Luncheons were formally served in the huge red marble dining room (the Salon of Hercules at Versailles), where the high-backed bronze chairs were so heavy that footmen had to move them in to the table. Anna Robinson, a fellow socialite, wrote of their housewarming party: ‘It was a superb affair and I was very glad I went. The house is gorgeous of course but too ornate it seems to me to live in everyday particularly the dining room which is only suitable for a banquet … the bedrooms are very pretty but simple & you could feel perfectly comfortable in them at once. While downstairs I should think one must be educated up to the surroundings.’ It was here that Alva held their daughter Consuelo’s coming-out ball on 28 August 1895 – and here that Consuelo was imprisoned until she bowed to her mother’s will.
* * *
After the Vanderbilts’ world cruise, Alva had taken Consuelo to London, where she made use of her friends for introductions, one of which resulted in a dinner party where Consuelo met the Duke of Marlborough for the first time. Neither made much impression on the other.
Meanwhile, Willie K, a keen racing man, rushed to London to see the Derby and then returned to Paris for the Grand Prix, on which he won 40,000 francs. Almost immediately afterwards he was introduced to a glamorous member of the demi-monde, Nellie Neustretter, an adventuress from Topeka, Kansas, known for her beauty and its effect on men. Instantly, Willie K gave her his winnings, following this by setting her up in a pied-à-terre in Paris with a dozen servants and giving her a superb carriage (grander than Alva’s), a Deauville villa and an allowance of $200,000 a year.
‘Willie is running round the town with this cocotte as publicly as possible, with the express design, as he loudly says, of humiliating his own wife, with whom he quarrelled latterly in a very bitter fashion,’ commented Town Topics gleefully, as stories trickled back of the pair’s visits to Les Ambassadeurs (the most expensive restaurant in Paris) and the Café de la Mort, done up in black, with coffin-shaped tables and waiters dressed as undertakers’ men.
This gave Alva her chance. Although gossip sheets had long alleged that Willie was unfaithful, she now had more concrete evidence. She filed for divorce, citing adultery in her suit, thus breaking the greatest social taboo of the Astor circle into which she had so painfully climbed. Even the word ‘divorce’ was taboo and ladies usually left the room if it was uttered.
Alva’s behaviour was the challenging of an unwritten rule: rich society men assumed that they could have anything they wanted, including women who weren’t their wives, in return for which the wives, the beneficiaries of the husbands’ great wealth, were supposed to accept this and look the other way. Alva’s lawyer did his best to talk her out of suing but the more he tried, the more she became convinced that the only reason for this was his fear that other fed-up society wives would follow her lead – and what would happen then to the world as everyone knew it?
It is possible that Willie’s fling with Nellie was planned because Willie, too, was determined to escape from the marriage – and also to hide his true interest. Among the women he was rumoured to have seen on the side was Consuelo Yznaga. Alva never discussed this, but that same year she dropped her old friend permanently from her life, a breach promptly broadcast by Town Topics.
After the summer in London, Alva and Consuelo returned to New York, where the divorce (in March 1895) had rendered Alva an outcast. The Vanderbilts cut their ties with her, a torrent of unsavoury press rained upon the family (one newspaper deemed the split ‘the biggest divorce case that America has ever known’ – it was splashed across eight columns in the World) and the judgement of those in her circle was swift and harsh. ‘When I walked into church on a Sunday soon after obtaining my divorce, not a single one of my old friends would recognise me,’ recorded Alva. ‘They walked by me with cold stares or insolent looks. They gathered in little groups to make it evident they were speaking of their disapprobation of my conduct.’
But she was still enormously wealthy. She owned the Marble House outright – she had refused Willie K’s offer of 660 Fifth Avenue and Idle House because of ‘unpleasant memories’ – and had received a sum of $10 million plus an income of around $100,000 a year and sole custody of their children. Not one to suffer in silence, she broadcast the tales of Willie’s infidelities to some effect and her social grip was such that she still received invitations to parties – but only the hostess would deign to talk to her.3 She claimed that other women, upon seeing her enter the room, would file out in silence, although ‘the men would talk to me even though they did not approve of my actions but they did not wish their womenfolk to notice me’. This ostracism was particularly hard on Consuelo, who could not now have a New York début and hardly went out at all.
