by gail maccoll
Capt. Arthur Paget, costumed as Edward the Black Prince, an earlier, more famous military man.
In the 1870s, the splashy wedding was the exception rather than the rule. The reception, or “breakfast” was short and far from lavish. Nevertheless, the aesthetics of the era mandated incredibly ornate wedding cakes.
CHAPTER 2
THE FAIR INVADERS
A Turn in the Tide
Audacity & Innocence
The Siege of London
The Competition
Poor Peers
The Self-Made Girl’s Wedding
A TURN IN THE TIDE
As the 1870s moved into the 1880s, the Buccaneers became fashionable young matrons and key players in the English social scene. Clearly, abandoning the fiercely competitive New York social scene had paid off for them. But even in the stuffy mansions of Fifth Avenue, times were changing. The sovereign power of the Mrs. Astor was coming under assault by Alva Vanderbilt—a childhood friend of Minnie Stevens and Consuelo Yznaga. In fact, Alva was a Buccaneer in her own right, but a Buccaneer who stayed home.
THE BUCCANEER IN NEW YORK
Like Jennie and Minnie and Consuelo, Alva could not call herself an Old New Yorker; her father, Murray Forbes Smith, had brought his family to New York from Mobile, Alabama, in the 1850s. Also like the other Buccaneers, Alva had gone to school in France, returning at the end of the Civil War. Smith, however, did not prosper in business, and there are tales of the Smith home being turned into a boarding house during the 1870s. Whether or not things got that bad, the Smith family was not wealthy by the standard of the times. So when Consuelo Yznaga introduced her to William K. Vanderbilt at a party in the early seventies, Alva may well have seen a way out of genteel poverty.
Alva, in mourning for her grandfather-in-law Cornelius Vanderbilt, with her children William K. Jr., Harold and Consuelo.
A sketch of the Smith house in Mobile, showing its crenellated roofline. There is a story about Mrs. Smith’s giving a ball to which le tout Mobile did not come; if true, it would account for some of her daughter’s ambition.
Left: William K. Vanderbilt, a gentleman to his very marrow, was a match for Alva only in the marital sense.
Right: Alva never looked like anything but what she was: pushy, pugnacious and determined.
William K. Vanderbilt was the grandson of the famous Commodore, who had founded the Vanderbilt railroad fortune. The Commodore’s son, William H., doubled the family’s worth, and it was this estate of some $200 million that Willie K., as he was known, would eventually share with his sisters and his brother Cornelius. But while they had money, the Vanderbilts had no social standing in the New York of the 1870s. The Commodore was never better than uncouth, swearing like a longshoreman to his dying day. His son William H. was more civilized (he amassed a large collection of French academic paintings, for example) but lacked any ambition to be received by the Astor set.
Enter Alva. Whereas the difficulties of New York social climbing had defeated her Buccaneer friends, Alva was magnificently equipped for the fight. Marriage to Willie K. had given her the money, and God had given her the temperament. She was aggressive, determined and ambitious. She was impervious to insults. And she had a strategy. America was just waking up to its native cultural insufficiencies. Europe, formerly the source of “dubious foreign influences,” was now being hailed as the fount of all that was refined. So Alva Vanderbilt chose to make her assault on New York society backed by nothing less than the weight of European civilization.
ALVA & ANGLOMANIA
Already, European ways were making their mark on New York. Where a parlormaid in a neat apron had sufficed for years, suddenly servants in livery appeared. Though the Ladies’ Mile of shops on Broadway was no less safe, suddenly young ladies couldn’t go out to buy a bonnet without a chaperone. Men’s clubs on the English model sprang up and multiplied. Dresses from Worth no longer needed to mellow for a season in the attic before they were worn. Above all, fashionable American houses began to be furnished with the spoils of European travels. Italian sculpture, portraits by French painters, Sèvres vases, Gobelins tapestries appeared in the cluttered interiors of Fifth Avenue mansions. Possession of these objects connoted connoisseurship on the part of the owners, and connoisseurship rapidly became a gambit in New York’s ongoing social wars.
By the early 1880s, the homespun coachman in his own coat had given way to smart fellows in top hats and the family livery. The Astors, in a preemptive strike, chose the shade of blue used by the Royal Family at Windsor.
