Dead End Gene Pool Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Thirty-one Moons

  Popeye

  Gaga in the Jungle

  Terrapin Soup

  My Family and Other Domestics

  Ugly House

  DC

  Why They Invented Florida

  A Dose of Religion

  Oi,Yank!

  George

  Maine Revisited

  We’ll Always Have Paris

  Go Fish

  Checkout Time

  Deposition

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

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  First printing, April 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Wendy Burden

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  Burden, Wendy.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18618-3

  1. Burden, Wendy—Childhood and youth. 2. Burden family. I. Title.

  CT275.B785218A3 2010

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  For my mother, goddamn it.

  Prologue

  IT’S A TESTAMENT to his libido, if not his character, that Cornelius Vanderbilt died of syphilis instead of apoplexy.

  In 1794, a few miles from where his powdered bones eternally lie, within the eight-foot-thick walls of the largest tomb ever built in America, the origin of my family’s fortune was born into what would prove to be a very material world. As the sixth of nine children, Cornelius was expected to pull his weight. At eleven he had dropped out of school, and at sixteen he was piloting his own small ferryboat. At nineteen he married his cousin Sophia Johnson (an act of consanguinity that arguably heralded the start of our genetic troubles) and set about fathering the first of thirteen children. By twenty-one the Vanderbilt name was on several schooners, and by thirty-five Cornelius had earned the sobriquet of Commodore and controlled a network of steamboat routes that traveled up and down the East Coast. At seventy he had the wherewithal to switch from steamships to railroads. And at seventy-five he eloped to Canada to marry a thirty-one-year-old woman named Frank.

  Many colorful adjectives have been used to describe my great-times-four-grandfather: egomaniacal, unethical, coarse, brilliant, vulgar, ingenious, pigheaded, underbred, ruthless. Only one is necessary: rich. And not just a little rich; at the time of his death—in the midst of a blizzard, which caused the glass roof of Grand Central Terminal to collapse, even as its creator lay rasping his final, philandering breath—the full market value of the Commodore was in the neighborhood of 167 billion bucks.

  Call it syphilitic dementia; in his will the Commodore disinherited all of his offspring—save one. William H. Vanderbilt, already in possession of the world’s largest muttonchops, was ceded control of his father’s fortune. To show his appreciation, he repaid his father with the monumental morgue he now resides in, a replica of the French twelfth-century church of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard in Arles, designed by the favorite architect of the Vanderbilts, Richard Morris Hunt. William H. had his father’s corpse exhumed and transferred posthaste, post-construction, and interred beneath an elaborate stone relief carving of the Creation.

  Eight years later, William H. was no doubt surprised at his own removal to the family vault. He now lies across the apse from his father, reposing in a kindred niche, beneath a depiction of Paradise. And whereas the Commodore died the richest person in America, his son managed to double his inheritance in the corporeal time he had left, and he died the richest person In The World.

  Thankfully, William H. was more egalitarian than his father. Instead of stiffing his children, he divided his wealth (however misogynistically) between his four sons and four daughters, one of the latter, Florence, being my great-great-grandmother.

  The sisters, Margaret, Emily, Florence, and Eliza, all married, and spent the remainder of their lives outbuilding one another. If a sister built a summer cottage with forty rooms, the next had to build one with forty-two. In 1877, the year her grandfather, the Commodore, died, Florence married a financier named Hamilton McKay Twombly. The groom came with his own money, and proved to be no slouch at making lots more of it. He invested all of their assets in mining ventures and transportation, and multiplied them. Florence went on to be the wealthiest of her siblings, as well as the longest lived, and she was without a doubt the biggest spender of them all. Which would explain why we, her descendants, carry the malignant code for extravagance in our genomes.

  The Twomblys had four children: Alice, Florence, Ruth, and Hamilton. The family lived the simple life of the wildly rich; they wintered in New York City, in their town house, the last great private home to be built on Fifth Avenue, and when not traveling in Europe, they summered in Newport, in a fifty-room cottage on Cliff Walk, overlooking the sea.

  It wasn’t enough. Hamilton Twombly wanted something within commuting distance of the city. So in 1890 he purchased twelve hundred acres in Morris County, New Jersey, and enlisted the architectural services of McKim, Mead and White. Six hundred laborers were shipped over from Italy, and it took them six years to construct a 110-room rose brick and limestone Georgian house that was a faithful reproduction of Christopher Wren’s west wing of Hampton Court palace. (Emulating the houses of King Henry VIII was not considered a frivolity at the turn of the century.) Thomas Edison, a neighbor and friend, designed the massive electrical generator and heating plant needed to run the estate. Stabling was built to house fifty horses, as were carriage houses and garages, a dozen greenhouses and an orangerie. Frederick Law O
lmsted rearranged a hundred and fifty acres of the wild New Jersey rolling hills, and forests of oak and beech, into a series of formal gardens, terraces, and parkland. The remaining 750 acres were designated for the working farm and the dairy operation of several hundred prized Guernsey cattle, the largest such private breeding farm in the country.

