The Scandalous Chrysler Family: The Gay Heir, The Nazi King, and Fake Picassos

If you heard the stories those skyscraper walls could tell.

On the afternoon of October 23, 1929, a small crew of riggers gathered inside the unfinished crown of a steel tower at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue and began assembling, in secret, a 185-foot ornament they’d been fabricating in pieces inside the building’s fire shaft for weeks.

The architect, William Van Alen, had told almost no one. The competing tower at 40 Wall Street was, at that moment, claiming the title of the world’s tallest building.

Van Alen waited until 40 Wall topped out, watched it claim the record in the morning papers, and then, in 90 minutes that afternoon, hoisted the secret spire through the roof of “The Chrysler Building”. When the riveters finished, the structure stood at 1,046 feet, the tallest man-made structure on earth.

Six days later, the New York Stock Exchange collapsed.

Family patriarch Walter Percy Chrysler, the man who’d paid for the tower out of his own pocket expressly so it could be inherited by his children rather than absorbed into a corporation, watched his country fall into the Great Depression with the world’s tallest skyscraper standing in his name.

Indeed, he’d built the iconic structure to outlive every one of his offspring. He believed it would, with the irrepressible confidence of a man who’d never had to test it.

Four children would eventually inherit that belief along with the building.

One of them became consistently ranked as one of the world’s best dressed women. One of them stands accused, in a book published decades later, of a homosexual affair with the alleged Nazi sympathizing King of England. And one of them looked Picasso in the eye, held up paintings the artist himself had personally rejected as fake, and refused to back down.

None of that had happened yet on October 23, 1929. The spire was up. The country was about to come apart. And so, eventually, was the family that built it.