The Belmont Boys and Girls Part 4: Twilight of a Generation
At the end of my previous installment, we looked at the lives and homes of the Belmonts up to the brink of World War 1. On July 28th, 1914, the day Austria-Hungary declared War on Serbia, Perry and Jessie Belmont happened to be in Carlsbad, a popular spa town within the western border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
As the conflict swiftly escalated when Germany, Russia, France and Britain entered the war, they made their way back to Paris. Jessie generated headlines when she was nearly seized as a suspected spy at the French Border after making an offhand comment in German to her traveling companions aboard a train.
Despite Perry’s misgivings about the leaving his racehorses in France, in early September the Belmonts, along with several hundred Americans boarded a special train arranged by the American Embassy to Le Havre. There an American Cruiser transported them across the English Channel to join the exodus of Americans in London trying to book passage back to the States. They sailed home on the Lusitania in late October along with the Vincent Astors, the Duryeas, and other acquaintances.
Shortly after landing in the States, Jessie and Perry settled back in their Washington mansion and began entertaining. Their dinner for the Italian Ambassador in January 1915 was noted as the largest given in the Capital that winter. In March, Alva hosted part of a large suffragette conference in the grand hall at 477 Madison Avenue.
Alva at a later suffrage convention in September, 1915
Cut off from Europe, American socialites flocked to sporting events, the opera, and leisure activities in 1915. The fashionable resorts were bursting at the seams that season, and the pace of socializing took on almost a manic air, as if they knew things might never be the same again. Acknowledging the mounting horrors across the Atlantic, many of the events incorporated a charitable aspect for War Relief.
Jessie and Perry chatting with Irene Castle, holding her pet monkey
Alva went to Newport that season to fundraise amongst the larger than usual summer colony, hosting a party for 500 people which raised funds for both the cause and war relief.
One of the biggest events of the season that year was undoubtedly the marriage of August’s son Morgan and Miss Margaret Andrews,
which took place at her parent’s cottage, Rockry Hall. The press wrote approvingly of the union which joined two of the resort’s “old line’ families.
Rockry Hall
A downside to Newport’s bursting at the seams that season was the uncomfortably high number of ex-husbands and wives present, who risked bumping into each other with their current spouses in the social fishbowl. Included in that number were Alva’s ex-husband , William K Vanderbilt and Jessie’s former husband Henry Sloane, as well as her estranged daughter from her first marriage, Mrs.George Widener.
Despite the presence of her former family, after spending several weeks at By-the-Sea around the festivities Jessie and Perry decided to re-establish themselves at Newport. They rented a cottage for the remainder of the season, and purchased Belcourt from Alva the following year. Sitting vacant since Alva had begun reoccupying Marble House after Oliver’s death, Belcourt once again became a social hub of the summer colony.
Belcourt was not the only house Alva divested herself of in 1916. In August she also sold her Long Island Estate Brookholt.
Having parted with two of her four homes in the States, it might first have appeared that Alva’s famed mania for building and collecting homes was slowing down, but soon enough she would prove that theory wrong.
Back in the City, August and Eleanor knew it was a matter of time before they would have to move as 34th street became more commercial, (August Belmont Jr’s house next door had been leased to trade back in 1913). In 1916 44 East 34th street was converted into offices and apartments and the couple leased a duplex apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue for the princely sum of $21,000 (roughly $410,000 in 2021 dollars) per year.
820 Fifth Avenue, where August and Eleanor took up residence after vacating their 34th st home.
When the United States entered the war, both August and Perry both volunteered their services, Perry was commissioned as a Captain at the age of sixty-five, while August, commissioned as a major, was sent to France. The ladies did their part as well. Jessie hosted benefits at Belcourt, while Eleanor threw her significant energies behind the Red Cross.
In 1918 the construction on Alva’s newest creation, a fairy-tale gothic castle named Beacon towers that rose above the beach at Sands Point Long Island was complete.
Beacon Towers - many believe it was the inspiration for F Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Jay Gatsby’s mansion
Designed by Hunt & Hunt, its inspiration was drawn from a number of sources, ranging from the alcazars of spain to depictions of castles found in illuminated manuscripts. A mural featuring Joan of Arc (a historical figure that Alva particularly admired), greeted guests in the entry hall. The symbolism was very appropriate as the mansion soon became a center of suffragette activities.
Alva with fellow Womens Rights activists on the steps of Beacon Towers
When the Prince of Wales traveled to America on an official tour to thank the United States for its role in defeating Germany. Jessie and Perry put their Washington home at his disposal while in the Capital (a few years later he planned to use Belcourt as well, but the Newport portion of that trip was cancelled in the end).
