An American Princess Read online

  The Hostetters, too, didn’t suffer in the least from the financial crisis. Their thinly veiled alcohol trade flourished, in fact, if only because the poor needed the solace of the herbal elixir more now than ever before and were prepared to spend their very last cent on it if necessary. This indifference to the crisis was reflected in Tod’s spending habits. In October 1893, when most of America was in the grip of financial uncertainty, he commissioned yacht builder Herreshoff to design for him a new, more luxurious, and even bigger sailboat.

  The Duquesne was more than 130 feet long and cost $50,000. The boat was so imposing that even the snobs at the New York Yacht Club could no longer ignore it. Under the pressure of the financial crisis, they had already been forced to reappraise their norms regarding respectability. Now they accepted Tod as a member and granted the Duquesne a permanent mooring berth in their New York marina.

  A month later Tod bought a piece of land near a fork in the Beaver River, about thirty miles north of Pittsburgh, for $25,000. A year earlier he had purchased nearly 250 acres in the same place because his young wife just couldn’t get used to the dirty air in Pittsburgh and longed for greenery and space.

  Naid’s Delight, as Tod’s new property had been known, was described in 1770 by George Washington himself as “a good body of land.” It was beautifully situated on a small tributary of the Ohio River called Raccoon Creek. Still used as farmland, it was perfect for the luxurious hunting lodge the young millionaire couple had built on it. Decades later, workmen would still remember how generous and friendly their employer had been. He was, in the words of one of them, “a first-class fellow to work for,” with “few worries in life.”

  On October 6, 1894, the Pittsburgh Press published a detailed article about Hostetter House, as the hunting lodge was called. According to the article, the house resembled a gigantic log cabin, once more showing that Allene wasn’t ashamed of her roots. She and Tod had been inspired by a building they’d seen the previous year in Chicago, during the first major world’s fair to be held on American soil. The California State Building resembled a Spanish-style country house, incorporating different woods characteristic of all the states.

  But the log cabin—only the chimney was built of brick—was one the pioneers could never have dreamed of. The house had a total of twenty-five rooms, including an impressive dining-and-ballroom and a just-as-fine sitting room. In the basement there were wine cellars and other storage rooms but also apartments built for the eight servants who lived there year-round. Along the river, space had been cleared for their own jetty, from which a drive lined with stately poplars led to the house. Next to the house was a polo field and a nine-hole golf course and beyond that, a stone house for the estate manager, kennels for a pack of hounds, and three large stable blocks. These contained Tod’s favorite carriage, a tally-ho pulled by six horses, and—Allene’s pride and joy—no fewer than forty chestnut horses for riding.

  The whole thing had cost about $100,000, and the Pittsburgh Press was lyrical in its description. The article’s headline read “Picturesque Raccoon Farm—A Country House of Magnificence where Wealth and Good Taste Are Combined to Produce the Happiest Effect.” Now Pittsburgh society could no longer ignore the young Mrs. Hostetter, who had carved herself a way into an environment that had originally greeted her with cold hostility. From 1895 onward, Mrs. T. R. Hostetter and her two daughters—the younger, Verna, was born in January 1893—were given their own mention in the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Blue Book. This meant that scarcely four years after her much-discussed wedding, the girl from Jamestown had succeeded in conquering first her in-laws and then the elite of one of the richest cities in America.

  3

  The Lucky Plunger

  At what point would Allene start to suspect that there was something seriously wrong with her husband? That his fascination for every opportunity that permitted betting or gambling—poker games, horse races, dogfights, boxing matches—was more than a youthful indulgence he would grow out of as he matured and took on the responsibilities of a family? And that Tod’s restlessness—“He never sat still,” according to a stable boy—could not be tempered by either her love for him or his for her? That, on the contrary, it would become ever worse and eventually be his downfall?

  She’d later tell a friend that the turning point came in the fall of 1895, shortly after Verna, their younger daughter, had fallen ill and died, tragically, on her sister Greta’s fourth birthday. Even Allene seemed to get over it fairly quickly. Death among babies and toddlers was quite common in those times—more than half of children died before their fifth year. For this reason, doctors often advised young parents not to get too attached to their children in the early years. What’s more, Allene and Tod were still young, and many more children were certain to come.

  But for Tod, little Verna’s death was one too many. Perhaps this was because his childhood had been overshadowed by the early deaths of two older brothers—the first died at age twenty-three from an infection he’d contracted on a grand tour of Europe; the second died at seventeen of a contagious disease—and also by the premature death of his father, with whom Tod had been very close. And now he had to bury his two-year-old daughter, too, in the family plot high in the hills of Allegheny Cemetery, while there was nothing urgent or essential in his life to distract him from his grief.

