The New York Times
July 3, 2006
Books of the Times: Archie and Amélie
'Archie and Amélie': A Combustible Couple in a Torrid Descent Amid Opulence
By JANET MASLIN

There are beagles to thank for "Archie and 
Amélie," Donna M. Lucey's irresistible account of 
two relatively obscure Gilded Age figures. Ms. 
Lucey, who lives in Charlottesville, Va., had 
been invited to follow a pack of hounds in the 
horse country nearby. During this event she 
caught wind of a local legend: Amélie Rives, 
goddaughter of Robert E. Lee and one of the 
region's first and most outlandish female literary figures.

At what point did Ms. Lucey realize how seriously 
she was onto something? Was it when she learned 
of the Rives ancestor who had found Abraham 
Lincoln "distressingly common?" Found Amélie 
described as "a sizzling vessel of molten lava?" 
Read Amélie's sly letters? "I am as sure that you 
will be one of the famous writers as I am of the 
moan of the wind down my chimney," Amélie told a relative.

The combustion between Amélie and her first 
husband, John Armstrong Chanler (a k a Archie), 
was a biographer's dream. They met at a ball in 
Newport, R.I., in the summer of 1887, when "Fate 
spoke in the alluring form of a lost red satin 
slipper skidding improbably across a crowded 
dance floor," Ms. Lucey writes. "It belonged to 
the fairest." And the man who caught it was a catch in his own right.

Archie Chanler, then 24, was a great-great 
grandson of John Jacob Astor and the oldest of 10 
orphaned siblings. He was a wealthy, commanding 
figure, if also a manic and self-aggrandizing 
one. "The news burst like a thunderclap on 
society & the world," Archie wrote when Amélie 
agreed to marry him. The prospect of this union, 
in the sniping words of one society publication, 
would mean that "the intellectually igneous but 
auriferous Astors will have at least one person 
of brains in their select family fold."

By then Amélie had become notorious as the author 
of a scandalizing novel, "The Quick or the Dead?" 
(It is still in print, as are many of her 
writings.) "America blushed, and ran out to buy 
it," Ms. Lucey says. Amélie became such a 
colorful celebrity (one interviewer invited to 
tour her boudoir described a setting that was 
"part museum, part girlish refuge, part 
whorehouse") that she eclipsed even her husband's 
Astor pedigree. And Archie was not someone who could happily be eclipsed.

"Have you ever thought in the bottom of your 
soul, that Archie's mind was not quite right?" 
Amélie asked a sister-in-law. "He laughs at me in 
such a dreadful way sometimes, until I am crying & trembling with terror."

Questions about Archie's sanity would only 
intensify over time. And Amélie's response was to 
keep on flirting (most notably with George 
Curzon, the future viceroy of India) and retreat 
into narcotics. A silver syringe that remains at 
Rokeby, the Astor estate in Dutchess County, 
N.Y., is thought to be one of Amélie's leftovers.

Archie would have a different sort of silver in 
his future. In a sequence of incredible events 
described here (and also in Lately Thomas's 
authoritative "Astor Orphans: A Pride of Lions"), 
he separated painfully from Amélie, wrote 
voluminously and histrionically about his pain 
and then embarked on a risky venture: creating 
the entire town of Roanoke Rapids, N.C., as part of a projected textile empire.

While that state arranged to have convicts do the 
construction work, Archie "wandered amid the 
construction site in a long, flowing black cape, 
which set him off nicely from the prisoners in 
their striped uniforms." And his siblings, who 
had been urged to invest in Roanoke Rapids, began 
to suspect financial malfeasance.

Archie became increasingly dangerous to them, not 
to mention frightening: he began to think he 
could receive messages from his unconscious via a 
Ouija board, and he claimed he could change his 
face into Napoleon's at will. One of Archie's 
brothers sought the help of a friend, the New 
York police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, to 
round up Archie and ship him off to a 
well-pedigreed mental institution. The 
Bloomingdale Asylum's BA monogram was engraved on 
the sterling silver tea service used there.

There is much, much more to "Archie and Amélie," 
from the treacherous role of Stanford White (who 
was affectionately nicknamed "Fuzz Buzz" by 
Archie) in Astor family finances to Amélie's 
second marriage, nearly as peculiar as her first. 
(Her new husband was Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy. 
His mother had been known as "the canary-bird of 
Lago Maggiore.") And Ms. Lucey tells it 
beautifully. Despite the potential for voyeurism 
in any story of such privileged characters, she 
blithely mixes curiosity with healthy skepticism. 
"Cheap histrionics, but highly effective," she 
writes about Amélie's melodramatic manipulations. 
When legal proceedings leave Archie declared 
insane in every state but Virginia, she calls him 
"the occupant of the nation's largest cell."

Ms. Lucey's success with this book also owes much 
to its subjects. When a man can (as Archie did) 
enjoy a breakfast of roast duck and vanilla ice 
cream while wearing leather pajamas and sitting 
near a fresh corpse, he certainly holds up his 
end of the story. Perhaps Ms. Lucey's greatest 
accomplishment is in keeping Archie sympathetic 
rather than freakish at such moments. Was he mad? 
Victimized? This much is certain: Archie wound up 
with the last laugh when he felt sufficiently 
vindicated to send a cable to the press asking, 
"Who's looney now?" That became both Archie's de 
facto epitaph and, for a while, America's most popular punch line.

Archie and Amélie
Love and Madness in the Gilded Age
By Donna M. Lucey
Illustrated. 339 pages. Harmony Books. $25.95.

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