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 Convening at 972 Fifth
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The Payne Whitney mansion (ivy covering the first floor exterior, located in between 78th and 79th and Fifth Avenue), designed in 1902 by Stanford White for Helen Hay and Payne Whitney, now the Cultural Services headquarters of the French Embassy. Photo: JH. |
June 25th, 2009. Yesterday was a sunny day in New York. The clouds came out when I got into the cab to go to lunch. By the time we reached 57th and Fifth I was reminding myself that I cudda brought an umbrella. I picked up one of those little fold-up numbers for five bucks on the corner of 56th by the Armani store. By the time I reach Michael’s it had stopped. But these days, you never know.
In the It’s-Wednesday-and-must-be-Michaels crowd, there were the likely suspects and a few of the occasional West Coasters who liven it up for the home team. Looking around the room: Charlie Rose et al, super agent Jim Wiatt, Pamela Fiori of Town & Country, Cosmo’s Kate White with the Linda Fairstein; Faye Wattleton, Stan Shuman; Sarabeth Schrager with Judy Bressler; super-literary agent Ed Victor with Sir Harry, joined by Tina Brown and child; Lisa Caputo with Adam Miller; Amy Rosenblum with Randy Jones (author of “The Richest Man in Town”); Amanda Haynes-Dale, Deborah Grubman, Francine LeFrak, Bob Barnett, Christie Hefner, Marvin Traub; The Four Horsemen of the Apocalyptics: Dr. Gerry Imber, Jerry Della Femina, Jeff Greenfield, Andy Bergman; Henry Schlieff, Lynn Goldberg, Steve Guttenberg with Morris Levy, Fern Mallis with Lisa Silhanek, Fermin, Perez Carlos Lorenzo and Diane Clehane. And I was with Nancy Stoddart (known once upon a time around this town as Nancy Huang) now of West Hollywood, California and Stoddartsville, Pennsylvania, back in town to give everything the good old once-over. |
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A pigeon surveys the city from atop a gargoyle on the Fletcher mansion, now the Ukrainian Institute, on 79th Street and Fifth Avenue. Photo: JH. |
Twenty-five blocks north a couple hours earlier, a ten a.m., some of the high honchos of the New York and Paris interior design world convened in the century old Stanford White designed Payne Whitney mansion at 972 Fifth Avenue, two doors south of 79th Street.
The occasion: kicking off the upcoming – later this year – French designer show house to be presented at Edith Wharton’s country house in Lenox, Massachusetts, “The Mount.” |
| Leiko Oshima, Maxime D'Angeac, Nicolette Zaech, and Olivier Lempereur |
| Bunny Williams |
Gordon Travers |
| Group of French Designers |
| These designers were personally selected by the great Andree Putman who coincidentally or not has a strong connection to Madame Wharton – her mother and her grandmother translated Wharton’s novels, and Mme. Putman as a child knew the novelist. |
| Adrian Dannatt, Katharina Plath, and Bunny Williams |
Antonio Virga and Carol Mallement |
| Deborah Burns and Susan Wissler |
Mercedes Abramo and Christine Goppel |
Cynthia Friedman and Ria Davis |
| David Usborne and Juan Carretero |
Gordon Travers, Nicolette Zaech, and Maxime D'Angeac |
| Dr. Elizabeth Beautyman and Gordon Travers |
Sarah Frank, Michael McKinnon, and Catherine Swintek |
| Karen Jeffers and Elizabeth Beautyman |
Louis Auchincloss, Ellie Dwight, and Susan Wissler |
| Matthew White and Suzane Slesin |
Nina Griscom and Charlotte Moss |
Lloyd Grove and Joan Kron |
| Pamela Lazares, Pamela Humphrey, and Sarah Frank |
Francois Le Grix and Leopoldine Le Grix |
| Katherine Kostreva, Claudette Blackwood, George Kakaty, and Sabine Rothman |
Susan Milmoe and Thomas Jayne |
Two years ago the American designers staged a show house at Wharton’s country place. The first book the novelist of the Gilded Age published was called “On the Decoration of Houses,” which she put together with her friend and co-author Ogden Codman, architect and interior designer.
With this book the two proclaimed themselves the leaders of the new interior design movement in the early 20th century when they shed their Victorian ways and went back to dear old France for a fresh up. Codman continued on and Wharton took to constructing her tales of modern women and New York society of her age.
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| Edith Wharton’s country house in Lenox, Massachusetts, “The Mount.” |
Wharton and Codman’s book is a classic today (and a beauty just to own in its current re-print). They had rules and reasons and a reference point based on the history of the development of the family dwelling (mainly for the rich who could have things optimally). It is an interesting contrast to today’s sensibility which often is without reference points, reasons and rules. Or, as the French would say, de trop. Or le plus ca change ...
