The Husband Hunters

by Anne de Courcy

  Two years later the intensity of her feelings, especially where anything to do with money was concerned, took its toll. In March 1895 she received the news that the Victoria Hotel, one of the prime Stevens properties, had failed. As by this time whatever she did or did not do was news, on 2 April The Times ran the headline ‘Mrs Paran Stevens Prostrated’, stating that since last week, ‘Mrs Stevens had been unable to leave her house, at Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. Acquaintances who called have been informed that she caught cold at a musicale, and that the probabilities of serious developments were so near at hand that she could not receive visitors.’

  The doors to the mansion were closed and, continued the paper, ‘The butler refused to take cards or to give any information, except that Mrs Stevens was suffering from a very severe cold.’ The truth was that her shock at the news of the hotel’s collapse and therefore the huge drop in her income was such that she had suffered a massive stroke. She was sixty-one.

  A telegram was sent to Minnie Paget, who boarded the first available steamship leaving from Liverpool for New York, but Marietta died on 3 April while Minnie was still at sea. Her body lay for days in a room with drawn curtains on the third floor of the mansion.

  The following day the New York Times wrote: ‘To persons familiar with the peculiarly nervous and excitable temperament of Mrs Paran Stevens, and to all who knew of the shock that the failure of the Victoria Hotel was to her, the sudden announcement of her death yesterday afternoon was not a surprise.’ Even in reporting her death, the newspaper did not hold back concerning her peculiarities. ‘No woman in New York society was better known than Mrs Paran Stevens, despite certain personal idiosyncrasies that all her friends thoroughly understood.’ Prime among these was her filthy temper and the expression of it in what was called ‘strong language’.

  She left $1.5 million, most of it to her daughter Minnie, who also received her emerald and diamond tiara, collar, pendant and brooches. Her sister Fanny, to whom she owed much of her social rise, received $3,000 a year for life. The Marble Row house with its cluttered rooms stuffed with French furniture where she had entertained so lavishly was sold. But she had achieved her goal: for many years she was at the heart of New York society. One obituary described her as ‘an ambitious woman, eager for social prestige [who] stamped out everything that stood in the pathway of her ambition’. It was an extraordinarily accurate summary.

  CHAPTER 7

  Alva

  Alva Vanderbilt, sexy, aggressive, iron-willed, was the supreme embodiment of both husband-hunter and social climber, first pulling her family into the higher echelons of American society through strategic moves and then forcing her daughter into marriage with a high-ranking nobleman whom she herself had tracked down and marked as quarry, to ensure and maintain her own high-status position.

  She was born on 17 January 1853 to Murray Forbes Smith and his wife Phoebe, the seventh of nine children of whom four died in infancy. As plantation-owners the family had been comfortably off, living in one of the grandest houses in Mobile, Alabama, with large, high-ceilinged rooms, tall casement windows and a hint of the Renaissance in its architecture – something that would influence her strongly in later life, as did also the fact that, like all well-off Southern families, the Erskine Smiths were slave-owners. As a five-year-old she would be taken for a weekly visit to her godmother, where she played with the small son of the house and the little black slave boys. ‘I never [in my life] played with girls,’ she wrote; and as a young adult, she invariably got on better with men than women.

  She grew up strong-willed, plump and pugnacious – as a child she loved screaming matches and a good fight and her personality was so forceful that she invariably won them; and she was rebellious from the start, always determined to go her own way and do what she wanted. As she herself wrote in her unpublished autobiography: ‘There was a force in me that seemed to compel me to do what I wanted to do regardless of what might happen afterwards … I have known this condition often during my life.’ She shared the same ruthless ambition and determination to succeed as had brought their millions to the power brokers of Wall Street and the railway magnates. All she lacked was their wealth.

  When the family moved to New York in 1859, they brought their slaves with them, including Alva’s favourite, Monroe Crawford – who had been given to her mother as a wedding present by her father – whom she bossed unmercifully. ‘It was a case of absolute control on my part,’ she told Sara Bard Field, the writer and poet to whom she dictated her memoirs in 1917. By the age of six, so deeply engrained was her sense of dominance over those she considered her inferiors, and her attitude to them, that it remained with her all her life.