After the Great War ended, wealthy Americans hoped for a return to their prior gilded age lifestyles. Major economic and societal shifts already set in motion and exacerbated by the war however, would affect all but the wealthiest in ways they could have never imagined. The Belmonts would be no exception. In 1922 the press reported dozens of the largest Newport cottages owned by its traditional social leaders were empty or boarded up that season.
While noting a new younger generation was making its mark at the resort, eschewing the grand entertainments and formal lifestyles of their predecessors what, the papers failed to mention was that federal income taxes remained stubbornly high (taking 56% off of an annual income of $100,000). Booming post-war industries offered higher wages and shorter hours than service did for members of the working class. For even cottagers who could afford to open their massive gilded age mansions, finding the dozens of servants required to adequately staff them presented a whole other challenge. Included in the number of vacant cottages that season were By-the-Sea and Belcourt, with the press writing that Alva was the sole representative of the venerable Belmont clan present at the resort that year.
Even before the war’s end August and Eleanor seldom used By-the-Sea, preferring one of their Long Island estates or Eleanor’s 800-acre farm in the Berkshires to the giddy social whirl of Newport.
They moved about frequently in town, leasing a including a townhouse at 9 East 84th. Street in 1918, an apartment at 907 Fifth avenue in 1920 and one at 270 Park Avenue In 1921. August Belmont died on December 10, 1924 in an apartment he and Eleanor had recently leased at 550 Park Avenue. He left a trust fund for Eleanor, guaranteeing her an income of $30,000 (worth roughly $461,000 in 2021) a year, Nursery Stud, and any property acquired during their marriage. The balance of the estate was to be divided between his sons Morgan and Raymond, along with the widow and children of his son August Belmont Jr, who had predeceased him in 1919. One of the more interesting provisions in his will was an allocation of up to $50,000 to purchase a pearl necklace that has once belonged to his mother from his late sister Fredericka’s husband SS Howland in order to keep it in the family.
While initial estimates of his estate ranged between twenty and forty million dollars, in actuality it was substantially less. His reputed Midas touch had failed him in the last decade of his life, with a string of bad investments. His estates single biggest asset were majority shares in the Cape Cod Canal, a project that had lost money from the day it opened.
Eleanor and his sons swiftly liquidated other assets. The sale of his breeding stock and stud operations netted roughly $1,000,000 while his seat on the stock exchange fetched $110,000. Eleanor agreed sold Nursery farm in 1925 for close to $500,000. By-The-Sea was eventually sold to Evelyn Walsh McLean (the owner of the Hope Diamond) in 1927. All this helped the heirs to manage quite nicely until the Cape Cod canal was finally sold to the US government in 1928 for $11.4 million dollars, netting them $5.5 million (the equivalent of roughly $82,000,000 in 2021) and allowing August’s estate to finally be settled.
If August Belmont’s fortune wasn’t nearly as large as people had assumed, by the 1920s, Perry and Jessie Belmont’s financial situation was penurious in comparison. The first hints of trouble came in 1921 when tradesmen put liens on both their Washington and Newport homes for unpaid bills (totaling less than a $1000 between them).
The Belmonts, in Europe at the time, explained them away as oversights on the part of the caretakers in charge of their properties. While they publicly announced their plans to return stateside in 1922, they remained in Europe, confiding to friends that their finances would not allow it.
Within a few years they seemed to be back on top of the world however, reopening their Washington and Newport mansions regularly again, hosting balls, dinners, and luncheons as in the old days. By 1927 the press noted that now they were the sole representatives of the family carrying on the torch in Newport, after Alva had more or less moved permanently to France several years earlier.
With the passage of the 19th Amendment in the United States, her focus increasingly turned towards the International Womens Movement. She sold 477 Madison Avenue in 1923. In order to be closer to her daughter to Consuelo, then married to French aviator Jacques Balsan, she settled in a house in Paris at 9 Avenue Monsieur and a villa on the Riviera at Ezes sur Mer. In 1926 she purchased the Chateau d’Augerville, a historic property with connections to Joan of Arc (an association that pleased Alva immensely). She threw herself into improving the property, restoring the exterior and principal rooms to their fifteenth century glory while modernizing kitchens and other service areas, installing a bowling alley in an outbuilding, adding a gothic-style gate lodge, and widening the nearby river to enhance the chateau’s setting.
In 1927 she sold Beacon Towers to her friend Millicent Hearst. By 1928, Marble House, shuttered and emptied of its furnishings, was officially put on the market.