So now you know what I think. However, the French and their design-ways, aside, I was intrigued by the venue for yesterday’s meeting – 972 Fifth, because, aside from the fact that it is now the headquarters of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the US, it was built for two people whose lives could easily have been a canvas for Edith Wharton to create on: Helen Hay and Payne Whitney. |
| The Payne Whitney mansion, now the Cultural Services building of the Embassy of France at 972 Fifth. |
| Detail of the doorway of the Payne Whitney mansion. |
| You’ve probably read this story before, possibly even here, so I’ll be brief. The house, which was commissioned in 1902 by Col. Oliver Payne was a wedding gift to Payne’s nephew, 32-year-old William Payne Whitney – thereafter known simply as Payne Whitney (for a reason which I’ll get to) – and his new wife, Helen Hay of Cleveland, Ohio. The bride, also 32, was the daughter of John Hay, President Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and afterwards a prominent political figure, Secretary of State and Ambassador to the Court of St. James’. The groom was destined to be very rich because of his uncle, the Colonel, and so they were being started out on the right foot. |
| The Designated Landmark of New York City placard. |
| The north and south corners of Fifth Avenue and 79th Street, circa 1911. The matching three limestone mansions were built for the Brokaw family and were razed in the mid-1960s. In the far right is the then in construction of the mansion of James B. Duke, father of Doris. At the time, the house on left of the Whitney house, number 973 was occupied by uncle Oliver. |
Payne Whitney was the eldest son of William Collins Whitney, a late 19th century New York lawyer and tycoon, of the stripe most familiar to today’s tycoons. Handsome and smart and sharp, Whitney played fast and loose when things called for it, exploited his political and social connections to advance his fortunes, lived grandly (acquiring thousands of acres of real estate in the northeast), raised a large strapping all-American looking family, and fooled around.
His brother-in-law, the colonel adored him. That is not a word the life-long bachelor colonel would have used or maybe even thought to describe his feelings, but adored he did. In other quarters he was perceived to have been in love with his handsome brother-in-law (whom he knew from Yale), WC Whitney. When Whitney married Flora Payne, the colonel’s adored (his word) sister, the colonel presented them with a mansion on the corner of 57th Street and Fifth where Bulgari stands today. When he came to town, the colonel would stay there. Everything was en famille. |
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| Clockwise from top: William C. Whitney, father of Payne; Helen Hay, Mrs. Payne Whitney on her wedding day; Edith Randolph, the woman who broke up the family. |
Except when it wasn’t. Whitney was a handsome guy and a romantic one. As it would be today, his looks and his money made him eligible no matter his marital status. This wasn’t so uncommon in his world. A generation before him the wealthy men of the community visited the houses of the ladies of the night on Murray Hill before heading home to sup with madam and Jeeves.
Whitney, however, had a big affair with a young woman he met through JP Morgan, Edith Randolph. He fell in love with Edith. This killed Flora Payne. Meaning, it may not have been what actually killed her, but it brought her down and she never really came up again. Flora died at 52 in 1894. Shortly thereafter her widower was seen publicly with the lovely Mrs. Randolph.
Oliver Payne was outraged. It was the rage of his sister scorned. He actually demanded that his brother-in-law break-off his relationship with Mrs. Randolph. Once upon a time, Oliver’s words would have had power with this Mayflower descended WASP country boy from Massachusetts. But those days were gone forever – Whitney was now rich too.
He married Mrs. Randolph -- although what fate had in store for them resembles a hex on the marriage -- and Oliver Payne tried to get the Whitney children – his nieces and nephews – to also turn their back on his former brother-in-law and his new bride. Two did and two didn’t. Payne Whitney, dropping his father’s name from his, went with the uncle. His brother Harry Payne Whitney (who married Gertrude Vanderbilt) went with the father. And so, in essence did the two fortunes, the larger of which was Col. Payne, who, with his father was an early partner of John D. Rockefeller.
When Oliver Payne died in 1917, he had already made his adored nephew a very rich man with an estate (Greentree) in Manhasset and a shooting plantation in the south. In his will, he completed his objective and Payne Whitney was one of the richest men in the country.
Payne Whitney died only ten years after his rich uncle, at, like his mother, age 52, in 1927. He left the largest-ever probated will in America at that time. His wife remained in residence at 972 and at her house in Greentree. Helen Whitney’s idea of a great summer afternoon was to listen to baseball games on the radio. That and a few beers to go along were her idea of heaven. It rubbed off on her daughter Joan Whitney Payson who later started the New York Mets. Son Jock Whitney inherited the house when his mother died in 1944, and his (second) wife, Betsey Cushing Roosevelt gave it to the French.
If its occupants had been portrayed by Edith Wharton’s pen, you would have learned how none of it was as simple or cut and dried as it sounds, and that there was heartbreak along the way, and more than once, no thanks to all that money and all that it could (and did) buy. And all that it couldn't. |
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