Word: vanderbilt
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Back in 1896 when auburn-haired Grace Graham Wilson bagged young Cornelius Vanderbilt, most of New York's 400 agreed that it was a most unsuitable marriage. As a great-grandson of the tough old Commodore who built the New York Central, Cornelius Vanderbilt had some claims to aristocracy. Grace's social assets were far more modest. Her father, Richard T. Wilson, was a onetime Georgia farm boy whom well-bred New Yorkers regarded with distaste because he had made his fortune himself and had started it by speculating in cotton while more gentlemanly Southerners were off fighting...
...Grace Vanderbilt's most potent social weapon was the cultivation of European royalty, a technique which earned her the nickname "Kingfisher." Her first great coup occurred in 1902, when by request of Kaiser Wilhelm II she was hostess to Prince Henry of Prussia at the only private social function he attended in the U.S. In the years that followed, she entertained the King and Queen of the Belgians, the Crown Prince of Sweden, the Crown Prince of Norway, and every British ruler from Edward VII to George VI. By 1915 she had completely routed erratic, sharp-tongued Mrs. Stuyvesant...
World War I, which depleted the ranks of royalty and otherwise lowered the tone of society, took some of the luster off Grace Vanderbilt's crown. High taxes and World War II dealt her even harder blows. The famed Vanderbilt hospitality was offered to some odd citizens indeed: among them was Soviet U.N. Delegate Andrei Gromyko, whom Mrs. Vanderbilt regaled with reminiscences of the late Czar Nicholas. After her husband's death in 1942, Grace Vanderbilt abandoned to the wreckers the 58-room Fifth Avenue mansion which had cost her husband's grandfather...
...Gardener's Cottage." Resettled farther up Fifth Avenue in a 28-room pile which she termed "The Gardener's Cottage," Mrs. Vanderbilt lost none of her queenly manner. Convinced that Vanderbilts were a breed apart, she sometimes described herself as "all alone in the house," when there were, in fact, 18 servants there with her. ("She was quality" explained one devoted retainer.) Despite increasing feebleness, she continued to maintain at least nominal sway over what remained of high society. At the 1949 opening of the Metropolitan Opera, she appeared in a wheelchair, persuaded to suffer this discomfort...
Within little more than a year, however, Grace Vanderbilt, now in her mid-80s, was bedridden. Within two years she was blind. Last week, she died of pneumonia. Totally dependent on others in the last years of her life, and confined to the little world of her bedroom, she sometimes remembered the great days at Beaulieu. She would say to whoever was near by: "Come, let's go for a drive, darling." Then her companion, sitting down by Mrs. Vanderbilt's bed, would take her on an imaginary tour of Newport. "There's a sparkle...