It was in Newport that the seventeen-year-old Consuelo Vanderbilt was kept a prisoner by her mother Alva in her enormous ‘cottage’, the Marble House, until she agreed to marry the man of her mother’s choice. This captivity was probably the most extreme example of maternal husband-hunting, in a setting that represented the extreme of social exclusivity.
For by the 1880s this small town on the north-east of Rhode Island had become the testing ground for those who wanted to get into society. If you couldn’t make it in Newport, you wouldn’t make it in New York.
There was still a pretence of bucolic, country living, rather in the fashion of Marie Antoinette playing at being a milkmaid. But the ‘cottages’ of the rich, jostling each other along Bellevue Avenue, had ballrooms and stables, Paris chefs cooked the dinners in the great marble dining rooms, and the daily round was as formal as anything at a European court. It was a long way from the rum-distilling for which the town had originally been known.
Then, Newport had been the centre of the infamous ‘triangle trade’: rum shipped to Africa in exchange for slaves, slaves despatched to the West Indies to cull the sugar canes, and the sugar then sent to Newport to make the rum. Through this, by the beginning of the eighteenth century it was a fashionable resort for wealthy Southern and West Indian planters, so much so that it had become almost a Southern colony. Also making them feel welcome was the produce of its twenty-two distilleries, its famous rum. As tensions grew between the North and the South, Southerners felt more at home here than in the richer, more Yankee resort of Saratoga Springs.
Throughout the 1870s Saratoga, noted for its spa, had been the place to go. Its season began on 1 July, when everyone (who could afford it) went for a cure, and it was, according to Cornelius Vanderbilt Jnr, ‘where Broadway and Fifth Avenue met’. Sporting men enjoyed it because there was trotting and flat racing, in July and August respectively. It was masculine in tone. ‘Nowhere do women seem so much like appendages,’ said the author Mary Gay Humphreys, describing the place.
The truly smart stayed in the old United States Hotel, with its black walnut staircases, red-carpeted floors and long verandahs on which guests would sit lazily in wicker rocking chairs. In the round wooden bath houses with their five-foot-deep pools, the clear, warm water bubbled like champagne; male visitors, who bathed in the nude, could have tall frosted mint juleps floated out to them on cork trays. Every morning people would check the hotel register to see who had arrived.
It was also where illicit liaisons were condoned – millionaires with beautiful ‘secretaries’ or ‘distant cousins’ settled in one of the colony of hotel cottages. Many of the demi-monde, flashing with diamonds and bright with paint, descended on Saratoga, justifying its racy reputation. Gradually the old smart set found themselves being swamped by the moneyed louche.
* * *
The catalyst for the change in Newport from an unpretentious seaside resort of white clapboard houses, their lawns bordered by blue hydrangeas, to a social centre dominated by huge cliff-top palaces was, as in New York, Ward McAllister. He was one of Newport’s earliest aficionados, having summered there as a child with his family like other Southerners. After the steamy heat of Savannah, Georgia (where the McAllisters lived), Newport’s fresh sea breezes, meadows full of clover and daisies and gardens where roses, clematis and carnations grew profusely were a delicious change. In the late 1850s he bought Bayside Farm on the island, where he intended to live for nine months of the year, wintering in the West Indies.
Here he would entertain New York friends during the summer months to simple dinners and picnics (partly owing to her health, his wife seldom made appearances at any of his entertainments). It was simplicity with a twist: the farm had a cellar for claret and an attic for madeira,1 some of the latter seventy or eighty years old and well preserved thanks to the cold Rhode Island winters. As he sipped it, McAllister would tell the company how many times the bottles had crossed the Atlantic before the wine had been mellowed to perfection.
From the start McAllister saw Newport as a place where the feminine element was strongest: here business, politics and religion were banned as topics of polite conversation. Soon he was organising dinners and picnics for friends and, sometimes, others. As he put it in his autobiography: ‘Riding on the Avenue on a lovely summer’s day, I would be stopped by a beautiful woman, in gorgeous array, looking so fascinating that if she were to ask you to attempt the impossible, you would at least make the effort.’ Fortunately, what she invariably wanted was not the impossible but one of his famous picnics. ‘I will do your bidding,’ he would reply, and a date would be fixed and he would jot down: ‘Monday 1 p.m., meet at Narragansett Avenue, bring filet de boeuf piqué.’