  The Twomblys named their labor of love “Florham,” a combination of their two first names. It was close enough to the city that you could see the skyline of New York from the east terrace, and for four months out of the year, during the spring and fall social seasons, they lived, and entertained, there.

  The opulence of the newly rich was at its zenith in the late 1800s, and no one did it better than my great-great-grandparents. They stuffed their houses full of “important” furnishings: Queen Anne, Georgian, Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and Regency furniture; seventeenth-century Barberini tapestries, paintings by Rubens and Vandyke; eighteenth-century colored mezzotints; antique Chinese and Persian rugs; Meissen, and K’ang and Ming Dynasty, porcelains; bronzes and miniatures, and gold and enamel snuffboxes; and Louis XV gilded chandeliers the size of the Hindenburg. They lured the highest echelon of workers imaginable, like Queen Victoria’s head gardener. They had nonstop weekend house parties, and dances and lunches and teas and balls. In just two generations what had begun as a meritocracy had turned into a lifestyle that could rival that of European royalty. It was all so wonderfully arriviste, so very American.

  Rarely do things go as planned: Alice, the eldest Twombly child, died of pneumonia when she was sixteen. Hamilton, the youngest, drowned a few years later, when he was a counselor at a camp for poor boys.

  My great-great-grandfather was inconsolable over the loss of his only son. He suffered a nervous breakdown. It eventually leeched into his kidneys, and he died—a brokenhearted, if extremely wealthy, man.

  Grandma Twombly, as she was now known, went on to thrive for another forty years. Tiny and birdlike, autocratic, elegant, frosty, and brittle, she worked like a party animal for her title of the Vanderbilt Hostess. As the undisputed head of old-guard New York society, she entertained lavishly, with the help of her famous French chef and her staff of two hundred, in an imperial style that few could match.

  And when she finally died, at the age of ninety-eight, from injuries sustained during a tumble in the living room-like confines of her Rolls-Royce limousine, it was said (by those who cared) that New York Society died with her.

  Out of the four Twombly children, two daughters remained: Florence, my great-grandmother, and her younger sister, Ruth.

  Ruth was never to marry. After her father’s death, she assumed management of her mother’s empire, and she excelled at running it. When her mother died, she continued to occupy the houses, and devoted the rest of her time to charitable pursuits in the City, and three-martini caviar-foie-gras lunches at Delmonico’s and the Pavillon. A practical girl, she had rung the wine merchant the day she’d heard the Volstead Act was coming, and had stocked her capacious cellars with enough drink to last a hundred years. (We’re still drinking it.)

  Florence, on the other hand, did marry. Which vastly benefitted my father’s side of the family, where we will remain, because even though this book is about my father and my mother, the truth of the matter is my mother’s family didn’t have a lot of money, and my father’s family did, and rich people behaving badly are far more interesting than the not so rich behaving badly.

  Across and north of the river from the Vanderbilt mausoleum, in a pastoral necropolis known as the Albany Rural Cemetery, within the less imposing ramifications of the Burden family vault, another great-etc.-grandfather reposes away. Born within a few years of the Commodore, Henry Burden was an inventor who emigrated from Scotland and settled in Troy, New York. There he took on a job of managing the local nail and iron factory, and with the same raw talent and unerring work ethic as the Commodore (but a much nicer personality), he rose through the ranks to become proprietor of a massive foundry. The Burden Iron Works was famous for the world’s tallest, most powerful waterwheel, and for the world’s first horseshoe-making machine, which was capable of spitting shoes out at the rate of one per second, allowing Henry, in the entrepreneurial spirit of his adopted country, to sell them (at great profit) to both armies during the Civil War.

  The sons of Henry Burden worked in the ever-expanding family business. His grandsons all followed suit—except for William Armistead Moale Burden, my great-grandfather; he was destined for a far more spectacular, if spectacularly shorter, life.

  William did everything right from the get-go. He went to Groton, then to Harvard, where he was captain of the football team, class president, first marshal, and president of the Hasty Pudding Club. Throughout, he even remained a devout Christian. In 1900, after only three years, he graduated cum laude, and embarked on a trip around the world, during which he was photographed repeatedly (and becomingly, for of course he was also handsome) astride everything from camels to elephants and in front of every edifice referenced in Baedeker’s. Upon his return to New York he was elected a member of the New York Stock Exchange and became a partner in the banking firm of J. D. Smith and Company. And then he married my great-grandmother, Florence Twombly.

