Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we’ve been transported back to the peak of 1920s America.

Flappers with bobbed hair dance the Charleston to hot jazz in speakeasies behind unmarked doors.

On Wall Street, the stock market climbs month after month, and suddenly everybody wants a piece of it. Ordinary families buy shares on credit and read the financial page over breakfast, sure the numbers can only go up.

And out west in a burgeoning neighborhood called “Hollywood”, all that money and swagger are pouring into the movies.

The pictures are silent, but the stars in them are the loudest names in the country.

Through the 1920s, the reigning king and queen of the silver screen were the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks and “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, the most famous woman in pictures.

Their own personal Camelot included one of the first private swimming pools in Los Angeles, and they liked to cross it by canoe.

For years, the most coveted invitation in Hollywood led up one winding drive, and getting it was the closest thing the town had to a knighthood. The house at the top went by a single word built from its owners’ last names: Pickfair.

Albert Einstein came. So did Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, while Charlie Chaplin simply came over from next door.

The house around it came down in 1990, within a year of its new owners promising to keep the famous name.

Any Duke

The year is 1922, and Beverly Hills is still a young town of bean fields and empty hillsides. Summit Drive winds up out of it into the hills above Sunset Boulevard.

On a knoll above San Ysidro Canyon, one of the ravines that split those hills, the lights of Pickfair come into view, with its stables, tennis courts and about 15 acres of grounds spread out around it.

Mary and Doug furnished its two dozen rooms like an English country seat, as if Hollywood’s royal couple fancied themselves landed gentry.

Guests drifted past early-18th-century English and French furniture, Louis XVI pieces and paintings by George Romney, beneath frescoed ceilings and walls of mahogany and bleached pine that glinted with gold leaf.

The society decorator Elsie de Wolfe did the living room. Mary wanted light, so she punched larger windows into the walls wherever she could and hung a sliding mirror over the dining-room fireplace.

Doug wanted a saloon, and he got one.

Downstairs stood a burnished mahogany bar hauled out of a real saloon in Auburn, California, with Frederic Remington’s paintings of the Old West on the walls. This was where Zorro himself entertained the cowboy star Tom Mix.

Somewhere beneath the estate, the King of Hollywood reportedly ran laps around an underground track without a stitch on.

On the first floor, a private projection room turned the house into its own little movie palace, and its most loyal patron lived next door. Charlie Chaplin often came over for dinner and a movie.

Then the royals arrived. Lord Louis and Lady Mountbatten spent part of their 1922 honeymoon at Pickfair. Decades later, Mountbatten summed the place up for the film historian Kevin Brownlow in a single line: “It was the house that everyone wanted to go to.”

The King and Queen of Siam came calling, and so did King Alfonso XIII of Spain. Some of the royal guests stayed for days, which gave Chaplin endless material.

“Hello, Doug. How’s the Duke?” he asked one day.

“What Duke?” said Fairbanks.

“Oh . . . any Duke.”

“We’ve got several here right now,” Fairbanks shot back. “Which one do you want?”

Life magazine rated Pickfair only slightly less important than the White House, “and much more fun.”

The guest list could have doubled as a history syllabus. Einstein and H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Ford and the boxer Jack Dempsey all made the climb, and Hollywood sent up Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford and the Gish sisters.

Mary played hostess the way she played her heroines, with total commitment. When the spiritual teacher Meher Baba arrived in June 1932, she met him at the door herself and told him, “We feel greatly honored by your presence in our home.”

The guests that night included Gary Cooper, the Countess Dentice di Frasso and Mary’s sister Lottie. Soon the Queen of Hollywood was sitting on the carpet at Baba’s feet, with the rest of the party settling onto the floor around her. After dinner, Baba tried three times to leave, and three times Mary wouldn’t let him go.

When he finally rose, the guests closed in around him, and he carried on the conversation by pointing to letters on his alphabet board.

