Art: End of an Avenue

End of an Avenue On a crackling-cold winter’s night three years ago the five-story, 56-room mansion at 1051 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, glittered like a luster chandelier. Inside, the warm pulse of a Cuban orchestra greeted the guests as they were ushered into the tapestried hall, which florists had turned into a bower of blossoming apple trees for the occasion. Last to arrive were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. As he pulled off his overcoat, the black-tied Duke asked if this was a white-tie occasion, then muttered, “Well, it’s too damn late to change anyway!” and toddled up the red-carpeted grand staircase.

Lord Nelson’s Ghost. In quiet, refined leisure, the evening passed. The dinner party of 40-odd guests proceeded to a pinepaneled dining room after Sir Christopher Wren, where the courses were served on Royal Worcester blue and gold, Chelsea, Derby and Minton porcelain. Then the ladies floated to the French salon on a cloud of chatter, admired the companion-piece oval Boucher paintings as they gossiped. The gentlemen warmed their brandy in the Lord Nelson room, surrounded by Elizabethan paneling that Nelson himself had admired when it was on the walls of a bedroom in the Star Hotel at Great Yarmouth. The party then assembled for music.

When the last guest had departed at 1:30. and the house had become silent, the hostess followed her regular custom. Recalls her personal maid of 20 years: “This was the time she loved best. She would walk around and look at everything again. She used to say: ‘It’s a lovely house for a party.’ ”

This was her last grand party. Long ailing, Mrs. Mae Caldwell Manwaring Plant Hay ward Rovensky died last July, at 75, in Clarendon Court, her 33-room summer house next door to the Vanderbilts’ 23-room “Beaulieu” in Newport, R.I. (She is survived by her fourth husband, John E. Rovensky, Manhattan financier, whom she married in 1954.) This week her Manhattan house, the last of the fabulous Fifth Avenue mansions to be fully occupied, will go on the block.*

Just to tabulate her possessions, the Manhattan auction house, Parke-Bernet, has published a 313-page illustrated catalogue. Sale of the 1,021 listed items will take two weeks, is expected to bring over $1.000.000. not counting the 167 lots of jewelry. Among the jewels are two of the most famous Oriental pearl necklaces ever assembled, a strand of 55 and another of 73 matched and graduated pearls, which in 1916 Mrs. Rovensky (then Mrs. Plant) received from her multimillionaire husband. Commodore Plant had taken them as payment of $1,000,000 for their house at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue. The purchaser: Carder’s, whose headquarters were established at the necklace-bought site.

“The Meaning of Wealth.” Before the 52nd Street house was sold. Plant called in Architect Guy Lowell, supervising architect of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, to design the new mansion, including a library of Jacobean carved-oak paneling (see cut). To furnish the town house, Antique Dealer Arthur Vernay ransacked his own collection, sent scouts throughout Europe. The result has borne well the test of time. For the jade, Chinese porcelains, 18th-century French furniture, paneling, fixtures. Royal Beauvais tapestries by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, paintings by Watteau, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Romney and Raeburn. the current market will pay back the investment, and more than make up for the toll of inflation.

But as a way of life, the Rovensky mansion, with its deep-sunk. 6½-ft. marble tub serviced with brass swans’ neck faucets and the 27-piece George I silver toilet service, is already as surely a thing of the past as the stately English homes for which the objects were first fashioned. Gone is the era in which the lady of the mansion and her good friend Grace Vanderbilt, who lived across 86th Street, would be chauffeured around the block to visit (because a lady went no farther than from her door to the curb on foot).

In the Parke-Bernet auction catalogue the bell tolled for the era: “Here was someone who believed with great sincerity that the social order was immutably secure; that the meaning of wealth . . . was that it should be translated into an environment of beauty and dignity, as its proper appanages; and that once the eye was trained to the pursuit, the appeal of great craftsmanship was irresistible, and its ownership a justification of one’s position.” Mrs. William Randolph Hearst Sr., a close personal friend of Mrs. Rovensky, put it more simply: “It was one of the most beautiful houses in New York with the most exquisite things in it. It’s one of the last great houses, fine houses. It’s the end of a wonderful era.”

* As the result of a domestic tangle with as many facets as Mrs. Rovensky’s life, her estate is being contested by Peter Bennett Plant, 27, the son of Cinemactress Constance Bennett. Miss Bennett claims that her son was born before divorce proceedings were completed against her husband, the late Playboy Philip M. Plant, who was Mrs. Rovensky’s son by her first marriage and the adopted son of her second husband, Railroad and Shipping Financier Morton F. Plant. But because Miss Bennett said nothing about the boy until after the divorce proceedings were final, for years claimed that he was adopted. Mrs. Rovensky never officially recognized him as her grandson.