  The Smiths’ Southern extraction might have made it easier for them to slip into New York society, Southerners having a certain social cachet; but the Civil War turned feelings against them. The Smith children and their mother travelled frequently in Europe. As Southerners, this was politic during the Civil War (1861–5), so that Alva was largely educated there. She was an obstreperous child and adolescent, rebelling against the highly regimented and constricted life of a girl and frequently fighting, with girls and boys alike. Often, when she went too far, she was whipped by her mother, but it made no difference to her behaviour.

  When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, the Smiths put black bombazine bows in their windows to avoid attack. But this was not enough to stem the rising tide of hostility towards Southerners and Alva’s father, who had lost most of his money through the war, decided to remove his family. The smart house on Fifth Avenue was sold and from 1866 Murray Forbes Smith conducted his business from Liverpool (the main English port for cotton from the Southern states).

  That summer, when Alva was thirteen, the family took a house in Newport, not then the citadel of prestige it was to become but merely the favoured summer resort of many Southern plantation-owners. Again, Alva’s upbringing was different in one respect from many of those around her and must have accounted for much of her later social confidence. ‘Southern children were never shoved off into nurseries but were always part of the family and allowed to see company … I sat always next to my father and stayed in the room when the women left, to hear discussions.’

  Another Southern family there were the Yznagas; before the Civil War Mr Yznaga, a Cuban, had owned a plantation in Louisiana worked by his 300 slaves.

  From Newport the Smiths went to Paris, where they rented an apartment on the Champs-Elysées. They were soon welcomed by the imperial court of Napoleon III and his glamorous Empress, Eugénie.

  France, largely through Paris, affected the teenage Alva strongly. She loved its art, its architecture, its history, its sophistication; her education proceeded with French and German governesses, visits to the great châteaux, sketching expeditions to Versailles and a year at a French school.

  In 1869, by which time feelings against Southerners had simmered down, Murray Forbes Smith decided to take his family back to New York. The sixteen-year-old Alva was desolate. ‘I was broken-hearted that I must leave France,’ she wrote. ‘I was in sympathy with everything there. This musical language had become mine. I loved its art, people, customs. America struck me in contrast … as crude and raw.’

  The America to which the Smiths returned had changed enormously. The huge number of new millionaires had sent expenditure on houses, servants, clothes and all the outward trappings of wealth soaring, while Mrs Astor, with her major-domo Ward McAllister, now ruled and regulated a society built on exclusion and exclusiveness – and the Smiths, who did not know Mrs Astor, were not in it. Just at this moment, Murray Forbes Smith’s business began to fail and the family had to move away from Fifth Avenue to ever smaller houses. Then, in 1871, came a shattering blow for Alva: her mother died at only forty-eight.

  Her father’s business continued to haemorrhage money and the responsibility of four daughters exacerbated his worries. Alva decided the only thing to do was to put herself on the marriage market
for two years. Fortunately, her social circle was younger than that ruled by Mrs Astor and, although neither the Smiths nor the Yznagas were within the magic Astor Four Hundred, their looks and personalities ensured that Alva and Consuelo Yznaga were welcome in this younger group – which also contained many of the children of Four Hundred families. Entering it, though, was not always easy and it is to Alva’s credit that, motherless and poor, she managed it – again, her determined character must have had much to do with this. She was not beautiful, but she had the freshness of youth, a well-rounded figure, vivacity and complete self-confidence.

  Another member of this group was William Kissam Vanderbilt, always known as Willie K, grandson of the famous Commodore who had founded the family’s railroad fortune. One day at a party Alva’s friend Consuelo Yznaga introduced them, and fostered Alva’s chances by bringing Willie K several times to the Smith house. He was handsome, charming, like Alva had been educated in Europe and spoke fluent French – and was potentially very rich.

