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

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.