Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  It did little to help that Consuelo allied herself politically with David Lloyd George who launched a blistering series of attacks on aristocratic government in general and dukes in particular from 1909 onwards. On one occasion at Mile End in 1910 Lloyd George got the ear of the crowd by demanding: ‘Since when have the British aristocracy started despising American dollars?’ When a wag in the crowd yelled ‘Marlborough!’ Lloyd George replied: ‘I see you understand me. Many a noble house tottering to its fall has had its foundations underpinned, has had its walls buttressed by a pile of American dollars.’18 The Duke responded to this in print by saying that it was ‘cowardly to attack lords through their ladies’, but Consuelo did not exactly ease the tension by befriending Mrs Lloyd George, and attending committee meetings at 10 Downing Street where the Prime Minister’s wife took the chair.

  A. L. Rowse’s assessment that the Duke suffered from depression, and the misanthropy and sense of persecution that often accompany it, is borne out by some of his letters to Gladys. He was certain, for example, that Consuelo was manoeuvring against him in 1915, when the ceremonial post of Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire fell vacant. Consuelo, according to the Duke, was not only supporting the candidacy of Lord Lansdowne but had become a central figure in the campaign. ‘Wd you believe that little L is my opponent on the C. ticket. Is it possible, you will say!!!!’19 he wrote to Gladys.

  It is difficult to understand why Consuelo would deliberately have taken such a course of action: she was preoccupied with her philanthropy and war work, and it was not in her interests to annoy the Duke. He, however, left no-one in any doubt about his feelings on the matter, storming round to see Lansdowne and losing his temper. Lord Lansdowne wrote to Winston Churchill that he had an open mind on the subject of his nephew’s wish to become Lord Lieutenant, but that his ‘violent and abusive’20 language had not helped him. Winston Churchill, F. E. Smith and others made representations to Asquith but the Duke had to endure a painful wait during which time he wrote to Gladys: ‘You have no conception of the vileness of the intrigue against me and I am overwhelmed with despair … I am in one of those moral convulsions of anger and despair which shake my whole being.’21

  Under the circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that the Duke’s thoughts should now turn to divorce, for Gladys Deacon too was placed in a difficult position and he was anxious to marry her before she tired of waiting. One interpretation of his behaviour towards Consuelo over both the matter of affairs and the very long delay in seeking a divorce, suggested by one member of the family, is that he did not wish to see her remarry until she was past child-bearing age, partly out of spite and partly because he feared that the Vanderbilt settlement might be dispersed in directions other than Blenheim. There are signs that Consuelo, too, was reluctant to give up her position as Duchess of Marlborough – which gave her such influence – without an alternative life in sight. The delay can also be attributed to a need to wait for changes to English divorce law, without which they would both face a complicated charade and a publicity barrage which could only rebound unfairly on their sons. There had been discussions since 1909 of an amendment which would make desertion for more than three years grounds for divorce. The outbreak of the war delayed the bill, however, leaving the Duke and Gladys in marital limbo, and consigning Consuelo to a lonely future.

  When Consuelo returned to England from America in August 1914, she expected to find her adopted country tense and sombre in the face of war mobilisation, and was surprised by the general mood of sang-froid. The outbreak of war meant the dissolution of an international web of friendships, including a sad goodbye to Count Mensdorff, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador; but she was soon caught up in a flurry of war work, which Janus-like, looked backwards and forwards. Some of it reflected the passing of an aristocratic age, such as an employment agency for domestic servants put out of work by the closure of great houses and a highly successful scheme where women were asked to give a jewel to save a child’s life, donating ‘cameos, chatelaines, diamond brooches, bracelets and rings, stomachers in their old-fashioned settings and diamond tiaras and necklaces’,22 and other accessories of Edwardian opulence that they would rarely need again. Other projects pointed to the future rather than the past. Consuelo quickly became involved with the Women’s Emergency Corps, one of the main mechanisms by which women took over the work of enlisted men, and became chairman of the American Women’s War Relief Fund which ran a military hospital in Devon.

