Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  ‘Again and again whenever she has wished, she has done something in the social world that has distinction and originality in sufficient degree to make people of the social world fall over each other in their attempt to get within invitations from her,’87 wrote the Holyoke Transcript. ‘In the bright lexicon of Mrs Belmont,’ remarked another newspaper, ‘There is no such word as fail.’88 But even Alva could not hold back the onward march of European history. The stuttering lanterns at her Chinese ball illuminated the death throes of the Gilded Age. A few days later Mamie Fish cancelled the ball she had planned in honour of Consuelo – for war had been declared in Europe.

  * Advised by Walter Damrosch, director of music at Consuelo’s wedding.

  10

  Love, philanthropy and suffrage

  AS SOON AS she heard that war had been declared, Consuelo left Newport to return to England. In New York, she discovered that the German liner on which she had booked a passage had been forbidden to sail, and returned to Marble House while she waited for another crossing. This, according to Town Topics, made at least one heart register an extra joyous beat.

  The organ was in the possession of one Boris Yonine, secretary of the Russian Embassy. There was reason a-plenty for the elation for if the eyes of Newport, mine included, may be taken as capable and veracious recorders of the things that are, Consuelo was leaving America with a very large slice of the genial Yonine’s tender sentiments stowed away among her other belongings. For reasons very well known to everybody – that the Duchess is already blessed(?) with a lord and master, although they do not abide under the same roof – the affair could not extend to its very limits. But that the swarthy Muscovite was deeply smitten was as plain as the nose on your face. Wherever the Duchess went there also went Yonine. He carried her fan and her parasol and her wraps with as much faithfulness as he will probably carry a musket for his Imperial Master, and gazed at her with a fervour that distinctly said ‘Where speech fails read it in my eyes.’ Oh I assure you it was quite a touching little passionette – a poem by Blanche Wagstaff – and since the disturbing war clouds in Europe have compelled the Duchess’s return to Newport I am sure that Mr Yonine, who accompanied her on the return, will say that it is a shockingly ill wind that blows nobody good. What are empires compared with tender sentiments?1

  Nothing more is known of poor Yonine. One can only assume that he was left broken-hearted on the New York dockside as Consuelo’s liner became a dot on the horizon. But the story shows that in 1914, at the age of thirty-seven, Consuelo had lost none of her power to charm and that it would be a mistake to see her life exclusively in terms of philanthropy and suffrage. The self-confidence that came with her achievements in public life attracted many admirers, in addition to those who simply assumed that a young, attractive duchess possessed of a great fortune and living on her own in a large London house was fair game.

  Her position was complicated, however, by frequent rumours of reconciliation with the Duke. These appeared in the press almost annually between 1907 and 1912, often accompanied by suggestions that a reunion would be warmly welcomed by Consuelo’s father. William K. seems to have continued to hope that the separation was temporary, if only out of concern for Consuelo’s difficult position. His readiness to host some of her great receptions at Sunderland House suggests that he was sensitive to her anomalous standing and he may well have thought – somewhat unimaginatively – that this was best addressed by a rapprochement with her husband.

  There is little sign, however, that any kind of reconciliation was ever likely if only because their differences became more pronounced with the passage of time. The Duke seemed increasingly beached by the tide of history, speaking out mainly on agricultural matters when the pressing political agenda was urban. Though he held another huge Unionist rally at Blenheim in 1912, he was not a wholly unreconstructed Tory for he did his best to grapple with some pressing issues of the day such as reform of the House of Lords. But his solutions – like his remarks about Consuelo at the time of the separation – often seemed designed to please no-one. ‘My dear Sunny,’ wrote Lord Lansdowne on 9 May 1911, after he had received the draft of a memorandum which the Duke wished to publish on the future of the House of Lords. ‘I am as much convinced as you that a fundamental scheme of reconstruction is called for; but I am not convinced that it must be on your lines. I should, if I were you, think twice before I confidently recommend a scheme which assumes that 500 peers have been created, which gives us a House of Lords consisting entirely of hereditary peers, and which confers upon the Prime Minister the right of dissolving the Second Chamber. Is it necessary for you to publish anything? If not, might it not be wiser to remain silent? Yours aff. L.’2

