Chapter One: The Commodore (1794 - 1877)
That Wednesday morning, May 10, 1876, reporters from every New York City newspaper gathered in front of the townhouse at 10 Washington Place, waiting for some sign that eightytwo-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Commodore as he was called, had passed away.
During the last few days, no one had seen the aging millionaire at any of his favorite haunts. He had not come to his office to oversee his railroad empire. He had not driven his fine team of trotters in the warm spring afternoons while nursing a tumbler of gin laced with sugar. He had not gone to the Manhattan Club for an evening game of whist. Something was wrong. Something bad happened.
All morning, the reporters paced up and down Washington Place, a fashionable street until the city's elite had begun moving up Fifth Avenue. Some ate sandwiches and drank beer. Others played cards. Now and then, one would leave to file a bulletin: The Commodore was dead! The stock market plunged. The Commodore was still alive! Wall Street rallied.
Finally, Frankie, the Commodore's ravishing thirty-seven-year-old wife, invited the reporters to come in, leading them over threadbare rugs to the large parlor. As they milled about, admiring a bust of the Commodore, and an oil painting of the Commodore in a road wagon driving his favorite team, and the small solid-gold model of one of the Commodore's steamships, a voice roared down from the upstairs hall, spewing forth a string of obscenities mixed with a message for the reporters:
"I am Not Dying!"
The house shook. The reporters froze.
"The slight local disorder is now almost entirely gone! The doctor says I will be well in a fewdays! Even if I was dying," the voice bellowed, I should have vigor enough to knock this abuse down your lying throats and give the undertaker a job!"'
It was vintage Vanderbilt. The reporters quickly departed, convinced the richest man in the world was alive and obviously well.
Alive, yes, but not feeling very well. After the reporters left, the Commodore summoned Dr. Jared Linsly, his physician for the past forty years.
"Doctor," be told him, "the devil has been after me."
"Well, don't let him catch you for if you do, you will not be Commodore Vanderbilt any longer for Commodore Vanderbilt never suffered anybody to catch him!"
"Doctor, if all the devils in bell were concentrated in me I could not have suffered any more. I want you to make a thorough examination of my case. I think I have neglected myself too long already. I have difficulty in urination, the efforts being protracted and painful. I have hernia and I have piles."
He was also suffering from chronic indigestion, he told his elderly physician, accompanied by excessive belching and flatulence.
After examining him, Dr. Linsly advised the Commodore that the difficulty in urination, which was causing the excruciating pain, was the result of an enlarged prostate gland. And what had caused that? the Commodore asked his doctor.
"The authorities considered it might be due, either to stricture, gonorrhea, horse-back riding or excessive sexual intercourse," Dr. Linsly answered. "It drives the victim of it into venereal excesses; it produces a species of lascivious mindedness; this is what the authorities give as the tendency of that disease."
Well, that explained a lot. The Commodore winked at hisdoctor and asked no more questions about the cause of his troubles. Now all he had to do was get better. He told Dr. Linsly that be "and the Lord were fighting the devil, and were going to whip him."
Every day, Dr. Linsly stopped by to visit. When the crusty Commodore was in pain, be lashed out at his physician in terrible fits of temper. "Has the old Doctor come?" he yelled to Frankie. "Is the old Doctor here? Is the old granny here yet?" "Blatherskite!" he exploded as Dr. Linsly entered his bedchamber, hurling his favorite epithet for anyone the Commodore considered a dolt. "Bloxhead!" Do something for the pain!
Uneducated, barely able to read (if a letter was longer than a paragraph or two, he would throw it down in disgust and have his clerk read it to him), superstitious, the Commodore believed in mysticism and the occult and, much to Dr. Linsly's dismay, was willing to try anything suggested by anyone promising a cure. Believing they were "health conductors," he even had four pans of salt placed under the four posts of his bedstead, just as a spiritualist advised.
The Commodore had frequently told his friends that he never made a business decision without advice from the spirits, so it was not surprising that now be summoned mediums to his aid.
"I have a communication from your dead wife," a spiritualist murmured to him during a seance in his darkened bedchamber.
"I don't care for that now," the Commodore snapped. As long as he bad made contact with the other side, he wanted to take full advantage of the practical aspects of the opportunity. "I want to know about the price of stocks," he told the medium. "Business before pleasure. Let me speak with Jim Fisk."He was clearly feeling better.
The spiritualist obediently conjured up the wraith of his deceased business rival, who began forecasting the prices of railroad stocks. Not agreeing with the predictions he was hearing, the Commodore argued with the spirit, until the medium convinced him he was interfering with the communications from the other world.
Reporters, Wall Street operators, doctors, and occultists were not the only ones interested in the state of the Commodore's health. His ten children had grown old waiting for this moment. His oldest child was sixty-one; his youngest, forty. Now, like vultures, they swooped around 10 Washington Place, consumed by the vision of picking over his sumptuous estate. The Commodore was not keen to see any of them, for when they entered his room, each one inevitably asked about his will. 10 He told them be "bad done the best he could for all" in his will and that if he bad made a hundred more wills be could not make a better one. 11 When he refused to see them, these birds of prey would gather in an adjoining room and, scared to death of the sick old man who was their father, peek through the crack in the open door, staring, waiting.