Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt
Page 54
Jacques’ arrival in the United States at the end of 1943 was timely since he was able to be at Consuelo’s side when her brother Willie K. Jr died on 8 January 1944, after several months of illness from a heart condition. On his return Jacques began to argue the case for stopping the American blockade on food relief to France that was being applied as a way of shortening the war. Consuelo contributed a long article to the Herald Tribune articulating French frustration at American failure to grasp the realities of daily life in France, where, in the towns and less fertile areas of the French countryside, the civilian population was close to starvation. She suggested that during the winters of 1940–41 and 1941–42, the Germans had allowed emergency supplies to reach their destinations unimpeded and that if the Allies did not do something to help France soon they would find themselves ‘liberating a cemetery’.20
In October 1944, following the success of Operation Overlord, Jacques (and possibly Consuelo) went back to France and arranged for the Paris house to be used by British service women in need of somewhere to rest. In Normandy, according to a letter from Consuelo’s son the 10th Duke of Marlborough to Churchill, ‘several hundred refugees were now billeted on St Georges-Motel’.21 Otherwise the house and its contents had an escape which seemed almost miraculous. Although it had been used as a base for airmen from the Luftwaffe, it had been treated with respect, and had even survived visits from the notoriously light-fingered Hermann Goering. The Luxembourgeois butler Louis Hoffman, who stayed on there, endured one hair-raising moment when he was arrested as a spy and threatened with a firing squad, but he was eventually released unharmed.
The explanation for the safe passage of St Georges-Motel and its furniture and paintings through the war lay with Basil Davidoff, who had played a central role in the lives of the Balsans from the late 1930s. A Russian who had fled to Europe at the time of the revolution in 1917, he was highly educated, was a polished conversationalist and could speak five languages. Consuelo ‘found him in a bank in Monte Carlo’, according to her granddaughter Lady Rosemary Muir, and gave him the role of a superior major domo. Davidoff mingled with the guests at Lou Sueil and St Georges-Motel and made sure that everything ran smoothly during house parties – matching tennis partners, setting up bridge games, finding golf caddies and ensuring that everyone was content. As a White Russian, Basil Davidoff was less troubled than most by the German occupation of France. Indeed, he longed for the Nazis to invade Russia too and dispose of the Bolsheviks. When officers of the Luftwaffe moved into St Georges-Motel, Davidoff dined with them in the evenings and, unknown to the Balsans, continued to act as major domo in an arrangement so cosy that the officers even arranged for the return of a beautiful stallion belonging to Jacques that had been sent to Germany. Relations became distinctly less friendly when a copy of a telegram from Consuelo to Winston Churchill congratulating him on becoming Prime Minister in May 1940 was discovered in the local post office, but regardless of the froideur that then ensued there is no doubt that the Balsans’ collection at St Georges-Motel was largely preserved as a result of Basil Davidoff’s unfortunate act of loyalty in cultivating the Luftwaffe.
After the war the great paintings and best furniture were shipped to America, accompanied soon afterwards by Louis Hoffman, who married Consuelo’s maid Annie. But the circumstances surrounding the survival of the contents of St Georges-Motel were something that Consuelo – who would show signs of anti-German prejudice for the rest of her life – found difficult to face and which she never discussed. She was always generous by instinct, but it is likely that deep unease may have made it easier to sell the great Renoir ‘La Baigneuse’ for $115,000 as a contribution towards food relief for French children after the war; and she also gave the Boldini portrait to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Basil Davidoff, meanwhile, took up residence in one of the outbuildings at Lou Sueil where there was no running water or heating. Jacques had rented out the house to an American during one of his wartime trips to Europe, in a gentleman’s agreement so half-baked that it proved impossible to evict this unwelcome tenant until 1953. The house was eventually made over by Consuelo to her grandchildren who had the greatest difficulty persuading Basil Davidoff that he would be better off in a comfortable flat in Monte Carlo, provided by the family. Lady Rosemary Muir supplemented Basil Davidoff’s Balsan pension out of her own pocket. When she helped him to pack, she discovered that all he owned were some old clothes belonging to Jacques, snapshots of his house in Kiev and a photograph of the Tsar. He continued to yearn for the return of the Tsar until he died.
