Dutiful Cornelius Vanderbilt rushed to Paris to try to negotiate a cease-fire between his brother and sister-in-law, of course to no avail. Alva had sworn that she would never speak to that man again, and she never did. After nineteen years of married life, wonderful Willie was, she had now decided, nothing but a “weak nonentity.”98
At the height of this Victorian age, an age when “ladies rose and left the room when divorce was mentioned and ‘adultery’ was an embarrassing word in the Ten Commandments,”99 Alva decided to do what was shocking and scandalous. She demanded a divorce.
“My divorce…created nothing short of a sensation in New York. Women were not supposed to divorce their husbands in those days, whatever their provocation, and social ostracism threatened anyone daring enough, or self respecting enough, to do it…. I was the first woman of any prominence to sue for a divorce for adultery, and Society was by turns stunned, horrified, and then savage in its opposition and criticism. For a woman of my social standing to apply for a divorce from one of the richest men in the United States on such grounds, or for any cause, was an unheard of and glaring defiance of custom. It was a shock to everyone.’100
Alva proudly told her friends, “I always do everything first. I blaze the trail for the rest to walk in. I was the first girl of my ‘set’ to marry a Vanderbilt. Then I was the first society woman to ask for a divorce, and within a year ever so many others had followed my example. They had been wanting divorce all the time, but they had not dared to do it until I showed them the way….”101 Alva couldn’t have cared less what anyone thought. “It’s all a pack of nonsense. The Smiths of Alabama cut me dead for marrying W. K. Vanderbilt because his grandfather peddled vegetables. Then they cut me dead all over again for divorcing him. I can’t be bothered with stupid prejudices.”102
“I still feel pain at the thought of the unkind messages I was made the bearer of,” Consuelo remembered half a century later, “when, in the months that preceded their parting, my mother no longer spoke to him. The purport of those messages I no longer remember—they were, I believe, concerned with the divorce she desired and with her wishes and decrees regarding custody of the children and arrangements for the future.”103
Willie returned to New York and went to live at the Metropolitan Club. Alva remained in Paris with Consuelo to await the results of the divorce proceedings.
Consuelo was relieved that her warring parents were parting: “The sinister gloom of their relationship would no longer encompass me.” But she did not realize “how irrevocably I would be cut off from a father I loved nor how completely my mother would dominate me from then on.”104
With little else to do but wait for her divorce to be decreed in New York, Alva turned her total attention to her seventeen-year-old daughter.
First, there were trips to the great dressmakers along the rue de la Paix. Inside the small modest doors bearing the names of Worth, Doucet, and Rouff were an “array of lovely dresses, expensive furs and diaphanous lingerie” that “fairly took one’s breath away. I longed to be allowed to choose my dresses, but my mother had her own view, which unfortunately did not coincide with mine.”105
Then, Alva arranged for Consuelo to make her debut at a party given in Paris by the duc de Gramont.
Consuelo was the first to admit that at seventeen she was “still in the ugly duckling stage…. My lack of beauty…made me painfully sensitive to criticism. I felt like a gawky graceless child.’106 As an acquaintance commented, “her frailty and height made her look as if she might break in two in an adverse breeze.’ Her cousin Gertrude Vanderbilt’s assessment of her was even more direct: Consuelo was, as she said, “nothing on looks.”108
It was therefore with a great deal of trepidation that Consuelo prepared for her coming-out ball in Paris. Though, Consuelo thought, the terror of not being asked to dance, the humiliation of being a wallflower, “ruined the pleasures of a ball for those who were ill favored,” she need not have worried for a moment, for a host of men found the wistful young heiress indescribably beautiful. “A galaxy of partners presented their respects to me and I was soon at ease and happy.’109 In June, Alva informed her daughter that five men had asked her for Consuelo’s hand, all of whom Alva had refused “since she considered none of them sufficiently exalted.”110 His Serene Highness Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg, a claimant to a Balkan throne who needed financial backing, seemed to fire Alva’s imagination for a moment—Queen Consuelo—before she remembered that there would be even better hunting over in England. To all these proposals, Alva returned the same answer: “that I was much flattered, but thought it better for an Anglo Saxon woman to marry in the Anglo Saxon race.”111
Alva and Consuelo spent that summer of 1894 in England. There Lady Paget, who as Minnie Stevens of New York had been one of Alva’s dearest friends, plotted with Alva to advance her plans for the perfect marriage of Consuelo and the duke of Marlborough. At a dinner party given by Lady Paget, Consuelo was seated next to the young duke. But all Consuelo received that summer were “two or three other proposals from uninteresting Englishmen which I found slightly disillusioning. They were so evidently dictated by a desire for my dowry, a reflection that was inclined to dispel whatever thoughts of romance might come my way.”112
Consuelo was relieved in the fall when she and her mother returned to their mansion at 660 Fifth Avenue, with Alva apparently over her obsession with the idea of a royal marriage for her daughter. Thank goodness. What Consuelo dreamed of doing was eventually going to Oxford to study languages and, right now, spending as much time as possible with Winthrop Rutherfurd, with whom she had fallen ‘Violently in love”113 on their travels through India.
