But that summer, magnificent Marble House was to Consuelo a jail. It was, she thought, just “like a prison,”142 with the high walls surrounding the property, and its gates lined with sheet iron. “My life became that of a prisoner, with my mother and my governess as wardens. I was never out of their sight. Friends called but were told I was not at home. Locked behind those high walls—the porter had orders not to let me out unaccompanied—I had no chance of getting any word to my fiancé.”143 This was just how Alva wanted it. “Nature will have her way among any group of young people thrown together,” Alva was convinced. “I was careful that my daughter should not meet men for whom she might have a youthful and passing fancy.”144
Consuelo fell into a mood of despair and hopelessness. Joy had disappeared from her life forever, she thought; such were her feelings of despondency one night when Alva chaperoned her to a Newport ball.
There he was! There was Winty! All six feet two inches of him. Consuelo was breathing again, she was living again; the love she felt for Winthrop Rutherfurd filled her again as if they had never been apart. “We had one short dance before my mother dragged me away, but it was enough to reassure me that his feelings toward me had not changed.’145
It was to be quite a night, a night Consuelo would never forget. As they were driven home, Consuelo said not a word, but her mother knew that she was flying, soaring with happiness, in love.
The carriage reached Marble House. The footman swung open the ten-ton steel and gilt-bronze entrance grille to admit the two Vanderbilt women. Alva told her daughter to meet her in her bedroom at once.
Consuelo climbed the marble stairs to the second floor, emboldened by her love for Winty. She would tell her mother everything, no matter what. It was time to bring it all to a head. It was now or never. She was eighteen. She had no intention of marrying a man she cared nothing about. She was engaged to Winty and would marry him.
Consuelo entered her mother’s cavernous rococo bedroom with its high ceiling and heavy tasseled curtains, rich Aubusson rug, damask walls, and cherub sconces holding shields bearing the letter A. Alva was waiting.
For the first time, Consuelo announced that she was engaged to Winthrop Rutherfurd and planned to marry him, and that “I considered I had a right to choose my own husband.’ These words, “the bravest I had ever uttered,” released from her mother “a frightful storm of protest.’146
At first Alva tried reason. Consuelo could not marry the Rutherfurd boy. “The marriage of youth is based almost entirely on physical attraction,” Alva explained to her daughter.147 Such marriages do not last. Marlborough is “the husband I have chosen”148 for you, Consuelo. My decision to select a husband for you is founded on considerations you are “too young and inexperienced to appreciate.”149 Consuelo, your interest in that Rutherfurd boy is “merely the whim of a young inexperienced girl.”150 Consuelo! Wake up! Look at my dearest friend, your godmother, Consuelo Yznaga, duchess of Manchester. You will be a duchess—can’t you see what that means? Consuelo Vanderbilt: duchess of Marlborough, princess of the Holy Roman Empire!
Seeing she was having no effect on her daughter, Alva broke into a “frightening rage.”151 Consuelo “suffered every searing reproach, heard every possible invective hurled at the man I loved.”152 Alva informed her daughter of Winty’s “numerous flirtations, of his well-known love for a married woman, of his desire to marry an heiress. My mother even declared that he would have no children and that there was madness in his family.’153 Consuelo! Are you out of your mind! He’s impotent! He’s mad!
Frightened by her mother’s vehemence, Consuelo struggled to maintain her composure, sitting in stony silence as her mother stormed on.
No one, no one had ever stood up to Alva before. She was furious. ‘There was a terrible scene in which she told me that if I succeeded in escaping she would shoot my sweetheart and she would, therefore, be imprisoned and hanged and I would be responsible.”154 No, “she would not hesitate to shoot a man whom she considered would ruin my life,”155 that’s how strongly she felt about this. She was ready to hang for her crime.
The ninth duke of Marlborough was coming to America, Alva firmly informed her daughter. He would stay with them at Marble House as their guest. “She had already negotiated my marriage with him.”156 And that was that.
As Alva said, “I have always had absolute power over my daughter, my children having been entrusted to me entirely after my divorce…. When I issued an order, nobody discussed it. I therefore did not beg but ordered her to marry the duke.”157 It was as simple as that.