  The rapid influx of women into every part of the wartime economy changed the nature of many of Consuelo’s pre-war interests. She turned her attention from Bedford College to raising money for the Medical School for Women at the Royal Free Hospital in London, the only hospital in England where women were allowed to practice, setting up an annexe with eighteen beds as a lying-in hospital, staffed by women doctors and students. In the same year, she was the first woman to give the Priestley Lecture and used the opportunity to collect her thoughts on infant mortality, a process which took her ‘three weeks to write and an hour to read’23 and caused something of a sensation. Consuelo departed from a conventional script in attributing almost half the number of infant deaths in England to syphilis, causing several distinguished ladies in the audience to walk out.

  Unlike many great London houses, Sunderland House proved unsuitable for temporary conversion to a nursing home, though it remained a useful place to have meetings. Its cellars doubled as a shelter during Zeppelin raids (the same man who had gazed at her parties as a child thanked her for the hospitality of the Sunderland House basement during the war). In spite of this, it became clear that it was somehow regarded as unpatriotic to live alone in such a large house when the country was at war; it also became uncomfortable and difficult to run, for young women servants preferred to work in the munitions factories. ‘When the tenth housemaid in two weeks gave notice I asked her to tell me frankly what was wrong. “Well”, she said, “I thought I had come to a private house, but I find it’s the Town Hall, and I’m sick of washing that there marble floor after those meetings and refreshments.”’24 Towards the end of the war, Consuelo put the house at the disposal of the British government and decamped with Ivor to a smaller house in Devonshire Place.

  The strain and tension of war did little to improve Consuelo’s relations with the Duke, though there were brief moments when they found themselves in accord. The Duke became chairman of the Women’s Land Service Corps, a movement which Consuelo also supported. In his inaugural speech, however, he could not help opine that if he could make do with the services of boys, old men and women as land workers, so could everybody else. As Consuelo’s support of the liberal-left progressive position on a range of social welfare issues crystallised, the Duke wrote: ‘Poor Demos, how he is struggling and dragging us all down with him. When will he learn the truth?’ In contrast with his wife, he often felt his existence had little point and was prone to attacks of self-pity. ‘I do not see what use I am in the world. I am so hopelessly tied down to an impossible existence … I am full of gloom for I see nothing ahead. Nothing.’25

  The Marlboroughs, in common with thousands of other parents of sons, had to cope with acute anxiety over the Marquess of Blandford who had now left Eton for a short course of officer training at Sandhurst before joining the army. Even this was the cause of tension between his parents. In a letter to Gladys, the Duke raged that he had ‘arranged everything with the WO [War Office], having taken B[landford] before the General concerned and having settled all formalities – after all these uncertainties B[landford] informs me that he prefers the 1st Life Guards.’ Consuelo, it transpired, also preferred the Life Guards for Blandford and had taken steps to arrange it. ‘The trouble is that the boy will keep on saying that he is in a second rate Regiment and his brother will keep on saying the same thing. B was perfectly contented a week ago. Only when he gets with his mother do these changed views appear. It is disturbing as it shows a weakness of character.’26 In a further letter the Du
ke wrote that he was ‘going to London tomorrow to see if I can undo the mischief that C has wrought re Blandford. I go with a heavy heart, the thing is so revolting.’27 His visit, however, achieved little for Blandford went straight into the 1st Life Guards as a second lieutenant.

  The war had one unexpected benefit for it rapidly improved the chances of English women being given the right to vote. As soon as war was declared the exhausted Pankhursts wisely declared ‘a patriotic truce’; the vast influx of women into men’s roles rendered anti-suffragist arguments about separate spheres of activity unsustainable; and concern about his ability as a war leader led to the replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George in 1916, removing an implacable opponent of women’s suffrage from the head of government. It is worth noting that many historians now consider the role of the constitutionalist mainstream movement led by Millicent Fawcett – supported by Consuelo – more important to the eventual success of the campaign than the Pankhursts’ militancy which, it is argued, may have ultimately delayed an extension of the franchise. In America, conversely, the war in Europe caused difficulties for suffragists. America would not enter the war until 1917, but it dominated the political agenda and made it more difficult for suffragists to be heard.