The whole glittering circus started in a six-room hunting lodge with no electricity, bought by a movie star in love with another man’s wife.

A Hunting Lodge

In 1919, Fairbanks paid $35,000 for the lodge, roughly $600,000 in today’s money. For that he got a hill, a view and six plain rooms with no electricity or running water.

For a man in his position, the isolation was the selling point. He was the screen’s great action hero, soon to be Zorro and Robin Hood, and he was in love with Mary Pickford, the biggest star of the silent era and, at the time, another man’s wife.

Doug got what he wanted, on screen and off.

They met at a party in 1915, both married to other people, and spent years keeping the romance out of the papers.

Hollywood’s reporters watched both stars closely, so the lovers hid in the one place nobody thought to look: in front of the crowds.

In 1918, with America at war, they crossed the country with Charlie Chaplin selling Liberty Bonds, the government loans that paid for the fighting in Europe.

The press photographs just showed three famous friends on a patriotic errand. Consequently, the reporters trailing them from rally to rally never caught the two who stood a little too close on the platform.

Within a year, they shared a business as well as a secret. In 1919, they joined Chaplin and D.W. Griffith to found United Artists.

Mary’s divorce from her first husband, Owen Moore, came through in early March 1920, and before the month was out, she was Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks.

The newlyweds quickly moved into the lodge on the hill, reportedly as a wedding gift to her.

Decades before Brangelina, the newspapers fused two stars into a single name.

Reporters stitched Pickford and Fairbanks into Pickfair, and the couple’s press agents made sure it stuck.

Winston Millet, a former president of the Beverly Hills Historical Society, later called the name “the invention of the popular press” and the whole legend a product of “the p.r. firms of Hollywood.”

Yet he was blunter still about the couple themselves.

They were “highly paid sex symbols,” he said, “and the more publicity written about it, the better it was for selling that product.”

A product that famous needed packaging to match, and six plain rooms on a hill wouldn’t do.

Fairbanks dressed the lodge in a mock-Tudor face in 1920. According to his son, the architect Wallace Neff wanted to go much further, tear the old place down and start fresh, and the couple refused to hear of it.

So Neff worked around the old bones. In 1932 he reshaped the house into an English Regency residence, adding two wings, an L-shaped veranda, leaded-glass windows and a copper roof held aloft on wrought iron.

With Neff’s work done, the house had a palace’s bones, and its rooms began collecting treasures from real thrones.

Siam’s royal family, rulers of the country known today as Thailand, gave Mary a silver urn shaped like a lotus flower. A set of china Napoleon gave his empress, Josephine, sat behind glass, an emperor’s tableware on display in the home of two people who earned their crowns at the box office.

Pickfair’s press agents kept the fairy tale polished for the newspapers, though even they couldn’t keep it shining much longer.

Within two years of Neff’s makeover, the marriage behind the house was headed for divorce court.

The Little Girl

In 1933, at the age of 40, Mary Pickford walked away from the camera for good.

“I knew it was time,” she said. “The little girl made me.”

Doug, meanwhile, still lived by the rule that built his downstairs saloon: when he wanted something, he got it.

In December, the rest of the fairy tale collapsed. Mary learned that Doug was having an affair with Sylvia Ashley, a former chorus girl, and she filed for divorce.

It took until January 1936 to become final, and in March, Fairbanks married Ashley.

Pickfair’s queen kept her palace, and the palace kept her for 43 more years.

She married Charles “Buddy” Rogers, the actor and bandleader who once played opposite her in “My Best Girl,” and settled him into life on the hill.

With Buddy at her side, Mary kept up the old Pickfair ritual of dinner and a movie in the first-floor projection room, watching from the seats now that her own screen days were over.

Doug’s own time was running short.

In 1934, Doug made his last picture, The Private Life of Don Juan, and the swashbuckler suddenly had nothing left to conquer on screen. He spent the next few years drifting between England and California with Sylvia, a born athlete in his fifties with no part to play, and his body quietly began to lose the fight.

