The ball, talked about for years afterwards, set a benchmark. The publicity-conscious Alva was the first hostess both to allow reporters to wander round the house early on the day of the ball and to enable a full report of it to be syndicated to newspapers around America through the New York World, so that citizens everywhere marvelled at its lavishness and what it cost.
But one ball did not a social leader make, and Alva’s plans were long-term. They included her children, notably her daughter Consuelo, now six. Consuelo’s education was rigorously supervised; by the time she was eight she could read and write in French, German and English. French was spoken at home and she had a German governess; during lessons she sat with a steel rod strapped to her back to ensure the necessary elegance of deportment. It was a time when children were supposed to be seen and not heard, but even then Alva was known as a ferocious disciplinarian, frequently punishing her children with a riding whip. Yet at Idle Hour, the Vanderbilt house on Long Island, there was plenty of fun, exercise and freedom.
When William Henry Vanderbilt, Alva’s father-in-law, died at an unexpectedly early age in 1885, it was found he had succeeded in doubling the family fortune to $200 million – and Willie K inherited $50 million of this. Now he and Alva were stratospherically rich and little Consuelo, aged nine, had become one of the world’s richest heiresses.
Willie K celebrated by ordering himself a yacht. The Alva, a 285-foot steam yacht, was launched in 1886. The walls of the cabins and staterooms were panelled in mahogany, the teak decks covered in oriental carpets, the dining room held a piano, there was a library with a fireplace and a crew of fifty-five. From then on the family would often cruise to Europe in the spring, taking with them friends, governesses, tutors and a French chef; other voyages took them to the West Indies, Turkey, North Africa and Egypt. Often these cruises ended at Nice, and the party would continue to Paris.
Alva, characteristically, celebrated the Vanderbilts’ sudden new wealth by building a house, this time in Newport, now the essential summer destination for New York’s smartest. This was the sumptuous Marble House, so called because this was the main building material. Much of it was shipped over from Italy – because of its weight, a special dock had to be built to unload it. The house was Alva’s from the start, given to her by Willie as a thirty-ninth birthday present, perhaps as a conscience-salver.
For by now Alva and Willie K were getting on badly. During the early years of their marriage youth, sex and their joint, overpowering ambition to enter and conquer the society that meant everything to them had made them a team. With their acceptance by Mrs Astor and their sudden, huge wealth this ‘glue’ no longer held them together. Later Willie K was to talk of Alva as a ‘virago’ – and she certainly had a violent temper and an over-riding conviction of her own rightness – while she found his continued infidelities difficult to turn a blind eye to in the way that other women of her circle did. For whatever happened, scandal must not emerge.
As many of these men, like Willie K, had yachts, ignoring what happened out of sight at sea was not too difficult – as Alva knew. As she wrote later: ‘Colonel Astor’s yachting parties were public scandals. He would take women of every class and kind, even chambermaids out of the hotels of the coastwise cities where the yacht put in, to amuse himself and the men of his party on these trips.’ Yet Mrs Astor, grande dame of New York society, did not see what she did not wish to see, and did not hear what she did not wish to hear. New York might be full of gossip about the wild, disreputable parties given by her husband on board his yacht, but if anyone dared to ask about him she would reply calmly that he was having a delightful cruise – ‘the sea air is so good for him’ – while regretting that she could not accompany him as she was such a bad sailor. Alva, however, was not one to sit down under either a real, or imagined, slight.
Later, after she became involved in the battle for female suffrage, she wrote bitterly of the double standard: ‘the husband, stepping over the confining threshold of his home whose respectability he left in the hands of his discarded wife, like a young colt in a meadow kicked up his heels and was off for a romp in the wide world … and met his obligations as a husband and father by signing generous checks’.
It was certainly true in Alva’s case. The start of their differences was believed to be in the winter of 1888 when Alva’s best friend Consuelo Yznaga, now Lady Mandeville, came with her husband for a long visit to Alva and Willie K in New York. Willie K’s penchant for Lady Mandeville, a beauty with pale-gold hair and melting dark eyes, became so obvious that Alva had row after row with him, so much so that her father-in-law had to step in. To avoid the chance of this happening again, and word leaking out, the senior Vanderbilt arranged with Consuelo Mandeville that she would never return to America – and she never did.