By now Alva had discovered that Consuelo was in love with Winthrop Rutherfurd; earlier, when he was one of a group on a cycling expedition, he and Consuelo had managed to outpace their respective mothers – and Winthrop hurriedly proposed. Although they kept their engagement secret Alva realised from Consuelo’s sudden happiness what had happened and laid her plans accordingly. She took her daughter to Europe; Winthrop followed them to Paris, but when he called at their hotel he was refused admittance.
From then on, Consuelo was guarded. Alva intercepted and destroyed Winthrop’s letters to Consuelo and those from Consuelo to him, so that her daughter did not even know that her suitor was trying desperately to contact her – or even that he was in the same country.
For Alva’s decision that the Duke of Marlborough would be Consuelo’s future husband had never wavered. So determined was she to bring this off that while in Paris she took the opportunity of ordering Consuelo’s wedding dress, telling Worth to send it when the engagement was announced. This done, she took Consuelo to London. Here, with friends in common, she knew it was only a question of a short time before they met the Duke again.
From the Duke’s point of view, a rich marriage was essential. By the 1870s the Marlboroughs had found themselves in such financial trouble that they had had to sell pictures and most of the family jewellery at auction, raising £10,000. Then came the sale of the wonderful 18,000-volume Sunderland library, a Raphael, a Van Dyck and finally the jewel of the collection, Rubens’ Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment, and their Son Peter Paul.4 But the sums raised were still not enough to cover either the family’s debts or the maintenance of the ducal palace and by 1892 the Spencer-Churchills were almost broke.
Consuelo’s second encounter with the Duke took place at a ball, when he invited Consuelo and Alva to join a small house party at Blenheim. The day after their arrival he took Consuelo out on her own for a drive around some of the villages on his estate. Alva, who had dropped her strict chaperonage of her daughter for any meeting with the Duke, followed this up by inviting him to Newport for the ball she was going to give for Consuelo in August.
At the news of the ball, the society papers were agog. Who would come to it and who would stay away? What would happen when the different branches of the Vanderbilts met? Would the boycott of Alva still continue?
The Duke, as Alva had guessed, proved too much of a draw for anyone to resist, and her invitations were all eagerly accepted. Consuelo, seeing the inexorable approach of a fate she dreaded, was in despair. As Alva was determined that nothing would interfere with her plan – let alone the fact that her daughter was in love with someone else and did not wish to marry the man her mother had selected – Consuelo was kept a prisoner in the Marble House.
The porter was under orders not to let her out alone, her mother and her governess were always with her and when friends called they were told she was not at home. She was unable to write a letter because she had no means of buying a stamp or posting it and all the letters that arrived for her were taken straight to Alva, who destroyed them. Equally powerful as a prison wall was the psychological factor that she had been brought up from babyhood with the habit of total subordination to someone whose will was law.
It was not long before Newport society, aware of
Alva’s treatment of her daughter, echoed with the phrase: ‘A marble palace is the right place for a woman with a marble heart.’
Consuelo held out against the prospect before her as long as she could but, after five months without word from her lover, and unable to reach him, with her mother raging, screaming and shouting that either she would have a fatal heart attack or that she would ‘shoot Winthrop Rutherfurd’ and threatening that therefore she would be arrested, imprisoned and hanged, she cracked, and agreed to accept Marlborough when he proposed. She was barely eighteen, completely isolated, utterly miserable and brought up to be subservient to her mother in all things.5
When the Duke arrived in Newport as part of an American tour he was entertained by several of its notables, with others crowding to watch where possible. But the highlight was Alva’s ball, planned so that she would outdo any previous entertainment in both taste and lavishness.
