On the second Sunday of November 1921, Edith Kingdom Gould hit the mightiest drive of her life off the fifth tee at Georgian Court, her estate in Lakewood, New Jersey. As the ball flew, she collapsed and died on the grass. Her husband, George J. Gould, carried her body himself to the indoor tennis pavilion and tried unsuccessfully to revive her.
Two doctors arrived from Lakewood and cut away her golfing clothes. Beneath them, from neck to ankle, she was encased in a tight rubber sweat suit, wrapped, the doctors said, like a mummy. She had worn it in secret beneath her clothing because her husband no longer wanted to look at her. Born Edith Mary Kingdom in Brooklyn in August 1864, she was the daughter of a Canadian-born businessman, Charles Dennis Kingdom, and his wife, Mary Carter Kingdom.
Her father died young, leaving the family without means, and young Edith was sent to England for an education. Upon her return, the family’s financial situation forced her to seek work. In 1882, at age 18, she began appearing in amateur theatricals in Brooklyn, and the surviving record is plain about the reason: her widowed mother had to be supported, and acting was the one door that opened wide enough for both of them. Within two seasons, a Boston company signed her, and before her twentieth birthday she was a professional touring actress.
In 1884, at age 20, she came to the attention of Augustine Daly, whose company was the most prestigious acting company in the United States. Daly’s ensemble toured Europe as an American cultural export, and under his discipline, Edith Kingdom became one of the great beauties of her day. In November 1884, she played a married charmer named Mrs. Marjorie Gwyn in a Daly comedy called Love on Crutches, a role audiences attached to her name.
Seven years later, she gave that name to a daughter of her own, Marjorie Gwyn Gould. George J. Gould, born February 6, 1864, was the eldest son of Jay Gould, the most feared and hated of the American robber barons. At age 20, having watched Edith perform in Love on Crutches, George went weak at the knees.
He pursued her for nearly two years, a courtship his family opposed. A discreet arrangement would have been understood, but the heir to the Gould railroads kept returning and escalating. Over roughly a year, according to accounts later published in the Times, the actress won the affections of the family one member at a time. Jay Gould, who trusted nobody on Wall Street, finally gave his consent.
On September 14, 1886, at Jay Gould’s Gothic revival estate Lyndhurst on the Hudson, Edith Kingdom married George J. Gould. The ceremony was held at a safe distance from the New York press, with the guest list cut to the bone. Only one member of her own family attended: her widowed mother, Mary Carter Kingdom, stood alone on Edith’s side of the drawing room while the assembled Gould family filled every other corner.
The New York Times reported that the refined ways, the clever sallies, and the lovable disposition of the young woman won admiration and regard. Helen Day Miller Gould, George’s mother, had strongly disapproved of the match. She stood in the drawing room as the ceremony went forward, but her blessing, as the family record later acknowledged through Jay Gould’s biographer, stayed upstairs. She died in 1889, three years into the marriage.
For a woman of Edith’s generation, the law lived under the shadow of coverture, folding a wife’s legal existence into her husband’s. New York’s reforms allowed a wife to hold property under her own name, which is how a house at 177 East 64th Street came to stand in Edith’s own name, but everything else, the great houses, the direction of the money, and the terms of the marriage itself, remained his. Divorce for a woman in her position meant social ruin and the loss of the world her children lived in. The children arrived steadily.
Kingdom Gould was born in 1887, Jay Gould II in 1888, Marjorie Gwyn Gould in 1891, Helen Vivien Gould in 1893, George J. Gould II in 1896, Edith Catherine in 1901, and Gloria in 1906. In 1896, Edith and George bought 156 acres in the Pine Belt of New Jersey and began building Georgian Court, a Georgian revival estate designed by Bruce Price, with roughly 30 bedrooms, Turkish and Russian baths, a bowling alley, a club parlor, and a room set aside for the automobile. Outdoors lay three polo fields, a nine-hole private golf course, squash and tennis courts, a gymnasium, and a swimming pool.