Winty’s blood was as blue as it came. His father, Lewis Rutherfurd, a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, had been among Ward McAllister’s first choices to serve as one of the Patriarchs, those twenty-five “nobs” whose position in society was secure by birth. Winty had it all. He was part of the magic Four Hundred by divine right, he was wealthy, he was bright, he was a lawyer, he was a sportsman, and, as a little extra icing on the cake, he had “really breath-taking good looks.”114 So enchanted was Edith Wharton by this Adonis that she made him “the prototype of my first novels.”115
Consuelo could no more tell her mother of her love for Winty than Alva would confess to her daughter her feelings for O.H.P. Belmont, even though the decree of divorce had been granted. But Alva was Alva, and knew of her daughter’s feelings without being told.
During these winter months without her father, who had been banished from 660 Fifth Avenue, Consuelo turned more and more to Winty, whom she “loved passionately.”116 Alva was carefully monitoring this relationship. Consuelo had to render “a strict account of the few parties I was allowed to attend without her, and if I danced too often with a partner he immediately became the butt of her displeasure. She knew how to make people look ridiculous and did not spare her sarcasm about those to whom I was attracted, reserving special darts for an older man, who by his outstanding looks, his distinction and his charm had gained a marked ascendancy in my affections.”117
Winthrop Rutherfurd, Alva agreed, was a nice boy; certainly he had a proper background, and yes, he was gorgeous. And yes, he was a lot of fun to have around. But this was not the man for her daughter to marry. Consuelo was much too young to have any idea of what was best for her.
5.
On her eighteenth birthday, March 2, 1895, Consuelo opened a small box that had been delivered to her and “found a perfect rose alone on its green foliage. I instinctively knew who had sent it, though no name was attached.’118
Later that day, Consuelo and Winty went bicycling along Riverside Drive with Alva and a group of her friends. The young couple sped ahead, and when they had lost sight of the others, Winty proposed to Consuelo, “the only proposal of marriage I wished to accept.’119
‘Of course, it was a most hurried proposal for my mother and the others were not far behind; as they strained to r
each us he pressed me to agree to a secret engagement, for I was leaving for Europe the next day. He added that he would follow me, but that I must not tell my mother since she would most certainly withhold her consent to our engagement. On my return to America we might plan an elopement.’120
Like a steamship huffing and puffing into port, Alva finally caught up with the beaming young couple and instinctively knew what had happened. This nonsense had gone far enough. It was time for her to spring into action. The bicycling party was over. There was packing to be done. They would sail tomorrow and not return home for many months.
Winty did follow Consuelo to Paris, but Consuelo never knew it. Alva had instructed her servants that Mr. Rutherfurd be “refused admittance when he called.’121 His letters were to be confiscated and the letters Consuelo wrote to him were not to be mailed by the servants, but rather given directly to Alva.
Consuelo never confided in her mother that she was engaged to Winty Rutherford. Alva never let on that she knew.
Day after day, week after week, Consuelo thought of Winty, wondering when he would come, wondering why he hadn’t written, wondering if he still loved her, never suspecting that he had been in Paris and had been turned away by the Vanderbilt servants, told that Miss Vanderbilt was not interested in seeing him. “When one is young and unhappy the sun shines in vain, and one feels as if cheated of one’s birthright. I knew that my mother resented my evident misery, and her complaints about what she satirically termed my ‘martyrdom’ did not improve our relations.”122
Without feeling, Consuelo went through the motions of life in Paris, trying on the clothes her mother ordered for her, visiting museums, attending concerts and lectures and “a few of those deadly debutante balls which I no longer cared for,” dancing “with men who had no interest for me.”123
Soon “events began to move more rapidly, and I felt I was being steered into a vortex that was to engulf me.’124
During their visit to England, Alva arranged through her old New York City friend Lady Paget for a visit to the duke of Marlborough’s great ancestral home, Blenheim Palace.
Set in a royal park of three thousand acres in Oxfordshire, sixty-five miles outside of London, Blenheim Palace was never meant to be a home; it was a national monument to the first duke of Marlborough, given to him by a grateful queen after his victory over the French in 1704 near the Bavarian village of Blenheim in the War of the Spanish Succession. Work had begun in 1705 on a palace to rival Versailles. For two decades thereafter, fifteen hundred workmen labored over the baroque structure whose roof covered more than seven acres of grand rooms and endless halls. Indeed, Blenheim easily could have contained all of the Fifth Avenue mansions, the country homes, and the summer cottages of every member of the Vanderbilt family. Wrote a noble lady in 1721 after visiting the palace: “…some parts of Blenheim were so vast in ye designs that tho’ they were formed by a man, they ought to have been executed by ye Gods.’125
As Alva and Consuelo approached the park of Blenheim through a stone arch, “a porter in livery carrying a long wand surmounted by a silver knob from which hung a red cord and tassel stood at attention and the great house loomed in the distance.’126 To Alva, such pomp and ceremony was nothing short of heaven.
