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gluttonous tumult of her balls and dinner parties. He was generally to be found in Europe and Florida; at Ferncliff, his country estate at Rhinebeck on the Hudson; or, with female guests, both social and professional, aboard Ambassadress, the biggest yacht afloat. He eventually replaced it with the more sumptuous 250-foot all-steel Nourmahal, meaning “Light of the Harem.” When asked about her husband’s absences, Caroline would reply placidly, as Elizabeth Lehr, Harry’s wife, reported, “Oh, he is having a delightful cruise. The sea air is so good for him. It is a great pity I am such a bad sailor, for I should so much enjoy accompanying him. As it is, I have never even set foot on the yacht.”
    In 1890 John Jacob III died of heart disease in his Fifth Avenue mansion, and two years later William Backhouse died of a ruptured aneurysm in a Paris hotel suite. Their sons inherited their differences and genetic incompatibility. William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV, sixteen years younger, scarcely knew but disliked and resented each other all the same and rarely met. The immense wealth each of them inherited conferred on them the status of crown princes in a society without a throne: William Waldorf’s stake, estimated at his death at $150 million to $300 million, made him (said the New York Times ) “the wealthiest man in America, if not the world.” However much these princes sought privacy, their wealth made them de facto public figures, especially vulnerable to comment because the Astors, along with the trustees of Trinity Church, were the city’s major slumlords. They drew rent money from festering tenements that harbored three-quarters of the city’s population in conditions that put Calcutta to shame. An unspoken but iron code exposed Astor scions to scrutiny and abuse by the newspapers, as well as envy and suspicion, if not downright hostile regard at every turn. That code held them accountable not only for how they used their wealth and how it had been gotten but also the degree, if at all measurable, to which they had deserved to possess it in the first place. They were in debt to their money, even captives of it, but any complaints from them on that score invited ridicule as “unhappy millionaires.”
    Relatively few career choices outside of banking and the law were open to most members of New York’s moneyed upper class. They practiced these professions in a part-time, gentlemanly way and were mainly occupied with conserving rather than expanding their family interests. “Even the acquiring of wealth,” Edith Wharton recalled of New York’s “old money” families, “had ceased to interest the little society into which I was born. In the case of some of its members, such as the Astors and Goelets, great fortunes, originating in a fabulous increase of New York real estate values, had been fostered by judicious investments and prudent administration, but of feverish money-making, in Wall Street or in railway, shipping or industrial enterprise, I heard nothing in my youth.” If, as rarely happened, a very rich man such as William Waldorf Astor chose to enter politics and public life instead of living a life of leisure, he was likely to find that derision, resentment, and suspicion were the price of entrance. “A wealthy man,” Tocqueville had written in the 1830s, “would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living. It is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work that so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find some scattered remains of aristocratic society, among whom idleness is still held in honor.” In a society that, unlike Europe, had no tolerance for “idleness” and no commonly accepted concept of leisure (“the nonproductive consumption of time,” in Thorstein Veblen’s definition), wealth alone could condemn its possessors to dwindle into