  The latter situation was, of course, the basis for Tod’s restlessness. A fellow heir to a fortune, William K. Vanderbilt, would once comment with a remarkable display of self-knowledge how difficult life was when your father had achieved everything humanly possible and had left you, despite his millions, without any space to do anything meaningful yourself. “Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness,” he said. “It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

  In the winter of 1895–1896, Tod met the man who would become his nemesis, David “Davy” C. Johnson. This native New Yorker had his own private racing stables, several gambling houses, and a reputation as one of the most legendary gamblers on the continent. When Tod met him, Davy was thirty-nine; his death fifteen years later would be commemorated in the New York Times with a mixture of awe and amazement:

  You may talk about your plungers and betting men . . . but this country has never produced another such a man. He had played the game ever since he was ten years old and he met his losses with a smile. Defeat never found him despondent. His coolness when thousands were at stake was wonderful. He appeared oftentimes to be the least interested in the results when another man in his position would have been driven by the uncertainty to the verge of insanity . . . Johnson was probably the most venturesome gambler who ever operated on the American turf. It was no unusual thing for him to bet up to 50,000 dollars on an event and on what he was wont to call a dull afternoon, his custom was to toss a cent for stakes of 1,000 dollars a side.

  Soon Tod was spending more and more time with his older friend in New York, which, thanks to the influence of new money, had grown into the only place in North America that could measure up to the big European cities in terms of influence and appearance. The leading travel-guide series Baedeker printed in 1893: “It is the wealthiest city of the New World, and inferior in commercial and financial importance to London alone among the cities of the globe.”

  At first Tod would stay on the Duquesne in the New York Yacht Club marina during these trips, but when fellow members began to complain about the all-too-frequent presence of the not particularly socially acceptable Johnson, he rented a four-story mansion, complete with stables, at 12 East Sixty-Fifth Street. The house was walking distance from the Waldorf Astoria hotel, where Johnson inhabited a suite, and the clubs of Broadway, where the duo were known as “high rollers”—men for whom no challenge was too great.

  Tod proved to be just as cool a player as, if not cooler than, his friend—“the nerviest gentleman player,” in the words of a New York evening paper. He accepted losses with a shrug; when he won, he’d treat everybody, or he’d
give away his winnings to passing newspaper delivery boys. His luck was legendary, particularly with horse racing. Although he gave the impression of picking winners from thin air, the staff of restaurants he frequented later told journalists that he actually carefully studied previous results before laying his bets. He soon earned himself a name in gambling circles: the Lucky Plunger.

  As Tod triumphed in his new role on Broadway, the country around him sank deeper and deeper into a seemingly endless economic recession. The contrast between the small group of elites who had ended up on the right side and the innumerable have-nots who had ended up on the wrong side of the American dream was very depressing by now—and all the more depressing because the instigators of the Panic of ’93, and with it all of the misery most Americans were suffering, were counted among that former group.

  In liberal circles especially, more and more questions were being asked about the unbridled capitalism that had counted as a form of evangelicalism in the United States up to then. Characteristic is an article in the New York Times from July 12, 1896, which reports the departure of Tod’s Duquesne and several other expensive yachts for the New York Yacht Club’s annual cruise. The yacht club cruise was the undisputed high point of the sailing season. An armada of hundreds of sailing yachts would slowly make its way into the more than hundred mile Long Island Sound while participants entertained themselves with races, regattas, and parties. It was said that you could walk across the champagne corks to the other side the morning after the fleet had moored in a harbor. For a duty reporter from the New York Times, the departure was a good opportunity to point out the extreme dichotomy in the America of those days:

  Several steam yachts were anchored off East 26th Street early in the morning and the scene on and around the dock of the Department of Correction was a gay one. Carriages were continually driving up with jolly parties, who were taken out to the yachts in naphtha launches or cutters.

  In the midst of this gay scene the steamboat Thomas E. Brennan arrived from Blackwell’s Island with about fifty unfortunate men and women who had served a term on the island for some misdemeanor and were brought ashore to be released. They filed down one side of the dock and presented a picture in sad contrast to the other. On one side were men strong, rich and happy, and women handsome, well dressed and about to go on some of the finest yachts of the world.

  That same summer, a populist Democratic candidate had a serious chance of getting into the White House. William Jennings Bryan promised social reform and to tackle the widespread corruption and greed that had plunged the country into ruin. But at the last moment, entrepreneurs and the financial establishment, supported by the Presbyterian Church, launched an aggressive countercampaign in which they told the public that phenomena such as socialism and trade unions were precisely what formed the greatest threat to what was left of the nation’s prosperity.

  On November 3, 1896, the Republican candidate, William McKinley, won the race. And so the rich continued to throw parties and the poor suffered—although with increasing complaints and protests. When a New York society couple, in the middle of the coldest winter of the crisis, announced in 1897 the biggest, most expensive ball ever organized in the city—for eight hundred guests, two entire stories of the Waldorf Astoria would be transformed into the court of Versailles to the tune of $400,000—they were subjected to the full force of the people’s anger. But none of the critical articles, angry reactions, or even death threats could sway the couple, the Bradley-Martins, from their plans, and the offending ball was held on February 10. As if to demonstrate how untouchable they felt and how little they cared about the anger of the plebs or the misery in which their less fortunate fellow citizens lived, the host opened the ball by playing the well-known ditty “When You Ain’t Got No Money, You Need Not Come Around.”

