CONSUELO

& ALVA

VANDERBILT

The Story of a Mother and Daughter in the Gilded Age

Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

To my daughters, Daisy and Marianna

Contents

Cover

Title page

PREFACE

Prologue

PART ONE

1: The family of the bride

2: Birth of an heiress

3: Sunlight by proxy

4: The wedding

PART TWO

5: Becoming a duchess

6: Success

7: Difficulties

PART THREE

8: Philanthropy, politics and power

9: Old tricks

10: Love, philanthropy and suffrage

PART FOUR

11: A story re-told

12: French lives

13: Harvest on home ground

Afterword

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PRAISE

Copyright

About the publisher

Select Family Tree of the Spencer-Churchills mentioned in the text

Select Family Tree of the Vanderbilts mentioned in the text

PREFACE

This book began with a story. Some time ago, I took my eighteen-year-old daughter and a young Australian friend to visit Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, in order that the young Australian could have a glimpse of English ‘heritage’ before she went home. The guides at Blenheim Palace are free to talk about its history as they please, but there is one tale which engages visitors powerfully – the story of Consuelo Vanderbilt, an American heiress said to have been compelled by her socially ambitious mother to marry the 9th Duke of Marlborough in 1895, bringing a generous Vanderbilt dowry to an English palace sorely in need. Anyone wandering through the state rooms of Blenheim soon encounters two very different portraits of Consuelo. The first, by Carolus-Duran, was painted when she was seventeen against a classical English landscape and suggests an enigmatic but dynamic young woman, as yet little more than a girl. The second portrait, far more uneasy and much more famous, was painted eleven years later by John Singer Sargent. Here, Consuelo and the 9th Duke have been placed in their historical context beneath a bust of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, but at a distance from each other. Each inhabits a markedly private space linked only by their eldest son. Neither looks happy; but while the Duke gazes steadily outwards, Sargent has painted Consuelo glancing anxiously to one side with a striking air of melancholy.

It soon became apparent that our guide had little time for the 9th Duke. ‘This is Sunny,’ she said, gesturing at the Sargent portrait. ‘Sunny by name but most certainly not Sunny by nature.’ She glared severely at my daughter. ‘Consuelo was your age when she came to Blenheim. You’re probably still at school. But she got out in the end. Thank Heavens.’

Afterwards, the young Australian professed to be enthralled by English heritage, so we moved on to the nearby church of St Martin in Bladon, where Winston Churchill is buried in the churchyard with other members of the Spencer-Churchill family. Since his death, relatives buried alongside him have thoughtfully been redefined so that visitors can understand the relationship with Churchill at a glance. In one grave in the corner of the plot, however, an inscription reads: ‘Consuelo Vanderbilt wife of the ninth Duke.’ On the other side, her headstone is inscribed: ‘In loving memory of Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan – mother of the tenth Duke of Marlborough – born 2nd March 1877 – died 6th December 1964.’

This was startling. Consuelo had clearly remarried. So why had she come back? Surely no-one had compelled her to burial in a Bladon churchyard, even if she had been forced to Blenheim Palace in life? This puzzle was soon replaced by another. Limited research revealed that there were writers who rejected the allegation that Consuelo had been forced to marry the Duke and there were those, even in her lifetime, who asserted the story was a flat lie. This was followed by a further conundrum. It emerged that Consuelo’s mother, Alva, villainess-in-chief, eventually became a leader in the fight for women’s suffrage in America. How could anyone square even rudimentary feminism with ordering her daughter to marry a duke? One writer suggested she might have undergone a conversion to suffragism as an act of penance, but even on superficial acquaintance, Alva Belmont (as she later became) did not seem the penitential type.

It soon became clear that an account of what had happened and why would have to explore Alva’s life as well as Consuelo’s but there were further complications. The story of Consuelo’s first marriage had inspired others, notably Edith Wharton’s last (unfinished) novel, The Buccaneers. There were obstacles in the way of non-fiction, however. Consuelo and Alva left few private papers, and surviving sources were far from impartial. Both made attempts at autobiography. Consuelo’s memoir The Glitter and the Gold was published in 1952. Alva started her memoirs twice, once in 1917 and again after 1928, but neither version was completed. At the same time, the lives of both women were frequently the subject of comment in the press. Alva in particular encouraged this and intermittently attempted to influence and re-edit press narratives, including those relating to Consuelo. Mother and daughter spent a considerable part of their later lives thousands of miles apart, separated by the Atlantic, and both eventually preferred to be defined by events and activities beyond Consuelo’s life as Duchess of Marlborough. In spite of these difficulties, however, their lives prove more illuminating side-by-side than taken singly. They continued to influence each other; their interests and tastes eventually converged; and they found themselves defined and bound together for ever by the story of Consuelo’s first marriage.

Prologue

IN NOVEMBER 1895, shortly before the New York wedding of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the 9th Duke of Marlborough, her cousin Gertrude raged at her journal about the unhappy lot of heiresses. ‘You don’t know what the position of an heiress is! You can’t imagine,’ she wrote, nib scratching paper with anger. ‘There is no one in all the world who loves her for herself. No one. She cannot do this, that and the other simply because she is known by sight and will be talked about … the world points at her and says “watch what she does, who she likes, who she sees, remember she is an heiress,” and those who seem to forget this fact are those who really remember it most vividly.’¹

Had she been in a position to read her cousin’s journal, Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt would have agreed, for the world she knew was certainly watching and pointing. In the days leading up to 6 November 1895, preparations for her wedding dominated the front pages of New York’s popular newspapers, relegating to second, third and fourth place the advancing popularity of bloomers as cycling dress, New York State elections and a war of independence in Cuba. One newspaper, the New York World, led the field in examining the bride-to-be, providing its readers with a helpful list of her most important characteristics:

Age: Eighteen years Chin: Pointed, indicating vivacity Color of hair: Black Color of eyes: Dark brown Eyebrows: Delicately arched Nose: Rather slightly retroussé Weight: One hundred and sixteen and one half pounds Foot: Slender, with arched instep Size of shoe: Number three. AA last Length of foot: Eight and one half inches Length of hand: Six inches Waist measure: Twenty inches Marriage settlement: $10,000,000 Ultimate fortune: $25,000,000 (estimated).²

As wedding preparations entered the final phase, a few enterprising passers-by near St Thomas Episcopalian Church on Fifth Avenue managed to peep in at the construction of the most spectacular wedding floral display ever assembled in a New York church: great flambeaux of pink and white roses on feathery palms at the end of pews; vaulting arches of asparagus fern, palm foliage and chrysanthemums; orchids suspended from the gallery; vines wound round the organ columns; floral gates constructed from small pink posies; and sweeping strands of lilies, ivy and holly swaggering from dome to floor, feats of festooning over 95-feet long. There was no shortage of other detail available for those with insufficient initiative – or interest – to seek it out for themselves. The press even provided lingering descriptions of the bridal underwear: ‘It is delightful to know that the clasps of Miss Vanderbilt’s stocking supporters are of gold, and that her corset-covers and chemises are embroidered with rosebuds in relief,’ said the society magazine Town Topics. ‘If the present methods of reporting the movements and details of the life and clothes of these young people are pursued until the day of the wedding, I look for some revelations that would startle even a Parisian café lounger.’³

On the morning of 6 November, it was soon apparent that uninhibited staring was the order of the day. The wedding was at noon. At 72nd Street and Madison, where the bride was dressing at her mother’s house, the crowds started to gather before 9 a.m. and soon lined the entire route to St Thomas Church, twenty blocks away at 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue. At 72nd Street no-one was allowed within a hundred and fifty feet of Alva Vanderbilt’s new home, but all kinds of tactics were deployed by certain individuals determined to subvert the rules. By 10.30 a.m. the crowd had grown to around two thousand people, and windows in every house in the neighbourhood were crammed with spectators enjoying small private parties of their own. Curiosity was not confined to the common herd. Gertrude Vanderbilt’s outburst at the manner in which heiresses were watched was more than vindicated for lorgnettes were much in evidence and The New York Times noted that halfway down the block towards Park Avenue, women could be seen standing in bay windows peering out through opera glasses for glimpses of the bridal party.⁴

As the morning wore on, crowd control outside St Thomas Church became increasingly difficult. Reporters fell back on military metaphor. Acting Inspector Cartwright was in overall command of forces; Captain Strauss was deployed with his platoon at the home of the bride; further detachments were stationed by the church preventing incursions on the left flank; and all faced a difficult and unpredictable enemy. ‘Picture to yourself a space 15-feet wide and 100-feet long,’ said the New York World, ‘tightly packed with young women, old women, pretty women, ugly women, fat women, thin women – all struggling and pushing and squeezing to break through police lines. Then imagine all those women quarrelling one with another, then struggling and pushing and squeezing and begging, imploring, threatening and coaxing the police to let them pass.’⁵

The most pressing problem for Inspector Cartwright was that some of the women came from good homes which put him in an invidious position and obliged him to give orders that clubs should not be used. ‘Had you seen those policemen pressed to desperation turn and push that throng back inch by inch, half crushing an arm here, poking a waist or a neck there, collecting three women in an armful and hurling them back, the crowd would have reminded you of nothing so much as an obstreperous herd of cattle,’ said one reporter.⁶

There were compelling reasons for such intense curiosity. In an age of international marriages, of trade between American money and European titles, this was the grandest. The New York World went straight to the point: ‘Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt is one of the greatest heiresses in America. The Duke of Marlborough is probably the most eligible peer in Great Britain … From the standpoint of Fifth Avenue it will be the most desirable alliance ever made by an American heiress up to date.’⁷ The engagement was presented by others as an all-American tale that held out hope for everyone, even the poorest. ‘The world is actively engaged in making its fortune,’ said Frank Lewis Ford in an article in Munsey’s Magazine. ‘Though sometimes it calls the task by another name and says that it is earning its living, acquiring a competency, building up a business, or what not. And there stand the Vanderbilts, with living earned, competency acquired, business built up, fortune made.’⁸

But to those in the know – and there were many people in the know thanks to the nature of the press in late-nineteenth-century New York – this was all too simple. The newspapers buzzed with rumours. Was it true that this wedding would break the heart of at least one eligible American bachelor? Was the English Duke simply marrying the eighteen-year-old bride for her money? And where were the Vanderbilts? Was it really possible that none of them had been invited? In America in the 1890s the lives of the very rich provided community entertainment supplanted later by cinema and television. This wedding alone was a soap opera with enough story lines to satisfy the most avid audience, laced with the faint but thrilling possibility of further drama at the church door. Might the eligible bachelor appear? Would rogue Vanderbilts attempt to force an entry? Could there be a misguided attempt to kidnap Consuelo to prevent her from marrying a blackguard, and stop her fortune from leaving the country? It was certainly worth waiting around to find out.

The wedding guests seemed just as determined to make the most of the occasion as the crowd. Some of them arrived as early as 10 a.m., a full two hours before the ceremony was due to start. This presented the embattled Inspector Cartwright with another headache because those in the crowd who had arrived early to obtain a good vantage point now refused to make way for the wedding guests, and had to be forced back inch by inch across the street. The guests, meanwhile, were required to dismount from their carriages and make their way to the church on foot. Here there were further difficulties, for the doors of the church were still tightly closed, creating a genteel but tense scrum as the ton barged each other out of the way. When St Thomas Church finally opened its doors, the gentlemen ushers, selected by Alva for their experience in seating guests at weddings, had to call for police reinforcements. The guests rushed past the sexton, whose task it was to match invitations to faces and expel interlopers. They ignored the efforts of the ushers to place them according to Mrs Vanderbilt’s list. Some of them (women again) climbed over the floral decorations, deposited themselves in the central aisle reserved for the guests of honour and were only removed to less prestigious seating by the gentlemen ushers with the utmost difficulty. Others stood on their pews to peer at fellow guests over the foliage – the floral display was widely held to be a great success but it undeniably obscured the sight lines.

Inside the church, official entertainment began with an organ recital from Dr George Warren, as sixty members of Walter Damrosch’s Symphony Orchestra moved into their desks. From 11 a.m., the orchestra played through a musical equivalent of the floral display in a programme at which even commercial classical radio stations might now baulk: the Prize Song from Wagner’s Die Meistersingers; the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin; Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3; Tchaikovsky’s Andante Cantabile String Quartet; the Grand March from Wagner’s Tannhauser; Fugue in G Minor by Bach; and the Overture to A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream by Mendelssohn, all in the space of fifty-five minutes. Fifty members of the choir took their seats in the choir stalls, together with four distinguished New York soloists, and the guests of honour began to appear.

Mrs Astor arrived first with Mr and Mrs John Jacob. She was escorted to her seat by Reginald Ronald and looked particularly splendid in a costume of grey completed by a velvet coat and a black toque with white satin rosettes. Mrs William Jay, close friend of Mrs Vanderbilt, followed closely behind with Colonel Jay, wearing one of the most ‘effective’ costumes of the wedding – a heavy black silk skirt, cut very full and with a bodice of yellow and crimson satin. A peal of church bells announced the arrival of the mother-of-the-bride, Alva Vanderbilt, with the bridesmaids. Miss Duer, Miss Morton, Miss Winthrop, Miss Burden, Miss Jay, Miss Goelet and Miss Bronson were ‘all exceedingly pretty young women’ gushed the reporter in charge of bridesmaids for The New York Times.⁹ They wore gowns of ivory satin, with magnificent broad-brimmed velvet hats, topped with ostrich feathers, and around-the-throat bands of blue velvet with over-strings of pearls. All heads swivelled as Mrs Vanderbilt came up the aisle, accompanied by the bride’s brothers, Willie K. Jr and Harold. She was wearing a gown of pale blue satin edged with sable, a hat of lace and silver with a pale blue aigrette, and had ‘a decided look of satisfaction on her face’.¹⁰

Alva Vanderbilt’s smug expression was not to last. Her arrival signalled the imminent appearance of the bride, escorted by her father, William K. Vanderbilt. A row of fashionable bishops appeared from the vestry room and took their places in the chancel. The Duke of Marlborough, who had slipped into St Thomas Church unnoticed with his best man, Ivor Guest, took up his position and waited, incidentally giving the wedding guests a good opportunity to stare at him instead. One of them told a newspaper that ‘some of the guests partially rose in their seats to have a better view of the Lord of Blenheim. Some were asking where his relatives were and others answered that they were represented by the British Embassy.’¹¹ This was true – the groom’s side was represented by the British ambassador, supported by two gentlemen from the embassy in Washington, Bax Ironsides and Lord Westmeath.

Along the New York streets and in St Thomas Church they waited. The ushers sauntered up to their stations, three on one side of the central aisle and three on the other – then sauntered back to the church porch again. Mr Damrosch, who had completed his concert programme, beat time with his baton in silence, his head turned round towards the church door. The Duke of Marlborough began to fidget nervously, and only regained some of his composure when he noted the English sang-froid of his best man. As the delay lengthened, the guests shuffled and whispered. Alva was observed looking uncharacteristically worried. And then decidedly strained. Five minutes passed … then ten … then twenty … and still the bride had not appeared.

PART ONE

1 The family of the bride

AS THE DELAY LENGTHENED and nervousness grew, self-appointed society experts in the crowd had time to debate one important question: had anyone seen the Vanderbilt family, whose apotheosis this was alleged to be? There could be no dispute that Vanderbilt gold was a powerful chemical element at work in St Thomas Church on 6 November 1895. It had given the bride her singular aura; it had drawn a duke from England; and without it, Alva would not now be waiting anxiously for her daughter to arrive. Scintillae of Vanderbilt gold dust brushed everything on the morning of Consuelo’s wedding, from the fronds of asparagus fern to the glinting lorgnettes in the crowd outside. It was remarkable, therefore, that apart from the father-of-the-bride, its chief purveyors should be so conspicuously absent; and even more striking that this scarcely mattered because of the force of character of the bride’s Vanderbilt great-grandfather, whose ancestral shade still hovered over the players in the morning’s drama as if he were alive.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of the House of Vanderbilt, lingered in the collective memory partly because he laid down the basis of the family’s extraordinary wealth; and partly because of the robust manner in which he did it. He died in 1877, a few weeks before Consuelo was born, but he left a complex legacy and no examination of the lives of Alva and Consuelo is complete without first exploring it.

Fable attached itself to Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as ‘Commodore’ Vanderbilt, Head of the House of Vanderbilt, even in his lifetime. He generally did little to discourage this, but one misconception that irritated him was that the Vanderbilts were a ‘new’ family and he embarked on genealogical research to prove his point. However, he held matters up for several years by placing an advertisement in a Dutch newspaper in 1868 which read: ‘Where and who are the Dutch relations of the Vanderbilts?’, causing such offence that none of the Dutch relations could bring themselves to reply.¹

More tactful experts later traced the Vanderbilts’ roots back to one Jan Aertson from the Bild in Holland who arrived in America around 1650. A lowly member of the social hierarchy exported by the Dutch West India Company, Jan Aertson Van Der Bilt worked as an indentured servant to pay for his passage and then acquired a bowerie or small farm in Flatbush, Long Island. His descendants traded land from Algonquin Indians on Staten Island, starting a long association between the Vanderbilts and the Staten Island community of New Dorp. They also joined the Protestant Moravian sect, whose members fled from persecution in Europe in the early-eighteenth century and settled nearby. The Vanderbilt family mausoleum is to be found at the peaceful and beautiful Moravian cemetery at New Dorp on Staten Island to this day.²

In a development that goes against the grain of immigration success stories, the Vanderbilt family arrived in America early enough to suffer a downturn in its fortunes in the mid-eighteenth century. Just at the point when the Staten Island farm became prosperous, it was repeatedly sub-divided by inheritance and by the time the Commodore was born in 1794, his father was scratching a subsistence living on a small plot, and ferrying vegetables to market on a periauger, a flat-bottomed sailing boat evolved from the Dutch canal scow. Historians of the family portray this Vanderbilt of pre-history as feckless and inclined to impractical schemes, but he compensated for his deficiencies by marrying a strong-minded, hard-working, frugal wife of English descent, Phebe Hands. Her family had also been ruined, by a disastrous investment in Continental bonds. They had nine children. The Commodore was their eldest son.

Circumstances thus conspired to provide the Commodore with what are now known to be many of the most common characteristics in the background of a great entrepreneur: a weak father and a ‘frontier mother’; a marked dislike of formal education (he hated school and spelt ‘according to common sense’); and a humble background.³ A humble background is almost mandatory in nineteenth-century American myth-making about the virtuous self-made man, but it was a characteristic the Commodore genuinely shared with others such as John Jacob Astor, Alexander T. Stewart and Jay Gould. After his death the Commodore was accused of being phrenologically challenged with a ‘bump of acquisitiveness’ in a ‘chronic state of inflammation all the time’, but he was not alone in finding that childhood poverty and near illiteracy ignited a very fierce flame.⁴ More unusually for a great entrepreneur, the Commodore was neither small nor puny. He developed enormous physical strength, accompanied by strong-boned good looks, a notorious set of flying fists and a streak of rabid competitiveness. Charismatic vigour, combined with a lurking potential for violence, made him a force to be reckoned with from an early age and even as a youth he developed a reputation for epic profanity and colourful aggression that never left him.

The Vanderbilt fortune was made in transportation. Its origins lay in the first regular Staten Island ferry service to Manhattan, started by the Commodore in a periauger, under sail, while he was still in his teens. From there his career reads like a successful case study in a textbook for business students. He ploughed back the profits from his first periauger ferry service until he owned a fleet. He expanded into other waters and bought coasting schooners. Then, when others had taken the risk out of steamship technology, he sold his sailing ships and embraced the age of steam, founding the Dispatch Line and acquiring the nickname ‘Commodore’ as he built it up.

The Dispatch Line ran safer and faster steamships than any of its competitors to Albany up the Hudson, and along the New England coast as far as Boston up Long Island Sound disembarking at Norwalk, New Haven, Connecticut and Providence. Between 1829 and 1835, the Commodore moved easily into the role of capitalist entrepreneur, profiting from the impulse to move and explore as waves of immigrants fanned out and built a new country. By 1845 he began to appear on ‘rich lists.’ The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City, compiled by Moses Yale Beach that year estimated his fortune at $1.2 million and added ‘of an old Dutch root, Cornelius has evinced more energy and go-aheaditiveness in building and driving steamboats and other projects than ever one single Dutchman possessed’⁵. The size of the Commodore’s fortune is particularly remarkable when one considers that the word ‘millionaire’ was only coined by journalists in 1843 to describe the estate left by the first of them, the tobacconist Peter Lorillard. In 1845, the millionaire phenomenon was still so rare that the word was printed in italics and pronounced with rolling ‘rs’ in a flamboyant French accent.⁶

It was only in the last quarter of his life, between the mid-1860s and his death in 1877, that the Commodore moved into railroads – the industry with which the Vanderbilts are usually associated (this came after an adventure in Nicaragua where he forced a steamship up the Greytown River to open a trans-American Gold Rush passage in 1850, fomented a civil war and took his bank account to $11 million by 1853). It took much to convince the Commodore that railroads were the future: 30,000 miles of railroad track had to be laid by others before he accepted that the argument was won. Once convinced, he divested himself of his steamships and began buying up railroads converging on New York in a spectacular series of stock manipulations or ‘corners’ at which he proved extremely inventive and adept.⁷

The Commodore’s accounting methods may have been pre-industrial – he kept his accounts either in an old cigar box or in his head – but the enterprise he created made him a pioneer of industrial capitalism. He was also a master of timing. The American Civil War (1861–65) confirmed the absolute dominance of the railways at the heart of the growing US economy. On 20 May 1869, he secured the right to consolidate all his railroads into the New York Central, and recapitalised the stock at almost twice its previous market value. He was much abused for inventing the practice of issuing extra stock capitalised against future earnings, or ‘watering’ as it was known, but the practice has since become not only standard practice but a key instrument of modern finance.⁸

The first version of Grand Central Terminal in New York, which opened in 1871, had serious design flaws, rather like the Commodore himself. Blithely ignoring the impact on the local community, trains ran down the middle of neighbouring streets and passengers wishing to change lines had to dodge moving locomotives and dive across the tracks in all weather conditions (in old age it amused the Commodore to play ‘chicken’ in front of oncoming trains). But this was the first American railroad terminal and it encapsulated an extraordinary achievement. ‘A powerful image in American letters,’ writes the historian Kurt Schlichting, ‘depicts a youth moving from a rural farm or small town to the big city, seeking fame or fortune … As the train arrives, the protagonist confronts the energy and chaos of the new urban society … Great railroad terminals like Grand Central provided the stage for this unfolding drama, as a rural, agrarian society urbanized.’⁹ In constructing the first version of the Grand Central Terminal (his statue still stands outside the 1913 version), the Commodore constructed a metaphor for both his own life and the industrialisation of America.

That, at any rate, was the business history, the journey from ferryman to railroad king which his first biographer, William Croffut, believed should be held up as an inspiring example to the young. This is not the whole truth, however. He may have been a great entrepreneur, but the Commodore had some disconcerting domestic habits. He is alleged to have consigned his wife, Sophia, and his epileptic son, Cornelius Jeremiah, to a lunatic asylum when they stood up to him; he was rumoured to be a womaniser, especially with the notorious Claflin sisters who were eventually prosecuted for obscenity (though not with him); and he dabbled in spiritualism for advance news from the spirit world on stock prices. There were many who objected to his meanness, for his habit of Dutch frugality was steadfastly extended to anything approaching a philanthropic gesture until very close to his death. ‘Go and surprise the whole country by doing something right,’ wrote Mark Twain in despair in 1869.¹⁰ New York society preferred to keep him at a distance too. There was, it was felt, altogether too much of the farmyard about him. He was even rumoured to have spat out tobacco plugs on Mrs Van Rensselaer’s carpet.

Alva later wrote that the Commodore was a charming old man. She came to know him in the last three years of his life, understood that he was a visionary and refused to be cowed by him which he always liked.¹¹ He was certainly forthright, as a love letter he penned to the young woman who would become his second wife demonstrated: ‘I hope you will continue to improve for all time,’ he wrote after she had been ill. ‘Until you turn the scale when 125 pounds is on the opposite balance. This is weight enough for your beautiful figure.’¹² It may be untrue that the Commodore spat out tobacco plugs, but he was not the only industrial tycoon unwilling to tone down a forceful style for genteel drawing rooms. Occasionally he was gripped by the urge to show off to snootier members of New York society but even this lacked conviction. In 1853 he commissioned the largest ocean-going yacht the world had ever seen, the North Star, and took his first wife and family to Europe. But though they were greeted by grand dukes, sculpted by Hiram Powers and painted by Joel Tanner Hart, he sold the yacht to the United Mail when he went home, never repeated the experiment and returned to what he enjoyed most, which was making money and doing down his competitors.

Unsurprisingly, the Commodore’s wealth inspired great jealousy as well as admiration. Some of the stories about his coarse behaviour came from his aforementioned competitors, and from embittered members of his own family contesting his will; he may also have played up to his image as a farmyard peasant when it suited him. Whatever the explanation, Frank Crowinshield could still write in 1941: ‘The most persistent myth concerning the family was that they were all, if not boors exactly, at any rate unused to the social amenities. The myth was so pervasive that one may still hear it from the lips of decrepit New Yorkers who, in discreet whispers, recite the risks their fathers ran in crossing the portals … Such people still speak as though their sires had risked calling upon Attila, or visiting, without benefit of axe or bludgeon, the dread caves of the anthropophagi.’¹³

The force of the Commodore’s personality was so great that it affected society’s perception of his children and grandchildren. For his own part, he left no-one in any doubt that his sons were a disappointment to him, and he was much exercised about the best way to hand on his great fortune until he felt he had solved the problem in the 1870s. There was naturally no question of giving any kind of financial control to his daughters; his favourite son died of malarial fever during the Civil War; and Cornelius Jeremiah, who not only suffered from epilepsy but also an addiction to gambling, was regarded as beyond redemption. This left Consuelo’s grandfather, William Henry Vanderbilt, who was treated with utter contempt well into middle-age, and was habitually addressed as ‘blatherskite’, not to mention ‘beetlehead’. William Henry – or ‘Billy’ as he was known to his family – made matters worse by kowtowing to his father at every turn. Even on the North Star cruise, he responded to the Commodore’s offer of $10,000 if he would give up smoking by refusing the money saying: ‘Your wish is sufficient,’ and flinging his cigar overboard. This tactic was so perfectly calibrated to irritate the Commodore that he slowly lit a cigar of his own and blew smoke in his son’s face.¹⁴

William Henry was a far more careful, painstaking and methodical man than the Commodore, showing little of the latter’s startling entrepreneurial flair – one of many causes of the Commodore’s profound scorn. During his early career at a banking house, William Henry worked himself into a state of nervous collapse, attracting further contumely, and was promptly expelled with his wife Maria Kissam to work a small and difficult farm on Staten Island. (The Kissams were an old and distinguished family, and although Alva Vanderbilt later claimed to have propelled the Vanderbilts into society, this match could certainly have taken them into its outer circles if either party had been interested.)

On Staten Island, Maria Kissam Vanderbilt carried on the family tradition by producing a large family of her own – nine children in all. Three of her sons would later become Consuelo’s famous building uncles: Cornelius II of The Breakers, Newport; Frederick of the Hyde Park mansion, New York; and George, who created the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. The fourth – though not the youngest – was Consuelo’s father, William Kissam Vanderbilt, often known as ‘William K.’

In the family mythology, William Henry, the father of these sons, only finally won respect from the Commodore after many years with one of the double-crossing japes over a deal that nineteenth-century Vanderbilts seem to have enjoyed. It involved the definition of a scow-load of manure. William Henry offered to buy manure for his farm from his father’s stables at $4 a load. The Commodore then saw him pile several loads on to one scow and asked him how many he had bought. ‘How many?,’ William Henry is said to have replied; ‘One, of course! I never put but one load on a scow.’¹⁵ Finally impressed that his son was capable of getting the better of him, the Commodore, who was a shareholder in the near-bankrupt Staten Island Railroad, decided to turn it over to William Henry to see what he could make of it. Within two years the Blatherskite had put the little railroad on a secure financial footing and proved his value in the only vocabulary the Commodore truly understood by turning worthless stocks into $175 a share.¹⁶

The Commodore then moved William Henry and his growing family back from Staten Island to New York, made him vice-president of the newly acquired Harlem and Hudson Railroad, and put him in charge of the daily operation of the lines. Once again, William Henry responded magnificently to the challenge, finding economies and efficiencies wherever he looked, whereupon his father made him vice-president of the New York Central after 1869. The Commodore remained in overall strategic control of the enterprise until the day he died, but increasingly left the day-to-day management to William Henry. In coming to trust his eldest son’s managerial capabilities, the Commodore, always in the vanguard of entrepreneurial capitalism, grasped that the qualities needed to build a fortune were not the same as the qualities needed to maintain it. ‘Any fool can make a fortune,’ the Commodore is said to have told William Henry before he died. ‘It takes a man of brains to hold on to it after it is made.’¹⁷

The difficult relationship that existed for so many years between the Commodore and William Henry would have repercussions for Consuelo: her father, William Kissam Vanderbilt (later one of the world’s richest men) grew up in modest circumstances on Staten Island during the period when his parents were out of favour with the Commodore. Munsey’s Magazine found this reassuring, thankful that the humble circumstances principle would hold good for another generation or two: ‘The decline of ancestral vigour and the dissipation of inherited wealth, which sociologists claim is almost inevitable among the very rich, has doubtless been deferred for a very few generations, among the Vanderbilts, by the sturdy plainness in which William Henry had brought up his sons and daughters,’¹⁸ it said pompously. This may have been true, but it also meant that William K. would spend much of his adult life having as little to do with sturdy plainness as possible, an attitude to life with considerable implications for his own children.

