Edith Vanderbilt Quotes

Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor’s famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico’s. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf’s, Tiffany’s.

Conchita Clossen in Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel of transatlantic husband hunting, The Buccaneers.

Curator David Finley called his friend Edith Vanderbilt, who agreed to hide the nation’s most precious artworks—sixty-two paintings and seventeen sculptures—at the Biltmore, her family estate in western North Carolina. There, after a secret 450-mile train trip to Asheville, the artworks were stored in the first-floor music room of the palatial château. Security was crucial to the mission: Workers installed steel doors and bars on the music room’s windows,