After that it was a question of waylaying every carriage known to contain friends – all the smart world went driving in the late morning – and assigning to those who could come the bringing of a certain dish plus a bottle of champagne. For single young men, it was a bottle of champagne and a bunch of grapes or a quart of ice cream. McAllister would then hire servants and musicians for the day, get a carpenter to make and lay a dancing platform, order flowers, arrange for people on the outlying roads to point the way to his farm and generally organise everything down to, as he said, the last salt spoon. Once he even hired a flock of Southdown sheep and some cattle for half a day to add verisimilitude to his ‘farming life’.
Such ‘picnics’ might have been called ‘rural’, but they had all the ersatz simplicity of the Petit Trianon. For, as McAllister pointed out: ‘These little parties were then, and are now, the stepping stones to our best New York society. Now, do not for a moment imagine that all were indiscriminately asked to these little fêtes. On the contrary, if you were not of the inner circle, and were a newcomer, it took the combined efforts of all your friends’ backing and pushing to procure an invitation for you.
‘For years, whole families sat on the stool of probation, awaiting trial and acceptance, and many were then rejected, but once received, you were put on intimate footing with all. To acquire such intimacy in a great city like New York would have taken you a lifetime.’
With the opening of Newport’s summer season of 1871, the year when the new structure of American society was being launched, came nine ‘Cliff Cottages’– an experiment in luxurious rental properties – with an exclusive hotel nearby. ‘The grounds are tastefully laid out, each family having separate grounds and flower-beds, and which are kept in order by the association,’ commented the New York Times. ‘Stables are provided also, with servants’ apartments at the hotel. Surely it is a novel idea.’
Novel it might have been, but it soon caught on. By the 1880s the truly smart, led by the queens, went to Newport in the summer; six weeks there was essential if you wished to keep, or improve, your place in society. Conversely, not to do so showed that one’s status was insecure. People would even travel to Europe in order to have a realistic-sounding excuse for not being in Newport for the season if they were still on the fringes and not certain of acceptance. One way of finding this out was to be invited onto someone’s yacht for a week or so, thus ‘testing the waters’.
Anyone unwise enough to take a villa without the certain knowledge that they were ‘in’ would suffer the humiliation of being omitted from the splendid balls and dinners that took place almost every night. They could not take part in bathing parties on Bailey’s Beach, nor were their men allowed to join the Reading Room or the Club, with its bronze owls on the gateposts. They could arrive on the Casino lawn on Bellevue Avenue and be ignored while the ‘rubber plants’ – as the ordinary townsfolk were known – peered at their discomfiture through hedges. They usually left after a month of such treatment.
* * *
The sea might be sparkling, the copper beeches glowing in the sunshine, but the refreshing sea breezes brought no sense of holiday relaxation; rather, the rules of etiquette were even more stringent here.
For some the day began with riding, changing at around mid-morning from riding habit to day dress, or with a visit to the Horse Shoe Piazza at the Casino (signing in here was a sign to your friends that you had arrived in Newport). Some women would sit listening to Mullaly’s orchestra, in clothes that swished and rustled if they moved or gestured – countless petticoats, of satin, lace or taffeta, embroidered, flounced, decorated with seed pearls or cupid’s bows in gold, enormous feather hats, parasols to match every dress, eighty or ninety different dresses for a season. ‘You will see at a reception in Newport more Worth dresses than anywhere else in America, except in New York during the height of the season,’ commented one newspaper. Sometimes the prettiest girls would seek a quiet corner ‘to listen to the music’, demurely embroidering while they waited for swains to gather round them, with whom they would take turns to promenade.
On fine days the destination would be Bailey’s Beach, a crescent of coarse grey sand reserved exclusively for the élite and for them the ‘only’ beach out of the half-dozen-odd suitable for bathing. But even the drive to Bailey’s, at the southern end of Bellevue Avenue, required the right clothes. ‘When I was seventeen my skirts almost touched the ground; it was considered immodest to wear them shorter,’ wrote Consuelo Vanderbilt of 1894.
‘My dresses had high, tight whalebone collars. A corset laced my waist to the eighteen inches fashion decreed. An enormous hat adorned with flowers, feathers and ribbons was fastened to my hair with long steel pins, and a veil covered my face. Tight gloves pinched my hands and I carried a parasol. Thus attired I went to Bailey’s beach for a morning bathe.’