  Florence must have sensed it was high time to clean up the waters of the gene pool. The family had been practically self-pollinating, what with all those cousins marrying cousins. And William in turn must have known it was time to evolve financially. The Burden fortune was known for its ups and downs, but mostly its downs, having been tossed about by several generations of ne’er-do-wells and inopportune matches.

  My great-grandparents were married on April 12, 1904, in a ceremony at St. Thomas Church, in New York. The New York Times devoted several columns to describing what it called a “full force turnout by New York society.” After a false start (a baby girl who died in infancy and was never again mentioned), William quickly sired two sons: my grandfather, William Armistead Moale Burden II, and my uncle Shirley Carter Burden. And then he died.

  A New York Times article dated February 3, 1909, explained:

  W.A.M. BURDEN DIES OF STRANGE MALADY

  Chronic Recurrent Fever the Only Name Physicians Can Give It——No Remedy.

  If one has to die of a malady, it might as well be strange.

  My grandparents met at a cocktail party in London in 1928. William A. M. Burden II was fresh out of Harvard and was on leg number four of his Grand World Tour. Margaret Livingston Partridge was in Europe for the season. My grandfather was bowled over by her beauty. For their first date, he picked her up at her hotel in a supercharged four-and-a-half-liter Bentley convertible. He remembered her as being unsuitably, if stunningly, dressed in high heels and an impressively grand picture hat. Which he also recalled she had difficulty holding on to during their fourth 110 mph lap around the Brooklands Raceway, which he only noticed because while she was cowering under the dashboard, the flapping brim of her hat was obstructing the temperature gauge.

  Peggy Partridge was the autumn leaf and only child of respectable, if bohemian, artist parents. Her mother was a fashionable poet and a follower of the occult. Her father, William Ordway Partridge, was also a poet, as well as a novelist and a critic, but he was famous for his portrait sculpture, such as the equestrian statue of General Grant in Brooklyn and the beautiful Pietà in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which has been handled and stroked so many times, Jesus is beginning to look conceptual.

  My grandparents were married at St. Thomas Church in New York City in February of 1931. After a four-month honeymoon to just about everywhere, they settled into a cozy duplex apartment at Number 10 Gracie Square with their French chef, their English butler, and their frequently intoxicated Scottish valet. My grandfather went to work on Wall Street, and my grandmother took classes at the Art Students League on Fifty-seventh Street, where she spent her days drawing naked people in charcoal.

  Right away, of course, a son was born. Then another, and another, and another
. My father, the eldest, was christened (un-surprisingly) William A. M. Burden III. He did everything he was expected to. He went to the Buckley School in New York, and then to Milton Academy, and then to Harvard. Along the way he met a girl named Leslie Hamilton. They fell in love and were married when both were in college. Their future was bright and scholarly.

  In September of 1951 Ruth Vanderbilt Twombly died while vacationing abroad. A week later my brother was born. And it was a good thing his father gave him a Y chromosome when he was a zygote, because otherwise he would have been stuck with the name of Ruth, instead of entering the world as—you guessed it—William A. M. Burden IV.

  None of Aunt Ruth’s heirs wanted anything to do with the three Brobdingnagian abodes and all their museum-quality contents; not her sister, Florence; her nephews, William and Shirley; or her great-nephew, my father. In 1955, the year I was to be born, Florham was put on the market, the Newport cottage was bequeathed to a Catholic college for girls, and the house in the city was sold. In an apocryphal four-day sale, Parke-Bernet auctioned off all of the contents of all three.

  If that’s not an omen, you tell me what is.

  Thirty-one Moons

  “YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE—whoops!” The head stewardess, a beehived blonde, dropped her microphone. While she grappled for it on the floor of the DC-4’s galley, the resultant screech and the disclosure of her pneumatic bust ensured all eyes were directed her way. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” she began again, “we have a little problem. In a short while, the captain will ask all of you to . . . ah . . . to assume the crash position as illustrated in the safety information located in the seat pocket in front of you—excuse me . . . ah please, your attention again—PLEASE!”

  The words crash position had thrown a switch. People began twisting in their seats, trying to figure out why such a measure was deemed necessary when the plane had not changed altitude for the last half hour and was, in fact, chugging nicely along. “Huh?” became “What’s happening?” which then turned to “Just what the HELL is going on?” Finally the stewardess lost it and yelled, “QUI—ET!” which was the cue for the captain to assume control from the flight deck.