Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part I

Enchanted Woods

Flying Cloud

Madison to the River

Big Mary

The Howling Swell

The Personal as the Political

Grand Mistakes

Rich and Romantic

Photos I

Part II

A Pleasure to Paint Her Portrait

The American Girl Herself

For Richer or Poorer

Smaller Castles

Pretty Manners

Photos II

Part III

Silent Bearers of Many a Half-Read Message

A Fine Object Lesson in Good Construction

Something in the Nature of the Marvelous

No Other City Will Live in the Future as New York Will

Our Goddess

Epilogue

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Copyright © 2012 by Jean Zimmerman

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Zimmerman, Jean.

Love, fiercely : a gilded age romance / Jean Zimmerman.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-15-101447-7

1. Stokes, Edith Minturn, 1867–1937. 2. Stokes, I. N. Phelps (Isaac Newton Phelps), 1867–1944. 3. Minturn family. 4. Stokes family. 5. Socialites—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 6. Architects—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 7. Social reformers—New York (State)—Biography. 8. Rich people—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 9. Artists’ models—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 10. New York (N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title.

F128.47.Z56 2012

974.7'0410922—dc23

[B]   2011036976

eISBN 978-0-547-76051-3

v3.0116

For Maud

Prologue

I saw her for the first time in a work of art. John Singer Sargent painted Edith Minturn Stokes in 1897, one of the soaring, seven-foot-tall canvases that made the American-born artist the most sought-after portraitist of his day.

This portrait was different, because Edith Minturn was different.

I remember encountering the painting in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a room hung with a half-dozen Sargent women, the Wyndham sisters posed against banks of peonies, Charlotte Louise Burckhardt pinching a rose between two delicate fingers, Mrs. Hugh Hammersley in a gold-trimmed gown of dusty-pink velvet.

Marvelous paintings, to be sure. But the subjects, all of them, to a woman, of their time. Remote. Victorian females, belles of the belle époque. I could admire them, but they could not engage me, not in the way that Edith did. Her face made me stop in front of the painting, in front of her. Sargent had caught a quality of gleaming freshness that rendered his subject disturbingly alive.

More than anything else, I recognized her. The sense of insouciance and independence that swirled around her was familiar. She reminded me of myself as a thirty-year-old. Edie Minturn—that’s what they called her when she was young—could have been my contemporary. In the painting, she embodies the quality of being stingingly, vivaciously alive. Her brother had nicknamed her Fiercely in her youth, and that was how she first appeared to me.

Fiercely.

I had actually gone to the Met in search of the other person in the Sargent portrait, Edith’s husband, I. N. Phelps Stokes. He was the author of one of the most astonishing books ever created on the early history of a city, the sprawling, labyrinthine and maddening tome called The Iconography of Manhattan Island. A massive undertaking, six volumes, 3,254 pages, collecting together everything that would otherwise have been lost about early Manhattan, pictures and drawings and maps, a priceless repository of our knowledge of New York City.

Obscure as the Iconography was to modern readers—it exists today primarily on the shelves of research libraries—I fell in love with its strange, postmodernist attempt to encompass a place fully within the pages of a book. It reminded me of something out of Borges’s famous infinite library, or of a trope by the comedian Steven Wright, about a map that grew to the same size as the place it was attempting to chart. I sought to find out all I could about the remarkable man who had created this huge, baggy monster of a book.

In the Sargent painting, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes stands behind his wife, caught in a skein of shadow. By far the most arresting figure in the portrait is the woman. In reviews and notices, and in the public’s view, the husband figured hardly at all.

THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF the portrait were thus. On their wedding day, in August 1895, both groom and bride were a well-ripened twenty-eight, relatively ancient for marriage in that period. Two years later, in 1897, they interrupted their sojourn in Paris (a honeymoon that would last almost three years) and traveled to London. On a sunny afternoon in June, Newton and Edith presented themselves at Sargent’s studio in Tite Street.

Obsessive about costume, Sargent selected a gown of blue satin for his subject to wear. Edie dressed herself, and the artist began. It gradually became clear that something was wrong. The great man painted, the subject posed. But Sargent realized he was missing it, missing her. After repeated sittings, he had something of the dress, the face. But the elements did not go together. The parts did not add up to a whole.