The veil that Consuelo mentioned was not just a coquettish adornment. To be considered a beauty a perfect complexion was essential, which meant the skin had to be defended against the ravages of sun, wind and sea air. A parasol was merely a second line of defence; a heavy veil, sometimes even made of wool, was the most popular answer. Occasionally one of the more dashing women would wear something even stronger: a mask made of fine chamois leather, often with embroidered lips and eyes.
Bailey’s had a watchman in a gold-laced uniform who knew every carriage by sight and would allow no one else in unless accompanied by a member or with a note from one of the great hostesses; everyone else had to go to Easton’s, used by the townspeople. Women bathers wore full-skirted costumes and long black stockings, often wading into the water holding their parasols. At midday, when a red flag was run up, they beat a hasty retreat: it was now the turn of the gentlemen, who as always bathed nude.
A few played the new game of tennis, the women in pleated skirts, black stockings and white tennis shoes, with sailor hats to which were attached the inevitable double veils to protect them from the sun. Later, bicycling was to become the craze, with even a bicycle fête (in 1894) when forty or fifty of the social cream set off for a picnic destination – followed, naturally, by their carriages in case of fatigue or accident. Others visited the Worth boutique, conveniently sited on Bellevue Avenue, for a little light shopping.
Then came luncheon, perhaps on a yacht for which smart clothes were essential – though only married women could wear jewels in the daytime – followed, possibly, by a short visit to the polo field after which came the all-important rite of calling. This, along with the other immutable patterns into which the day fell, was, to those determined to maintain their position, unavoidable. ‘I could never comprehend why we should spend every glorious summer afternoon at Newport showering the colony with our calling cards when we had already nodded and spoken to our friends several times since breakfast,’ wrote Consuelo’s cousin, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, son of the redoubtable Grace.
‘Yet punctually on the dot of three Mother expected my father, sister and me to join the splendid dress parade of carriages on Bellevue Avenue. How vividly I can recall the tedium of those occasions when, proceeding at a snail’s pace in a shiny black victoria and clutching our hateful card cases in spotless white gloves, we accompanied Mother on this sacred ritual … for two hours in the velvet-upholstered carriage we were not allowed to lounge, or slump, or cross our legs. My cards, at the age of nine, read: “Master Cornelius Vanderbilt, Junr”’.
Children, for whom this was supposedly a summer holiday, were taught never to laugh or cry too loud, always to stand when a lady entered the room, never to sit down in a carriage until all the ladies were seated, and only to speak when spoken to.
Other lessons quickly absorbed from their parents were those of snobbishness. One girl, a scion of two of the oldest Knickerbocker families, wrote in her journal of a seamstress who came to their home to mend carpets: ‘I don’t like to have her use our forks and drink out of our cups … I try to pick out a nicked cup for her to use so that we can recognise and avoid it.’ Another felt humiliated because she was the only one at a formal luncheon without a personal servant to carve for her.
When calling, it was important never to overtake the carriage of a social superior (in the same way that you must not out-dress, out-jewel or out-entertain her). These rules of exclusion even extended to marking invisible boundaries on the ground itself: although the cottagers could wander in the town, the townspeople were not allowed in Bellevue Avenue. Only during Tennis Tournament week did the two sets mingle. The ‘outsiders’ could also attend the Tennis Club Ball – and did – which ended the season although, again, there was no mingling.
In the late afternoon, for the privileged, there was the equivalent of the European evening stroll up and down the boulevards. Carriages of all sorts, from dog-carts to four-in-hands, drove up and down Bellevue Avenue in a double line, passing and repassing each other; the custom was to make a ceremonious bow the first time you passed a friend, to smile the second time and to look away the third.
It was as necessary then to be well turned out on wheels as to have a fine house. The grandest equipage was that belonging to Mrs August Belmont, drawn by four horses, on two of which rode postilions in short jackets, tight breeches and velvet jockey caps. In these vehicles sat women dressed to the nines in satin-striped dresses fitting smoothly over tight-laced corsets, flower-trimmed bonnets and the ubiquitous parasol, this time in fringed silk or velvet.
