The Jews in America Trilogy by Stephen; Birmingham Page B

appeared in a full suit of steel armor inlaid with gold which had cost him $10,000, causing a bemused reporter from the London Chronicle to ask, “Were all the costumes ticketed with the price?”) In some ways Belmont seemed consciously trying to outdo the Astors. In 1846 John Jacob Astor, Jr., married the daughter of Thomas L. Gibbes, a South Carolina aristocrat, and the marriage was the occasion of a great reception. The Astors’ “spacious mansion in Lafayette Place was open from cellar to garret, blazing with a thousand lights,” but August Belmont once more was not invited. Then, in 1847, he made a move that forever removed doubts about his social position. He proposed to, and was accepted by, Caroline Slidell Perry.
    He had chosen her as carefully and cynically as he chose his wines, his dueling opponents, the stocks for his portfolio, his name, and his religion. The Perrys were not imposingly rich, but they had all the social cachet that Belmont wanted and needed, more than he needed money. Caroline was the daughter of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, hero of the Mexican War and the officer later credited with having “opened Japan to the West,” and her uncle was another naval commander, Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Lake Erie. Caroline, furthermore, was wan, pale, and dreamily beautiful, an exquisite creature who wept bitterly when she was told that families “of wretched poor” lived south of Canal Street, which was why her coachman would not drive her there. In 1848 the elder John Jacob Astor died leaving a fortune of twenty million dollars, and was accorded a great funeral conducted by “six Episcopal clergymen.” The Belmont-Perry nuptials of that same year had only one clergyman officiating, but they were of course Episcopal. The wedding was at Grace Church, and it was an even more glittering social event than the Astor funeral. There were at the reception—in addition to a complement of Morrises, Vanderbilts, Costers, Goelets. (no Van Rensselaers), Webbs, and Winthrops—even a few Astors, come out of mourning. Even more important, as far as August Belmont was concerned, was the fact that a few weeks before his wedding he was invited to join the Union Club.
    Lower Fifth Avenue and Washington Square were alreadysprouting palaces of brownstone and marble. Though there was still no Central Park to give Fifth Avenue a garden view for much of its length, that wide thoroughfare running up the spine of Manhattan was already becoming the city’s best residential address. Soon after their marriage, the young Belmonts established themselves in a lower Fifth Avenue house that was grander than anything that existed in New York. It was, among other things, the first private house in the city to have its own ballroom—a room designed for nothing but the annual Belmont ball and which, as Edith Wharton commented later, “was left for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its chandelier in a bag.” The Belmonts were also the first to own their own red carpet, to be rolled down the marble front steps and across the sidewalk for parties, instead of renting one, along with the chairs, from a caterer.
    The Belmont house awed New York society. It was much more magnificent than the Astors’ old house in Lafayette Place, and it made everybody feel that they had been doing everything very provincially until August Belmont came along from—well, where was he from actually? people asked. The Belmont mansion was one that New Yorkers pointed out to visiting friends from other cities. When the visitors expressed curiosity about what lay within it, New Yorkers said, “We shall see whether we can get you an invitation.” And so August Belmont, the archetype social climber, had made his house the goal of every climber’s dreams. Belmont’s