The Oregon daily journal., July 12, 1908, Page 29, Image 29

THE OREGON SUNDAY JOURNAL PORTLAND, SUNDAY HORNING, JULY: 12, 1903
Singular
Unbappiness of Two
of America's Great
amines
O YOU know, I never realized
until now what a terrible curse it"
is to have money? I suppose I
am being paid back for some of the money I
have."
It was young Frank J. Gould who said it,
so very wistfully, only a few weeks ago. as he
declared, in almost the same breath, that he
would tell nothing of the causes that led to
his estrangement from his wife. " .
And his words were most true. Of all
these heirs whom Nemesis pursues, young
Frank Gould with his "bully" wife, whose
love for him was so great that it bade her defy
her religion's rules, with his love for her that
endured as a beacon for other lovers harassed
in the trials of marriage, with all that should
assure a husband's happiness should have
been the last tu discern the cause of it in
money.
But he did not pursue the analysis, which
his misery, in that single flash, opened to'his
eyes. For; of all the unhappinesses that have
sprung from wayward, baffled or starved af
fections, those that have befallen the heirs of
the millions made in the making of the great
railroads have been most numerous and most
unconquerable.
THOSE two huge fortunes of the Goulds and the
Vanderbilts made amid the smoke of financial
battles which were Homeric even when com
pared with the giant conflicts of railway in
terests today, bequeathed to the heirs, who received
them under the most elaborate safeguards, strife more
bitter than any ever waged by the original creators of
the wealth.
And the battles Incident to that strife have been
fraught with far keener suffering than any that raged
in the mere making of the riches.
The conquering- "Commodore" Vanderbllt, ousted
from one company In the days of California the Golden,
never repined. Heart-whole fighter that he was, ha
found delight in establishing a rival line, and, by the
sheer force of his genius, beating his former colleagues
into submission and into his reinstatement with all
the honors and more than the profits of war.
The astute Jay Gould,' covered In his lifetime with
as many anathemas as there were dollars in his ever
growing hoard, found no chagrin, no regrets." What
ever he was as a financier, he was the fighter whose
happiness is in conflict.
When a VanderBllt clashed with a Gould giant
grappling with giant the vulpine shrewdness of the
Gould genius could devise the trick of issuing more
and more stock as, day after day, the Vanderbllt cour
age could buy It up.
And when the Vanderbllt brains perceived that the
capital of the whole earth must fall In a combat with
any stock printing press unlimited by law, they were
discreet enough to relinquish the attempt to control
the Kria Road and daring enough to establish the
New York Central. When the "Commodore" died, in
1877. he left a fortune estimated at $100,000,000 the
fortune a Staten Island farm boy had begun to ac
cumulate when ha was 16, and started a farmer's ferry
from his home to New York.
COULDN'T MAKE MONEY SAFE "
Gould, dying, was able to bequeath the millions
wrenched from the game old fighter In that tremendous
struggle over Erie, where Greek met Greek, to his
children under the Infallible protection of the "family
council," that European device for guarding the head
against the heart, which works so automatically abroad
in balking fond lovers and leaving the family wealth
and position undiminished.
But neither tho far-seeing shrewdness of a Gould
nor the KnKllali primogeniture plan of the wise old
"Commodore" could make railroad money "safe."
The 'heads" of the Vanderbllt family have been no
more able to steer all its scions to the haven of hap
piness, and keep them there, than has the "family
council" intrusted with the government of the hearts
and fortunes of the Gould heirs.
Society has since acknowledged that it was startled
by the divorce suit, in 1895, of Mrs. William K. Vander
bllt, Sr.. against her husband. Society is mild in its
recollection. As a matter of fact, society was stunned.
It revived only when the more astounding fact became
known that Mrs. Vanderbllt named as co-respondent
with her husband a notorious Parlsienne, Nellie Neu
etretter. The decree against him was so severe that the court
forbade him to marry again, although his wife was
free as any woman who had never worn matrimony's
I- . v . til ifJH 1 r . XL z-9 1 1 . . ,. T v llll
Marital - ; v-; Mmmmmmm -
M until now what a terrible curse it III 4 Zf tv-. ' kVlL I ,t-4 I' ' fX ill
fa?
r ..a
1 II 1 1
3
bond. She used her freedom to marry O. H. P. Bel
mont, who died this summer.
Wealthy as her new husband was. Mrs. Belmont
kept the marvelous Marble Villa at Newport, which
represented $2,000,000 of the Vandertllt wealth, and
received annually as alimony from the Vanderbllt heir
a fortune of $.250,000, although her daughter and his,
the Duchess of Marlborough, and their two sons made
additional drains upon him of nearly a million more.
It has been scarcely five years since that Vander
bllt, the notoriety of his wife's divorce having meas
urably paled In the interval, went humbly before the
courts and protested, that now, for years, he had led a
moral life. The courts relented and removed the ban.
He married at once Mrs. Anne Harrlman Ruther
ford, a sister of Oliver Harrlman, and the Episcopal
condemnation of the English clergyman who married
them grew to a notoriety that almost equaled his
original divorce.
