Fortune's Children

by Arthur T. Vanderbilt

  “Mr. and Mrs. William H. Vanderbilt!”

  Alva’s mother-in-law was dressed as a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. Ordinary evening dress was absolutely prohibited, Alva had made clear to everyone invited, but William H. Vanderbilt, the head of the House of Vanderbilt, Willie’s father, Alva’s father-in-law, the richest man in the world, surely could wear whatever he chose, and he chose to wear his usual formal black evening clothes, as did his companion. That was all right, too. Alva would make another exception to her rules for the evening, for his companion had been the great commander of the Union armies during the Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States, sixty-year-old Ulysses S. Grant. A man who had seen it all, Grant was nevertheless fascinated by this party. Always in financial straits, he had just joined his son’s new brokerage firm, Grant and Ward, to make some money. Tonight, the hardbitten old soldier had stepped into the world of his dreams.

  It was nice that the general could come, but Ulysses S. Grant wasn’t the name Alva had been listening for all evening.

  The procession of guests continued on and on: wizards, Jack and Jill, Prince Charming, Little Red Riding Hood, Russian peasants, an Indian chief, Henry IV of France, a toreador, a picador, a flower girl, Queen Elizabeth, a fairy queen, Music, Ice, every imaginable costume decorated with diamonds and rubies, precious stones, pearls, gold and silver thread, exotic feathers.

  “Mrs. Astor!” the butler called out after almost all the other guests had arrived and passed through the receiving line.

  Ah, here she is.

  And there she was, like Alva, dressed as a Venetian princess, in a gown of dark velvet, embroidered with gold roses and other designs in pearls, the inside of her long flowing sleeves embroidered with more jewels. And as she entered the lair of the woman who wanted her crown, she was armed to the teeth with chains of diamonds that circled her neck and fell over her bosom, diamonds that hung from her ears, diamonds that circled her wrists and fingers, her famous Marie Antoinette diamond stomacher at her breast, her black hair crowned with a diamond tiara set with diamond stars. Some said she was wearing every jewel she owned that evening. “Borne down by a terrible weight of precious stones,”104 as one reporter described her, Mrs. Astor bade good evening to Mrs. Vanderbilt.

  After being received by Mrs. Vanderbilt and Lady Mandeville, the guests were led into the Henry II dining hall at the back of the mansion, a mammoth room, fifty feet long and thirty-five feet wide, whose walls, wainscoted with quartered oak and carved Caen stone and covered with tapestries, rose two stories. At one end of this grand dining hall, which had been turned into a ballroom for the night, was a music gallery suspended eighteen feet above the floor. From behind the wall of roses and ferns that hid the musicians, the Vanderbilts’ two children, six-year-old Consuelo and five-year-old Willie, “crouching on hands and knees behind the balustrade of the musicians gallery, looked down on a festive scene below.’105 The silvery splendor of the calcium lights that illuminated the room shone on the great stained-glass windows depicting the meeting of Francis I and Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. One guest remarked that these windows “gave exactly the effect of another fancy dress ball going on in another room.’106 But that scene of ancient grandeur paled in comparison with the shifting gleams of colorful costumes moving that evening through the rooms of the Vanderbilt mansion.

  At exactly 11:30, the hobbyhorse quadrille began.

  From behind the canopy of roses that covered the music gallery blared the circus music of P. G. Gilmore’s military band—violins, violas, violoncellos, double basses, horns, trombones, and kettledrums—as lady riders, dressed in scarlet coats and white satin vests and breeches, with patent-leather boots and gold spurs and flared riding caps, rode around the dining hall astride their hobbyhorses. The hobbyhorses were actually their gentlemen partners, wearing the horse costumes delivered that evening, which had taken workmen two months to complete. Over their heads and attached around their waists were lifesize heads of horses, covered with horsehides, with large bright eyes and flowing manes and tails. The costumes, though large, were very light. The gentlemen’s feet and hands, as they bent over to be ridden, were concealed by richly embroidered hangings with horse legs represented on the outside of the blankets. The appearance of these lifelike hobbyhorses “was the cause of much amusement,” one guest remembered.107 Spurred on by the laughter of the crowds, the hobbyhorse quadrille became more and more lively with two riders tossed off their mounts. The ice was broken. The party had begun.