His heart gave out in December 1939, and according to one biography, Mary was on the road with Rogers’s band in Chicago when the news reached her. She was heard to whisper,

“My darling is gone.”

Sylvia gave him a marble tomb at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and a line from Hamlet to carve on it: “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

In the decades that followed, Mary grew frail and reclusive, and Rogers became the keeper of both his wife and her silent-film legacy. The house that once welcomed kings drew in around a much smaller circle, and one account says the estate itself began to slide.

Inside, Mary lived among her younger selves. A visitor late in her life found portraits of her in nearly every room, a gallery of Marys from 18 to 59 keeping company with a little “Rodin Room” and Napoleon’s china behind glass.

And she stayed at Pickfair almost to the very end. Mary Pickford left Pickfair only days before her death. She suffered a stroke and died at Santa Monica Hospital in May 1979, at 86.

Under an arrangement Mary made before her death, Rogers sold the estate and built himself a smaller house on a piece of the land.

The sale ended up in a courtroom, where the judge’s first remark set the spectators laughing.

An Empty Nest

For the first time in 60 years, Pickfair stood without Mary Pickford inside it.

In March 1980, less than a year after her death, the house went on the market at $10 million, roughly $38 million in today’s money, a number that proved wildly hopeful.

At the probate sale that followed, the bid that carried the day came from Jerry Buss, owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, at roughly half the asking price, and nobody in the room topped it.

“It must be a fixer-upper,” said Superior Court Judge Edward Rafeedie, and the courtroom laughed.

Buss took the joke as an assignment. He poured an estimated $2 million to $3 million into the house, remodeling the bathrooms and kitchen, restoring the old moldings and floors, and adding a library and a championship tennis court.

His spokesman, Bob Steiner, said there was “a concerted effort to make the house look as it did at its peak.”

Where Mary’s gowns once hung, a basketball owner displayed his trophies.

Doug’s old taproom stayed exactly as it was, as if Tom Mix might wander in for a drink at any moment. The broker Elliot Feinman, who handled the sale for the Pickford estate and came back to list the house again, praised Buss for keeping it “Old World” and called the restoration “one of the finest jobs I’ve seen.”

For a few years, the house came back to life. Buss opened it to charity events, and later said it was “very satisfying to help raise millions of dollars for good causes.”

Then the children grew up. In 1986, only his son Jimmy still lived at Pickfair, and Buss bought another place outside Los Angeles.

“So Pickfair is rapidly becoming an empty nest,” he said. “It’s a much bigger house than I need.”

The buyers who finally took it off his hands arrived with a promise that sounded, at the time, like a gift to Hollywood history.

Like Cancer

The next couple up Summit Drive brought show business back to the hill, along with bigger plans for the house than anyone since Wallace Neff.

In 1988, the singer and actress Pia Zadora and her husband, the multimillionaire businessman Meshulam Riklis, paid $6.7 million for Pickfair, roughly $18 million in today’s money.

At first, they said all the right things. Riklis sent word through a secretary that “Pickfair will be called Pickfair,” and Zadora’s manager, Tino Barzie, described a couple who craved privacy.

“She’s in show business and he’s a successful businessman, but they’re quiet kind of people,” Barzie said. “There’s not going to be a neon sign saying ‘Pia and Rick live here.’”

Privacy was exactly what they got, because for months nobody lived behind the old gates in Golden Age Hollywood’s former kingdom.

In the summer of 1989, after standing empty for close to two years, Pickfair was “dusty and run down,” and the couple’s plans called for something far grander than Mary’s English country house.

They wanted a Renaissance-style Venetian palazzo, with tile roofs, balconies, fountains, reflecting pools, a terraced garden and a dog run, all approached by a grand Italian entrance on two tiers of flanking stairs.

The City of Beverly Hills reportedly accepted plans to dismantle most of Pickfair without a single objection.

