When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan Page A

the affair with levity,” according to a spokesman, and said he was getting used to being made a ghost. Normally he would not have tolerated a prank at his expense but would have dispatched a whole posse of lawyers to pursue the offender. But this prank was grand, transatlantic, and imperial, on a scale with Astor’s ego and his fortune, and its eventual butt was not Astor but his old enemy, the American press. A threatened investigation of the hoax by British cable authorities trailed off into unsubstantiated published rumors that Astor had been mildly deranged at the time of his death notice. Perhaps, it was also rumored, he had absorbed the mystical teachings of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the late Russian soothsayer and conduit to the spirit world.
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    His public career behind him, and an immense fortune at his command, William was now freer than ever to indulge his passion for collecting, the arts, and a literary career. He founded a monthly publication, the Pall Mall Magazine, partly as an outlet for his short stories and his views on literature, history, politics, and American society. Rudyard Kipling, George Meredith, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Israel Zangwill, and Thomas Hardy were among the distinguished authors of the day who contributed fiction or verse to the magazine.
    Several of Astor’s own pieces in the magazine turned out to be its chief weak points and aroused both consternation and hilarity in his readers. As if inaugurating a brand-new line of inquiry, he entered the debate over the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare. “Even the staunchest adherents of the Stratford man admit the existence of a few awkward facts which cannot be explained away,” Astor wrote. “Let us glance, briefly, at some of them.” The historical Shakespeare, a butcher’s son (like old John Jacob Astor), a sometime stage carpenter and actor, had terrible handwriting: “Fancy a play traced in such barbarous characters!” “He was reputed intemperate; he was whipped for poaching; he married Anne Hathaway under circumstances discreditable to them both. At sixteen he is said to have been apprenticed to a butcher, after which he becomes a dealer in wood.” This thoroughly inadequate creature spent the last decade of his life, Astor wrote, in a “dirty and soulless little village,” and he died of a fever resulting from a drinking bout “of exceptional length and severity.” “Is this,” William concluded with a triumphant flourish, invoking the examples of Columbus, Napoleon, Luther, Newton, Galileo, Goethe, Richelieu, and Dante, “consistent with a great man’s nature?” Astor’s article became “a universal target for chaffing and ridicule,” the New York Times correspondent, the novelist Harold Frederic, reported from London. “The second syllable of his name is clearly superfluous.”
    Following another line of scholarly inquiry, Astor tried to plumb the secret of the witty and beautiful Madame Juliette Recamier, object of the emperor Napoleon’s “amorous advances,” and concluded she had been married to her own father. In another much-quoted article he described London’s famous fog, the city’s chronic pall of mist and greasy coal smoke, as “an enveloping goddess in operatic raiment.” He was unswayed by ridicule.
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    T HE SENIOR, more thoughtful and brooding of the two Astor cousins, William Waldorf appointed himself family historian and defender. “I am glad my Great Grandfather was a successful trader,” he wrote in his sixties, “because in all ages Trade has led the way to Civilization. I have studied his life, seeking to learn its aims, grateful to him for having lifted us above the ploughshares of Baden and bent on continuing his purpose.” One result of these studies was a ten-thousand-word essay in which he reviewed his ancestor’s allegedly maligned career