Fashionable young men drove dog carts, with two horses in tandem; older men drove showy phaetons with the best horses they could find and a groom with folded arms behind. A handsome pair of horses would draw a ‘sociable’, in which four people could converse easily while leaning back on cushioned seats under a sheltering canopy, the women in picture hats and organdie dresses, the men in white flannels and peaked sailor hats. It was as much a promenade of Newport society as a visit to the Casino.
Edith Jones (later Wharton) remembered seeing a young woman staying with the Jones family appear for the afternoon drive in a white silk dress with a broad black satin stripe and a huge hat wreathed in crimson roses, hung with a green veil against the sun. She was escorted by Edith’s brother Harry, dressed equally smartly in a frock coat, a tall hat and pearl-grey trousers. After tea and gossip, it was time to change for the evening, perhaps for dinner on another yacht, perhaps for a grand dinner in one of the ‘cottages’, perhaps for a dance or ball.
‘Newport is like an enormous and brilliant garden in which are palatial homes,’ commented Price Collier. ‘We have summer resorts in and out of France, all over Europe in fact, but no one place where the wealth and fashion of a nation focus themselves as here.
‘When an American family gets money enough to afford an attack on the citadel of Society, they begin at Newport. Here congregate what are called “society people” from New York especially, but from Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago as well, and for two months in the summer the most highly polished American kettle boils and bubbles and steams upon the Newport hob.’
Nothing was too expensive or too grand for those summering in this little town. On the Vanderbilt lawns ices were eaten under the shade of Japanese umbrellas, with feet upon Turkey rugs. Tapestries were brought from New York drawing rooms along with silk sheets that could be changed twice daily, 100 pounds of lobster would arrive in basement kitchens on party days. There were fancy-dress balls galore, dinners on gold plate for 100 overlooking the distant sea dotted with white sails and the Newport shore, glowing in the last bright rays of the sun setting behind the Narragansett Hills. Once, a butler who was sacked got his revenge by painstakingly unscrewing the whole of a gold dinner service into 300 separate pieces and leaving them mixed in a heap on the dining-room table. As there was a dinner party that night a wire had to be sent to Tiffany’s, who despatched two men from New York to put the service together again in time for dinner.
In this society designed by women for women, a husband – provided he paid the bills and turned up dutifully at important dinner parties – was scarcely needed. Even Newport’s most eligible widower, James Van Alen, a man with an impeccable Knickerbocker background and a passion for all things English, from copper warming pans and oak settles to pewter tankards and expressions like ‘Prithee’ – once, he even brought over a man from England at vast expense to teach the members of the Coaching Club how a coaching horn should be blown – had to toe the line laid down by the female half of society.
When he invited a pretty young woman whom he had met at Narragansett, to which he had sailed on his yacht, to stay for the weekend, he was quickly made to feel he had gone too far. The reason? She was not part of ‘the circle’. Every single woman of the twenty-odd who had been coming to his luncheon party on Saturday now found that, somehow, it had become impossible – a headache here, a slight cough there, friends arriving unexpectedly – and a number of their husbands called off too.
Eventually, the desperate Van Alen asked his daughter to act as hostess. She agreed, but only on condition he paid her $5,000 – and if he wished her to talk to his pretty guest, he would have to make it $10,000. With no alternative, he had to agree. She took the cheque and told him it would get her some earrings she had seen in Tiffany’s. The luncheon party took place but the guest was left in no doubt that she was unwelcome and departed the following morning, saying the sea air did not agree with her.
Another who broke the rules was the colourful and popular James Gordon Bennett Jnr, publisher of the New York Herald and a noted sportsman who had introduced polo to the United States (he also funded Stanley’s expedition to find Livingstone). Frequently drunk, he would pursue one of his favourite hobbies by driving a coach and four at breakneck speed through the streets of New York, often in the small hours and sometimes in the nude.
His real prowess was as a yachtsman, something greatly admired by Newporters; in 1866 he had won the first trans-oceanic yacht race, between three American yachts, the Vesta, the Fleetwing and his own Henrietta. On another of his yachts, the 300-foot Lysistrata, he kept a milk cow in a fan-cooled stall, a Turkish bath, a company of actors and a luxury car – later he sponsored motor racing.
