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playboys, “clubmen,” sportsmen, alcoholics, expatriates, and eccentrics who pursued amusement and novelty to allay their boredom, lassitude, and inertia.
    After his father’s death, John Jacob Astor IV, then twenty-eight, kept a close and knowing eye on the management of his share of the Astor estate, but this took up only a tiny portion of his time. He belonged to about two dozen clubs in New York, Tuxedo Park, and Newport and “divided his time” (in the idiom of society news reporting) between his yacht, his Fifth Avenue mansion, his country estate at Rhinebeck, a seasonal “cottage” at Newport, and other residences. “The wilfully idle man, like the wilfully barren woman,” Theodore Roosevelt declared, managing somehow to conflate birth control and leisure, “has no place in a sane, healthy, vigorous community.” Roosevelt’s hyperenergized personality prevailed over the popular prejudice against blue bloods entering the hurly-burly of politics, but in this respect, as well as in so many others, he was an exception. For the two Astor cousins, neither of them outgoing, empathetic, or philanthropic in his makeup, it was nearly impossible to find a comfortable “place” in American life outside the family countinghouse. “We were too prosperous,” William recalled toward the end of his life. “We liked the amenities of foreign travel; we had been known to employ alien servants, French chefs and English butlers. We were un-American.”
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    G EORGE T EMPLETON S TRONG , diarist, civic leader, and Trinity Church vestryman, was often a guest at the dinner table of John Jacob Astor III. Over nearly a decade he recorded his impressions of his host’s only child, William Waldorf, born in 1848, the year of the founding Astor’s death. “Has shot up too fast and looks delicate and fragile. He seems a nice, well mannered boy of eighteen, more or less,” Strong wrote. Nearing twenty-one, an accomplished fencer and boxer, Willy was “not handsome,” the diarist noted a few years later, “but well-bred, modest, self-possessed, and agreeable. He inherits something of his mamma’s refined, courteous manner.” Another few years later, after Willy had returned from a stay in Germany and Italy, Strong called him “a nice, refined young fellow” who showed significant artistic talent and initiative—“His statue, ‘The Wounded Amazon,’ is a creditable work.” Willy had made at least, a maquette of this ambitious standing figure while studying under the renowned expatriate sculptor William Wetmore Story. Story’s apartment in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome was one of the centers of artistic life for Willy and other Americans.
    At the age of twenty-six, when he made his last appearance in Strong’s diary, “nice young Willy Astor” was an imposing figure, athletic, over six feet tall, with polished manners, an intense and unflinching gaze, and a worldly assurance that belied his essential shyness and melancholy. Fluent in French, German, and Italian, he had by then graduated from Columbia Law School, been taken into the Astor estate “Counting Room” at 85 Prince Street, passed the bar, clerked in the law office of the attorneys for the estate, and acquired a command of real estate law and business practice, along with a measure of aplomb.
    Sent once on a business errand to Boston, he had time for a cultural visit to Cambridge. There William Dean Howells, then an Atlantic Monthly editor, took him to meet a famous neighbor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “the most beautiful old man I have ever seen,” Astor was to recall. The fame of the family real estate millions, and of how they were acquired, had preceded young Willy Astor to the Longfellow house on Brattle Street, and the poet put to him a question that he said had been “long in my thoughts.” “Frankly, when you