Moneyed Magnificoes

THE BIG SPENDERS by Lucius Beebe. 404 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

Diamond Jim Brady, the big, bluff New York Irishman whose stomach was as expansive as his manner, is enshrined in American folklore as one of the truly great spenders of the Gilded Nineties. He spangled himself with outsize diamonds, usually began a twelve-course meal with a gallon of orange juice, hosted lavish dinners where champagne corks were gathered up in laundry baskets. What is not so well known is that Brady was one of the founding fathers of expense-account entertaining. He shrewdly courted publicity because he felt that it was an asset in his job as a railroad-equipment salesman; most of his opulent blowouts were aimed at getting orders for brake rigging, patent couplings and switch stands.

By the reckoning of the late Lucius Beebe, who finished this gossipy and amusing book shortly before he died in February at 63, Brady was a gross arriviste, strictly a spender without class. Himself a relentless connoisseur, a professional dandy, and perhaps the best known boulevardier of his time, Social Chronicler Beebe held that the true test of spenders of distinction was not necessarily how they rid themselves of substantial sums of money but rather how closely they subscribed to the dictum of the late Gene Fowler: "Money is something to be thrown off the back end of trains." As an example of a freehanded spender with class, Beebe gives an account of Boston's Mrs. Jack Gardner's paying Paderewski $3,000 to play at teatime for an elderly friend and herself on condition that he remain concealed behind a screen. Or James Gordon Bennett, owner of the New York Herald, who bought a restaurant in Monte Carlo one day because he could not get a seat by the window, cleared the restaurant of customers, lunched at leisure and then gave a waiter the deed to the place.

Although he writes admiringly of the vast sums expended by Vanderbilts, Goulds and Morgans on yachts, castellated mansions, cotillions, fine libraries and blooded horses, Beebe concedes that for pure genius, nobody topped "Colonel" Ned Green, the spectacularly eccentric, wooden-legged, oversexed son of Hetty Green, the miserly "Witch of Wall Street." For more than half a century, until his death in 1936, Green squandered about $3 million a year on stamp collecting, orchid culture, private railroad cars, teen-age girls, luxurious yachts and diamond-studded chamber pots. Green sometimes traveled with a battered Gladstone valise stuffed with $10,000 bills. Once when he was visiting Dallas, the president of the Security National Bank appealed to Green to help him stanch a run on the bank. Green counted 20 ten-grand notes out of his wallet and then sent a bellboy to his hotel suite to fetch his valise, which was on the bed. From that, he produced 30 additional $10,000 bills, then sent the still-bulging satchel back to his suite with instructions to the bellboy to put it in the closet, where it would be safe.

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