  Mrs. C. L. Perkins, Jr., wearing a high hat and carrying a large goose, then led the Mother Goose quadrille, which Ward McAllister had made a standard dance at all Patriarch costume balls. As one guest noted, “All the friends of our childhood”—Jack and Jill, Little Red Riding Hood, Bo-Peep, Goody Two Shoes, Little Miss Muffet, the Pieman, Ping Wing the Pieman’s Son, Squires, the Wizard, and My Pretty Maid—”were gotten up with conscientious exactitude.”108

  For the Dresden china quadrille, four couples had dressed all in white court costume of the period of Frederick the Great. The ladies wore gowns of ivory-white satin, their hair piled high on the backs of their heads, powdered and decked with white ostrich plumes. The gentlemen were in immaculate white waistcoats, knee breeches, hose, buckle-slippers, and powdered wigs, with white narcissus in their buttonholes. Each had the Dresden factory mark of crossed swords on the breast. “It was the whitest, purest thing possible amid all this saturnalia of colors,” commented one partygoer, “and was danced with reserve, like a quadrille at court, in the presence of royalty….”109

  Alva watched with special interest the star quadrille, which had made possible her conquest. Pairing up with their partners wearing Henry III costumes of dark velvet, powdered wigs, knee breeches, and buckled shoes, with swords at their sides, were Miss Astor and Miss Beckwith in white, Miss Hoffmann and Miss Marie in yellow, Miss Warren and Miss McAllister in blue, and Mrs. Bryce and Miss Carroll in mauve. Each carried a wand tipped with stars, and above the forehead of each, nestled in her hair, was a tiny electric light. Alva smiled slightly and nodded to Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister as Lander’s orchestra began to play “Disputation” and the girls and their partners began the dance. Ward McAllister, naturally enough, declared to one and all the star quadrille to be “the most brilliant” since it contained “the youth and beauty of the city,”110 including the daughter of his Mystic Rose and his own rather homely daughter.

  Relieved when the presentation of the formal quadrilles was finally over, the guests began dancing themselves, led off by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt in the “Go-as-you-please” quadrille.

  It was the other side of midnight, but the partygoers were not sleepy. Like some modern-day Merlin, Alva had cast her spell and her guests had fallen under it, swept on waves of chatter and laughter into a kaleidoscope of characters from history and literature, through a swirling mass of colors and costumes to another age, far beyond March 26, 1883, at 660 Fifth Avenue. To be dancing that night through the dining hall-ballroom, into the period rooms, up the grand staircase and around the tropical rain-forest gymnasium was to be possessed by Alva’s magic, to forget everything but that moment, which would never be forgotten.

  The guests danced the “Ticklish Water Polka” and returned to the gymnasium in the early hours of the morning for an eight-course dinner prepared by all of the Vanderbilt family’s chefs and the famed Delmonico’s pastry cooks, sipping the finest champagnes, wines, and then Madeiras.

  “Every smiling face,” one guest noted, testified to the “general hilarity and enjoyment of the evening.”111

  Ward McAllister, looking dashing in his costume of royal-purple velvet slashed with scarlet, and a rakish hat with a plume, reminded the Schermerhorns about an incident at their fancy dress ball some years before. “The men in tights and silk stockings, for the first time in their lives, became jealous of each other’s calves,” he chuckled, “and in one instance, a friend of mine, on gazing at the s
uperb development in this line of a guest, doubted nature’s having bestowed such generous gifts on him; so”—he paused dramatically, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye—”to satisfy himself, he pricked his neighbor’s calf with his sword, actually drawing blood!” McAllister had caught the attention of others around him. “But the possessor of the fine limbs never winced; later on he expressed forcibly his opinion of the assault. By not wincing, the impression that he had aided nature was confirmed.”112

  “The beauty of the women was perhaps not enhanced by their costumes,” one guest observed, “for American women are always beautiful. But the beauty of the men was very much improved by the glory of costume. It shows how much men lose in the ugly dress of the nineteenth century.”113