  Consuelo, on the other hand, felt thoroughly at home in the new Liberal zeitgeist. She drew on the support of a wide circle of aristocratic and American friends in her philanthropic ventures; in turn these reinforced friendships and opened up new vistas. Her interest in social welfare problems brought her to the attention of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Asked to dinner by the Webbs, she found herself sitting next to George Bernard Shaw who became a friend. In the years after the separation she built up literary acquaintances by giving a series of dinners on Friday evenings at Sunderland House, and although she was never regarded as an eminent saloniste, guests flocked to these evenings, where the company was stimulating and the food delicious. Her early supporter, Lord Rosebery, acted as host to one such dinner, given in honour of H. G. Wells (Lord Lovat put it about afterwards that she had invited another H. G. Wells, but he was wrong) and attended by Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie and John Galsworthy – whose ‘Forsyte Saga’ was taking London by storm. W. B. Yeats was more often to be found at dinner with her godmother, Consuelo Manchester, and later she wrote that it was difficult to know who had been the most brilliant conversationalist – Yeats, Shaw or the ‘outrageously handsome’ George Wyndham. ‘Looking back,’ wrote Consuelo later, ‘I cannot imagine a more gifted company in any country. No matter what the subject, the talk was never heavy, for there was always a flash of British humour to enliven it, and with Maurice Baring, Harry Cust and Evan Charteris to add fuel to the fire we were often privileged to assist at a marvellous display of pyrotechnics.’3

  In her memoirs Consuelo remarked that ‘niches give me claustrophobia’4 and the manner in which she moved between different cliques in Edwardian society suggests that she preferred to resist classification. She was close to the group of aristocratic and self-consciously intellectual Edwardians known as the Souls who favoured intense conversation, tennis and long walks over gambling and racing and whose relationships were characterised by a complex web of intimacy and extra-marital relationships. Consuelo was a regular visitor to one Soul stronghold, Taplow Court, the Desboroughs’ home near Marlow, where there were ‘shady walks in the woods and always an agreeable cavalier as escort’. When she invited Souls to her literary dinners, she liked to add ‘a judicious mixture of a more frivolous element’ to discourage excessive solemnity. She was also a popular guest at great weekend house parties that harked back to the eighteenth century, like those of the Duke and Duchess of Portland at Welbeck Abbey. But much as she enjoyed a few days ‘enshrined in a hyper-aristocratic niche where sorrow or want or fear were unknown’,5 she was always ready to leave after a few days.

  Sunderland House played host to many leading figures of the international belle époque too. When her memoirs were published, one man who lived in Curzon Street as a child wrote to tell her that he would steal out of bed to catch a glimpse of her great receptions through the windows of the salon facing onto West Chapel Street, enthralled and captivated.6 Had he found his way inside, he would have encountered an array of Astors, Vanderbilts, Keyserlings and Lichnowskys, Russian and French aristocrats and young attachés, as well as ambassadors of the Great Powers like Count Mensdorff, so enchanted by Consuelo’s flair and talent as a linguist that they would ask her to act as hostess at their own parties.

  Feeling the
need to escape from London at weekends, Consuelo took over the lease of Crowhurst Place in Surrey from the architect George Crawley in 1910. Crowhurst, which she breezily described as ‘a small house’, was a fifteenth-century manor house belonging to the Gainsford family, which Crawley had already begun to convert and restore until forced to stop by financial problems and his wife’s ill-health. Consuelo retained George Crawley to complete the restoration, adding an extra wing, filling the house with old furniture, and creating a beautiful garden, which Mrs Crawley disliked because ‘civilisation and shrubbery have diminished the drowsy air of a vanished day and … have spoiled much of the charm’.7

