Rockefeller, Morgan, Livingston, Astor. Names that will forever be associated with Gilded Age opulence. However, one cannot begin to think about the late 19th century without the name that would become synonymous with New York high society: Vanderbilt. Alva Smith Vanderbilt was determined to launch the Vanderbilt family into the social stratosphere after she married…
Beautiful, well-connected, and fascinated by power, Susan Mary Alsop was referred to as “the grand dame of Washington society” due to her political dinners attended by a who’s who of the capital city in the early 1960s. Born Susan Mary Jay in 1918, her father, Peter Augustus Jay, was an American diplomat and the great-great…