{Denise Kiernan will be at Quailridge Books in Raleigh on October 9th at 7:00pm}
By Bruce C. Steele
http://www.citizen-times.com/
September 15, 2017
Denise Kiernan at her home in Asheville (Photo: Matt Burkhartt/mburkhartt@citize)
It's a tossup whether author Denise Kiernan loves Biltmore House or Edith Vanderbilt with more fervor, but the edge seems to be with the first mistress of the great Asheville estate.
"I can’t say enough about her," Kiernan says, speaking in her home office not far from Beaver Lake in North Asheville. "I think she’s awesome.”
As a follow-up to her nonfiction best-seller "The Girls of Atomic City" (2013), Kiernan has just published a new book, "The Last Castle," tracing the origins and heyday of the Biltmore Estate and its first family, George and Edith Vanderbilt, and their only child, Cornelia.
The history is not all glamour and parties, although there's plenty of both. "I don’t want to give too many spoilers," Kiernan says, "but Edith endured a lot of tragedy in her life. It’s really difficult to understand what an incredibly resilient woman she was if you don’t understand what she had to go through."
To tell that story, which spans more than seven decades, Kiernan broadened the scope of "The Last Castle" to bring to life the era in which the Vanderbilt family flourished, the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, and the rocky times that followed in the early 20th century. (Kiernan will talk about the book at a ticketed event at Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe at 6 p.m. Sept. 26; see the box at the bottom of this story for details.)
"What I tried to do was step back and place the house within a much larger historical context," she says, citing the book's many excursions to New York, Washington, D.C., Europe and even India. "I wanted to be able to talk about how the financial crises [of the early 20th century] affected families like this, how they affected houses like this. [And later,] the effect the Jazz Age had on attitudes and women."
So despite its title, "The Last Castle" is "really not just about the house," she says. "It's about the town. It’s about the people. It’s about America."
The "America" line, Kiernan quickly explains, is actually an in-joke she and her husband like to share, since both are freelance writers often asked to explain their work. "It's about America — all of it" is a quote attributed to Asheville's hometown literary lion Thomas Wolfe in the 2016 movie "Genius," as Wolfe delivers to his editor the massive manuscript for "Look Homeward, Angel."
But reading "The Last Castle," the flowing novel-like narrative really is "about America." It's about celebrity culture, wealth disparity, the remarkable charity and foresight of a few wealthy people, the urge to create and maintain a family legacy and, in its darker moments, the ever-present potential for personal tragedy. It's grounded in Kiernan's years of globe-trotting research and yet also immediately relevant to the topics that clog social media in 2017.
For Kiernan, Biltmore "became this little lens and microcosm through which to examine what I think was a really interesting moment in time," she says.
She dabbled in Biltmore research for years before committing to the project after "Atomic City." Realizing all the strands of history and culture that converged on Biltmore, she said, "Something just clicked.”
A worldwide research project
Like George Vanderbilt, Kiernan moved to Asheville as an adult several years ago, after falling in love with the area as a visitor. A self-described "army brat," she grew up all over the place but wound up at Brevard Music Camp the summer before her senior year of high school and spent the next year at the NC School of the Arts.
College and graduate school at New York University, and her parents' NYC roots, anchored her in the Big Apple for many years. It was there she launched her career as a journalist at The Village Voice weekly newspaper. She could probably fill her own nonfiction book with her travels and career digressions thereafter, including as a soccer correspondent, a reporter at a women's conference in Beijing, a ghost writer, four years in Rome and a stint as the head writer on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" ("hands down one of the most interesting gigs I’ve ever had").
She first visited Biltmore as a teenager, and she's been back countless times since. But not for research: The estate politely declined her request for access to its archives in 2013, saying "it wasn't a good time," she recalls.
Biltmore senior public relations manager LeeAnn Donnelly explained that Biltmore received Kiernan's request but "we were unable to move forward due to timing with existing research projects." Nevertheless, Donnelly added, "we wish her success on this project. ... Generations of writers have found inspiration at Biltmore and we are pleased to know the same was true for Ms. Kiernan."
The lack of access to Biltmore's private family collection was only a minor hindrance, Kiernan said, since she knew she'd find most of what she wanted elsewhere. After all, when the Vanderbilts wrote letters, the missives typically came to reside in the recipients' archives, not among the letter-writers' papers.
"I didn’t want to do something unless there were really interesting archives elsewhere," she says. "And I was thrilled with what I found. I found so much more than I thought I was going to. ... I found stuff in the U.K. I found stuff at Yale. I found stuff at the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. I was off to the races.”
Her goal of capturing an era, not just the history of a house, allowed her to follow leads that took her to parties in Manhattan, gossip in D.C., rural enclaves in England and trans-Atlantic crossings on famous ships (including the Titanic, on which George and Edith had booked passage).
All the expected characters drop into the narrative — not just the Vanderbilts and their siblings and cousins and friends among "the 400," the leading families of New York society, but also Biltmore architect Richard Hunt, legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and Biltmore's original foresters, Gifford Pinchot and Carl Schenck.
"We talk a lot today about the 1 percent," Kiernan says. "You know, the 400 was really the original 1 percent.”
The way all these people, traveling in this rarefied realm, kept intersecting Kiernan found especially intriguing. As an example, she recalls "when I put together that Edith's family, when she was a young teenager, had rented a house from the Pinchots — the guy who would go on to do forestry for the husband she hadn’t met yet — it was just like, 'Oh my God, these lives just keep on crossing.' It makes you feel very claustrophobic. And I think that was especially true for the women."