William K. was also raised in a very different atmosphere from his father, who was a kind and mild-mannered man, an affectionate husband and not in the least given to domestic tyranny. A charming painting of the William Henry Vanderbilt family by Seymour Guy in 1873 suggests a large family at ease with itself, and even allowing for polite obituarists and nineteenth-century sentimentality, there appears to have been none of the contemptuous atmosphere that blighted the youth of the Commodore’s children. Maria Kissam came from a cultivated background and both she and her husband saw to it that their children were properly educated. Willie (as he was known) was taught by private tutors and his parents took the unusual step of sending him to Geneva in Switzerland for part of his education. According to architectural historians John Foreman and Robbe Pierce Stimson: ‘Few Americans of the time possessed the means, let alone the inclination, to send their sons abroad to school. Willie became a true sophisticate at an early age. He was fluent in French, and a connoisseur of European culture, art, and manners. The scandal-mongering tabloids of the era loved to portray the Vanderbilts as coarse parvenus. However, the truth in the case of Willie’s generation – and especially in the case of Willie himself – was precisely the opposite.’¹⁹

William K. Vanderbilt grew into an outstandingly good-looking young man who later became famous for his charm, hospitality and agreeable manners. Consuelo adored him. ‘[He] found life a happy adventure …,’ she wrote. ‘His pleasure was to see people happy.’²⁰ The problem for such a gregarious young Vanderbilt was that while his grandfather the Commodore was alive there was little possibility of making an entrée into New York society, or of enjoying a life of leisure. The Commodore’s reputation as a vulgarian put paid to contact with New York’s emerging social elite; and while his grandfather retained an iron grip on the family fortune, it was essential to behave as he wished. ‘What you’ve got isn’t worth anything unless you have got the power,’ was one of the Commodore’s favourite financial saws.²¹ Even in 1875, two years before he died, he continued to strike fear into the heart of his relations. He believed that extravagance was a weakness, a sign that one was not responsible enough to inherit a cent. ‘He’s a bad boy,’ he said of his son Cornelius Jeremiah. ‘Money slips through his fingers like water through a sieve.’²²

In 1868, William K., whom the Commodore liked, had no choice other than to join the family railroad enterprise alongside his brother Cornelius II and start learning the railroad business, some way down the hierarchy of the Hudson River Railroad. For a charming and sociable youth, this cannot always have been easy. For the time being, however, there was little alternative to assenting amiably to the Commodore’s assertion that only ‘“hard and disagreeable work” would keep his grandsons from becoming “spoilt”.’²³

The person who would not only solve William K.’s problem but do much to change society’s perception of the Vanderbilts was Alva, nee Erskine Smith, later Mrs Oliver H. P. Belmont and the mother-of-the-bride. The reasons why she was drawn to this challenge lay deep in her own background, about which there remain many misconceptions. She has variously been described – in even scholarly works – as the daughter of the wealthiest couple in Savannah, and so poor that she helped her father keep a boarding house in New York after the American Civil War.²⁴ Whereas Consuelo, her own daughter, thought that her mother was the daughter of a ruined plantation owner.²⁵ Some of this was Alva’s fault for she often exaggerated to suit her purpose, particularly when it came to issues of status and power. Commodore Vanderbilt’s disdain for New York society was particularly unusual; for many others nineteenth-century America was a time of straightforward struggle for social advantage. Alva was one of them, and she was not alone in claiming aristocratic genealogy to assist her case.

On her father’s side, she maintained that her pedigree stretched back to Scotland, and the Earls of Stirling. She was named Alva after Lord Alva, a Stirling descendant, and she called her youngest son Harold Stirling Vanderbilt to underscore the connection. One of her Stirling forebears emigrated to Virginia, and married a Smith of Virginia. Her father, Murray Forbes Smith, was a descendant of this line. The antecedents of Alva’s mother, Phoebe Desha, were much less hazy. She – rather than Alva – was the daughter of a plantation owner, the distinguished and powerful General Robert Desha of Kentucky, who won his rank in the war of 1812, and was twice elected to the House of Representatives. Her uncle, Joseph Desha, was a governor of Kentucky. Thus far, Alva’s claims to a relationship with America’s southern landed aristocracy appear to have been valid, but in her parents’ generation they became diluted. Murray Forbes Smith had just finished training to be a lawyer in Virginia when he met Phoebe Desha. ‘His entire career, like all women’s but unlike most men’s was upset by this marriage,’²⁶ Alva wrote later, for his powerful father-in-law persuaded him to abandon his fledgling legal practice and move to Mobile, Alabama to look after the family cotton interests. This made Murray Forbes Smith, in effect, a superior cotton sales agent working on behalf of the Kentucky Deshas.

While there may be some confusion about her background there is no doubt at all about the strength of Alva’s personality, which impressed itself on everyone who ever met her. ‘When convinced,’ said one witness ‘Not God nor the devil can frighten her off.’²⁷ ‘When she speaks, prudent men go and get behind something and consider in which direction they can get away best,’²⁸ said another. ‘Her combative nature rejoiced in conquests,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘A born dictator, she dominated events about her as thoroughly as she eventually dominated her husband and her children. If she admitted another point of view she never conceded it.’²⁹ If anything, Consuelo, anxious not to appear over-critical of her mother, always downplayed Alva’s forcefulness. Alva, by contrast, seemed to take great pride in her own strength of character to the point of sounding puzzled by the strange impulse within her and writing in her (unpublished) autobiography: ‘There was a force in me that seemed to compel me to do what I wanted to do regardless of what might happen afterwards … I have known this condition often during my life.’³⁰

Alva explained her dominant personality by saying that she had been born forceful, that she was the seventh child and – according to an old saying – the seventh child was always the strongest and the mainstay of the family. Elsewhere she attributed it to her upbringing, particularly her mother. ‘There is, I believe, no stronger influence on the development of character and personality than our early environment, and childhood memories,’³¹ she wrote. It is difficult to dispute this. Her domineering character was given free rein by her strong-minded mother in childhood, and family circumstances which involved a weakened father in her teenage years conspired to emancipate it entirely.

The Smiths moved to Mobile in boom years for the cotton trade, when Mobile was a great cotton port. In 1858, Hiram Fuller described Mobile as ‘a pleasant cotton city of some thirty thousand inhabitants, where the people live in cotton trade and ride in cotton carriages. They buy cotton, sell cotton, think cotton, eat cotton, and dream cotton. They marry cotton wives, and unto them are born cotton children.’³² Life for the Murray Forbes Smiths was not entirely happy, however. According to one account, Phoebe was determined to show the cotton wives how things were done by grand families such as the Deshas of Kentucky. Sadly, Mobile society was first indifferent and then irritated. Alva omits to mention in any account of her childhood that Phoebe’s attempt to conquer Mobile ended in abject failure, and would not have been pleased by a book which appeared some years later where her mother’s social efforts in Mobile were pilloried. ‘Some people ate Mrs Smith’s suppers; many did not. There was needless and ungracious comment, and one swift writer pasquinaded her social ambitions in a pamphlet for “private” circulation. Then the lady concluded that Mobile was … unripe for conquest,’³³ commented Thomas De Leon in 1909.

Mobile must have been a difficult time for the Smiths in other ways. Alva was born on 17 January 1853, the seventh of nine children, of whom four died in infancy. Of the eight children born to the Smiths in Mobile, three are buried in Magnolia Cemetery – Alice, aged twenty months in 1847, one-year-old Eleanor in 1851, and thirteen-year-old Murray Forbes Smith Jr in 1857.³⁴ In her memoirs (which she wrote after her conversion to the cause which would dominate her later life – women’s suffrage), Alva traced intense feelings of resentment towards men back to the death of this brother, Murray Forbes Jr. He died when she was four, and she grew up being made to feel that as far as her father was concerned, the death of his thirteen-year-old son and namesake was a far greater loss than her baby sisters. ‘He was always kind to us, always generous in his provision and care, but atmospherically he made his daughters feel that the family was best represented in the sons … I didn’t suffer with tearful sadness but with violent resentment.’³⁵

In spite of this, Alva remembered the house in Mobile with deep longing. The Smiths were comfortably off and their house stood at the corner of Conception and Government Streets, one of the grandest and most distinctive houses in Mobile with crenellations round the roof, and a Renaissance suggestion to the porches. Memory of the dream house of early childhood would haunt her all her life, influencing the design of the remarkable houses she created as an adult: ‘Always these houses, real and imaginary, reproduced certain features of the home in which I was born and where my early childhood was spent … It had large rooms, wide halls, high ceilings, with high casement windows opening upon the surrounding gardens … apart from the big house, also, was the bath house. The floor and bath were of marble, and marble steps led down into the bath which was cut out and below the level of the floor.’³⁶ When Alva was six, her parents decided to leave Mobile and go to New York. Quite apart from his wife’s problems with Mobile society, Murray Smith sensed that success as a ‘commission merchant’ would be unsustainable if he stayed. His judgement (correct, as it turned out) was that the rapid spread of railroads would tip the balance from Mobile and the ports of the Gulf of Mexico in favour of New York. It was therefore the onward march of the American railroads that would ultimately bring the Smiths and Vanderbilts together.

The Smiths’ move to New York shortly before the Civil War initially seemed well judged. They avoided the depression in the South that came with the Civil War, and profited from a property boom in Mobile. Several characteristics of nineteenth-century southern life moved with them. Like almost every other well-to-do southern antebellum family, the Murray Smiths had slaves, given to Phoebe by her father in lieu of a marriage settlement. These slaves went with the Smiths to New York. Alva had her particular favourite, Monroe Crawford, whom she adored. ‘The reason Monroe Crawford and I got along without conflict for the most part was because I managed the situation, I wanted my own way and with Monroe I got it. I bossed him. It was a case of absolute control on my part,’³⁷ she told Sara Bard Field, the writer and poet to whom she dictated her first set of memoirs in 1917. Though Alva never said so, this early exposure to a system of human relations based on slavery may explain as much about her as Murray Smith’s lack of interest in his daughters. She never entirely lost the habits of mind of a southern slave owner in relation to those she regarded as her inferiors: more profoundly such total control over another human being at such a young age can only have contributed to Alva’s later obsession with power and control, and her almost phobic fear of losing her grip on it.

There were other aspects of her childhood that set the Smith children apart from middle-class New York. First, they were unusually international in outlook, partly, no doubt, as a result of their southern parents. Prosperous southerners were a familiar sight in London even in the eighteenth century and Phoebe Smith loved travelling. She began taking her children abroad when they were very young. One expedition included a babe in arms, a little dog, two maids, and a southern mocking bird in precarious health in a large cage. They all crossed the Atlantic in a wooden paddle steamer on a voyage which took fourteen days, and travelled to England, France, Germany, Austria and Italy. While it would clearly have been easier to leave her children at home, Phoebe Smith liked to broaden their minds and teach them to observe. This international outlook also extended to fashion. ‘My mother, who loved the beautiful in dress as in all else, preferred the clothes made by European dressmakers, designed as they were by artists of an older civilisation, to those worn in her time by women in the United States. It was her custom, therefore, to order from Paris her own clothes, and later those of her children. Twice a year, from Olympe, a famous house of that day, would come a box containing clothes sufficient for our needs for the next six months.’³⁸ Alva would pass on this feeling for French style and couture to Consuelo, but in childhood she did not appreciate being a fashion pioneer. Parisian outfits were a major provocation to sniggering little New York boys, whom she claims to have pitched into the gutter.

One striking feature of Alva’s account of her nineteenth-century upbringing in New York is the extent to which she presents herself as an aggressive, violent child. It was impossible to find a nurse to manage her. When she wanted to leave the nursery for a room of her own she smashed it up; and she particularly enjoyed thumping boy playmates when displeased. Any boy who teased her soon learnt better. ‘I can almost feel my childish hot blood rise as it did then in rebellion at some such taunting remarks as “You can’t run”; “You can’t climb trees”; “You can’t fight. You are only a girl,”’ she once wrote in a letter to a friend.³⁹ Even at thirteen, passers-by had to pull her apart from a male tormentor in a fight so fierce that Alva boasted it was reported in the local newspaper. No-one has ever succeeded in tracing this report, but it is telling that it was a story Alva liked to recount about herself. ‘I caught him and threw him to the ground. I choked him and banged his head upon the ground. I stomped on him screaming: “I’ll show you what girls can do,”’ she told Sara Bard Field.⁴⁰ It comes as no surprise that Alva had few girl playmates. She greatly preferred playing with the opposite sex, for she found boys’ lives more interesting. ‘I wanted activity and I could not find enough of it in the circumscribed and limited life of a girl. So I played with boys and I met them on their own ground. I asked for no compromise or advantage. I gave blow for blow.’⁴¹

It is perhaps surprising that although she detested the life conventionally lived by nineteenth-century American girls, Alva liked playing with dolls and designing imaginary houses – two activities that she regarded as closely connected. She told Sara Bard Field that she was unable to sleep if her sisters left their dolls sitting up with their clothes on: ‘I loved dolls … I took them very seriously. I put into their china or sawdust bodies all my own feelings. They could be hot or cold. They could be weary, sleepy and hungry. Their treatment had to vary accordingly to these supposed conditions.’⁴² She saw this as a childish manifestation of maternal instinct which she thought men had downgraded. She saw no contradiction between her love of dolls and her rebellion against the constricted life of a girl, claiming: ‘It is because I must have felt then in an inarticulate way and feel now with a passionate conviction that the very fact of her maternity which men have used to lower woman’s status, raises her to superior position. Thus my love for the doll children and my rebellion against the superimposed restrictions of a girl’s life were bound up together’⁴³ – an insight which would have an impact on Consuelo later.

Phoebe Smith was ahead of her time in the amount of freedom she granted her headstrong daughter, allowing Alva to ride out alone all day when they holidayed in Newport. She had no hesitation, however, in whipping Alva when the boundary was finally crossed – when, for example, she took a horse from the stable and rode bareback in the garden (Alva maintained that the pleasure was worth the whipping, and her streak of physical daring was noted by others throughout her life). Alva expressed it to Sara Bard Field thus: ‘My Mother found me the most difficult of all her children to train. The combination of rebellion and daring were difficult for her to meet. And in those days there was no Montissori [sic] methods and books on child psychology by which parents directed their training of children. The rod was the all-sufficient guide and to this my Mother resorted. There is a record in our family of my receiving a whipping every single day one year … but the end I desired was always strong enough to overcome the fear of the whipping … I was an impossible child.’⁴⁴

Moving north before the start of Civil War, the Smiths appear to have made a smooth entrée into New York society. New York’s elite at this period has often been seen in terms of a dichotomy between the old introverted ‘Knickerbockcracy’ – descendants of the original Dutch settlers, the Knickerbockers – on the one hand, and extrovert new money on the other. However, New York society was always more permeable than this suggests, and making one’s mark on society was largely a question of becoming part of the right networks and (unlike the Commodore) demonstrating that one understood society’s rules and wished to opt in. Genteel in values, tone and style, the Smiths fitted quite easily into New York’s socially mobile elite before the Civil War, and there is every reason to suppose that without this unfortunate interruption, they would have soon felt well established. After a brief spell in a house at 209 Fifth Avenue, the family moved to a fine house at 40 Fifth Avenue, built for an affluent merchant in the 1850s by the well-known architect Calvert Vaux. New York City tax assessments of the house bear out Alva’s assertion that the family was well-to-do at the time of the move north, for records put its value at between $25,000 and $39,000, making it one of the more valuable houses in the city.⁴⁵

Nonetheless, some of Alva’s assertions about the social position of the Smiths in New York during this pre-war period are simply wrong – saying much about Phoebe’s own social anxieties since she was probably the source of the errors. Alva maintains, for example, that her mother was on the receiving line for the Prince of Wales at a famous ball held in his honour in New York in 1860. If true, this would have put Phoebe Smith at the pinnacle of society, but the ball took place on 12 October, seven days before Phoebe gave birth to her second daughter, Julia, in Mobile, Alabama.⁴⁶ Phoebe would not have stepped out of doors, let alone travelled to New York. Similarly, Alva suggests that the Smiths’ entrance into New York circles came through the department store owner Alexander T. Stewart, but Stewart had an uneasy relationship with New York’s elite because he was a shopkeeper, and was suspected of vulgarity. The Smiths did not, as she claimed, have a box at the Academy of Music, though they may well have attended performances there; neither did they have a pew at Grace Church (one clear marker of membership of New York’s inner circle), though they belonged to another fashionable Episcopalian church, the Church of the Ascension.

On the other hand, Murray Forbes was elected to the Union Club in New York in 1861. This was a significant social success since one of the most important developments in the emerging exclusivity of New York society was the expansion of gentlemen’s clubs. Like gentlemen’s clubs in London, New York clubs were, to quote the historian Eric Homberger, ‘rooted in an ethos of exclusion’.⁴⁷ The Union Club was the first of the gentlemen’s clubs from which many others emerged as a result of splits and disagreements. Membership was limited to a thousand members and lasted for life unless one chose to resign. By 1887 an observer noted that ‘membership in the Union implies social recognition and the highest respectability’.⁴⁸ Founded purely for social (as opposed to political or sporting) purposes, the Union Club’s early membership tended to favour merchants over ‘gentlemen of leisure’, but even here, Murray Smith was several steps ahead of the Vanderbilts. The Commodore had become a member in 1844, resigned and then rejoined only in 1863. William Henry Vanderbilt would not become a member until 1868, and William K. Vanderbilt was only elected to the club after his marriage to Alva and the death of his grandfather in 1877.

The outbreak of the Civil War, however, brought real difficulties for the Smiths. They were slave owners; Murray Forbes Smith did not believe that slaveholding was wrong, and took the view that emancipation was only possible if it happened gradually. As hostilities began, tension with northern neighbours escalated. One of the first places this manifested itself was in the Union Club itself. According to the club’s historian: ‘feeling rose high against the South in New York … Many Southerners, including Benjamin [the Confederate Secretary of State] and Slidell [the Confederate Commissioner to France] resigned, and more were dropped for non-payment of dues.’⁴⁹ Such clashes were not surprising in view of the fact that the Union Club’s membership also included General Ulysses S. Grant, General William Sherman and General Philip Sheridan, as well as twenty-four Confederate major generals. The abolitionist views of the rector at the Smith’s church, the Church of the Ascension, caused such offence to the southern members of the congregation that they all withdrew. Mounting tension affected the children directly too – this was a time when Jennie Jerome, later Lady Randolph Churchill, remembered pinching little southerners with impunity at dancing class.⁵⁰

The turning point, according to Alva, was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln just after the end of the war on 15 April 1865. The Smiths felt obliged to sign up to the general mood of mourning, putting black bows of bombazine in their windows to avoid attack. By now, Alva recalled, ‘feeling against southerners had risen from unfriendliness and suspicion to active antagonism and enmity,’⁵¹ scarcely surprising considering that the city had lost over 15,000 men to the war and, in a last desperate throw of the dice, Confederates attacked New York itself by setting fire to ten hotels in November 1864.

Bows in the window, it turned out, were not enough to prevent unpleasantness. After the President’s funeral, life became so difficult for the family that Murray Forbes Smith decided they should not remain in New York and sold their fine house on Fifth Avenue to a Mr McCormick of Chicago, inventor of the reaping machine. Social and business networks in New York once plaited closely together were torn apart by wartime antipathies. The cotton trade was disrupted by the war, and so was the transport system from south to north.

From 1866, Murray Forbes Smith based his business activities in Liverpool, the main English port for cotton from the southern states. That summer, when Alva was thirteen, the Smith family briefly took a villa on Bellevue Avenue in the resort of Newport, Rhode Island, where they probably met the Yznaga family for the first time. Mr Yznaga was Cuban and owned a cotton plantation in Louisiana that had been worked by over three hundred slaves before the Civil War. Mrs Ellen Yznaga was of New England stock but was thought ‘fast’ by some. These attributes were enough to disbar them from certain aristocratic New York households after the Civil War. At one point the Yznagas owned a house in New York on 37th Street, but in the post-war years their fortunes fluctuated so dramatically that they ended up living in Orange, New Jersey and the Westminster Hotel in New York. In the summer of 1866, however, they were still in a position to spend the summer in Newport. This was almost certainly the time of Alva’s fight as a thirteen-year-old with a male tormentor, for her opponent was a Yznaga houseguest. She spent much of that summer fearlessly rolling down a hill that ended in a cliff face in the company of Fernando Yznaga, her future brother-in-law; and started a long and important friendship with Consuelo Yznaga, who was about three years her junior, and almost as high-spirited.

Soon after this, and quite possibly speeded on their way by some of Newport’s matrons, Phoebe took her daughters to Paris, rented an apartment on the Champs Elysées and set up home. Although the Smiths kept smaller houses in New York throughout the period, they were based in Paris for much of the time between 1866 and 1869. Like other southern families who appeared in Paris during and after the Civil War, they were able to live well in reduced and uncertain circumstances. Apparently affluent, they were welcomed by the imperial court of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, at a time when the Second Empire was at its most brilliant and glamorous. Precise gradations of wealth and social distinction of New York meant little to society circles in Paris. The Smiths were able to mix on easy terms with French aristocracy, equally untroubled as to how or when the latter had acquired their noble titles, some more recent than others. Lilian Forbes of the Forbes family, who had been a neighbour of the Smiths in New York, married the Duc de Pralin. Prince Achille Murat, distantly related to the Smiths by marriage, called at the house. The Marquis Chasseloup Loubat, who was Napoleon III’s Ministre de la Marine, and married to an American, Louise Pelier, was particularly cordial in his invitations, inviting Phoebe and Alva’s eldest sister, Armide, to select dances, and inviting the children to the Ministere de la Marine to watch processions. In Paris, Phoebe arranged a debut for Armide (who would never marry) and launched her into French society.

The impact on Alva of the move to Paris would have many consequences in the decades to follow: for American architecture, for the Vanderbilts and for Consuelo. Now in her early teens, she fell passionately in love with France, and above all with its history, art and architecture. In New York she had been just as resistant as the Commodore to attempts at formal education (‘I could not learn from impersonal pages. I wanted the contact of mind with mind. I liked the friction of thought it engendered,’⁵² she remembered later.) Now she responded to the clarity, rigour and competitiveness of French schooling which appealed to both ambition and pride; she particularly liked the French approach to learning history which she thought made sense. At one point she even demanded to go to a boarding school run by one Mademoiselle Coulon. She enjoyed this too, though she continued to prove a most difficult girl to handle and only stayed for about a year.

Much of Alva’s French education, therefore, was a freelance affair in the hands of French and German governesses, with trips to places that appealed to Miss Alva Smith. Thanks to the ever-expanding French railway system, there were frequent visits to the great Renaissance chateaux on the Loire, and to Versailles. It is understandable, given her dominant personality and her love of history, that Alva would be drawn to the magnificent architecture of both the French Renaissance and of the Bourbons. It is easy to imagine her walking in awe through the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, or believing that the apartments of Madame de Pompadour really belonged to her, or sketching the Petit Trianon for the umpteenth time – doubtless followed by a breathless governess much relieved to have found a way of passing the time in such an acceptable manner.

At the height of the Second Empire there was much to grip the imagination of such a child: French history was invested with a magical quality of particular intensity. As Alistair Horne writes: ‘The haut monde escaping from the bourgeois virtuousness of Louis-Philippe’s regime had sought consciously to recapture the paradise of Louis XV. In the Forest of Fontainebleau courtesans went hunting with their lovers attired in the plumed hats and lace of the eighteenth century.’⁵³ The retrospective mood was set by Louis-Napoleon himself who loved to appear as a masked Venetian noble (masked balls being a particular feature of the Second Empire’s illusory and fantastic world).

There were times, indeed, when the imperial court reminded observers of an endless Venetian carnival, with every ball outdoing the one before in dazzling display. One of the most extraordinary balls was given in 1866 by the Smiths’ friend, the Ministre de la Marine, where the guests formed tableaux vivants of the four continents and ‘a procession of four crocodiles and ten ravishing Oriental handmaidens covered in jewels’ entered in front a chariot in which one English guest noticed the Princess Korsakow was seated en sauvage. Africa was represented by Mademoiselle de Sevres, ‘mounted on a camel fresh from the deserts of the Jardin des Plantes, and accompanied by attendants in enormous black woolly wigs’; finally came America – ‘a lovely blonde, reclined in a hammock swung between banana trees, each carried by Negroes and escorted by Red Indians and their squaws’.⁵⁴ Three thousand guests came to this ball which cost about 4 million francs. Although there were balls and assemblies a-plenty in New York before the Civil War – indeed they were deeply embedded in the structure of society life – there was certainly nothing that came close to such a ball in terms of fantasy or expense until, that is, Alva threw one herself in 1883.

As a young lady protected from the seamier side of Second Empire life, Alva could see only enchantment in the Paris of Napoleon III. It seemed to embrace a great international vista, a future of scientific wonders as well as a magical past, encapsulated in the Great Exhibition on the Champs de Mars in 1867. The Great Exhibition was an extraordinary, opulent, dreamlike, awe-inspiring spectacle: As dusk fell, the Goncourts exclaimed that ‘the kiosks, the minarets, the domes, the beacons made the darkness retreat into the transparency and indolence of nights of Asia’.⁵⁵ Alva particularly remembered the astonishing exhibits of Thomas Edison, and looking on in wonder from the windows of their apartment on the Champs Elysées at the great reviews held in honour of visiting kings and emperors by Napoleon III. ‘The people seemed to worship their Imperial family,’⁵⁶ she later said wistfully. Alva may have spent her year at Mademoiselle Coulon’s school in 1868–9, while her parents moved back and forth between houses in New York and Paris.⁵⁷ In 1869, however, Murray Smith decided that the whole family must return permanently to the United States. Sixteen-year-old Alva was utterly distraught. ‘I was broken hearted that I must leave France. I was in sympathy with everything there. This musical language had become mine. I loved its culture, art, people, customs. Child that I was, America struck me in contrast to France, as crude and raw.’ France, unlike America, was a ‘finished product’.⁵⁸

The New York to which the Smiths returned in 1869, was a very different city to the one before they left for France in 1866. Capital markets were already centralising in New York by the end of the Civil War in 1865. Commodore Vanderbilt’s consolidation of his railroads in 1869 was a harbinger of things to come. The drive to expand the economy for military purposes had created a national market for the first time and war precipitated an almost limitless demand for goods that only increased with peace. This was the beginning of what Mark Twain termed ‘The Gilded Age’, the period spanning the final third of the nineteenth century that ended when Theodore Roosevelt became President in 1901, determined to control its worst excesses.

Twain’s novel The Gilded Age satirised what he described as ‘the inflamed desire for sudden wealth’,⁵⁹ and came to define the period of about thirty-five years of economic boom centred on New York, characterised by rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and technological invention, harsh social inequity, grandiloquent, competitive opulence and by a relentless drive towards economic monopoly and big business. A new phenomenon, the industrial corporation, emerged quite suddenly, driven forward by intensely competitive individuals with energy as great as the Commodore’s, whose corporate power was unrestrained and who were assisted by corrupt politicians and a regime of virtually non-existent taxation – inheritance tax expired in 1870, income tax was abolished in 1872 and tax on corporate profits did not exist. Labour costs were low, and workers had yet to organise themselves efficiently against exploitation. The potential for vast personal fortunes suddenly became limitless. Those who did well out of the war continued to fare very well after it was over. Wealthy men became richer; others suddenly acquired fortunes overnight.

The fact that Murray Forbes Smith had sold his Fifth Avenue house to new money from Chicago was significant. The newly rich flocked to New York, often accompanied by wives determined to partake of the delights of New York society. Before long, ‘old’ New York felt itself besieged by outsiders, an impression born out by the demographics of the period and a range of expressions for the new arrivals: ‘social climber, men of new money, arriviste, bouncer, (as in the Yiddish Luftmensch, air man, someone who has arrived apparently from nowhere). The parvenus, objects of fierce social mockery, were assumed to be rich, crude, half-educated, and were seen as embodying the raw hunger for social distinction.’⁶⁰

The Smiths had put down a marker in New York society between 1861 and 1865, but after absenting themselves for nearly four years, they came back to the city to find themselves at a remove from its inner circle. Worse, they discovered that there were far more people knocking on high society’s door demanding admission and that the financial cost of re-entry had gone up sharply. In the early 1870s, according to Eric Homberger, ‘New York was literally swirling with cash. Prices rocketed, but even inflated costs seem to have no effect upon the ton … The holdings of the New York banks had risen from $80 million in the early 1860s to $225 million in 1865. When the Open Board of Stock Brokers merged in 1869 with the New York Stock & Exchange Board, forming the New York Stock Exchange, membership increased from 533 to 1,060. There were many more millionaires in the city than there had ever been before.’⁶¹

In his memoir Society As I Have Found It, the southern gentleman Ward McAllister made the same point: ‘New York’s ideas as to values, when fortune was named, leaped boldly up to ten millions, fifty millions, one hundred millions, and the necessities and luxuries followed suit. One was no longer content with a dinner of a dozen or more, to be served by a couple of servants. Fashion demanded that you be received in the hall of the house in which you were to dine, by from five to six servants, who, with the butler, were to serve the repast.’⁶² In an era of conspicuous consumption, this had an immediate impact on modish womenfolk. The newspapers began to notice, for example, that the cost of dressing fashionably was reaching breathtaking new levels. ‘Ladies now sweep along Broadway with dresses which cost hundreds of dollars,’ noted the New York Herald. ‘Their bonnets alone represent a price which a few years since would more than have paid for an entire outfit. Silks, satins and laces have risen in price to an extent which would seem beyond the means of any save millionaires, and yet the sale of these articles is greater than ever.’⁶³

As often seems to happen in periods of intense social mobility, a self-defined social elite emerged quite suddenly, as those who had been there longest, and felt they had the best claim to be top of the pile, pulled up the social ladder. It was the queen of this society resistance movement who swept up the aisle of St Thomas Church as guest of honour at Consuelo’s wedding on 6 November 1895. Mrs Caroline Schermerhorn Backhouse Astor, the Mrs Astor, was born into the Schermerhorns, an old Dutch family who were already entertaining and patronising the arts when the Commodore started the Dispatch Line. A generation older than Alva (there was a twenty-three year difference), Caroline married new money in the form of William Backhouse Astor in 1853. She immediately set about de-vulgarising Mr Astor, whose fortune was derived from furs, pianos and Manhattan slums. She persuaded him to drop the ‘Backhouse’ and ‘Jr’ and moved him north to 350 Fifth Avenue. This house famously had a ballroom into which she could squeeze 400 people, eventually giving rise to the idea that New York’s elite comprised ‘the Four Hundred’.⁶⁴

Caroline Astor was essentially a conservative. Though she was aware that society needed new blood, she felt that New York social life should be conducted much as it had been by her great-grandmother a century earlier. Many in her close circle were descended directly from Dutch settlers. But even the ‘Knickerbockers’ could fall out of favour with Mrs Astor, however, and some simply refused to opt-in. It was Mrs Astor’s considered opinion that New York society would be fatally undermined if vulgar wealth alone was allowed to dictate the social agenda. In her view, it was essential to harness the power of money, tame its owners, and show them how to behave if standards were to be maintained. Unharnessable individuals such as the Commodore, and by extension, his family, were not to be admitted to the Four Hundred. Indeed, Mrs Astor regarded the Vanderbilts as just the sort of people New York should rally round to exclude. At the same time, however, Mrs Astor was not immune to the effect of the new money swirling round New York. She was, after all, married to Mr Astor. The effect of this was that, with very few exceptions, wealth became a sine qua non for anyone wishing to participate in Mrs Astor’s elite circle.

