Chaloner John Armstrong - Archie and Amélie: love and madness in the Gilded Age

Frontispiece: Amlie Rives (UVA Library)

Copyright 2006 by Donna M. Lucey

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lucey, Donna M., 1951
Archie and Amlie : love and madness in the Gilded Age / Donna M. Lucey. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Rives, Amlie, 18631945. 2. Novelists, American19th centuryBiography.
3. Chaloner, John Armstrong, 18621935. I. Title.
PS3093.A5L83 2006
818.409dc22
[B]

ISBN 978-0-307-35145-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-34583-7

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For Henry, with love

O n the eve of Thanksgiving in 1900, a distinguished figure walked out of the gates of Bloomingdale Asylum, the madhouse for the rich just outside of New York City. The thirty-eight-year-old man, smartly dressed in a black fedora, a navy blue melton overcoat, and a dark satin four-in-hand tie, could easily have been mistaken for a doctor who had just completed his rounds. Carrying a cane, he walked purposefully down the street and disappeared from sight. By train he made his way into the city, hailed a hansom cab, and asked to be taken to the Jersey City ferry. He held a handkerchief to his face for the entire ride across town, as if he were illin fact, he feared being recognized. He was, after all, a prominent lawyer, industrialist, patron of the arts, and esteemed former member of the Union, Century, Knickerbocker, Racquet & Tennis, and Players clubs. His bloodlines couldnt have been bluer. He was an Astorthe great-great-grandson of John Jacob Astor and an heir to his millions. To the citys newspaper readers he was the man who had stunned the haute monde of the Gilded Age by marrying the scandalous (and gorgeous) bestselling author Amlie Rives of Virginia.

He was also a madman. Within days, newspapers all over the country trumpeted the news that, after nearly four years of forced incarceration, the high-society lunatic John Armstrong ChanlerArchie to his family and friendshad escaped from Bloomingdale Asylum and vanished into thin air. A manhunt failed to find any trace of Archie, and as his trail went cold, his friends could only assume that this hopeless paranoid, as he had been diagnosed, had taken his own life.

I heard of Archie and Amlie while tramping across the Virginia countryside just down the road from where the couple lived in the 1880s and 1890s, in the horse country outside Charlottesville. I had been invited for an autumn afternoon of beaglingfollowing a pack of hounds as they unsuccessfully tried to sniff out a rabbit. The point of beagling is not the hunt, but the walk through the enchanting landscape, amid the rolling hills of genteel historic estates, each of which contains a story. The most astonishing stories were attached to Archie and Amlie. There were tales of sances and ghosts, a murder, the mysterious burning of a church, a sensational lunacy trial, and a hauntingly beautiful, barely clad young woman prowling her gardens at night as if she were searching for somethingor someoneor trying to walk off the effects of the morphine that was deranging her.

I was inclined to dismiss all this as the tall tales Virginians love to spin; but when I looked into these yarns, I found the proof that they were true in yellowing front pages with banner headlines, along with the letters, court papers, books, and manuscripts this extraordinary pair left behind. One of my informants on that autumn afternoon in the hills was a Rives herself, the wife of Amlies distant cousin Barclay Rives, a horseman, raconteur, author, and enthusiastic collector of the odds and ends of local lore. Barclay later took me to see Castle Hill, the eighteenth-century Rives mansion where the couple was married in 1888. With Barclay as my guide, I was able to call on the now elderly folks who had known Archie and Amlie, and I visited the house where Archie supposedly killed a man with a single pistol shot to protect the life of a woman. The details of the story were vague, but there was nothing vague about the bizarre, six-pointed metal star that Archie ordered set in the floor on the spot where the victim fell. The current owner of the house dramatically pulled back the carpet to show me this outlandish monument to Astor nerve and marksmanship.

Barclay also recounted how, after Amlies death, when his family was clearing the outbuildings of Castle Hill, they came across a truly extraordinary work of arta voluptuous nude portrait of Passion is perfume and flame and is its own excuse and raison dtre.

Archie and Amlie were young at the height of the Gilded Age. They were, perhaps, the most glamorous couple of that most glamorous agethe Scott and Zelda of the 1880s and 1890s, with the genders reversed. Amlie broke new literary ground with a series of bestselling novels that won the esteem of Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde, but scandalized polite society with her provocative evocations of feminine passion. In turn, Archie exuded a devil-may-care eccentricity, a trait that was both cherished and reviled in the upper reaches of Gilded Age society, where the code of social propriety was rigid, ruthless, and appallingly destructive.

As a child, Archie had grown up in New York and at Rokeby, the familys four-hundred-acre Hudson River estate. He and his siblingsa wild and willful bunchwere left in the care of nannies, tutors, and distant guardians. The scene at Rokeby was one of frenzied, nonstop activity (to an outsider it seemed more like chaos). Packs of hounds, ponies, cats, chickens, rabbits, and all manner of other pets accompanied the competitive and argumentative children. The house rules were simple: no hitting, no showing off, and, as a precaution against long-windedness, a bore must shut up.

Amlie was the offspring of an old-line Virginia family. Her godfather was Robert E. Lee. From a young age, she was both a fearless horsewoman and a natural writer. When she was around ten years old, her grandmother limited the amount of paper she could use; undeterred, Amlie took to writing on the five-inch hem of her a sizzling vessel of molten lava.