Willie K now spent more and more time on his yacht, it was said with various young women, while Alva threw herself into the furnishing of the Marble House and, increasingly, the grooming of her daughter. Consuelo had led an isolated life, being educated largely at home, under her mother’s eye and thumb, a subordination that increased as the years passed.
By 1890, when Consuelo was sixteen, Alva had banned all contact with the opposite sex. Not for Consuelo the innocent and well-chaperoned picnics with her friends and their brothers that Alva had enjoyed as a girl, in case her fancy was taken by one of the boys. Alva had decided that her daughter was to make the most brilliant marriage possible and that, irrespective of her child’s feelings she, Alva, would decide with whom that match would be. So Consuelo spent the day studying while everything, from the furniture and bibelots in her room – she was forbidden to put out anything of her own – to her clothes, was chosen by her mother. Even her ideas were censored. ‘I don’t ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you are told,’ Alva once snapped to her daughter.
But Consuelo still had eyes and ears and she realised what was going on between Alva and Willie. ‘I had reached an age when the continual disagreements between my parents had become a matter of deep concern to me,’ she wrote of that time. They still cruised together – perhaps in an effort to keep the marriage going – but in 1892 the Alva was sunk, run down by a steamer off Nantucket Shoals during a heavy fog (fortunately with no loss of life).
Willie K’s immediate reaction was to order another, even more splendid yacht, the Valiant. It was built in England, by Lair Brothers, and the following year, 1893, Willie sailed her across the Atlantic to Newport, to pick up his family and friends for a round-the-world cruise. Consuelo believed it was a desperate last effort to ‘avoid the rupture which I felt could not be long delayed’. Their guests included several bachelors, ostensibly to amuse the seventeen-year-old Consuelo, on the verge of making her début.
One was Winthrop Rutherfurd, a rich and handsome twenty-nine-year-old considered one of the most eligible single men in New York. Another was Oliver Belmont, an open admirer of Alva’s. Often, she had sat beside him on the box of his coach, with its four famous bay horses (Sandringham, Rockingham, Hurlingham and Buckingham) at New York’s annual and very public Coaching Parade.
He was the son of the financier August Belmont, a man whose Jewish ancestry was redeemed in the eyes of smart New York by his marriage to a society woman of unimpeachable background. Oliver, a smallish man with a high colour, was passionate about horses, coaches and their turnout. His coachmen wore maroon coats with scarlet piping and silver buttons, and black satin knee breeches with silver-buckled shoes, and all his carriages were painted maroon with a scarlet stripe on the wheels. When he himself drove one of his coaches he was decked out in a green coat with brass buttons, scarlet waistcoat and pearl-coloured bell-crown hat3 with lilies of the valley in his buttonhole.
Oliver had also married a socialite, but when, on their honeymoon in Paris, her mother and two sisters had moved in and refused to leave, he had walked out angrily – and with another woman. The divorce that followed and subsequent birth to his wife of a daughter whom he ref
used to acknowledge did nothing for his reputation. His parents were mortified, but women tended to find him attractive, liking ‘his face rutted with lines – from the hopes and disillusions of his life as a lover, I suspected,’ wrote Blanche Oelrichs, ‘for certainly he was a romantic man’. With no job, he spent his life amusing himself and was a racing friend of Willie K’s.
The Valiant set off in late November, with a total of eighty-five people on board, arriving in Bombay on Christmas Day; then, with the Valiant sailing round to meet them, the party had a ten-day train journey to Calcutta. Here, unexpectedly, Alva and Willie were invited to stay at Government House (Calcutta was then the capital of British India) by the Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne.
For Alva it was a transformative experience, setting her a social goal with which nothing and nobody would be allowed to interfere. Her weapon would be her unwitting daughter.