By 1870, when the Smiths had returned to New York, Mrs Astor’s power was reinforced by a symbiotic relationship with Ward McAllister, a southern gentleman of quite remarkable fatuity who self-consciously modelled himself on Beau Nash, arbiter of society elegance in another period of intense social mobility in eighteenth-century England. Confronted by rows of post-war millionaires, this self-styled dandy took it upon himself to tell them quite explicitly how to stop living like vulgarians, acting as spokesman for Mrs Astor – who never pronounced in public (he referred to her as his ‘Mystic Rose’). His advice extended to how to dress, what to eat, how to serve wine, how to provide suitable music, correct etiquette, and forms of address – in short, he provided ‘a code of manners that would act as the constitution of upper-class social life in America’.⁶⁵

For over a decade, from the early 1870s, this odd couple held extraordinary sway. As wealthy New York went through a social convulsion in the years following the Civil War, Ward McAllister and Mrs Astor acquired the power not simply to constrain but to exclude. They did this partly by setting up ‘the Patriarchs’ – a committee of twenty-five New York society gentlemen, whom Ward McAllister persuaded to draw up guest lists for three exclusive subscription balls at Delmonico’s each year – balls that were modelled on those held at Almacks in eighteenth-century London. The Patriarchs’ guest lists in turn defined New York’s social elite. Behind the scenes, Mrs Astor almost certainly had power of veto over the names on Ward McAllister’s committee, and dictated indirectly just who could be asked to the Patriarchs’ balls. From 1872, for about two and half decades, membership of New York’s elite was thus largely determined by Mrs Astor’s family relationships, Mrs Astor’s friendships, and those in the world of business Mrs Astor deemed suitable for membership.

The evolution of society and social life in this highly monopolistic direction created great difficulties not just for the younger Vanderbilts, but also for the Smiths as they returned to New York from France. Their presence in New York did not go back even one generation, and they were not acquainted with Mrs Astor. It was of little use that their main point of contact with rich New York circles was the department store owner A. T. Stewart, since Mrs Astor excluded Mr and Mrs Stewart from her drawing-room, remarking sniffily: ‘I buy my carpets from them, but then is that any reason why I should invite them to walk on them?’⁶⁶ The Smiths could not rely on business connections either, for in spite of the fact that Murray Smith was one of 300 members of the Cotton Exchange in 1871, and remained a member of the Union Club, his southern background put him at a disadvantage after the Civil War and he may have severed many of his old links by conducting much of his business activity outside the US between 1866 and 1869.

Then, just at the moment when the financial bar to participating in the top drawer of New York society was raised to eye-watering levels, Murray Smith’s business started to fail. Whereas Commodore Vanderbilt relished the atmosphere of economic boom in the 1870s and thrived, Murray Smith was defeated. Smith may not have been a particularly effective businessman in the first place; according to Alva, her father was never able to come to terms with the new dog-eat-dog spirit of mercenary capitalism abroad in the land. ‘He could not stoop to the new methods which to him seemed underhand,’ she wrote. ‘Nor was he trained in the arts of clever manipulation by which big deals were put through. His inability to meet these changes resulted in a great change in our circumstances.’⁶⁷

Murray Smith was forced to tell his children that the family must retrench. One outward sign was that the houses they rented went steadily downwards in terms of status from 1869 onwards. As New York’s aristocracy moved north, the Smiths moved south and away from Fifth Avenue, so that by 1870 they were living at 14 West 33rd Street. In 1871, there was another terrible blow. Phoebe Smith, who had many of the characteristics of a frontier mother, would probably have been able to find a way of hacking through the social jungle and steering her daughters towards Mrs Astor. She was unable to withstand a severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis, however, and died at the age of forty-eight. Alva was eighteen and was left grief-stricken and feeling that she had lost the only person in the world who really understood her.

In her biography of Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin observes that families often select one child on whom they pin their hopes; but that sometimes the child who is not preferred in this way elects him or herself as a saviour of the family.⁶⁸ In the Smith family, hopes had been pinned on Murray Jr, the brother who died aged thirteen. Now, with her mother’s death, Alva elected herself to save her family in his place:

I remember as I stood by her coffin and gazed upon the being that had been everything in my life, to whom I had given so much trouble, and who had borne my follies with so much patience, interest and love, I felt I owed her a great debt … But I knew, too, that if she could, she would ask that I should not content myself with grieving for her, that she would wish that grief should become on my part a determination to do as she would have me do if she were still living beside me … And I solemnly vowed to do my best always to carry out the wishes I knew would have been hers.⁶⁹

Although Alva was inclined to self-dramatisation, it seems that she now genuinely felt the need to step into the vacuum left by her mother’s death – a vacuum that can only have expanded when her only surviving brother, Desha Smith, left home at seventeen, probably after a disagreement with his father (he may have never compared well with his dead brother). None of her sisters were doughty fighters like Alva. The eldest, Armide, who might have been expected to take on a maternal role after Phoebe’s death, was a particularly gentle character. In the short term, however, there was little that even Alva could do to rescue the Smiths. Phoebe’s death in 1871 was followed by a year of mourning which took the sisters out of society for many months. A visit to Smith relations in Virginia, as mourning ended, only reinforced Alva’s lack of enthusiasm for proud poverty. Even in 1872, seven years after the end of the Civil War, the countryside was in ruins and some of her Smith relations had lost everything except a faintly obnoxious dignity.

On their return from this visit, the Smiths’ financial position started to deteriorate in earnest. Murray Smith may have lost money in the Panic of 1873 and it has sometimes been suggested that the family was forced to run a boarding house. There is no evidence of this: Alva mentions in her memoirs that her father was in such an anxious state that he claimed they would be reduced to keeping a boarding house, but she makes it clear that this was merely a figure of speech – an indication of the desperation of a man faced with declining income and four uneducated daughters. She cites it simply to explain her own limited room for manoeuvre as the family’s financial situation slid from bad to worse. ‘Through change of circumstances he began not only to make no money but to lose it, so he notified us that we must move from 33rd Street to 44th Street. I could not understand the great worry and grief to my father because it did not seem to affect me. I remember hearing him say when he was very worried “we shall have to keep a boarding house” – at this my sisters would look dismayed but I would shout “If we do keep a b.h., I’ll do the scrubbing”. My father’s anxiety was dreadful but it was perfectly justified by existing circumstances – 4 daughters never educated to do anything.’⁷⁰

By her own account, Alva took the only option open to her. She put herself on the marriage market for two anxious years. Her social circle revolved round a younger group than Mrs Astor’s. Within it, social demarcation as delineated by Mrs Astor was already breaking down. Alva described her set as an exclusive group based on family connections where the parents all knew each other and which was ‘very exclusive and safe on that account’.⁷¹ Some members of this younger set undoubtedly came from families already in the Four Hundred, while others would have been regarded by Mrs Astor as ‘fast’ or ‘new’.

Edith Cooper and the Livingston sisters, for example, were from old New York families. Alva’s Newport friend Consuelo Yznaga, on the other hand, did not meet Mrs Astor’s exacting standards on account of her oscillating Yznaga fortune and flamboyant Cuban background. Minnie Stevens, a friend whom Alva met at Madame Coulon’s school in Paris, was another of the younger set who suffered from the disdain of the Four Hundred. She was the daughter of Mr Paran Stevens, a hotel owner who collected hotels ‘as assiduously as Commodore Vanderbilt collected railways’.⁷² Although she was much more financially secure than either Alva or Consuelo Yznaga it was to Minnie’s disadvantage that Mrs Paran Stevens was rumoured to have been a hotel chambermaid, a charge she most indignantly fought off, eventually becoming a successful hostess in New York in her own right.

For the young blue bloods in the group, this mix was part of its charm. In truth, society as constructed by Mrs Astor was often intensely dull. This younger set was fun precisely because it was far less concerned with keeping out arrivistes. Its members skated on Central Park and danced at ultra-exclusive Delmonico’s too – not at the Family Circle Dancing Class, or even the first Patriarchs’ ball, but at the ‘bouncer’s balls’ which the press took great delight in describing as ‘opposition’ to Mrs Astor and Ward McAllister. The newspapers’ suggestion at the time of wholesale exclusion from the Four Hundred is misleading, however. According to Eric Homberger: ‘When we look at accounts of events labelled “bouncer’s balls”, such as a subscription ball held in New York in 1874, we find it under the management of an impeccable group of young blue bloods led by Charles Post, William Jay, and Peter Marie.’⁷³ William Jay would later marry Alva’s great friend Lucie Oelrichs, another member of the same circle; and on 6 November 1895, Colonel and Mrs William Jay would walk up the aisle as guests of honour, just a little way behind Mrs Astor herself.

Although social demarcation lines were changing, it is possible to overstate the idea of ‘permeability’ too: entry to a circle such as this presented a formidable challenge. It seems likely that as a motherless girl, Alva was helped by the patronage of mothers of her friends who already knew the genteel Smiths well, and that once she was accepted she made sure her social behaviour was impeccably charming. Such mothers would have included both Mrs Yznaga, and Mrs Paran Stevens – who knew the family from the Smiths’ Paris years, when Mr Stevens was a US commissioner to the Great Exhibition in Paris in 1867. Even if these mothers were not ideal patronesses from the point of view of the Four Hundred, the attitude of New York’s social elite towards them was also being forced to change. Mrs Paran Stevens was particularly ambitious and frequently took Minnie to Europe in response to cold-shouldering by Mrs Astor. By 1874, New York knew that Minnie was a success in London society and had met with the approval of the Prince of Wales. Eric Homberger also suggests that Alva’s circle would have interested her fellow southerner Ward McAllister, and that it probably benefited from his informal protection. His reactions often ran ahead of the intensely conservative Mrs Astor. A younger set comprised of old families, genteel southerners and energetic and pleasant newcomers that kept the truly rich at a distance was a development of which McAllister would have approved.⁷⁴

This group also provided the entry point for William K. Vanderbilt into New York society. Its members did not hold the Commodore’s reputation against him, whatever Mrs Astor had to say on the subject. William K. was handsome, charming, amusing, potentially rich, and keen to join in. It helped that he could spend time with these new young friends without attracting the Commodore’s opprobrium, for the ethos of this group was not flashily vulgar. For example, parents put a stop to a custom that suddenly sprang up of young men sending bouquets to girls they admired on the night of a ball, so that favourites would go home loaded down with flowers, while others had nothing at all – on grounds of cost to the young men. William K. was introduced to the circle by Consuelo Yznaga, who also effected his introduction to Alva, bringing him to at least one social event at the Smith house at 14 West 33rd Street in 1873 before financial problems precipitated another downward move to a house at 21 West 44th Street.

In her memoirs, Consuelo wrote that she could not understand why her parents ever came to marry, but Alva Erskine Smith and William K. Vanderbilt had much more in common than either of them were later prepared to admit. They had both been educated in Europe, spoke fluent French and shared a more international outlook than many of their peers. The imbalance in good looks that came later was not so apparent when both were in their twenties. Around the time of her engagement Alva was a highly attractive young woman with a great mane of hair (she lopped it off after catching a rich husband). In those of her personal papers that have survived her drive and wit shines through – alongside other less attractive characteristics. Perhaps Consuelo was never permitted to understand the extent to which the Vanderbilts were anathematised by Mrs Astor and the extent to which William K. felt that he needed Miss Smith. In 1874, Alva appeared to be a young woman whose genteel background and energy would open doors – and for some considerable time it was Willie who was widely perceived to have the better part of the bargain, and was thought, however unfairly, to have been led out into the world by his socially accomplished wife.

Perhaps Consuelo was never allowed to grasp just how close her mother and aunts came to financial ruin when they were in their teens, either. Alva’s experience of genteel poverty thus far had made her almost as ‘inflamed’ on the subject of money as the Commodore. Like him she was acutely aware of its power. Even in 1917, she tried to persuade Sara Bard Field to marry a rich man for the benefit of her children saying: ‘You cannot help your children to advantages through sentimental romance but through money which alone has power.’⁷⁵ For over two years Alva had experienced at first hand the growing powerlessness that poverty brings, the terrifying insecurity of a family sliding ever closer to bankruptcy with nothing in the way of a safety net as it tried to preserve a refined front. She had known what it was to have slaves. She now sensed the enslavement of poverty for herself and its capacity to force her to the margins of her own existence. At best she faced a world of erratic kindness from her friends’ parents, a life of constant gratitude. At worst, she could expect extended and difficult stays with patronising relations, a world of fading watering-holes and drab and grimy boarding houses.

In New York, true poverty was often close by. As the historian H. Wayne Morgan writes, this was a time of extremes, ‘of low wages and huge dividends, of garish display and of poverty, of opulent richness in one row of houses and degrading poverty a block away’.⁷⁶ Somewhere beneath 14th Street, the ‘other half’ lived in a world of slum tenements and sweatshops, but it was not a sealed world. In Manhattan, said another writer, ‘Wealth is everywhere elbowed by poverty.’⁷⁷ Genteel poverty was even closer in the streets near the Smiths; and to Alva, life as a woman on these margins was no life at all. ‘It has seemed to me since that women and girls always play the part of spectators in the theatre of life while men and boys have the vivid action. And except to the serene gods there is nothing attractive in looking on,’⁷⁸ she once said. It was a theme on which she would play many variations throughout her life.

When Alva was twenty-one, her father’s health started to fail as a result of acute financial strain, and possibly because of a drink problem. In the summer of 1874, Alva travelled to White Sulphur Springs in Virginia, a popular resort since the eighteenth century on account of its mineral waters, and a well-known spot for southern belles wishing to secure proposals of marriage. She knew that William K. Vanderbilt was also on his way there and she was under immense pressure. Although Alva may appear as coolly cynical as Edith Wharton’s Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, her anxious manipulations in 1874 seem much closer to those of the orphaned Lily Bart in The House of Mirth – who knew that she had to ‘calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance’ if she were to succeed, and who ‘hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch’.⁷⁹ At twenty-one, it was clear that Alva already felt that her years were against her for she would lie to William K. about her age, telling him that she was a year younger than she actually was – an error which continued to appear in Vanderbilt legal documents long after his death.

Much later, Town Topics would recall the gossips’ story about the way Alva netted her husband at White Sulphur Springs in 1874. According to the whisperers, she had decided that a grand gesture was required so she went to the village store and bought yards and yards of black tarlatan which she and her old nurse turned into a dress in the course of the afternoon: ‘At dusk when everyone was upstairs dressing for dinner, the gay young girl and the old bent black woman took a mountain trail over the hill and half an hour later slipped back into the hotel laden with goldenrod.’ Together, Alva and her nurse stitched tiny Dresden bouquets of yellow goldenrod flowers all over the black tarlatan dress to spectacular effect. ‘The charming brunette, her beauty well framed in the black and gold, made her appearance in the ballroom. She was the sensation of the evening.’⁸⁰ When the group returned to New York in September, Alva Erskine Smith and William Kissam Vanderbilt were formally engaged.

2 Birth of an heiress

IN SPITE OF Murray Smith’s failing health, the family rallied to give its saviour a smart wedding. Some press reports suggest that Murray Smith felt well enough to give his daughter away in marriage, but Alva was adamant in her memoirs that he was too ill to attend, telling Sara Bard Field: ‘When I was all dressed up for the ceremony and about to leave the house he kissed me with great tenderness and told me I was taking a great burden off his mind and that he knew that if anything happened to him I would look after the rest of the family.’¹ This notion that she had rescued the Smiths – and had done as well as any absent son – was important to Alva’s view of herself in later life, allowing her to think of herself as a heroine rather than a gold-digger. In a letter to her lover, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Sara Bard Field remarked that Alva’s ‘terrible marriage to Mr Vanderbilt with its sordid selling of her unloving self but with the truly noble desire to save her Father’ was much like life itself: ‘a pathetic mixture of good and bad’.²

Whatever her reasons for marrying William K. Vanderbilt, Alva went to some lengths to ensure that her wedding on 20 April 1875 was impressively exclusive. It was reported as ‘the grandest wedding witnessed in this city for many years’,³ and even in old age she was anxious to stress that Calvary Church was the most fashionable church in New York and that Dr Washburn who conducted the marriage service was the most fashionable divine. Her bridesmaids included Consuelo Yznaga and Edith Cooper, but Minnie Stevens was too ill to attend and had to be replaced at the last minute by Natica Yznaga. Alva’s wedding dress from Paris failed to arrive in time (or so she said) and another was run up by Madame Donovan of New York using Phoebe’s antique lace flounces. The New York Times remarked that the wedding guests included ‘hundreds’ of the ‘wealth and fashion of the city’,⁴ although most of those it listed were in-laws to the Vanderbilts. Four policemen had to escort the bride through crowds from her carriage. Significantly, Alva was the first bride in New York to issue cards of admission to her wedding guests, a move guaranteed to bring crowds of the excluded flocking to the church door.

The account of her wedding that Alva dictated to her secretary, Mary Young, after 1928 suggests that she grasped early the Faustian bargain emerging between publicity and social success in Gilded Age New York – a development deplored by Henry James a decade later. ‘One sketches one’s age but imperfectly if one doesn’t touch on that particular matter: the invasion, the impudence and shamelessness, of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private. It is the highest expression of the note of “familiarity”, the sinking of manners, in so many ways, which the democratisation of the world brings with it,’⁵ he expostulated in 1887.

In a democratised world with few other navigational aids, visibility was rapidly becoming the key to social success and it was largely in the gift of newspapers (now becoming big businesses in their own right), and later assisted by the invention of photography. Almost everyone with social ambitions had to come to terms with this. Alva and William K. were part of a younger group. They were already much less inhibited about using publicity as a weapon than their elders, though even they would find it difficult to manipulate by the 1890s. ‘Unable to control the press, and unwilling to consider life without heightened visibility, the late nineteenth-century aristocrats were America’s first celebrity-martyrs,’⁶ writes Eric Homberger. If heiresses such as Gertrude Vanderbilt and Consuelo later complained that they hated being watched, they had good reason to blame their parents’ generation for seeking out publicity twenty years earlier.

Two weeks after her wedding in 1875, however, Alva had to attend to sadder matters than publicity, for her father finally died. His daughter’s change in circumstances had come too late to help him. ‘Had he died sooner, the whole course of my life might have been other than it was. But who is there living who cannot say that of some event in his or her life?,’⁷ Alva remarked to Sara Bard Field. After Murray Smith’s death she was shown great kindness by William Henry Vanderbilt who told Alva that he regarded her as a daughter and that she should turn to him for whatever she needed. The affection was mutual for Alva always held him in great regard. This relationship was not the problem however. Even after marriage, Alva continued to experience the effect that the power of money has on the powerless as she watched her in-laws tiptoe round the ageing Commodore. Though she always maintained fiercely that she was not overawed by him, Alva also took great care to avoid giving offence, for no-one knew how his fortune stood, nor what he proposed to do with it after his death.

Fortunately, the Commodore took to his pugnacious new granddaughter-in-law from the outset, perhaps divining qualities which were less apparent in his handsome grandson. When she expressed a fondness for country life, he shocked everyone by giving her the use of his old family home on Staten Island. ‘Much to his surprise, and I believe also his interest and gratification, I took him at his word … I renovated the old house, which had been his home many years before, and went there one July intending to remain perhaps through August.’⁸ The visit was an unqualified disaster and soon ‘between mosquitoes, and chills and fever, I had quite enough of it’. The Commodore remained happily unaware of this. ‘I never told the Commodore, leaving him under the impression that I stayed there longer than was really the case. It pleased him, and that was all that mattered.’ For his part William K. also netted a significant success after becoming engaged to Alva: his name appeared as one of the sponsors of a bouncer’s ball, marking the first appearance of the Vanderbilt name in a social column.⁹

After the wedding in 1875, there was a period of mourning for Alva’s father. Mr and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt concentrated on settling in to their new brownstone house on West 44th Street and avoided taking any action that might unsettle the Head of the House of Vanderbilt. Alva could at least console herself with the knowledge that she had a fashionable home, a secure income, an amiable and handsome husband whose social standing was improving, warm relations with his rich family and excellent expectations. Compared to at least two of her closest friends, her position was enviable. In spite of her success with the Prince of Wales and her reputation as an heiress, Minnie Stevens stayed on the marriage market until 1878 by which time she had suffered considerable public humiliation. After the death of Mr Paran Stevens, his wife and Minnie spent much time in Europe on the look-out for an aristocratic husband. The Duc de Guiche proposed to her but broke off the engagement when the Duc de Gramont had a man go through her affairs who discovered that she was not worth as much as anyone had imagined. Lady Waldegrave, one of Miss Stevens’ sponsors in London society, wrote to Lady Strachey: ‘I must say I think this business very cruel, but at the same time I can’t help thinking she deserved a snubbing as she told me she had £20,000 a year and would have more and she told me that sum in dollars as well, so there is no mistaking the amount.’ Minnie Stevens finally married the titleless Arthur Paget in 1878, at the age of twenty-five (though the story could be said to have one kind of happy ending for he eventually became a baronet, and she became Lady Paget).

Alva’s oldest female friend, Consuelo Yznaga, meanwhile, caused a social sensation the year after the Vanderbilts’ wedding by marrying Viscount Mandeville, heir to the 7th Duke of Manchester. Like Alva, Consuelo Yznaga brought very little money to the marriage, a disadvantage compounded by a growing family reputation for eccentricity, though it must be said that the bar for eccentricity was set low in late-nineteenth-century New York. Consuelo Yznaga’s brother Fernando was later divorced by Alva’s sister Jenny, ‘because he never wore socks’;¹⁰ Consuelo Yznaga herself became famous for whipping out a banjo in London drawing rooms and playing popular songs to the assembled company. Viscount Mandeville’s parents were deeply dismayed by the engagement because of his fiancée’s inadequate dowry, but in the longer term it was their son who proved to be the libertine. In spite of a magnificent wedding in Grace Church attended by 1,400 guests, it was not long before the gossip columns were talking openly of the manner in which the Viscount was putting the Atlantic between a music-hall singer and his wife: and when he died young, in 1892, it was said of his widow that she had spent much of her married life as ‘the pet of the spare bedrooms’.¹¹

Later, Edith Wharton would use Consuelo Yznaga as the model for an unhappy, indebted, adulteress in The Buccaneers. In 1876, however, her transformation into Viscountess Mandeville looked like a pace-setting coup. It may have unsettled Alva and it certainly seems to have implanted an idea. Alva had already turned her attention to starting a family, becoming pregnant in June 1876. The William K. Vanderbilts’ first child, a daughter, was born on 2 March 1877. The baby was immediately named Consuelo after her godmother, the only duchess-in-waiting that either of the Vanderbilts knew.

About the same time as Alva became pregnant with Consuelo, the Commodore was diagnosed with cancer. His strong constitution made death protracted. A miasma of disinformation floated over his deathbed as competitors circulated tales of his demise to undermine the Vanderbilt stocks. He is said to have thrown hot-water bottles at his doctors and yelled imprecations at waiting journalists, though his wife was encouraged that he simply paid off a noisy organ grinder beneath his window rather than threaten to shoot him.¹² The Commodore finally died on 4 January 1877, surrounded by large numbers of his family. It was claimed that he had enjoyed singing hymns on his deathbed, although the Reverend Henry Beecher spoilt the party by adding sourly: ‘I am glad he liked the hymns, but if he had sung them thirty years ago it would have made a great difference.’¹³

The Commodore’s obituary in The New York Times ran to several pages, and the flags in New York flew at half-mast. He was buried in a simple ceremony at the Moravian Cemetery at New Dorp. In one sense, the Commodore’s story had come full circle – the farm boy from Staten Island returning to be buried as a titan of industry. In another sense, however, the arrangements the Commodore made for his fortune demonstrated his absolute determination that the history of the earlier Staten Island Vanderbilts should never be repeated.

When it was published, the Vanderbilt will caused uproar. The Commodore had left an astonishing $100 million*, making him the wealthiest man in America, twice as rich as John Jacob Astor and the department store owner Alexander T. Stewart. Even more surprising, however, was the manner in which he had bequeathed his fortune. Almost $90 million went to William Henry to keep the New York Central Railroad intact, suggesting that when the Commodore had said ‘If you give away the surplus you give away the control,’¹⁴ he meant it. A further $10 million was divided between William Henry’s four sons, with the greater share assigned to two of them already working in the family enterprise – Cornelius II and William K. Even in death, the Commodore had flown in the face of convention. He had, in effect, transferred to the English system of primogeniture from the European principle of equal inheritance, setting up a Vanderbilt dynasty which would descend through William Henry, and, in the words of Louis Auchincloss, consigned the rest of his children and their descendants to life as ‘nonkosher Vanderbilts’. When William Henry heard the news, he is said to have put down his head on the piano and wept.

There were few sounds of weeping from William K. and Alva, however. Their cautious strategy had paid off. William K.’s charm and application on behalf of the family enterprise (and possibly the Commodore’s affection for Alva) netted him $3 million – without the responsibilities laid upon his elder brother Cornelius II. The industrious and conscientious Cornelius received a larger bequest totalling $5.5 million, but this signalled his position as head of the family designate and a clear understanding that he would eventually take charge of the business. Others of whom the Commodore approved also fared well, including William Henry’s younger sons, Fred and George, while his widow had already agreed to $500,000 and the house in Washington Square as her dower settlement. The rest of the family were less than delighted. The Commodore’s eight daughters were left $2.45 million between them, split unevenly and depending, it would seem, on relative degrees of spite towards his second wife. The unfortunate Cornelius Jeremiah was only awarded $200,000 in trust.

Just when William K. and Alva felt financially secure enough to launch themselves at the very pinnacle of New York society, Cornelius Jeremiah and two of his sisters determined to sue. This was a major setback. The will case dragged through the courts for months until March 1879. Allegations flew backwards and forwards of the Commodore’s profanity, his aggression, his association with spiritualists and ‘healing hands’, and his cruelty to his afflicted son. Much to the disappointment of the press, the Claflin sisters did not produce the embarrassing testimony that was anticipated (possibly because William Henry paid them off) but the public was once again reminded of a most unfortunate association. It was alleged that the Commodore suffered from a form of mania when it came to money and his ‘virility’ was adduced to support this. In turn, the defence made much of Cornelius Jeremiah’s drunkenness, gambling and indebtedness. Most of these arguments were rejected by the judge, and the trial was suddenly settled in 1879 when William Henry volunteered to hand over some of his fortune to his sisters. Nonetheless, the feud was never patched up and it is small wonder that in 1878, Mrs Astor still felt compelled to hold the line when it came to admitting Vanderbilts to her famous ballroom.

Although the trial was acutely embarrassing, William K.’s legacy of $3 million was not included in the contested part of the will. He and Alva continued to keep a modest profile as they set about their first important building project, a house on Long Island. If Alva’s imagination had been ignited by French culture as a teenager, the model that entranced William K. was that of the English sporting gentleman with a house in the country. He was not alone. ‘Wealthy Americans learned to drive fancy coaches, play polo, hunt with hounds, breed racehorses and pedigree livestock and took up yachting …,’ writes Eric Homberger. ‘They collected Old Masters, oriental carpets, heirloom silver, and precious jewels. Americans began to describe themselves as “sportsmen”. English taste and style, suggesting refinement, social position, and wealth were professedly aristocratic in the eyes of New Yorkers. They still are.’¹⁵

Soon after the death of the Commodore in 1877, William K. bought 900 acres of land near Islip on Long Island and asked the architect Richard Morris Hunt to build him a sporting retreat. Alva’s vehement determination to control the story of her first marriage has disguised the fact that in their early years of wedlock, William K. was just as set on aristocratisation as his wife. At this stage, indeed, he led the way. The arrival of the railroad to Islip in the 1870s put an abundant supply of game within easy reach of New York; and it helped that Islip was secluded – the more the lives of the social elite were observed by the press, the more important privacy became. More significantly, however, the spot William K. selected for his country house was conveniently close to the first exclusive gentlemen’s club that invited him to become a member, the South Side Club near Islip which he joined the year after his marriage in 1876. The South Side was a sporting club where pedigree and social connections mattered less than whether a chap was a good shot with pleasant sporting manners, making William K. a perfect candidate.¹⁶

The house, which was ready for occupancy in 1879 when Consuelo was two, was designed by Hunt in the fashionable ‘Stick Style’, an all-wood version of the English mock-Tudor method of half-timbering. Unlike the houses of England’s landed aristocracy, however, it was conceived from the outset as a retreat from city life. The name it was given, ‘Idle Hour’, suggested a place of leisure, decided (it was said) on the toss of a coin with Mr Schuyler Parsons on the porch of the South Side Club, who then had to make do with ‘Whileaway’ for his own establishment nearby.¹⁷

Idle Hour cost the Vanderbilts a mere $150,000 out of the $3 million they had inherited. Throughout the 1880s they developed it to a point where the estate was almost entirely self-sufficient. Eventually Idle Hour had amenities of which most English aristocrats, sporting or otherwise, could only dream, including an icehouse, a laundry, a water tower, a house for the superintendent, a house for the palm trees and a teahouse by the bay. Idle Hour played an important role in securing William K.’s membership of other smart clubs. Although he joined the Union Club in 1877, the most exclusive of them all – the Coaching Club – only capitulated after he invited all its members to stay at Idle Hour in 1883.¹⁸ The building of Idle Hour was just as significant for Alva for quite a different reason: it brought her into contact with its architect Richard Morris Hunt. In Alva, Hunt found a visionary client in sympathy with his ideas; she encouraged daring and innovation, allowing him to find new levels of creativity and audacity that would make him the leading architect of the Gilded Age. For her part, Alva suddenly found a way of expressing herself.

In another world, at another time, it is perfectly possible that Alva might have been an architect. Some of those who knew her best, including Consuelo, thought she was always at her happiest when she was designing houses and rearranging landscapes. This was one of life’s theatres where she ceased to be a spectator and became a paid-up member of the cast. When it came to designing Vanderbilt houses, she considered every detail and it seemed to calm her down. Hunt understood this instinctively. He described her as a ‘wonder’ to his wife, and gave Alva the use of a draughtsman in his office to help her work out her ideas. ‘I spent many delightful hours in his office, working with the draughtsmen he placed at my disposal, always encouraged by him, and inspired alike by his kindness and great genius. He was my instructor and dear friend for many years, and the work we did together was for me always an endless delight, and a great resource.’¹⁹ This is not to say they did not fight, but when they did they were well matched. ‘Mr Hunt had a fiery temper … my own was not mild. We often had terrific word battles. With fiery intensity he would insist on certain things. I would, with equal eagerness, insist on the contrary. Once during the planning of this house we had had a long and heated argument over some detail of measurement. Finally he turned to me in rage and said “Damn it Mrs Vanderbilt who is building this house?” and I answered “Damn it, Mr Hunt, who is going to live in [it]?”’²⁰

Richard Morris Hunt has the distinction of being one of the very few men Alva ever really loved, although there is no suggestion that the relationship was anything other than platonic and plenty to demonstrate that she was a rigorously demanding client. She called it one of the great companionships of her life. It gave her scope to fulfil a long-held ambition – to change the way New York looked, and to turn it, as far as possible, back into France. The prevailing architectural fashion was the brownstone house, symptomatic, in Alva’s later professed view, ‘of the lightly veneered crudeness of America’. When Alva and Richard Morris Hunt first met there was a meeting of minds on this issue: ‘I told him how my taste trained in the European capitals had been shocked with what seemed to be a conspiracy of bad taste in American architecture and how willing and eager I was to break away from all precident [sic] and under his guidance build a thing of beauty … [I] determined that if ever the time came when I built a house I would profit by my contact with the architectural beauties of the Old World …’²¹.