  If the men were handsome in their elaborate costumes, at least some were uncomfortable. Their clothes inspired a joke that made the rounds of the male guests. “I’m Appius Claudius,” one of the guests reported to another. “Oh, are you?” came the reply. “I’m uncomfortable as Richard the Lion-Hearted.”114

  At one point during the night, Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Astor were seen deep in what appeared to be a friendly conversation. How beautiful young Carrie looked in the star quadrille! What a charming house. Who was your architect? Some guests must have been reminded of Ward McAllister’s precept that “the highest cultivation in social manners enables a person to conceal from the world his real feelings. He can go through any annoyance as if it were a pleasure; go to a rival’s house as if to a dear friend’s; ‘Smile and smile, yet murder while he smiles.’”115

  Whatever Mrs. Astor’s innermost thoughts, the guests had no doubt that they were at the greatest social event of their lives. The investment banker Henry Clews, who came to the ball dressed as Louis XV in chocolate and gray satin, believed that the party had “no equal in history. It may not have been quite so expensive as the feast of Alexander the Great at Babylon, some of the entertainments of Cleopatra to Augustus and Mark Antony, or a few of the magnificent banquets of Louis XIV, but when viewed from every essential standpoint, and taking into account our advanced civilization, I have no hesitation in saying that the Vanderbilt ball was superior to any of those grand historic displays of festivity and amusement.’116

  A few of the older guests left after two o’clock that morning, but by six o’clock the party was still going strong. As Tuesday’s sky paled above the city, Alva led a Virginia reel, her sign that the fancy dress ball had officially ended. The ball had lasted “long after sunrise, to the surprise and keen interest of passers-by who stopped in amazement on their way to work to watch my departing friends.”117

  One French courtier dressed in ruffles and powdered wig, who decided to walk home to clear his head, was hooted and chased up Madison Avenue by a group of boys on their way to school.

  When Alva awoke some hours later, her maid brought into her bedroom overlooking Fifth Avenue all of Tuesday’s newspapers. Propped in bed, she savored them, one by one.

  The lead article on the front page of the New York Times set the tone: ALL SOCIETY IN COSTUME, the headline read. “Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt’s Great Fancy Dress Ball.” And in column after column, the article described in lavish detail the interior of the mansion, the decorations, the costumes of society’s leaders, and of course “Mrs. Vanderbilt’s irreproachable taste”—Alva paused to read this phrase over several times—”Mrs. Vanderbilt’s irreproachable taste was seen to perfection in her costume…,”118

  MRS. VANDERBILT’S BALL: AN EVENT NEVER EQUALLED IN THE SOCIAL ANNALS OF THE METROPOLIS, blared the headline of the New York World. “The fancy ball given last night by Mr. and Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, in the new and noble house built by Mr. Richard M. Hunt, was unquestionably the most brilliant and picturesque entertainment ever given in New York.”119

  The New York Sun was in complete agreement. “Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt’s fancy ball, which has caused such a stir and din of preparation in fashionable circles for a month and more, was gorgeously accomplished last night…. In lavishness of expenditure and brilliancy of dress, it far outdid any ball ever before given in this city.’120

  LIKE AN ORIENTAL DREAM, proclaimed the headline of the New York Herald. “Ghosts of every century, fairies, goblins and gnomes, re-embodiments of historical personages of all climes and times stole out from the pages of their annals last night for a revel in the nineteenth century at the bidding of Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, [and] made up a scene probably never rivaled in Republican America and never outdone by the gayest court of Europe.’121

  See, the party certainly had been worth the $250,000 it cost,122 Alva told Willie, as squads of servants marched from room to room, throwing away $11,000 worth of fading roses, pulling the tangled vines down from the ceiling of the gymnasium, washing and drying and putting away the thousands of crystal glasses and gold plates and solid silver knives and forks and spoons, sweeping up the bits of gray fluff and tinsel that Mrs. Lorillard, the Phoenix, had scattered about the house.

