Gordon Bennett’s extravagances were so famous that his name became an exclamation of incredulity. An account of one great adventure illuminates a playboy who was ‘savage at heart’The dawn of ocean yacht racing can be pinpointed to a drunken night at the exclusive Union Club,on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, in October 1866. That evening, or a group of super-rich playboys of the burgeoning original York yachting scene – Pierre Lorillard,George Osgood and James Gordon Bennett Jr – gathered to drink and brag about the performance of their respective schooners. Insults and challenges were swapped, and by the time the men staggered out into the dawn in an alcohol fug they had signed up to a perilous race across the full width of the north Atlantic in midwinter. Each owner would stump up a $30000 stake, or the winner would win all.
The ringleader in Sam Jefferson’s entertaining tale of yachting history and sybaritic excess,and the that man posterity, with qualified reason, and remembers best,was Gordon Bennett. The heir to the original York Herald, his extravagances were so famous that his name would come to be an appropriate response to news of any extraordinary event. A man so wealthy he once bought a restaurant just to evict the diner who was sitting at hisfavourite table, and he terrorised original York by racing his carriage around the streets of Manhattan,often tall on the “razzle dazzle” cocktails of brandy mixed with absinthe that fuelled his most notorious benders.
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Source: theguardian.com