Richard Morris Hunt had found a kindred spirit. Although a generation older, he had spent nearly nine years studying in Paris. Like Alva, he was captivated by French art and architecture in his youth, and came to speak French so fluently that he was sometimes mistaken for a Frenchman. Moreover, he studied architecture with Hector-Martin Lefuel, official architect to the Second Empire which had so entranced Alva. Lefuel encouraged Hunt to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, making him the first and only American architect of his generation to be trained there. Alva and Richard Morris Hunt were not, of course, the only people in New York who were fascinated by the opulent world of Second Empire France but between them they pioneered something new: the introduction of beaux-arts architecture to New York, a style that would define the Gilded Age and dominate the city’s architecture until the First World War.

The core idea at the heart of the beaux-arts was the conviction that the architectural ideal was classical, embracing not just Greek and Roman architecture but the French and Italian Renaissance as well. However, beaux-arts theory also looked to the future with state-of-the-art construction techniques, using modern materials such as plate glass and iron.²² Indeed the great beaux-arts buildings of New York were only possible thanks to the more remarkable inventions of the industrial revolution, such as the elevator and electric lighting, which allowed corporations to construct great edifices for large numbers of workers. One characteristic of these buildings was the way they dramatised space. According to the architectural historians Foreman and Stimson: ‘Good beaux-arts buildings have a very calculated dramatic effect … Facades and entries were held to be crucial in establishing important initial reactions to the building’s use and importance.’²³ In public beaux-arts buildings such as the New York Public Library the effect was democratic – anyone gliding down its great main staircase could feel stately. Applied to domestic architecture, however, the beaux-arts philosophy had quite the opposite effect. The style provided sweeping backdrops for America’s new aristocrats in much the same way that Versailles dramatised the ancien régime. Alva would have agreed with Henry James that the secret of its appeal lay in a ‘particular type of dauntless power’.²⁴

The first beaux-arts collaboration between Alva and Richard Morris Hunt was a house in New York to replace the brownstone house on West 44th Street that she secretly greatly disliked. The design of the new house was undeniably the outward expression of social ambition. Alva was, in effect, pioneering vertically rather than horizontally, creating a space that the aristocrats of New York would find irresistible. However, 660 Fifth Avenue can also be understood as the first great example of Hunt and Alva’s shared vision – a house designed to show American aristocracy what could be done if the great architecture of the European past was combined with the American gift for the modern in America’s own ‘Renaissance’. Alva’s vision for the Vanderbilts went even further, for she felt the family should act like Renaissance merchant princes and become great patrons of the arts. The Medicis of Florence had built houses that were not merely beautiful private residences but an outward expression of the importance of the family. They had ‘represented not only wealth but knowledge and culture, desirable elements for wealth to encourage …’ If the Medicis could do it, so could the Vanderbilts. ‘I preached this doctrine at home and to William H. Vanderbilt’ she wrote later.²⁵

Persuading her father-in-law, William Henry Vanderbilt, to behave like a Medici, turned out to be surprisingly easy. Liberated from both the Commodore and the will case after 1879, he went into action in an uninhibited manner which astounded New York society, only just coming to terms with his transformation from Staten Island farmer to railroad tycoon. He needed little persuasion that the Vanderbilts should build houses that reflected the family’s wealth, and encouraged his elder son, Cornelius II, to follow suit. The settlement of the will case had the effect of a starting pistol: William H., Cornelius II and William K. all filed plans for houses along Fifth Avenue on the same day. Fifth Avenue north of 50th Street was at that time unfashionable, but by the 1880s the area would be known as ‘Vanderbilt Alley’, setting a tone for sumptuous development in New York for the rest of the century.

660 Fifth Avenue was not the largest of the three houses (the others were at 640 and 1 West 57th Street) but it was certainly the most audacious. Alva drew gasps from her in-laws when she presented her plans to them in 1879:

I knew that they were more elaborate and would have a somewhat staggering effect on the family group. Nor was I mistaken. When the paper was unrolled and they all saw the pretentious plans of a house which would cover almost a city block there was a unanimous gasp from the assembly. With much elation I carefully explained the drawing, elaborating all the details and enjoying the effect on my audience. After a while my father-in-law said crisply: ‘Well, well, where do you expect to get the money for all this?’ ‘From you’ I answered instantly, giving him an affectionate slap on the back. The rest sat appalled at my temerity. To them it was like being families with Established Power. My father-in-law laughed and the money for the house came.²⁶

660 Fifth Avenue, designed by Richard Morris Hunt for Alva and William K., would become a New York landmark for decades. Based on the sixteenth-century chateau of Blois on the Loire, out of Chenonceau, it also enjoyed fifteenth-century French Gothic accents, and marked a clear turning point for Hunt as he finally slipped his American architectural moorings. Suggesting that Sleeping Beauty’s castle had somehow landed from outer space on Fifth Avenue, its dominant feature was a three-storey tourelle by the entrance. There were gargoyles, flying buttresses and gables. The designs for this house, a masterpiece of aristocratic image-making, suggested something more complex than straightforward conspicuous consumption, or even aristocratic emulation – though both were an important part of its make-up. The most striking note of all was an unmistakeable flight from reality. In Richard Morris Hunt’s conceptual watercolour for 660 Fifth Avenue, ghostly figures inhabited a fairy-tale palace; drawings for other rooms, such as the Supper Room, were peopled by tiny Renaissance princes.²⁷ In 660 Fifth Avenue, it was as if a deliberate decision had been taken to turn an aristocratic back on the drab, poverty-stricken world a few blocks away – a world into which one could fall so easily without a safety net. This sense of withdrawal to a magical past was a new departure for American architecture; it would make its own contribution to the growing sense of division between rich and poor in New York and it would be copied to the point of pastiche by the early-twentieth century.

Although New York’s architects generally approved of 660 Fifth Avenue, and admired its originality, reaction from New York society was mixed. The pale Indiana limestone of its exterior marked a decisive break with the ugliness of brownstone houses. Every block of limestone was tooled – worked over by a hand chisel. The facades were covered with a riot of rich and decorative carving which caused great consternation: ‘This radical departure from the accepted brown-stone front raised a storm of criticism among my friends,’ wrote Alva. ‘O these whippings from parents and society when the child or adult wishes to be a person and not a member of a mass.’²⁸ (Readers of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence may remember that Catherine Mingott’s decision to build a pale, cream-coloured house also marked her out as a morally courageous eccentric.) While she was away in Europe, Alva received a stream of alarmed letters telling her that carvings ‘of naked boys and girls’ were appearing on the rooftop. ‘They failed to see, as many, fatally tainted by Puritanism still fail to see, the exquisite beauty of the human form and of its significance in connection with the special period we were trying to represent,’²⁹ she commented.

Even to those who could take the psychological strain, the interior was almost overwhelming, dominated by spaces intended to dramatise the authority and economic power of the Vanderbilts. The dining room was 80-feet long, 28-feet wide and 35-feet high, had two colossal Renaissance fireplaces and a stained-glass window depicting a scene from the meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The sweeping grand stairway of Caen stone to the second floor was a tour de force of trophies, fruit, masks and cherubs. The entrance hall measured 60 feet and was lined with carvings and tapestries. The dominant theme may have been illusion and flight from reality but the translation of the remains of France’s ancien régime to this new American interior was real enough. It had all been masterminded by the French firm, Jules Allard et Fils, who would come to specialise in importing architectural salvage, artefacts and paintings directly from the houses of ruined French aristocrats for the houses of plutocratic aristocrats in the United States. The William K. Vanderbilts’ paintings not only included Rembrandt’s ‘Man in Oriental Costume’, and Gainsborough’s ‘Mrs Elliot’, but François Boucher’s spectacular ‘Toilet of Venus’. This came to Alva’s boudoir – indirectly – from the boudoir of Madame de Pompadour; and at least one fine secretaire came from the apartments of Marie Antoinette herself.

As late as 1882, Mrs Astor was still refusing to acknowledge the Vanderbilts formally. Her attitude was increasingly irrational for leaving aside Alva’s claims to southern gentility, Cornelius II had married Alice Claypoole Gwynn in 1867 (whose great-great-grandfather was Abraham Claypoole, a direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell), and in 1881 William K.’s sister, Lila, married William Seward Webb, whose grandfather had been an aide to George Washington. Both William Henry and Cornelius II, head of the family elect, were building fine houses and lived lives of unimpeachable luxoriousness. However, Mrs Astor’s strength of feeling on this matter may have been reinforced by two Vanderbilt upsets in the same year. One came about as a result of William Henry Vanderbilt remarking: ‘The public be damned!’ in answer to a reporter’s question about running a Pennsylvania train for the public benefit. Some maintain that William Henry was simply defending the interests of shareholders as he had every right to do, but he was universally excoriated for this jest, and the image of a Vanderbilt as a boorish robber-baron was successfully dangled before the public once again by his opponents. The scandal surrounding the unfortunate Cornelius Jeremiah was worse. After the Commodore’s death he became obsessed with funding his addiction to gambling. In 1882 he shot himself in the Glenham Hotel in New York, leaving debts of over $15,000. An undignified auction of his belongings compounded the disgrace of a family suicide.

Undaunted, Alva and William K. pressed on with their entrée to New York’s social elite. A charming and energetic couple, about to take possession of a huge and dazzling house which would flatter the ambitions and pretensions of New York’s gratin, they were already being asked to the best parties. In spite of family scandals they were invited to a Patriarchs’ ball in 1882 and another early in 1883. As 660 Fifth Avenue neared completion, they started to plan a house-warming party of their own. The Vanderbilt ball, as it came to be known, has gone down in the annals of party history. In deciding to hold it in March 1883, and to send out 1,600 invitations, Alva and William K. must have calculated that to a very great extent, society’s resistance to the Vanderbilts was already collapsing. They knew that the elite of New York was agog with curiosity over 660 Fifth Avenue; they made sure that society understood that the ball would be like no other in terms of expense and display; and Alva shrewdly reduced the social risk to invitees (and herself) by giving the party in honour of her old friend, Consuelo Yznaga, now Viscountess Mandeville, knowing full well that the presence of a real aristocrat would overcome residual hesitation – a manoeuvre she would repeat in the future. This left the problem of Mrs Astor.

The story goes that Alva used the ball to outwit Mrs Astor, who had not, in March 1883, been persuaded to relax her Vanderbilt-denying ordinance. This may have been because of recent scandals; possibly because she still thought the Vanderbilts remained a symbol of the dangers of vulgar wealth; and probably because she had anathematised them in the past and was in no hurry to back down. Her daughter, Carrie, on the other hand, was closer in age to the William K. Vanderbilts and enjoyed parties given by younger ‘swells’. She looked forward to being asked to the Vanderbilts’ house-warming ball, and even started to rehearse quadrilles with her friends. It then transpired that there could be no invitation because, according to the etiquette of the day, Mrs Astor had to call on Mrs Vanderbilt before Alva could invite Miss Carrie Astor to the ball. Such was the distress of Miss Carrie Astor that Mrs Astor’s maternal love overcame her pride. She relented, made the call and an invitation was forthcoming.

This story has long been called into question. There is no doubt that the ball was planned with an element of calculated risk and that Alva wished Mrs Astor to grace it with her presence. There is no doubt that Mrs Astor only called on Alva for the first time shortly before the ball. However, Alva and Mrs Astor sat together on the executive committee of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund,³⁰ and the Vanderbilts had already attended two Patriarchs’ balls, which would have been impossible without Mrs Astor’s implicit approval. It is more than likely that if there had been no ball, Mrs Astor would have called on Alva soon after she moved into her new house – at the moment when, as one wag put it, the Vanderbilts had finished Vanderbuilding. The ball simply acted as a catalyst for Mrs Astor’s public acknowledgement as Alva hoped it might.

Once the invitations had been sent out, it is perfectly possible that Carrie Astor appealed to her mother to speed things up and that Ward McAllister sensed that it would be better for Mrs Astor to acknowledge the Vanderbilts formally if she wished to stay abreast of the Zeitgeist and avoid looking foolish. The story that Alva deliberately outwitted Mrs Astor is too crude, however. In one sense she had done that long before when she started to plan 660 with Richard Morris Hunt. The end result was the same, however. It only took a brief glimpse of the interior of 660 Fifth Avenue to reassure the Queen of Society that Mr and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt were fine upstanding examples of the civilised ‘money power’³¹ which she and Ward McAllister so wished to encourage. ‘We have no right,’ she commented in 1883, ‘to exclude those whom the growth of this great country has brought forward, provided they are not vulgar in speech or appearance. The time has come for the Vanderbilts.’³²

Proust’s remark that parties do not really happen until the day afterwards when the uninvited read about them in the newspapers is only partly true of the Vanderbilt ball. This party was a wild success before it ever took place. Not only did Mrs Astor finally capitulate, but the ball was the principal subject of discussion for weeks beforehand among the prospective guests. It was a fancy-dress ball, of course, in the spirit of make-believe and flight from reality that characterised the house; and the elite of society happily collaborated. ‘Every artist in the city was set to work to design novel costumes – to produce something in the way of a fancy dress that would make its wearer live ever after in history,’³³ wrote Ward McAllister with a characteristic sense of proportion. Alva was deeply gratified by the time and energy expended by hundreds of guests on their outfits, which took weeks of work by New York’s best dressmakers and couturiers. The degree of focus, effort and cost expended could only be seen as a compliment to the new generation of civilised Vanderbilts and marked out their elevation to the apex of society just as clearly as any endorsement from Mrs Astor.

In Alva’s view, the male guests at the ball were, if anything, ‘more brilliantly and perfectly turned out than the women’.³⁴ The invitation certainly sent some of them into a great sartorial tizzy. On the day of the party Ward McAllister was obliged to recruit extra helpers to get him dressed, ‘two sturdy fellows on either side of me holding up a pair of leather trunks, I on a step-ladder, one mass of powder, descending into them, an operation consuming an hour’.³⁵ Another male guest, Augustus Gurney, never managed to resolve his outfit crisis. He went home in the middle of the ball and changed, disappearing as a Moldavian chieftain and re-appearing as a Turkish pasha.

It was, said Alva modestly, ‘the most brilliant ball ever given in New York’.³⁶ It was certainly one of the more surreal. Don Carlos chatted away over supper with Little Bo Peep; Mary Stuart was seen in conversation with Neapolitan fishermen and a Capuchin monk; a plethora of Hungarian hussars mingled with several representatives of the French Bourbons; and the Cornelius Vanderbilts stood for both past and future with Cornelius as Louis XVI and Alice as ‘Electric Light’, in a costume that intermittently lit up, courtesy of batteries secreted in her pockets. Curiously, both Alva and Mrs Astor appeared as Venetian noblewomen, and were seen chatting amiably and publicly on the stairs. Alva’s dress was made of white satin embroidered in gold, with a velvet mantle, and a diadem of diamonds. Many of the costumes, including Lady Mandeville’s as Queen Maria Theresa of Austria, came posthaste from Paris. Perhaps most interesting of all, William K. was dressed as François I in doublet and hose, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the small princely figure whom Richard Morris Hunt once inserted into his earliest designs for the Supper Room.

That evening, the involvement of the guests in the success of the party went further than turning up in elaborate costumes and acknowledging that the Vanderbilts had ‘arrived’. The other huge compliment paid to the hosts was the trouble taken over the quadrilles, which became the high point of the evening. Quadrilles were square dances in five movements which had become elaborate fixtures at society balls, for they were danced in costumes designed round a theme, and took weeks of organisation and rehearsal by teams of guests beforehand. The six quadrilles at the Vanderbilt ball exceeded anything that had ever been seen before, danced by over a hundred of the Vanderbilts’ friends.

According to one authority, ‘the chief attraction was the “hobby horse quadrille,” for which the dancers wore costumes that made them look as if they were mounted on horses. The life-size hobby horses took two months to construct and were covered with genuine leather hides and flowing manes. Tails were attached to the waists of the dancers and false legs placed on the outside of richly embroidered horse blankets, giving the illusion that the dancers were mounted; “the deception”, one observer enthused, “was quite perfect”.’³⁷ Ward McAllister organised the Mother Goose Quadrille himself (another compliment to the hosts) which involved participation from Jack and Jill, Little Red-Riding Hood, Bo-Peep, Goody Two-Shoes, Mary, Mary Quite Contrary, and My Pretty Maid. He was forced to concede, however, that it was the Star Quadrille containing the ‘youth and beauty of the city’ which was the most brilliant, for all the young ladies wore electric lights in their hair which produced ‘a fairy and elf-like appearance to each of them’.³⁸ As Alva put it later, the 1883 Vanderbilt ball ‘marked an epoch in the social history of the city’. As well as consolidating the position of the Vanderbilts, it marked a change of pace in two other ways. Alva, ever mindful of maximum visibility, was the first hostess to allow a full report of the ball to be syndicated to the newspapers through the New York World and to allow reporters to wander through the house earlier in the day. It was one of the World’s earliest society scoops and set a precedent for press coverage of similar events in the following decades. The paper calculated that the ball cost $155,730 for the costumes, $11,000 for the flowers, $65,270 for champagne and music, and $4,000 for hairdressers. This meant that Mrs William K. Vanderbilt had also set a vertiginous new standard for just the kind of social expenditure that had come so close to defeating the Smiths when they returned from France to America.³⁹

When writing her memoirs in later life, Consuelo could recall very little of her early childhood. She remembered nothing of the ugly brownstone building where she was born. No-one registered her birth either, an oversight that subsequently caused a great deal of bureaucratic trouble. She moved into 660 Fifth Avenue with her parents in 1883, just before she was six, so the childhood she recollected began in surroundings of extraordinary affluence. She does not seem to have been present at the 1883 ball (unlike Cousin Gertrude who was two years older and went for part of the evening, dressed as a tulip). She remembered other parties, however: ‘How gay were the gala evenings when the house was ablaze with lights and Willie [her younger brother] and I, crouching on hands and knees behind the balustrade of the musicians’ gallery, looked down on a festive scene below – the long dinner table covered with a damask cloth, a gold service and red roses, the lovely crystal and china, the grown-ups in their fine clothes … the ladies a-glitter with jewels seated on high-backed tapestry chairs behind which stood footmen in knee-breeches.’⁴⁰

At other moments, there were distinct disadvantages to living like a princess in a neo-Gothic palace, which, like many houses built primarily for entertaining and display, could feel gloomy and frightening when no-one else was there. The fact that the stairway was carved in Caen stone was quite irrelevant when the princess happened to be cursed with a neo-Gothic imagination. ‘I still remember how long and terrifying was that dark and endless upward sweep as, with acute sensations of fear, I climbed to my room every night, leaving below the light and its comforting rays. For in that penumbra there were spirits lurking to destroy me, hands stretched out to touch me and sighs that breathed against my cheek.’⁴¹ Life in an urban chateau had its compensations, however. On the floor beside her bedroom there was a playroom big enough for bicycling with friends. There were horse-drawn sleigh rides in the streets of New York in winter, trips to the family box at the Metropolitan Opera to hear Adelina Patti sing, and weekly classes at Dodworth’s Dancing Academy marking her out as a junior member of New York’s elect from birth.

Alva always said that she loved motherhood. She remembered a sense of religious joy when she discovered she was to have her first baby. If it ever became fashionable to decry such feelings, she wrote, she would not join in. ‘So long as the world endures there will be women who will quiver to these emotions … no matter what freedom of expression is finally attained.’⁴² Consuelo’s birth in 1877 was followed by the arrival of her brothers William Kissam II (known as Willie K. Jr) in 1878, and Harold Stirling in 1884. Alva prided herself on the fact that, unlike members of the English aristocracy, she did not hand her children over to the care of others. ‘I dedicated the best years of my life to rearing and influencing and developing those three little beings who were my links with the future. I gave them an exclusive devotion. I considered their welfare before all else. I lived in their lives and cultivated no other apart from them for myself.’⁴³

In 1909 Alva announced that she was writing a book about her child-rearing methods, and though it never materialised, she told the New York City Journal: ‘[My children] were not put away to sleep in a room with the nurse; they slept in my room. The nursery was next to my room, and when they were older they slept there, but with the door open to I could look after them, and the smallest one slept in my room. I nursed all my children, though I don’t know that anyone is particularly interested in that.’⁴⁴ By 1917, however, she had come to believe that excessive pre-occupation with her children had been misguided, and that mothers should not sacrifice themselves as she had done. ‘I want to say unhesitatingly that I believe this was wrong. I deplore the eternal sacrifice of women for another or others. Motherhood and Individuality should not conflict. Motherhood ought not to kill Personality in the mother and Personality in the mother ought not to injure the child.’⁴⁵

However much Alva enjoyed motherhood she was also ambivalent about it – largely on the grounds that many women became mothers just at the moment they were finding themselves. ‘It is a formative time for them so far as intellect goes … [A young mother is] in a sense a diamond already cut and ready to sparkle as she can find the light. Yet for the sake of developing the unknown quantity which her children are she gradually slips back into the darkness.’⁴⁶ Alva always felt that the equation between the perfect woman and virtuous female martyr was wrong. ‘The whole history of most women’s lives is summed in self-sacrifice. If it is not for a child whose future is uncertain then it is for an aged parent whose life is done. Again and again people have pointed out to me some splendid woman who was burying her talent under care for a decrepit relative. “Isn’t her life beautiful!” they would exclaim. No, it is not beautiful. I think it is disgusting. I think it is wicked,’⁴⁷ she told Sara Bard Field.

In Alva’s case, talk of immolating maternal self-sacrifice should be treated with caution. This was not modern hands-on motherhood. Like other affluent households in New York in the 1880s, 660 Fifth Avenue had nursemaids, nannies, housemaids, governesses and cooks. The fact that Consuelo’s earliest years were so unmemorable has much to do with the disciplined and dull world of an affluent nineteenth-century nursery where the emphasis was on avoiding undue stimulation, building up the infant’s strength and avoiding infection. Even when her children were very young, Alva was occupied with other matters: designing and decorating houses with Richard Morris Hunt, ensuring the Vanderbilts were behaving like Medicis, taking her rightful place at the apex of New York society, as well as the complex task of managing two large households.

There is also no sign that Alva’s personality was in any way dimmed by maternity, though as each child left the nursery she certainly exercised an increasing degree of control over its life. Alva saw a direct relationship between building houses and building children: ‘If one can judge of her own self I would unhesitatingly say that the two strongest characteristics in me are the constructive and the maternal. They are or ought to be associated.’⁴⁸ Children were, of course, the greater responsibility for here one was building character. Alva’s view of maternal responsibility was first, that the mother was directly responsible for developing the character of each child; second, that each child should be treated as an individual with an independent mind; and third, that it was the parent’s responsibility to ‘guide’ the child to the right course in life, based upon (and this was the rub) parental assessment of the child’s individual characteristics.

This view of maternal responsibility was, in many ways, an extension of the way Alva had described how she played with her dolls as a child (‘I loved dolls … I took them very seriously. I put into their china or sawdust bodies all my own feelings.’⁴⁹) She frequently expected Consuelo to behave with the submission of a doll, a ‘china body’ on to which Alva projected all her own feelings. Consuelo was to be the princess in Sleeping Beauty’s palace. ‘Gertrude and I were heiresses,’ Consuelo once told Louis Auchincloss. ‘There seemed never to have been a time when this was not made entirely clear.’⁵⁰ She was even dressed to stand apart by Alva, forced into ‘period costume’ for parties and sniggered at by other children. However, this often clashed with Alva’s other view, which she held with equal conviction, that her children should be independent-minded individuals – like her, in other words. This contradiction at the heart of her approach to child-rearing was frequently irreconcilable and posed a very difficult conundrum for her offspring, especially Consuelo. Should they please her by submitting to her as doll-children? Or would Alva be more contented if they showed signs of independence? It was often very difficult to know.

In practice, submission to Alva’s will generally took priority. It was, in any case, an age when inculcating obedience in children was widely considered a major parental responsibility, the first step in developing moral character. Childcare manuals of the period recommended that obedience training should start as early as twelve or fourteen months to encourage ‘self-control and self-denial, and advancing a step towards the mastery of [the child’s] passions’.⁵¹ If obedience was important in boys, it was essential in girls. ‘We were the last to be subjected to a harsh parental discipline,’ Consuelo wrote. ‘In my youth, children were to be seen but not heard; implicit obedience was an obligation from which one could not conscientiously escape.’⁵²

Even by the standards of the day, however, Alva was a ferocious disciplinarian, administering corporal punishment with a riding-whip for the most minor acts of delinquency. When Alva was a child, her mother’s whippings had had little effect. But a less headstrong personality like Consuelo could still feel the impact in old age. ‘Such repressive measures bred inhibitions and even now I can trace their effects,’⁵³ she wrote later. Most difficult of all, perhaps, was the stomach-knotting tension induced by a mother with a volatile and ferocious temper: ‘Her dynamic energy and her quick mind, together with her varied interests, made her a delightful companion. But the bane of her life and of those who shared it was a violent temper that, like a tempest, at times engulfed us all.’⁵⁴

While Alva certainly took time to be with her children it was not quite the unalloyed pleasure for her offspring that she seemed to imagine. ‘The hour we spent in our parents’ company after the supper we took with our governess at six can in no sense be described as the Children’s Hour,’ wrote her daughter. ‘No books or games were provided; we sat and listened to the conversation of the grown-ups and longed for the release that their departure to dress for dinner would bring.’⁵⁵ Alva lunched with her children almost every day for seventeen years, refusing (or so she later claimed) all social invitations in the middle of the day so that she could be available to her children. While she maintained that these lunches were the ‘children’s dining table’, an ‘open forum’ at which ‘everyone’s opinion was gravely received’ even when there were adult guests present, Consuelo remembered longing to express a view but invariably being repressed by a look from Mamma.

Having one’s character developed by Alva could also be a brutal experience. ‘Sitting up straight was one of the crucial tests of ladylike behaviour. A horrible instrument was devised which I had to wear when doing my lessons. It was a steel rod which ran down my spine and was strapped at my waist and over my shoulders – another strap went around my forehead to the rod. I had to hold my book high when reading, and it was almost impossible to write in so uncomfortable a position.’⁵⁶ Later, however, Consuelo attributed her famous straight back in old age to this dreadful device.

One result of Alva’s passionate involvement in her children’s upbringing was that, unlike cousin Gertrude who went to school, Consuelo was educated almost entirely at home so that Alva could oversee her doll-child’s educational curriculum. Alva wanted to educate her sons at home too but lost the battle. ‘I regretted very much the sending of my sons to preparatory schools. Personally I did not see the necessity of it. When parents have the intelligence required to guide and direct youth, I think it is better for children to stay at home as long as possible. I neither appreciate nor approve the theory held by many as to the value of outside influence in the rearing of children.’⁵⁷ In particular Alva objected to the ‘one-size-fits-all approach to education she felt had failed her badly as a child. It is likely that William K. was just as certain that only boarding school stood four square between his sons and total domination by their mother.

Consequently, Consuelo bore the brunt of Alva’s educational experiments and maternal philosophy. Alva insisted on proficiency in foreign languages, an accomplishment that was also encouraged by William K. ‘At the age of eight I could read and write in French, German and English. I learned them in that order, for we spoke French with our parents, my father having been partly educated in Geneva,’⁵⁸ wrote Consuelo. She was made to recite long poems in French and German to her parents every Saturday so that by the time she was ten she was capable of reciting ‘Les Adieux de Marie Stuart’ at a solfège class concert with such emotion that she burst into tears and was thrown a bouquet.

While instruction was given by tutors and governesses, Alva kept a very close eye on her curriculum, saying that she ‘knew the books from which [Consuelo] was being mentally fed as I knew the food that nourished her body.’⁵⁹ Alva later told the New City Journal that Consuelo often had three governesses at any one time, but ‘it was a great nuisance to have them around’.⁶⁰ At the same time, Consuelo’s education as a linguist did represent genuine encouragement of individual talent, though it was along strictly approved lines. She showed an early talent for languages and everything was done to promote it; and when she occasionally did something well enough to please Alva, the praise was worth having.

Physical independence was also encouraged. At Idle Hour, no-one could have been less like a conventional nineteenth-century mother than Alva. The children crabbed, fished and experienced a taste of the autonomy Alva enjoyed as a child, though even here she could not resist instruction. She had a pond specially constructed so that they could learn to sail and she could dispense geography lessons:

As the knowledge of navigation increased a mast and sail were added. The row boat, like a caterpillar, put on wings and became a butterfly of the water, a sail boat. With this craft and the pond we developed the Geography of the whole world. Now we were going from Dover to Calais on the choppy Channel. Now we were coming from New York to Liverpool on the perilous Ocean. William, the elder boy, by continuous exertion rocked the boat so successfully that we believed in storms and what they could accomplish for we were all pitched into the pond … no young friend who ever visited us met me at the luncheon table attired in her or his clothes.⁶¹

A governess was also pitched into this pond by the children, who promptly received one of Alva’s more memorable thrashings. In spite of her impulse to control every aspect of her children’s lives, Alva could be great fun, and courageous if things went wrong. At least once she prevented a serious accident when she jumped up and seized the bridle of a galloping pony as it bolted with Consuelo towards a water hydrant.

In a household where the children were waited on hand and foot, Alva thought it necessary to provide a play house where they could acquire some self-reliance. It was called ‘La Récréation’ and was one aspect of childhood which Alva and Consuelo later agreed had been a success. ‘The German governess and my daughter made preserves there and did a great deal of cookery. In fact, they superintended the cooking while my eldest son was the carpenter and waiter. I and my friends often went there for afternoon tea. It was prepared and served by the children and was most excellent,’⁶² wrote Alva. These hours in La Récréation gave Consuelo an early taste of the pleasure of running houses where she was in control. ‘This playhouse was an old bowling alley, and when my mother handed it over to us she insisted as a matter of training that we should do all the housework ourselves,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Utterly happy, we would cook our meal, wash the dishes and then stroll home by the river in the cool of the evening.’⁶³

The children were also given a garden where they grew flowers and vegetables which they were encouraged to take to the nearby Trinity Seaside Home for convalescent children, Alva’s first philanthropic undertaking. She told Mary Young that she started the home after watching her delicate eldest son grow into a robust boy and grasped the extent to which wealth had assisted his recovery from precarious health in infancy. Realising that poor mothers lost children because they could not afford the necessary care, Alva purchased land and built a home where convalescing children from poor homes were looked after by Protestant sisters. This was also Consuelo’s first exposure to the lives of those less fortunate than herself.

