The Great Pierpont Morgan (24 page)

So accustomed was he to vacationing on this generous scale that it was not always easy for him to understand that such a life was not possible for a great many people. When one of his young partners-to-be, preparing to enter the firm, said he would like to be able to manage his work so as to get three months off each year, Morgan was all affability: “Why certainly. Of course. Let's see: you're coming in January first—why don't you pick up your family on February first and take them up the Nile? Have you ever been up the Nile?” The young man demurred. He and his wife had young children. He doubted if this would be possible. (Privately, of course, he was meanwhile wondering what sort of impression it would make in the Street if he went off on a long holiday at the end of his first month at the Corner.) But Morgan made light of his doubts. “Nonsense. Take a couple of nurses. Take a doctor if you want to.” It was all very simple to him and he was cordial and enthusiastic, planning a trip which—as the young partner later said—“of course never came off.”

4

Morgan was very loyal to family ties and family rituals—the Sunday-evening hymn singing (at which he loved to hear, and sometimes to sing in a voice of uncertain pitch, old favorites such as “Blest Be the Tie That Binds,” “The Church's One Foundation,” “Rock of Ages,” or “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”); the family Thanksgiving dinner (with four kinds of pie); the Christmas festivities (a tree for the grandchildren, an expedition in a cab to leave presents at friends' houses, and a big Christmas dinner with the choir of St. George's Church to sing for the company, with the famous Negro baritone Harry Burleigh as soloist). When he was at breakfast at
No. 219, he liked to have one of his daughters, usually Louisa Satterlee, with him, because Mrs. Morgan had her coffee upstairs; and nothing pleased him more than to have one or two small grandchildren playing about in the dining room. With Mrs. Morgan he was always affectionate and deferential. But she was seldom with him on the
Corsair
or on the European trips of his later years; when she traveled abroad, she went separately. Being shy, domestic by taste, and in increasingly uncertain health, she became increasingly settled in the habit of remaining behind at No. 219 and at Cragston while he with his overpowering energy and hunger for human society roamed widely.

Usually on his voyages abroad it was a daughter who accompanied him—again most likely Louisa; and since he loved to have many people about him and had at his disposal big houses, a very big yacht, and almost unlimited means, he was accompanied wherever he went by considerable parties of friends. Once he remarked that no man who did not number among his close associates several men who would be willing to spend much time with him, ought to consider having a yacht: otherwise he would find it the loneliest place in the world. The frequent presence of attractive women in the party on his trips abroad or on the
Corsair
caused systematic gossip, especially as he liked nothing better than to escort one of them to the jewelers' shops in the Rue de la Paix and ask her to choose what she liked. Exactly how much fire there was behind the smoke of continuous rumor is a matter of conjecture; without doubt there was some. But as I have already remarked in a preceding chapter, it must be remembered that in a puritanical society rumor always puts the most extreme construction upon any companionship that looks at all unorthodox, especially if a man of note is involved.

Naturally, too, Morgan's lamentable nose was attributed by some people to high living. As a matter of fact, he drank very moderately: ordinarily nothing before dinnertime (it was before the era of the inevitable cocktail); some wine at dinner and perhaps a cordial afterward; nothing in the evening. He smoked perpetually; or rather, there was usually a cigar between his lips or between his fingers from breakfast until bedtime, though it was often unlighted for considerable intervals. He breakfasted hugely, but lunched lightly; in the
office he would have a chicken or turkey sandwich and perhaps a slice of pie set out for him in the back room, where he ate it alone; or perhaps, in summer, nothing but a plate of sliced peaches which he would bury in sugar. No coffee, no milk; just a glass of water. In his last years, when he came to the office only briefly, he would sometimes arrive about half-past twelve and join the partners for lunch in the building; on one or more such occasions, a partner recalls his choosing a somewhat startling, if small, repast—a dozen raw oysters and a slice of mince pie.

