by gail maccoll
THE EXCLUSIVITY GAME
The schedule was rigorous and utterly inflexible. One did not drive in the morning or visit the Casino in the afternoon. Furthermore, the prescribed costume must be worn for each activity, and fashionable women wore a new dress for every occasion, with matching hats and parasols and four or five pairs of new kid gloves a day. The Philadelphia Times even commented that “you will see at a reception at Newport more Worth dresses than anywhere else in America, except in New York during the height of the season.”
* * *
“Such clothes! How they swished and rustled! Petticoats of satin, of lace, of taffeta; petticoats embellished with elaborate designs of plump cupids playing gilded lyres, true-love-knots interspersed with doves embellished in seed pearls. Parasols to match every dress, enormous flopping feather hats assorted to every costume. White gloves to the elbow, three or four new pairs every day, priceless lace ruffles at throat and wrists, yards of lace flouncing on underskirts, thousands of dollars worth dragged over the Casino terrace. Different dresses for each occasion, eighty or ninety in a season, worn once or twice and put aside.”
ELIZABETH DREXEL LEHR
* * *
What you would see even more of in Newport than in New York was rigid etiquette enforced with unremitting vehemence. A self-conscious passion for correct behavior reassured the plutocratic class in a way that even their furniture with its royal provenances and their houses by Richard Morris Hunt could not quite do. For beneath the opulence and the pretensions to grandeur lurked a tenacious insecurity. Americans had been mocked for their gaucheries too long ever to be quite comfortable about their taste or their manners. Where once had been a spontaneous, informal style appropriate to a democratic country, there was now a peculiar version of what Americans supposed English manners to be. The salient feature, in the American view, was stiffness. So stiffness was adopted as the mode of social intercourse.
THE LOUIS FIXATION
The Petit Trianon at Versailles. If they’d had their way, the plutocrats would have shipped it to Newport, block by block.
Having surfaced from the project of amassing more money, the nouveaux riches looked around them and decided that a bit of grandeur would be appropriate in their housing, their dress, their entertainments. And what would be most becoming for a plutocrat? Gilding, by all means. Elaborate furniture, yes, and of course expensive. What’s more, it should look expensive. Eighteenth-century French furniture and decoration satisfied all these conditions. Hence, the Louis fixation.
An aura of courtliness, of indolent aristocracy that was the very antithesis of industrial magnates, the whiff of Versailles and minuets and droit de seigneur— these became the robber baron’s goal. Marble House allowed the William K. Vanderbilts to dwell in their own, graceful Petit Trianon. A Grand Trianon at Rosecliff lent Francophile splendor to the shipping/Comstock Lode combine of the Hermann Oelrichs family. The coalmining Berwinds based The Elms on a smaller Mansart château called Asnières. The houses that harked back to other eras, like the stupefying Breakers in the Medici mode, contained their Louis rooms. Even funny old Château-sur-Mer, with its quaint Eastlake paneling, boasted a grand Louis XV salon.
This nostalgie de la cour also surfaced, less permanently but more explicitly, in the grand setpiece entertainment of the era: the costume ball. Wearing fancy dress permitted the expression of fantasy. It also allowed women to wear all their jewels at once, no small advantage when sumptuary laws, though vestigial, did exert some restraint. And—a small but valid point—the silhouette of eighteenth-century dresses, with snug busts and full skirts, conformed to the nineteenth-century ideal of fashion. Why dress as Empress Josephine for a costume ball if it meant wearing one of those ugly, skimpy muslin dresses? Much better to go as a French king’s mistress in satin with gold embroidery and an eight-inch diamond stomacher pinned to one’s boned bodice.
Marble House, featuring paired medallions of Mansart (the architect of Versailles) and Richard Morris Hunt (the architect of Marble House). Top right: Its ballroom, with enough mirrors and gilding to stun the Sun King himself.
Stanford White’s Rosecliff. Tessie Oelrichs, a California girl, used the urns for shooting practice.