Consuelo’s nurse ‘as near a saint as it is possible for a human being to be’,⁶⁴ was another person responsible for drawing back the curtain a little further so that one of the most protected little girls in America had a glimpse of how other people lived. In conversation with a workman from Bohemia responsible for cutting the grass at Idle Hour, Consuelo discovered that he had a crippled child. Encouraged by her nurse, she loaded up her pony-cart with presents and went over to see the child, an experience which forced her to realise for the first time ‘the inequalities of human destinies with a vividness that never left me’.⁶⁵ At other times, the children sold the vegetables they grew at La Récréation to their mother in an exercise in elementary capitalism: ‘I know that they have grown up to profit by these lessons,’⁶⁶ wrote Alva. In one respect she was right. Behind her back her children gave themselves elementary lessons in gambling. ‘My brother Willie, who was of an impatient nature, would pull up the potatoes long before they were ripe,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Our earliest bets were made on the number we would find on each root.’⁶⁷

In 1885 Consuelo’s grandfather, William Henry Vanderbilt, collapsed mid-conversation with an old competitor at 640 Fifth Avenue, and died. He was sixty-four. It is difficult not to feel sorry for William Henry. In addition to vilification as a result of ‘The public be damned!’ incident, he only lived to enjoy eight years of liberation from his father (or six, if one deducts the years spent attempting to settle the Commodore’s will). In the short time available he made up for years of repression. He flung down a challenge to Mrs Astor on his own account as one of the founders of the new Metropolitan Opera Company, set up by a group excluded from the Academy of Music because they were born too late to acquire a box; and he indulged a passion for horseflesh which he inherited from his father. He particularly loved trotting horses, and was often seen driving his famous trotting teams up and down Fifth Avenue. His favourites, Maud S and Aldine, broke the record for a mile at the track at Fleetwood Park in 1883. His stables for the ‘trotters’ were renowned for having gas lamps with porcelain shades, and sporting pictures on the walls.

When his new house at 640 Fifth Avenue was completed, it was clear that William Henry had finally lost all inhibition when it came to shopping. It was stuffed with enormous pieces of Renaissance furniture (in line with proto-Medici thinking), suits of armour, marble statues, bronzes, mirrors, tapestries and oriental rugs. His front doors were an exact copy of the Ghiberti bronze doors in Florence. There were Japanese rooms, early-English rooms, Grecian rooms. The walls were hung with paintings by Alma-Tadema, by Fortuny, Millet, Munkacsy, Bonheur and Bouguereau, and his great favourite, Meissonier. Those who regarded this favourably saw it as ‘regal magnificence’. Edith Wharton, on the other hand, described such Vanderbilt excess as ‘a Thermopylae of bad taste’.⁶⁸ Amidst it all, William Henry is said not to have seemed entirely at ease, boxing himself into one corner of his library in his old rocking-chair.

In William Henry’s hands the Vanderbilt fortune had continued to grow and multiply. Though assisted ably by Cornelius II and William K., as well as the Vanderbilt man of affairs Chauncey Depew, he found it hard to delegate and therefore much of the credit for this must go to him. He shepherded the railroads through a difficult period of unregulated competition, appalling accidents, organised protest at exploitative and abusive freight rates, and serious labour unrest (much of it justified). He improved Vanderbilt trains and managed to keep the Vanderbilt workforce largely on side during a violent railroad strike in 1877. As Alva put it: ‘He lacked the commanding qualities of the Commodore who had founded the family fortune, but he had a quality of genuine kindness – almost an extreme kindness and a dogged persistence and thoroughness which father had either instilled or encouraged in him and which made [it] possible for him to handle the great Rail road business left in his care.’⁶⁹

A few days after his death, William Henry Vanderbilt’s will was the source of even greater astonishment than the Commodore’s. In the short time that he had been responsible for the family fortune, dogged persistence and careful control had doubled its value from about $100 million to $200 million**. This made him the richest man in America and the poet-statisticians of New York’s newspapers went into overdrive. In gold, the estate would weigh 500 tons and would need 500 strong horses to pull it down Wall Street; if paper, it would take a man eight hours a day for thirty days to count it. The New York Sun declared: ‘Never was such a last testament known of mortal. Kings have died with full treasuries, emperors have fled their realms with bursting coffers, great financiers have played with millions … but never before was such a spectacle presented of a plain, ordinary man dispensing of his own free will, in bulk and magnitude that the mind wholly fails to apprehend, tangible millions upon millions of palpable money. It is simply grotesque.’⁷⁰

William Henry altered his will nine times in six years, as he fretted over how best to bequeath such a legacy. He was determined to prevent the embarrassment of another will trial, and he felt strongly that the burden of such a fortune was too great for one man alone. ‘The care of $200 million is too great a load for any brain or back to bear. It is enough to kill a man. I have no son whom I am willing to afflict with the terrible burden,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘I want my sons to divide it and share the worry which it will cost to keep it.’⁷¹ At the same time, he appears to have been anxious to respect the Commodore’s wish that the family fortune should remain intact. Within his own family everyone was treated generously. His daughters were all given the houses in which they lived, and each of his eight children received $5 million with a further $40 million in trust for them jointly with arrangements made for grandchildren. Maria Kissam Vanderbilt, his widow, received 640 Fifth Avenue, its contents and an annual allowance of $200,000, as well as a bequest of $500,000 which she used to help her Kissam relatives. There were donations to Vanderbilt University and a range of smaller bequests.⁷² However, it was the two sons with the longest experience of managing the family enterprise who received the bulk of the estate between them: Cornelius II and William K. now discovered that they had inherited about $50 million each.

Because William Henry died prematurely, his sons and daughters-in-law were unexpectedly young when they inherited his fabulous wealth. Cornelius II was only forty-two, William K. was thirty-six, and Alva thirty-two. Under normal circumstances, they would all have had to wait at least another ten years before coming into such riches. But William Henry’s early demise meant that Alva and William K. could now have whatever they wanted. The consequences for Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt were even greater. She became one of the world’s greatest heiresses at the age of nine. This gave Alva plenty time to think about her daughter’s future; and this made the impact of her grandfather’s bequest on Consuelo’s life almost incalculable.

Alva and William K. immediately reacted to the unexpected improvement in their circumstances by commissioning two new accessories: their own private yacht, the Alva, and a summer cottage in the fashionable summer resort of Newport, Rhode Island, which would become the backdrop to much of the drama ahead. At first glance it seems odd that the charming and refined colonial town of Newport, expressly founded on the principle of religious tolerance during the seventeenth century, should be the locus of titanic social struggles in the Gilded Age. The town manifests something of a split personality to this day, with elegant small colonial houses nestling together round the harbour and strenuously competitive nineteenth-century palaces on the slope above scarcely conceding existence to the throng below. The explanation for its singular history lies partly in its geography: a cool summer breeze which has always attracted visitors in search of a ‘healthy climate’ and a deep natural harbour which made it accessible to steamships from the south from the early nineteenth century. It is not surprising that Alva was brought to Newport as a child by her southern parents, nor that it should have been in Newport that she first made friends with the Yznaga family who came from Cuba and Louisiana.

For much of the nineteenth century, Newport was a holiday resort for writers, artists and intellectuals of modest means. After the Civil War however, Newport fell victim to the noisy arrival of the urban rich, ‘quick to pick up the scent and take over the land, driving up prices to push out the eggheads’.⁷³ The transformation of Newport into the epicentre of social warfare at its most vicious was largely the work of two enterprising speculators: Alfred Smith and his associate Joseph Bailey. Spotting an opportunity in a manner of which Commodore Vanderbilt would have been proud, this duo acquired 140 acres of land on the slope to the north of the colonial town and began to develop terrain along Bellevue Avenue, creating large tracts of building land amid broad tree-lined streets in an informal exclusivity zone. This development paved the way for competitive snootiness unparalleled anywhere in America. In the hitherto smart resort of Saratoga, for example, society stayed and entertained in hotels, making it easier for those on its fringes to find a foothold. In Newport, on the other hand, rich families built their own ‘summer cottages’ on Smith and Bailey’s land, while those who could not afford it were kept out.⁷⁴

The summer cottages of Newport were, of course, nothing like cottages at all. Those that remain range from the elegant, to the ludicrous, to the very slightly mad. Henry James famously described them as ‘white elephants … all cry and no wool … They look queer and conscious and lumpish – some of them, as with an air of brandished proboscis, really grotesque.’⁷⁵ Several of the most famous were designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Uncle Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s house, The Breakers, had seventy rooms; the gardens of The Elms required twelve gardeners simply to keep them in order; and every Gilded Age cottage along Bellevue Avenue had a ballroom large enough to accommodate several hundred guests. This was the point of being in Newport in the first place. Even allowing for the appearance of the Casino (where one played tennis or croquet, rather than gambled) and swimming at Bailey’s Beach, the focus of activity during Newport’s short summer season was private entertaining by society figures, creating a vicious circle – or a virtuous one, depending on your point of view – of aristocratic exclusivity.

It only took the arrival of a few rich society families in Newport in the post-war years to attract others, turning Newport for a few brief weeks in July and August into New-York-by-the-Sea. By the end of the nineteenth century almost every wealthy family of the industrial age had established some kind of presence there. ‘They were the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Paran Stevenses, the Lorillards, the Oelrichses, the Belmonts, the Goelets, the Fishes, the Havemeyers, the Burdens … There were several hundred of them in Newport in any one summer season – a magical inner circle of those powerful few who called the social tune and those newly arrived families who desperately danced to it.’⁷⁶ Even for its aristocrats, Newport was anything but a holiday. For six short weeks the social competition of New York was transferred to the seaside, twisted, condensed and inflated. By 1890 the unwritten rules of competitive display required a twice-daily appearance in a phaeton on Bellevue Avenue in a different dress, a swim at private Bailey’s Beach from one’s own cabana (one of the least pleasant beaches in Newport by all accounts), luncheon on a yacht moored in the harbour, or a fête champêtre at a farm, attendance at the polo field, dinner and a further change of costume, then a ball at the Casino or, if one was of the elect, in a summer cottage on Bellevue Avenue. A season could require over ninety new dresses.⁷⁷

For the hundreds of visitors who were not part of the inner circle and who arrived in Newport each summer with the hope of breaking through, it was far, far worse. ‘It is an axiom of Newport that it takes at least four years to get in,’ wrote society author Mrs John Van Rensselaer. ‘Each season the persistent climber makes some advance through a barrage of snubs. The seasoned member of the Newport colony enters into the cruel game of quashing the pride of the stranger with great glee. Eventually, if he will bear all this, the candidate receives an invitation which indicates that he has finally been accepted by whatever particular set he has besieged. Then he turns about and snubs those remaining petitioners as harshly as he himself was snubbed. For the privilege of being a guest at certain houses and the license to affront those not yet in, he has spent perhaps a million dollars.’⁷⁸

In commissioning Richard Morris Hunt to design Marble House as her Newport summer cottage Alva accelerated Newport’s progress towards becoming the social capital of the Gilded Age. It has been remarked that the Vanderbilts only went to Newport in 1885 because of the Astors. Alva would have resented this deeply for though she undoubtedly set up camp in Newport near Mrs Astor’s house, Beechwood, and then proceeded to outshine her architecturally, she had, of course, been to Newport for holidays as a child. She was now a leader of society herself; and by 1885 she would have regarded a Newport summer ‘cottage’ of her own as a matter of entitlement. Having acquired a plot of land on Bellevue Avenue, however, she and William K. set about taking the business of aristocratisation one step further than anyone else. While Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport house, The Breakers, was modelled on the palazzo of a Medici merchant, Alva left the Medicis behind and addressed herself directly to the Bourbon monarchs of the ancien regime.

Often described as Richard Morris Hunt’s masterpiece, Marble House contained allusions to the White House and the Petit Trianon at Versailles. It was certainly not lacking in ambition. In the memoir she dictated to Matilda Young, Alva also made mention of the Acropolis. For Richard Morris Hunt it was one of the great commissions of his life: he had unlimited resources, a client whose historical imagination and ambition matched his own and who had a sense of refinement and taste far more developed than any of his other clients.

Construction of Marble House began in conditions of great secrecy in 1888. By 1889, the contractor, Charles E. Clarke of Boston, had leased a wharf and warehouse in Newport harbour for materials which were brought in by ship. Artisans imported from France and Italy were quartered in separate lodgings and banned from communicating with each other on site. High fences went up round the building plot to hide it from the gaze of curious Newporters. It would take four years to complete. As drawings in the archives of Richard Morris Hunt show, it was very much Alva’s project and she involved herself in every detail. ‘This absolutely disapproved of by Mrs Vanderbilt’ notes an anonymous hand on one drawing of a doorway. ‘This is all wrong,’ declares Alva in her own handwriting on another drawing. ‘Will send photograph of marble to be adopted and each side of mantle to be solid marble panels and no columns on this end of the room.’⁷⁹

While Marble House was under construction, the Vanderbilts kept themselves amused with their other new toy, the steam yacht Alva. Launched by Alva’s sister, Jenny Yznaga, on 14 October 1886, the yacht was 285-feet long and 32-feet wide and had a tonnage of 1,151.27, making her the largest private yacht in America by a good 35 feet, beating J. P. Morgan’s Corsair (165 feet), William Astor’s new Nourmahal (233 feet) and Jay Gould’s Atlanta (250 feet). In fact, the Alva was so large that the Turkish authorities once mistook her for a small cruiser and fired two shots across her bow in the Dardanelles. ‘Mrs Vanderbilt, who is generally credited to be a lady of excellent taste, deems that elaborate and ornate furnishings are out of place on a yacht. She thinks that she is rich enough to afford simplicity in this instance,’ reported The New York Times.⁸⁰ It was true that all the walls were simply panelled with mahogany, and the teak decks were simply covered with oriental rugs, but this principle was extended to a dining room which had a piano, a library with a fireplace, seven guest rooms, and a ten-room suite for the Vanderbilts (though the mahogany gave out below stairs in the accommodation for the crew of fifty-three).

While Alva’s mother, Phoebe Smith, had once travelled with two maids and a southern mocking bird, the Vanderbilts found it necessary to take along a crew that included a master officer, a first officer, a second officer, a boatswain and a boatswain’s mate, a storekeeper, four quartermasters, a ship’s carpenter, twelve seamen, a chief engineer, first and second assistant engineers, six firemen, three coal passers, three oilers, a donkey engineman, an electrician, an ice machine engineer, a chief steward, a ward-room steward, a firemen’s mess-man, a sailors mess-man, two mess boys, a baker and a doctor.⁸¹ (The crew total of fifty-three does not include the French chef, family friends, household servants, or tutors and governesses for the children who were frequently present.) Labour unrest was dealt with in peremptory fashion. On 4 December 1887, the ship’s log noted that men who had demanded better rates of pay and who refused to work were ‘quickly landed’. Replacements were then picked up in Constantinople. The Vanderbilts and their guests, meanwhile, not only travelled in the lap of luxury but were treated as visiting dignitaries wherever they went, greeted by consuls, admirals, ambassadors, and kings. Even the Sultan of Turkey made recompense for the shots fired across the yacht’s bows in the Dardanelles by granting William K. an audience and arranging a tour of his private palaces which included a visit to his harem; (the abject dependence of the women there would make a lifelong impression on Alva).

Cruises on the yacht between 1886 and 1890 took William K., Alva and the children to the West Indies, Europe, Turkey, North Africa and Egypt and often lasted several months. One voyage started in July 1887 and only ended on 31 March 1888, stopping at Madeira, Gibraltar and at Alexandria – where the party left the Alva and engaged one of Thomas Cook’s steam dahabiyehs, the Prince Abbas, for a trip up the Nile. Alva later remembered that while they were in Cairo, one of their regular travelling companions, Fred Beach, became the object of Baroness Vetsera’s attentions when they met her in Shepheard’s Hotel – attentions to which he showed no objection at all, but allegedly did not respond. (The following year the Baroness Vetsera would be found dead of gunshot wounds alongside her lover, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, at Mayerling.) Alva shopped for furniture for Marble House during cruises on the Alva, and on at least one occasion left the children at Nell Gwyn’s house in London while she went to look at potential purchases. On one cruise, the men of the party hunted deer at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and stalked them in Scotland where the Vanderbilts took Beaufort Castle for the shooting season. Its owner, Lord Lovat, died while they were in residence and they witnessed a Highland funeral. This added to the general gloom of the experience, which Alva never wished to repeat: ‘I always found the climate very trying in Scotland, and caring nothing for sport, found little to do there of interest.’⁸²

The benefits of this style of international travel were not always clear to Consuelo. Extended cruising put paid to any chance of conventional schooling and it isolated Consuelo from the company of children her own age for months at a time. Life on the largest private yacht in America could be dull for a child, due in part to Alva’s relentless emphasis on improvement. ‘Heavy seas provided our only escape from the curriculum of work,’ Consuelo wrote later, ‘for even sightseeing on our visits ashore became part of our education, and we were expected to write an account of all we had seen’.⁸³ In spite of her magnificence, Alva was not a particularly seaworthy boat. There were extended bouts of seasickness (noted in the ship’s log when they moored off Burntisland in Scotland in 7 August 1887), and life at sea could sometimes be positively frightening. ‘Ship rolling a great deal and shipping quantities of water, which found its way below … Both large tables in forward and after saloons carried away,’⁸⁴ read an entry in the ship’s log of an early cruise. During one storm an idiotic tutor maintained that it would only take seven huge waves in succession to sink the boat. ‘Willie and I spent the rest of the day counting the waves in terrorised apprehension as the green water deepened on our deck,’⁸⁵ recalled Consuelo.

The cruises often ended in Nice, and the party travelled to Paris, where the Vanderbilts spent May and June with their retinue. As a child Consuelo fell in love with Paris just as Alva had done. Here she could ride on the carousel, watch Punch and Judy on the Champs Elysées and sail her toy boat in the gardens of the Tuileries. Like her mother, Consuelo came to associate Paris with liberation. After months on the yacht she could play with friends from New York on the same international circuit – Waldorf Astor who would marry Nancy Langhorne, May Goelet who would be her bridesmaid and later marry the Duke of Roxburghe, and Katherine Duer, later Mrs Clarence Mackay, already demonstrating that she had a bossy streak. ‘She was always the queen in the games we played, and if anyone was bold enough to suggest it was my turn she would parry “Consuelo does not want to be Queen” and she was right,’⁸⁶ wrote Consuelo later. For several years in succession the early summer months were spent in Paris, followed by a brief return to New York; Newport in June and July; and a few weeks at Idle Hour in the early autumn before returning to New York for the confined world of the winter season.

When Consuelo reached her mid-teens, Alva finally allowed her to attend ‘Rosa classes’ when they were in New York. These were classes given by a Mr Rosa to a group of six young ladies in the home of one of the pupils – in Consuelo’s case, the classes took place at the house of Mrs Frederick Bronson on Madison Avenue and 38th Street. Blanche Oelrichs attended the Rosa classes a year or two after Consuelo, and remembered Mr Rosa as ‘a very stylish gentleman, with sideburns and a heavy watch chain, whose ambition to die in Rome was eventually gratified’.⁸⁷ The classes lasted from eleven till one while Mr Rosa fought to cram in as much English, Latin, mathematics and science as he possibly could. Consuelo preferred studying English and history and kept her early essays for Mr Rosa on the Punic Wars until she died. Two hours each morning with Mr Rosa were followed by French, German and music lessons with governesses, and an hour of exercise in Central Park.

None of this meant that Consuelo was gradually permitted greater independence. Instead, such freedom as she had enjoyed as a child was steadily curtailed in her teens, and gave way to a life that was increasingly controlled and introspective. Her brothers became more distant as they went away to boarding school and as she grew older she was forbidden to join in with their holiday activities. By the time Consuelo was sixteen there were ‘finishing governesses’ in residence, one French and one English. Since French and English views about finishing young ladies were sharply divergent if not contradictory (and probably still are), these governesses had to be handled with great tact. Alva spent many hours in the schoolroom supervising the curriculum and directing the finishing governesses. Unable to resist a competition, she sent off for the entrance papers to Oxford University and ‘found that so far as [Consuelo’s] equipment went she could enter with a condition in three live languages and one dead one’.⁸⁸

Even by the standards of the day, Consuelo’s teenage life was highly managed. It is striking that cousin Gertrude Vanderbilt was permitted far more independence, in spite of the fact that Uncle Cornelius and Aunt Alice were serious and strict. Gertrude’s teenage diaries are filled with accounts of close female friendships, sorrow at leaving school, upsets about being too young to take part in ‘tableaux’, quarrels with her best friend and making-up. As Gertrude and her cousin Adele Sloane emerged from the schoolroom and into society, they were encouraged to form views about young men in the circle of aristocratic families in which they moved. Gertrude came home and analysed some of them: ‘You have not enough go. You are trustworthy without being interesting.’ [Mo Taylor]. ‘If anyone ever looked out for No. 1, you are that person.’ [Richard Wilson], ‘You mean well by people, but you will not take very much trouble to make yourself agreeable.’ [Lewis Rutherfurd].⁸⁹ Adele was even allowed to go out riding with some young gentlemen, though she was never permitted to be alone with a man indoors (‘Had nobody in the older generation read Madame Bovary?’ asks Louis Auchincloss in astonishment.⁹⁰)

Alva would allow none of this. ‘My mother disapproved of what she termed silly boy and girl flirtations … and my governess had strict injunctions to report any flighty disturbance of my thoughts.’⁹¹ There were moments when the doll-child found such micro-management truly insulting: ‘I remember once objecting to her taste in the clothes she selected for me. With a harshness hardly warranted by so innocent an observation, she informed that I had no taste and that my opinions were not worth listening to. She brooked no contradiction, and when once I replied, “I thought I was doing right,” she stated, “I don’t ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you are told”.’⁹²

In America in the 1890s there were many constraints on the lives of well-to-do young ladies: few telephones, no motor cars, corsets, long skirts, hats fixed with pins, gloves and blouses with high whalebone collars. Even at Bailey’s Beach at Newport, Consuelo bobbed up and down in the water in an outfit of dark blue alpaca wool consisting of a dress, drawers, stockings and a hat. It is perhaps not surprising that almost two pages of her memoirs are given over to a long list of the books she read in French, German and English. One German governess in her teens particularly inspired her with a love of German poetry and philosophy – to such an extent that after her marriage Consuelo considered translating Also Sprach Zarathustra into English, only to discover that there were twenty-seven translations already in existence. Meanwhile, she was inspired to secret but short-lived experiments in austerity by Plutarch’s Lives (she spent a night on the floor, but caught a cold) and reached a ‘real emotional crisis’ when she found a copy of Mill on The Floss in the yacht’s library. The picture Consuelo paints of herself as a somewhat sensitive, solitary and rather bookish teenager is reinforced by an entry in the diaries of the household superintendent, William Gilmour. On Thursday 2 March 1893, he wrote: ‘Miss Vanderbilt’s birthday, 16 years old. I went down to Wintons [Huttons] 23 St this morning and bought 3 vols Keats poems for Willie’s present to his sister.’⁹³

For many years, the marriage of Alva and William K. Vanderbilt had been propelled by shared ambition. They had conquered New York society together, paving the way for other Vanderbilts, particularly Cornelius II and Alice, to take their place at the apex of New York society. By the mid-1880s, William K. and Cornelius II were members of all the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs. Between them, the Vanderbilts had a row of magnificent houses on Fifth Avenue. Alva had undermined Mrs Astor’s monopoly to such an extent that it had become a newspaper joke to talk about the ‘Astorbilts’. Alva made her mark on New York’s architectural history too, forging an important creative link with its greatest architect, Richard Morris Hunt. But these achievements came at great emotional expense. Even by 1885, when William Henry’s death made the William K. Vanderbilts one of the richest couples in America, the glue of shared ambition had dried out. Consuelo’s sixteenth birthday in 1892 may have been celebrated with a thoughtful present from her brother; but the next two years would be deeply scarred by the unhappiness already engulfing her parents.

* approximately $13.9 billion today

** approximately $20.7 billion today

3 Sunlight by proxy

WHEN SHE TALKED about the story of her early life in later years, Alva was only prepared to discuss the disintegration of her relationship with William K. Vanderbilt in general terms. She intimated to Sara Bard Field, however, that the start of married life had been dismal. Field, whose feelings about Alva were mixed (at best), wrote to Charles Erskine Scott Wood that Alva had stopped her in the middle of the lawn at Marble House, where no servant could eavesdrop, and had spoken of herself as ‘a girl of barely seventeen who did not fully know the sex mystery’. Alva had alluded to an ‘agony of suffering’. The memory brought ‘tears from her hard heart to her eyes’. She refused to allow Field to write about this, saying that ‘it was the sacred confidence of a woman’s heart’ and that ‘the children would object … and the Vanderbilts’. Sara Bard Field suddenly found herself in tears too, partly because her own experience with Wood was very different and partly because she felt that ‘a heart that could have been loved into beauty … has been steeled against its own finer and softer emotions. O, it is all fascinating what she is now telling me. Really, it is Life.’¹

Leaving aside the fact that Alva was twenty-two and not seventeen when she married, it is possible that her wedding night did indeed come as a terrible shock. Her mother had died almost five years earlier, her elder sister Armide was unmarried and such ‘innocence’ was not uncommon. (One can only hope that Mrs Oelrichs, her chaperone at White Sulphur Springs, took it upon herself to have a quiet word.) The historians John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman point out that there were also tensions in the sexual education of young men which did not help the process of marital adjustment. Many young men in New York in the 1870s had their first sexual experiences with prostitutes, ‘a poor training ground for middle-class bridegrooms’.² In pioneering studies carried out in late-nineteenth-century America, middle-class women talked of finding sex pleasurable, but it depended on the behaviour of their husbands. Young men used to encounters with prostitutes would often ‘bring to the conjugal bedroom a form of sexual expression badly out of line with what their wives might desire. On the other hand, some married men may have continued to visit the districts precisely because they could not find in their wives the kind of sexual availability, or responsiveness, they wanted.’³ The problems caused by this kind of mismatch were often exacerbated by fear of contracting venereal disease. There is some evidence in the later part of Alva’s life that she was familiar with this particular anxiety while married to William K. Vanderbilt.

For several years, the Vanderbilts found a way of resolving these early difficulties which cannot have been helped by the death of Murray Smith two weeks after the wedding. Until about 1885, however, the marriage had such forward momentum and such a triumphantly successful agenda, that both husband and wife ignored its disadvantages. Alva later hinted that the real difficulties set in after about ten years. ‘Not many men are in love with their wives after ten or twelve years,’⁴ she wrote. Elsewhere she remarked that ‘sex passion’ between man and wife generally lasts about ten years, and that after that time men of her class ‘amused themselves elsewhere’.⁵ In the case of William K. and Alva, however, ten years of marriage coincided with the death of William Henry in 1885. William Henry’s fondness for Alva may have acted as a check on his son’s behaviour. After his death, this impediment disappeared and William K., always a handsome man, found himself in possession of a limitless fortune and much less to do. By 1885 the Vanderbilts had achieved most of their shared objectives: their yacht, the Alva and Marble House may have kept them busy – but these were opulent extras, icing on a well-baked cake.

In the second set of memoirs that Alva dictated to her secretary, Mary Young, after 1928, she suggests that having fought so hard to extract herself from the snares of genteel poverty, she now found herself faced with an even more pernicious form of exclusion. ‘It was a time’ according to Alva, ‘when men of wealth seemed to think they could do anything they liked; have anything, or any woman, they, for the moment wanted. And so, as a matter of fact, they very nearly could, and did. If a man was rich enough and had enough to offer there were, unfortunately, women willing and waiting to throw themselves at their heads, women who were younger and more attractive to them than the wives of whom they had grown tired.’⁶ Alva does not mention William K. by name when she talks of women insulted by their husbands’ ‘open and flagrant and vulgar infidelities’, but she comments that the conduct of J. Pierpont Morgan, Colonel John Jacob Astor, and others was notorious. ‘Col Astor’s yachting parties were public scandals. He would take women of every class and kind, even chambermaids out of the hotels of the coastwise cities where the yacht put in, to amuse himself and the men of his party on these trips.’⁷

And what of the wives of these rich men? These men did not seek divorce for there was no need. They simply set their wives aside, leaving them ‘to maintain the dignity of their position in the world, such as it was, and to care for their children, while they amused themselves elsewhere. That, they took it upon themselves to decide, was all that a woman was good for after they had finished with her in ten years or less of married life.’⁸ No-one was prepared to challenge the convention by which a society woman in her prime ignored adulterous behaviour on the part of her husband and withdrew into a kind of half-life, while bravely maintaining a public front of domestic respectability. ‘It was considered religious, dignified and correct for the wife to withdraw into the shadows while her husband paid the family respects to the sunshine … she was supposed to get her sunlight by proxy through the husband.’⁹ It was, in Alva’s view, an intolerable by-product of monopoly capitalism, a uniquely American form of purdah: the seclusion of cast-off wives enforced by rich men whose solidarity in the matter was perceived to be indestructible.

When she recalled working with Richard Morris Hunt on Marble House, Alva remarked that the period from 1886 and 1892 marked ‘some of the saddest years of my life’.¹⁰ It is possible that she welcomed long cruises on the yacht as a way of controlling her husband’s infidelities. Later, the New York World recalled that she had looked unhappy for much of this time. ‘She looked both weary and sad, and people wondered why it was. They said it was because she was naturally of a peevish and discontented disposition. They said it was because she had achieved every ambition possible to her, and was made wretched because there was nothing further to achieve … But gradually the truth crept out and it was known that Mrs Vanderbilt was wretched because her husband had broken his marriage vows, not once but over and over again.’¹¹

The tension certainly affected sixteen-year-old Consuelo. ‘I had reached an age when the continual disagreements between my parents had become a matter of deep concern to me. I was tensely susceptible to their differences, and each new quarrel awoke responding echoes that tore at my loyalties.’¹² On 16 July 1892, in an apt metaphor for the disintegrating state of the William K. Vanderbilt marriage, the Alva sank. Bound for Newport from Bar Harbor, the yacht was forced to anchor in dense fog off Monomoy Point where she was accidentally rammed by the mellifluously named freight steamer, H. F. Dimmock. William K. reacted by commissioning an even more luxurious – and rather more seaworthy – yacht, the Valiant.

While the Valiant was under construction, Alva occupied herself with the finishing touches to Marble House so that it was ready to receive its first guests in August 1892. There was plenty to amaze these visitors who were welcomed into the house through an elegant and elaborate bronze entrance grill (weighing 10 tons and made by the John Williams Bronze Foundry of New York). In the hall, warm and creamy Siena marble lined the walls, floors and staircase. Guests were then invited to admire rooms that have been described by one expert as a series of knowledgeable experiments in French decorative style.¹³ The dominant theme was the art and architecture of Versailles. In the upper hall a bas relief of Richard Morris Hunt faced a matching bas relief of the architect of Versailles, Jules Hardouin Mansart. The dining room was inspired by the Salon of Hercules, the Siena marble of the entrance hall giving way to walls lined with pink Numidian marble specially quarried in Algeria. A painting of Louis XIV attributed to Pierre Mignard, said to have hung in the Salon of Hercules at the time Alva visited the palace in the late 1860s, dominated one end of the room.