That marriage precipitated a long train of conse
querices upon his children by his first wife, for the
claims of the second made a new and appreciable in
road upon the millions inherited by their father. And
goes where the money goes, and tho rash lover's father
penalized his older son by leaving tho bulk of hi hug
fortune to Alfred Gwynne Vanderbllt.
It was Alfred who, when his brother was the father
of two children, effected the reconciliation, which Ctm
about the time that William K. Vanderbllt was re
lieved of Ms odium by the courts of New York. Mother
and son. and pretty and proud Grace Wlison, and th
grandchildren who had come to this Inheritance of
strife, all were reunited. The curse of the railroad
millions seemed to have been burned out In suffering.
It had merely been dulled for a time. The Very
Alfred, "head" of the house by virtue of the money,
married more than seven yeara ago to charming Elsie
French, daughter of the late Francis Ormond French,
director in many railroads, rode into Central Park
little more than a year ago laden with his happiness
and the still Increasing millions he got $60,000,000
when his father cut off the Independent Esau who was
hta rtlHftr Krnthar 'l-iK . I.' r- a r. 1, lln, ,11 k.U 1 M
as the source of man's curses.
Radiantly beautiful, Mme. Ruiz was dismounting from
her horse. The saddle was slipping. Of course she did not
know the Impressionable young millionaire, with a heart
that was brother to one able to fling away $80,000,000
for another fair face, was near her. Mme. Ruis Belle
O'Brien-Baudoine-Hilton-Ruiz the divorced wife of a
young Cuban, the daintiest and most fetching of such
women in New York,' the iron-willed creature who hat
reduced her weight from 200 to 115 pounds, could not
have premeditated it. ,
But impressionable Alfred Gwynne Vanderbllt gave
her the aid she needed, or didn't need. And the divorce
suit of his wife at the recent recommendation for ab
solute separation of the couple by the referee, had tt
scandal enhanced by the interposition of the pitiful
story of the easting off of Florence Schenck, once a bella
of Norfolk, Va., by Charles Wilson, the head of the)
vanuerDiu sianies
Young. Frank Gould', when the Iron entered his soul.
did not recall the tragedies in the lives of the heirs Of
the ancient Gould foes, lie saw only his own misfor
tune, with its background of his own family miserlftfl.
those consequences go on still.
With the Vanderbilts It has not been husband and
wife alone whose ways have been parted. That strain
of Iron In the blood of the Vanderbilts, which might
have come of the kinship the early commodore felt
for the rails that bound whole communities literally
with Jles of steel, has sufficed to mart mother and son.
For seven years Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbllt refused
forgiveness to her son, Cornelius Vanderbllt, Jr., for
defying his family and marrying pretty and proud
Grace Wilson. The headship of the Vanderbllt families
A BITTER REMINDER ,r
The marriage of Anna Gould to 'tier persistent
Prince de Sagan could serve only as a bitter reminder
of the unblushing rascalities, banalities and brutalities
of his relative and predecessor, the unspeakable Bonl
de Castellane. How the Gould family council fought
with Bonl lirst, and with Heile later; how the com
bined wisdom of the council failed before the inherited
shrewdness of the heir they so earnestly sought to
protect! What occult fate invested her with the skill
and the resolution to frustrate not only tho foz-llko
cunning of the greatest of the living Goulds, but to
set at naught all the fond, wise care with which hia
descendants sought to safeguard her? And what occult
destiny has that rate yet In store for her? :
It has had no mercy on Howard Gould. He ha
sworn before the courts that he was married, In Kath
erlne Clemmons, to a drunkard, a woman whose breed
ing vviia u. puuuc uueiiBe, wiiusts jnamier ui uxe was aucn.
that his self-respect, If nothing else, forced him to
leave his own home, CaBtle Gould. t
It was a shocking reverse to the plcturo o oelal
triumphthat was presented In ther early married lifts.,
when a great Parisian theater showered her with roee.i
as the most beautiful woman who breathed within Its
four walls; when the German emperor honored her as
the most agreeable and brilliant American' woman
he had met. and when society acclaimed her as its,
smartest, most piquant belle. j
Equally shocking was the mass of counter charges!
the woman flung at him. when she declared he was'
unfaithful to his marriage, and' not with ono woman f
alone, but with half a dozen. f
The Howard Gould divorce scandal dragged its
wretched length along with such an effluvium - of ;
shame as oft-shamed American society bad Seldom
been revolted by, until there came this last tragedy j
of the railroad millions, the tragedy of Frank Gould,'
so young tnat na can oniy wonder at tho cruelty of
the fate that ferreted him out in the midst of hl quiet
ecstatic marriage. ,
There is no scandal there. There Is only too much
love and foolish jealousy. Helen Kelly, marrying for
love out of her church and proud of her love as such
a woman could well be, resented her young husband's
overfond Jealousy. And so there was a separation and
the beginnings of a suit for limited dlvorco, and all
the makings of the trouble that left the husband lov
ing more than ever, and puzzling, like a hurt child, t
the wantonness of the evil that had befallen him. -
Then, later, they made their home near each other,
at Belle Haven, Conn., and the love which, after all,
can never be sacrificed for mere money, endeavored
again to ward off the curses of the millions. But In
the meantime the divorce suit went on, and tho hearts
of both young people hjiire been sad.