During Lord Lansdowne’s viceroyalty the British Raj was at the height of its splendour and the Viceroy and Vicereine lived in far greater magnificence than the Queen they represented: they were attended by a host of servants in red and gold liveries, the viceregal band played at dinner, top-booted bodyguards with scarlet coats and huge black, blue and gold turbans lined the stairs for parties. Regal pomp and ceremony were everywhere. At evening parties they sat on a ‘throne’ – a sofa on a dais with their feet on a tiger skin – and on official occasions were bowed and curtsied to.
Even to Alva, accustomed to the external trappings of wealth, this was an eye-opener. When the Vicereine told Alva that she had a nephew – the young Duke of Marlborough – the right age for marriage, Alva’s plans crystallised, though for the moment she kept them to herself. Consuelo, she determined, would marry either the Duke or his cousin, Lord Lansdowne’s heir. That neither she nor Consuelo had met either of them was, to Alva, irrelevant.
* * *
After the Vanderbilts had stayed with the Viceroy in Government House, the Valiant’s cruise had continued to Ceylon and then back to the Mediterranean via Alexandria. During this, the final fracture in the Vanderbilt marriage occurred and when the yacht reached Nice, Consuelo was told that her parents’ marriage was over. Alva took Consuelo to Paris, as she had often done before, installing the two of them in twelve large first-floor rooms in the Hotel Continentale and, in characteristic Alva fashion, having the furniture ripped out so that she could furnish it herself to her own liking. Willie K, mutteringly, paid the bills.
In Paris the unsuspecting Consuelo enjoyed driving with her mother in the Bois de Boulogne, walking under the chestnuts in the Champs-Elysées and going to museums, churches, lectures at the Sorbonne and classical matinées at the Théâtre Français. Here Alva furthered her plan for her daughter’s marriage by commissioning a portrait of Consuelo, specifically requesting that the background be not the painter’s usual red velvet but a classical eighteenth-century landscape à la Gainsborough, as seen in many English family portraits, so that it would fit seamlessly into a stately home – although Consuelo, naturally, did not realise this.
Here, also, Consuelo made her début, at a bal blanc (a debutantes’ ball at which everyone wore white), attracting several admirers; by the end of June, five of them had – unsuccessfully – asked Alva for her hand. But Alva had already made up her mind: Consuelo would marry the Duke of Marlborough.
What Alva did not know was that on the Valiant cruise Consuelo and Winthrop Rutherfurd had fallen in love.
CHAPTER 8
Newport
It was in Newport that the seventeen-year-old Consuelo Vanderbilt was kept a prisoner by her mother Alva in her enormous ‘cottage’, the Marble House, until she agreed to marry the man of her mother’s choice. This captivity was probably the most extreme example of maternal husband-hunting, in a setting that represented the extreme of social exclusivity.
For by the 1880s this small town on the north-east of Rhode Island had become the testing ground for those who wanted to get into society. If you couldn’t make it in Newport, you wouldn’t make it in New York.
There was still a pretence of bucolic, country living, rather in the fashion of Marie Antoinette playing at being a milkmaid. But the ‘cottages’ of the rich, jostling each other along Bellevue Avenue, had ballrooms and stables, Paris chefs cooked the dinners in the great marble dining rooms, and the daily round was as formal as anything at a European court. It was a long way from the rum-distilling for which the town had originally been known.
Then, Newport had been the centre of the infamous ‘triangle trade’: rum shipped to Africa in exchange for slaves, slaves despatched to the West Indies to cull the sugar canes, and the sugar then sent to Newport to make the rum. Through this, by the beginning of the eighteenth century it was a fashionable resort for wealthy Southern and West Indian planters, so much so that it had become almost a Southern colony. Also making them feel welcome was the produce of its twenty-two distilleries, its famous rum. As tensions grew between the North and the South, Southerners felt more at home here than in the richer, more Yankee resort of Saratoga Springs.
Throughout the 1870s Saratoga, noted for its spa, had been the place to go. Its season began on 1 July, when everyone (who could afford it) went for a cure, and it was, according to Cornelius Vanderbilt Jnr, ‘where Broadway and Fifth Avenue met’. Sporting men enjoyed it because there was trotting and flat racing, in July and August respectively. It was masculine in tone. ‘Nowhere do women seem so much like appendages,’ said the author Mary Gay Humphreys, describing the place.
