GLITZ, GLAM, AND A DAMN GOOD TIME: How Mamie Fish, Queen of the Gilded Age, Partied Her Way to Power, by Jennifer Wright
If a party can be replicated, it was not a success. Transience is an essential part of the charm, which means that some of history’s greatest parties (and partiers) are hard to reanimate. Nowadays, we have plenty of extravagant, excessive entertainments — but are they fun? Do they have legendary hostesses?
One such dazzling figure from the late 19th century was Mamie Fish, a socialite who is also a minor character in Julian Fellowes’s HBO series “The Gilded Age,” now in its third season. Fellowes has a deft understanding of the famous rivalry between the Vanderbilts (thinly veiled in the show as the Russells) and the Astors, whose jostling for dominance in New York society represented the showdown between new and old money.
But his screen portrayal has turned Mrs. Fish into a cheery gossip, a mere sidekick to the other battling doyennes. Instead, as Jennifer Wright asserts in her new biography, “Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time,” Fish was a provocative and popular woman who was able to party her way to the top and stay there.
She was born Marion Graves Anthon in 1853 in an upscale area of Staten Island, though her family was left close to destitute after the death of her father, a lawyer and legislator who served as a general in the Civil War. But at 22, she married Stuyvesant Fish, the son of a onetime New York governor and secretary of state, who could trace his family lineage back to the early Dutch colonist Peter Stuyvesant. Fish was not a famed beauty, nor did she come from a particularly prominent family. But she was funny.
While Mr. Fish may have been very rich, their marriage proved to be a love match, and enduringly romantic: He saved a rose from their wedding day, pressed between the pages of a book, along with Mamie’s love letters to him, which he kept until he died in 1923.
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The post She Was No Beauty, but This Gilded Age Hostess Knew How to Party appeared first on New York Times.