  Alva breathed a rare sigh of exhaustion: “I know of no profession, art or trade, that women are working at today,” she declared, “as taxing on mental resources as being a leader of society.’123

  4

  CONSUELO

  1875-1883

  1.

  Alva’s fancy dress ball changed everything.

  Five weeks later, William H. Vanderbilt, either believing that his children were going to need a lot more money to maintain their new position in society, or wondering why at the age of sixty-two he was still working so hard when his children were living the good life, resigned as head of all his railroads and appointed his thirty-four-year-old son Willie, Alva’s husband, chairman of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad, and president of the Nickel Plate road. He also named his oldest son, forty-year-old Cornelius, chairman of the New York Central Railroad and Michigan Central Railroad. “I am out of active business now.’ He smiled as he talked with reporters. “My interests are in the hands of trusty managers, so I give myself no concern about them. I think that I have done my share of work, and so now I am taking a vacation, and really I do not try to keep posted on what is going on.’1 After a lifetime of indoctrination by his penny-pinching father, the Commodore, William was learning from his children that it was even more fun spending money than it was saving it.

  Before the ball, the Vanderbilt family “was unheard of in New York society, except occasionally when it was abused for watering stock or damning the public.’2 The old families looked at the Vanderbilts with disapproval. “The Huntingtons do not go to the Vanderbilts’,” one debutante remembered her mother telling her. And Herman Rogers, the son of a Knickerbocker family, recalled as a boy that his parents had told him he could play with the Roosevelts, but to be wary of the Vanderbilts. “You may be nice to them,” his mother told him, “but don’t get involved.”3

  But after the ball, no social function in New York was complete without Alva and Willie, or at least some member of the Vanderbilt family. One contemporary now commented that the Vanderbilts “exhibit a high degree of refinement, showing how fast human evolution under favorable circumstances progresses in this country…. In this country, three generations in this instance have produced some of the best examples of nature’s nobility.”4 The Vanderbilts had unquestionably secured a permanent place for themselves among the Four Hundred. Alva and Willie were, of course, invited to Mrs. Astor’s next ball. In no time, Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt became the best of friends. And a newspaper cartoonist even created a socialite named Mrs. Astorbilt, who embodied the characteristics of Mrs. Astor and Alva Vanderbilt.

  After such a spectacular social triumph, Alva became even more firmly convinced that she could accomplish just about anything to which she set her mind. She was more assertive, more obstinate, more domineering than ever, making it obvious who ruled the château at 660 Fifth Avenue.

  Alva and Willie Vanderbilt’s three children—Consuelo, born in 1877; Willie K., as everyone called him, born in 1
878; and Harold, born a year after the ball in 1884—grew up in a very special world. They were the first generation of the Vanderbilt family to experience unlimited wealth from the day they were born.

  The heirs knew no other home than the palace on Fifth Avenue, a home whose size terrified them after dusk. In it, a child could easily get lost, bumping into a terrifying carved stone gargoyle along an echoing corridor that never seemed to end. The vast spaces of the mansion hid “spirits lurking to destroy me,” young Consuelo later remembered, “hands stretched out to touch me and sighs that breathed against my cheek.’5 But in the daytime, the house was a veritable playground, with its massive gymnasium on the third floor “where we used to bicycle and roller skate with our cousins and friends” and where each December “a Christmas tree…towered to the roof and was laden with gifts and toys for us and for every one of our cousins.’6

  There were “joyous sleigh drives” in the city after heavy snowfalls, Consuelo recalled, “the horses with their bells, the fat coachmen wrapped in furs, and Willie and myself in the back seat with our small sleigh on which we were allowed to toboggan down slopes in the Park.”7 And matinees at the Metropolitan Opera House. And Sundays after church when the children could spend “delirious hours marching armies of tin soldiers across the carpet that represented land, or sailing them over the seas of parqueted floors to fight furious battles for the possession of the forts we built out of blocks.”8

  The three children loved to spy on their parents’ parties, those “gala evenings when the house was ablaze with lights” when, from behind potted plants, they could peep “down on a festive scene below—the long dinner table covered with a damask cloth, a gold service and red roses, the lovely crystal and china, the grownups in their fine clothes.”9