#492 How Mamie Fish Partied Her Way to Gilded Age Power

About this episode

In the summer of 1902, all of Newport was buzzing: a European prince was coming to town, and Mamie Fish — one of the reigning hostesses of American high society — was throwing a dinner in his honor. The young ladies practiced their curtsies. But what walked through the door that night was no prince, but did tell you everything about who Mamie Fish was. She hadn’t started anywhere near the top. Raised in the Gramercy Park neighborhood in the 1850s, she watched her family’s fortune vanish and they relocated to the working class neighborhood of Astoria. She was barely educated, no beauty, and armed with nothing but a wit that could cut glass. It was enough to win Stuyvesant Fish, heir to one of New York’s oldest names and a future railroad president, who adored her for the rest of his life. Mamie essentially invented the theme party at a time when New York society under Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister was incredibly dull. Mamie’s response was to make it fun: live ducklings paddling down the dinner table, a harvest ball with golden pitchforks, a formal dinner for the dogs of Newport, and a party for the Czar of Russia who turned out to be her partner in crime, Harry Lehr, in a tinfoi