Maybe the Bible gives us the clue. Maybe it all began … in the beginning.
Babe frowned and turned the page. In the first chapter, “By Their Roots Shall Ye Know Them,” Dobbsie examined bloodlines.
Through marriage licenses he had been able to trace Scott Devens’s ancestry back through three impoverished Kentucky generations; he said that research further back had been made impossible by “a wall of illegitimacy.”
Dobbsie then turned to Babe’s family tree. He had unearthed the name Pieter Isaak Valk in the register of the Shearith Israel Synagogue of Amsterdam—a remarkable congregation where, almost seven decades earlier, the name Jan Jakob Astor had been similarly inscribed—Jan, of course, being the Dutch form of John. (The name Valk, Dobbsie explained, was related to the Dutch word for falcon, which also served as a slangy Lowlands pejorative for a sharp operator. Imagine, he said, a young American called Peter Isaac Shark, and you have the picture.) Pieter Isaak, the youngest son of a peddler, had been bar mitzvahed in 1830 and in 1833 had emigrated to New York on a ship of the Dutch West Indies Company. He went into the fur-trading business, hauling barrels of Dutch rum into the Indian reserves in upper New York State and Quebec; he bartered liquor for animal pelts, shrewdly extending credit to the tribes, and forged a monopoly.
In 1848 Valk, now a stock market millionaire calling himself Peter Isaac Vanderwalk, rescued the United States Treasury from bankruptcy, forming a consortium to buy up the largest bond issue ever floated by the federal government. From 1860 to 1864 he bankrolled Abraham Lincoln’s Union government in its struggle against the Confederacy.
At age sixty-eight, Peter Isaac married Isabella Hadley, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of the president of the New York Stock Exchange. On the wedding day, Isabella’s father, under grand jury indictment for embezzlement, was able to make good all discrepancies in the Exchange’s books, effectively mooting the charge.
Because Vanderwalk so openly used his power, society considered him a robber baron and shut him out.
Dobbsie told a story dating from the 1880s, when the Astors and the Vanderbilts had sworn they would never say more than two words to any Vanderwalk.
Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt, competing for the position of absolute leader of New York society, had filled their mansions with quantities of European art and sculpture. But one prize eluded them: neither could persuade her husband to spend the half-million dollars which the Austrian chancellory was asking for its Rubens Adoration.
Isabella Vanderwalk determined to exploit the situation and make her long-delayed mark in society. At his wife’s insistence, Vanderwalk paid the Austrians a half million and hung the painting in his Fifth Avenue mansion.
Society faced a dilemma: how to view the Rubens without appearing to accept Vanderwalk’s hospitality. Finally Mrs. Astor’s friends decreed they were willing to visit the Vanderwalk mansion, but only between two and four in the afternoon, taking no food or refreshment. Mrs. Vanderbilt’s friends decreed they were willing to visit between four and six, with the same condition.
Vanderwalk thereupon announced that he would give the Rubens to the Metropolitan Museum, with an endowment to keep admission free. However, he gave both the Vanderbilt and the Astor factions one last chance to see the painting privately: he invited them to dinner at his home the evening before the gift was to be made. (It was well known that Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Astor never entered the same private home or sat at the same table.)
After agonizing whether it was better to dine with one’s enemies in the home of a robber baron or to rub shoulders with one’s inferiors in the Metropolitan Museum, society opted for the more comfortable humiliation, dinner.
The etiquette of the time required that invitations had to be returned, and by accepting Vanderwalk’s, New York society obligated themselves to invite him and his family into their homes.
There was, however, no obligation to speak to a Vanderwalk.
Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt both arrived at exactly 8:15. As they had sworn, they said only two words to Vanderwalk: “Good evening.” They had arranged that any other messages would be communicated by their banker, Pierpont Morgan.
The ladies found the Rubens hanging in the grand salon, covered by a gold velvet curtain. Pierpont Morgan asked, “Do you not have something to show these ladies?” Vanderwalk answered in his Dutch accent, “Whatever the ladies like.” The ladies said nothing. “Well, then,” Vanderwalk said, “I will show them a fine dinner.”
After the four-hour twelve-course seated banquet, Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt again stood before the curtained Adoration, and Pierpont Morgan again asked Vanderwalk, “Are you absolutely sure you do not have something to show these ladies?” Again Vanderwalk said in his Dutch accent, “Whatever the ladies like.” The ladies still were silent. “Well, then,” Vanderwalk said, “I will show them some fine dancing.”
The guests repaired to the ballroom, where the New York Symphony played the latest waltzes and quadrilles. At two in the morning, when a light breakfast was served, Pierpont Morgan spoke in great anger to his host. “Sir, to put it plainly, have you not an Adoration by Peter Paul Rubens to show us before we go home?”
Vanderwalk looked astonished. “Indeed I had, but at midnight it became the property of the museum, and the workmen removed it.”
“Why in God’s name did you not uncover it?”
In his Dutch accent, Vanderwalk replied, “Out of consideration for Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Astor. They have criticized me, in society, for displaying my possessions.”
“Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt would not have criticized you tonight.”
“Bless me, but I am buffaloed. The ladies had only to say the word.”
Over the next two years, Vanderwalk’s five hundred guests dutifully invited him and his Mrs. to five hundred dinners; at none of the gatherings was one word beyond “Good evening” addressed to either of them.
Till his death, Vanderwalk remained an unregenerate embarrassment, speaking English with a thick accent, cheating at cards, dining with dirty hands and dripping food on himself, calling for Dutch rum with his meals, even though fashion insisted on French wine. Old Vanderwalk even went so far as to tell bawdy stories in mixed company that included the wife of President McKinley; for this he was roundly scolded in his New York Times obituary.
With the expansion of wealth and the slackening of moral codes that resulted toward the end of the 1890s, the entry requirements for New York Society shifted. It was enough to have money and not to have been convicted of a crime. The New York that had shut Vanderwalk out welcomed his young wife, his son, and his dollars.
Vanderwalk’s son, Hadley Vanderwalk, Sr., attended Princeton University, married a Rockefeller, produced three sons, built a telephone and telegraph monopoly, served in World War I and in the kitchen cabinet of three presidents, never drank or smoked, financed Lend Lease, and spent a lifetime living down his father’s reputation.
But perhaps Hadley Vanderwalk, Sr.’s most fateful act, Dobbsie wrote, was to bequeath to his youngest granddaughter—Beatrice Wilmerding Vanderwalk—half of all the aluminum in the United States—making her, at age three, one of the ten richest women in America.
As Babe read on, she felt she was seeing herself in a fun-house mirror. The person that Dobbsie called Babe bore only a distant, distorted resemblance to the self she remembered and knew.
As a five-year-old, Dobbsie reported, Babe had been photographed by Cartier-Bresson, playing with her two hundred dolls, her thirty-two doll houses, and her two thousand doll gowns; the photographs had appeared in Vogue.