WSJ: A Book to read

When The Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan Viking 240pp $24.95

Great American fortunes have a sad little habit of falling into disrepair after one or two generations. Among the villains are the usual suspects: divorce lawyers, alcohol and the Internal Revenue Service. Then there is the American philosophy of money, which is: Spend it. As a result, we all assume that today's Powerball winners will die broke.
But one American family has proved itself to be an exception: the Astors. Since the late 18th century, the possibility of finding an impoverished Astor has fallen into the "when pigs fly" category. It is this extraordinary clan that Justin Kaplan has taken on in "When the Astors Owned New York."
Actually, his title is something of an understatement. At the height of their powers in the post-World War II era, the Astors owned property all over the world. But it is true that the basis of the family fortune was Manhattan real estate. Building on his success in the fur trade in the late 18th century, the first John Jacob Astor, an immigrant son of a German butcher, began buying land. He lived by two maxims: "Buy by the acre, and lease by the lot" and "Lease -- never sell." These words of wisdom served his heirs and assigns so well that when New York was building its subway system a century later, the city found that it had nowhere to turn without tunneling through Astor acreage.

Lavish Gifts
Even the most frivolous of the patriarch's descendants seem to have heeded his business prescriptions. When his great-great-great granddaughter, Alice Astor Playdell-Bouverie, died in 1956, she had gone through four needy husbands and a furious spate of mansion-building, with lavish gifts to lovers and psychics she had met along the way. Yet she left an estate of exactly $5 million -- the sum she had inherited from her father, John Jacob Astor IV (who himself was considered a wastrel and a rake, dubbed by the press Jack Ass).
Perhaps because the family's founding father had married the daughter of his rooming-house landlady, later Astors have shown a fondness for taking in paying guests but taking them in on a grand scale. Among the New York hotels built with Astor money have been the Knickerbocker, the New Netherland, the original Waldorf-Astoria (razed in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building) and, of course, the Astor. All these hotels were conceived not as simple hostelries but as fashionable gathering places for the famous and moneyed. To that end, Astor hotels introduced a startling development in American hotel design: bedrooms with bathrooms that were not "down the hall." Mr. Kaplan suggests that today's luxury hotels and resorts owe a certain debt to the inn-keeping Astors.
"When the Astors Owned New York" represents something of a departure for Mr. Kaplan, who is best known for prize-winning biographies of folksy American writers ("Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain," "Walt Whitman"). Yet he seems right at home in this plush, high-living milieu and explores it with his customary grace and gusto. And he is not above indulging in bits of delicious gossip. When the divorced Jack Astor married his second wife, Madeleine Force, in 1911, the ceremony at his mother's "cottage" in Newport, R.I., was so hastily arranged (he was 47, the bride 18) that his chauffeur, "not expecting his services to be needed," had taken the day off. The newlyweds, needing to get to their yacht, ended up riding to the dock in a taxi hired by a reporter. (The following year, Jack would die aboard the Titanic, but the pregnant Madeleine survived.)
Family feuds are most fun when the combatants are rich, and the Astors have provided ample entertainment over the years. The major Astor battle was between two third-generation brothers: "imperious and somber" John Jacob Astor III and William Backhouse Astor Jr., who was regarded by his brother "as shiftless, a drifter and wastrel," Mr. Kaplan writes. Their fight was, inevitably, about money. And the feud eventually prompted William's son to decamp to England, where he purchased himself a lordship and established the family's "English branch."

Notable Ancestors
Then there was the rancor between Mrs. William Backhouse Astor and her nephew's wife. The former believed that the simple address "Mrs. Astor, New York" ought to be sufficient enough for the Postal Service to deliver mail to her; unfortunately, the latter Mrs. Astor felt the same way. Neither woman would budge. Like many rich families, the Astors thought it would be nice to have notable ancestors, so in the 1880s William Waldorf Astor hired a genealogist to prepare a family tree. After considerable research (and expense), the genealogist traced the family back to one Count Pedro d'Astorga of Castille, a Crusader killed in the siege of Jerusalem In 1100. Along with this information came a noble coat of arms, which William promptly adopted as his own. The family sports it to this day.
But Mr. Kaplan's own researches tell him that this family history is hardly convincing: He calls the tale of Count Pedro "at best an exercise in the optative mood," at worst a fabrication. In fact, he says, the family can be tenuously traced back to a certain Issac Astorg, a Jewish doctor in Carcassonne, France, who died in 1305. And yet, through all the spats, scandals and shenanigans, the Astors have managed to hang onto their money and even make it grow. A hundred years from now, will Bill Gates's descendants be able to say the same?

Mr. Birmingham is the author of "Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York" and "Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address."