For years he had summered at The Elms, a house facing the Casino. Then, at the age of thirty-six, he became engaged to the socialite Caroline May, an engagement that ended in scandal when he arrived late and drunk at a party at her family house and then urinated into a fireplace in full view of his hosts. Caroline was so shattered that she broke off the engagement at once; the next day her brother attacked Bennett with a horsewhip and challenged him to a duel – fortunately both men were such bad shots that they missed each other completely. This time, Bennett realised he had gone too far and sailed for Europe. The Elms remained empty for years until he judged, accurately, that sufficient time had passed for his return to be welcomed.
Some found the relentless Newport social round tedious in the extreme. ‘To take a meal with them was to look dullness squarely in the eye,’ wrote Blanche Oelrichs, daughter of one of society’s leaders, of the small ‘informal’ lunches McAllister organised in Newport.
Men, in particular, chafed at its restrictiveness and some managed to escape from it on their yachts. ‘Father’s boredom on these expeditions [the afternoon ritual of calling] matched my own,’ wrote Cornelius Vanderbilt IV. ‘However, he soon developed the habit of disappearing to his boats or club just before the calling hour began. Mother left several of his cards, anyway, with the corner turned down to indicate that he was in Newport and available for parties, a favour for which he did not thank her.’
The yacht to which the nine-year-old Cornelius’s father disappeared was one of the most luxurious in the world. The 233-foot North Star was gleaming white, with a thirty-foot dining room, cabin walls hung with silk, velvet-rope handrails, Irish linen sheets, a well-stocked wine room and a library.
Yachts also served another purpose. They provided the perfect hideaway for the clandestine affair: out at sea, there were no prying eyes and no one could prove what did or didn’t go on. As both husbands and wives, for their different reasons, did not wish to upset the status quo, even when some magnate had added a boatload of chorus girls to the crew both he and his wife could maintain the convenient fiction that he was merely taking a short cruise for his health.
As in New York, there were never enough men. Many husbands only came from their offices at weekends, often in their own private train; others simply remained in New York or took off in their yachts. Sometimes there were so many absentees that there was a serious shortage of men for dinner or dancing. When extra were needed, the young officers from the Naval Training Station were invited. ‘Can you let me have five bridge players for tomorrow at Mrs Hamilton Twombly’s?’ would run a typical call to the Commanding Officer. Or ‘Will you send a dozen dancing men for Mrs Oliver Belmont’s ball?’ Although, naturally, they had to be of good family, they were still outsiders, and certainly nowhere near their hosts in wealth, so as one woman put it: ‘They always wore their uniforms, so that no one wasted any time on them.’
* * *
Magnificent as were the yachts, it was the ‘cottages’, stretching the length of Bellevue Avenue along the cliffs and over Ochre Point, for which Newport became (and remained) best known – houses like White Lodge, a villa with a Nile-green ballroom, Elm Court, with three entrances (copied from those at Buckingham Palace), built by a coal baron, and the Frederick Vanderbilts’ Rough Point, a grey stone ‘Tudor’ house with lawns running down to the cliff edge and a Gothic hall. These Newport mansions had stained-glass windows by Tiffany, mosaic floors, panelled walls, furniture of bronze, white holly, red cherry or black walnut.
The best known and grandest of these huge mansions was The Breakers. In 1885 Cornelius Vanderbilt II had bought an estate at Newport’s Ochre Point that included a three-storey brick and frame house as a holiday home for his family. When the house burnt down seven years later, his wife Alice took charge of the rebuilding. What emerged was a palace (no wood was used in its construction as Cornelius insisted the building should be fireproof). Instead it was almost entirely marble.
The Breakers had seventy rooms (thirty-three of them to house the necessary number of servants).2 Twenty-six horses lived in the outlying stables, together with their grooms and the twelve gardeners who looked after the eleven acres of garden. Its massive double staircase had bronze and gold balustrades, the white and gold music room with its tapestry panels and the morning room were designed and built in France, taken apart for shipping, and reassembled at Newport; weekly crates of treasures – fireplaces, columns, tapestries, pictures and mantelpieces – came from the houses of European noblemen; in the bathrooms with their marble tubs and solid silver taps were not only hot and cold running water but hot and cold running salt water, and the kitchen was so large that Mrs Vanderbilt could give a dinner party for 200. At a cost of $5 million it was far and away the most impressive house in Newport, and Alice Vanderbilt surged ahead towards the leadership of society.
