(Alva and a friend had once been at Woodlawn Cemetery, looking at a tomb of pink marble that an heiress had built for her husband. “Ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous!” Alva opined. A workman who was nearby heard her. “Well,” he said, “if you think this is funny, go and look at that tomb over there where the crazy woman who built it has put cats on

Two of William’s sisters, Ethelinda Allen (the beneficiary of a $400,000 trust fund) and Marie Alicia La Bau (the recipient of $250,000 of railroad bonds), along with William’s brother, Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt (who had been given only the income from a $200,000 trust fund to be controlled by William), ganged up and decided to contest their

Harry laughed. “I don’t suppose you have any idea of the way I live. Well, I shall have to enlighten you. I live not on my wits, but on my wit. I make a career of being popular.’39 Bessie did not understand, so Harry patiently explained to her just how he had been living so well on so little.

“My life was never destined to be quite happy,” he told them. “It was laid out along lines which I could not foresee, almost from earliest childhood. It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for. Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

With the Commodore’s money, the two lively young ladies published the first edition of their newspaper, Woodhull Ö Claflin’s Weekly, on May 14, 1870. And what a paper it was! PROGRESS! FREE THOUGHT! UNTRAMMELED LIVES! BREAKING THE WAY FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS? heralded the masthead. The paper, whose articles were written by a number of gentlemen

If ever Scott Fitzgerald needed evidence to substantiate his aphorism that “the very rich…are different from you and me,” it was here in spades in this portrait gallery of extravagant crazies that is the unique saga of the Vanderbilt family.

Burning forty-two tons of coal each day, averaging thirteen knots, the North Star plowed across the Atlantic. Within several days, a routine had established itself. “There was discipline on board that ship, sir,” the Reverend Choules noted. “Each man attended to his own business. The Commodore did the swearing, and I did the praying. So we never

“Society,” he had said, “is an occupation in itself. Only a man who has a good deal of leisure and a taste for it can keep up with its demands.’2 He found himself “assailed on all sides” by people wanting to enter society, and became, as he said, “a diplomat [who] committed myself to nothing, promised much and performed as little as possible.”

How would the ladies make their investment decisions? That was easy, the Commodore responded. Mrs. Woodhull would go into a trance and predict the course of railroad stocks. “Do as I do,” he told one young man asking for stock advice, “consult the spirits.”100 The stock of the New York Central would be rising, he told another. How did he know?