The Astor 400

The Astor 400

Caroline Astor created a legend with her select social circle — an air of glamour and elegance that lives on today.

TEXT: Lori Fredrickson

The Gilded Age of New York City in the last quarter of the 19th century was a renaissance of architectural development and enterprise. The social habits of the city’s elite took on new heights of decadence and lavish spending. In the ballrooms of Fifth Avenue town homes — some belonging to the older class of wealth, some to newly rich industrialists — private parties spared no expense in opulence, as guests competed with one another to match the atmosphere in dress design and jewelry. Extravagant in every aspect of appearance, these events were also part of a new class struggle within New York’s social elite, as an older generation of wealth fought to maintain a foothold against the flood of newcomers. Holding court at the top of the elite social circle was Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, wife of real estate heir William Backhouse Astor Jr., and the mother of St. Regis founder John Jacob IV.

“Caroline Astor’s parties were the epitome of high class throughout this period of the Gilded Age,” says David Patrick Columbia, founder and editor of New York Social Diary (www.newyorksocialdiary.com), a website that features news of today’s high-class society as well as the history of its beginnings. “Her great ball at the start of the year was what launched the social season. And her list of guests was what determined the social scene.” Known as the Astor 400, Caroline Astor’s ‘list’ of guests would at the time be a legend and later, a historic artifact of how New York Society was ruled at the time.

But, Caroline Astor’s journey to the top of the social class would not be an easy one.

  An Era Begins

Marrying into the Astor family dynasty in 1854, Caroline Astor learned quickly that her husband William Jr. scorned the social class nearly as much as she wanted to achieve it — unlike father William and brother John Jacob — and that his interests lay more in breeding racehorses and yachting than in maintaining a place in the social elite. For the first decades of her marriage, “Lina” Astor would be more preoccupied with raising their five children and keeping charge of her household. All of this would change in the early 1870s, when she began the process of introducing her debutante daughters into society, and as she became more aware of how the new wealth in the city may be challenging the Astor family name. As she took charge of arranging social functions to find eligible husbands for her daughters, Lina found herself surrounded by prominent newer families such as the Vanderbilts, who had entered society through earned wealth rather than inheritance.

“Caroline Astor only wanted the cream of society surrounding her and her family,” says Meryl Gordon, author of Mrs. Astor Regrets; The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). “Status was very important to her.”

Determined to keep the social elite held by the older establishment, Caroline Astor partnered with Ward McAllister, an organizer of social functions and adviser to many of the city’s wealthier residents.

“In modern-day terms, you might call Ward McAllister a press agent,” says Columbia. “He was her social planner, he also helped to create a cult of status around the social events that she held. Most importantly he helped to make the parties themselves a success.” These events, held in the massive ballroom of her home on 350 Fifth Avenue, outdid her rivals in terms of decadence. Beginning with 10-course dinners followed by dancing in the ballroom, the parties would last for hours and hours, stretching into a second meal in the early morning — what would later be termed a “midnight supper,” and become a social ritual continued by her son John Jacob’s hotel, the St. Regis, and held still for gala events today.  

As writer Justin Kaplan writes in “When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Blood and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age,” a typical midnight supper menu at her mansion “offered, among main courses served on plates of silver and gold, terrapin, fillet of beef…Pyramids of hothouse fruit and banks of orchids, roses, apple blossoms and azaeleas decorated her table and dining room.” With 125 outside caterers and a resident staff of 18, Astor servants would serve the meals dressed in court livery; Lina Astor herself would greet guests beneath a massive self-portrait in the home’s anteroom, wearing a tiara, a collar of pearls, and enough diamond pendants and corsage ornaments to fill (as another writer at the time noticed) a dozen Tiffany cases. Although worldly, perhaps more important than the events themselves were the members of the guest list.