At the same time, Cornelius’s brother Willie K was building the Marble House, designed by Richard Morris Hunt and masterminded by his wife Alva, in hot competition with her sister-in-law Alice, with whom no love was lost. It was finally finished in 1892.
At $2 million to build, with another $9 million spent on its interior, it outdid Alice’s creation (hence the term ‘vanderbuilding’ for this form of social competitiveness). It was inspired by the Sun King’s Grand Trianon at Versailles. Two sweeps of drive rose towards its portico, held by four Doric columns the height of the entire two-storey house; its fifty rooms needed a staff of thirty-six servants. The hall and staircase were built of yellow marble, the dining room of red; the walls of the Gold Room were covered in gold leaf applied by hand. Over Alva’s bedroom door, cherubs clasped shields featuring the initial A.
Luncheons were formally served in the huge red marble dining room (the Salon of Hercules at Versailles), where the high-backed bronze chairs were so heavy that footmen had to move them in to the table. Anna Robinson, a fellow socialite, wrote of their housewarming party: ‘It was a superb affair and I was very glad I went. The house is gorgeous of course but too ornate it seems to me to live in everyday particularly the dining room which is only suitable for a banquet … the bedrooms are very pretty but simple & you could feel perfectly comfortable in them at once. While downstairs I should think one must be educated up to the surroundings.’ It was here that Alva held their daughter Consuelo’s coming-out ball on 28 August 1895 – and here that Consuelo was imprisoned until she bowed to her mother’s will.
* * *
After the Vanderbilts’ world cruise, Alva had taken Consuelo to London, where she made use of her friends for introductions, one of which resulted in a dinner party where Consuelo met the Duke of Marlborough for the first time. Neither made much impression on the other.
Meanwhile, Willie K, a keen racing man, rushed to London to see the Derby and then returned to Paris for the Grand Prix, on which he won 40,000 francs. Almost immediately afterwards he was introduced to a glamorous member of the demi-monde, Nellie Neustretter, an adventuress from Topeka, Kansas, known for her beauty and its effect on men. Instantly, Willie K gave her his winnings, following this by setting her up in a pied-à-terre in Paris with a dozen servants and giving her a superb carriage (grander than Alva’s), a Deauville villa and an allowance of $200,000 a year.
‘Willie is running round the town with this cocotte as publicly as possible, with the express design, as he loudly says, of humiliating his own wife, with whom he quarrelled latterly in a very bitter fashion,’ commented Town Topics gleefully, as stories trickled back of the pair’s visits to Les Ambassadeurs (the most expensive restaurant in Paris) and the Café de la Mort, done up in black, with coffin-shaped tables and waiters dressed as undertakers’ men.
This gave Alva her chance. Although gossip sheets had long alleged that Willie was unfaithful, she now had more concrete evidence. She filed for divorce, citing adultery in her suit, thus breaking the greatest social taboo of the Astor circle into which she had so painfully climbed. Even the word ‘divorce’ was taboo and ladies usually left the room if it was uttered.
Alva’s behaviour was the challenging of an unwritten rule: rich society men assumed that they could have anything they wanted, including women who weren’t their wives, in return for which the wives, the beneficiaries of the husbands’ great wealth, were supposed to accept this and look the other way. Alva’s lawyer did his best to talk her out of suing but the more he tried, the more she became convinced that the only reason for this was his fear that other fed-up society wives would follow her lead – and what would happen then to the world as everyone knew it?
It is possible that Willie’s fling with Nellie was planned because Willie, too, was determined to escape from the marriage – and also to hide his true interest. Among the women he was rumoured to have seen on the side was Consuelo Yznaga. Alva never discussed this, but that same year she dropped her old friend permanently from her life, a breach promptly broadcast by Town Topics.
After the summer in London, Alva and Consuelo returned to New York, where the divorce (in March 1895) had rendered Alva an outcast. The Vanderbilts cut their ties with her, a torrent of unsavoury press rained upon the family (one newspaper deemed the split ‘the biggest divorce case that America has ever known’ – it was splashed across eight columns in the World) and the judgement of those in her circle was swift and harsh. ‘When I walked into church on a Sunday soon after obtaining my divorce, not a single one of my old friends would recognise me,’ recorded Alva. ‘They walked by me with cold stares or insolent looks. They gathered in little groups to make it evident they were speaking of their disapprobation of my conduct.’
