Dashing, he was widely regarded as wickedly clever, quite charming and terribly attractive. Yet according to some, these attributes only made William Collins Whitney, 1841-1904, a prominent American political leader and financier, an all-the-more accomplished rake and rogue. When he died in 1904, a few even speculated that Whitney was murdered knowing of his former friend, Yale-roommate and brother-in-law, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne’s threat to ruin him!
Secretary of the Navy in the first Grover Cleveland administration, Whitney primarily made his fortune as a streetcar magnate. Expertly manipulative, his stock-watering, it is said, would make today’s colossal mortgage-backed derivatives, seem by comparison, like an amateurish undertaking. That he had married his roommate-friend’s sister, Miss Flora Payne, of Cleveland, daughter of Senator Henry B. Payne of Ohio, certainly proved to be useful. A brilliant academician interested in science, if no beauty, Mrs. Whitney was rich. Her devoted brother, who was named treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, was richer still. The Whitneys had five children.
William Collins Whitney, 1841-1904
Social leaders in New York as well as in Washington, the couple lived at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. Diagonally across the intersection stood the imposing winter residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt, II. Following two years spent mourning after Flora Whitney's death in 1893, Whitney was married to an elegant widow named Edith Sibyl Randolph. Out to impress the world with his ever-increasing riches, Whitney turned to McKim, Mead and White, commissioning them to build for his new wife a magnificent residence in the Italian Renaissance style at Fifth Avenue and 68th Street.
Whitney's new house was only sedate outside.
As so often was the case with Robert Adam, many of Stanford White’s most brilliant successes resulted from the remodeling of an existing house. Between 1896 and 1902, White moved heaven and earth to transform the enormous, but ordinary four-story brownstone mansion, designed in 1884 by William Schickel for the sugar magnate Robert L. Stuart, into a palace, a ‘palace of art’!
The stairway to paradise?
Employing such extraordinary antique elements as the gilt-iron and bronze gates from the Palazzo Doria in Rome in the Whitney’s porte cochère and Louis XVI boiserie from a château near Bordeaux in their second floor ballroom, then the largest private ballroom in New York, it’s estimated that White spent $4,000,000 converting 871 5th Avenue. Alas, before she had a chance to enjoy these splendors, on May 6, 1899, Edith Whitney died. Grievously injured in a riding accident in the south, she been brought home, never to regain consciousness.
Edith Sibyl Whitney
Coinciding with his loss was the blow of estrangement from Col. Payne. Beyond vowing to cause Whitney’s financial and social ruin for insulting his sister’s memory by remarrying, Payne had brought his considerable wealth to bear, to divide him from two of his children.
Harry Payne Whitney, the traction king’s eldest offspring remained loyal to his father. He had married Cornelius Vanderbilt's daughter, Gertrude, the girl next door, sort off.
A rather conventional multi-millionaire-industrialist-sportsman, in time Harry Payne Whitney grew apart from his wife, who was as unusually gifted as his mother had been. More and more, as time passed, the pair lived apart, leading distinctly separate lives. If money was ever a bit tight between Uncle Oliver’s efforts of retribution and William Whitney’s prodigal extravagance, soon enough, money was again no serious barrier to infinite gratifications. With William Whitney’s death his palatial city house had been sold furnished. When the new owner, James Henry ‘Silent’ Smith unexpectedly expired age 56 on his honeymoon trip in Japan, out of sentiment the family house was re-acquired by the Whitneys.
Harry Payne Whitney.
James Henry 'Slient' Smith's abode, before he moved into 871 Fifth Avenue, had been the Wilbraham. At 282-284 Fifth Avenue or 1 West 30th Street, it was built in 1888-90 as a bachelor apartment-hotel. Its "bachelor flats" each consisted of a bedroom and parlor, with bathroom but no kitchen; the communal dining room was on the eighth floor.
A distinguished sculptor of great sensitivity who had trained with Rodin, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney increasingly lived in a converted Greenwich Village mews, where she had a studio. When the occasion demanded, she dutifully put in an appearance at Fifth Avenue, but drag balls and night clubs in Paris and Harlem came to offer far more appeal for her than staid society functions. She is all but notorious today, for the hard role she played in having her sister-in-law declared an unfit mother and thereafter taking charge to raise her young niece, Gloria Vanderbilt. Courtroom intimations that little Gloria’s mother engaged in lesbian relationships seem cruelly ironic as, since girlhood, whispers of Gertrude Whitney’s varied passions for men and women had swirled all around among bon ton New York and Newport.
Ca. 1912: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bedecked in a good portion of her extensive collection of jeweled ornaments.
The founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
1934: Scars from her custody trial and separation from her mother, have never faded. Gloria Vanderbilt with her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt.
1940: Gloria Vanderbilt with Aunt Gertrude.
The artist's studio.