  By now the so-called yellow press, the gutter press, had developed a taste for pillorying the multimillionaires. William Waldorf Astor, heir to the hotel fortune, felt so threatened by the increasingly aggressive press hounds that he fled to Europe, hoping to find more respect and restraint toward the leisure class to which he belonged as a consequence of his birth. Unfortunately, inventions like the telegraph and the telephone meant that news now traveled faster across the ocean than he could. What’s more, the English gutter press was just as vicious as New York’s. As a consequence, Astor saw his comings and goings subjected to close scrutiny on both sides of the ocean, and he had even less room to maneuver than he’d had before.

  At this time, Tod Hostetter was still just a small fish to the newspapers, a foolish young millionaire from Pittsburgh with poor taste in friends. The 1896 presidential election so important to the country was interesting to him because it was something he could bet on. Here, too, his legendary luck didn’t let him down: he was the only person to guess all of the results correctly, down to the last decimal point, and won $30,000 in one blow. He lost the sum almost immediately on roulette, the only game of chance he lost time after time. In the words of a friend:

  Roulette was his ruin . . . He was the wildest plunger I ever knew, and he was smart as a steel trap, except when he played roulette. If he had left the wheel alone, he could not have lost anything, but he could not leave it alone. He was sure he would win in the end.

  Allene did what she could to keep her husband away from the company of Davy Johnson and the temptations of horse racing and roulette. (“If one has the will and persistence, one CAN do things.”) She turned Hostetter House on Raccoon Creek into the setting for “many a gay nineties party,” it was later written. For years, local inhabitants would remember festively decorated boats filled with happy guests sailing to and from Pittsburgh. Allene also successfully threw her feminine charms into the battle, and in the early spring of 1897, she discovered she was pregnant again.

  On October 2, 1897, Allene gave birth to a son, baptized Theodore Rickey Jr. after his father. Little Teddy, as the child was called to differentiate him from his father, Tod, originally seemed to have been born under a lucky star. A few months after his birth, America, its own fight for independence fresh in its memory, chose to side with the rebels in the Spanish colony of Cuba and went to war against Spain. This meant that little Teddy’s father would have his first—and, as it would transpire, his only—chance to actually do something for his country. Tod put his Duquesne at the disposal of the American marines. It was therefore partly thanks to him that the Americans were able to drill the Spanish fleet in the Philippines into the ground on May 1, 1898.

  The old superpower Spain turned out to be no match for the modern, patriotism-inspired America, and within a few months, America had won the Spanish-American War.

  For the first time in its existence, the United States had manifested itself as an independent, imperial entity. During peace negotiations, the country even managed to gain Puerto Rico and the Philippines as colonies. Cuba became an American protectorate, and Hawaii was simply annexed: the leap to political world power had been more than successful.

  The quickly won war gave a substantial boost to national self-confidence and was a blessing to the economy, which, as a consequence of the war efforts, quickly picked up speed again. But while his mother country climbed back out of her depression, Tod seemed to have gone too far downhill to be able to find his way back up again. The Duquesne returned to New York, and Tod resumed his career as a professional gambler with renewed élan. As the Pittsburgh Press would euphemistically summarize: “Theodore Hostetter was best-known for his devotion to sports.”

  In practice, this meant Tod belonged to the so-called Waldorf Crowd, an illustrious group of gamblers to which steel magnate Henry Clay Frick and industrialist John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates also belonged. Gates was known for betting between poker games on such things as the route certain raindrops would take on the windows of his expensive hotel. Tod was in no way inferior to Gates in terms of creativity in gambling. If a fly landed on the table, he’d bet on which direction it would take off. If he saw a wai
ter coming over, he’d lay money on whether or not he’d drop his tray. And if he saw a beggar on the street, he’d bet on whether, if he gave him a hundred-dollar bill, he’d thank him profusely or make a swift getaway.

  “If one has no steady belief and foundation to one’s life, it is all hopelessness and tears,” Allene would later write, clearly from personal experience. Tod had no belief or foundation in his life, and the hopelessness and tears were her own. After a while, she gave up organizing parties: the chance was great that her husband wouldn’t be there, and his absence would only raise more embarrassing questions. She wasn’t invited anywhere herself much, either. “Society, always fearful of Tod’s wild ways, never bothered much about his pretty young wife,” a journalist acquaintance would later write. Her hard-fought place among the Pittsburgh social elite would ultimately do her no good at all.

  More and more often, the young Mrs. Hostetter was spotted with her children in the “log cabin” that had been built with so much pleasure on Raccoon Creek. She taught Teddy to ride and practiced with Greta for days on end on the obstacle course next to the house. Or she’d trot along on her horse, completely alone, spending hours in the dark woods around them. The glittering paradise she’d married into, and which she’d had all kinds of dreams about, had turned into a lonely place.

  In the spring of 1901, Tod bought a new yacht. The Seneca was a whopping 330 feet long and had both a player piano and a roulette wheel below deck so that he could receive and entertain his gambling friends on the boat. He also bought an automobile, a “self-driving” car, the latest rage among the rich in those years. It was just “a small affair with no top,” in the words of a servant, but small and open topped as it was, the car ensured that Tod was no longer dependent on the availability of horses, coachmen, or trains to New York. And that he could escape the watchful eyes of his wife and family whenever he wanted.