Crazy Love, 1880s Style
Reading about the rich and famous is often a guilty pleasure. Intimate details bring out the voyeur in all of us. Sorrows produce a frisson of schadenfreude. This was as true in the Gilded Age as it is in our own era of widening income disparity and mass consumption. But there is no need to feel even a twinge of guilt in opening Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, by Donna M. Lucey (Harmony, 352 pages, $25.95). This tale of two larger-than-life turn-of-the-century characters, their chaotic headline-making marriage, and its unhappy, even more notorious demise, tells us as much about a vanished world as it does about the two title characters who were at its center.
John Armstrong Chanler, known as Archie, was an heir to the Astor fortune, first-born and, after the premature death of his parents, patriarch of a large, unconventional, and constantly feuding family. An inventor, industrialist, mystic, and poet, he spent a good part of his life as a fugitive from the Bloomingdale Asylum for the insane.
Amélie Louise Rives was the goddaughter of Robert E. Lee and the daughter of an old Virginia family that still boasted of its superior blood even as it struggled against its financial decline. Hypnotically beautiful, scandalously seductive, drug-addicted, she became a successful writer whose name appeared along with Henry James’s on the cover of the November 1887 issue of Harper’s magazine. Archie and Amélie were ill-matched and star-crossed, incapable of living together, unable to break entirely apart.
The book is especially good on the amassing of the Astor fortune and the characters and quirks of the Astor ancestors. Archie’s great-great-grandfather, John Jacob Astor, a butcher from Waldorf, Germany, arrived in Baltimore in 1784 with seven flutes and about five pounds sterling, which he parlayed into a fortune estimated at $20 million, much of it in New York real estate. Nonetheless, his manners were the laughingstock of genteel society (he “ate his ice cream and peas with a knife”), and his miserliness was the stuff of legend, or, as the reformer Horace Mann described it, “insanity.”
Astor’s great-granddaughter Margaret Astor Ward died at the age of thirty-seven, leaving behind ten children ranging in age from thirteen-year-old Archie to a one-year-old infant. Archie was devastated, and his father’s aloofness did nothing to alleviate his pain, but there was worse to come. Two years later, the emotionally elusive father, John Winthrop Chanler, died from what Lucey describes as “an excess of chivalry.” He developed pneumonia after acceding to a lady’s wishes to play croquet on wet grass. Archie, who was at school in England at the time, was not permitted to return home.
Amélie, in contrast, grew up on the family plantation, Castle Hill, adored, indulged, the apple of the family’s eye, until her two younger sisters came along, and even they could not force her to yield center stage. She was a terrible and talented flirt who seemed to think it her duty to bewitch every man who came within range. She was also a gifted, if lurid, writer. She published her first short story in The Atlantic Monthlyat the age of 22. A few years later, her novel, The Quick or the Dead?, the story of a forbidden love affair between a young widow and her late husband’s cousin, scandalized the country. Libraries banned it, preachers condemned it, and moralists shuddered at the idea of a widow expressing carnal desire (“Jock! Kiss me!”) and of a woman writing sexual fantasies. The book sold more than 300,000 copies.
The hero of The Quick or the Dead? bore an unmistakable physical resemblance to Archie Chanler. He and Amélie had met the previous summer at Newport when her red satin slipper flew off her foot during a spirited dance. Another man retrieved the shoe and put it back on Amélie’s foot, but watching the antics, Archie fell instantly in love, or so he would later say.
She turned down his first proposal of marriage, but he persisted, and the wedding took place, despite Archie’s family’s disapproval, at Castle Hill in 1888. The Chanlers were not present, but a reporter from the New York Herald was. Amélie had a distinctly modern sense of publicity.
From the beginning, there was trouble. Amélie’s letters speak of “gloom, and grief, and terror.” She kept one or another of her women friends and relatives at her side at all times. Some family members believed the marriage was never consummated. Perhaps Amélie’s sexual ardor had been spent in her novels and in a startling and highly erotic nude self-portrait she painted at the time. Perhaps the problem lay with Archie, who was erratic and moody.
They traveled to London, where Amélie’s book had preceded her, and she enchanted the witty and aristocratic inner circle, self-christened the “Souls”; bewitched Lord Curzon; and aroused her husband’s jealousy with her professional and romantic successes. But she was bedeviled by headaches and discovered morphine.
By the end of the London season, the newlyweds were quarreling bitterly. Neither travel nor a return to America brought them closer. They were often in different locales, and the farther away Archie was, the more loving Amélie grew. She was, after all, an accomplished writer of passionate romances. But even her husband’s absence could not stave off a variety of vague but disabling illnesses. In 1893 she was committed to a clinic for the first, though not the last, time.
Meanwhile Archie pursued various artistic endeavors and investment opportunities. He got involved in the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, as a result of being “joined at the hip . . . with [Stanford] White and [Augustus] Saint-Gaudens.” (Unfortunately, Lucey occasionally slips into infelicitous and anachronistic phrases. Archie is a “onetime slacker.” Amélie’s lawyer cousin “moonlights” as a writer, and her grandmother serves as a “role model.” French kings “stash” their mistresses at Fontainebleau.) Archie also set out to build an idyllic mill town on the banks of the Roanoke River in North Carolina called Roanoke Rapids, “a kind of Utopian workers’ paradise,” designed by Stanford White and built by state prison labor. He persuaded his siblings to invest in the project, and as the town rose, family bonds frayed, and his and Amélie’s marriage unraveled. In 1895 Amélie established residence in South Dakota, one of the early divorce-mill states. Their tempestuous union had lasted eight years. According to Lucey, Archie never got over her. Four months later she married a Russian prince, Pierre Troubetzkoy. Archie would continue to support his former wife and her new husband until his siblings stripped him of his fortune.
Family squabbles among the unconventional and competitive Chanlers continued to escalate. Many of them concerned money. Archie’s behavior became increasingly erratic. He dabbled in the occult and in psychic experiments. On the afternoon of March 13, 1897, with the help of his old friend from the Porcellian Club at Harvard, police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, Winty Chanler had his eldest brother committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum just outside New York City. Archie would remain there against his will, until, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1900, he somehow managed to elude his keepers, walk through the gates, take a train into a Manhattan still owned in large part by Astor interests, and catch a ferry across the Hudson. For the next 22 years he lived as a fugitive, until finally in 1919 the family relented, and he returned to New York. As the years passed, however, he became more reclusive and unstable. When he died, in 1935, he left part of his estate to Amélie.
She and the prince lived on in poverty in the decaying Castle Hill. She refused to part with the family plantation, though there often was not enough to eat, a fact that did not deter the prince from donning his white tie for dinner each evening. Amélie published two more novels and recreated herself as a successful playwright. When she died, in 1945, she was buried under a tombstone carved with an inscription she had chosen: “Love Is Strong as Death.” Beside her in the earth, however, lay not Archie Chanler but Prince Troubetzkoy.
Amélie’s and Archie’s separate graves are emblematic of the book’s single weakness. The great love implied in the subtitle eludes it, perhaps because that passion eluded Archie and Amélie. We never understand what tore them apart, because we never see what brought them together. Could the attraction have been as mundane as her beauty and his money? In the pages of this dual biography, Archie and Amélie dazzle in public but remain ciphers in private, despite Lucey’s impressive efforts to penetrate the smoke screen each of them threw up. Nonetheless, Archie and Amélie is a colorful evocation of a glamorous and intriguing era and two flamboyant figures who cut a swath through it.