Who is Ward McAllister in The Gilded Age?
The real Ward McAllister, friend to Mrs Astor and Mrs Bertha Russell in The Gilded Age, is based on a real gentleman in 19th-century New York society…
Ward McAllister (played by Nathan Lane in The Gilded Age) is remembered as a socially ambitious Southern gentleman from Savannah, Georgia. Born in 1827, McAllister later moved from Georgia to California with his father, establishing a law firm and making a fortune.
By the mid-1800s, he had made a name for himself as a social arbiter in East Coast society, after touring Europe and observing closely how wealthy Americans conducted themselves.
Cultivating a network within such circles (he founded the Society of Patriarchs in 1872, which comprised of a group of 25 ‘worthy gentlemen’ from New York society), McAllister was soon regarded as a tastemaker.
He would often cherry-pick friends from both old money and new, matchmaking where he saw an expedient opportunity that would better society (and perhaps burnish his own reputation along the way).
Together, he and the famed Mrs Astor worked together to shun undesirables and elevate the deserving, protecting (as they saw it) the traditions of the old families, including during the War of the Operas. He's often credited with the phrase, 'the Four Hundred'.
“There are only about four hundred people in fashionable New York Society,” he told the New York Tribune in 1888. “If you go outside that number,” he warned, “you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.”
Four years later, the New York Times published an ‘official’ list of the Four Hundred deemed acceptable by McAllister and other social judges of the day.
His book Society As I Have Found It was published in 1890. He died in 1895.
Mrs Astor in The Gilded Age
Both Mrs Astor and Ward McAllister appear in Julian Fellowes’ period drama The Gilded Age, played by Donna Murphy and Nathan Lane respectively.
Their characters are drawn from reality, portrayed as gatekeepers between extravagantly wealthy newcomer Bertha Russell (an original character in the drama played by Carrie Coon) and New York society. The fictional Russells’ attempts in the drama to break into the upper ranges of this set mirror those of the Vanderbilts in many ways.
Read more about the real history the show draws upon:
Series 2 of The Gilded Age is streaming on HBO in the US from 29 October 2023, and in the UK will be broadcast on Sky Atlantic and available to stream on NOW
Authors
Elinor Evans is digital editor of HistoryExtra.com. She commissions and writes history articles for the website, and regularly interviews historians for the award-winning HistoryExtra podcast
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