The casino building enclosed an immense indoor riding ring, and in 1899, a real tennis court was built for young Jay Gould, then eleven years old. The boy raised on that court would hold the world championship of real tennis for a quarter of a century. In 1903, George gave his wife a rope of pearls from Tiffany’s valued at $500,000, worth roughly $18 million in today’s money. In 1898, Edith had sat for the French society portraitist Theobald Chartran, wearing a claret-colored velvet gown by the House of Worth.
In 1908, the Goulds demolished their fifty-room Victorian mansion on Fifth Avenue and replaced it with a Beaux-Arts palace at 857 Fifth Avenue, built expressly, in the words of the period press, so that Edith could entertain on the scale of any hostess in New York. On January 21, 1908, more than twenty years after leaving the professional stage, Edith walked back onto it for a single afternoon in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. The occasion was a semi-private theatrical, a one-act piece called Mrs. Vanvetchon’s Divorce Dance, with Edith playing opposite Frederick Townsend Martin.
The guests who fought for seats included Commodore Elbridge Gerry, Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt, Gladys Vanderbilt, and Ruth Livingston Mills. The New York Times verdict ran eleven words: “Mrs. Gould’s acting shows she has lost none of her skill. ” It was the last time she stood on a stage and was reviewed.
In December 1913, George J. Gould went to the New York opening of an English musical called The Girl on the Film. He was 49 years old, twenty-seven years a husband, and the father of seven. In the chorus stood Guyneth Jean Sinclair, a 28-year-old Gaiety girl from the George Edwardes musicals in London, born in Westfield, Iowa, and trained across the ocean.
The same thing that had happened to him in 1884 happened again. Within months, the affair had begun, and George installed Sinclair on Manursing Island off the shore of Rye, New York, on an estate of twenty-nine acres, reachable by water. He kept a yacht, and the yacht became the ferry of his double life, carrying him out on the weekends to the island and back to the world of Fifth Avenue and Lakewood. In 1915, a boy called George Sinclair Gould was born to Sinclair on Manursing Island, and in 1916, a girl called Jane Sinclair Gould followed.
Both children carried the Gould name informally, without documents, without law. The biographical file assembled on Edith states without decoration that she knew her husband kept a mistress housed with the two children born from their affair, and that she, in the file’s own words, was not bitter, a composure the file proves by pointing to her will. When the United States entered the Great War, Edith was made chairman of the entertainment committee of the New York City Mayor’s Committee of Women on National Defense. She directed entertainments at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and in hospitals across the city.
The Beaux-Arts palace at 857 Fifth Avenue became the committee’s warehouse, filled with wigs, grease paints, and costumes. Mary Carter Kingdom, the widow whose poverty had sent her daughter onto the boards, died in 1911. After the armistice, with her public role dissolved and her husband’s attention seventy miles away, Edith turned her formidable will onto the last territory her world left open to her: her own body. She had a documented weakness for sweets and no habit of denying herself, and she took up golf in her middle fifties as a regimen of walking and swinging laid out on her own land.
Alongside the golf came a prescribed reducing suit of rubber, tight and sealed from neck to ankle, worn beneath her clothes through Sunday services and Sunday golf and the long ceremonial hours of a hostess’s day. The household knew, and the household said nothing. On the evening of Saturday, November 12, 1921, Georgian Court settled into a November night. The next morning she attended church and then changed into her golfing clothes, wearing the rubber suit beneath them, as the regimen required.
She and George walked out onto their private nine-hole course and began to play. Four holes went by, and the record of them is silence. At the fifth tee, she addressed her ball. She hit the mightiest drive she ever hit, long and high and true.
George turned his head to follow it. Behind him, without a sound that reached the record, Edith went down. She died there on the grass on her own course, with her husband standing the length of a golf swing away, looking the wrong way at the ball. George carried her himself to the indoor tennis pavilion and tried uselessly to bring her back.