Another of Alva Vanderbilt’s great gifts was timing. She didn’t make the error of a grand gesture too soon after her 1875 marriage, but threw herself into being a rich man’s wife. She produced children, two sons and a daughter, whom she named for her close friend Consuelo Yznaga, now Lady Mandeville. She ran the huge Long Island house, Idlehour, which was built shortly after she married Willie K. When the Commodore finally died in 1877, the living reminder of the Vanderbilts’ unsavory beginnings was removed. It was time to start her push.
THE HOUSE THAT ALVA BUILT
Within months of the old man’s death, William H. Vanderbilt and both his sons filed plans for new houses with New York City’s Buildings Department. Following in the old traditions of New York domestic architecture, William H.’s double mansion on the west side of Fifth Avenue was built entirely of brown-stone and massed in two blocky shapes. The Willie K. Vanderbilt mansion, however, was something else again. To begin with, it was clad in pale limestone, a startling departure from the brownstone norm. And then, it looked nothing like a house; what it looked like, quite frankly, was a château. It had a steeply pitched roof with copper cresting, elaborate dormers, balustrades, flying buttresses, and a slender tourelle decorated with fleurs-de-lis.
Idlehour, the country house built on Long Island by Richard Morris Hunt for the young Vanderbilts. It burned down in 1899, and Hunt’s son built a new house on the site for William K. Jr.
Naturally, the building of such a house provoked a great deal of curiosity. As dozens of workmen carved and painted and gilded, as carpets and tapestries and stained glass were carried into the house, New Yorkers longed to see the final result. And in the winter of 1883, Alva Vanderbilt let it be known that they would soon be satisfied. Her dear friend Lady Mandeville would be paying a visit to New York. (Lord Mandeville, having other fish to fry, wouldn’t be coming.) By then the house would be finished, so a party in honor of Consuelo seemed appropriate.
Above: The château at 660 Fifth Avenue, Hunt’s first venture into the style that would prove so gratifying to his clients (and lucrative to him). Soon châteaux by Hunt and his imitators would line the avenue.
Below: Alva’s Louis XV salon, with its Boucher tapestries. Decorating with antiques, particularly those of one period, was a new idea in the early 1880s.
With the classic Alva combination of timing and nerve, the party was scheduled for March 26. Timing, because that was the Monday after Easter; New York still observed a somewhat somber Lent, so the Vanderbilts’ housewarming would be the first big social event in six weeks. And nerve because Alva chose to give a costume ball, a form of merriment that had long been frowned upon in Old New York as encouraging loose behavior. Finally, Monday was the night when Mrs. Astor was traditionally at home to receive guests. In giving her ball on that day of the week, Alva was flinging down the gauntlet.
CALLING-CARD PROTOCOL
The censorious Thorstein Veblen may have referred to paying calls as “purposeless leisure,” but the call of ceremony was the basic unit of social intercourse. It was how a lady made acquaintances, who in turn became friends. At its most purely ceremonial, it was something to get dressed up for.
The call itself was a formal visit of fifteen minutes. The caller, togged out in hat and veil and gloves and parasol, didn’t remove any of these. She perched on a chair, made small talk and then departed, leaving, on her way out, her card and two of her husband’s (one each for the
hostess and host; a woman could not, however, leave a card for a man).
A card could substitute for a call. If, upon entering the house, the caller was told the lady was Not at Home, she left a card to signal that she had called. The lady might very well be upstairs reading French novels, but the pleasant fiction allowed the caller to discharge her social duty and be on her way. A code of folded corners would let the unseen lady know the reason for the call.
Card with top-right corner folded down: tailing to pay respects.
The occasions on which this duty was decreed were numerous. Strictly speaking, a call should be returned within ten days. That was the basic, cutlet-for-cutlet reciprocation that kept an acquaintanceship cordial. Then there was the “party call,” a visit to one’s hostess within a week of being entertained.
The most important call was the “first call,” always made by a social superior. It was considered terribly forward for newcomers to make “first calls” on people they didn’t know; they had to wait to be noticed.