“The house has been changed through the years a number of times so that it no longer is the original Pickfair,” said Paul Selwyn, the planning commission chairman.

Arguably the commission’s chairwoman, Rose Norton, was simply relieved that the estate would stay in one piece. “We’re so delighted there was one owner who would buy it and restore it to a style they preferred,” she said, “rather than have someone buy it and subdivide it into a lot of little lots.”

With the city’s blessing in hand, the crews moved into the iconic Hollywood mansion and began taking her rooms apart.

And Barzie was right about the neon sign. In April 1990, there was hardly a house left to hang one on.

Only a guest wing and fragments of the living room still stood, the same room where Einstein, Chaplin, the King of Spain and the Windsors were once entertained.

The contractor, Rob Myers, said his crews opened up the old house and found its timbers riddled with termites and dry rot.

“Once we got into it, it was like cancer,” he said. “We kept cutting away at the bad stuff, trying to get at the good stuff until we got down to the foundation. And the foundation didn’t have any steel in it.”

What survived of the living room, Myers said, would be worked into the new house as a tribute.

Old Hollywood took it personally. “I regret it very much,” said Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

He was Doug’s son from his first marriage, and Junior still remembered moonlight swims in that pool. “I wonder, if they were going to demolish it, why they bought it in the first place.”

Phyllis Lerner, president of the local historical society, gave the house its epitaph. “It really wasn’t a pretty house,” she said, “but my God, the guest list!”

And Wallace Neff’s son, whose father wanted the old lodge torn down in 1920, took the news both ways. “Maybe it was time,” he said. “But I really am sorry to see it gone.”

Two decades later, Pia Zadora offered her own explanation, and it involved something far stranger than termites.

The Woman in White

In 2012, Zadora went on the television series Celebrity Ghost Stories and said the house was haunted.

In her telling, a tall woman in white would appear to her and her children, laughing, and the house echoed with women’s laughter and the sounds of parties long since over, all while Riklis was away on business.

“If I had a choice, I never would have torn down this old home,” she said.

“I loved this home, it had a history, it had a very important sense about it and you can deal with termites, and you can deal with plumbing issues, but you can’t deal with the supernatural.”

The palazzo that rose in Pickfair’s place was finished in 1994, and it made the old Pickfair look positively modest.

It sprawled across about 26,000 square feet, with a spa beneath a glass dome, a gym, a beauty shop, a theater and a disco. Riklis borrowed decorative ideas from Versailles and the Sistine Chapel, and one craftsman lived on the estate for three years while he worked on the house.

It once entertained Einstein. Now it had its own disco.

Subdivision whittled the grounds down to just over two acres, and in 2005 the estate passed to UNICOM Global, a company owned by the Korean businessman Corry Hong, which bought it for executive meetings and events. Hollywood’s most famous party house was now a corporate meeting center.

Mary’s treasures scattered long ago, and the silver lotus urn from Siam went under the hammer at a 2008 auction.

Phyllis Lerner had it right all along. Pickfair’s glory was its guest list, a press release with a copper roof, and once the last of the guests went home, a famous name was all that stood between the house and the wrecking crews.

The gates still stand, and so does the old guest wing where royalty once slept.

And on the grounds, the old kidney-shaped pool survives, the same water Mary and Doug once crossed by canoe for the cameras, waiting for a party that ended 90 years ago.

COMMENT: Should Pickfair have been saved no matter what, or was it just the “hand of the market” deciding it wasn’t worth keeping?

At the end of Ochre Point Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, a pair of towering iron gates swing open onto a lawn that runs to the edge of the Atlantic.

At its center sits The Breakers, a mansion of pale Indiana limestone modeled on the palaces of 16th-century Italy, its arched loggias open to the sea air.

It looks as though it drifted over from Renaissance Genoa and decided to stay.

