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

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.