There’s a letter from Will’s friend Min, written January 21, 1901, that has always amused/intrigued me a bit...
The relevant part of the letter reads:
“Now decidedly I was in your region last week as the Metropolitan press asserted - riding around in pearl studded automobiles the Yale contingent made a daring showing and appeared absolutely housebroken. We smoked & burned stage money so that we were photographed left & right & kept up the bluff until we arrived at our home doors”...“we had to bathe in champagne. It was a gala event and we were glad to have been there. Perhaps you have raised your weary beady [eyes] from your well used, dusty tomes and read an account of how it was done. The service was more impressive than other weddings I have attended, and I was soberer than I shall be at yours.”
Min comes across as a fairly sarcastic person in his other letters, and was also on the executive committee of Yale’s American Humorists’ Club in college, so I’ve never taken his account of this mystery event very seriously.
Still, him mentioning “pearl studded automobiles” and paparazzi had me intrigued. In January of 1901 most people had never even seen a car, let alone ridden in one, and the average newspaper was still publishing far more drawings than photographs. He also mentions twice that Will had probably read about the event in the paper, which made curious if there might be something to his story.
So using the clues that may not have been complete fantasy, namely that Min might have attended a fancy wedding in New England the week of January 13th, 1901, I decided to do a quick search.
I found a probable answer immediately, as it was on the front page of nearly every newspaper in the country, and then spent the next hour quietly repeating “come on, there’s no way...” to myself until I managed to confirm my suspicions.
Min’s “mystery event” was the wedding of Alfred Vanderbilt, heir to the Vanderbilt fortune, and Elsie French.
Alfred Vanderbilt was the son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, the eldest son of the eldest son of the original Cornelius Vanderbilt. (He was also an uncle of the recently deceased Gloria Vanderbilt, and great-uncle of her son, Anderson Cooper.)
Alfred was actually his father’s third-born son, but one older brother died of typhoid fever while in college and the other was disinherited for marrying without his father’s approval. This left Alfred as the primary recipient of a fortune somewhere in the realm of $200 billion dollars when adjusted for inflation.
Now Min’s family doesn’t seem to have been hurting for money, but his dad was a lawyer from Scranton. Not exactly “high society”, nor the kind of person would get an exclusive wedding invite from one of the richest families in history. So how did they know each other?
Min (whose real name was Charles Welles) mentioning “the Yale contingent” in the letter made me suspect that they probably went to school together, and a quick search showed that indeed Min and Alfred Vanderbilt were both member’s of Yale’s graduating class of 1899, the same class as Will.
Min and Alfred seem to have known each other due to their membership in the same secret society as well as having both been members of the Yale Junior Prom Committee, as in THE prom.
It seems Min, and a few other Yale classmates, were likely invited to the wedding as personal friends of Alfred, and spent the weekend trying their best to blend in with the most gilded members of the Gilded Age. (Ironically the main image in the Wikipedia article for “Gilded Age” is a picture of the Vanderbilt’s "cottage” in Newport where the wedding took place.)
So, despite being the very last entry on the 150-person guest list, Min got to spend a few days hobnobbing with the rich and famous and then wrote Will with his completely accurate account of the event.
Sadly Alfred’s marriage to Elsie didn’t last, and the two went through a scandalous front-page divorce in the spring of 1908. Alfred remarried in 1911, but died only four years later - one of the 1,198 casualties of the ill-fated RMS Lusitania. His widely-reported last act was taking off his own life-jacket and putting it on a young mother who was holding a baby.
Min became a lawyer, like his father, and lived the rest of his life in Scranton. He was also married twice, his first wife dying of breast cancer at the age of 34 in 1919.
Min outlived his friend Alfred by nearly 50 years, dying in 1962 at the age of 85.
