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

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.