The dining room was only surpassed by the ballroom – the Gold Room – Alva’s miniature edition of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a riot of neo-classical exuberance with panels of Aphrodite, Demeter, Pan and Heracles suggesting a world of love, beauty, revelry and music sadly at odds with the lives of the proprietors. (Only a panel of Heracles aiming an arrow at Nessus who had made off with his wife comes close to reflecting emotional turmoil behind the scenes.) Above the marble mantelpiece, bronze figures bore vast candelabra, while cupids capered playfully and cherubs blew trumpets on the walls and ceilings. The Gold Room was dominated by wood panels gilded in red, green and yellow gold carved by the architectural sculptor Karl Bitter, its dazzling magnificence multiplied many times by vast mirrors hung over the four doors, above the mantelpiece, on the south wall, and by the south windows. Elsewhere in the house, Louis XV replaced Louis XIV in an outbreak of Rococo Revival: swags and garlands of flowers, masks, and somersaulting cherubs prevailed here and in Alva’s bedroom an eighteenth-century four-poster bed stood on a very fine Aubusson carpet.

The anomaly was the so-called Gothic Room, probably inspired by the Bourges house of the great medieval merchant, Jacques Coeur, whom Alva greatly admired. Paul Miller, curator at the Preservation Society of Newport County, suggests that the Gothic Room may originally have been intended for 660 Fifth Avenue. In 1889 the Hunts and Vanderbilts met in Paris to discuss furnishings at a meeting that coincided with the publication of a catalogue raisonné of Emile Gavet’s collection of European works of art from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The Vanderbilts bought half the collection, including a ‘Madonna and Child’ by Luca della Robbia that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Hunt’s design for the Gothic Room was then transferred to Marble House to display objets purchased from the Gavet collection, though the room acquired American accents in the process: the foliate cornice around the room which was inspired by Coeur’s house reappeared with crabs and lobsters to reflect the seaside setting.¹⁴

In 1892, those who knew Alva best might have detected her unhappiness in much of this design. She once described Marble House as her fourth child and its interior made few concessions to her husband, other than cartouches bearing the monogram ‘WV’ and a small study reflecting his sporting interests. Meanwhile, Alva’s preoccupations could be found everywhere: on the ceiling painting in her bedroom where the paradoxical Goddess Athene reigned supreme, war-like but the goddess of fine craftsmen, and in many references to the French ancien régime. Even the use of marble suggested a fugitive memory of the Smith house in Mobile. If it is true that the best buildings of the Gilded Age dissolved almost entirely into make-believe, her greatest collaboration with Richard Morris Hunt had this quality in abundance. Even more than 660 Fifth Avenue, Marble House was characterised by a feeling of withdrawal from the world outside. But here there was a sense of unhappy withdrawal from a miserable marriage too, as if Alva has turned in on herself and back towards the world of the ancien régime she loved as a girl before the harsh compromises of adult life took their toll. To some, the Gold Room still stands as a symbol of the heartless, glittering emptiness of the Gilded Age; but it can also be seen as the most heartfelt room in Newport, an intense and private dream.

As far as Consuelo was concerned, however, Marble House was associated with sensations closer to nightmare, claustrophobia and control. It felt like a gilded cage. Even the gates were lined with sheet iron. ‘Unlike Louis XIV’s creation,’ she wrote tartly, ‘it stood in restricted grounds, and, like a prison, was surrounded by high walls.’¹⁵ Consuelo was sixteen when Marble House was finished. In spite of this, Alva conceded nothing to her daughter’s taste. In this instance her vision of the Marble House interior entirely overpowered the section of her child-rearing theory that involved independence. Still a doll in a doll’s-house, Consuelo’s bedroom was designed by her mother down to the last detail and furnished with objects which she scarcely dared to move. ‘To the right on an antique table were aligned a mirror and various silver brushes and combs. On another table writing utensils were disposed in such perfect order that I never ventured to use them. For my mother had chosen every piece of furniture and had placed every ornament according to her taste, and had forbidden the intrusion of my personal possessions.’¹⁶ It was this bedroom that inspired one of the most quoted passages about Alva from Consuelo’s memoir The Glitter and the Gold: ‘Often as I lay on the bed, that like St Ursula’s in the lovely painting by Carpaccio stood on a dais and was covered with a baldaquin, I reflected that there was in her love of me something of the creative spirit of an artist – that it was her wish to produce me as a finished specimen framed in a perfect setting, and that my person was dedicated to whatever final disposal she had in mind.’¹⁷

When Marble House opened to widespread acclaim during the Newport season of 1892, Alva was less concerned with the final disposal of Consuelo than the state of her own marriage. ‘Sunshine by proxy’ was decidedly not for her. She was only thirty-nine. She refused to accept a scenario in which she tolerated her husband’s philandering and retired to a virtuous life in the shadows. She particularly objected to the way in which rich husbands enforced their wives’ powerless position by reminding them of their financial dependence. ‘If a wife, hungering for love and with more spirit than most of her sex, asserted her right to a lover or to contacts with the outside world, the husband declared she was ruining his reputation along with her own and with the power of the bank resources at his command, bade her retire to the obscurity of respectability.’¹⁸ Alva’s reaction to this was spirited. She acquired a lover of her own.

Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont was the wayward son of financier August Belmont. Married to a socially pre-eminent wife of impeccable pedigree, August Belmont was of Jewish origin, though he had converted to Christianity, and represented the Rothschilds’ interests in New York. He lived flamboyantly, introducing the first French chef to a private New York house, establishing a pace-setting example when it came to wining and dining, and causing wild gossip. He was another of Mrs Astor’s principal bêtes noires, though her resistance to the next generation of Belmonts gradually dissolved.

Before his relationship with Alva, Oliver Belmont was often to be found in the Oelrichs household, charming Blanche Oelrichs as a child. She liked his ‘slow urbanity, his face rutted with lines – from the hopes and disillusions of his life as a lover, I suspected. For certainly he must be a romantic man.’¹⁹ The circumstances surrounding the collapse of Oliver Belmont’s first marriage suggest that his behaviour was not always romantic. After a long courtship which was bitterly opposed by both his parents, Belmont married a beautiful socialite, Sara Whiting. On their honeymoon in Paris they were joined by Sara’s domineering mother and two sisters, who moved in with the newlyweds and refused to leave. Oliver eventually marched out on the ménage – understandable perhaps had he not stormed off in the company of an exotic Spanish dancer, bad form at any time, but especially on one’s honeymoon. On hearing that his new bride was pregnant he returned to Paris to attempt a reconciliation, only to find himself accused of heavy drinking and physical violence – allegations which he rebutted furiously. Sara Whiting later gave birth to a daughter, Natica, whom Belmont refused ever to acknowledge, while Mrs Whiting insisted on a divorce.

Oliver Belmont’s parents were mortified by the publicity surrounding his first marriage. They had in any case long despaired of him: in spite of various attempts to find him gainful employment he appeared to have no greater ambition than to live as a gentleman of leisure. As early as 1888 they were concerned that he was joining a cruise on the Alva, fearing that Vanderbilt sojourns in resorts such as Monte Carlo would do nothing to raise his level of ambition and knowing that his friendship with Mrs William K. Vanderbilt was already a talking point.²⁰ Oliver joined part or all of subsequent Vanderbilt cruises in 1889 and 1890, however.²¹ Indeed, his obstinacy and readiness to ignore society’s opinion on this matter may have attracted Alva. Here was someone with strength of personality, someone to brace against, unlike William K. whom Alva later described as a ‘weak nonentity’. It may also be true, as Louis Auchincloss has written, that Oliver was attractive because he represented a challenge. He had already caused offence. There was just a whiff of violence about him. He was a Belmont. ‘One begins to suspect that the setting up of hurdles in order to jump them was her way of adding a bit of zest to the sameness of a social game that was already showing itself a drag to her lively spirit. And were not the Belmonts partly Jewish? Better and better!’²²

Initially the relationship between Alva and Oliver Belmont raised few eyebrows for it was not unusual for the neglected wives of rich men to acquire ‘walkers’. ‘The Newport ladies of those days were trying hard to emulate their sisters in cosmopolitan Europe,’ writes Blanche Oelrichs; ‘and it would have been thought extremely “bourgeois” for attractive matrons not to have gentlemen about them who were “attentive”.’²³ As the warmth of feeling between Alva and Belmont began to show, however, the gossips got down to work. ‘I used to think Oliver Belmont one of the handsomest men at the Coaching Parade, with his dark eyes, clear-cut profile and slender, faun-like grace,’ wrote Elizabeth Lehr, thinking back to her teens. ‘Mrs W. K. Vanderbilt often sat at his side on the box behind the four famous bays, Sandringham, Rockingham, Buckingham and Hurlingham. The women glanced at her as she sat wide-eyed and innocent-looking, and whispered to one another.’²⁴ Town Topics also picked up Oliver’s constant presence at Alva’s side and talk persisted into later generations. In a delightful lecture about her childhood on Bellevue Avenue, Eileen Slocum remarked: ‘Down the years I especially remember the gossip about Mrs William K. Vanderbilt’s affair with Mr O. H. P. Belmont … Daddy was very critical … “Poor Willy K. drove up, unexpectedly, one day from the train in his carriage,” Daddy said, “and entered his own house and ascended his own staircase and found Mr Belmont hiding in the closet of his own bedroom. Willy should have shot him.”’²⁵

It does seem perverse, therefore, that in the autumn of 1893, when their marriage was strained to the point of collapse, the Vanderbilts not only decided to go on a long cruise on the Valiant to India but invited Oliver Belmont to join them. It is just possible that Alva and Oliver were not yet lovers, for this would have put Alva, who was always political, at a disadvantage. Perhaps William K. welcomed Belmont’s presence because he improved Alva’s mood. Perhaps the expedition was William K.’s idea and Alva only agreed to go on condition she could take Oliver too. Consuelo later said that it was clear even to her that the cruise was a desperate last attempt to patch things up, one last effort to avoid ‘the rupture which I felt could not be long delayed’. The expedition set off in an atmosphere of ‘dread and uncertainty’ with a party that included ‘my parents, my brother Harold, a doctor, a governess and the three men friends who were our constant companions. Willie, being at school, remained at home. My mother, claiming that my governess gave sufficient trouble, refused to have another woman on board.’²⁶ The three men friends whose names appear in the ship’s log were Oliver Belmont, Fred Beech and J. Louis Webb.

The cruise began on 23 November 1893 at 3.35 p.m. precisely with a total of eighty-five people on board, seen off by a crowd that ‘surged and pushed and jostled on the pier like animated stalks in a bunch of asparagus’.²⁷ The Valiant arrived in Bombay just over a month later, on Christmas Day. On 30 December, the Vanderbilt party disembarked for a two-week overland journey by special train to Calcutta, while the yacht made its way round from Bombay to await them. Alva was pleased to discover that the Taj Mahal had been inspired by the spirit of a woman. Otherwise, much of what she saw in India appalled her. If Alva was taken aback by what she described as superstition and ‘repulsive religious ceremonies’,²⁸ Consuelo was frankly terrified by such unusually close proximity to humanity en masse, particularly when it rattled at the doors of the Vanderbilt sleeping cars and tried to force an entry. ‘It was difficult to secure bath water and the food was incredibly nasty. We lived on tea, toast and marmalade … It was wonderful to find all the luxuries of home on the Valiant which had come round India from Bombay and lay anchored in the Hooghly.’²⁹

What Consuelo did not know as she recuperated from this taxing journey, was that the stay in Calcutta would mark a turning-point in her life. While Consuelo, Harold, and the Vanderbilts’ friends remained on board the Valiant, Alva and William K. were invited to stay by the Viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne, at Government House in Calcutta. Sometimes described as ‘the most neglected statesman in modern British history’ Lord Lansdowne (or Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne), had already had a distinguished career as Governor-General of Canada and would go on to become Secretary of State for War, Foreign Secretary, leader of the Conservative and Unionist peers, and a member of Asquith’s wartime cabinet. At the time of the Vanderbilts’ visit to Calcutta, however, his sojourn in India as Viceroy was almost at an end, and, worn out by his tour of duty, he was longing to go home. Nonetheless, Lord and Lady Lansdowne extended generous hospitality to the Vanderbilts with the result that just when Alva was feeling most vulnerable to a life of ‘sunlight by proxy’ she witnessed the life of the Vicereine, Lady Lansdowne, when the British Raj was at its zenith.

‘We might as well be monarchs,’³⁰ wrote Mary Curzon when she arrived as Vicereine herself three years later. Even aristocrats such as Lord Lansdowne, accustomed to palatial space and waited on since birth, found Government House in Calcutta somewhat grandiose. ‘Words cannot describe the hugeness of this place or the utter absence of anything like homely comfort … [The bedroom with its] colossal bed large enough for half a dozen couples … the ceiling which is so far up that one can scarcely see it,’³¹ he wrote to his mother. Historian David Cannadine suggests that the grandeur was a deliberate political ploy: ‘The British now saw themselves as the legitimate successors of the Mughal emperors, and came to believe that their regime should project a suitably “oriental” and “imperial” image. So they set out to construct a new ritual idiom for the government of India, partly based on the appropriation of what they believed were traditional Mughal court ceremonials, and partly invented and developed by themselves, through which they could express their own authority … The ceremonial surrounding the Viceroy, both in Calcutta and at Simla, and as he travelled round India, became increasingly splendid, ornate, elaborate and magnificent – far grander than the state in which British monarchs themselves lived at home.’³²

The illusionists of the British Raj found a most appreciative audience in Alva, though even she was startled by the size of the Government House guest suite and the ‘ten native servants who were assigned … in beautiful royal liveries of red embroidered in gold to serve us’.³³ What impressed her most, however, was the quasi-imperial role of both Lansdownes. ‘The numerous house guests and outside friends assembled in an antechamber, and at a given moment the double doors were thrown open and the Viceroy and Lady Lansdowne were announced’. Even at lunchtime. Calcutta House had a throne room and on state occasions the Vicereine took her place on a throne on the dais beside her husband, receiving Indian princes in magnificent ceremony. Alva was even more impressed by the extent to which the British Vicereine made an important contribution in her own right, undertaking charity work in Calcutta and running much of the social life at Government House.

The Vanderbilts’ visit coincided with plans for the handover of power to Lord Elgin and tributes were already flowing in to the departing Viceroy and Vicereine. Lord Lansdowne had been a popular viceroy and the view was frequently expressed that his tour of duty had enjoyed ‘an almost unique popularity, to which the social gifts of Lady Lansdowne had largely contributed’.³⁴ Alva would also have been aware of the splendid formalities planned for the Lansdownes’ departure, ceremonies which would acknowledge the contribution of them both, just as the ceremonies to welcome the Curzons in 1898 acknowledged Mary Curzon’s American birth. There was no life in the shadows or sunlight by proxy for a Vicereine of India; and just as she had once pictured the Vanderbilts as Medicis, Alva could now visualise her daughter’s future.

‘My mother, whose habit it was to impose her views rather than to invite discussion, had already, on occasion, revealed the hopes she nourished for my brilliant future, and her admiration for the British way of life was as apparent as was her desire to place me in an aristocratic setting. These intentions, I am sure, crystallised during her visit at Government House,’³⁵ wrote Consuelo later. Worse, conversations between Alva and Lady Lansdowne revealed that there was a most interesting way of moving this vision forward. Maud Lansdowne had a nephew of the right age, with an interest in politics. He was already a duke – the young Duke of Marlborough. Consuelo thought later that it was during her parents’ stay in Calcutta that ‘the possibility of my marriage to him may have been discussed’. Even if the idea was not discussed explicitly, however, ‘it is certain that it was then [my mother’s] ambitions took definite shape; for she confessed to me years later that she had decided to marry me either to Marlborough or to Lord Lansdowne’s heir’.³⁶

It was possibly in a spirit of mutual inspection that Consuelo was invited to spend a day with the Lansdownes’ younger daughter, Lady Beatrix, for Lady Lansdowne was fond of her nephew and knew that he had inherited a troubling financial burden in Blenheim Palace. The impression made by Miss Vanderbilt on the Lansdownes is not recorded but the serious-minded Consuelo was astounded (to the point of sounding quite priggish) by the ignorance and ‘homespun education’ of Lady Beatrix. On 19 January 1894 the captain of the Valiant recorded that ‘the Viceroy & party from Government House were entertained on board’.³⁷ The Valiant left its moorings in Calcutta on the same day and headed back to Europe. It mattered not that when she played with her friends in Paris, Consuelo never liked being queen: Alva had decided what she wanted for her only daughter.

It was later claimed by the press that the Valiant cruise broke up in India after a final blazing row between the Vanderbilts; but according to both Alva and the ship’s log, it continued as planned, sailing first to Ceylon, where the entry read: ‘left a fireman behind at Colombo so we are one short’.³⁸ Apart from the fireman, the party remained intact, winding its way back to the Mediterranean by way of Alexandria, where the yacht was detained by rough seas. Near Rhodes, in another strangely symbolic incident, the Valiant lost its way – the captain took a local pilot on board who turned out to be incompetent. There is no doubt that relations between the Vanderbilts were strained to the limit and these setbacks can have done little to help matters. A visit to Delphi in Greece briefly acted as balm to Consuelo’s troubled soul, but the break came by the time the yacht reached Nice. As the Valiant docked, Consuelo was told that her parents’ marriage was definitely over.

Consuelo’s initial feeling was one of relief ‘that the sinister gloom of their relationship would no longer encompass me’.³⁹ It was only later that she realised how little she would now see of her father and the extent to which Alva would come to dominate her life. In the short term nothing changed. After their yacht moored at Nice on 24 February 1894, Alva took Consuelo to Paris, as she had so often done before. Both Vanderbilts remained in Europe for the rest of the summer, leaving the American press in something of a bother about where they were. Town Topics sneered derisively at newspapers alleging that the Vanderbilts were simultaneously in Newport, New York and Marseilles, asserting confidently that they had left America for three years and had leased a deer forest in Scotland. There was a calm interlude of several weeks before the press grasped what had actually happened.

Meanwhile, Consuelo’s experience of Paris during the late spring of 1894 was happier than it had ever been. She and Alva moved into the Hôtel Bristol. ‘I can still see the view over the Tuileries Gardens from our windows, still enjoy our walks under the flowering chestnuts of the Champs Elysées and our drives in the Bois de Boulogne in our carriage and pair. Every day there were visits to museums and churches and lectures at the Sorbonne, but the classical matinées at the Théâtre Français were my greatest pleasure.’⁴⁰ It was only with hindsight that she realised that her mother spent the early summer of that year preparing her for an aristocratic setting. Alva chose Consuelo’s dresses from the great French dressmakers – Worth, Doucet and Rouff – and she arranged for her to have elocution lessons, in French, with an actress from the Comédie Française, where there was a long tradition of perfect diction. It seems likely that Alva arranged these lessons to prepare her daughter for a public life such as that of Lady Lansdowne’s, where good voice projection was required when opening bazaars and returning speeches of welcome. ‘Whatever her motive, the lessons produced a voice that carried,’ said Consuelo. (Alva was later frustrated by her own fear of public speaking, brought up in a world where, in the rare event that a woman wrote a speech, she would hand it over to be read by a man.)

While they were in Paris, Alva also commissioned the portrait of Consuelo that now hangs at Blenheim, by Carolus-Duran. Alva’s choice of artist was significant for Carolus-Duran was a fashionable painter particularly renowned for his portraits of aristocratic women. In an early exercise in branding, Alva requested that the background of red velvet which Carolus-Duran normally used should be replaced by a landscape in the classical style of the English eighteenth century, wishing Consuelo to ‘bear comparison with those of preceding duchesses who had been painted by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney and Lawrence’.⁴¹ On its completion, Alva arranged for it to be shipped to America and hung in the Gold Room at Marble House.

Consuelo made her Paris debut that summer at a ball given by the Duc and Duchesse de Gramont for their eldest daughter; she wore a dress of white tulle by Worth. ‘It touched the ground with a full skirt, as was the fashion in those days, and it had a tightly laced bodice. My hair was piled high in curls and a narrow ribbon was tied round my long and slender neck. I had no jewels and wore gloves that came almost to my shoulders. The French dubbed me La belle Mlle. Vanderbilt au long cou.’⁴² The party was a bal blanc, as parties for debutantes were known, where all the young women wore white. Elisabeth de Gramont remembered Consuelo as ‘a tall girl whose small head with retroussé eyes like a Japanese, drooped languidly over her shoulder. She possessed great charm.’⁴³ Such evenings were misery for ‘wallflowers’ for whom any help from artifice was banned. ‘Good girls were dressed in light, insipid colours and the poorest of materials, and all the touches that give “tone” – diamonds, powder, paint and perfume – were rigorously forbidden.’⁴⁴ The aces of the period, the grand ‘marrying men’, would sometimes look in briefly at these social gatherings, at the rows of nervous, perspiring debutantes lined up like cattle for their inspection. (On one occasion Elisabeth de Gramont heard one say: ‘This place stinks of armpits, let’s go to Maxim’s.’⁴⁵) There was little opportunity for conversation because permission to dance had to be sought from the young lady’s chaperone and as soon as the dance was over, she was led straight back to her mother.

There was no shortage of partners for a seventeen-year-old American heiress, however, and by the end of June, Consuelo had received five proposals of marriage. ‘When I say I had, I mean that my mother informed me that five men had asked her for my hand … She had, as a matter of course, refused them, since she considered none of them sufficiently exalted.’⁴⁶ Consuelo was only allowed to consider one: Prince Francis Joseph, a German prince who was the youngest of the four Battenberg princes, and at the centre of an intrigue to elect him ruler of Bulgaria. Confronted with the prospect of a royal crown rather than an English ducal coronet, Alva seems momentarily to have wavered from her original plan and Prince Francis Joseph was allowed to present his case to Consuelo. She was horrified both by the idea and by the Prince to whom she developed an immediate aversion. Alva too had second thoughts, unsure whether the intrigue would succeed. Nothing more was heard from her on the subject, though news of this potential engagement eventually reached Town Topics in New York who asserted (correctly this time) that: ‘There is a general feeling that the report is not based upon facts, at this time at least.’⁴⁷

In June, Alva took Consuelo to England. ‘[Alva] did not let her dally long in the drawing-rooms of Paris,’ wrote Elisabeth de Gramont. ‘She intended [Consuelo] for the English aristocracy, which she deemed more advantageous.’⁴⁸ Here Alva rented a house at Danesfield near Marlow and asked her old friend Mrs William Jay and her daughters to join them. The weather was so cold that they only went to Danesfield at the weekends and spent the rest of the time in the warmth of a London hotel. Consuelo described it as ‘frowsty in the true English sense’,⁴⁹ and thought with longing of their lovely hotel in Paris beside the Tuileries Gardens.

In England, Alva made use of her networks. The two people whose help she enlisted in the summer of 1894 were Consuelo Yznaga, now Duchess of Manchester, and Minnie Stevens, now Mrs Paget – pre-eminent figures in English society, favourites of the Prince of Wales and leading lights of his circle known as the Marlborough House Set. Consuelo did not care for Minnie Paget (later Lady Paget) one jot, however. ‘Lady Paget was considered handsome; to me, with her quick wit and worldly standards, she was Becky Sharp incarnate … Once greetings had been exchanged I realised with a sense of acute discomfort that I was being critically appraised by a pair of hard green eyes.’⁵⁰

Such scrutiny was all too familiar. In an age when young women were commodities on the marriage market, they were forced to become accustomed to such analysis, which is not to say they enjoyed it.* ‘I was particularly sensitive about my nose, for it had an upward curve which my mother and her friends discussed with complete disregard for my feelings,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Since nothing could be done to guide its misguided progress, there seemed to be no point in stressing my misfortune.’⁵¹ In London, Minnie Paget expressed her views forcefully. ‘The simple dress I was wearing, my shyness and diffidence, which in France were regarded as natural in a debutante, appeared to awaken her ridicule. “If I am to bring her out,” she told my mother, “she must be able to compete at least as far as clothes are concerned with far better-looking girls” … It was useless to demur that I was only seventeen. Tulle must give way to satin, the baby décolletage to a more generous display of neck and arms, naiveté to sophistication. Lady Paget was adamant.’⁵²

Minnie Paget was once described by Town Topics as having ‘watchful eyes ever on someone with money to burn’,⁵³ and was rumoured to accept a fee for this kind of help. Having made over Consuelo to her satisfaction she arranged a dinner party to which she invited the young Duke of Marlborough. By now Alva’s plan was becoming clear, even to her daughter. Minnie Paget placed the Duke to her right with Consuelo on his other side – ‘a rather unnecessary public avowal of her intentions’ Consuelo thought afterwards. ‘He seemed to me very young, although six years my senior, and I thought him good-looking and intelligent. He had a small aristocratic face with a large nose and rather prominent blue eyes. His hands, which he used in a fastidious manner, were well shaped and he seemed inordinately proud of them.’⁵⁴

They only met once during Consuelo’s visit to England, and it seemed at the time that nothing would come of the matter, to Consuelo’s great relief. Behind her back, however, English tongues were already wagging. Mrs Paget (later described by George Cornwallis-West as the worst gossip in London) was unable to keep quiet about the plan. On 19 July, the Duke’s grandmother, Frances, Duchess of Marlborough, wrote to her daughter-in-law Lady Randolph Churchill that she was ‘amazed at the news … [of] Marlborough’s marriage. Mrs Paget has been very busy introducing him to Miss Vanderbilt and telling everybody she meant to arrange a marriage between them, but he has only met her once and does not seem to incline to pursue the acquaintance.’⁵⁵

One reason that the introduction may have stalled was that the American press had finally picked up the scent of the Vanderbilts’ separation. By 1894, the dark side of the Faustian bargain between the press and newer members of high society was all too obvious: socialites who had courted publicity now found themselves the captives of its machinery. It had become big business too. By the early 1880s most newspapers in New York responded to demand and carried social columns, while magazines devoted entirely to society matters began to appear. Both were aimed at two audiences. The first was a wider readership well outside the social elite, and included those who simply enjoyed society sagas as entertainment, nosey servants and those who worked in society’s service industries for whom information was power, such as Mrs Heeney in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of The Country (the ‘society’ manicurist and masseuse whose alligator bag was always filled with newspaper clippings). The second audience was high society itself and those who aspired to it. Here, the position of its members was reinforced and legitimised by constantly seeing their names, clothes and parties in print. ‘If one’s social goal was to force an entry into the most exclusive circles, half the satisfaction of achievement would have been lost if one’s erstwhile acquaintances had not been able to read all about it,’⁵⁶ writes Ruth Brandon.

In some cases, newspaper editors were society figures in their own right, like James Gordon Bennett Jr of the New York Herald, or the society columnist George Wetherspoon who wrote for The New York Times. Though the social elite sometimes claimed to be irritated by comment in such publications, it generally remained on the right side of intrusive. Oddly, the two publications where it was most important to be ‘seen’ were the two which explicitly held the Four Hundred in the greatest contempt. One was the New York World after 1883, when it was bought by Joseph Pulitzer, who combined formidable liberal campaigning with a keen sense of the aspirations of his poorer female readership, and reconciled the two by covering the activities of high society in sensational and barbed detail while stopping just short of pouring unmitigated scorn. The other key publication was Town Topics, which changed the whole nature of society journalism after it was purchased by the piratical Colonel D’Alton Mann in 1891. When he took over ownership of the magazine that year he wrote: ‘The 400 of New York is an element so absolutely shallow and unhealthy that it deserves to be derided almost incessantly’⁵⁷ – an editorial philosophy he pursued with great ebullience until a court case in 1905 exposed the seamier side of his methods. Colonel Mann paid for stories from a wide network of clubmen and other members of society down on their luck for his information, as well as servants and suppliers, which then became part of his weekly ‘Saunterings’ column. As a weekly magazine, Town Topics harassed society’s elite week in, week out using a well-placed network of spies so that long-running plot lines emerged for the initiated, which often turned out to be accurate because his informants were so close to the heart of society. Colonel Mann was known to accept money from society figures in return for pulling unflattering stories; and it would later emerge that he had a group of eminent ‘immunes’ whom he blackmailed into handing over large sums of money in exchange for soft treatment.

One of Mann’s favourite tricks was to place paragraphs in his column that described reprehensible behaviour on the part of anonymous individuals, giving the readership the fun of decoding his allegations (this was often easy because he frequently placed another paragraph describing quite innocuous activities by the named individual close by). On 19 July 1894, Town Topics leapt into print with a story of ‘a most offensive liaison going on in high life between a man who has been conspicuous in society and … the wife of a millionaire that moves in the same set’. It had long been thought that this relationship would become a scandal. ‘But with a great deal of manoeuvring some sort of treaty of peace was patched up.’ Much to Town Topics’ sorrow however, ‘the shameful affair had continued without abatement’, the lover in question was now in Europe with the married woman, and the husband’s reputation had been ‘recklessly besmirched’. The names of two honourable families were about to be ‘dragged in the dust, all to gratify the passions of a pair that have renounced the thousand legitimate delights at their command to embrace the one that is forbidden and reprehensible’.⁵⁸

But there was another twist to the story. It would appear that the husband in the case had inexplicably forsaken the moral high ground by taking up with an inamorata of his own in Paris, a demimondaine whom he was entertaining in ‘the fashion of Lucullus of old’. By the following week Town Topics had stopped bothering to keep up the fiction. William K. Vanderbilt was in Paris flaunting his relationship with one Nellie Neustretter, a very grand courtesan – ‘one of the prettiest and nicest of the high-class horizontales’.⁵⁹

Alva seems to have decided to sit the publicity out in England, staying on after the London season and all suitable aristocrats had dispersed to the grouse moors of Scotland. It is unclear whether Town Topics was correct in maintaining that Oliver Belmont joined her, but it is quite likely. Alva and Consuelo returned to New York on 28 September 1894 on board the Lucania, arriving in Newport well after the season closed on 29 September. Alva now prepared to implement a three-point plan. She would divorce William K. for adultery, ensuring that she could have custody of the children; she would place Consuelo in an English aristocratic setting; and she would regularise her own position with Oliver Belmont. These three objectives would become intricately entangled in the months ahead.

After the amusements of Paris, Consuelo looked forward to a winter season in New York, well away from Europe and threats of international marriage. She and Alva settled back into 660 Fifth Avenue. William K. was banished to his club. (Dissatisfied with the configuration of space he called in workmen to knock down partition walls and redecorate. ‘When at the club Mr Vanderbilt can entertain at dinner forty friends on the same floor upon which his rooms are and be sure of no intrusion,’ insinuated Town Topics silkily.⁶⁰) It was reported variously that his brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II had rushed to Paris in the summer for crisis talks and that the Vanderbilts had met for a family caucus in Boston. Whether or not these family conferences took place, the Vanderbilts now rallied firmly behind William K., because, according to Town Topics, Alva had condescended to them all in the most supercilious manner for years.⁶¹ There was certainly tension. As far as Alva was concerned they were either with her or against her. She broke off relations with every one of William K.’s siblings and anyone else who failed to offer her unconditional support. As a result, Consuelo’s hopes of a New York debut were dashed. ‘During the following months I was to suffer a perpetual denial of friendships and pleasures, since my mother resented seeing anyone whose loyalties were not completely hers,’⁶² she wrote.