Numb, Consuelo walked down the hall to her bedroom “in the cold dawn of morning feeling as if all my youth had been drained away.”158
The next morning, Marble House was ominously quiet. “I heard that my mother was ill and in her bed, that a doctor had been sent for.”159
Later in the day, Mrs. Lucy Jay, one of Alva’s sisters who was staying at Marble House, came to talk to Consuelo. “Condemning my behavior, she informed me that my mother had had a heart attack brought about by my callous indifference to her feelings.” She said that Alva would never, never consent to Consuelo’s plans to marry Mr. Rutherfurd, and that she was resolved to shoot him if they planned to elope.
Consuelo asked her aunt if she felt there was any hope that her mother would come around to see her position.
“Your mother will never relent,” Mrs. Jay sternly told her, “and I warn you there will be a catastrophe if you persist. The doctor has said that another scene may easily bring on a heart attack and he will not be responsible for the result. You can ask the doctor yourself if you do not believe me!”160 If Consuelo insisted on opposing her mother’s will, it would kill her. Alva would die unless the wedding was arranged.
Alone, confused, bewildered, Consuelo had no one to turn to. Her father was far away in New York. Winty was kept outside the gates of Marble House, his letters intercepted. There was no way he could reach the woman he loved. Still imprisoned in Marble House, Consuelo had no way of talking to him. ‘The servants had orders to bring my letters to my mother.’161 Her mother had been forever the center of her universe, someone who had always exercised total control of her life, someone who had always thought for her, always made decisions for her. Now she was kept away from her mother. She began to worry. Maybe it was wrong to question her mother’s judgment; maybe she did know what was best. Maybe she should follow her wishes without question. Consuelo certainly did not want to confront her again and have her fly into another tirade. She did not want her mother to suffer another heart attack, an attack that now would be fatal.
What should she do? What could she do? Alone in her “austere” bedroom, “paneled in a dark Renaissance boiserie, “with its six windows through which at best “one could only glimpse the sky through their high and narrow casements,” Consuelo pined the summer away. Even there, in her own bedroom, she was reminded of the control her mother had over her life. To the right of her bed “on an antique table were aligned a mirror and various silver brushes and combs. On another table writing utensils were disposed in such perfect order that I never ventured to use them. For my mother had chosen every piece of furniture and had placed every ornament according to her taste, and had forbidden the intrusion of my personal possessions.”162 Alva had done everything for Consuelo. “I don’t ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you are told.”163 And now, she was telling her daughter to forget the man she loved; she was tearing Consuelo “from the influence of my sweetheart”;164 she was forcing her daughter to marry a man she did not love, a man she hardly knew, the ninth duke of Marlborough, to leave Marble House and Fifth Avenue and live far away from her family in a crumbling old castle in England. “How sad were those summer days of disgrace and unhappiness, my mother turned away from me, my father out of reach, my brothers engrossed in their personal pleasures…. My friends who had wearied of being rebuffed no longer called, and with an ingrained reticence I kept my worries to myself.’165
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br /> Consuelo worried all summer, but within a day of the encounter, Alva had experienced a complete recovery from her heart attack and was bustling about Marble House, preparing for the arrival of the duke of Marlborough. There was so much to be done. She would give a “Bal Blanc” on Wednesday, August 28,1895. It must outshine every previous entertainment. It was, of course, as the newspapers noted, “in honor of her daughter, Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt, who is having her first Summer out.’166 But it was also Alva’s personal “declaration of war,” as she called it, against the archaic notion that a divorced woman had to be ostracized from society. “When I walked into Trinity Church in Newport on a Sunday soon after obtaining my divorce, not a single one of my old friends would recognize me. They walked by me with cold stares or insolent looks. They gathered in little groups and made it evident they were speaking of their disapprobation of my conduct. Often in the ensuing days of my new freedom I have gone to a dinner party where the only woman who would speak to me would be the hostess. When the men were left in the dining room the women would sweep away from me, leaving me standing alone so that the hostess was forced to come to the rescue.”167
Alva sent out five hundred invitations, veritable summonses to appear at her Bal Blanc. She doubted very much if anyone would dare not come, especially since this was the first time she had thrown open the gates of Marble House for a ball, and especially with the ninth duke of Marlborough as her honored guest.