  The meeting of the Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage at Marble House at the end of August 1914 went ahead as planned, and to Alva’s great pleasure, it now adopted the principle over which she had lost her temper with Caroline Reilly. This was the Pankhurstian approach of holding the party in power responsible for failure to deliver votes to women, regardless of support for the cause by individual members. In America this meant that the CU now targeted both the Democratic Party and President Wilson, who claimed to have an open mind on the suffrage question but consistently refused to take action. Alva, according to Doris Stevens, was the one who led the way in persuading the CU that the best way to apply pressure on male politicians was to make women’s suffrage an election issue. The key to this was that women in the nine ‘suffrage states’ should be urged to withhold their votes from the Democrats in the forthcoming congressional elections until the party agreed to support a federal amendment. ‘We knew this policy would be called militant and in a sense it was,’ wrote Doris Stevens. ‘It was strong, positive and energetic.’28

  Apart from financing the CU, the adoption of these two political manoeuvres represented Alva’s principal political contribution to the radical group. She was always prepared to trust the judgement of women she regarded as stronger than herself, and though she met very few, Alice Paul, the CU’s leader, was one of them. Indeed, by financing the energetic CU led by Alice Paul, Alva suddenly found herself with less to do. For the time being she continued to run the Political Equality Association in New York, dividing her energies between the CU’s national campaign and the New York State campaign for another referendum in 1915, for both approaches to suffrage were still in play.

  In 1915 Alva finally sold Belcourt to Oliver Belmont’s brother Perry, and bought a piece of land on the north shore of Long Island where she orchestrated the construction of another extraordinary house, Beacon Towers, at Sands Point (the ruins can be seen to this day). Designed by Richard Howland Hunt, it took as a starting point Alva’s fascination with France, this time with the chateaux of Burgundy and the paintings of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Indoors, there were great murals of Alva’s militant heroine, Joan of Arc. Outdoors, the architect grafted a strikingly modernist note. Walls were surfaced in white stucco and the windows lacked surrounds in the style of Corbusier, in a manner ‘appropriate to new structural materials in a new age’.29 In photographs taken from the shore, Beacon Towers seemed to float weightless and fantastic, as if Alva’s dreams of living as a princess in a castle had now meshed with ambitions of modernity. The house was sold to William Randolph Hearst in 1927, and demolished in 1943. Had it survived it would perhaps have been Alva’s greatest architectural achievement.

  Back in the political world, any hopes of a rapprochement between the Congressional Union and the National American were finally dashed as the result of action taken by Alice Paul in the wake of the Lusitania crisis. On 7 May 1915 the British Cunard liner was sunk off the Irish coast by a German submarine. Of the 1,195 passengers who died, 128 were US citizens and included Alva’s nephew by her first marriage, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, a son of Cornelius II who had avoided the sinking of the Titanic three years earlier when he changed his passage at the last moment. Although the German embassy published advertisements in the morning papers warning American passengers not to sail, they appeared far too late and the sinking of the Lusitania increased pressure on President Wilson to take America into the war against Germany. Alice Paul felt this would be a good moment to ratchet up the pressure on the President and allowed two members of the CU, Florence Harmon from Alva’s PEA and Mabel Schofield, an English suffragette, to ‘besiege’ him by attempting to deliver a letter to him at a banquet. When that failed, they pursued him in a taxi to the pier, eventually giving the letter to his stenographer.

  Criticism of the CU and Alva for bothering the President at such a moment was widespread. Anna Howard Shaw was among those who denounced ‘English militants’ who ‘were employed by Mrs Belmont to make the outrageous attack on the President’.30 Alva damped down criticism with some well-judged remarks and then proceeded to the San Francisco Voters Convention where she publicly waved off members of the CU on a transcontinental journey to Washington with a petition to which they added more than a million signatures as they travelled from coast to coast. This garnered many headlines, again deflecting press coverage away from the war, and succeeding in generating real political discussion between the CU and two senate committees when the petition was delivered in Washington. When the New York State suffrage campaign was defeated in another referendum in 1915, however, Carrie Chapman Catt and Shaw blamed the ‘militant’ action by the CU and Alva for its failure. Catt took over as leader from Anna Howard Shaw at the end of 1915, and remained implacably hostile to Alva, though she slowly began to adopt tactics that Alva had advocated for years.