She succeeded. The grounds were lit by thousands of tiny lights, a host of servants wore livery in the style of Louis XIV, there were nine French chefs, three orchestras and the tables were decorated with pink hollyhocks among which swarmed tiny hummingbirds. In the yellow marble hall, a bronze drinking fountain held pink lotus plants, above which hovered artificial butterflies.
Even the cotillion favours, previously chosen by Alva in Paris – Louis XIV fans, etchings, gold watch-cases – were so splendid that guests actually stole them from one another. Alva wore white satin with a court train and a dazzle of diamonds; beside her stood Consuelo in white satin and tulle. It was a triumph – except that there was no offer of marriage from the Duke.
The parties and dinners went on … and on … and on – and still nothing. Finally, the evening before he was due to leave, the Duke proposed. Alva, determined to waste no time in clinching the matter, announced the engagement the following day, even ordering her servants to spread the good news with the words ‘Go out and tell everyone you know.’
The magazine Town Topics, under no illusions, remarked on the ‘short but decisive campaign of General Alva’, while Consuelo’s twelve-year-old brother told her: ‘He is only marrying you for your money.’ Consuelo burst into tears, perhaps because it was true. After some hard bargaining, the eventual settlement to the Duke was $2.5 million in share stock on which 4 per cent gave him an annual income of $100,000.
The wedding was also choreographed by the dominating Alva who, on the grounds that Consuelo had ‘no taste’, did not let her daughter choose either her bridesmaids or her trousseau, and refused to ask any of her Vanderbilt relations.
For weeks beforehand there was constant press attention, with the daily doings of the couple retailed to a fascinated audience. The publicity-conscious Alva sent some of Consuelo’s trousseau underwear to Vogue, which to Consuelo’s squirming embarrassment ran a feature on her bridal corset with solid-gold clasps, her rose-embroidered corset covers, her pink, lace-trimmed drawers and her silk nightgowns. ‘It is not too much to say that the future of female underclothing will be momentously affected by the light which the public has lately received,’ wrote The Saunterer in a caustic paragraph about Alva’s pursuit of publicity.
The couple were married at the end of November 1895 in St Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, Consuelo spending the morning of her wedding in tears alone in her room, with a footman posted at the door – Alva was taking no chances. As soon as Alva had left the house for the church Willie K arrived to escort his daughter there. They were half an hour late, owing to efforts to try and conceal the signs of her red-eyed weeping. A huge and excited crowd waited outside, following the carriage to the church and then back to Alva’s house on 72nd Street, where the wedding breakfast took place, with Mrs Astor as guest of honour – Alva had not forgotten her priorities.
Other guests were sensitive to the faint aura of scandal that hung like a mist in the church, as one of them noted: ‘It was the most peculiar thing to see Mr & Mrs Vanderbilt quite near each other listening to the choir sing the hymn “O perfect love”.’
With her daughter’s marriage into the highest rank of the British aristocracy, Alva managed to overcome the disgrace of her divorce. Her place regained in society, she married Oliver Belmont the following year, a wedding attended neither by the Vanderbilt clan, who had stood by Willie K, nor the Belmonts – perhaps because they disapproved of Oliver’s treatment of his first wife and his behaviour in settling so much of his fortune on his second, a woman already hugely rich.
For not only did Alva’s alimony continue after her marriage but her new husband settled on her both his estate of Grey Crag and his enormous Newport ‘cottage’ Belcourt – also designed by her favourite architect, Richard Morris Hunt, this time based on the Louis XIII hunting lodge at Versailles. Virtually the whole of the ground floor was devoted to Belmont’s collection of carriages and his prized horses – he was known for his skill as a four-in-hand carriage-driver – its huge Gothic rooms with their stained-glass windows emblazoned with the Belmont coat of arms. True to form, Alva lost no time in making alterations, converting Oliver’s carriage room into a banqueting hall and transforming a study into her boudoir, complete with eighteenth-century French panelling.