Finally, one day, Edith and Newton arrived at the studio for a sitting in what passed for their street clothes. They had been around town all morning. Afterward, it was said they had come from tennis, but this turns out not to be true. Edith’s complexion flushed with exertion. Glowing, as the euphemism has it, perspiring or, more candidly, sweating.

Sargent pulled up, transfixed by the image she offered. Beginning again, he depicted Edith as he had none of his subjects before, in an informal, modern ensemble, caught in the moment. He captured the essence of a woman who was truly different from the ladies he’d previously painted, in their silks and satins, posed in fancy drawing rooms. He must have known the picture would resonate with her, that she would accept his unorthodox interpretation. Yet the finished portrait set off a flurry of debate in its day, recognized as a depiction of something new under the sun.

Even though I had gone on pilgrimage to the painting in order to find him, and discovered her instead, I gradually came to see the portrait not as I first encountered it, as a painting of a singular woman, but one that told the story of a couple, and a time—Manhattan at the turn of the last century. From the year of their birth, 1867, to the year of their marriage, 1895, Edith and Newton Stokes lived in a nation swept up by one of history’s greatest explosions of wealth, power, creativity and empire. During that remarkable span of time, twenty-five million newcomers from other shores poured into the country, Bell invented the telephone, Edison developed electric light and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford drove the golden spike into the ground at Promontory Point. Eight states were added to the Union. Great fortunes were either created or extended.

Edith and Newton were New York City to the bone. He, raised in an Italianate residence at Madison Avenue and 37th Street, which after his time there would become J. P. Morgan’s townhouse and then a celebrated museum of the arts. She, born a little farther afield, in still countrified Staten Island. They were in love and in Manhattan, which represents an unparalleled state of bliss. They led not so much independent as interdependent lives. Newton, the man in the shadows, was an antiquarian and aesthete who created a masterpiece, his life’s work, the Iconography. Edith too became accomplished, though in quite a different sense. I saw her first in a Sargent painting, but most of Gilded Age America encountered her beauty in the visage of a colossal statue, a figure representing the Republic, which adorned the entrance of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.

Icon and iconographer. A couple, a place, a time. Edith and Newton would last forty years together, a crucial stretch of a burgeoning country’s history. They reached great heights, experienced much the age had to offer in the way of wealth and experience, and then lost everything except each other. Theirs might be the greatest love story never told.

PART ONE

1

Enchanted Woods

June 1871. The sunny four-year-old girl played on the beach, the Atlantic’s sparkling blue water stretching away toward the horizon. In the style of the day she suffered to be thoroughly wrapped in cotton and wool, a miniature bathing costume, long black stockings, a straw hat, a two-piece puffed-sleeve dress of white muslin with a sailor’s collar and ribbon trim, then her mother’s shawl, plus a parasol to top it off. Shielded not only by her clothing but by the presence of her watchful mother, the girl existed in a sunlit sphere of love and restriction, guarded as carefully as an uncut diamond.

Edie Minturn always bridled at restraint. Her mother, Susanna, looked after her next-to-eldest child, Edith, called Edie from birth, as she did her whole brood, including Edith’s elder sister Sarah, always known as May, and her younger sisters Gertrude and Mildred, her older brother Robert and her brother Hugh, the baby of the family. From the beginning Edie stood out, more spirited, headstrong, the child seen as somehow different from the others. One of the games she played on the beach was to try to slip out from under the cover of the parasol that her mother held carefully over her and run shrieking to the waves. No other four-year-old girl ran to the waves. Edie acted more like her adored, charming, lively older brother Robert than her sisters.

This was Staten Island in the years after the Civil War, a place unto itself, separate, rural, immune. This most beautiful isle of the sea was the description of a contemporary real estate brochure. More pungent was Thoreau. I have just come from the beach and I like it very much, he wrote after a visit to the island’s eastern shore, going on to describe what the four-year-old Edie would have seen: Everything there is on a grand and generous scale—seaweed, water, and sand; and even the dead fishes, horses and hogs have a rank, luxuriant odor; great shad-nets spread to dry; crabs and horseshoes crawling over the sand; clumsy boats, only for service, dancing like sea-fowl over the surf, and ships afar off going about their business.