Supremely beautiful, the mirrored screen overlain in ormolu in William Whitney’s ballroom, had started life as two, of a set four doors, ordered by Giacomo Filippo Carrega for the Galleria Dorata, Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi, in Genoa. Sublimely shimmering, they were designed by Lorenzo de' Ferrari 1680-1744, a painter. Devising all the gallery’s appointments; paneling, mirrors, consoles and seat furniture, between 1743 and 1744, Ferrari adopted an aquatic theme, replete with mermaids, scallop shells and dolphins, devices which typify the decorative repertoire of the exuberant Genoese rococo style.
William C. Whitney's Fifth Avenue Drawing Room
For Whitney’s ballroom, White amassed a far more eclectic, yet still related assemblage, one which even included a Victorian rococo revival sofa of the 1840s. Yet much like Ferrari, he intended to rival other magnificent spaces, both great historic European interiors of the past and the grandest rooms of his own time, too. The perfect finishing touch, the group of rock crystal-hung 18th century chandeliers White located for this space were finally hung just in time for New York's first cotillion of the new century, early in 1901.
In William C. Whitney's damask-hung, art-filled Drawing Room, tassels hanging from the ceiling concealed light bulbs used to illuminate paintings.
Acquired directly from the Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi by Stanford White, Ferrari's ‘screen’ from the Galleria Dorata, joined by settees from the same source, were exported to New York expressly for William Whitney’s showplace. Following Gertrude Whitney’s death in 1942, the golden screen was sold to Baron Cassel and Baroness Cassel van Doorn. They, in turn, sold it in 1954, in Paris, to the dealers Serge Roche & J. Rotil, and it remained in their stock until at least 1956. Elinor Dorrance Ingersoll, who summered at lovely Bois Doré in Newport, must have acquired the screen about then, for it was sold from among her effects at Christie's September 27-28, 1977 house sale, for $14,500, to Miss Doris Duke. At nearby Rough Point, where it remains, divided into two sections, of two panels each, it seems almost unbelievable that these one-time doors were not here always.
William C. Whitney's splendid Ballroom.
Almost as difficult to fathom, is that there are any additional, identical, mirrored and gilt-bronze doors. These second two pairs were retained by Stanford White for himself and incorporated into the opulent decoration of his own city house at 121 East 21st Street, facing Gramercy Park. I have always so admired that White felt entitled to the same splendors he afforded for his much, much richer clients.
Stanford White's mirrored screen.
Sold for $1,250 in 1907, upon the architect’s sordid murder, the screen was obtained by shipping heir Frederick E. Guest, of Old Templeton on Long Island. For the same price, at the time one could have gotten a nice Rolls Royce. Sold to Whitney Warren, Jr. by the Guests' son, Winston Guest, the panels realized $11,000. An acclaimed and discretely gay host and aesthete, after forming a magical backdrop for parties in his Nob Hill apartment, the panels were bequeathed by Warren to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
A drawing by Lorenzo de' Ferrari 1680-1744
Two of four of Lorenzo de' Ferrari panels in Doris Duke's Rough Point Drawing Room.
That was in 1986. By 1989, as lot 115, these precious panels were sold for $181,500 to Alexander & Berendt Ltd., London, from whom they were acquired for an undisclosed price, which, whatever it might have been, was well worth it, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1991.
Whitney Warren, Jr.'s Nob Hill apartment.
The young aesthete. Whitney Warren, a Whitney and Vanderbilt relation, was always discretely gay.
Mr. Warren entertains for Miss Audrey Hepburn.
White’s treasures collected for William Whitney were legendary. So it’s not unexpected to learn that even objects with an indefinite lineage, like the handsome Franco-Flemish 16thcentury chimneypiece from the dining room, found good homes when New York’s finest Renaissance palace was destroyed. Rid of embellishing flourishes so typical of White, it landed at Harvard’s venerable Fogg Museum. But not for long.
William Whitney's baronial Dining Room.
When I discovered that Darryl Pinckney and James Fenton were selling a lovely old farm near Oxford, in order to buy and restore Harlem’s old John Dwight house, I was pleased. ‘At last, the unimaginable, restoration of a great landmark, will actually happen!’ I thought. Long Leys farm, where James has made a garden of enchantment, is the real estate agent’s pictures reveal online, quite a pretty place, of just the sort where one might like to retire. A wreck when they bought it, in addition to the great garden, it was augmented by a wing with a great room of two stories.
The Great Room at Long Leys Farm.
I knew at once that their antique mantelpiece seemed strangely familiar. Because the William Whitney house was razed so long ago, an ocean away, it seemed unlikely that it had somehow supplied this stunning souvenir of Stanford White’s weakness for old-world grandeur. But of course, by the oblique route of the saleroom, as a cautionary testament to impermanence, the vagaries of tastes and the fecklessness of museum collections, it was.
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