The truly smart stayed in the old United States Hotel, with its black walnut staircases, red-carpeted floors and long verandahs on which guests would sit lazily in wicker rocking chairs. In the round wooden bath houses with their five-foot-deep pools, the clear, warm water bubbled like champagne; male visitors, who bathed in the nude, could have tall frosted mint juleps floated out to them on cork trays. Every morning people would check the hotel register to see who had arrived.
It was also where illicit liaisons were condoned – millionaires with beautiful ‘secretaries’ or ‘distant cousins’ settled in one of the colony of hotel cottages. Many of the demi-monde, flashing with diamonds and bright with paint, descended on Saratoga, justifying its racy reputation. Gradually the old smart set found themselves being swamped by the moneyed louche.
* * *
The catalyst for the change in Newport from an unpretentious seaside resort of white clapboard houses, their lawns bordered by blue hydrangeas, to a social centre dominated by huge cliff-top palaces was, as in New York, Ward McAllister. He was one of Newport’s earliest aficionados, having summered there as a child with his family like other Southerners. After the steamy heat of Savannah, Georgia (where the McAllisters lived), Newport’s fresh sea breezes, meadows full of clover and daisies and gardens where roses, clematis and carnations grew profusely were a delicious change. In the late 1850s he bought Bayside Farm on the island, where he intended to live for nine months of the year, wintering in the West Indies.
Here he would entertain New York friends during the summer months to simple dinners and picnics (partly owing to her health, his wife seldom made appearances at any of his entertainments). It was simplicity with a twist: the farm had a cellar for claret and an attic for madeira,1 some of the latter seventy or eighty years old and well preserved thanks to the cold Rhode Island winters. As he sipped it, McAllister would tell the company how many times the bottles had crossed the Atlantic before the wine had been mellowed to perfection.
From the start McAllister saw Newport as a place where the feminine element was strongest: here business, politics and religion were banned as topics of polite conversation. Soon he was organising dinners and picnics for friends and, sometimes, others. As he put it in his autobiography: ‘Riding on the Avenue on a lovely summer’s day, I would be stopped by a beautiful woman, in gorgeous array, looking so fascinating that if she were to ask you to attempt the impossible, you would at least make the effort.’ Fortunately, what she invariably wa
nted was not the impossible but one of his famous picnics. ‘I will do your bidding,’ he would reply, and a date would be fixed and he would jot down: ‘Monday 1 p.m., meet at Narragansett Avenue, bring filet de boeuf piqué.’
After that it was a question of waylaying every carriage known to contain friends – all the smart world went driving in the late morning – and assigning to those who could come the bringing of a certain dish plus a bottle of champagne. For single young men, it was a bottle of champagne and a bunch of grapes or a quart of ice cream. McAllister would then hire servants and musicians for the day, get a carpenter to make and lay a dancing platform, order flowers, arrange for people on the outlying roads to point the way to his farm and generally organise everything down to, as he said, the last salt spoon. Once he even hired a flock of Southdown sheep and some cattle for half a day to add verisimilitude to his ‘farming life’.
Such ‘picnics’ might have been called ‘rural’, but they had all the ersatz simplicity of the Petit Trianon. For, as McAllister pointed out: ‘These little parties were then, and are now, the stepping stones to our best New York society. Now, do not for a moment imagine that all were indiscriminately asked to these little fêtes. On the contrary, if you were not of the inner circle, and were a newcomer, it took the combined efforts of all your friends’ backing and pushing to procure an invitation for you.
‘For years, whole families sat on the stool of probation, awaiting trial and acceptance, and many were then rejected, but once received, you were put on intimate footing with all. To acquire such intimacy in a great city like New York would have taken you a lifetime.’
With the opening of Newport’s summer season of 1871, the year when the new structure of American society was being launched, came nine ‘Cliff Cottages’– an experiment in luxurious rental properties – with an exclusive hotel nearby. ‘The grounds are tastefully laid out, each family having separate grounds and flower-beds, and which are kept in order by the association,’ commented the New York Times. ‘Stables are provided also, with servants’ apartments at the hotel. Surely it is a novel idea.’
The Husband Hunters Page 13