  For Alva, with the shadow of permanent genteel poverty and even bankruptcy hanging over her and her family, Willie K must have seemed heaven-sent. She already knew what it was to be poor; and she was adamant that this was not for her and that a rich husband was a necessity. Although not pretty – one of her friends described her as ‘having the face of an intelligent Pekinese’ – she was sexy and above all determined. It is unlikely that she loved Willie; as Sara Bard Field wrote to her lover,1 ‘Alva’s terrible marriage to Mr Vanderbilt with its sordid selling of her unloving self but with its truly noble desire to save her Father was … a pathetic mixture of good and bad.’

  To Willie K, Alva’s wit, vitality, attractiveness, ease of manner and drive must have seemed just what he needed in a wife and the interest in Europe and its culture they shared must have been another bond. While the Smiths had simply slid out of society, there had been an active raising of barricades against the Vanderbilts by Mrs Astor. To overcome them would be a mammoth task and Willie K, just as anxious to achieve acceptability as Alva, must have believed (correctly) that in Alva, well educated, steeped in the sophisticated culture of Europe and without the black mark of Mrs Astor’s disapproval, he had found the woman to do this.

  Perhaps, also, Willie K was attracted by the forceful streak already visible in the youthful Alva as echoing the vigour and determination so evident in his own family – the Commodore still behaved and swore as in the days when he founded the beginnings of his immense fortune as a tough sixteen-year-old ferrying passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan. It is likely that the Commodore also recognised these qualities in Alva, for he took to her from the beginning.

  Willie and Alva married in 1875, when Alva was twenty-two. Already her gift for planning how to attain her ends was visible: she had realised that publicity was essential for social success – the papers described the crowds at her wedding – and she was the first New York bride to issue admission cards to guests, thus turning the exclusion principle that had hitherto hindered her to her advantage.

  For the first few years Alva was busy giving birth to her three children – Consuelo, named after her friend Consuelo Yznaga, who became the little girl’s godmother, then William Kissam and Harold Stirling – and running the large Vanderbilt house on Long Island. Then came the next step. When the Commodore died in 1877, both his sons spent some of their huge inheritance – his will had disclosed that he was the richest man in America, with a fortune of $100 million – on equally huge and ostentatious houses on Fifth Avenue. William Henry’s was enormous but in the classic brownstone tradition, whereas the one built by Willie K – or rather, by Alva – was anything but discreet.

  For it, she formed what was virtually a partnership with the architect Richard Morris Hunt, who loved France and its architecture as much as she did. Sited at 660 Fifth Avenue, it was nothing less than a French château (it was based on the sixteenth-century Château de Blois), built in pale limestone, with spires, tall chimneys, deep windows, balconies, gargoyles, flying buttresses and an ornate, extravagant frontage.

  It had a central atrium rising to the roof of coloured glass with balconies on all four sides, and was packed with treasures: the walls and floor of the hall were marble, there were carvings, statues, oriental rugs, paintings and porcelain everywhere. There were Renaissance mantelpieces, Flemish tapestries, bronzes made for Marie Antoinette, stained glass and Rembrandt portraits. The newel post of the grand staircase – the statue of a female slave – was in bronze overlaid with gold, and even Alva’s boudoir, its walls hung with dark blue silk, was twenty-six feet long. It had a sixty-foot hall, a large stone staircase, library walls clad in sixteenth-century French Renaissance panelling, a Louis Quinze-style salon with a ceiling painted with mythological scenes, a two-storey banqueting hall with marble caryatids and a musicians’ gallery and a stained-glass window depicting the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Nothing like it had ever been seen in New York before.

  Alva also managed to persuade her father-in-law to acquire a knowledge of the arts and to invest in them and to display his family’s wealth in houses that reflected this. Soon two other Vanderbilts were building grand houses on Fifth Avenue (by the 1880s the area of Fifth Avenue north of 50th Street was known as ‘Vanderbilt Alley’).

  But Alva was not only ambitious; she was a strategist, with a cool, analytical intelligence that could work out a coherent plan of campaign – a campaign to achieve not only acceptance but social dominance. In 1882 she and her husband were invited to a Patriarchs’ Ball, with another to come in early 1883. So far, so good – but for Alva, not good enough. There remained Mrs Astor.

