Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Mother and a Daughter in the ‘Gilded Age’

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.