For some, the identification was closer still than merely dressing and living in the Louis manner. Grace Wilson Vanderbilt once said to her son, “Poor dear Marie Antoinette. I’m sure if we had a revolution, I’d be the first to go!”
Left: A royal-looking bust on a marble-topped table ennobled The Elms.
Right: Paneling from a French château graced the walls of the W.C. Whitneys’ ballroom in New York.
THE LOUIS LOOK: WARNING SIGNS
• Iron banister with bronze hand-rail, usually paired with marble stairs; gilding optional.
• Anything curved that could be straight. (Louis XV or rococo.)
• Marquetry, or elaborate inlays of different-color woods.
• Louis XVI staff. (Adele Grant’s bridesmaids received jeweled staffs.)
• Portrait of any Louis, by any painter.
• Theme ball. (Mrs. Bradley Martin wins the prize: at her costume ball in 1897, she wore the same ruby necklace that had hung on the neck of Marie Antoinette herself.)
Guests at a Louis XV ball included Stanford White (fourth from the right) and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish (far right).
Newport was proud of the tall, graceful elms shading its streets. Most of them are now long gone.
This rigid etiquette also served to winnow the élite from the aspirants. The unyielding, complex code of behavior baffled the uninitiated and kept them at a distance. For the real fun at Newport had nothing to do with fresh, salty air and glorious sun—or even the company of congenial friends. The real sport was Exclusivity. As the Newport Mercury put it in 1889, “The plutocrats have gradually more and more given up trying to pretend that they liked equality, and the give-and-take of democratic hotel life, and have drawn off into their cottages—villas they call them now—and taken a good deal of satisfaction in the reserve and withdrawal from the vulgar herd of resorters.”
An important factor in Exclusivity was that Newport was run by women. In the city, they might have to defer to their husbands’ wishes and entertain business-connected undesirables. But most New York businessmen visited Newport only on the weekends, taking the Fall River boat up and then, on Sunday nights, leaving dinner parties before dessert to head back to the city. The women took their social life very seriously; it was, after all, their fiefdom, and they could be implacable. At Newport you were In, in which case you went to the Casino and Bailey’s Beach and to Beechwood and The Breakers; or you were Out, in which case you could drive on Bellevue Avenue and see Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Mills and Mrs. Goelet (you could also be sure they knew exactly who you were and were probably betting on how long you’d last) but be ignored. Blanche Oelrichs, writing as Michael Strange, describes how “one morning shortly after breakfast I found a lady actually crumpled up on the stairs outside Mama’s door, weeping bitterly because my good-natured mother had failed to procure for her an invitation to somebody’s ball.” Manuals for social climbers suggested they attempt the assault on Newport in stages, beginning with a visit in a yacht, to see how one “took.” The process of getting In could take five years, but as Munsey’s Magazine pointed out, acceptance was “a hallmark of approval recognized all over the Continent.”
MARCH OF ANGLOMANIA
The first international polo match was played at Newport in 1886, when England’s Hurlingham team beat the Westchester Polo club.
DAUGHTER: “We no sooner learn a little about one subject, mamma, than we stop and turn to another.”
MOTHER: “You must remember, dear, that I am fitting you to enter society.”
In Newport, moreover, society was the only game in town. No culture, no business, no philanthropic activities distracted attention from the matter at hand. That was the way the socialites liked it; they wouldn’t be tainted by any social inferiors. Equally to t
he point, neither would their débutante daughters. These perfect gems, newly released onto the marriage market, could go to polo matches and dinner parties all summer long, casting their well-polished lures with no danger of fishing up something nasty. The pool had been purged of ineligibles.
Menu for a spring luncheon on board the Vanderbilts’ first yacht, the Alva: eggs, lobster Newburg, tournedos with marrow, potatoes, spinach, and asparagus with hollandaise; chicken with watercress, salad, crepes, dessert and cheese.
