think, if you could give people a city where life was made easy, where you could have…” he took one of the balls in his hand and carefully placed it on the lawn. “…shopping centers in one convenient place…” Astor took another ball and placed it about a yard from the first “…and dining centers in another convenient place…” He took a third ball and placed it so that an arc was taking shape…“and work centers and recreational centers and living centers…” He put a ball down for each center. The arc transformed into a careful geometric circle. “…And all these centers would be powered by a centralized electrical system and connected by efficient, mass transportation, don’t you think people and businesses would flock to these cities?”