But she was still enormously wealthy. She owned the Marble House outright – she had refused Willie K’s offer of 660 Fifth Avenue and Idle House because of ‘unpleasant memories’ – and had received a sum of $10 million plus an income of around $100,000 a year and sole custody of their children. Not one to suffer in silence, she broadcast the tales of Willie’s infidelities to some effect and her social grip was such that she still received invitations to parties – but only the hostess would deign to talk to her.3 She claimed that other women, upon seeing her enter the room, would file out in silence, although ‘the men would talk to me even though they did not approve of my actions but they did not wish their womenfolk to notice me’. This ostracism was particularly hard on Consuelo, who could not now have a New York début and hardly went out at all.
By now Alva had discovered that Consuelo was in love with Winthrop Rutherfurd; earlier, when he was one of a group on a cycling expedition, he and Consuelo had managed to outpace their respective mothers – and Winthrop hurriedly proposed. Although they kept their engagement secret Alva realised from Consuelo’s sudden happiness what had happened and laid her plans accordingly. She took her daughter to Europe; Winthrop followed them to Paris, but when he called at their hotel he was refused admittance.
From then on, Consuelo was guarded. Alva intercepted and destroyed Winthrop’s letters to Consuelo and those from Consuelo to him, so that her daughter did not even know that her suitor was trying desperately to contact her – or even that he was in the same country.
For Alva’s decision that the Duke of Marlborough would be Consuelo’s future husband had never wavered. So determined was she to bring this off that while in Paris she took the opportunity of ordering Consuelo’s wedding dress, telling Worth to send it when the engagement was announced. This done, she took Consuelo to London. Here, with friends in common, she knew it was only a question of a short time before they met the Duke again.
From the Duke’s point of view, a rich marriage was essential. By the 1870s the Marlboroughs had found themselves in such financial trouble that they had had to sell pictures and most of the family jewellery at auction, raising £10,000. Then came the sale of the wonderful 18,000-volume Sunderland library, a Raphael, a Van Dyck and finally the jewel of the collection, Rubens’ Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment, and their Son Peter Paul.4 But the sums raised were still not enough to cover either the family’s debts or the maintenance of the ducal palace and by 1892 the Spencer-Churchills were almost broke.
Consuelo’s second encounter with the Duke took place at a ball, when he invited Consuelo and Alva to join a small house party at Blenheim. The day after their arrival he took Consuelo out on her own for a drive around some of the villages on his estate. Alva, who had dropped her strict chaperonage of her daughter for any meeting with the Duke, followed this up by inviting him to Newport for the ball she was going to give for Consuelo in August.
At the news of the ball, the society papers were agog. Who would come to it and who would stay away? What would happen when the different branches of the Vanderbilts met? Would the boycott of Alva still continue?
The Duke, as Alva had guessed, proved too much of a draw for anyone to resist, and her invitations were all eagerly accepted. Consuelo, seeing the inexorable approach of a fate she dreaded, was in despair. As Alva was determined that nothing would interfere with her plan – let alone the fact that her daughter was in love with someone else and did not wish to marry the man her mother had selected – Consuelo was kept a prisoner in the Marble House.
The porter was under orders not to let her out alone, her mother and her governess were always with her and when friends called they were told she was not at home. She was unable to write a letter because she had no means of buying a stamp or posting it and all the letters that arrived for her were taken straight to Alva, who destroyed them. Equally powerful as a prison wall was the psychological factor that she had been brought up from babyhood with the habit of total subordination to someone whose will was law.
It was not long before Newport society, aware of Alva’s treatment of her daughter, echoed with the phrase: ‘A marble palace is the right place for a woman with a marble heart.’
Consuelo held out against the prospect before her as long as she could but, after five months without word from her lover, and unable to reach him, with her mother raging, screaming and shouting that either she would have a fatal heart attack or that she would ‘shoot Winthrop Rutherfurd’ and threatening that therefore she would be arrested, imprisoned and hanged, she cracked, and agreed to accept Marlborough when he proposed. She was barely eighteen, completely isolated, utterly miserable and brought up to be subservient to her mother in all things.5
When the Duke arrived in Newport as part of an American tour he was entertained by several of its notables, with others crowding to watch where possible. But the highlight was Alva’s ball, planned so that she would outdo any previous entertainment in both taste and lavishness.