Staten Island floated to the south and west of the island of Manhattan, hugging the coastline, separated from New Jersey by the narrow Arthur Kill, and from Manhattan by the calm, five-mile-wide waters of the harbor. By accident of history and politics, it had been connected to New York since the Dutch lumped Staaten Eylandt with Albany, Long Island, Manhattan and Westchester into the seventeenth-century New Netherland colony.

Centuries before, the Lenape gave the island the name Enchanted Woods, and its clayey soil held on to a kind of forest magic. Stands of cedar, gum and tulip trees still marched along the island’s crest. Orchards proliferated, heavy with fruit. Thoreau (again) wrote of apricots with the girth of plums. Frederick Law Olmsted cultivated pears there before taking up the trade of landscape architect. The island’s natural abundance furnished a major export, as thousands of tons of beach sand were shipped to Manhattan in the postwar years for the city’s sleek new sidewalks and buildings.

In the 1870s, the island had yet to be annexed to the City of New York—that would happen in 1898—and the old ways lingered. The ancient craft of oystering, pursued by the island’s unusually large free black population, was only just being supplanted by small industries like brickworks and breweries.

Steam ferry service between Staten Island and Manhattan had begun a full five decades before, but the stream of beach visitors was as yet only a trickle. That would soon change in the coming years, so Edie’s protected sphere would be invaded by the hoi polloi hordes, but for now she and her family floated in a green-golden haze, an Eden-like paradise in which children could happily lose themselves.

For Edith Minturn we have only the year she was born, 1867, and the county of her birth, Richmond, the official name for the principality of Staten Island. Birth records for Staten Island were not formally kept until 1880, so no clerk recorded the precise time and locale of Edie’s birth. But her parents lived in Elliottville, near New Brighton, the main hamlet on the northern tip of the island, on Bard Avenue, with an intimate vantage of both Brooklyn and Manhattan’s southern precincts. Based on knowledge of birthing practices at the time, it is likely that Edie drew her first breaths at home, in the childhood house she would occupy until her thirteenth year. During childbirth, Edith’s mother would have come under the care of her own mother, Sarah, as well as a nurse and perhaps a medical practitioner to administer the chloroform that was the latest medical craze.

Thus Edie came into the world, an enchanted girl in an enchanted wood. Adding to the fairy-tale beginning was the fact that her Prince Charming attended to her from the very first.

THAT THEY WOUND up as soul mates might have been predicted. Each child was beautiful, clever, doted on by loving parents. Both had every material thing they could want, every book or doll or toy boat. And both earned recognition from their families early on as somehow different from their siblings. The only surprising thing is that it took so long for love to flower between Edith Minturn and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes.

Known from childhood simply as Newton, the boy entered a world of wealth and privilege on the eleventh day of April in 1867. As the firstborn and as a son, Newton had the regard of his parents that would classically be accorded young princes, even after the rest of his eight siblings came along to share his parents’ attentions. In keeping with the gender strictures of fairy tales, while the maiden kept herself sequestered on Staten Island, the prince had more worldly beginnings, born in the Manhattan mansion built fourteen years earlier by his maternal grandfather. The sprawling Italianate brownstone stood at 37th Street and Madison Avenue, giving off a sober air of prim and proper prosperity.

But the prince must come to the maiden. Every year, the Stokes family escaped the Manhattan beehive by sojourning on Staten Island, where the Minturns lived year-round. They were, just then, a new phenomenon, the towering mansions and manicured lawns that were being installed atop the hills that stretched back from St. George landing, edifices for arrivistes, products of the postwar boom. In 1869, the Stokes family bought one of the grandest.

The new mansions clustered at the northeastern tip of the island, whence the ferry carried passengers to and from Manhattan’s Battery. The ferry service had its own upper-crust pedigree. As a teenager in the early 1800s Cornelius Vanderbilt launched his fortune with a sail-powered Staten Island–to–New York ferry, charging fifteen cents for the trip. He styled himself Commodore for the remainder of his life.