Past the front doors, the Great Hall rises fifty feet to a ceiling painted as an open sky. Upstairs, the bathtubs once offered four taps, hot and cold fresh water and hot and cold seawater piped in from the ocean below.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II, grandson of the richest man in America, built it between 1893 and 1895 and, with a straight face, called it a summer cottage.

For decades after tourists began filing through its roped-off parlors, his descendants still lived in a third-floor apartment above the crowds.

Then, in the summer of 2018, the last two Vanderbilts in the house received a notice to vacate.

sent by the very preservation society their family once handed the keys to in the hope of saving the house.

Every room the tourists now pay to see was built for one family’s private pleasure, and in the summer of 1895, the Vanderbilts finally moved in.

“I Laugh at Great Wealth”

In the summer of 1895, the Vanderbilts arrived in Newport to a house built to leave every guest on Ochre Point Avenue speechless.

The architect Richard Morris Hunt raised all of it on steel and masonry, without a single wooden beam, because the first house on the site burned to the ground in 1892.

The boilers that heated it sat in a vault under the front lawn, swallowing more than 150 tons of coal a year, so no spark could ever reach the rooms where the family slept.

Guests entered the Great Hall, a perfect cube of pale stone. Above its six doorways stood limestone figures for the pillars of civilization: Galileo for science, Dante for literature, Apollo for the arts, Mercury for commerce, the sculptor Karl Bitter for sculpture, and, for architecture, Hunt himself.

To the east, the Morning Room opened toward the ocean, its walls lined with platinum-leaf panels of eight of the nine Muses.

The Paris decorator Jules Allard built the room in France and shipped it across the Atlantic in pieces to be assembled on the cliff.

Next door, the Music Room glowed beneath a coffered ceiling of gold, with woodwork crafted in France and a fireplace of Campan marble from the Pyrenees, a room made for recitals and dancing. Across the hall, the billiard room was all gray-green Cipollino marble and rose alabaster arches, with billiard balls and acorns set into the walls in semi-precious stone.

The library was the quietest room on the floor, paneled in Circassian walnut and gold leaf and lined with green Spanish leather, with dolphins painted overhead.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s library mantel mocked the very fortune that paid for it.

The fireplace came out of a 16th-century château in Burgundy, and carved into its stone was a line his heirs would have done well to read twice:

“I laugh at great wealth, and never miss it; nothing but wisdom matters in the end.”

But dinner was the true performance. Twelve freestanding columns of rose alabaster ringed the Dining Room, a painting of Aurora bringing the dawn filled the ceiling, and two Baccarat crystal chandeliers, built to burn either gas or electricity, lit an oak table that could seat 34.

And none of it ran by itself. A household of 33 indoor servants moved through hidden corridors and service stairs, and the family silver slept in a steel vault off the pantry. The kitchen, with its 21-foot cast-iron stove, stood apart from the main house so fire and cooking smells never reached the dining room.

Upstairs, the Boston designer Ogden Codman dressed the family’s bedrooms. Cornelius slept in a Louis XIV room of walnut and rouge marble, while his wife, Alice, had an oval bedroom with four closets, a bell system to summon her maids, and hidden passages so they could come and go unseen.

Their daughter Gertrude was 20 that first summer. The youngest, Gladys, was just eight, and decades later, she’d be the one deciding what became of every room in the house.

Bu the Vanderbilts’ last foothold in The Breakers would be the floor where their servants slept.

The third floor held about 30 bedrooms for the staff, with more tucked into the attic. Gladys would later keep a private apartment on the southern half of that floor, with eight bedrooms and a living room facing the sea, and her descendants would hold on to it until 2018.

An Otis elevator installed in 1895 carried the family between floors, and more than a century later, it was still running when the last of them packed their bags.

Cornelius II got roughly one healthy year inside his summer palace, and in June 1896, the head of America’s richest family sat down to sign his will.

The Favorite Grandson

Before he ever signed that will, Cornelius Vanderbilt II spent his days behind a much humbler desk, as a clerk at the Shoe and Leather Bank in New York City.