  Her opportunity to overcome the resistance of this grande dame came in the spring of 1883. She and Willie K had planned to give a housewarming party for the opening of their new house, now finally completed, and Alva decided on a fancy-dress ball, something New York had not seen for a long time. She let it be known that the ball would be like no other in terms of display and extravagance, and sent out 1,600 invitations. The bait, and final note of reassurance to those who might have hesitated, was that the ball was in honour of her friend and bridesmaid Consuelo Yznaga, who had married Lord Mandeville, the Duke of Manchester’s heir. And as Alva knew, even the most diehard Astor adherents were unlikely to refuse to meet a future duchess.

  Even the date was cleverly picked: this sumptuous affair would take place on 26 March, the first Monday after Easter, so that it would be the first real entertainment after the low weeks of Lent for a city craving amusement and already agog to see the interior of No. 660. In addition, Monday held a particular significance in that it was traditionally the day Mrs Astor was ‘At Home’. Not, as Alva pointed out to her friends, that this mattered, as Alva did not know Mrs Astor: after all, Mrs Astor had never called on Alva, so Alva could not possibly call on Mrs Astor – protocol demanded that the senior or longer-established family made the first call. Alva, the newcomer, was therefore correct in not inviting New York’s queen to the ball – except that Mrs Astor was, and always expected to be, invited everywhere, though whether or not she accepted was another matter entirely.

  One story has it that, as Alva knew, Mrs Astor’s adored debutante daughter Carrie, with a group of her friends, had been religiously practising their ‘Star Quadrille’2 in order to shine at Alva’s ball. Suddenly, Mrs Astor realised that no invitation had come; she let this be known among her circle. In response, Alva allowed it to filter out that as Carrie’s mother had never officially recognised the existence of Mrs William K. Vanderbilt, Mrs William K. Vanderbilt could not invite Carrie to her ball.

  Shortly afterwards, a footman in the blue Astor livery delivered a card to 660 Fifth Avenue after which, even more expeditiously, an invitation was sent up the Avenue to No. 840, the Astor home. The coup had succeeded; with the receiving of that one small piece of pasteboard, Alva was officially on the Astor calling list. She had arrived.

  Such crowds gathered outside the Vanderbilt mansion long before
the hour the ball was to begin that they held up the carriages of the guests. For the ball, the huge ground-floor rooms were full of gilded baskets of roses, 6,000 of them, each of which had cost $2 – twice as much, as Alva informed everyone, as Mrs Astor paid for hers. Up the grand staircase walked the guests, into a vast room decorated with palms, giant ferns and orchids, where Alva and Consuelo received them side by side, Alva a Venetian princess of the Renaissance in a Worth gown with a gold embroidered bodice and a blue and gold embroidered train, Consuelo Mandeville in a black velvet dress copied from a Van Dyck painting of Princesse de Croy.

  There too was Mrs Astor, in blue velvet hung about with endless diamonds – tiara, earrings, strings of diamonds round her neck, brooches, stomacher, numerous bracelets round the wrists of her white gloves – escorted by Ward McAllister as Count de la Mole (the lover of Marguerite de Valois) in a suit of purple velvet slashed with scarlet silk.

  At midnight the 100 dancers, who had been practising their quadrilles for weeks, went down the stairs and through to the Louis XV salon with its Gobelin tapestries, carved walnut wainscoting and ceiling decorated with the union of Cupid and Psyche. The most spectacular of these dances was the ‘hobby horse’ quadrille, for which the dancers were costumed as if they were riding horses – each hobby horse had a real leather hide and flowing mane and tail. After the quadrilles came the dancing. This continued until six in the morning, when Alva led a Virginia Reel as a sign that the party had finished.

  The ball had cost over $250,000, but to the Vanderbilts it was worth every cent. Soon afterwards, Willie K was admitted to membership of New York’s most exclusive clubs: the Coaching Club, the Metropolitan, the Knickerbocker, Union, Racquet and Tennis, Turf and Field and the New York Yacht Club. That winter the Vanderbilts were invited to Mrs Astor’s traditional winter ball. It is hardly surprising that Alva had a photograph taken of herself in her ball costume.