It took decades for the harbor’s ferry business to build into a reliable, steam-powered phenomenon. In the meantime, the island’s very isolation made it desirable among the elite of New York. And its outlook. The breathtaking view from the heights of New Brighton, the premier spot for the new development, took in Staten Island, New Jersey, Brooklyn and Manhattan, all connected by the busy waters of Upper New York Bay.

Both fathers, Anson Stokes and Robert Minturn, took the ferry from St. George to Manhattan’s financial district. Anson worked in banking, while the Minturns based their business in shipping and shipbuilding. The rhythmic movement back and forth across the bay emphasized the isolation of the enclave at the end of the ferry line. Manhattan was male, worldly, predatory. Staten Island was female, remote, secure. The city was business. The island was home.

The sea dominated the sensibilities of the new Staten Island residents, as it did for the Native Americans who long ago harvested mullet along the shoreline. Throughout his later life, Newton would recall an image that had impressed him in those early years. As he sailed with his father on Anson’s yacht near St. George, he saw Robert Minturn rowing a shell just offshore. He would always remember the tableau: the white-capped waves on the blue waters of the bay, his future father-in-law’s preternaturally black hair, set off by the pirate-like blue silk handkerchief tied around his forehead. That Anson and Robert counted themselves among the best of friends meant shared social experiences for the adults and playtime for the children.

The Stokes and Minturn families took some of their identity from the respective houses in which they lived, for the Stokes and Minturn homes were, each in its own way, among the finest on the island.

On first glance, the Stokes manse was much more impressive, a Romanesque, cinnamon-colored monster (Newton’s word) situated on seven acres. For eighteen years it served as the family’s destination during the spring and autumn seasons (summer’s mosquitoes sent them elsewhere). They might occasionally have celebrated the winter holidays there, too, Newton’s mother, Helen, and his eight brothers and sisters tromping out from Manhattan to New Brighton, with canvas still covering the furniture and roaring fires to warm the sleeping house.

The Stokes estate had everything to commend it: a private pier, a sledding hill, a lawn for tournaments of badminton or cricket, formal gardens, greenhouses, a cow barn, a pasture and a bowling alley. These luxuries formed the accoutrements of the typical landed family of the time, but the Stokes manse was truly over the top. Newton and his siblings never lacked for novelty. Once Anson Stokes presented the family with a net, balls and rackets—this in 1877, when no one locally even recognized the word tennis, much less knew the rules of the game. In that same year the All England Club sponsored its first lawn tennis tournament at Wimbledon, but Americans would not play the game in any numbers until the end of the century. And they rarely had their own courts, but played at clubs.

If Edie’s family occupied a somewhat less formidable fortress, it did pride itself on a generously dimensioned, English-style country house cushioned by emerald lawns and gardens, reached via a long, gracious driveway. Less dramatic than the Stokes place, a mile away, but more dignified, and surrounded by dignified neighbors. A solid house, now long gone. Also, living year-round on the island did not have the cachet of a house in Manhattan and a seasonal abode a ferry ride away, but it was still quite desirable. When it came to the traditional values that held the Minturns together, family ties and a sense of refinement trumped tennis sets and bowling alleys. Edith’s mother, Susanna, had grown up in the house with her high-minded, well-off parents and her four brothers and sisters. Susanna would never stray far from the family womb; she purchased her childhood house as a newlywed from her father and mother, who moved nearby. This mansion signified the unity and pride of the tight-knit Minturn clan.

A series of professional portraits from 1885, taken after the Staten Island residence had come to an end, suggests the air of genteel privilege that had always permeated the Minturn household. The photographer James Breese captured Edith and her three sisters, a quartet of snowy-gowned teenagers gathered around a piano beside a towering potted plant and a bust of Venus on a pedestal. May, Gertrude and Mildred all have pretty faces, but ingénue Edith stands out with her sweet, fine features.

The refinement of the girls’ upbringing in their surroundings, the lessons in music and French, the shopping trips and visits from the dressmaker, all formed intimacies that would keep them close for years to come. That the Minturns hired this photographer at all telegraphed their class, their connections and their taste. Breese, a member of New York’s artistic elite, inhabited a circle that included John Singer Sargent, the architect Stanford White and the artist Charles Dana Gibson.