It was also necessary to make farewell calls when leaving town, or at least drop off “P.P.C.” cards (“pour prendre conge”). However, P.P.C. cards could be mailed to all one’s acquaintances without giving offense.
Of course, this many required calls could get burdensome, and the rules relaxed somewhat over time. Mrs. William Collins Whitney, when her husband was secretary of the navy, invented a “professional visitor”—a young woman who distributed Mrs. Whitney’s cards to the right people. It became acceptable to send one’s carriage and footman around leaving cards, though a woman had to be seen sitting in the carriage (usually one’s lady’s maid was deputed for the job). By 1910, one lady simply left her calling list with her stationers, who printed the cards and delivered them for her twice yearly, saving her—or her lady’s maid—the trouble of ever having to make another call.
THE WILSON FAMILY SCORECARD #2
Orme & Carrie
Marshall Orme Wilson, painted in 1894 by Léon Bonnat; his intended, Carrie Astor, in her Star Quadrille costume.
Though Caroline Astor was implacable in her mission to keep society pure, her soft spot was her concern for her children. And in 1884, a year after Alva’s ball, daughter Carrie again put it to the test. This time, she wanted to marry Orme Wilson. Mrs. Astor hesitated—giving the Vanderbilts the nod was one thing, but becoming related to the Wilsons was something else entirely. The Astors set a condition: that the Wilsons match Carrie’s $500,000 dowry. Though his fortune had receded from its multimillion high-water mark to a scant million, R.T. scraped together the fee. Astor in-laws, after all, would be a matchless asset in New York society.
This gold-plated calling-card receiver was named “Hilarity” by its manufacturer. It cost a mere $10.
ALVA STRIKES BACK
Needless to say, the Vanderbilt ball was the talk of the city. While Alva was ransacking novels and history books to come up with her costume and decorating details, 140 dressmakers labored day and night for weeks to finish the outfits commissioned by the guests. (A fancy-dress costume was an extravagance, but this event demanded nothing less from the invitées.) Press coverage commenced well before party night: each course to be served at the 6:00 A.M. breakfast, the names of the various kinds of roses used by the thousands for decorating, every detail of the hostess’s costume—these and more particulars were doled out to a hungry public. Everyone wanted to go, and more than a thousand people were blessed with invitations.
A line had to be drawn somewhere, of course, and Alva, in the boldest stroke yet, drew the line at Mrs. Astor. After all, Alva knew her place in New York; as a newcomer, she must wait for Mrs. Astor to call on her. A reversal of the procedure would have been pushy. But, as it happened, Mrs. Astor had a débutante daughter named Carrie who, with a group of her friends, had whiled away the tedious weeks of Lent by practicing a little dance called the Star Quadrille to be performed at the Vanderbilt ball. The girls would present themselves as pairs of stars, costumed in yellow, blue, mauve and white, each with an electric light in her hair.
Left: Perry Belmont, of the banking Belmonts, costumed as a Ruritanian hussar for the ball. He later had a distinguished career in New York politics.
Right: The invitation to Alva’s ball was delivered to the Astors’ genteel four-story brownstone with the pedimented door. The more imposing mansion to its right belonged to department-store magnate A. T. Stewart.
Word of Miss Astor’s rehearsals came to Alva’s ear. She let it be known that she was surprised: how could Miss Astor come to her ball when Miss Astor’s mother had never officially recognized the existence of Mr. and Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt? It was blackmail, certainly, but Mrs. Astor could not let New York’s social purity outweigh her daughter’s happiness. A footman in blue livery delivered an Astor calling card at 660 Fifth Avenue, and shortly afterward a footman in maroon livery delivered an invitation at the Astor house at 350 Fifth Avenue.
THE GREAT VANDERBILT BALL
On the night of March 26, a crowd gathered at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street to catch glimpses of the élite hurrying along the red carpet to the door. Inside, Alva (costumed by Worth as a Venetian princess), her husband (impersonating the Due de Guise, in yellow tights) and Consuelo Mandeville (a French princess) stationed themselves by the grand stairway to receive the guests. Upstairs, maids costumed as French peasants waited to replace hairpins and stitch up torn trains. Footmen in powdered wigs patrolled the salon ready to fetch the champagne. By eleven o’clock, the immense front hall was full of New Yorkers trying hard not to stare at what Alva had wrought.