THE vpJote TRAD
i i 1 i
"I'm sure you will excuse mo. I3ut don't you
want to ;"
"NO! I don't want anything. Is that
plain? And If you annoy me further, I shall call
that officer."
"Well, before you do or I do don't you want
to see the manager?"
The very elegantly parbed youncr woman, as
slender ns she was haughty in the graceful curves
of her princess gown, standing there in front of
the great department store, with her fawn-colored
auto cloak over her arm and her auto itself, attend
ed by the obsequious chauffeur, waiting at the curb,
stared for a single, brief instant into the steely,
penetrating eyes of the well-dressed ma:i who had
accosted her.
"O-oh, yes; th-thnnk you. Perhaps I do."
And, with the corner policeman, whom she had
threatened to call, exchanging a friendly wink with
her insistent escort behind her princess back, she
turned to re-enter the store.
A rich and respectable girl, ten minutes pre
viously, the pet ward of the city's gnardians in her
walks and rides, now she was a shoplifter, caught
in the act of crime, nffrightcdly on her way to
punishment.
DISHONEST? Not at all until ten minutes ago.
Plihonest now? Not In the least, although 0ro
minutes hence, her arm only then released from
the erparer.tly gallant bold by hich the pollta
tore detectiie nips the motor coat tiRr.tly lest she drop
from u folds the lares It conceals, she will bo a COO
fessed thief, wtldlv hysterical.
I'ntil her Identity is fully assured, the vitiUnt do-
tctiv will not b poeUtve whether he ias "rlm-hed" a
new and gorgeous profsional. and 4 jacqulred nwth
g'ory. or h rmrely rescued O worth of IrtsS point
nd made nearly as much trouble for himself it U .
worth.
For this Is tho day of tho ohflTUfter. wnen, after
the yrs of sporadic aevelopment and chase discovery
and axroot. oho baa ovoluted lata prlsaisd typoo savd
els sots, ail eluljr scheduled anl ail duly haAU4 aa part
of the routine of the great modern store. '
Give her a skin-tight sheath gown, a Charlotte Cor
day hat trimmed with roses blanches and her favorite
traveling bag, and she will live like a baroness where
her prototype subsisted like a beggar.
It may be interesting to know that the bag. haa a
hlneed hettom. opening upward and inward, so that, set
down upon a lot of goods piled upon ho counter for her
pred.uory ladyship's Inspection, she can fumble Inside
of It and (tather up 1100 worth of plunder In a minute.
Or her best-liked ruse in 190S leave her nothtn
more than a loose coat or wrap over her pretty, round"
arm, with her delicately modeled hand lying. Innocent,
and Immovably, on the goods before your, very eye
while ti.e-oth-jr holds up for Inspection the articles,
juu put thi-ni beff're her. ,
The tricky little xinner has three hands. Instead nf
two It is the third, of .perfectly tinted wax. whlLt
plays before your eves the passive role Of companion i.
the genuine one that takes the goods aa you show them.
Ti e other real hand is busy, under cover of the wrap, I i
gathering up th articles the wrap eonceala
It takes four men detectives, and as many women,
to guard the average department store in dull times; it
takes five times that force, in the i-te fall, when the
Christmas crowds ar pouring in. - ; ,
Yet the ordinary department store of a large city
rarely escapes with fewer than forty or fifty capture
month And every one Is a prima facie Case of iv '.
detected In the act and eaujht-with the goods, a m -
take could cost the establishment $50,000 In civil dam t.
Wherever it Is possible, the arrest Is effected ou'-. t
of the store, a.1 then with the utmost quietness, t- -
notoriety is advertising of the kind which the di i
ment store, past master In advertising s wondrous srt,
most ardently abhors. ,
The professional, whenever caught, la rroeeeutM I
the extreme extent of the law. As for the lmpu.jo -
kleptomaniac weak femininity's eternal bleiris on t
doctor, who coined the word some thirty yours ol
"Madam," the Btely eyed detective U saying ti
occupant of that beautiful princegs gown, eo r'-
doffed apd moro recently resumed ,"et ore saitii s:
is your first offense. But ere anut have your ur
to this confesalon, la order to safeguard the eioio fr .
any resentment yrti may later swk to sallafT.'
The gltmsner of hope that lights h-er m l wt
is accompanied by a gleam of that eery revvlt acd I
seotment which he so aecurauly fnreeaw.
"A confeaatonl I I sign a oonfun r
""Would yoi" suavely coas.lrat "care to tm'i
your father, so that be eaa arreage t4M. ehiio we
sending for the police setr4?"
"Oh! Oh, say don't don t 4o tst I ?t
alga. Oh. plo-e-eas let e'gn. wcti t ywet"
"Thana; you. ery tnoch." A lt:. 'io -while
the coafeosloB into . sle. T ' . "
se glad It was sa vers'gM iht ; i--
to pay foe your yurch. Th in t Is i --a
These saJe are cash, yo iow.
"Ob. tnank ye eo Bmce, Tins, I t4e
with ase.-
V