He was born on Staten Island on November 27, 1843, and studied at Columbia College, yet the grandson of a railroad titan started at the bottom, counting other people’s money.

His grandfather, “The Commodore”, believed in hard work above almost everything, and the young clerk’s diligence won him over.

Cornelius became the old tycoon’s favorite grandson, and when the Commodore died, he left him $5 million (equal to over $150 million today… in an era before income tax).

Indeed, he was devout and hardworking to his core. He taught Sunday school at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, and there, between lessons, he met another teacher, Alice Claypoole Gwynne. They married on February 4, 1867, and had seven children, though the first, a daughter named Alice, died of a childhood illness at five.

He rose through the New York Central Railroad, and in 1885, when his father died, he took over as its chairman and president and inherited an additional $70 million (worth more than $2 billion today).

Then he began to build. His Manhattan home at 1 West 57th Street grew until it filled the entire Fifth Avenue block front up to 58th Street, with a two-story ballroom, interiors by Jules Allard, and 37 servants to keep it running.

It was the largest private residence ever built in New York City.

The same year he took over the railroad, he bought a summer house in Newport called The Breakers from the tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard IV for $400,000, the largest real estate deal ever made in the town.

In a single year, Cornelius Vanderbilt II lost his eldest son and his summer house.

In 1892, his son William Henry II died of typhoid fever during his junior year at Yale, reportedly after drinking from a contaminated water pump on a trip out West. His grieving father built Vanderbilt Hall on the Yale campus in his memory.

That November, a fire broke out in the kitchen of The Breakers and destroyed the house. Two safes holding Alice’s jewelry came out of the ruins intact, but Cornelius said the loss ran several hundred thousand dollars beyond what his insurance would pay, and he answered with the fireproof palace that still stands on the cliff.

Grief soon gave way to a family war. With William gone, the next son, Cornelius III, known as Neily, stood first in line, and in 1896, he set his heart on Grace Wilson, a socialite his parents refused to accept.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II all but disinherited his son for marrying the wrong woman.

Neily and Grace planned to marry on June 18, 1896, the very date his father put on the final version of his will. Neily married her anyway, and his inheritance shrank to $1.5 million, a fraction of his siblings’ shares, while his younger brother Alfred took the bulk of the fortune. Alfred later handed over millions of his own to even things out.

That same year, a stroke forced him to step back from the railroad. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his Fifth Avenue mansion on September 12, 1899, at 55, leaving an estate appraised at nearly $73 million, about $2.8 billion in today’s money.

His will gave Alice the right to live at The Breakers for the rest of her life and to leave it to whichever child she chose.

Within three decades of his death, the fortune behind the house was slipping away, and The Breakers would pass to the daughter who was just eight that first summer.

The $1 Lease

Cornelius II’s wife Alice lived on at The Breakers for 35 years after her husband’s death, and the house cost more with every one of them.

In the mid-1920s, the property taxes alone ran $83,000 a year (equal to over $1 million today), and keeping the place running took 33 indoor servants… and 25 more outside.

The Commodore’s fortune, meanwhile, was splitting into smaller pieces with every generation. In 1926, Alice sold the gargantuan 57th Street mansion, and it was soon torn down to make way for the Bergdorf Goodman department store.

Alice died in 1934, at 89, and left The Breakers to her youngest daughter. Gladys, by then the wife of the Hungarian count László Széchenyi, was reportedly the only one of her children without an American home of her own.

Investors wanted to turn Gladys Vanderbilt’s inheritance into a hotel.

Newport gossips doubted she could afford to open the house at all. One 1935 report said she considered the bequest “more of a liability than a gift,” and a business syndicate offered to buy The Breakers and turn it into a hotel.

Gladys held on. She moved back in for the summer of 1936, and when war came, she lent the house to the Civilian Defense Council, which named it “Newport No. 1 air raid shelter.”

