A Douglas/J.P. Morgan (Dis)connection

By Prentice Cushing

1999

The New York Times announced in November that it would start having expanded coverage of "boating," which we hope will include yacht racing, these days a politically incorrect term. (Shall we change the name to the Douglaston Boat Squadron?) This would be welcome news to those raghangers who still like to race and find the results of such activity in the news. Some thirty-five years ago our illustrious Club member Jim Roach, was sports editor of the Times and informed us that sailing was just not of wide enough appeal to warrant much space. However, odd-ball events were of interest. When DYS initiated its Windjammers Race in 1965 and a swarm of old wooden gaff-rigged sloops, schooners, catboats, ketches, etc. descended on Little Neck Bay our non-sailing neighbor smelled a story and agreed to come out on the Bay with the Race Committee to observe the proceedings. He even assigned a Times photographer to cover the start, who used up some film picturing the Committee, along with his boss and wife Allene (Zillman), a good sailor-see our Nimblet story of last year.  

Your ignominious correspondent was assigned to write a story and was paid by the Times for it, thus becoming a professional reporter! The pay hasn't been so good since then.    

Interesting Douglaston publicity also hit the bookstands last March with the emergence of biographer Jean Strouse's book on J. Pierpont Morgan. I missed a book-signing event here in Virginia but our attentive editor Ralph Kamhi, kindly sent a New, Yorker article about the book. In addition to repeating his famous remark that "if you have to ask how much it costs to own a yacht you can't afford it," the author did a lot of research on his attraction to "bright, self possessed women who met him on his own ground, felt at home in society, and shared his gregarious instincts and sybaritic tastes." One of these was Adelaide Louisa Townsend who was born in Bayside in 1853 and married our own William P. Douglas in 1879. She was sixteen years younger than Morgan and "her high spirits offset his tendency toward depression." Having left the Douglas Manor house, she traveled with Morgan to Paris in the early 1900's, where he put her up at  the Hotel Vendome in a suite which Morgan redecorated every spring. Some of us who attended our Douglas Manor party at the New York Yacht Club met her grandson, Gordon Bennet Douglas, whom Strouse interviewed extensively. He recalled that after she separated from W.P., Morgan built a house for her (which had a private entrance at the rear) near his on Parl Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets. The children were expected to disappear when he arrived. The house is now a landmark and is the U.N. Guatemalan Mission. Apparently, William P. was quite understanding, since he left her a third of his estate. Of course, he knew Pierpont well, having been NYYC Vice Commodore seven years before Pierpont was elected to membership in 1882. It is not inconceivable that Adelaide had some influence on Pierpont's decision to drop a bomb or the general meeting of October 1898 at which a committee recommended the purchase of property on West 44th Street on which to erect a new clubhouse with a frontage of fifty feet. The assembled members were utterly astonished to hear Morgan offer to personally purchase the property and present it to the Club, provided the frontage be increased to seventy-five feet. After gratefully accepting the offer, construction began on the magnificent building, which opened January 20, 1901, with a reception for him.