railroads and traction companies, of nineteen banks, of Westinghouse Electric and Western Union—forty-six in all. It would have been enough to turn the heads of older and less impressionable men than Hyde.

Naturally he entertained on an increasingly lavish scale. At first, nobody disapproved; in an age more apt than ours to equate wealth with virtue, it was pleasant enough to see this picturesque young man making his way in society, and to read of his parties, covered by the newspapers as thoroughly as any political or sporting events.

But this benign mood changed with Hyde’s grandest effort, a costume ball— the theme, inevitably, to be the court of Louis XV—held in Sherry’s restaurant “le Mardi 31 Janvière 1905.” Slim and splendid in his “coat of bottle green … with the Revers of dove colored silk,” Hyde greeted his three hundred and fifty guests as they flowed past him into a ballroom thatched from floor to ceiling with roses. There they danced (those who could, at any rate: Mrs. Clarence Mackay was hung with so much jewelry that she required the attention of two black footboys to move about at all) until midnight, when they took in a short French bedroom farce composed for the occasion. At last bugles summoned them to dinner in a room so sumptuously tricked out with flowers and grass and fountains that the illusion of a Versailles garden might have been perfect had it not been for one guest stridently demanding hardboiled eggs and a glass of milk.

The papers reported that the ball had cost up to a quarter of a million dollars. Hyde himself called an estimate of $100,000 “considerably exaggerated,” and the World gave an “authoritative” figure of $70,000. Whatever the cost, it struck a lot of people as too much, and rumors began to circulate that Equitable policyholders had paid for the night of Old World foolishness. Joseph Pulitzer saw a story here, and the World , which a few days earlier had described Hyde as “a serious and an excellent man of business,” now changed its tune and decided he was “a little too Frenchified” for decent Americans.

Appalled by the growing publicity, members of the Equitable management demanded that Hyde surrender his control of a majority of the stock. This triggered a ferocious battle between the Equitable old guard and Hyde’s new friends. With men like E. H. Harriman in the latter camp, the battle was pretty much fought above Hyde’s head; later he said bitterly that he had been used as “a catspaw.” On March 31 Hyde was told that if he did not agree to a mutualization plan—in which he would turn over the election of the directors to the policyholders—the old management would demand an investigation. Hyde spent a furious night considering it, and the next morning tucked his violets in his lapel, went downtown, and abdicated.

But by now this was not enough; the

papers wanted Hyde out altogether, and his allies, thoroughly demoralized, put up only a feeble defense: one loyalist claimed, with desperate cheer, that Hyde had done nothing a successful champagne merchant wouldn’t. The welter of charges and countercharges about Hyde’s management of Equitable brought on an investigation of the whole industry. With scalding vigor, young Charles Evans Hughes dissected the workings of the companies—the interlocking directorates, the inflated salaries (Hyde himself drew $127,000 annually), the nepotism, the fictitious loans. The next year new government regulations overhauled the entire business.

Hyde wasn’t around to see it happen. On December 28 he sailed for Paris, where he lived until the Nazi army overran it. He married a Frenchwoman, and was so fast a friend to his adopted country that he not only was awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor but also had a dessert named for him by Durand’s restaurant: “Poached peach à la James Hazen Hyde.”

Perhaps his love of the ancien régime had worn a little thin in his last days: before his death in the centennial year of Equitable’s founding, he had taken to describing himself as a “capitalist.” It was a title the young king of the insurance industry might have kept honestly throughout his life, had he paid more attention to the career of Louis XVI and less to that of his royal predecessor.