  Defeat in the New York referendum in 1915 left all New York’s suffragists uncertain of how best to proceed. By state law, another referendum on woman’s suffrage could not be held until 1917. The immediate problem was keeping the suffrage issue alive. Alva stepped in with a bright new idea, the most idiosyncratic of all her schemes for uniting suffrage with society. She announced that she would put on a suffragette operetta, to be sung by New York debutantes, assisted by suffrage workers. The music – and some of the lyrics – would be written by Elsa Maxwell, whom Alva had befriended that year when she arrived in America from England bearing a letter of introduction from Consuelo. Elsa Maxwell was, in her own words ‘a short, fat, homely piano player from Keokuk, Iowa, with no money or background [who] decided to become a legend and did just that’.31

  Alva took to her on sight, not always an immediate reaction, since Elsa Maxwell’s appearance was as singular as everything else about her. ‘Prince Christian of Hesse once saw me swimming off Eden Roc, and mistook me for a rubber mattress,’32 she once wrote. She would eventually succeed in becoming an international society celebrity and a famous giver of parties. Doris Stevens was deeply disturbed by Maxwell’s lesbian relationship with Dickie Fellowes Gordon and wrote: ‘Many people hate her passionately and others are indifferent, but wherever she is functioning she is always a subject of speculation.’33 But Alva tended to see anyone who was always a subject of speculation as a person after her own heart.

  If Alva and Elsa Maxwell had set out to create an antidote to gloomy news from Europe with their production Melinda and Her Sisters, they certainly succeeded. The New York Times, Tribune, Telegraph, Sun, Journal, World and even Musical America tracked the operetta to the night of its premiere. The leading role of Melinda was taken by a professional actress, Miss Marie Douro; the rest of the cast comprised an exciting mix of debutantes and suffragists. Marie Douro, in an early exercise in m
ethod acting, became a suffragist overnight for the part. ‘I did not know that suffrage meant all that,’ said Miss Douro to The New York Times when she read the libretto. ‘It appeals to the very highest and best there is in me’34 – though not, it would appear, to her vanity, for there was rather a tussle over her preference for classical sandals rather than the flat-heeled sensible shoe so characteristic of the suffragette. Some of the debutantes were astonished that just before the first performance they would be required to rehearse for a whole day. Alva, in her self-styled role as theatrical impresario, announced that she expected Melinda to be produced all over the country and that it would make at least a million dollars for the cause. As it turned out, Melinda and Her Sisters had one performance at the Waldorf Astoria on Friday 18 February 1916. Boxes cost a staggering $150 each, but the parents of the debutantes queued up to buy them and it was soon completely sold out.

  The debutantes’ parents did not go unrewarded. The plot, devised by Alva, concerned the eight daughters of Mrs Pepper of Oshkosh, all talented and beautiful except Melinda, a suffragist. When Mrs Pepper has a birthday party she omits to invite Melinda on the grounds that her embarrassing suffrage politics will ruin her sisters’ social chances. The seven sisters dance with their friends – one of them performs the dance of the faun from Diaghilev’s ballet L’Après midi d’un Faune – but Melinda appears uninvited, with a suffrage parade in tow and an assorted collection of ‘laborers, factory girls and salesladies’. In a twist of the plot which is never quite explained Mrs Pepper sees the error of her ways, converts to the cause of female suffrage, forgives Melinda and they all live happily ever after. This plot summary does not, however, do justice to some of Alva’s lines. Her heroine comes off worst with persistent calls for women to unite. The wicked characters do rather better. ‘It doesn’t take money to get a villa at Newport, it takes brains,’ says Mrs Grundy. ‘It takes brains to make money,’ replies Mrs Malaprop. ‘Any fool can make money, it takes a clever person to spend it,’ replies Mrs Grundy. ‘Society is the key to the Higher Life – Publicity,’35 remarks another character elsewhere. But as the reviewer from Theater Magazine pointed out, ‘each present thought the quip was intended for his or her neighbour and accordingly laughed with unsuspecting heartiness’.36