Каролина Астор: Королева нью-йоркского общества

American socialite

Caroline Webster "Lina" Schermerhorn Astor (September 22, 1830 – October 30, 1908) was a prominent American socialite of the second half of the 19th century who led the Four Hundred. Famous for being referred to later in life as "the Mrs. Astor" or simply "Mrs. Astor", she was the wife of yachtsman William Backhouse Astor Jr. They had five children, including Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, who perished on the RMS Titanic. Through her marriage, she was a prominent member of the Astor family and matriarch of the male line of American Astors.

Although popularly imagined as wholly preoccupied with "high society", for the first several decades of her married life, Lina Astor was principally occupied with raising her five children and running her household, as was typical of women of her class in mid 19th century New York City. Due to an inheritance from her parents, Lina had her own money, thus she was far less dependent on her husband than most American women of the time. the present site of the Empire State Building. It also neighbored his brother's family, who lived at Beaulieu.

In the decades following the Civil War the population of New York City grew almost exponentially, and immigrants and wealthy arrivistes from the Midwest began challenging the dominance of the old New York Establishment. Aided by the social arbiter Ward McAllister, whose first cousin, Samuel Cutler Ward, had married into the Astor family, Lina attempted to codify proper behavior and etiquette, as well as determine who was acceptable among the arrivistes for an increasingly heterogeneous city. They were the champions of old money and tradition. Lina was the foremost authority on the "Aristocracy" of New York in the late nineteenth century. She held ornate and elaborate parties for herself and other members of the elite New York socialite crowd. None was permitted to attend these gatherings without an official calling card from her. Lina's social groups were dominated by strong willed "aristocratic" women. These social gatherings were dependent on overly conspicuous luxury and publicity. More so than the gatherings themselves, importance was highly placed upon the group as the upper crust of New York's elite. She and her ladies therefore represented the "Aristocratic," or the Old Money, whereas the newly wealthy Vanderbilt family would establish a new wave of New Money.

The Vanderbilts, as members of socialite New York through the copious amounts of money that the family had earned rather than inherited, represented a type of wealth that was abhorrent to Astor and her group. Lina Astor found railroad money distasteful. For this reason, she was reluctant to call upon the Vanderbilt girls. In 1883, however, Astor was forced to formally acknowledge the wealthy socialite Alva Erskine Smith, first wife of horse breeder/railroad manager William Kissam Vanderbilt, thereby providing the Vanderbilts, the greatest "new" fortune in New York, entrance into the highest rungs of society.

Until 1887, Lina Astor had been formally known as "Mrs. William Astor", but with Charlotte Augusta Gibbes's death that year, she shortened her formal title to "Mrs. Astor", as she was then the senior Mrs. Astor, the only remaining one in her generation. Charlotte's son, William Waldorf Astor, felt that his own wife, Mary "Mamie" Dahlgren Paul, should be "the Mrs. Astor." With the death of John Jacob Astor III in 1890, William Waldorf Astor had inherited his father's share of the Astor holdings and, titularly, became the head of the Astor family. In his mind, this made Mamie "the Mrs. Astor." However, Mamie was eighteen years younger than Lina and lacked Lina's social power. His further attempts at challenging Lina's preeminence in New York society, however, were thwarted, and he soon moved with his family to England, where he later became a viscount.

By the time she moved into her new house facing Central Park, at the corner of 65th Street, Mrs. Astor's husband had died, and she lived with her son and his family. Spending her last several years suffering from periodic dementia, she died at age 78 on October 30, 1908, and was interred in the Trinity Church Cemetery in upper Manhattan. Her youngest daughter, Carrie, erected a commemorative 39 foot tall (11.9 m) cenotaph in her memory, in addition to her uptown burial plot. The inscription is dated A. D. MCMXIV and the cenotaph is located within the small churchyard cemetery at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street, in which many prominent early Americans are buried. Following Mrs. Astor's death, it reportedly took three women to fill her role in New York Society: Marion Graves Anthon Fish, the wife of Stuyvesant Fish, Theresa Fair Oelrichs, the wife of Hermann Oelrichs, and Alva Belmont, by then the wife of Oliver Belmont. Mrs. Astor has been portrayed by Donna Murphy in the HBO drama, The Gilded Age.