Perry and Jessie’s days of entertaining in lavish surroundings came to an end with the crash of 1929, which left them in increasingly straightened circumstances. They had to vacate their beloved suite at the Ritz in Paris and take smaller quarters at the Hotel Vendome in order to economize. Reopening Belcourt or their Washington residence was out of the question. In January 1932 papers announced Belcourt’s sale at public auction, revealing the Belmonts had failed to pay the taxes on it for the past three years. Alva stepped in to avoid this ultimate embarrassment, buying out Perry’s interest in the house, paying the back taxes and making tenancy arrangements for Perry and Jessie.
Later that same summer Alva sold her original Newport cottage Marble House to Frederick Prince for a reputed $100,000 (a fraction of its cost and worth). When Alva died the following year, she left Belcourt to August Belmont’s twenty-five year old grandson, August Belmont IV (along with a $100,000 legacy to make it less of a burden).
Still, the young scion of the clan had no interest in Newport, and in 1933 the papers marked the seeming end of the family’s active connection with Newport
In the meantime, Perry and Jessie, unsuccessful in their attempts to find a buyer for their Washington mansion, applied for zoning approval to convert it into 6 apartments but were turned down. Jessie died in Paris in 1935. Her estate consisted primarily of her splendid jewelry collection. The following year,a buyer came forward for the Belmont’s Washington mansion in the form of The Order of The Eastern Star, which purchased it for use as their National Headquarters. It contents were auctioned off in a three-dale sale.
With the funds from the sale and auction Perry was able purchased Belcourt back from his great-nephew in 1937. At first he planned to restore it, but soon realized keeping the white elephant was beyond his resources.
Belcourt’s ballroom, showing its age.
In 1941 he sold it in turn to George Waterman, who planned to open an automobile museum there (only to discover it wa forbidden by zoning restrictions). Perry spent his final years as a fulltime Newport resident in a much smaller, though still comfortable cottage called Elm Lodge on Old Beach Road.
Elm Lodge
While his days of throwing grand parties were long gone, he remained an active member of the resort, visiting the Reading Room every day and lunching with the town’s surviving grande dames. As he approached 90, his birthdays were treated as special occasions by the press, who used them as an opportunity to reminisce of Newport’s gilded age heyday when the Belmonts ruled the resort. He passed away at Elm Lodge on May 24, 1947, at the age of 96.
Perry’s death left his sister in-law Eleanor Belmont as the sole surviving member of the generation. While she had forsaken the role of social leader, she immeasurably burnished the Belmont name by becoming one of the country’s leading philanthropists. In addition to being one of the Red Cross’s stalwart leaders and raising millions for the unemployed during the Great Depression, she is credited as "the woman who single-handedly saved the Metropolitan Opera." when it was on the brink of insolvency during the Great Depression. She tirelessly raised funds for the organization, founding the Metropolitan Opera Guild and becoming the first woman to sit on its Board of Trustees. She also strove to make Opera more accessible to the masses and as a vehicle to promote the War effort during WW2.
By the 1950’s it was written that she probably helped raise more money than any other woman in America. When Eleanor died on October 26, 1979 in her apartment at 1115 Fifth Avenue at the age of 100, her front page obituary in The New York Times lauded her as one of New York Society’s last true grande dames.
Eleanor’s death was not the end of the Belmont name by any means though. The descendants of August Belmont continued to distinguish themselves in the fields established by the family, including thoroughbred racing, breeding horses and dogs, and running the family firm, but they generally lived more quiet low-key lives than their headline-generating forebearers.
Over the years, many of the iconic homes owned by the Belmont siblings and their spouses were lost; 477 Madison Avenue, Nursery Farm, Blemton, By-the-Sea, and Beacon Towers among them.
Nursery Farm during demolition
Fortunately, a number still stand. Fredericka’s former estate at Mount Morris is still a private home and appears to be in good shape.
After going through a series of ups and downs and uses (truly a house with nine lives),
Postcard of Belcourt’s courtyard during a medieval festival
Belcourt is undergoing a thorough restoration by its latest owner, the owner of the Alex and Ani brand, and open for tours.
The Ballroom at Belcourt today - Photo: Belcourt.com
Alva’s Marble House and Chinese Tea House are likewise open to the public through the Preservation Society of Newport, but for those hoping for a little bit more immersive experience her final home, Chateau D’Augerville is now a luxury hotel and Spa.
Aerial view of the Chateau d’Augerville Hotel and Spa (photo from website)
Special recognition however, should be given to the Order of the Eastern star, who have proved to be diligent stewards of Perry and Jessie’s spectacular Washington Mansion for over 80 years.
Not only have they maintained to a high standard, some of the grand entertaining rooms are available to rent for events, and tours can be arranged by appointment.
Grand Staircase (photo: Andrew Roby Events)
photo: Perry Belmont House Facebook page