That year, a society reporter wrote of Newport: ‘Never before have the lines between the smart set and the others been more closely drawn. A few women seem to lead the concourse like sheep and there is an almost riotous struggle of getting in and keeping other people out.’
CHAPTER 9
The ‘Marrying Wilsons’
One of the most spectacular entries into New York society was that of the Wilsons. They were exactly the sort of people that the Knickerbockers wanted to keep out, with their new money, no particular pretensions to family background, and the added drawback that Richard Wilson was the subject of unpleasant rumour. But as so often, success in husband-hunting allowed them to leapfrog their way into the heart of New York society, so much so that a favourite joke of the time was: ‘Why did the Diamond Match Company fail?’ ‘Because Mrs Richard T. Wilson beat them at making matches.’
The father of the ‘marrying Wilsons’ was Richard Thornton Wilson, born in Habersham County, Georgia, in about 1829. The son of a poor Scottish tanner and shoemaker, the twenty-year-old Richard left home after the death of his father with forty dollars in gold and a mule. He first found work as a clerk in a store, then became a travelling salesman. One evening, exhausted by life on the road, he fell asleep on the doorstep of a store belonging to a man called Ebenezer Johnston, the owner of a 700-acre estate and a number of slaves. Ebenezer took him on and was soon impressed by his ability and hard work, and in 1852 Richard married Ebenezer’s eldest daughter Melissa. Their children, May, Orme, Belle, Richard and Grace, were born respectively in 1855, 1860, 1864, 1866 and 1871.
Richard, at six foot six, was a handsome giant of a man with plenty of Southern charm who was said to be the model for Rhett Butler, the glamorous Southern black sheep of a hero in Gone with the Wind. Hard work, enterprise, an unswerving determination to succeed and perfect manners took him up the ladder until, during the Civil War, he was appointed Commissary General of the Confederate Army by Jefferson Davis, where his fortune was said to have begun by selling cotton blankets to the Confederate Army while charging them for wool.
At the time England’s sympathies lay with the South, thanks largely to the lucrative cotton trade they shared, so to England Richard moved in 1864, accompanied by his family, chiefly as an agent to dispose of the South’s cotton crop – though some said to sell Confederate supplies to foreign governments. When the Civil War ended he brought his family back to America, this time to the Union, along with a fortune of $500,000. Always with an eye to the main chance, he began buying up derelict railways in the devastated South to refurbish or sell later at a large profit, amassing another fortune in doing so.
The Wilsons settled in a brownstone house at 812 Fifth Avenue, between what is now 63rd and 64th Street – then very much the unfashionable part of Fifth A
venue, with much of the land north of 59th Street still a rocky, hilly area dotted with wooden farmhouses and squatter settlements. Later they moved into the much grander house of the disgraced Tammany Hall supremo, Boss Tweed,1 on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, a much smarter neighbourhood.
Here, despite all Melissa’s efforts, the family remained outside the charmed circle of society until the eldest Wilson daughter, May, struck gold, in the form of Ogden Goelet. Ogden, although a scion of one of the oldest New York families, lacked confidence: he was serious-minded, shortish, not very rich, and shy. When he was sent to recuperate from a long illness in a small New England town, Mrs Wilson seized her opportunity. Cannily, she rented a nearby house and got her daughters to read to him during his long hours of enforced idleness.
To this young man with little faith in his attraction to women, May’s warmth and generous open-heartedness must have had an irresistible appeal. Natural flirtatiousness – Southern belles were accustomed to have admirers competing with each other for their favours – only added to the allure, and May was clearly not afraid to step up this attitude until it would almost seem that she was making most of the running.
‘I never liked you so well, or wished more to be with you, than last night,’ she wrote, ‘and yet you left me – heedless of my entreaties, left me with a man too prone to say sweet nothings, which some think mean so much, or so little.
‘I am convinced you have no jealousy – I shall really be awfully disappointed if I do not see you tomorrow, and prefer of course seeing you in the evening. Forget the other girl and I will do the same with the other man.’
The Husband Hunters Page 15