  Hers was a lone voice of dissent however. The restoration has been described by one connoisseur of the genre as a masterpiece8 and Consuelo herself loved it, remembering Crowhurst as a pastoral idyll, a weekend escape from city problems and the pressures of committees. Crowhurst was also an antidote to the baroque splendours of Blenheim. Here there were flagged floors, furniture polished to a ‘honeyed sheen’, rafters, owls, an oriel window, swans in a moat, and a herb garden with a splashing fountain. Like Alva’s attempt to start a school for young women farmers at Brookholt, there was a discernible anti-industrial, arts-and-crafts note to Consuelo’s affection for the house, the first on which she really had a chance to impress her own personality, an impulse which extended to having her monograph stamped on the drainpipes. The house was too small for large house parties, but there were many visitors, including three different Asquiths – the former Prime Minister among them after 1916 – on three separate weekends.

  It is quite likely that there were admirers too, away from the watchful, prying eyes of London society. In 1913, Consuelo had dazzled another young diplomat, the writer Paul Morand, on his first posting as an attaché to the French embassy in London. That year he tried his hand at a series of written impressions of Consuelo devising a process which he described as ‘layers of superimposed replicas’. The ‘likeness’ that emerged has to be treated with great caution, for one critic believes it is probably a composite of several women in Edwardian society including Margot Asquith. Here and there, however, his insights ring true. His Consuelo was also difficult to place, and Morand was annoyed with himself for being unable to form a clear judgement. ‘She sums up all others, and yet is herself,’ he wrote. Morand paints a picture of a charming, warm-hearted impulsive woman quite changed from the shy teenager who made her debut in London society in 1896. His Consuelo calls the pompous by their first names, wires a new friend once an hour for a week in the first flush of new friendship, sends flowers, rushes to the railway platform as one’s train is leaving, tends to sick ambassadors, arrives late for her own dinner parties ‘dazzling from the day’, laughs easily and takes over the conversation like a ‘wonderful firework’.9

  The real Consuelo hated these impressions so strenuously that she begged Paul Morand not to publish them and he delayed for a number of years. She was clearly afraid that the world might take him too literally. She might have tolerated unhappily his portrait of a giddy female who was an enthusiastic friend of the successful, but cared less for the obscure; she could probably have shrugged aside his trivialisation of her own political activity (‘she sees herself as mistress of the world, and wants to make the liberal candidate lose in the following week’s by-elections’10), though his failure to note the practical, committed streak of his muse would have been irritating. The difficulty was that Morand implied that their intimacy was one of the boudoir; he quoted one princess who described her as ‘immoral’ and hinted strongly that Consuelo had at least one lover in the background.11

  Friendships and admirers were one thing. Affairs were quite another. If Consuelo took lovers after the separation with the Duke she was careful to cover her traces. Many men attended her dinners and soirees and some of them, like Harry Cust, were celebrated philanderers; but it can only be a matter of conjecture whether any of them were more than close friends, a judgement made more difficult by Consuelo’s friendships with individual Souls. While the Souls took a relaxed view of extra-marital relationships it is also true that this was a circle which prided itself on a new tone in male-female friendship, where intensely intimate platonic relationships were common, and flirtatious letters de rigueur. Consuelo is sometimes said to have been a lover of one Soul, Sir Edgar Vincent, who lent her a house in Esher as a holiday home for women workers, but one letter to Sir Edgar calling him a ‘perfect eugenic specimen’ is not enough on which to build a case, especially since she also sent her warm regards to his wife.12

