Sublime

And the New York Central. Where did they think the money was coming from? “Keep the Central our road,” he had told Billy. And what had they done? They had sold their stock and let others manage the railroad, and now the Central, their source of wealth, was gone. And the spending! The wild, extravagant, endless spending. The Commodore had never let

Why had he left his fortune to one son, to Billy? To keep the wealth concentrated from generation to generation. “What you have got isn’t worth anything, unless you have got the power, and if you give away the surplus, you give away the control.”

What was the secret of his success? he was asked. “Secret? There is no secret about it. All you have to do is to attend to your business and go ahead. The secret of my success is this: I never tell what I am going to do till I have done it.”

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.

When the Cornelius Vanderbilts had acquired the land in the 1880s, it had cost $375,000 and the house $3 million more. Their new mansion had been hailed by the press as “a private house which must for a century or two elevate the standard of such houses, and tend, at least, to the improvement of domestic architecture.”8 Now in 1925 the land, a prim

“If a boy is good for anything,” the Commodore remarked, “you can stick him down anywhere and he’ll earn his living and lay up something; if he can’t do it he ain’t worth saving, and you can’t save him.”

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 fa