First, there was the interior of the house. The rooms were crammed with references to Greek mythology and French kings, paneled with wainscoting ripped from a Loire Valley château, hung with Boucher tapestries, stocked with Boulle cabinets; here a pair of Renaissance mantelpieces, there a Rembrandt portrait, and in the corner a set of Gouthiere bronzes commissioned by Marie Antoinette. Polite sang-froid forbade gaping, but really, New York had seen nothing like it. (Polite sang-froid also forbade obvious efforts at pricing, but close to three million dollars had been spent on the interior of the house, and nearly a quarter of a million on the party.)
Mrs. Cornelius (Alice Gwynne) Vanderbilt, holding high her electrified torch. Though her husband was senior to Willie K. and just as rich, Alice was content to cede social honors to her sister-in-law.
COMME IL FAUT
A girl is always accompanied to and from a ball by her mother, a chaperone or, at the very least, a maid.
And then there were the New Yorkers themselves, done up as they had never seen each other. Willie’s older brother, Cornelius Jr., had roused himself from his usual sobriety to appear as Louis XVI, while his plain wife Alice had decided to come as “the Electric Light”—in a costume that inspired Worth to install gas jets in the folds of pale yellow satin trimmed with diamonds so that his client could, periodically, light up. Mrs. Paran Stevens, back from her European wanderings, was costumed as Queen Elizabeth, so laden with jewels it was a wonder she could walk. Mrs. Bradley Martin gave Mrs. Stevens some competition in the jewel department, for across her imposing bosom was draped a triple strand of pearls, punctuated with five diamond brooches and a diamond cluster pendant. Mrs. Martin (alias Mary Stuart for the evening) watched the proceedings with a measuring eye, for she too had social ambitions and longed to make her mark.
Alva, prepared for her moment of glory. The doves were a conceit of the photographer and had nothing to do with her costume.
Above: The Leslie paper sent sketch artists to the Vanderbilt ball, the first of the era’s highly publicized social events.
Below: Bradley Martin made a convincingly foppish-looking Louis XV.
The evening was a triumph. For Consuelo Mandeville, there was immense pleasure in the warm greeting of a New York that had been in no hurry to know her as a débutante. For Alva, there was the satisfaction of having successfully launched the Vanderbilt family onto the high seas of social acc
eptability. And for New York society, a new orientation had been imposed. Quaint republican simplicities be damned: Alva’s ball, with its European extravagances and pretensions, was New York’s first heady dose of Anglomania.
THE BIG SHOWDOWNS
The early 1880s saw a critical shift in New York’s balance of social power, as marked by the fates of a pair of cultural institutions. For a number of years, the New-York Historical Society had been the city’s preeminent museum of fine arts. Then, in 1872, a league of artists and art connoisseurs founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Initially they had proposed an amalgamation with the Historical Society, but were turned down, theoretically because Knickerbocker Nicholas Fish found the Metropolitan’s committee socially unacceptable. By 1880, in contrast to the socially correct but languishing Historical Society, the new museum had outgrown its downtown quarters and moved to Central Park at 80th Street.
It took a single season for the Academy of Music, another bastion of Old New York, to fall by the wayside. The Academy made the mistake of rejecting men like William H. Vanderbilt, whose offer of $30,000 for a box was turned down, and soon faced opposition in the form of a brand-new theater. The opening night of the Metropolitan Opera House, as it was called, coincided with the seasonal opening of the Academy of Music on October 22, 1883. The house was splendid, all crystal chandeliers and rosewood and gold plush. The singing (though hardly the point) was fine. Most important, boxes had been taken not only by nouveaux riches such as the Vanderbilts, but also by the Astors and Goelets and Iselins. And though Mrs. Astor went to the Academy of Music that night (and Mrs. Paran Stevens, hedging her bet, went to both, seeing a bit of Gounod, a bit of Wagner and a great deal of Broadway), it was clear that the Metropolitan Opera would be a success. By the 1885 season the Academy of Music had gone out of business—and its demise can be taken, for all intents and purposes, as the demise of Old New York itself.