In January 1943, more than 500 wardens and volunteers crowded into its basements for a civil defense drill, with the countess among them as a Red Cross volunteer.

After the war, a new kind of rescuer appeared in Newport.

In 1945, a local couple, Katherine and George Warren, founded the Georgian Society to save Hunter House, an 18th-century merchant’s home near the harbor, from demolition, and the group soon renamed itself the Preservation Society of Newport County.

The Catholic diocese no longer needed the old house as a convent, and a Newport stone carver warned the Warrens that its rooms were “going to be taken off to museums.” The new society saved the building, but it had little money to restore it and needed a way to bring paying visitors through its doors.

Gladys Vanderbilt rented out The Breakers for a dollar a year and kept paying its bills.

Gladys’s own reasons went largely unrecorded, but the deal solved a problem on each side. The Breakers was draining her money, and opening it to the public kept the house cared for and full of life, with the family still living upstairs.

For the struggling society, the ticket money was a lifeline, and it paid for the experts who would plan the restoration of Hunter House.

On June 10, 1948, the society announced it was leasing The Breakers for $1 a year, and on July 1, the ground-floor rooms opened to tourists at $1.25 a ticket.

The society took the admission money, while Gladys went on paying the property taxes, the insurance, and the major repairs.

But she saved a private apartment upstairs for herself. The rooms where she spent her girlhood summers now belonged, for a few hours each day, to anyone with the price of a ticket.

It was a gentleman’s agreement dressed up as a lease. The family’s name stayed inside the house, and the society got a Gilded Age palace to show the world.

When Gladys died in 1965, she left The Breakers to seven heirs and gave them a single year to decide whether they wanted it at all.

Breaking Off

Gladys’s will gave her four surviving daughters and the three children of her late eldest daughter, Cornelia, one year to decide whether to keep The Breakers or let it go.

If they gave it up, the house would pass to the Preservation Society, and if it declined, to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Even the taxman weighed in. Her executors valued the palace on the cliff at just $192,000, and the IRS sued, insisting it was worth $250,000.

The family agreed to reopen the house for the summer of 1966 while they made up their minds, and the society took over the property taxes. The decision took seven more years.

Gladys Vanderbilt’s heirs sold The Breakers for less than their grandfather paid for it.

In December 1972, the heirs sold The Breakers to the Preservation Society for $366,000.

Adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly $2.8 million today, and in plain dollars, it was less than the $400,000 Cornelius II paid for the property in 1885, before Hunt laid a single stone.

The society has since said the sale came “with no restrictions, pledges or promises,” at what the attorney who negotiated it called “a premium price.”

The family also handed over much of the furniture and art that filled the rooms. In the 24 years after the doors first opened, more than 1.5 million visitors bought tickets, and running the house now cost the organization about $500,000 a year in wages alone, for a staff of more than 100.

The deed changed hands, but the family didn’t leave.

Under the sale agreement, Gladys’s daughter, Countess Sylvia Szápáry, received the right to live in her mother’s third-floor apartment for the rest of her life. As a girl, Sylvia used to toboggan down the mansion’s stairs on a silver tray, and younger Vanderbilts kept the tradition alive for years.

Two Vanderbilt great-grandchildren lived at The Breakers rent-free, at the society’s invitation.

When Sylvia died in 1998, the society invited her children, Paul and Gladys Szápáry, great-grandchildren of Cornelius II, to stay on the third floor without paying rent.

In a 1998 letter, the board president explained what the family’s presence meant to the society: “It will be helpful to us to be able to tell our visitors” that the original owner’s great-grandchildren still lived in the house.

For years, the deal held. Gladys spent every summer of her life on that third floor, while downstairs, the tour groups shuffled past the velvet ropes, rarely aware that a Vanderbilt was home above their heads.

Then, in 2013, the society unveiled plans for a $4.2 million building on the grounds, and the family upstairs decided to fight.

The Visitor Center

By Breakers standards, the building the society wanted was modest: a single-story pavilion for tickets, restrooms, and light refreshments, tucked into a little-used corner of the estate.