* * *
“I know of no profession, art or trade that women are working in today as taxing on mental resource as being a leader of Society.”
MRS. WILLIAM K. VANDERBILT
* * *
Consuelo, who did her lessons wearing an iron brace to improve her posture, had separate governesses to teach her French and German.
THE PUSHIEST MAMA
Newport’s most exquisitely displayed débutante of the 1890s was, naturally, Consuelo Vanderbilt. Alva had seen her best friend (and her daughter’s godmother), Consuelo Yznaga, marry the heir to a dukedom and take an important place in English society despite undistinguished breeding and decidedly unconventional manners. Surely a girl with a Vanderbilt fortune and faultless manners could do better, not only in the marriage market but in her performance of a duchess’s duties. So Alva trained her daughter, from the cradle, to be a duchess. As Consuelo reflected of her mother, “it was her wish to produce me as a finished specimen framed in a perfect setting.”
Alva’s role in all this (as per the European child-rearing model) was largely executive. Consuelo was placed in the hands of governesses, who supervised her daily education. Alva would see her every day, for lunch, and on Saturday she would have her recite the week’s lessons. She also sent for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations, and had them administered to Consuelo, who passed with flying colors.
Scholarly pursuits, however, were not the main event, and there was never any chance that Consuelo would be permitted to go to university. Alva’s plans for her daughter were revealed in a portrait she commissioned from the French painter Emile Carolus-Duran. Though he preferred to pose his sitters against a dark background, Alva insisted that Consuelo be painted in a white dress, descending the steps of a terrace set in a vaguely classical landscape. The finished picture would thus fit in with the row of family portraits by Lely, Kneller, Gainsborough and Romney in the stately English home that Consuelo was being groomed to occupy.
Whatever stately home it eventually was, Consuelo would do it justice, as would any of the American Aristocrat heiresses. They wouldn’t be troubled by the task of writing out menu cards in French; they would know exactly which fork should be used for the ortolans; they would never stare at frescoed twenty-foot ceilings. They had been brought up to these things. They had been scolded and chaperoned and drilled and dressed so that, when they made their débuts, they were refined little specimens indeed. No awkwardness about how to dance a quadrille, no hesitation when pouring tea, no clumsy handling of a train would mar the picture. When they came to Newport for their first summers “out,” these daughters of the American aristocracy were magnificent.
In the Carolus-Duran portrait commissioned by Aha, the pale draperies of Consuelo’s dress added to the “classical” effect.
MARCH OF ANGLOMANIA
Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., was taught to speak with an English accent; when he was sent to boarding school, his fellow students called him “Limey.”
WALL STREET FATHER NO. 3: THE COLLECTOR
In the era of the American Aristocrat, a new sort of Wall Street Father came to the fore: a captain of commerce who was also a captain of culture. This father, best represented by Anthony ]. Drexel, Michael P. Grace, J.P. Morgan and William Whitney, did not stay quietly behind while his wife and daughter roamed Europe; rather, he led the way, with his wife and daughter bobbing along in his wake. His was the dominating social ambition.
Having used up the challenge of the New World, this Wall Street Father was now prepared to take on the Old. He became a London resident, bought a country house, traveled widely on the European circuit. J.P. Morgan went so far as to dress his Scottish retainer in a spurious Morgan tartan. Obsessed with the surface of aristocracy, he oversaw his family’s wardrobe selections in the rue de la Paix and was one of the few clients ever allowed the privilege of visiting Worth at his country home in Suresnes. He was said to have sobbed openly at the news of Worth’s death in 1895.
William Collins Whitney, one of the most voracious collectors of his era; below, his house in New York.
Anthony J. Drexel, Anglophile extraordinaire
Top left: “If we go to Europe, Cynthia, I don’t want you to marry any of them counts or dukes. You just wait until we run across some king in reduced circumstances.”
Shipping magnate Michael P. Grace bought and restored Battle Abbey, built by William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings.