Disliking scandal and controversy, William K. did his best to dissuade Alva from pressing for a divorce. However angry he may have felt, he was concerned that given the double standards of the day, disgrace would rebound on her alone. Well into the autumn, Alva’s lawyer, Joseph Choate, did his best to dissuade her, pointing out that her close circle would regard her as a traitor for drawing scandalous attention to the lives of the ultra-wealthy. ‘He saw immense fortunes in the hands of a privileged few. He knew the inevitable social unrest which would result from such a condition. If Wealth laid itself open to attack from any source its throne was weakened.’⁶³ When that failed to have any effect, Choate tried to warn Alva that by insisting on divorcing William K. Vanderbilt for adultery, she would be pitting herself against the vested interests of American male wealth. ‘He knew better than I did the power and influence of wealth. He knew its sway over Courts of Kings and Courts of Law … prelates and laymen … even those who called themselves “friend”.’⁶⁴

Choate argued that the punishment meted out to women daring to challenge male hegemony would be so harsh that even Alva would not be able to withstand it. Reflecting on the episode, Alva once again presented her reaction as heroic: ‘My argument in return was that I believed it was necessary for some woman to blaze the way for a just recognition of her own personality.’⁶⁵ Later, though, she also said that if she had known how difficult it would be, she might have thought twice about going into battle alone. The problem which Alva never mentioned was that it was one thing to sue for adultery (and this was courageous); but it was quite another matter to survive the battle when the world knew that she had a lover of her own whom she wished to marry. Once Joseph Choate assured her she would have custody of the children, however, Alva determined to press ahead regardless. ‘The legalized prostitution that marriage covers is to me appalling … If marriage is a protection for the woman against many wrongs, divorce is also an escape from many degrading evils,’⁶⁶ she said to Sara Bard Field.

Having surrendered on the divorce issue, William K. went back to Paris, where observant correspondents reported on his dalliance with Nellie Neustretter. A reporter for Town Topics thought that he looked wretched. ‘There were large circles under his eyes, and he looked neither well nor happy.’⁶⁷ William K. arrived back in New York on 22 December 1894, and even the taciturn superintendent Mr Gilmour noted that the Christmas atmosphere was strained and tense. ‘Willie and his father went out walking this morning. In the evening I went to the Knickerbocker Club, 32 Street to get Mr V. for Mrs V. but he was not at home. Mr Jay came in the evening to see Mrs V. I was called out of my bed to take a note to Mr V. 11 pm.’⁶⁸ On New Year’s Day, Alva had a huge row with another servant: ‘He was told to leave the house. He replied he would go when he felt so disposed.’⁶⁹

The only person who did her best to ease the tension was seventeen-year-old Consuelo who treated her maid, her governess and Mr Gilmour to tickets for the opera on Boxing Day. In the middle of January 1895, William K. fled back to Europe amid mounting press speculation that the Vanderbilts were filing for divorce. On the day of his departure the World finally broke the story in prose breathless with excitement: ‘Mr Vanderbilt came from Europe just one month ago. His stay has been almost entirely devoted to arranging his family affairs. There has been no reconciliation between him and Mrs Vanderbilt.’⁷⁰ One influential figure rallied to Alva’s defence. On the evening of 16 January, Mrs Astor publicly supported Alva by inviting Consuelo to a party for her great-niece, Helen Kingsland. It was a kind gesture but one society reporter noted that Consuelo had a miserable and embarrassing evening as the gilded youth of New York tittered about the scandal whenever her back was turned.

From a Vanderbilt point of view, William K.’s precipitate departure to Europe was both unfortunate and misjudged, for it handed control of the story to Alva. When the divorce was finally granted on 6 March, the dam of publicity burst. Never a newspaper to understate matters, the World described it as ‘the biggest divorce case that America has ever known. It is, in fact, the biggest ever known in The World.’⁷¹ The paper saw it as its moral duty to provide the reading public with everything it wanted to know, while simultaneously lambasting the rich for lax moral standards. One striking feature of its reportage, however, was the extent to which it favoured Alva over William K., leading to the suspicion that she had managed to brief its journalists. Mrs Vanderbilt had not fled to Europe, like her husband wrote the World. She was determined ‘to stay here until the divorce should be publicly announced; not to run away from the publicity which reflects only on her husband, who is pronounced guilty’.⁷² A photograph of Nellie Neustretter was printed in what looked suspiciously like her underwear. Alva (though the report was not entirely complimentary) was presented as the unhappy victim, made peevish by her philandering husband; and Oliver Belmont was never mentioned at all.

It is possible that Alva arranged a deal. Oliver’s name would be kept out of the World’s story in exchange for a most intriguing piece of information. On the morning of 7 March, the World produced a sensational piece of news. Nellie Neustretter was an elaborate sideshow, possibly just a decoy. The real object of William K.’s affections, and the true reason for Alva’s implacable fury, was that her husband had been having a longstanding affair with her very old friend, Consuelo, Duchess of Manchester.

There is no means of establishing for sure whether this story is true. It was never formally denied by anyone involved, however, and it may have some basis. Years later Sara Bard Field told an interviewer that although Alva would not allow her to mention it in the memoirs, William K. ‘had brought his mistresses right into the home’ including ‘poor women of the nobility of England’.⁷³ Consuelo Manchester, to all intents and purposes, disappeared from Alva’s life after 1894, which is odd since she was not simply Consuelo’s godmother and an English duchess, she was also a relation by marriage after Alva’s sister, Jenny, married Fernando Yznaga. In her memoirs, Consuelo (Vanderbilt) makes very few references to her godmother.⁷⁴ Consuelo Manchester was also famously unhappily married. Her husband had been declared bankrupt in 1890, and had abandoned her in favour of a music-hall singer whom he escorted round London before his death in 1892. She was constantly short of money; her other lovers included the Prince of Wales. The World suggested the affair between Consuelo Manchester and William K. was well established (though not exclusive): a ‘titled American woman’ and William K. had been linked eleven years earlier, in 1884. There was even one report that Alva had almost thrown a ‘titled American friend’ out of the marital home as early as 1879.⁷⁵ William K.’s inexplicable conduct with regard to Nellie Neustretter was now quite comprehensible, said the World. He was simply trying to deflect attention away from a scandal involving his mistress by flaunting a relationship with a grande cocotte.

Town Topics, peeved at its failure to uncover this story first, managed to keep it alive by downplaying it. ‘According to the rumour most generally credited among those who know nothing on the subject, one of them is to marry a banker and the other a duchess.’⁷⁶ Whatever the truth, the warm relationship between William K. and Consuelo Manchester was to be highlighted in the most tragic fashion possible within days of this publicity firestorm. In a coincidence far more dreadful than the sinking of any yacht, Consuelo Manchester’s daughter, who was named after Alva and who was only in her late teens, died in Italy ten days after the divorce was granted. Acutely distressed, Consuelo Manchester turned to William K. for help. On Saturday 16 March, he gave orders to the captain of the Valiant to sail to Civitavecchia in Italy. The captain wrote in the ship’s log: ‘In the afternoon we embarked the remains of the late Lady May Alva Montagu, accompanied by the Duchess of Manchester, Lady Alice Montagu, Miss Yznaga, Dr A. Muthie, Mr F. Yznaga, and servants, and at 6 p.m. sailed for Marseilles.’⁷⁷ According to the same log, William K. went up to Rome by the 4.50 p.m. train, possibly to assist with legal formalities, or to avoid making scandalous rumours worse. The Duchess of Manchester and her party sailed with Lady Alva Montagu’s body back to Marseilles, and from thence to Paris. The Valiant then turned round and went back to Italy to pick up the rest of the party. William K. was back in Paris by 2 March.

This story of the liaison refused to go away for several months. It was noted that Alva did not attend her namesake’s funeral. By April, Town Topics was reporting that the rumour mill had it that the death of Lady Alva Montagu had marked a turning point in the relationship between William K. and Consuelo Manchester, and that there was a persistent story ‘that will seemingly not die down … to the effect that Mr Vanderbilt would have become the husband of the Duchess of Manchester had it not been for her bereavement in the loss of her twin daughter Lady Alva Montagu’.⁷⁸ By the middle of June, a consensus seemed to be emerging in the society press that Nellie Neustretter had indeed simply been engaged by William K. as co-respondent, though this does not wholly explain why he felt obliged to spend several months in her company.

The affair caught the attention of Henry James, also in Paris in the summer of 1895, who thought that William K.’s relationship with Nellie was part of a complicated strategy to force Alva into divorce, and that it had the makings of a short story: ‘The husband doesn’t care a straw for the cocotte and makes a bargain with her that is wholly independent of real intimacy. He makes her understand the facts of his situation – which is that he is in love with another woman. Toward that woman his wife’s character and proceedings drive him, but he loves her too much to compromise her. He can’t let himself be divorced on her account – he can on that of the femme galante – who has nothing – no name – to lose.’⁷⁹ This would become the starting point for James’s novel, The Special Type, published in 1903.

Under the terms of the divorce, Alva kept Marble House, which had already been made over to her at her insistence, and refused William K.’s offers of both 660 Fifth Avenue and Idle Hour, which were ‘rendered disagreeable by unpleasant memories’.⁸⁰ The terms of the divorce settlement were never made public, in spite of furious efforts by the press to find out, but Alva received a sum close to $2.3 million and an income of about $100,000 a year, with provision that specified amounts of the capital sum should be transferred to each of the children on marriage or at the age of twenty-eight.⁸¹

Predictably, Alva faced a harsh reaction from some elements in society, but as ever, she presented herself as having toughed it out: ‘I did not fail myself at this stormy time. I got my divorce and just as in childhood days I accepted the whipping my mother gave me for taking the forbidden liberty, so I bared my back to the whipping of Society for taking a freedom which would eventually better them as well as myself.’⁸² In spite of Choate’s warnings about the viciousness of hegemenous males, society women were worse. ‘Yes, and they put on the lash, especially the women, and especially the Christian women. When I walked into Trinity Church in Newport on a Sunday soon after obtaining my divorce, not a single one of my old friends would recognize me.’⁸³

On Wednesday 13 March, Alva departed for Europe with Consuelo and Harold, seen off by William Gilmour. The New York Tribune reported that Alva travelled in her usual style with five maids, one man servant and seventy pieces of luggage.

By now, Alva had another compelling reason for sailing to Europe. Preoccupied by her divorce, she had failed to take seriously Consuelo’s growing attachment to a man of thirty-three, which was threatening to undermine her plan to place her daughter in an aristocratic setting. It is impossible that Alva failed to notice the warmth between Consuelo and her American admirer since the indefatigable World had picked up the scent as early as the middle of February that year. On Valentine’s Day, it chose to run the story as a romantic tale of shattered hopes: ‘A young man, bearing an old family first name, prefixed with a prominent Boston family surname, has been all devotion to Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt and she apparently was most happy in his attentions. This joyousness must now be relegated to the saddest of “might have beens”.’⁸⁴ Two days later the same paper explicitly linked Consuelo and the Duke of Marlborough asking: ‘Is she to be a Duchess? It is quite generally recognised that the Duke must marry money if he is to keep up Blenheim. His income is only £8,000 ($40,000) a year and Blenheim costs £14,000 ($370,000) a year.’⁸⁵

The young man who had been all devotion to Consuelo was Winthrop Rutherfurd, son of the eminently respectable Mr and Mrs Lewis Rutherfurd, a New England family of impeccable pedigree (Lewis Rutherfurd was one of the earliest Patriarchs in 1872). Through his mother, Winthrop Rutherfurd was a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, colonial governor of New York, and John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts. ‘Winty’ Rutherfurd was tall and famously good-looking. Though trained as a lawyer, he spent much of his youth playing polo and golf, for which he had something of a reputation. He was a member of the elite Newport Golf Club and has been described as suitable for Consuelo in every way.

As far as Alva was concerned, however, he was not suitable at all. The first problem was that he simply represented the wrong marital path. In America in the 1890s, there were two routes to dynastic marriage open to the new phenomenon, the American heiress. One was to marry into the network of American families enriched by industrial capitalism, further consolidating vast fortunes, creating an aristocracy of money but effectively embracing the ‘new’. The other was to marry into one of the European aristocracies, depleting the industrial fortune but ennobling the American family through association with nobility and centuries of tradition, elegance and culture.⁸⁶ This trend had been started in Alva’s generation by Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill and by Consuelo Yznaga, though as it happened neither of them had huge dowries. By 1895, the European route to aristocratising one’s family had become highly competitive. That year alone there were nine marriages between heiresses and English aristocrats** while Anna Gould’s marriage to Frenchman Count Boni de Castellane set new standards for lavish New York weddings. By 1914 commentators calculated that over 500 American fortunes had been transferred to Europe through this route.⁸⁷ Alva, always ambivalent about the ‘crude’ and ‘unfinished’ nature of American life, embittered by the power structures of American society, drawn to those parts of European history where aristocratic marriages were arranged as a matter of course and a great admirer of British aristocracy was, of course, determined that it would be the European and not the American route for Consuelo.

A further problem with Winthrop Rutherfurd, however, was that he was far too close – and far too similar – to William K. Vanderbilt, the ‘weak nonentity’ whom she had just divorced. According to Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr, ‘the Rutherfurds lived well, dressed expensively, and did little else’, though Winthrop’s father, Lewis Rutherfurd, was a distinguished astronomer who took some early photographs of the surface of the moon. As far as Alva was concerned, Winthrop Rutherfurd was a fine example of the new breed of useless male now emerging, like her ex-husband, from three generations of plutocratic wealth. Alva also suspected him of being a gold-digger. American society had evolved to a point where it was impossible to participate without being very rich. Consuelo’s dowry was a clear temptation to a young man from a good family with social ambitions but without great wealth. Alva, of course, took the view that almost all rich American men were serial adulterers who left the business of keeping up respectable appearance to their wives, while they romped like young colts in ‘the world-wide field’.⁸⁸ In Consuelo’s case there was a real danger that she would facilitate ‘romping’ by financing it. Alva always maintained that her divorce had no effect on her children’s lives. In reality, the bitterness and cynicism engendered by William K.’s philandering profoundly coloured her plans for Consuelo’s future.

For the moment, however, she dealt with her daughter’s first love badly, in a manner guaranteed to encourage romance rather than stifle it. According to Consuelo, her first line of attack was contempt, ‘reserving special darts for [the] older man who by his outstanding looks, his distinction and his charm had gained a marked ascendancy in my affections’.⁸⁹ Winty’s response was to propose, and when the proposal came, it would not have been out of place in an Edith Wharton novel. It took place on Consuelo’s eighteenth birthday on 2 March 1895, a few days before the finalisation of the Vanderbilt divorce. First, he sent her an American Beauty rose, her favourite. Later, he joined Consuelo, a group of other young people, and Alva, on a cycling expedition along Riverside Drive. ‘My Rosenkavalier and I managed to outdistance the rest. It was a most hurried proposal, for my mother and the others were not far behind; as they strained to reach us he pressed me to agree to a secret engagement, for I was leaving for Europe the next day. He added that he would follow me, but that I must not tell my mother since she would most certainly withhold her consent to our engagement. On my return to America we might plan an elopement.’⁹⁰

Consuelo was not, in fact, due to leave for Europe for another fortnight. But there were to be no further meetings with Winty. A few days after Alva and Consuelo set sail for Paris, several newspapers also noted the departure for Europe of Winthrop Rutherfurd. If he hoped to see Consuelo he was to be disappointed. Alva regarded her daughter’s glow of happiness with dark suspicion and did everything in her power to prevent a meeting. ‘She laid her plans with forethought and skill, and during the five months of our stay in Europe I never laid eyes on Mr X, nor did I hear from him. Later I learned that he had followed us to Paris but had been refused admittance when he called. His letters had been confiscated; my own, though they were few, no doubt suffered the same fate.’⁹¹ The happiness of the previous summer in Paris was a distant memory. Consuelo tried on new clothes ‘like an automaton.’⁹² Alva was intensely irritated by her daughter’s air of adolescent ‘martyrdom’, and her complaints about it only served to deepen Consuelo’s misery.

Alva later argued vigorously that she had only had her daughter’s interests at heart in keeping her from Rutherfurd in this way. It should not be overlooked that in this period immediately after her divorce, Consuelo’s interests were closely bound up with her own. Alva wished to marry Oliver Belmont. She did not, however, wish to abandon her position as a leader of society once she remarried, and thus retreat from the only theatre of life that was open to her. However high-minded Alva’s reasons may have been for saving her daughter from life with an American plutocrat, Consuelo’s marriage to Winthrop Rutherfurd would have done little to bolster Alva’s position in America, however popular he might have been at Newport Golf Club. The Duke of Marlborough was another matter entirely. Consuelo later maintained that Alva ordered her wedding dress in Paris that spring, so sure was she about the successful conclusion of her plans. There is no evidence for this; but Alva certainly bought hundreds of expensive ‘favors’ – small presents – for a ball, as she now planned what would become a decisive manoeuvre.

As Town Topics put it: ‘There has been little doubt in the minds of those who know Mrs Vanderbilt intimately, and consequently, understand her character and temperament, that she would return to Newport this summer and assert her position.’⁹³ Months in advance of her return to Newport, Alva fired her first shot by letting it be known from Paris that she would be giving a ball at Marble House the following August, and that she would construe acceptance of this invitation as a pledge of loyalty. By the middle of June, these reports were sending New York’s elite into a frenzy, particularly in the absence of any signal from the Vanderbilt family whom nobody wished to offend. ‘Small wonder it is that the approaching dilemma begins to assume tremendous proportions in the minds of not only those who are not yet absolutely sure of their position in the social world, and who feel they cannot afford to risk their chances by a false move in the start, but even, indeed, in those of the contingent of assured position, who have no prejudice or animosity toward Mrs Vanderbilt herself, who certainly feel kindly toward her daughter, and yet are on terms of friendship and even intimacy with the other members of the family,’⁹⁴ said Town Topics sagaciously.

Alva then moved Consuelo from Paris to London to participate in the London season of 1895. Here, she re-established contact with Minnie Paget who took the necessary steps. Consuelo was asked to a ball by the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland and, knowing almost nobody, was grateful to anyone who requested her as a partner by marking her dance card. Perhaps Aunt Lansdowne had had a word, for the Duke of Marlborough claimed several dances. To Alva’s intense satisfaction, he followed this up by inviting them both, and Lady Paget, to spend a weekend at Blenheim Palace.

The party that travelled to Oxfordshire on 15 June was small, consisting of Alva, Consuelo, Minnie Paget, ‘three young men’ – including Lord Lansdowne’s heir – and the Duke’s two sisters, Lady Lilian and Lady Norah Spencer-Churchill. They all seemed ‘lost in so big a house’ wrote Consuelo, but she liked Lilian immediately, finding her unaffected and kind.⁹⁵ Saturday evening was spent listening to the Duke’s organist, Mr Perkins, playing the organ in the Long Library, installed when his father the 8th Duke married ‘Duchess Lily’, a wealthy American widow to whom Blenheim also owed the installation of central heating and electric lighting.

The following day, Alva’s usual rules of chaperonage were conspicuous by their absence for no obstacle was placed in the way of the Duke showing Consuelo round part of the Blenheim estate. They drove together to pretty outlying villages where ‘old women and children curtsied and men touched their caps as we passed’.⁹⁶ Although enchanted by the countryside, the feudalism on display made Consuelo feel uncomfortable, and in Alva’s absence she was quick to say so. ‘That Marlborough was ambitious I gathered from his talk; that he should be proud of his position and estates seemed but natural; but did he recognise his obligations? Steeped as I then was in questions of political economy – in the theories of the rights of man, in the speeches of Gladstone and John Bright – it was not strange that such reflections should occur to me.’⁹⁷

According to Consuelo – and we only have her side of the story here – the Duke of Marlborough seemed to find these remarks amusing rather than tiresome, and made up his mind that very afternoon that he would set aside his feelings for an English girl with whom he was in love and marry Consuelo. It seems more likely, given his subsequent caution, that the Duke of Marlborough simply decided that marriage to Consuelo was a possibility that could reasonably be explored. Even if her notions were a trifle outlandish, she was intelligent and thoughtful; and the intervening year had given this young duke ample time to discover that both his sense of obligation to Blenheim and his political aspirations required substantial financial resource. As far as Alva was concerned, however, the weekend at Blenheim and his pleasant attentions to Consuelo made it easy for her to extend an invitation to her ball at Marble House in August. The Duke immediately accepted, giving out that he had never visited the United States, and would come to Newport as part of a longer tour.

This was a major coup for Alva. By late June, the society press were lying in wait in Newport to await her return. The World even sent detectives – an early form of paparazzi – to Newport to watch every move both Vanderbilts made and report back. Once again, there were multiple narrative lines. How would the Cornelius Vanderbilts, who would be opening their house The Breakers that August, react if they met Alva? How would society as a whole respond to the invitation to her ball? There was also the delicious extra twist of Oliver Belmont’s arrival and the news that he too would be giving a house-warming ball at his Newport house, Belcourt. ‘The housewarming of this new mansion will probably be one of the chief social events of the Newport season, and may, if reports be true, also be the opening gun in the Montague and Capulet warfare that is still a menace to the peace of the season and looms like a dark cloud on the horizon,’ reported Town Topics.⁹⁸ It was all feverishly exciting.

When Alva finally arrived with Consuelo in Newport in July, she soon put Newport society out of its misery by unleashing a secret weapon in the diminutive form of the Duke of Marlborough. The attention paid by the Duke to Consuelo had been noted by Town Topics, but stories of an engagement were dismissed on the grounds that the divorced status of Mrs Vanderbilt would present an obstacle to such a match. Now, Alva let it be known that there was no obstacle whatsoever for the Duke of Marlborough had accepted an invitation to attend her ball and would be coming to stay with her in Newport for several days. Suddenly, the much anticipated drama ebbed away. Realising they had been wholly outflanked, the denizens of Newport reached for their pens and their blotting paper, thanked Mrs Vanderbilt for her kind invitation through gritted teeth, and told her they would have much pleasure in accepting.

Consuelo faced a much more serious problem. She felt that she was being ‘steered into a vortex’.⁹⁹ She considered herself secretly engaged to Winthrop Rutherfurd, and after the weekend at Blenheim she was certain that she did not wish to marry ‘Sunny’ Marlborough. ‘Homeward bound, I dreamed of life in my own country with my Rosenkavalier. It would, I knew, entail a struggle, but I meant to force the issue with my mother.’¹⁰⁰

Once they reached Newport, however, even making contact with Winthrop Rutherfurd became very difficult and with the Duke of Marlborough’s visit less than six weeks away, Consuelo became anxious and despondent. Marble House stood in a prominent but isolated position on Bellevue Avenue, where every move was scrutinised by the summer colony and by the press; assignations were impossible, and all her post was monitored. ‘On reaching Newport my life became that of a prisoner, with my mother and my governess as wardens. I was never out of their sight. Friends called but were told I was not at home. Locked behind those high walls – the porter had orders not to let me out unaccompanied – I had no chance of getting any word to my fiancé. Brought up to obey, I was helpless under my mother’s total domination.’¹⁰¹

Was this melodramatic? Probably not, for by now the stakes for Alva were very high. It was essential to the success of Alva’s manoeuvres that nothing should prevent the Duke from honouring her invitation. She had no intention of letting her daughter undermine such a careful campaign with a misjudged teenage crush, and she may have feared that an obstinate but desperate Consuelo would somehow arrange an elopement. (One fictional account of Alva’s life even has her turning this period into a test of Winthrop Rutherfurd’s strength of feeling, which is not implausible either.¹⁰²) Quite apart from Rutherfurd’s intrinsic unsuitability, Alva would be the laughing stock of America and her chances of protecting her own position in the aftermath of divorce would be greatly diminished.

In spite of every difficulty being placed in their way, however, Consuelo and Winthrop Rutherfurd eventually met once more at a ball. They had one short dance before Consuelo was taken away by Alva, but he had time to tell Consuelo that his feelings had not changed. That evening, matters came to a head in the most famous mother-daughter row of the Gilded Age. Following an ominous silence on the drive home, Consuelo went to Alva’s bedroom and informed her mother that she felt that she had a right to choose her own husband, and that she intended to marry Winthrop Rutherfurd. ‘These words, the bravest I had ever uttered, brought down a frightful storm of protest. I suffered every searing reproach, heard every possible invective hurled at the man I loved. I was informed of his numerous flirtations, of his well-known love for a married woman, of his desire to marry an heiress.’¹⁰³ Alva went on to declare that there was madness in the Rutherfurd family, and that he could never have children (this was certainly inaccurate). Consuelo, by her own account, stood her ground. Alva argued back that Consuelo was far too young to make the choice herself, and that her ‘decision to select a husband for me was founded on considerations I was too young and inexperienced to appreciate’¹⁰⁴ – sentiments Alva would later repeat almost word for word herself to Sara Bard Field.¹⁰⁵

Alva had prided herself in bringing up independent-minded children, but when her doll-child finally showed some signs of independence, mother and daughter collided with force. For the first time in her life, Consuelo stood her ground and argued back. ‘I still maintained my right to lead the life I wished. It was perhaps my unexpected resistance or the mere fact that no-one had ever stood up to her that made her say she would not hesitate to shoot a man whom she considered would ruin my life.’¹⁰⁶ Shouting that she would shoot Winthrop Rutherfurd was characteristic of Alva at her most impulsive, and it would give anyone who knew her a moment’s pause for thought. When Consuelo’s cousin, Adele, indicated she might want to marry her old roué of an uncle, Creighton Webb, her mother Emily – a far kinder and more subtle character – simply replied that she would rather see Adele in her coffin first, and that that was the end of the matter.¹⁰⁷

What followed went far beyond the firm but well-meant line taken with Adele by Aunt Emily. The next day, the house was ominously quiet, and no-one came to see Consuelo. She was told that her mother was ill and that the doctor was on his way. Even her calm and collected English governess seemed harassed. Eventually, her mother’s friend, Lucie Oelrichs, now Mrs William Jay, came to see her. Aunt Jay condemned Consuelo’s behaviour. She may have pointed out that what Consuelo wanted to do was potentially very damaging to Alva. Most seriously, Aunt Jay gave Consuelo to understand that her mother had had a heart attack ‘brought about by my callous indifference to her feelings. She confirmed my mother’s intentions of never consenting to my plans for marriage, and her resolve to shoot X should I decide to run away with him. I asked her if I could see my mother and whether in her opinion she would ever relent. I still remember the terrible answer, “Your mother will never relent and I warn you there will be a catastrophe if you persist. The doctor has said that another scene may easily bring on a heart attack and he will not be responsible for the result. You can ask the doctor yourself if you do not believe me!”.’

The precise details of this scene may have been embellished over time, but much of what Consuelo maintained took place is consistent with Alva’s later behaviour at other times and in different places. Alva’s crude attempt to translate the question of Consuelo’s marriage into one about her own health and happiness is typical behaviour of a highly controlling personality in a very anxious state. Unlike Aunt Emily, Alva was the first to claim that when crossed, her instinct was to head straight for a tremendous fight and an outright win. In this instance she was fighting three battles at once: to stop Consuelo from marrying Winthrop Rutherfurd; to prevent Consuelo from doing anything which might stall the Duke’s visit; and to protect her own social position. Consuelo’s determined reaction may have taken her by surprise. Perhaps her daughter’s unprecedented display of strength of character did indeed make Alva feel so powerless that she fell ill. Who can tell? Whatever the truth, being told that she would kill her mother if she persisted had the desired effect on Consuelo as Alva must have known it would. ‘In utter misery I asked Mrs Jay to let X know that I could not marry him.’¹⁰⁸

The short period between this terrible row and the Duke’s arrival was marked by a time of intense introspection when Consuelo felt compelled to keep her feelings to herself. She wrote that friends who had been rebuffed no longer called; her brothers meanwhile were too young and too preoccupied with their own affairs. What is perhaps more shocking to the modern sensibility is that no adult intervened. This was because they either shared Alva’s view of Consuelo’s best interests, were too frightened of Alva to protest, or, like Mrs Jay, had a vested interest in the Duke’s arrival in Newport. Remembering the gossip of previous generations, Eileen Slocum remarks that no-one in the wider summer colony could believe that Consuelo would hold out against such an advantageous match for long. It soon became clear that Winthrop Rutherfurd would not be attempting a dramatic elopement. A kind interpretation is that he simply took Consuelo at her word and did not wish to force the issue; a less charitable view is that the prospect of a fight with Alva which might damage a wedding settlement caused him to back off sharply, and he seems to have spent the rest of the Newport season in the background, pottering about on the golf course.

William K. Vanderbilt, meanwhile, was even less help. Even though the Valiant was moored in Newport harbour (and was not ‘away at sea’ as Consuelo thought in her memoirs), he felt out of reach. Consuelo adored her father too much ever to describe him as a weak man but this is the inescapable conclusion: ‘his gentle nature hated strife,’ she wrote. Even while her parents had been married, the children knew it was pointless appealing to him in any struggle with their mother. ‘He played only a small part in our lives … he was always shunted or side-tracked from our occupations … with children’s clairvoyance we knew that she would prove adamant to any appeal our father made on our behalf and we never asked him to interfere.’¹⁰⁹ The Commodore’s first biographer, who met him, thought William K. showed signs of a ‘morose disposition’, and a rare interview in later life does indeed suggest that however charming and gregarious, William K. also had a melancholic, passive streak. ‘My life was never destined to be quite happy,’ he told the journalist. ‘It was laid along lines which I could not foresee almost from earliest childhood. It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for.’¹¹⁰ On this occasion, passivity may have led him to fail his daughter.

It is also possible that the idea of Consuelo becoming a duchess appealed to him. Here indeed was the apotheosis of the Vanderbilts; here at last was the final symbol of the family’s rise to the highest echelons of international society; and here was splendid protection from any untoward consequences of his divorce from her mother. In fairness, Consuelo later admitted that she had kept her feelings to herself, and that she knew there was little point in involving her father in a struggle which would ‘only involve him in a hopeless struggle against impossible odds and further stimulate my mother’s rancour’.¹¹¹ The log of the Valiant during the Newport season of 1895 suggests that though William K. had no need to protect his social position as Alva did after her divorce, he was equally determined to consolidate it with an on-board entertaining schedule that culminated in a luncheon for the Duke of Marlborough, giving rise to a dark suspicion that he may even have colluded with Alva on this issue.