  Another Soul with whom she has sometimes been linked is her old friend George Curzon whose first wife Mary Leiter died in 1906 and who did not start an affair with his second, Grace Duggan, until 1915. Here, anyone wishing to play detective encounters the problem of Curzon himself, for his romantic life was a constant source of speculation. He was extremely attractive to women, had many affairs and was rumoured at one stage to be involved with at least three women simultaneously. Curzon and Consuelo were deeply attached to one another in spite of their political differences, and stayed at each other’s houses. Consuelo often went to Hackwood to join Curzon’s great Whitsun house parties. Like Sir Edgar Vincent, Curzon supported Consuelo in her philanthropic ventures, opening the Mary Curzon Lodging House for Women in 1913. However, according to Curzon’s biographer, David Gilmour, there is no evidence that their relationship was anything more than another amitié amoureuse, though Curzon would certainly have burnt any adulterous correspondence. It seems equally plausible that Consuelo could have decided that romantic involvement with such a strong-willed character with pronounced anti-suffrage views was not for her. She observed that his first wife Mary had to subjugate her character to him almost entirely, though even Consuelo was startled when she was once his house guest to discover that Curzon had changed all the books that his second wife Grace had picked out and put beside Consuelo’s bed.

  Consuelo’s position as a separated woman in society was bound to attract gossip, some of it stoked by jealousy. The affectionate and flirtatious charm which Morand implied made her so many friends may also have misled the susceptible. It certainly confused one nameless gentleman who so misread the signals that he resigned from his clubs, convinced that they were about to elope. The most compelling reason for thinking that Consuelo enjoyed having admirers at her feet but generally kept them at arm’s length is that she would have been highly concerned about destabilising her difficult relationship with the Duke, particularly in the years just after the separation. Her reputation had already been threatened by the affair with Lord Castlereagh and she had worked hard to salvage it. She remained vulnerable to salacious gossip which could all too easily have given an angry Duke grounds for challenging favourable custody arrangements while her sons were young, something she was anxious to avoid at all costs.

  There is also evidence that the Duke actively tried to stop her from having love affairs, the only area of her life in which he felt he still had any power. In 1913, the year that Morand wrote his ‘likeness’, whispers of romantic dalliance grew louder. Consuelo was only thirty-six, but by now, Blandford and Ivor were sixteen and fifteen respectively and her position in London society was secure. A measure of Consuelo’s difficulties in pursuing any romance at all is revealed by a letter in 1913 from the Duke to Gladys Deacon from Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the French Riviera in 1913 (theirs had been an on-off affair until 1911, when they started to correspond regularly again and entered a phase which would end with their marriage in 1921). In it the Duke wrote that Consuelo was enjoying an affair with one of his first cousins, Reginald Fellowes, second son of the de Ramsays, who were furious about it. ‘I ought really to have him watched,’ he wrote to Gladys. ‘I must do so when I get back.’13 He told Gladys that the de Ramsays wanted their son to marry a girl who was ‘cut and dry for him, anxious to ally herself with his dusky loins’, but that Consuelo was preventing him.14 He wrote to Gladys again on Easter Sunday saying that he had met �
��the buck’ and cut him dead and was highly satisfied that Consuelo had now been forced to stay in London. ‘I have spoilt this plan for the moment,’15 he told Gladys.

  For his part, the Duke seems to have become more embittered towards Consuelo as the years passed. He certainly resented the fact that she always seemed to have the upper hand in public relations, for her status as both serious philanthropist and victim of ducal greed charmed the popular press. In a letter to Gladys from Blenheim on 13 September 1912, the Duke enclosed a press cutting from the Daily Chronicle which remarked that: ‘No London hostess takes greater practical interest in outdoor sports than her Grace of Marlborough, who is a fine horsewoman and a fairly good shot. Golf likewise claims her as an enthusiast.’ An infuriated Duke annotated the cutting for Gladys’s benefit: ‘Philanthropist, Beauty, the used wife, Patriotic Yank, what else!!!’.16 He also appeared to have enjoyed moments when Consuelo was mocked for her liberal leanings by others, sending Gladys a cutting from Town Topics in 1913, after the magazine had heard that Consuelo was speaking publicly on the need for women’s lodging houses. ‘Really Consuelo,’ jeered Town Topics, ‘even for a democratic Duchess – this is a bit tough.’17