I’ve spent a lot of stupid money in my life, but nothing beats buying tickets to go inside a rich man’s house in Asheville, North Carolina. Of all the ways to let your money keep making you more money, opening your old house for costly tours seems pretty savvy. This was a Depression Era move for the Vanderbilts to save their estate, but one that endures today. I can’t believe we got suckered into buying tickets to go inside the Biltmore.
In our defense, we were on our second cross country trip, and this time we had baby Henry in the backseat. We had wild ambitions to show him the view from the road at only 3 months old. But we hit Tennessee and turned quickly back around and headed for home weary from changing diapers and sanitizing bottles at rest stops and hotels. The only thing baby Henry got out of this trip for his troubles was a Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, faux raccoon cap.
As we headed back to Virginia, we decided to squeeze in one more excursion as a trade for all the states we wouldn’t see this time around. The Biltmore mansion was in our sight and on the way home, a convenient trap.
Set, sprung, and caught off I-40.
I strapped Henry onto my chest, gathered up the older kids and followed Chris onto the grounds of the estate.
Vanderbilt’s scheme lined us all up with our curiosity blooming and our withering hope that all this money didn’t actually bring happiness because that would mean we have it all wrong. Passing through hallways with roped off views and closed doors, the scam was in full effect. We sweltered as we were herded through the house because the ultra-rich can be truly cheap and would not pay to have air conditioning for the peasants invited in for a price. For the record, I keep my AC on freeze and sometimes open the windows for fresh air while the AC is still humming away. I am the model for inefficiency and fiscal unawareness. Vanderbilt’s wealth on display was modeling something different, excess and capitalism, American grandeur, a measuring stick of success or impossible heights.
We roamed through the few available rooms as much as we could looking for ghosts. We felt like Don Knotts and Tim Conway in Private Eyes, the 1980s movie filmed here, bumbling and stumbling around the mansion looking for someone to tell us the gossip.
But, the ghosts were quiet.
We had found the setting.
Where were the plot and the characters?
I started Googling.
It’s an old story. A gilded rich kid with money to burn likes the view, needs a haven in the forest away from the grind, deep down wants to be a country farmer, dies like all of us, but the money lives on for generations.
Then, a surprisingly sad detail of the story revealed itself to us from the Google ghosts nattering on about the Vanderbilt family. Vanderbilt and his wife were supposed to be on the Titanic. Instead, they changed their passage in the last hours to sail on another ship and avoided the disaster.
However, too late to get their luggage off the Titanic, they sent a servant in second class to travel with all their stuff. The servant died on the Titanic with the Vanderbilt luggage.
It would be extreme to say I relate to the servant, but am I not a steward of Vanderbilt’s stuff as I walk through his house taking stock of paintings, furniture, and knick knacks? It’s not killing me in body but maybe in soul...just a little.
Full disclosure, I did not feel this way when Chris and I visited Neuschwanstein in Germany. I also didn’t have three kids in tow on that European trip, so overall I was more genial and open to be awestruck. And it was Europe which for me has a luster that is pure shine rather than stain. I will happily pay to see the castles of Europe and the grand estates made famous by Downton Abbey. I will plead Walt Whitman here and borrow his white man bravado and insistence...
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself; I am large - (I contain multitudes.)”
Despite my grumpiness at paying to go inside a mansion, I still am a sucker for biography and memoir, and for history. The house has a story to tell, lessons to impart even difficult ones about wealth inequality and the unearned payout of generational wealth. A celebration of beauty and art is also on display, and the house goes all in inspiring that universal urge to decorate our rooms. Whether we are importing from Italy or TJ Maxx, we all can relate to a well-chosen accent pillow, candlestick, or mirror.
Although not nearly as exciting as a Vanderbilt home’s tale, our houses certainly have stories to tell about us. In order to fund our summertime cross-country trips, we spent many years living in winter rentals in Virginia Beach. Croatan, one of the nicest neighborhoods in our city, always seemed to have an abundant supply of empty homes near the water with owners looking for off season income. When we cut this trip short, we were in a bind and looking for our next place to rent. We took a drive through Croatan just to see if we could get lucky with a year round rental at a reasonable price. In our previous experience living there, year round winters were impossible to find. The owners of the homes could get the same amount of money per week in the summertime as what we paid per month the rest of the year. Some homes would sit empty from September through May and earn enough money in the 12 weeks of summer to pay the yearly mortgage.
As we cruised past the beach houses filled with lots of Northern tourists and finding nothing available as usual, suddenly it appeared: a real estate sign with something other than SEASONAL written on it.
Chris immediately called the phone number on the sign and we connected with the realtor and signed the lease within the next day or two. We were in shock that we had nabbed a year round rental one street over from the beach, and magically and unbelievably, it was on Vanderbilt Avenue. Had the ghosts from the mansion heard my cries?
We lived a happy two years at Vanderbilt Avenue paying our rent month after month, and then the completely unexpected happened. The bankers came calling and they were ruthless. They were calculating. They were business-only. The man who owned our house, who we had never met and did not even know his name, was battling cancer and losing the fight. In his heartbreaking struggle he was also losing control over his finances. We learned that he had been using our rent money to live but had not paid his mortgage in over a year. The bank was foreclosing on the house, and we were asked to vacate it. To motivate a quick exit, they offered us $8000.00. CASH for KEYS was what the bank called it. We probably could have resisted, held out, and made an offer on a dying man’s house but it felt wrong in every way. Furthermore, as two teachers, we had nothing financially to offer in a potential bidding war.
In the end, we took the cash, surrendered our keys, and moved into an apartment nearby. The house sat empty for a couple of months then went up for auction. The man who owned it passed away and some contractors moved in after buying it for much less than its value. For years after, we said to ourselves, what would the Vanderbilts have done?