NEW YORK SOCIETY.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVII, Issue 4930, 25 January 1926, Page 1

NEW YORK SOCIETY.

GRADUALLY LOWERED BARRIERS. THE VANDERBILT PALACE. It takes an hour to walk over the Vanderbilt palace in Fifth Avenue, New York, which is about to be pulled down to make way for an hotel (states a writer in the “Dominion”). This, sumptuous home, if such* it can be called, was first thrown open to public view in November last a ; t a dollar a head, and the mob has been

swarming in ever since with successive reductions in the admission money, and new strata of the populace tapped whenever the attendance begins to fall off. There are forty rooms in the building, which has five floors, and one of the greatest centres of attraction is Mrs Vanderbilt’s famous bath tub. This is most elaborately carved from a single piece of white marble weighing several tons, and it cost £lO,OOO be?ore it was finally fixed up to ite owner’s satisfaction in its mirrored bathroom—and yet it seems it was just plain, plebian water that the lady washed in.

Even a. Vanderbilt has his worries, despite his millions, and the late Mr Reginald Cornelius Vanderbilt, who died four months back, was no exception. Twenty years back they were having one of their periodical cleanup in New York, and the District-At-torney, Mr Jerome, was on the trail of Richard Caufieldfe famous, New York gambling house. Mr Vanderbilt was reported to have been a, playei and heavy loser in the establishment, and Mr Jerome desired his attendance at court as a witness. The millionaire was not in the least desirous, of this sort of publicity, and Mr Jerome is process-servers followed him from point to point over the United States, with Mr Vanderbilt living in a state of perpetual motion and flitting ahead of them. The chase was given up when he took steamer for Europe and remained an exile for a, yeai, until the high play in Mr Canfield’s establishment had ceased to interest either the courts or the newspapers. The Fifth Avenue brown-stone mansions reared their ornate fronts in the days when New York society took itself very seriously, and no selfrespecting millionaire failed to dine on gold plate with at least a dozen courses and an elaborate ritual, of etiquette. A lot of raw millionaires broke in later on, and the ol.d ceremonioujs' stuffing of the gold-pla,te dinners gradually gave way until the present-day rowdy cabaret dinnerdance period arrived. New York society is stated to be now almost human, and is almost tolerant towards outsiders who seek admission into it. In fact, that high New York social authority, Mr Frank Crowninshield, estimates that the number of those who comprise society there has increased by a thousand per cent, during the past thirty years. It was. in the ’nineties that New York society put up its hardest battie to keep the outsiders out. Fashionable people began to build iron walls a.round their country houses; to blackball the less known candidates at their clubs; and to band together in every possible way in order to keep the threatening invaders out. This terrified dread of outside encroachments upon the part of society made the way easy for a famous and picturesque figure in New' York life, the redoubtable Ward McAllister,* whose inspired and happy task it was to keep the insiders in and the outsiders out, a task that occupied him until his death in 1895.

In 1892 Mra William Aistpr, the most portentious figure in the social history of America, mad© her famous request to Mr McAllister. Said this undisputed social sovereign of the millionaires ,to her stalwart henhcmii,n : “1 am beginning to think about my annual dance, and, as my ballr room is; only large enough for four hundred people I want you to help me cut down my invitations to approximately that number.” Mr McAllister, scenting a labour quite ,to his liking, consented smilingly. After the invitations had been dispatched he chanced to remark to some friends of liis that only four hundred people had been invited .to the great lady’s dance.. His remark was 1 repeated to others in the club, and subsequently found its way into the pages, of the New York “World,” the society editor of which even printed, with only a score or more errors, the names and pen-and-ink portraits of the fortunate mortals who had been bidden to the sabred festival. The term Four Hundred is now used universally to describe those people who dwell in New York society’s more rarefied altitudes.