Meanwhile Town Topics reported that Oliver Belmont would also be entertaining the Duke when he arrived in Newport, and that he was planning his own splendid ball to take place shortly after the one being given by Alva. So many people had a vested interest in the success of the Duke’s visit that eighteen-year-old Consuelo must indeed have felt that the forces ranged against her were overpowering and that the whole situation was too difficult to fight. The only person to whom she confided her fears was her English governess, Miss Harper, of whom she was very fond. In Edith Wharton’s novel The Buccaneers, the governess sacrifices her own happiness to secure the happiness of her charge. Miss Harper chose a more pragmatic approach. ‘How wisely she spoke of the future awaiting me in her country, of the opportunities for usefulness and social service I would find there, of the happiness a life lived for others can bring. And in such gentle appeals to my better nature she slowly swung me from contemplation of a purely personal nature to a higher idealism.’¹¹² It was just as well for the news soon arrived at Marble House that the Duke was on his way to New York aboard the Campania and would be in Newport in just a few days.

* In The Buccaneers Edith Wharton writes: ‘A good many hours of Mrs St George’s days were spent in mentally cataloguing and appraising the physical attributes of the young ladies in whose company her daughters trailed up and down the verandas … As regards hair and complexion, there could be no doubt; Virginia, all rose and pearl, with sheaves of full fair hair heaped above her low forehead, was as pure and luminous as an apple-blossom. But Lizzy’s waist was certainly at least an inch smaller (some said two),’ pp. 4–5, p. 6.

** They were: Maud Burke to Sir Bache Cunard; Mary Leiter to George Curzon; Josephine Chamberlain to the 1st Baron Scarisbrick; Lily Hammersley to Lord William Beresford; Elizabeth LaRoche to Sir Howland Roberts; Leonora Van Roberts to the 7th Earl of Tankerville; Pauline Whitney to Almeric Paget; Cora Rogers to Baron Fairhaven of Lode; and Consuelo Vanderbilt to the 9th Duke of Marlborough.

4 The wedding

THE DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH was not the star passenger as he left Liverpool on the Cunard steamer Campania on Saturday 16 August 1895. This slot was reserved for Keir Hardie, leader of Britain’s emerging Independent Labour Party who was on his way to the United States for a lecture tour, and who was seen out of the harbour by waving supporters in a tug boat, The Toiler, complete with bunting, a band, and fluttering socialist mottoes.

Keir Hardie noticed the ‘haughty aristocrat’ immediately he boarded the Campania but refused to be intimidated. ‘There are dukes and archbishops and bishops and State Senators on board; but the I.L.P. passengers were the only ones who could command a crowded tug boat by way of a farewell,’ he wrote in tones of satisfaction a week later.¹ One of the ship’s waiters told Keir Hardie that the Duke of Marlborough had been most interested in his presence, though he did not attend any of Keir Hardie’s impromptu on-board talks about socialism, where Hardie drew on the relationship between the Campania’s cabin accommodation and the British class structure to illustrate his point.²

When they disembarked in New York on Friday 23 August, however, it was the Duke who was greeted by the New York press, in a manner for which he was wholly unprepared. He was followed to the Waldorf; he was observed eating breakfast at 10 o’clock; he was joined by Captain A. H. Lee, a fellow passenger on the Campania; he took a stroll down Fifth Avenue; and he was called on by Creighton Webb (the same old roué who had tried to marry Cousin Adele). He then travelled in a reserved seat in a parlour car on the 5 o’clock train to Newport on the following day, Saturday. ‘Look-outs from some of the great housetops on the Cliffs are already watching for his Grace’s arrival,’ said the New York Herald; ‘and should he come he may expect a charge such as his famous ancestor, John Churchill, never met.’³

The charge soon came. The news that the Duke had been seen with the Vanderbilts at Trinity Church in Newport on Sunday morning spread fast. That afternoon Alva held open house for Newport society and was promptly mobbed. It was clear that an in-house duke had eviscerated all scruples. ‘Mrs Vanderbilt has been informally “at home” on Sunday afternoons ever since her arrival at Newport, and a few of her friends have dropped in there for tea and a chat,’ reported Town Topics. ‘But on Sunday afternoon last – the morning newspapers having announced that the young Duke had arrived at Marble House – the huge iron gates were swung open to admit the entrance, during the afternoon, of almost every member, with the exception of the Vanderbilts, of the Newport summer colony.’⁴

The following day the New York Herald reported: ‘Everyone in Newport today was running around saying to everyone else “Have you seen the Duke?” And then all strained their necks to find a man who looked like a duke, however a duke may look.’⁵ Those who felt confused should have bought copies of the Newport Mercury which reported that those who had called at Marble House ‘did not find, as many expected, a big strapping Englishman with a loud voice, whose grip you would remember with pain for hours after, but instead a pale-faced, frail-looking lad, with a voice devoid of that affected drawl peculiar to the English, and as soft as a debutante’,⁶ who looked amused by all the excitement he was causing.

On Monday, those who had not called at Marble House for tea on Sunday crowded into Newport Casino to catch a glimpse of the Duke of Marlborough near the tennis courts. That evening Richard T. Wilson Jr gave a calico party (where all the favours were made of calico) at the Golf Club for 300 guests. ‘The Duke of Marlborough was present, of course, and that meant that all of the cream of the elite set would attend,’ wrote the Newport Journal. On Tuesday 27 August, the newspaper estimated that about 5,000 people went to the Casino to watch tennis in the hope of catching a further glimpse, but were disappointed. On Wednesday 28th, the day of Alva’s ball, the Duke of Marlborough demonstrated that he was a passable tennis player himself and ‘played two sets on the casino grounds, with Mr P. M. Lydig’.⁷ More significantly, William K. assisted Alva on the day of her ball (to which he was naturally not invited) by entertaining the Duke to lunch on board the Valiant with the cream of Newport society.⁸

Alva’s long-planned ball, it was generally agreed, was the highlight of the Newport season. One newspaper called it ‘The Most Beautiful Fête Ever Seen’ – which would have pleased Alva because from the outset she had been determined to outdo all previous entertainments. Every invitee accepted. As if working to a plan (and he probably was), ‘Mr W. K. Vanderbilt steamed away on Vigilant [sic] just at sunset.’⁹ From early evening, scores of onlookers gathered at the gates to catch a glimpse of the guests. This was not a fancy-dress ball, but the party had an ancien régime flavour in the spirit of the house. A small army of servants was dressed in the style of Louis XIV; there were nine French chefs; and ‘the grounds were illuminated by thousands of tiny globes of different colors, just as they used to be in Versailles when Louis strolled across the broad terrace of Versailles with his court’.¹⁰

The world of Louis XIV and Versailles was particularly noted by the party correspondent of the New York Herald who thought he had been thence transported until woken from his reverie by the strains of an Hungarian polka. Alva was dressed ‘in a superb costume of white satin, with court train and wonderful diamonds, and looked as if she might have stepped out of one of the old court pictures in Versailles. Her daughter Miss Consuela [sic], becomingly arrayed in white satin and tulle, stood beside her.’¹¹ Lotus flowers and water hyacinths filled with tiny globes of light floated in a fountain in the hall; on every table there were orchids, ferns and pink hollyhocks tied with illuminated pink ribbons; and – in a touch that was a talking point of the evening – tiny humming birds swarmed amid the flowers.

Partly because of the heat, Newport balls started late. That night, guests danced to three different orchestras and supper was served at midnight (one course alone included 400 mixed birds) before breakfast appeared at 3 a.m. Richard T. Wilson Jr led Consuelo in the cotillion where she distributed the favours bought by Alva in Paris earlier in the year to those who had not been fortunate in winning them for themselves. These included ‘genuine bagpipes made by French peasants’,¹² as well as ladies’ silk sashes, etchings and fans of the Louis XIV period, work baskets, mirrors, watch cases, ribbons and bells, and white ‘Marble House’ lanterns. One newspaper reported that the favours were so fine that they ‘occasioned an immense amount of heartburning, envy and jealousy, and led to a deal of petty thievery. I am told that some of the women … stole favours from each other whenever they could.’¹³

Alva left nothing to chance and a good deal to shameless suggestion where her central campaign was concerned. The portrait of Consuelo in duchess mode by Carolus-Duran hung above the fireplace in the Gold Ballroom. The Duke of Marlborough stood beneath it, beside Mrs Jay, ‘viewing the pretty women with interest’,¹⁴ the only barbed note in reports of the evening’s entertainment. The Newport Mercury thought that Mrs Vanderbilt and the Duke were the ‘cynosure of all eyes’.¹⁵ ‘It was a perfect night’, Alva told Mary Young, ‘and the house and grounds [looked] lovely in the moonlight, provid[ing] a setting of almost unreal beauty for one of the most beautiful balls I have ever seen.’¹⁶ It was less amusing for William Gilmour. The ball ended at 5 a.m. and according to his notebooks, ‘some had to be taken home as their navigation was somewhat uncertain, especially the gentler sex’.¹⁷ He finally went to bed about 6 a.m., ‘tired out’, though he was luckier than the policemen stationed at the gates whose cab at daybreak collapsed after just a few yards, compelling them to walk home.

Alva, meanwhile, was almost certainly lying in bed, staring up at the Goddess Athene on the ceiling and basking in triumph. Town Topics concluded that the ball had been just as significant a social event as the great Vanderbilt ball of 1883. ‘The Marble House ball of 1895 put the seal of fashionable approval upon that lady and all her doings, and was in its way, quite as remarkable and significant an entertainment as the fancy ball. The presence of the Duke of Marlborough – if not an acknowledged suitor for the hand of Miss Consuela [sic] Vanderbilt, certainly a suspected one – was of itself a successful stroke of diplomacy on Mrs Vanderbilt’s part, and when was added to this a dance marked by the richest and most beautiful favors bestowed at an entertainment in years, and every appointment that taste could suggest or wealth provide, the success of the entertainment as a whole may be easily imagined.’¹⁸

Immediately after the Marble House ball, there was a momentary setback when Oliver Belmont collapsed from exhaustion. This meant that his much-anticipated house-warming ball at Belcourt had to be postponed until the following Monday, whereupon it clashed magnificently with a musical evening at the Cornelius Vanderbilts’. Faced with this social emergency – a gap in the collective party schedule – Mrs Robert Goelet rallied nobly and threw a ‘surprise’ party, which, of course, gave her an opportunity to entertain the Duke too. When it finally took place, Oliver’s Bachelor’s Ball (which simply meant that he received his guests alone) demonstrated the architect Richard Morris Hunt’s ability to follow his clients into a marked degree of eccentricity when required.

Inside an exterior inspired by a Louis XIII chateau, Oliver, who was famous for his love of horses, had instructed the architect to build palatial stable accommodation on the ground floor. ‘It is a most singular house,’ wrote Julia Ward Howe to her daughter, ‘with stalls for some thirteen or more horses, all filled, and everything elaborate and elegant. Oh! To lodge horses so, and be content that men and women should lodge in sheds and cellars!’¹⁹ The residential part of the house was on the first floor, in Gothic style, but even here Oliver had had two of his favourite horses preserved by a taxidermist and placed at one end of the large salon.

The Bachelor’s Ball was another splendid event, where the favours included small riding whips to reflect the masculine tenor of the invitation. Consuelo, Alva and the Duke of Marlborough were also entertained by the John Jacob Astors on their yacht the Nourmahal, and by the Goelets on the White Lady, though the Duke – who must have been feeling the pace by now – declined further invitations to cruise on the grounds that he was a bad sailor. ‘How leisurely were our pleasures!’, wrote Consuelo later. ‘In the mornings, with my mother, we drove to the Casino in a sociable, a carriage so named for the easy comfort it provided for conversation. Face to face on cushioned seats permitting one to lean back without the loss of dignity, we sat under an umbrella-like tent. Dressed in one of the elaborate batistes my mother had bought for me in Paris, with Marlborough opposite in flannels and the traditional sailor hat, we proceeded in state down Bellevue Avenue.’²⁰ Oliver Belmont was often in attendance: ‘Sometimes he drove us to the Polo Field, where the young Waterbury boys were giving early proof of the dash and skill that later placed them in the team known as the Big Four.’²¹

The Duke of Marlborough had been invited to stay for the America’s Cup races, but everyone knew that this was not the real reason for his visit. The days passed, and then a week, but there was still no announcement of an engagement, although the Duke was frequently seen having tennis lessons at the Casino. The social campaign at Marble House, meanwhile, continued unabated. On Saturday 31 August, Alva gave a dinner ‘in honour of the Duke of Marlborough … among her guests being Mr and Mrs John Jacob Astor, Mr and Mrs Victor Sorchan, Miss Burden, Miss Post, Mr and Mrs T. S. Tailer, Miss Wilson and Mr Sidney Smith.’²² This guest list also included Edith and Teddy Wharton, who were on the outer fringes of Alva’s social circle and had based themselves largely in Newport since their marriage in 1885. The next day, Consuelo gave a party of her own at Marble House. Mr Gilmour noted: ‘Sunday September 1st/2nd Miss V. had a huge reception in the afternoon. 3 Hindoos performed tricks for the guests.’²³ The New York Herald called it: ‘the society event of the afternoon’,²⁴ (which was hardly top billing), and mentioned that two new English arrivals were present, the daughters of Lord Dunraven, whose boat the Valkyrie would shortly compete for England against America in the America’s Cup race.

On Thursday 5th and Friday 6th September, there was a sudden exodus from Newport to New York where the America’s Cup races were to be held. Just as suddenly, society’s focus swivelled away from Consuelo and the Duke of Marlborough to the race itself, leaving Newport ‘as if stricken with a pestilence’ and at the mercy of a few ‘hen’ dinners organised by women in desperation at having been left behind.²⁵ According to William Gilmour’s notebooks, Alva, Consuelo and the Duke of Marlborough joined many other spectators on the 1.20 train to New York on Thursday 5 September, and watched the races from the Astors’ yacht the Nourmahal.

In the event, the America’s Cup of 1895 became mired in one of the more acrimonious controversies in the history of the race. Although William K.’s yacht, Defender, won the America’s Cup with a 3–0 victory over the Valkyrie, it only won the first race on water. At the start of the second race, the Valkyrie’s boom hit Defender’s topmast stay and broke it. Although Defender’s crew made emergency repairs, they were unable to overcome the handicap, and the race committee reversed Valkyrie’s win by disqualifying her. Lord Dunraven, patron of the Valkyrie, reacted furiously and defaulted from the third race to challenge the decision that he had lost the second. He blamed the large fleet of small spectator boats crowding the starting line, until it was pointed out that this had affected Defender too. Then he alleged that Defender had been illegally ballasted. His protest was disallowed, but he continued to make it so indignantly that he was stripped of his membership of the New York Yacht Club, causing such a breach that England made no further official challenge for the America’s Cup until 1934.²⁶ The controversy had serious implications for Consuelo too, for just at the moment when she might have found an opportunity to talk to her father, William K. was caught up in the furore which threatened to bring the America’s Cup race to a premature end, and a row which called into question the honour of his captain, and his own.

Unlike many other members of society, Alva, Consuelo and the Duke of Marlborough returned to Newport on Sunday 8 September. There had been rumours that the Duke was planning to proceed from New York to Lenox, a smart resort in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, but the press noted with interest that this plan had been set aside. The days came and went. Nothing materialised. Impertinent speculation continued. ‘The lingering of the Duke of Marlborough at Marble House must mean something,’ thought Town Topics, ‘and his daily drives with the fair daughter are, in the minds of Newport gossips, convincing proof that America will have another Duchess, and a reigning one of the house of Spencer-Churchill at that.’²⁷ By now, the magazine was explicitly linking the presence of the Duke of Marlborough to Alva’s relationship with Oliver Belmont. The Duke of Marlborough, the magazine remarked, ‘seems to be the exclusive property of the Marble House Vanderbilts and the Stone Stable Belmonts’.²⁸ Moreover, every step was being taken by the aforementioned working in tandem to give the two young people time alone together. ‘While the Duke and Miss Consuela [sic] are driving, you may meet any morning, and again in the afternoon, Mrs Willie and Mr Oliver Belmont wheeling or walking.’²⁹

As speculation reached fever pitch, another week passed. It is possible that the Duke of Marlborough, who had an obstinate streak, may have disliked the idea that he was being pressured into a proposal and refused to be rushed; by now he may have noticed that the ferocious Mrs William K. Vanderbilt always succeeded in getting her way and suspected that he was being used as a weapon in her armoury. He may have felt that it was undignified, given Consuelo’s wealth, to propose to her too quickly; and on closer inspection he may have found Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt most difficult to read. For what is one to make of Consuelo?

There were no newspaper reports that she looked unhappy during this courtship, though public sulking and failure to rise to the occasion would have been regarded as almost as insubordinate as eloping with Winthrop Rutherfurd. There were no reports of her looking radiantly happy either, however. In fact there was very little discussion of Consuelo’s demeanour at all. Her name was often misspelt, even by newspapers that had spent weeks tracking every move. There were philosophical debates such as ‘Why Do Women Crave Titles? Are They by Nature Imperialists and Enemies of Democracy?’³⁰ Otherwise, it was as if Consuelo scarcely existed. Perhaps that is what she felt too, for Consuelo later spoke of being frightened of risking her mother’s displeasure and of being ‘disciplined and prepared’³¹ for the Duke’s arrival. For his part, the Duke may have found her so inscrutable that he began to doubt whether they were remotely compatible, for even marriages of convenience require a degree of mutual understanding to make them work. The difficulty was that the longer he stayed, the more awkward the position became.

Years later, Alva gave evidence to the Rota – the Catholic court in Rome – that she had precipitated the engagement by announcing it in the newspapers. The Duke of Marlborough told his hosts that he intended to depart during the week beginning 16 September and Alva may have applied pressure by issuing a formal denial of an engagement knowing that he was about to go. ‘New York papers insist upon the engagement of Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough. Mrs Vanderbilt said to a reporter of the Daily News that evening “Miss Vanderbilt is not engaged to the Duke of Marlborough. I regret that the papers so often see fit to connect her name with different friends of ours”,’ wrote the Newport Daily News on the morning of Wednesday 18 September. This could have had the desired effect on the same evening, for according to William Gilmour’s records, Alva made a dash to New York on Thursday 19 September, returning the following day.³² She almost certainly went to New York to put matters in hand for the formal announcement of Consuelo’s engagement on Friday 20 September.

When it came, the proposal itself was undramatic. After dinner on the night before he was supposed to leave, the Duke of Marlborough took Consuelo into the Gothic Room at Marble House, which she famously described as ‘propitious to sacrifice’, and asked her to marry him, saying that he hoped he would make her a good husband. Consuelo ran upstairs to break the news to her mother. ‘There was no time for thought or regrets,’ she said. ‘The next day, the news was out.’³³ These two short sentences may disguise a moment of real maternal cruelty by Alva however. It is possible that when she told her mother of the Duke’s proposal, Consuelo was still hesitating over whether or not to accept. It is equally possible that Alva simply ignored her daughter’s obvious doubts, and chose to regard the engagement as a fait accompli, leaving for New York as soon as she could to arrange for the announcement. The reaction of Consuelo’s twelve-year-old brother, Harold, did not help. He looked at her calmly and said: ‘He is only marrying you for your money.’ ‘With this last slap to my pride,’ wrote Consuelo, ‘I burst into tears.’³⁴

As soon as the engagement was announced a fierce battle began for control of the narrative. The formal announcement on Friday 20 September 1895 immediately triggered a convulsion of publicity. Initially, much of the coverage was deferential, although Alva’s successful direction of the matter attracted some snide remarks. The ‘short but decisive campaign of General Alva’, was congratulated by Town Topics.³⁵ ‘It was a Famous Victory,’ crowed the World, quoting Southey on the triumph of the 1st Duke of Marlborough at the Battle of Blenheim, in an unexpected outbreak of erudition.³⁶ Newspapers dedicated several column inches to profiles of the young Duke, ‘Blenheim Castle’ and the Spencer-Churchills, and apart from remarking that he did not seem particularly clubbable, the commentary was superficially polite. Consuelo was described as sweet and cultivated though her ‘youth’ and ‘simplicity’ were consistently underlined. Sometimes this went a little far. As the Newport Journal remarked: ‘Her picture as a girl of ten or twelve years old, wearing a tucked guimpe and a childish gown of white muslin and lace with a baby sash is made to do duty in a full page reproduction as “The Fiancée of the Duke of Marlborough” … and some of the papers are indulging in ill-natured criticism.’³⁷ Suspicion about the Duke’s motives was never far from the surface either, even in those newspapers who claimed to despise such cynicism. ‘All doubt as to what impelled the Duke’s visit to this country is dissipated by the announcement of his engagement,’³⁸ opined the New York Herald, immediately planting seeds of doubt by mentioning it, and failing to explain why becoming engaged to an heiress in any way cleared the matter up.

Once excitement about the engagement subsided, public attention turned to the scale of the deal. There was a short delay until the Duke of Marlborough’s lawyer arrived from England. ‘The marriage settlements gave rise to considerable discussion. An English solicitor who had crossed the seas with the declared intention of “profiting the illustrious family” he had been engaged to serve devoted a natural talent to that end,’³⁹ wrote Consuelo. Although wild sums were discussed in the press – $10 million according to one source, plus an additional $5,000 to pay off the Duke’s creditors – the eventual settlement to the Duke was $2.5 million in $50,000 shares of capital stock of the Beech Creek Railway Company, on which an annual payment of 4 per cent was guaranteed by the New York Central Railway Company, giving him an annual income of $100,000*. This income, which was very similar in structure and total to Alva’s divorce settlement, was the Duke’s for life, and was guaranteed even if his marriage to Consuelo ended. In a most unusual arrangement, however, which may have reflected some unease on the part of William K. about the motives of his daughter’s fiancé, a comparable sum was settled on Consuelo. William K. agreed to pay her $100,000 a year in four equal quarterly instalments, a sum which almost certainly took account of $50,000 already paid to Alva annually for Consuelo’s upkeep which was now transferred to her on marriage under the terms of the divorce settlement.⁴⁰

There was some delay in the negotiations until Consuelo proposed that the final sum should be split between them ‘in equal shares, at my request’.⁴¹ It is interesting to note, in view of the later charges of coercion, that Consuelo herself came up with the proposal that finally unlocked the problem, for failure to find a compromise could have resulted in the engagement coming to a premature end. She may have felt, however, that matters had proceeded too far for her to back out. Later, Blanche Oelrichs remembered Newport servants gossiping that Consuelo cried all night at the conclusion of the settlements between the Duke and her father. ‘What were these settlements that tied people up in them against their will? For what did they barter this mysterious something which they cared for enough to cling to with tears? I put a few leading questions to my sister, a great friend of Consuelo’s … to be angrily told that if I went on playing with “street children” I would never get “anywhere”.’⁴²

After the first flush of enthusiasm, the attitude of the American press became much more ambivalent, as if the editors were responding simultaneously to a sentimental desire to see the engagement as a love match and to widespread cynicism about the Duke’s motives. In the World, which had both a political agenda and a wide female readership, both interpretations of the story appeared on the same page. Consuelo wrote later that the Duke went off on a tour of America shortly after the engagement was announced, but this is not true. Soon afterwards, Oliver Belmont arranged a coaching trip to Tuxedo for Consuelo, the Duke, Alva and the Jays, which lasted a few days. While the Duke was still – to all intents and purposes – Alva’s guest, criticism by the flock of journalists who followed him was muted. On the return of the coaching party to New York, however, this changed when the Duke took rooms at the Plaza Hotel. From the moment that he ceased to be Alva’s house guest the press declared open season. The Duke was quite inexperienced in dealing with this kind of publicity, accustomed to a far more deferential press in England. At the same time, however, he clearly lacked Alva’s instinctive grasp of publicity as an instrument of social power. Shortly after the engagement was announced, for example, he let it be known that the marriage had been ‘arranged by his friends and those of Miss Vanderbilt’,⁴³ a most unfortunate turn of phrase which would be held against him for a very long time.

The Duke cannot be held responsible for all criticism, however, for some of it was politically motivated. Joseph Pulitzer at the World, in particular, had a longstanding objection to the manner in which ‘our vulgar moneyed aristocrats’ were prepared to buy ‘European gingerbread titles’⁴⁴ for their daughters. He thought it was deeply unpatriotic and objected just as strenuously to the European nobles who came hunting for American bounty. The day after the coaching trip, when the Duke was joined from England by his cousin Ivor Guest (who would be his best man), they departed for a short excursion to look at the famous blood stock of Kentucky, followed by a bevy of reporters. Such a trip does not seem wholly unreasonable given that the Duke had been staying with the Vanderbilts for several weeks and that Mrs Vanderbilt was on the point of moving into the new house at 72nd Street and Madison Avenue from which Consuelo would be married. Indeed, he may have felt that his presence would have been a burden at such a time.

The Duke must soon have regretted the decision to strike out alone, however, for the World in particular was determined both to poke fun and to show him in the worst possible light. In common with other newspapers, it particularly objected to the fact that he measured just over five foot two inches and that Consuelo stood taller than him at five foot eight. He was accused of discourtesy at a Kentucky racecourse when he picked up a glove; he showed excessive enthusiasm for Kentucky whisky; and in Louisville he was spotted with various sporting friends, at a performance of a high-class comedy “The City Club of Gay Paree” at the Buckingham Theatre. At this point, the World’s reporter thought he had a scoop, maintaining that the Duke had been spotted giving ‘the glad hand and the cheerful word’ to Miss Sophie Erb who had played the role of Tottie Coughdrops.⁴⁵ Miss Sophie Erb told the reporter that she had been ogled throughout her appearance as a living picture in ‘The Birth of Venus’ by a sporty-looking man who later sent word that he was the Duke of Marlborough and asked her for supper – an invitation she indignantly refused saying that she didn’t care if he was the Prince of Wales. Since ‘sporty-looking’ is an adjective that no-one else has ever applied to the 9th Duke of Marlborough, it seems likely that he was the victim of a prank, but the Tottie Coughdrops incident was soon picked up by other more sober newspapers including the New York Tribune.⁴⁶

The World then proceeded to print an exceedingly unflattering profile of the Duke, describing him as ‘no credit to his tailor … hollow-chested … with queer hats … very short of stature and some people say of money’,⁴⁷ and was unable to understand why this had no influence over certain young ladies who, after his return to New York, took to hanging round the foyer of the Plaza Hotel. ‘They want to speak to the Duke, to touch him, to cut off a piece of his coat tails or in some other way to obtain a souvenir of the affianced husband of Miss Vanderbilt. The faithful attendants with difficulty preserve the amiable and ingenious duke from their clutches,’ wrote the World on 15 October. Almost certainly acting on Alva’s advice, the Duke sent for a reporter from the World on his return from Kentucky, his trip having lasted no more than five days. In an attempt to set the record straight he said rather plaintively: ‘They’ve told so many lies about me that really I hardly know myself any more. I’ve become a sort of stranger to myself don’t you know … You Americans seem to like to amuse yourselves at the expense of the English, isn’t that so?’ He offered to tell the reporter anything he would like to know about arrangements for the wedding; but his hazy grasp of the wedding details did little to help his case. He was then reported as having asked the journalist: ‘Why are you people are so fond of interviews with Englishmen? I suppose your American men never give interviews?’ When told that, on the contrary, they were very fond of being interviewed, the Duke was said to have replied incredulously: ‘No, really? They can’t be such flats.’⁴⁸

No sooner had the readership put the Tottie Coughdrops affair behind it than the Duke of Marlborough was arrested for ‘coasting’ on a bicycle in Central Park with his feet on the handlebars. This might be considered rather to his credit, but not by Policeman Sweeny. Said by his admiring colleagues to be capable of ‘arresting anything’, Sweeny had already ordered the Duke off the grass and moved him on, when, to his horror, the felon re-appeared ‘scorching’ down Block House hill, his feet elevated on the handlebars of his bicycle at a rate of at least twenty miles an hour. Policeman Sweeny marched the Duke to the police station, where he confessed his ignorance of park regulations and pointed out that there was no sign warning innocent scorchers that they were in breach of the law. There was considerable embarrassment when the Duke’s identity was discovered, but since a crowd had gathered, ‘it was too late to recede’.⁴⁹ The distinguished visitor was reprimanded, ‘discharged’, and proceeded on the offending bicycle back to the Plaza. This time the story appeared in The Times in London, though all mention of feet on handlebars was respectfully omitted.

As these stories appeared, there was a counterblast in different mode. The Sunday edition of the World began to print a weekly ‘Diary of the Most Interesting Couple in America’. The newspaper was watching every move made by the Duke and Consuelo and was perfectly capable of fabrication, but there is also a strong possibility that it was being fed information by Alva in an attempt to manage criticism of her future son-in-law. Alongside impolite press coverage of the Duke, a different voice stressed his painstaking attentions to Consuelo, described by the World as ‘in many ways more entertaining than one of Ouida’s novels of high life and far more instructive to aspiring duchesses – for it is fact’.⁵⁰ He showers her with roses; she carries three of them to a soiree; she wears a fetching gown of white mousseline de soie with a jewelled buckle; she breakfasts late with her mother; she steals a rest on a veranda as she receives the congratulations of friends; when he hears that Miss Vanderbilt is slightly indisposed, he sends more roses; she selects the most beautiful and wears it in her hair, etc.

On Saturday 18 October the ‘Diary’ gave way to extensive coverage of Alva’s new house on 72nd Street, complete with elaborate descriptions of the interior, including Consuelo’s boudoir described as ‘the lovely little rooms she will leave behind when she becomes mistress of Blenheim Castle’. As the World pointed out: ‘The happy dwellers in it do not have to spend weeks in hanging pictures, living in one room at a time and so forth, as ordinary mortals do when they move into a new house,’⁵¹ but Alva certainly had much else to think about, and this included protecting her future son-in-law from the raw energy of New York’s newspapers. For a few days the tactic seemed to work. The Duke accompanied Consuelo and Mrs Vanderbilt to church on Sunday morning and on the Monday it was announced in the papers that the wedding would take place on 6 November (for some inscrutable reason the Duke refused to be married on Guy Fawkes Day); Walter Damrosch would direct the music; an orchestra of sixty players had been engaged. Letters appeared in the press saying that the Duke’s ‘arrest’ had been ridiculous and inhospitable. On Monday 21 October, he enjoyed a good day’s hunting with the Monmouth Hunt Club in New Jersey. And there, perhaps, matters could have rested.

By Tuesday 22 October, however, the papers were in full flow again, this time because, in a serious public relations blunder, the Duke had refused to pay duty on family jewellery and on wedding presents for Consuelo sent from England. On the face of it, this was not an unreasonable reaction from a man accustomed to making economies. The presents would only be in the States for a very short time before travelling back to England with the bride and groom. But he was about to marry one of the world’s richest heiresses, there was great sensitivity about his motives and his instinctive reaction appeared curmudgeonly, mercenary and mean-spirited, particularly since it was also reported that he had bought four expensive white Kentucky mules which were being shipped back to England (a purchase he later denied). The World

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