But if his lunch was usually light, he enjoyed dining largely and well; and dining largely and well, during the first decade of the twentieth century, was among people of means a formidable thing indeed. Those were the days of multi-course dinners—six or eight or ten courses. Morgan belonged to a small dining group who called themselves the Zodiac Club; they met from time to time at the house of one or another of the members, or at a club, and vied with one another in offering sumptuous meals. Here is the menu of one Zodiac dinner, given at the University Club; Satterlee, from whose book I quote it, swears that it was devised to be eaten right through from start to finish, though he imagines that most members preferred to let one or more of the dishes pass untasted:

Amontillado Sherry

Cotuit oysters

Bisque of crabs à la Norfolk

Consommé de volaille Sévigné

Hors-d'oeuvres variés

Rhine Wine, 1893

Soft clams à l'ancienne

Château-Latour, 1878

Saddle and rack of spring lamb

Mint sauce

Peas à la Française

Bermuda potatoes rissolées

Moët & Chandon, 1893

Terrapin, Maryland Club

Grapefruit au Kirsch

Clos-Vougeot, 1893

Canvasback ducks

Fried hominy

Celery à l'université

Parfait noisettes

Cheese

Fruit

Coffee

Cognac, 1805

5

Whatever Morgan did, he did in a big way, whether it was organizing a party or buying masterpieces. When Herbert Satterlee and Morgan's daughter Louisa were about to be married in 1900, their first idea was that they would prefer a modest service in the little church at Highland Falls, followed by a reception at Cragston. But Morgan took over the planning, and the result was that the ceremony was held at St. George's in New York, with cards of admission because the church would hold only fifteen hundred people; for the reception, Morgan had a large ballroom temporarily erected behind No. 219 to hold the twenty-four hundred guests who came. As for his purchases of art, they were made on such a scale that an annual worry at 23 Wall Street at the year end, when the books of the firm were balanced, was whether Morgan's personal balance in New York would be large enough to meet the debit balances accumulated through the year as a result of his habit of paying for works of art with checks drawn on the London or the Paris firm.

There is a story—probably apocryphal but nevertheless suggestive of Morgan's purchasing methods—to the effect that once two men who owned a steel mill decided, as they approached Morgan's office, that they would be willing to take five million dollars for it but might as well begin by asking for ten; whereupon Morgan said to them abruptly as they entered, “Now, I don't want to hear any talk from you men; I know all about your plant and what it's worth; I haven't time for any haggling; I'm going to give you twenty million dollars—now take it or leave it.” Often art dealers got much more money from him than they had dreamed of getting. On more than one occasion, finding that some object of art that appealed to him was part of a large and varied collection
, he said to himself, “What's the use of bothering about one little piece when I might get them all?” and promptly made a large offer for the whole collection. Nor did he like to waste time. Once he was just getting into his automobile to take the steamer for Europe when a dealer came along and told him that such-and-such a collection was for sale. It was a collection which Morgan knew all about. “Very well,” said he, “if you are authorized to negotiate for it, you may buy it for me”—and drove off without another word.

The Rigbys, in their entertaining book on collectors and collecting, produce two other equally characteristic anecdotes. One is to the effect that George S. Hellman once brought Morgan a Vermeer to look at, and found to his surprise that “the great Dutchman's name was strange to the Morgan ear.” Thereupon Hellman delivered a brief lecture on Vermeer, his place in the history of art, and the value set upon his work in recent sales.

“Morgan gazed at the picture; abruptly asked the price.

“‘One hundred thousand dollars,' said the dealer.

“‘I'll take it,' snapped Morgan, and the deal was concluded.”

The Rigbys' other story is to the effect that after Morgan had bought the famous Garland Collection of Chinese porcelain, he remarked to Duveen, the dealer who had acted for him, “I understand that Mr. Garland did not complete the collection.” That was true, said Duveen. “Then,” said Morgan, “I shall be glad if you will complete it for me”—an instruction which, in view of the expense of Chinese porcelains, was enough to take a dealer's breath away.