Two doctors arrived from Lakewood, confirmed heart disease as the cause of death, and cut away her golfing clothes. Beneath them, from neck to ankle, they found a tight rubber sweat suit, sealed to her skin by hours of wear, wrapped, the doctors said, like a mummy. They had never seen the suit before because no one had ever seen the suit. The funeral was held privately at 857 Fifth Avenue at two o’clock on November 15.
Seven children stood at that service. She was interred in the Jay Gould Mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The will was then read, and the will is the reason her death has an author. Edith left George the Fifth Avenue mansion and the property at 177 East 64th Street, holdings worth together between two and three million dollars, and she left them to him outright in words the record preserved: “to my beloved husband.
” Attached to the gift sat one condition: if George remarried, both properties would pass at once to their children. She knew about the mistress. She knew about the two children at Rye. The clause was the only sentence Edith Kingdom Gould ever got to speak out loud about her own marriage.
On May 1, 1922, at the home of a Lakewood judge with three witnesses, George J. Gould married Guyneth Sinclair. The interval between his first wife’s funeral and his second wedding was six months and eighteen days. On the marriage certificate, the bride gave a Manhattan address on West 74th Street and her age as 29.
By the operation of the will, the Fifth Avenue mansion and the house on East 64th Street passed out of George’s hands and vested in the seven Gould children. The doors that had opened for George since birth began closing silently, completely, and without appeal. In July 1922, George sailed for England with Guyneth and their three children. In the spring of 1923, George joined the great pilgrimage to the newly opened tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt.
Somewhere on that Egyptian journey, he contracted a fever. He carried it out of the country and never fully shook it. The press suggested the curse of the pharaohs, though the grounded reading is an ordinary febrile illness in a man of 59 settling into pneumonia. On May 16, 1923, at a villa above the Mediterranean at Cap Martin on the French Riviera, George J.
Gould died of pneumonia. He was brought home to the Bronx and laid in the Jay Gould Mausoleum, which meant he was laid with Edith. Guyneth, the wife of his last year, would live another 55 years and be buried nowhere near him. George’s will acknowledged the three Sinclair children as his own.
The press called the estate $30 million; the formal probate valuation came in at just over $15 million, and by the time taxes and debts had taken their share, the fortune had shrunk to a little over five million. The litigation over the remainder consumed more than four years, with more than fifty lawyers engaged. Guyneth came away with one million dollars outright and a trust fund for her children. In July 1925, Guyneth married George St.
John Brodrick, Viscount Dunsford, and in the fullness of the peerage became Countess of Middleton, presiding over lavish house parties at Eastwell Manor in Kent. She died in Switzerland in 1978 at age 84, outliving Edith by 57 years and George by 55. In 1924, three years after Edith fell and one year after George died, Georgian Court was sold to the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic religious order in search of a home for a women’s college. The college became Georgian Court University in 2004.
The mansion survives, the casino survives, and the real tennis court built for an eleven-year-old boy in 1899 remains one of only about 45 such courts still in use on Earth, the second oldest in the United States. In 2018, Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, played on it during an American tour. The estate is a National Historic Landmark. Of Edith’s seven children, Katharine Gould Wurts-Dundas wrote an autobiography of the Gould family, published before her death at 36.
Her son, Stuyvesant Wurts II, would sit in the United States House of Representatives. The actress’s grandson became a congressman. Gloria, the youngest, drowned in her own swimming pool at her Arizona home in 1943, at 37 years old. The inheritance that Jay Gould had left his eldest son, the $15 million and the working command of the railroads, had come down one generation later to a probate file, a fee ledger, and a family that existed mainly as opposing captions in court papers.
The refined ways, the clever sallies, and the lovable disposition of the young woman won admiration and regard. Every word of it turned out to be true, and every word of it was beside the point. She won everything a woman of her era could win and paid the whole bill for it in private. She left one sentence with a clause in it, executed from the tomb.
The masterpiece of that sentence was its precision: it could only ever go off if George proved to be exactly the man she had spent 35 years knowing him to be.