Consuelo refused to return to France to see her houses before they were sold after the end of the war, feeling, perhaps, that happy memories had become tainted by the complexities of survival in wartime, and that it was better to look forward than back. Nonetheless, her strong identification with France persisted. She was rewarded by the French government on 24 July 1947 for her support when she was appointed officier of the Légion d’Honneur for all her efforts ‘in the field of Public Relief’.22 Insults directed at the French could rouse her to formidable anger: Elsa Maxwell recalls that soon after the war, the Earl of Carnarvon (known as ‘Porchy’) incurred Consuelo’s wrath by making rude remarks about France when he was staying at Casa Alva. ‘In the middle of dinner one night the conversation had turned with mounting acrimony onto the international situation and France’s role in post-war Europe … Whereupon Porchy, falling back on the traditional schoolboy expression, suddenly delivered himself of the opinion that “the French were a lot of frogs, anyway”. As Madame Balsan is married to a Frenchman and devoted to France the fat was in the fire. Icily, firmly and irrevocably the ultimatum was delivered to poor Porchy across the plates and glass: “Will you kindly leave my table and my house this instant,” Mme Balsan demanded. Whereupon, his dinner half eaten, he left the room, went upstairs and had his bags packed and left the house.’23
Alva’s love of France as a girl, and her attempts to bring French style to America, finally came full circle in the stunning aristocratic French interiors created by Consuelo and Jacques in Old Fields and Casa Alva. ‘Paintings by Fragonard, Oudry, Hubert Robert, Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, Utrillo, Segonzac; lacquer cabinets on gilded stands of the seventeenth and eighteenth century; Aubussons, Savonneries, and Chinese rugs; Regence secretaries, Louis Quinze sofas and bergères; Clodion terres cuites, chinoiserie figurines, Meissen and Chi’en Lung birds and fish with mounts of eighteenth-century French gilt bronze … The mere bald recital is liable to impress,’24 wrote Valentine Lawford for Vogue. But the resemblance of Consuelo’s American houses to her mother’s Gilded Age palaces was only superficial for the priceless collection that surrounded the Balsans had nothing to do with ostentation nor was it even simply the legacy of the Balsans’ shared past and exquisitely refined taste.
‘The more one became acclimatized to the atmosphere of these extraordinary houses, the firmer was one’s conviction that to impress was not their owner’s need or intention,’25 wrote Lawford. Flowers were arranged, ‘as a painter will use colours’, beneath the treasures on the wall, the pictures were hung – and re-hung – at a height where Consuelo could enjoy them and he noticed that she often sat in a spot where the view of the room was most perfect, or would move her chair so that the light fell on one of her paintings in the way she liked best. When they travelled north or south each year, the Balsans took their favourite works of art with them, sending them a few days ahead by road and rail. When two of Consuelo’s walnut bergère chairs were sold much later at auction in New York, labels explaining their precise location in each house could still to be found on their undersides.26
The impression of a small perfect French world set down unexpectedly in the middle of America was reinforced by the fact that Consuelo and Jacques spoke French to each other. After the arrival of Louis Hoffman and his wife from France, so did most of the servants. ‘Everything was perfect,’ says Margarette Blouin, French governess to the children of Consuelo’s gra
nddaughter Lady Sarah Russell, who had been found for them by Consuelo who insisted that they had to speak French properly. ‘The flowers were perfect, the food was perfect, she was beautiful and everyone always looked marvellous.’27 ‘The éclat of it all was probably more stupendous in Florida,’ Lawford thought. ‘Greeted each time one came through the front door by Cézanne’s “Bridge” on the far side of the hall, and turning towards a room of painted walls brought from Hamilton Palace, one found it frankly inconceivable that such a treasure house should actually have been superimposed on Hypoluxo Island, still in process of growing, every year a little longer out of the unspeakable bed of the lagoon.’28
It was almost too much for the Churchills. They stayed with the Balsans at Casa Alva after the end of the war, in January 1946, where it is thought that Churchill may have worked on the famous speech delivered at Fulton Missouri on 5 March, where he spoke of an ‘iron curtain’ and called for a Western alliance that later emerged as NATO. ‘There is a Norwegian Butler, flocks of pale blue parlour-maids, delicious food, ancient French panelling and Aubusson carpets, with a faint feeling of “ennui” pervading the whole,’ wrote Clementine Churchill to her daughter Mary Soames on 27 January 1946.29 Though it brought back memories of the 1930s in France, the war ‘made this elegant life and its setting seem remote and out of touch’,30 Mary Soames wrote of one of her parents’ stays there, an understandable reaction when Europe was still gripped by hardship. Another guest, Laura Canfield, found Churchill difficult and moody during this visit but thought that this was caused by the shock of his election defeat in 1945 rather than by the enervating effect of Casa Alva.