She succeeded. The grounds were lit by thousands of tiny lights, a host of servants wore livery in the style of Louis XIV, there were nine French chefs, three orchestras and the tables were decorated with pink hollyhocks among which swarmed tiny hummingbirds. In the yellow marble hall, a bronze drinking fountain held pink lotus plants, above which hovered artificial butterflies.
Even the cotillion favours, previously chosen by Alva in Paris – Louis XIV fans, etchings, gold watch-cases – were so splendid that guests actually stole them from one another. Alva wore white satin with a court train and a dazzle of diamonds; beside her stood Consuelo in white satin and tulle. It was a triumph – except that there was no offer of marriage from the Duke.
The parties and dinners went on … and on … and on – and still nothing. Finally, the evening before he was due to leave, the Duke proposed. Alva, determined to waste no time in clinching the matter, announced the engagement the following day, even ordering her servants to spread the good news with the words ‘Go out and tell everyone you know.’
The magazine Town Topics, under no illusions, remarked on the ‘short but decisive campaign of General Alva’, while Consuelo’s twelve-year-old brother told her: ‘He is only marrying you for your money.’ Consuelo burst into tears, perhaps because it was true. After some hard bargaining, the eventual settlement to the Duke was $2.5 million in share stock on which 4 per cent gave him an annual income of $100,000.
The wedding was also choreographed by the dominating Alva who, on the grounds that Consuelo had ‘no taste’, did not let her daughter choose either her bridesmaids or her trousseau, and refused to ask any of her Vanderbilt relations.
For weeks beforehand there was constant press attention, with the daily doings of the couple retailed to a fascinated audience. The publicity-conscious Alva sent some of Consuelo’s trousseau underwear to Vogue, which to Consuelo’s squirming embarrassment ran a feature on her bridal corset with solid-gold clasps, her rose-embroidered corset covers, her pink, lace-trimmed drawers and her silk nightgowns. ‘It is not too much to say that the future of female underclothing will be momentously affected by the light which the public has lately received,’ wrote The Saunterer in a caustic paragraph about Alva’s pursuit of publicity.
The couple were married at the end of November 1895 in St Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, Consuelo spending the morning of her wedding in tears alone in her room, with a footman posted at the door – Alva was taking no chances. As soon as Alva had left the house for the church Willie K arrived to escort his daughter there. They were half an hour late, owing to efforts to try and conceal the signs of her red-eyed weeping. A huge and excited crowd waited outside, following the carriage to the church and then back to Alva’s house on 72nd Street, where the wedding breakfast took place, with Mrs Astor as guest of honour – Alva had not forgotten her priorities.
Other guests were sensitive to the faint aura of scandal that hung like a mist in the church, as one of them noted: ‘It was the most peculiar thing to see Mr & Mrs Vanderbilt quite near each other listening to the choir sing the hymn “O perfect love”.’
With her daughter’s marriage into the highest rank of the British aristocracy, Alva managed to overcome the disgrace of her divorce. Her place regained in society, she married Oliver Belmont the following year, a wedding attended neither by the Vanderbilt clan, who had stood by Willie K, nor the Belmonts – perhaps because they disapproved of Oliver’s treatment of his first wife and his behaviour in settling so much of his fortune on his second, a woman already hugely rich.
For not only did Alva’s alimony continue after her marriage but her new husband settled on her both his estate of Grey Crag and his enormous Newport ‘cottage’ Belcourt – also designed by her favourite architect, Richard Morris Hunt, this time based on the Louis XIII hunting lodge at Versailles. Virtually the whole of the ground floor was devoted to Belmont’s collection of carriages and his prized horses – he was known for his skill as a four-in-hand carriage-driver – its huge Gothic rooms with their stained-glass windows emblazoned with the Belmont coat of arms. True to form, Alva lost no time in making alterations, converting Oliver’s carriage room into a banqueting hall and transforming a study into her boudoir, complete with eighteenth-century French panelling.
That year, a society reporter wrote of Newport: ‘Never before have the lines between the smart set and the others been more closely drawn. A few women seem to lead the concourse like sheep and there is an almost riotous struggle of getting in and keeping other people out.’