Edith and Cornelia
Edith Dresser Vanderbilt, though, seemed to have something special from early on in her life, growing up with three sisters and one brother after the early loss of both parents. "You read about them [as children] on their little South American adventure, sneaking down [into the crew area of their ship] to watch the crossing of the equator ceremony," Kiernan says. "Even from a young age, these were women who had some sort of crazy spirit instilled in them."
Edith brought that spirit with her to Biltmore after her 1898 marriage to previously "resolute bachelor" George. (They were essentially set up to meet on a ship to Europe and married in Paris less than a year later.)
“I love her," Kiernan says again, unable to contain her enthusiasm for her most vibrant subject. For her entire tenure at Biltmore, Edith was deeply and personally involved in community projects. "Charity for some people [at that time] was like a spectator sport," Kiernan says of the New York society in which George and Edith grew up. "Whereas you’ve got Edith on a horse, taking baskets out to people down here [in Asheville]."
Edith long nurtured a school and business, eventually called Biltmore Industries, that turned traditional Appalachian arts and crafts into careers and marketed their goods (especially "Biltmore Homespun" cloth) in New York and elsewhere. She essentially laid the groundwork for today's thriving artisan culture in and around Asheville.
"I think you can make a very strong argument that a lot of what exists here as far as Southern crafts are concerned is because of Edith and the assistance she paid early on," Kiernan says.
After George's death in 1914 at age 51, Edith almost single-handedly kept the estate together and viable. In 1925, once Cornelia was grown and married, Edith remarried. Her second husband was a U.S. senator from Rhode Island, Peter Goelet Gerry, and Edith soon came to be considered "the first lady of D.C. fashion." In a surprise twist, her new life intersected with her old one, and she had to intervene again to help rescue Biltmore long after leaving Asheville for D.C. — but you'll have to read the book to get that story."
The Last Castle" also follows Edith's daughter, Cornelia, after she left Asheville. The husband she married with great fanfare in Asheville in 1924, British aristocrat John Cecil, she divorced in 1934. In the decades that followed, John stayed in North Carolina (except during World War II), while Cornelia spent most of the rest of her life in England with her two sons, George and William, who went to school in Switzerland.
The stories of Cornelia's two subsequent marriages, her artistic aspirations and her final years in the U.K. have gone largely untold until now. "Where she ended up in England was very rural, very quiet," Kiernan says. Even well past World War II, "she liked riding and didn’t like cars. She liked little river punts. So in that sort of way, I think she was a real Tar Heel, a real product of this area."
But it was John Cecil who may have had the greatest impact on his and Cornelia's children. When the two boys were grown, Kiernan reports, it was their father, the Englishman, who brought the younger boy back to North Carolina from abroad and convinced him to help preserve Biltmore, his grandfather's great legacy. (Both of George's grandsons are still living in Asheville.)
"I wish I had had more papers of John Cecil's," Kiernan laments. "There’s somebody I would love to sit down with. I have always found it fascinating that the Englishman, the descendent of Lord Burghley, comes over here and suddenly he's dairy farming. It’s fascinating stuff."
Shaping Western North Carolina
All in all, "The Last Castle" traces all the unusual and unlikely twists of fate and forces of will that led to Biltmore's construction and, against all odds, kept it largely intact and within the family for more than 120 years.
"A lot of these [great Gilded Age] houses met the wrecking ball or ended up in developers’ hands," Kiernan says. Indeed, only one of the many ornate Vanderbilt mansions along Fifth Avenue in New York remains standing. (It was recently on the market for $50 million.)
But the survival of the house and the innumerable jobs provided by Biltmore Estate, Biltmore Village and the artisan heritage of Biltmore Industries don't encompass the whole picture of the Vanderbilt legacy Kiernan sets out to paint with her book.
“Oftentimes the Vanderbilt family’s impact is discussed with regard to what they built here," she says. "but I think what they didn’t build here also had a tremendous impact on Asheville and the surrounding communities. I think about the efforts that went into restoring lands, restoring forests, doing the best they could not to have them all sold off piecemeal. What that has done is create the incredibly well preserved, beautiful place that we all live in.
'When you think of how many people come here because of how beautiful it is and to climb, to float on the river, to kayak, go hiking — how many of those people would still be coming here if someone like George Vanderbilt had not decided that he really wanted to preserve a huge, huge swath of forest, and if Edith Vanderbilt hadn’t worked to make sure it didn’t wind up in a million different hands?"
The many layers of the Biltmore story are key to the multiyear commitment Kiernan made when she decided to write "The Last Castle." Because even though "Biltmore is pretty unique," she says, "sometimes you just want to tell a story that you think strikes a chord.”
IF YOU GO
Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe presents "An Evening with Denise Kiernan" in conversation with Karen Abbott at 6 p.m. Sept. 26 at the store, 55 Haywood St., in downtown Asheville. The evening focuses on Kiernan's new book, "The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation's Largest Home."
Admission is $34.11 (including fees), which includes a copy of the book. For details or to purchase a ticket, visit www.malaprops.com or call 828-254-6734.
http://www.citizen-times.com/story/life/2017/09/15/last-castle-denise-kiernan-biltmore-stories/634298001/
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