With hundreds of thousands of visitors arriving every year, the society said the crowds needed somewhere to buy tickets, rest, and find a restroom.

To its opponents, any new building on Hunt’s grounds was one too many. Neighbors, preservationists, and members of the Vanderbilt family warned that it would damage the landscape around the house and suggested the parking lot across the street.

Benjamin Lenhardt, chairman of the Garden Conservancy, wrote that the project “would destroy all or part of crucial design elements” of the grounds.

Twenty-one Vanderbilts signed a letter protesting how the society ran their family’s house.

In May 2015, 21 members of the family wrote to the society’s board, objecting to the visitor center and to the way The Breakers was being managed. They said they wouldn’t donate money or objects “under the current leadership climate.”

The society answered with a seven-page rebuttal from its chairman, Donald Ross, who wrote, “It is unfortunate that this has become at times personal and unpleasant.”

In a public statement, the society said the opposition came from a “small and vocal minority.” It noted that members of the family were paid $90,000 in 2014 for a portrait of Countess Széchenyi.

It also quoted the state’s historic preservation commission, which found the center “will not alter the historic character of The Breakers.”

According to press reports at the time, a memo from the society’s leadership described the family’s recent contributions as “minor” items, such as hairbrushes or wastebaskets, and noted that the Szápárys’ occupancy of the third floor “can be ended at any time.”

Gladys Szápáry said she was waiting for the society to throw her clothes out the window.

The siblings didn’t hide how they felt. “I’m waiting for them to throw my clothes out the window,” Gladys told a reporter that summer. Paul put the family’s case in a sentence: “The Breakers was a house. It’s not just a mansion, a museum.”

The legal fight belonged to the neighbors. Newport’s zoning board approved the center in January 2015 by a 4-1 vote, and a neighborhood association took the battle to court.

In January 2017, after a lower court ruled against it, the Rhode Island Supreme Court declined to step in.

The society declared victory. Board chairman Monty Burnham called the ruling “exceptionally good news for the more than 450,000 people who visit The Breakers each year,” while opponents vowed to keep pressing the society to “preserve the historic integrity of The Breakers.”

Within a year of that ruling, the Vanderbilts on the third floor were gone.

“Discontinued”

In January 2018, a year after the court fight ended, the Preservation Society announced that the Szápárys’ life on the third floor was over.

In the society’s words, their occupancy “has … been voluntarily discontinued.”

There was no formal lease to break. For decades, the siblings’ summers upstairs rested on an arrangement with the society, and Paul and Gladys spent them in the house from the year they were born.

The society said a year-long study by a preservation architect and an engineer found the apartment’s systems “dangerously outdated for residential use, putting the structure and collections at risk.”

The same systems, it added, were “completely safe for museum use.”

Some observers drew their own conclusions. The Harlem preservationist Michael Henry Adams suggested the siblings’ opposition to the welcome center played a part, a connection the society itself never made.

That June, the welcome center opened on the grounds with a ribbon-cutting for 600 guests, under a curved roof of copper shingles designed to echo a 19th-century garden conservatory. “The Welcome Center will operate virtually unseen,” Burnham said.

Tourists now pay to walk through the rooms where the last Vanderbilts slept.

In 2024, the society opened the third floor to the public for the first time, saying it made the decision after discovering water damage. Its curators chose to conserve the rooms much as the family left them, peeling walls and faded fabrics included.

Visitors can see the suite Ogden Codman designed for Cornelius’s sons, virtually as built. Down the hall is the tiny kitchen Gladys Széchenyi squeezed into a bathroom, where the original 1895 bathtub sits on one side of a thin plasterboard wall and a postwar GE electric oven on the other.

Downstairs, the Burgundy fireplace in the library still carries its warning about laughing at great wealth.

COMMENT: Should the last Vanderbilts have been allowed to stay at The Breakers?