High society of the sort to which the Minturns and the Stokeses belonged had blossomed in the post–Civil War era, when millionaires multiplied and New York became the place to see and be seen. The self-appointed social arbiter Ward McAllister coined the term the 400 as a way of categorizing the haves of the era—in the most literal sense, he used it to mean the number of notables qualified to be guests in society matron Caroline Astor’s ballroom.

McAllister died in 1895, but his legacy lived on with increasing numbers of nouveau riche New Yorkers, who resided on Fifth Avenue and took their status-conscious summer vacations in huge Newport, Rhode Island, mansions. Some of the 400 were New York’s Knickerbocracy, sometimes termed Patriots, old New York families whose roots stretched back to New Amsterdam, while others had made their money much more recently, but altogether they were the people who felt at ease with their fellow swells. Both the Minturns and the Stokeses qualified as part of the 400, though neither family made society dinners and balls the center of their lives as some families did. And Staten Island was largely off the social radar, which set these families apart.

Between Edith and Newton, the first touch would be only a glancing blow. Christ Church stood in the center of Elliottville, on Bard Avenue, the same street as the Minturn home. On Sundays both families attended the Episcopal services, with Anson Stokes leading his older children on a foot march through the woods, a mile hike from the heights of New Brighton. There Newton Stokes first encountered Edie Minturn. She sat at right angles to him, the pews of the two families positioned cater-cornered, so he saw her not from behind but in profile.

It would not be the first time that a match was begun in a liturgical setting. And it indicates more than anything that the Minturn and Stokes families swam in the same waters. Aristocrats in postbellum New York formed an extended family, sharing marriages and schools, churches and cemeteries. They maintained the same rituals and customs, with a sense of identity that was made up of the refinement of the clothes one wore and the grandeur of the houses one inhabited. The Metropolitan Opera, opened in 1883, was their shared back yard.

Thus, a match between two children of the best families involved a feeling of destiny that revolved around tribal traditions much more than individual romance. Cued by markers of wealth and privilege, members of the upper class recognized (and thus married) each other with unerring alacrity. Still, church-crossed might rank just below star-crossed in the lovers’ lexicon.

By the 1880s, the rustic enclave of northeastern Staten Island had grown less exclusive and, for those who prized exclusivity, less desirable. The Minturns fled first, in 1880, then the Stokeses, in 1886. The deciding factor for each was the explosion of popular resorts around St. George, which exercised a powerful lure for Manhattanites, louche and luxe both, now that ferry service had grown more dependable. The Staten Island Amusement Company produced athletic contests and beauty pageants, as well as an enterprise enticingly titled The Fall of Babylon Show.

The adults became disenchanted with the enchanted woods much sooner than did the children. Newton recalls hearing his mother wax indignant over the rough element that was ruining their island, blighting the paradise that rightfully belonged to them. Moving from New Brighton to New York City full time, the families would leave the Fall of Babylon behind. It was a good thing, considered Helen Stokes, because it would now become more convenient to expose the children properly to the social opportunities and dancing lessons that honed a person entering society.

Newton and Edith obediently followed their parents. The rural, green-golden childhood years had come and gone. But the abundance, refinement and elegant privilege they had always known, even in the wilds of Staten Island, would switch to a new venue. For now, Newton and Edie would see each other only occasionally, at teas, balls and dinners, demure functions that placed formal etiquette firmly over personal interaction. The love born as childish affection under a seaside sun would have to wait its turn.

2

Flying Cloud

It was difficult for an eighteen-year-old girl to see how it had come to this. Edie Minturn knew her father had been having financial difficulties. She had overheard gloomy words, like reversal and setback, flapping up like black carrion birds from the hushed conversations of the adults in the family. Edith knew, too, that business was bad all around. For three years, a deep recession had gripped the country, beginning on Wall Street, where brokerages failed, and continuing to railroad bankruptcies, crop failures and a slaking of the export business, what the newspapers had labeled the Panic of 1883. All around New York, two years later, millionaires were still hemorrhaging money.

This was not the first Panic of the century. Yet until now her father’s shipping concern had survived the sudden jolts and wild swings of the economy. This recession had a direct impact on the business of Grinnell, Minturn & Co. She knew it was ridiculous, but some petulant part