The Vanderbilts entered the great hall of the palace, where Consuelo “had to crane my neck to see the Great Duke dressed in a Roman toga driving a chariot” in a mural painted on the ceiling sixty-seven feet above her.127 Everywhere murals, paintings, tapestries, statues, and busts glorified the military conquests of the first duke of Marlborough. Each was pointed out and explained to the Vanderbilts as they were led on a tour by the young ninth duke, who lived alone in the 320-room palace looked after by 200 servants.
Even for someone like Consuelo, it was obvious how impractical a residence Blenheim was. The kitchen was hundreds of yards from the dining room, which made the serving of each meal a matter of careful strategic planning. The palace had only a few bathrooms and “they were usually installed in some inconvenient place at the end of a passage.”128 Consuelo found it strange “that in so great a house there should not be one really livable room” and judged all the rooms “devoid of the beauty and comforts my own home had provided. We slept in small rooms with high ceilings; we dined in dark rooms with high ceilings; we dressed in closets without ventilation; we sat in long galleries or painted saloons. Had they been finely proportioned or beautifully decorated I would not so greatly have minded sacrificing comfort to elegance.”129
Consuelo was not the first to conclude that Blenheim had been “planned to impress rather than to please.”130 Wrote Alexander Pope of England’s greatest palace:
See, Sir, see here ‘s the grand Approach,
This way is for his Grace’s Coach;
There lies the Bridge, and here’s the clock,
Observe the Lyon and the Cock,
The spacious Court, the Colonnade,
And mark how wide the Hall is made?
The Chimneys are so well design’d,
They never smoke in any Wind. This Gallery’s contriv’d for walking,
The Windows to retire and talk in;
The Council-Chamber for Debate,
And all the rest are Rooms of State.
Thanks, Sir, cry ‘d I, ‘tis very fine.
But where dye sleep, or where dye dine?131
“In a word,’ Pope concluded, “the whole is a most expensive absurdity and the Duke of Shrewsbury gave a true character of it when he said it was a great quarry of stones above ground.”132
Consuelo quickly perceived what was wrong at Blenheim: The young duke was destitute, unable to maintain so monumental a home. From the days of the first duke of Marlborough, Blenheim had been an impossible burden. The first duchess of Marlborough had sighed that Blenheim was “so vast a place that it tires one almost to death to look after it and keep it in order.’133 The sixth duke had begun to admit tourists for a shilling apiece to help defray the upkeep, and the seventh and eighth dukes had sold off the palace library, its collection of old masters, and the Chinese export porcelain to pay for essential maintenance. The Vanderbilts’ host’s father, the eighth duke, had divorced his wife and married Lilian Hammersley, the widow of a New York millionaire (whom the New York papers described as a “common looking and badly dressed woman with a moustache”), whose fortune he’d drained to install central heating and electric lights at Blenheim. Now, with Blenheim stripped of heirlooms, its great lawns turned to hay, the burden lay heavy on the shoulders of the ninth duke, who understood it to be his “first duty in life to preserve and embellish” this great home.134 “To live at Blenheim in the pomp and circumstance he considered essential,”135 Consuelo recognized, required vast sums of money. Now it was all too clear to her where she fit into the picture: Her dowry would rescue an impoverished duke; in return, he would give her the royal title of duchess, which her mother craved for her.
“I don’t know what Marlborough thought of me, except that I was quite different from the sophisticated girls who wished to become his Duchess. My remarks appeared to amuse him, but whether he considered them witty or naive I never knew….”136 What was clear, at least to Alva, was that the duke was more than willing to forgo any of the “sophisticated girls” who might have been of interest to him for this shy American heiress.
The next day, the duke showed the Vanderbilts around his estate. “We also drove to outlying villages where old women and children curtsied and men touched their caps as we passed…. I realized that I had come to an old world with ancient traditions and that the villagers were still proud of their Duke and of their allegiance to his family.”137 By the end of the weekend, Alva was enthralled by a grandeur that surpassed even her wildest fantasies. Consuelo, on the other hand, found everything about Blenheim and the duke bizarre, and wanted nothing to do with the impossible gloom of the dreary old palace. By the end of the two-day visit, she had “firmly decided that I would not marry Marlborough.” She would marry Wi
nthrop Rutherfurd. “It would, I knew, entail a struggle, but I meant to force the issue with my mother. I did not relish the thought, but my happiness was at stake.”138
On the voyage back to the United States that summer of 1895, Consuelo gathered the courage to tell her mother that she was not going to be forced into marrying the duke of Marlborough.
Don’t be silly, Alva told her daughter. That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. No one is forcing you to marry the duke. “Generously allowing [Consuelo] the choice of alternatives.’139 Alva told her daughter that she indeed did not have to marry the ninth duke of Marlborough; she could marry his cousin, the duke of Roxburgh, if she so chose. It was up to her. Unmindful of Ward McAllister’s dictum against foreign alliances—”the wealthy men of America should be ambitious to build up families composed entirely of native stock instead of importing from time to time, various broken-down titled individuals from abroad”140—Alva had set her heart on a noble marriage for her daughter.
Consuelo sat silently, thinking only of her return to Newport, “where I could get into touch with the man to whom I considered myself engaged.”141 Once she was with Winty again, she would tell her mother everything, of her love for Winthrop Rutherfurd, of their engagement, of their plans for marriage.
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