As far as some of the Balsans’ American friends were concerned, however, Jacques was not always sufficiently remote for members of the opposite sex who caught his eye. Those who remember him consistently testify in the same breath to his warmth and kindness and to the fact that it was most unwise for any attractive woman to find herself alone in a room with him, a tendency which became worse as he grew older. Some of his reputation can be attributed to the difference between prim New England society and the style of a lady’s man of the belle époque. It was also attributed by some of his younger relations to his fondness for rejuvenation treatments involving monkey glands, pioneered by their old neighbour at Lou Sueil, Serge Voronoff. One sensitive French nephew thought that sometimes Jacques felt restless and confined in his post-war gilded exile, and noticed him using up surplus energy by hacking away at the jungle undergrowth surrounding Casa Alva with a machete. Consuelo – though not her granddaughters – remained wholly unruffled by his pouncing tendencies, expecting little else from a Frenchman of Jacques’ age and class. It was clear to all that however Jacques behaved when his wife’s back was turned, the Balsans loved one another. He was, says one relation, a perfect foil for her and continued to buzz round her with petits soins. Another relative describes his affection for his wife as so overwhelming that she would ‘bat him away like a slightly annoying insect’.
In the final phase of her life, Consuelo appeared an intimidating figure to some. Her powerful character, her deafness, her height, her straight back and elegant beauty could make her seem inaccessible to those who did not know her well. She controlled her hearing aid by a small dial on her chest, and had a disconcerting habit of switching it off sharply when she was bored, unaware that the click of the switch could be heard by everyone present. Her hospitality was flawless but formal, even by the standards of the 1950s. In late 1945, the 10th Duke’s eldest daughter, Sarah, who had married American publisher Edwin Russell in 1940, went to live in the United States permanently, becoming the grandchild on whom Consuelo relied as though she were a daughter. The Russells’ four daughters (one of whom was named Consuelo; another, Jacqueline, was named after Jacques) thought of Consuelo as ‘Granny’ – though she was, of course, their great-grandmother – and spent many holidays with her on Long Island and Palm Beach. Much as they loved Consuelo and Jacques (who would start every holiday by taking them all off to buy piles of boxes of holiday shoes), some of Alva’s drive for control undoubtedly resurfaced in Consuelo in old age. Perfect manners were expected. For lunch, the main meal of the day, the girls changed into tickly white organza dresses, had their own small chairs and were expected to make polite conversation regardless of the grandeur of the guests. Mademoiselle Blouin clearly remembers the thunderstruck expressions on the faces of passers-by on annual visits paid by Consuelo and her great-granddaughters to the Radio City Christmas Show in New York as the chauffeur-driven limousine pulled up on Sixth Avenue and Consuelo stepped out in her famous pearls.
Those able to find a way past her intimidating elegance – and there were many – knew that there was a very different person behind this grande dame: kind-hearted, affectionate, interested and cultured. There was a constant stream of visitors to both houses: young and old, distinguished and unimportant, ‘authors and career women, lonely or just tired’ according to Valentine Lawford. The staff stayed. Mademoiselle Blouin once found a new black cook from Georgia crying in the garden because no white employer had ever spoken to her so kindly before. ‘Beautiful’ and ‘riddled with charm and really rather clever’,31 was the verdict of the young Louis Auchincloss, who married Adele Lawrence, and thus into the Vanderbilts. Consuelo’s granddaughter, Rosemary, (a daughter of the 10th Duke) often travelled to Casa Alva with her parents after the Second World War. She thought that her grandmother’s upbringing at the hands of Alva made her particularly sensitive to the aspirations of the young, especially young women who wished to get out and see something of the world before they married. On one occasion, when she was seventeen, Lady Rosemary arrived at Casa Alva with her father, hoping that she would be allowed to travel on to Arizona where she had been invited to stay by an American friend. Her father refused to countenance this proposal and was adamant that she would do nothing of the kind. Consuelo stepped into the fray, told her son firmly that he was being wholly unreasonable and insisted that Rosemary should be encouraged to see a different side of America while she could. She then undermined paternal authority entirely by giving her granddaughter the money to make the trip.
