A Wealth of Amusement

 

“Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time

 

By Jennifer Wright

 

Grand Central, 288 pages, $30

 

America's Gilded Age was a period characterized by massive income inequality between a superwealthy plutocracy (think Astors, Morgans and Vanderbilts) and an increasingly restive workforce. There are obvious parallels to today, including the propensity of the superrich to throw epic parties breathlessly reported in the media.

 

In "Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time," however, Jennifer Wright argues that those late-19th-century parties were about more than conspicuous consumption. They allowed a smart, glamorous extrovert to shed some of the stuffy constraints of her era, acquire a social power that would increase her family's prosperity and be a model for others.

 

Marion Graves Anthon, or Mamie, as she was known, was a barely literate and rather plain young woman whose family had fallen on hard times. Her only assets were her natural wit and aplomb, but in a twist worthy of Edith Wharton, these were enough for her to snare a suitor who, according to his own family history, had been born "with a silver spoon in his mouth big enough to be called a soup ladle." As a young man, Stuyvesant Fish had rejected his patrician father's choice of law as a suitable career and went to work for the Illinois Central Railroad. Mamie enraptured this rather dull, Columbia-educated man, and in 1876 they married. They were a devoted couple. "He thought she was a hoot," Ms. Wright tells us, "and she loved that he was a constantly amused audience for her jokes and adventures."

 

The Fish fortune multiplied. But while "Stuyvesant seemed to sense that railroads were going to be huge," Ms. Wright suggests that "Mamie seemed to understand that extroverted, exciting women who loved the spotlight were the future."

 

New York social columnists were soon extolling the virtues of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, who "amazed and amused the fashionable folk." In 1889 Mamie decided to make a splash in Newport, R.I., the summer playground of New York's elite, where the redoubtable Caroline Schermerhorn Astor held sway. Dinner invitations from Mrs. Astor were the hard currency of the Gilded Society aristocracy, despite the deadly predictability of these stodgy occasions.

 

Mamie's modest origins meant that she could not expect a second glance from Mrs. Astor, so she began to throw parties that challenged all the Astor rules and conventions. An early foray included baby ducks paddling around a miniature pond. Ward McAllister, the uber-snob who had compiled the list of 400 people who "mattered" in New York, was so horrified that he "read Mrs. Fish out of society," according to one newspaper.

 

Mamie didn't care. The housewarming party at Crossways, her newly built Newport "cottage," was described by one newspaper as "one of the most spectacular balls in American life." A week later she hosted a dance at which a little donkey with gold-painted hooves delivered flowers, rakes, bows and arrows to 110 guests. Two days later, circus performers entertained more guests at another party. A month later she threw a party in her new barn, where the party favors were goslings, baby rabbits and puppies that guests were encouraged to take home. Partygoers left with pitchforks and milk pails trimmed with red ribbons and painted with Stuyvesant Fish's initials. Mamie's guests laughed, relaxed and forgot about their wealth and power for a few hours.

 

Ms. Wright chronicles Mamie's competitive entertaining with some sympathy as well as a nice irony. "If you were an ambitious woman, you could not go about making millions. . . . You could not enter politics. You could not do much, really, with your ambition, other than climb to the top of the social pile." Parties now were not simply about confirming status but also about having fun -- the more outrageous the better. Mrs. Astor's three-hour sit-down dinners were soon eclipsed.

 

"Mamie loved her reputation as a woman who lived on the cutting edge of society," Ms. Wright tells us. She took a newly invented electric automobile out for a spin, crashed into a stone wall, then ran over the same man three times. (The man finally rolled to the side of the road and "balefully regarded Mrs. Fish," reported the local paper.) "All this to say," suggests Ms. Wright, that Mamie had "empowered the women around her with the freedom to be a little weird."

 

Inevitably, social columnists began to tire of Mamie's weirder antics. When she organized a candlelight dinner for 100 of her friends' dogs, at which fricassee of bones and shredded dog biscuits were served, she triggered outrage at this "unwarranted, ostentatious display of wealth." Mamie shrugged off the scorn.

 

Where was Stuyvesant Fish during these giddy goings-on? He receives little mention in Ms. Wright's pages until the revelation that in 1907 Fish, who had risen to president of the Illinois Central Railroad, was accused by a member of his board of siphoning off $1 million (about $33.5 million today) of company funds for his personal use. This suggests that the author's thesis, that Mamie's extravagant parties helped promote her family's prosperity, might be a little overblown: Instead, the festivities may have contributed to draining the family's funds. Yet Mamie did wipe the stain from the family name and regain her social eminence with a tactic straight out of Mrs. Astor's playbook: She hosted a dignified dinner party for Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, the kind of guest her compatriots fawned over. Mrs. Astor herself had capitulated months earlier and accepted a Fish invitation.

 

"Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time" is the seventh book of pop history by Ms. Wright, and is written with her combination of contemporary references, irreverent humor and careful excavation of newspaper archives. It has the light (very light) touch of some of her previous titles, dealing with such topics as the worst plagues and the worst breakups in history, without the substance of her recent biography of Madame Restell, the 19th-century New York abortionist. For those who love eye-popping accounts of events like the recent Bezos-Sanchez wedding in Venice, this book will be catnip.

 

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Ms. Gray is the author of "Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt."” [1]

 

1. A Wealth Of Amusement. Gray, Charlotte.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 06 Aug 2025: A13.