HISTORICAL NOTES: Quality

Back in 1896 when auburn-haired Grace Graham Wilson bagged young Cornelius Vanderbilt, most of New York’s 400 agreed that it was a most unsuitable marriage. As a great-grandson of the tough old Commodore who built the New York Central, Cornelius Vanderbilt had some claims to aristocracy. Grace’s social assets were far more modest. Her father, Richard T. Wilson, was a onetime Georgia farm boy whom well-bred New Yorkers regarded with distaste because he had made his fortune himself and had started it by speculating in cotton while more gentlemanly Southerners were off fighting Yankees.

The elder Vanderbilts never really forgave the young couple. Cornelius’ inheritance from his father was cut to $1,500,000—though brother Alfred Gwynne, who fell heir to the bulk of the estate, evened things up somewhat by giving Cornelius another $6,000,000. Cornelius’ mother, who made little secret of the fact that she regarded her daughter-in-law as a climber, did nothing to ease Grace into the charmed circle of the elite.

“Poor Marie Antoinette.” Grace saw to it that she was not excluded for long. Her parties, on which in her heyday she spent about half a million a year, became famed for their opulence. For one Fēte des Roses she brought the entire cast of Red Rose Inn, then in the midst of a highly successful New York fun, to a theater built especially for the occasion on the grounds of Beaulieu, her red brick villa at Newport. Said one of her guests, the Grand Duke Boris of Russia: “Is this really your America or have I landed on an enchanted island?”

Grace Vanderbilt’s most potent social weapon was the cultivation of European royalty, a technique which earned her the nickname “Kingfisher.” Her first great coup occurred in 1902, when by request of Kaiser Wilhelm II she was hostess to Prince Henry of Prussia at the only private social function he attended in the U.S. In the years that followed, she entertained the King and Queen of the Belgians, the Crown Prince of Sweden, the Crown Prince of Norway, and every British ruler from Edward VII to George VI. By 1915 she had completely routed erratic, sharp-tongued Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, the chief rival claimant to leadership of U.S. (i.e., New York and Newport) society. The importance of the position she had won was fully apparent to Grace Vanderbilt. Said she on one occasion: “I feel deeply for poor dear Marie Antoinette, for if The Revolution came to America I should be the first to go.”

World War I, which depleted the ranks of royalty and otherwise lowered the tone of society, took some of the luster off Grace Vanderbilt’s crown. High taxes and World War II dealt her even harder blows. The famed Vanderbilt hospitality was offered to some odd citizens indeed: among them was Soviet U.N. Delegate Andrei Gromyko, whom Mrs. Vanderbilt regaled with reminiscences of the late Czar Nicholas. After her husband’s death in 1942, Grace Vanderbilt abandoned to the wreckers the 58-room Fifth Avenue mansion which had cost her husband’s grandfather $1,000,000 to build in 1881.

“The Gardener’s Cottage.” Resettled farther up Fifth Avenue in a 28-room pile which she termed “The Gardener’s Cottage,” Mrs. Vanderbilt lost none of her queenly manner. Convinced that Vanderbilts were a breed apart, she sometimes described herself as “all alone in the house,” when there were, in fact, 18 servants there with her. (“She was quality” explained one devoted retainer.) Despite increasing feebleness, she continued to maintain at least nominal sway over what remained of high society. At the 1949 opening of the Metropolitan Opera, she appeared in a wheelchair, persuaded to suffer this discomfort by a friend’s remark that Queen Mary was upset because “so few were left to uphold traditions.”

Within little more than a year, however, Grace Vanderbilt, now in her mid-80s, was bedridden. Within two years she was blind. Last week, she died of pneumonia. Totally dependent on others in the last years of her life, and confined to the little world of her bedroom, she sometimes remembered the great days at Beaulieu. She would say to whoever was near by: “Come, let’s go for a drive, darling.” Then her companion, sitting down by Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bed, would take her on an imaginary tour of Newport. “There’s a sparkle on the water today,” she would say. “There’s Mr. So-and-So bowing to you . . .”