Consuelo did not, however, win all her battles with the 10th Duke. In his fifties, in the late 1940s, he decided not to hand over Blenheim Palace to the National Trust after the war, and worked extremely hard to restore it after the depredations of wartime, opening it to the public in 1950. In every other respect he appeared to the world as a splendidly ducal anachronism (‘antediluvian’ is the word used by one commentator). The Balsans’ American friends could be forgiven for finding him baffling on visits to the States since he was famously incomprehensible even to the English. Much taller than his father (he inherited the Commodore’s height) ‘Bert’ barely moved his lips when he spoke, rarely removed his pipe from his mouth, and thus reduced all his sentences, most of which ended in ‘What?’, to an inaudible rumble. His deep dislike of appearing sentimental masked kindness and humour, but it took time to get the hang of its surreal streak, and some people never quite managed. His opening sally to Blenheim’s historian David Green, who later became a friend, was: ‘My main burden at the moment is this bloody roof, what? When we had that heavy fall every man jack in the place had to help sweep the snow off it. One of them disappeared in a drift. I’m told they’ve found him, but they know I can’t go up there because of vertigo.’32 When the idea of putting on son et lumière at Blenheim was under discussion his chief concern was that the public would ‘copulate and poach the pheasants, what?’33 When Richard Dimbleby turned to the 10th Duke in the Long Library during a television interview and said: ‘They tell me that you have the biggest private organ in England,’ he smiled and said, ‘I would like to think so.’34 He was deeply attached to his mother who loved him dearly but even she could do nothing about his dress sense. During American visits – in a desperate attempt to make him presentable – she ‘would order for him a range of matching outfits, only to be faced next morning with a h
eartbreaking assortment of oddments, some new, some old, topped with an ancient pullover and a favourite jacket which she hoped had been given away’.35
There were some who preferred to think of Consuelo as a Proustian figure whatever she was like: the designer Christian Bérard, for instance, almost ‘passed out with excitement’36 when he discovered that she was sitting in front of him at the Paris Opera. In reality, Consuelo was far more adaptable than most Proustian figures, an advantage in a world that was changing fast. The New York Central, source of so much Vanderbilt wealth, found itself challenged by new competitors. At the end of the Second World War, Commodore Vanderbilt would probably have divested himself of trains and started an airline. Harold Vanderbilt, though effective in seeing through the change to diesel, was unable to fend off a challenge from corporate raider Robert Young which ended Vanderbilt involvement in the New York Central. It was a Pyrrhic victory for Young who was eventually forced to merge with the New York Central’s great rival, the Pennsylvania Railroad. The merger took place in such an atmosphere of fraud and scandal that Young felt that the New York Central was finished and shot himself in the library of his house in Palm Beach in 1958.
The association between the Vanderbilts and society was sustained by Grace Vanderbilt, now the Mrs Vanderbilt and society queen, wife of Consuelo’s cousin Cornelius who once said despairingly that his wife had become a ‘waltzing mouse’. Leading society was ‘a full-time profession which taxed all her resources every waking moment’,37 wrote her son, who rarely saw his mother while she partied with her friends in Europe. Consuelo had known Grace Vanderbilt since she was a girl, but she kept her distance from a cousin-in-law who is said to have entertained 30,000 guests in one year at William Henry’s house at 640 Fifth Avenue. The Vanderbilts started to leave mid-town Fifth Avenue during the Depression in the 1930s. Grace was the last to go in 1944, moving north to 1048 Fifth Avenue, a fine house by Carrière and Hastings that is now the Neue Galerie. Grace called it ‘the gardener’s cottage’ but even here she often had thirty guests for lunch and a hundred for dinner. Her final years echoed those of Mrs Astor, for she was bedridden for two years before she died in 1953, entertained mainly by a companion who would retell and tell again stories of the Mrs Vanderbilt’s great social triumphs of the past. After Grace Vanderbilt left, 640 Fifth Avenue was bought by Lord Astor of Hever and knocked down to make way for a bank. ‘In the greatest of American society rivalries,’ writes Jerry Patterson, ‘the Astors in a sense had the last word.’38