Circle of Friends

Lina Astor’s parties were exclusive and guests hand-selected. “Ward McAllister is the one who came up with the idea of the ‘Astor 400,’ ” Columbia points out. “It was based on the idea of how many she could fit in her ballroom, but that was a bit of a myth. The idea instead was who was important enough to be included on the social register.” The compilation of the list would begin in the winter season in the months leading up to her famed seasonal ball, including a designated 25 patriarchs of New York society along with social figures from other cities, varying debutantes and visiting guests.

Kept under tight secrecy, the actual names of the Astor 400 list would be shown to the public once, in the winter of 1891-1892, after Ward McAllister released the names to the New York Times for publication. Fitting with Lina Astor’s traditionalist ideas of the ruling elite, these names largely came only from families of ancestral wealth, including both heirs and heirs to be. Of the original “25 Patriarchs” (listed on New York Social Diary and culled from Dixon Wecter’s The Saga of American Society), members included, among others, legislator and trade merchant Royal Phelps; Wall Street operator and socialite William R. Travers; banker and railroad chairman William Butler Duncan; coming-out-ball organizer Archibald Gracie King; as well as other class elites either related by blood or later by marriage to the Astor family, including William Langdon Jr., Oliver DeLancey Kane, and William C. Schermerhorn. 

Other names would change from year to year, designating a “Who’s Who” of New York Society that would determine who became the most highly-sought guests at other dinners, balls, and social functions around the city. And Caroline Astor would continue to hold court even as at the turn of the century she relocated from her home on Fifth Avenue to a new residence further uptown; her last formal reception would be in 1905, one year after the construction of the St. Regis New York. In the final years before her death in 1908, she allowed herself to relax only slightly with the liberal times by occasionally venturing out of her home to dine in public restaurants.

Later, both the bloodline and the custom of New York’s social elite would undergo many transformations, but Caroline Astor’s rituals, as well as her ideas on exclusivity, would linger. As Gordon points out, Brooke Astor (wife of Vincent Astor, Caroline’s grandson) would later maintain her own exclusive set: “A more modern one, incorporating politicians and artists rather than the cream of ancestral bloodline,” she explains. The celebrations continue, but the standard for privilege in New York society has changed.

The Astor Legacy

The tradition of the midnight supper was continued at the St. Regis, though for a different audience, and is still celebrated by the Starwood-owned hotel chain today. This past November, the original St. Regis in New York held a midnight supper gala event with the launch of an Alexis Bittar-designed jewelry line inspired by Caroline.

The St. Regis Atlanta also holds a similar daytime tradition inspired by this legacy of glamour: the Spring Luncheon and Fashion Show, held annually in April. This year’s event included a guest list that in some ways could be considered the modern-day “Astor 400” of Atlanta, including its event chairs, Ginny Brewer, Danielle Rollins and Liz Lazarus, and honoring eight women of style and substance: Meg Arnold, Stephanie Blank, Merry Carlos, Marjorie Harvey, Lila Hertz, Elizabeth Klump, Jackie Montag and Lovette Russell.

Unlike the New York 400 of an earlier era, today we think of the more glamorous elite in terms of their accomplishment more than bloodline. “We all have our own lists,” Meryl Gordon says. “Today, when you think of the Paris Hiltons and Tinsley Mortimers, ‘socialite’ doesn’t have the same meaning. Today, it’s about using appearances to further one’s own goals and career.”

But that doesn’t change the importance of glamour; if our ideas of luxury have changed from ten-course dinners and quadrilles in ballrooms to a modern equivalent in high-class locations across the globe, the importance of the best designs in fashion, music, and cuisine is what has kept that idea of glamour always progressing. And it’s a quality that the St. Regis itself both set in the era of Caroline Astor, and has maintained over the years.

As David Patrick Columbia points out, “St. Regis was a natural evolution of what was going on in New York society, out of the pattern that Caroline Astor set with social life. The fact that it’s lasted over a century, while remaining a first-class hotel, is a testament to that insistence on elegance.”