The Polish Mission to the United Nations was built as a home for the most mysterious of Wall Street's Men of Mystery. Even Joseph Raphael DeLamar's closest acquaintances report never really knowing him. The more formal age notwithstanding, no one called him friend. DeLamar was born in Amsterdam in 1842 and fatherless at four. So at 12 he ran away from home, stowed away on a ship and was off like few other famous fabled stowaways. Discovered aboard, he was indentured to the cook for seven years, a slave who worked his way up to cook to master to captain.
He bought a ship, then, a fleet, scouring coasts for shipwrecks and plunder, gold, marble, jewels. A harrowing thirty-six hours trapped underwater in wreckage led him to buy a fleet of river boats reaching into the depths of the African continent, twice as dangerous but closer to the surface. He took a class in metallurgy, and by the end of that twist in his attention, owned mountains in Idaho and Colorado (he was the very first senator Idaho sent to Washington) and had cornered markets in Silver, nickel, copper, and gold. He was on boards of almost every major metal corporation, survived any number of horrifying physical encounters with death, surfed with both agility and luck the treacherous wild west of the 19th Century American economy, but it was his heart done him in...
He married the great beauty of the day, Nellie Sands, thirty-seven years his junior of course, but to compensate, threw the world at her feet, showered her with every conceivable luxury on earth, whisked her off to Paris while he built her palace on Madison Avenue, you say you'd like one in Cairo, too? Coming right up. He raised their daughter Alice like a fairytale princess. While vacationing in Rome with his little family, DeLamar was called back to Paris to attend to some business and waiting for the Mrs. DeLamar a whole packet of love letters, not from the Mr. DeLamar. Cuckolded, this mountain of a man, the side of St. Helens blowing out sideways comes to mind. His anguish I believe is why no one ever gets close to him again. He grabs Alice, gains full custody, and lives out his life rattling around in the enormous, resplendent, Taj of a building, full of everything and nothing. Right here. On Madison Avenue. Millions walk by. And almost nobody knows.
Wanna go in?
