The Scarlet Sisters by Myra MacPherson

put them in business. “Very soon after the Commodore had aided to set up these two women as brokers in Broad Street the firm was known all over the land,” recalled Clews.
    Delicious rumors circulated about Vanderbilt and young Tennie—even though he had recently taken a second wife with the unusual first name of Frank. Only eight years older than Tennie and forty-three years younger than Vanderbilt, Frank was bent on leading the swearing, womanizing Vanderbilt onto a path of righteousness.
    The sisters’ friendship with Vanderbilt illustrates how truly pragmatic they were in dealing with anyone who could help them. Vanderbilt could hardly be viewed in the vanguard of feminist support, which the sisters so strongly championed. His womanizing was legendary, and when his first wife, the mother of his thirteen children, balked at leaving Staten Island for his Washington Square home, he had her committed to an insane asylum until she came to her wits and moved to Manhattan.
    Vanderbilt’s famous signature on their check meant everything to the sisters. More than the money, his power led to their tumultuous renown and notoriety, as did the role Tennie had allegedly played in securing Vanderbilt’s support, even though she would later be eclipsed by her older sister’s fame. Vanderbilt’s biographer Stiles sees the sisters as fleeting diversions in the tycoon’s long life, and points out that Vanderbilt soon shunned them and that their brokerage firm did not last. However, without his initial push, the sisters would have been unknown trifles in a class-conscious world. Without Vanderbilt, their ride on Wall Street and their subsequent fame as suffragists, Spiritualists, sex radicals, authors, lecturers, and players in Henry Ward Beecher’s adultery scandal would not have happened.
    When Clews announced that he had deposited the Commodore’s check for the sisters, the Street listened. Jay Gould, the great manipulator, acknowledged that one speculator “paid Victoria and sister Tennie $1,000 a day commission through quite a warm summer spell. I don’t happen to know the ladies myself, but in their office things certainly do move smoothly; and I don’t doubt at all that it is because of that—exclusively for that—that Commodore Vanderbilt stands for them.” Gould did not buy “all this sugary stuff” about a love affair, and he revealed that the sisters had been unwitting foils during his bid to oust Vanderbilt in one scheme: “I picked the ladies’ firm myself—without them realizing it—because, you see, The Street when Woodhull and Claflin sold would just naturally jump to the conclusion that the principal was Cornelius Vanderbilt, getting shorter and shorter. Rather neat finesse I thought.”
    In 1652 the Dutch government of then Nieuw Amsterdam built a wall to keep out English settlers who sought land near a strategic harbor. The wall never kept anyone out, as the Dutch settlers found out when the British invaded in 1664, but the wall gave the Financial District its alternate name. In the seventeenth century, Broad Street was a fetid waterfront canal, and residents were commanded to pave it over. As this rank inlet metamorphosed into the Financial District, the foulness never left; without any regulation, unfettered pillaging made many a war-profiteering scoundrelfabulously rich. The sisters roared onto the Street in this era of wild speculation, where an unknown shoe polish manufacturer one day might become a millionaire the next, suddenly striking it rich in a market complete with easily bought politicians and judges. George Francis Train, an eccentric millionaire, wrote a poem that mirrored the easy come, easy go spiral.
     
Monday: I started my land operations;
Tuesday: owned millions, by all calculations:
Wednesday: my brownstone palace began;
Thursday: I drove out a spanking new span;
Friday: I gave a magnificent ball:
Saturday: smashed—with just nothing at all.
     
    The Williams and Grey