Rich And Infamous

By John Elson

THE VANDERBILT ERA

by Louis Auchincloss

Scribner's; 214 pages; $19.95

Reading this slight, elegant book is a bit like having a guided tour through an album of family snapshots. There, notes your cicerone, is Great-Great-Uncle George, who built that incredible castle in North Carolina. Here is Great-Aunt Adele, blithe and beautiful, seated next to her sad cousin Consuelo -- she had to marry a duke, you know.

Louis Auchincloss, discreet attorney to the well-to-do and subtle novelist of their mores, proposes that the period between 1880 and 1910 could be called the Vanderbilt Era, after its largest and wealthiest clan. In these portraits in miniature of family members -- plus outriders like Richard Morris Hunt, who designed their grandiose homes -- Auchincloss writes with the relaxed intimacy of a frequent houseguest. (In fact, his wife Adele is a Vanderbilt descendant.)

That sense of belonging seems to gentle his judgments. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the builder of his family's fortune (and of the New York Central Railroad), was a whiskey-swilling, street-fighting parvenu who bullied his wife and children, cheated the public and gave away pittances from the $100 million he amassed. Auchincloss notes, a bit sorrowfully, that Vanderbilt and his colleagues in stiff-collar crime like Jay Gould would not find themselves out of place on Drexel Burnham Lambert's Wall Street. Still, the author can find it in his heart to suggest that the commodore's coarseness may have been caused by social insecurity.

Auchincloss tosses off small but fascinating insights into the life-styles of the rich and infamous. Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, the longtime doyenne of Manhattan society, had elaborate dinners for 40 guests served at near Burger King pace: eight courses in an hour. Despite their snobbishness and excess, Auchincloss notes, the Vanderbilts did live up to a code. They were true to their own, and, as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney indicated during the 1930s custody case involving her niece Gloria, they knew the difference between a lady and a tramp -- which is that the lady must conceal the tramp inside her.