He showered the Metropolitan Museum with gifts in great variety; in 1906, for example, when he bought the great Hoentschel collection of eighteenth-century French decorative art and also of Gothic decorative art, he gave the eighteenth-century part of it to the museum outright, and announced that he would deposit the entire Gothic part of it on loan. He filled his new Library with beautiful things, he filled Prince's Gate, he loaned treasures in quantity to this museum and that, yet still the works of art piled up in storage—and he could not stop, had no idea of stopping. Edward P. Mitchell, editor of the New York
Sun
, sketched him briefly as he sat in the West
Room of his Library about 1910, an old man, yet still burning with the collector's fever:

The lesser monarchs of finance, of insurance, of transportation, of individual enterprise, each in his domain as haughty as Lucifer, were glad to stand in the corridor waiting their turns like applicants for minor clerkships in the ante-room of an important official, while he sat at his desk in his library room within, looking through a pile of newly bound volumes which the binder had sent for his inspection, giving a three-seconds glance at some treasure of printed or manuscript literature which was to go instanter to the shelf or safe in that incomparable storehouse, probably never to be seen again by the eyes then contemplating the acquisition.

Mitchell ended his description with the comment, “It was
his
possession now and Mr. Morgan was pleased.” That was true; but that, I think, was not all. He was engaged in assembling a big thing—as big in its way as the Steel Corporation—every bit of which was to him beautiful; and he must make it bigger still, the very biggest aggregation of lovely things that there was or ever could be.

6

After breakfast at No. 219, and perhaps a business conference or two or a call from an art dealer, Pierpont Morgan would proceed downtown in a horse-drawn box cab which he hired from the New York Cab Company; or, in his very latest years, in a large automobile. Arriving at the Drexel Building—which occupied the site of the present Morgan headquarters at Broad and Wall—he would establish himself at a corner desk on the Broad Street side of the ground-floor banking rooms; there was a glassed-in place behind him which was occupied by secretaries. He dressed severely in a dark suit, with a wing collar and an Ascot tie which filled almost completely the V of shirt front at the neck; he had a taste for fancy waistcoats, which people liked to give him for Christmas, but those were for the
Corsair
or for traveling; he wore to the office an old-fashioned square-topped derby
hat, or in summer a wide-brimmed Panama. At intervals he would retire from his desk in the front office to a back room which was in the adjoining Mills Building; he had another desk in this room, and his partner Charles Steele had one, and there was a pleasant open fire; here he could work more comfortably and quietly, out of sight of people who came to ask for him. There was, of course, a stream of these, some of whom had no idea of being granted an audience but came in merely in order to be seen going in and out of the building; there was even one occasion on which a broker carefully dropped on the steps of 23 Wall Street an unsigned buying order for securities, in the hope that passers-by might pick it up and the report might go about that the great House of Morgan was interested in the stock.

At some time between twelve and three o'clock, “the Senior,” as they called him in the office, would make a tour to look at the books. First to the stock desk, then to the security department, then to the general books, beginning with the cash position and going on to the ledgers which showed the balances of all depositors. It was a nervous moment for the clerks, for his searchlight gaze seemed to be able to take in a whole page of figures in an instant and catch any irregularity; if a clerk had put down a 4 per cent bond as 4½ his eye would pick up the error without fail. His manner was ordinarily quiet and kindly, but if he found something that he disapproved of, he would shout out something like “Who gave that order, Kinnicut?” in a loud deep voice—and if he caught a mistake that he attributed to sheer carelessness he would thunder. He often took his sandwich lunch in the back room as late as two or even three o'clock; by four or thereabouts the box cab would be waiting outside the door—often to remain there hopefully for an hour or two; finally he would be through for the day and would be off in the cab, to proceed to his beloved Library or to drop off at a friend's house for a call on the way home.

7

That his mien could be frightening—as Steffens has so well made clear—is undeniable. When people first met him the one thing they saw was his nose; trying not to look at it, they met his blazing eyes, and were speechless. One woman
who came to know him very well said that for the first few weeks of her acquaintance with him she was terrified; only gradually did she come to realize that behind his alarming front were courtesy and kindness. Edward Steichen, who took the great photograph of him which appears as the frontispiece of this book, says that meeting his gaze was a little like confronting the headlights of an express train bearing down on one. If one could step off the track, they were merely awe inspiring; if one could not, they were terrifying.