But, more than anything else, this father was a plunderer, a top client of art dealers Duveen and Wertheimer, forever sifting through the detritus of the fallen French or Italian aristocracy for more paintings, wall panelings, priceless tapestries, anything that was older than the republic to which he belonged. He wanted to buy history, to purchase a past—not a little piece of the past but as much of it as he could get his hands on. (Consuelo Vanderbilt’s father had to construct his own wharf and warehouse at Newport to accommodate all the marble furniture and statuary being shipped from Europe for his new house on Bellevue Avenue.)
The Collector, having somehow made his pot, hadn’t the faintest intention of letting anyone else—the womenfolk, for instance, spend it. His entire mission was to propel himself, in one great leap, onto the narrow social ledge occupied by the cultivated sons of England’s oldest families, and it was therefore of the very first importance that his daughter marry an English aristocrat. Without a title, she not only compromised his social successes but also denied him that final item to round out his collection. He needed one crucial other acquisition to display along with the Savonnerie carpets, the Boulle desks, the settees by William Kent, the embroidered pillows once owned by Marie Antoinette, the Tintoretto ceilings, the medieval manuscripts and Renaissance miniatures. The Collector’s daughter must fetch for him the pièce de résistance of his collection—the noble English son-in-law.
THE MATCH OF THE CENTURY
In the fall of 1893, Consuelo Vanderbilt joined her parents and younger brother Harold on a cruise to India. Also aboard the 312-foot family yacht the Valiant, along with the governess, tutor, doctor, and 72 members of the crew, were Oliver H.P. Belmont and Winthrop Rutherfurd. Belmont and Consuelo’s father, Willie K., were best friends; they were both sons of rich men, both horse lovers, both clients of Richard Morris Hunt. If Belmont’s attentions to Alva had been rather pointed recently, Willie seemed willing to ignore it. Rutherfurd, a young attorney of impeccable lineage (his mother was a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New York), shared the sporting interests of the other two men.
By the time she was eighteen, Consuelo was the “finished specimen” her mother had groomed her to be.
THE FIRST HINT OF TROUBLE
The Vanderbilts saw India as scheduled, but upon reaching Paris in the spring, Alva announced that she and Willie K. were parting company. Unperturbedly, she shopped and planned Consuelo’s coming-out ball while Cornelius, Willie K.’s elder brother and head of the family, hustled across the ocean to try to patch things up. Alva, as he should have expected, was implacable. Willie was keeping mistresses; rumor had it that a certain not-quite-lady in Paris had dressed her servants in Vanderbilt livery. Alva was not one to toe the society line, turning a blind eye to her husband’s attentions. He was committing adultery, and she would divorce him for it.
Consuelo’s Paris début went well. Her mother’s rigorous child-rearing program had produced an exquisite girl. Tall and slender, she had beautiful posture (apparently the iron
brace had paid off), a cloud of dark hair and a gloriously long neck. A number of aristocratic Frenchmen took note of her many attractions and approached Alva for permission to pay court to her daughter. They were turned down. Alva had her plans, and they did not include a Continental parti. She took Consuelo on to London.
THE HUNT BEGINS
The first stop was Minnie Paget’s pretty house on Belgrave Square, where Consuelo later remembered being assessed by “a pair of hard green eyes.” “If I am to bring her out,” said Minnie, “she must be able to compete at least as far as clothes are concerned with far better-looking girls.” So, as Consuelo wrote in her memoirs, “Tulle must give way to satin, the baby décolletage to a more generous display of neck and arms, naïveté to sophistication.” The clothes were achieved, and a little dinner was arranged with the Duke of Marlborough as the principal guest. This was not the eccentric roué snubbed by most of New York eight years earlier—Blandford had died in 1892—but his twenty-four-year-old son, Sunny. That evening Lady Paget placed the slender, mustached Duke at her right hand and seated Consuelo on his right. It wasn’t subtle, but then it didn’t have to be.