Outshine every other ball it did. It was called “the most beautiful fete ever seen in Newport.”168
Footmen in powdered wigs and maroon Louis XIV costumes led the guests into the great hall, over floors of lustrous yellow Siena marble, past a large bronze fountain filled with floating lotus of the Nile and lilac-colored water hyacinths and pale pink hollyhocks, surrounded by swarms of artificial hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies. At the other end of the hall one could see the moonlit sea.
Standing in the dining room against the walls of rose marble that “gleamed like fire.’169 Alva was dressed in a gown of jade-green satin trimmed with white satin and Spanish lace, the three-foot pearl necklace of Catherine the Great casually draped over her shoulder. Consuelo wore a white satin gown trimmed with lace that had belonged to Alva’s mother. The young duke of Marlborough stood with them, closely scrutinizing all the pretty women. The guests were surprised to find Marlborough “rather undersized.’170 not “a big, strapping Englishman with a loud voice, but instead, a pale-faced frail-looking lad with a voice…as soft as a debutante’s.’171
Outside on the marble terrace overlooking the ocean, protected by the two projecting wings of Marble House, thirty-five dinner tables were arranged, each with a wreath of pink hollyhocks tied with pink ribbons. The “grounds were just as they used to be at Versailles, when Louis strolled across the broad terrace with his court,”172 reporters noted. The branches of every tree twinkled in the evening sea breeze with white Chinese lanterns shaped like Marble House.
Some of the guests might have thought that Mrs. Vanderbilt had even paid for the moon to be shining on Marble House to provide, as Alva reflected, “a setting of almost unreal beauty”173 that warm summer night, as the guests danced around the marble terrace and perfect green lawns to the music of three orchestras, while nine French chefs prepared dinner. The first dinner was served at midnight, as the lawn was kept ablaze with colored fires. A cotillion in the gold ballroom followed, capped by a larger supper served at three in the morning.
This midnight ball at Marble House outdid “any private social function ever given in the country,”174 the papers reported the next morning, but all the guests were disappointed. That night “everybody was thinking of just one thing—would the engagement that would make Consuelo Vanderbilt the Duchess of Marlborough be announced?”175 Alva told the reporters that “she thought it a shame that such a report had gone abroad.”176 “Miss Vanderbilt is not engaged to the Duke of Marlborough. I regret that the papers so often see fit to connect her name with different friends of ours.”177
Alva spent the next several weeks displaying her English friend and her daughter to Newport society, driving with them in a carriage up and down Bellevue Avenue, chaperoning them at dinners, balls, luncheon parties aboard the Astor yacht in Newport Harbor, polo games followed by tea.
The one mistake Alva made was in taking the duke to The Breakers, the just-completed Italian Renaissance villa of Willie’s brother Cornelius. It was even bigger than Marble House, with more marble, more bronze, more gilt. The duke assumed that these Vanderbilts were even richer than Consuelo’s parents, and reportedly proposed to Gertrude Vanderbilt, the twenty-year-old daughter of Alice and Cornelius, who flat out said no.178
On the last day of his visit, remembering all the expenses back at Blenheim, Marlborough took Consuelo into the Gothic Room of Marble House, “whose atmosphere,’ Consuelo felt, “was so propitious to sacrifice,” with its “stained-glass windows from some famous church [that] kept out the light, creating a melancholy atmosphere in which a Delia Robbia Madonna suggested the renunciation of a worldly life.’179 and there asked her to become his duchess. Alva had waged so successful a campaign that Consuelo accepted.
Later that evening, when Consuelo broke the news of her engagement to her brother, he spoke the words that Consuelo felt but dared not think.
“He is only marrying you for your money,” Harold told her in the matter-of-fact tone of an eleven-year-old.180
With that, Consuelo’s careful hold of her emotions collapsed. She burst into tears and ran to her room.
Before either Consuelo or Marlborough could have a change of heart, Alva notified all the papers of the engagement and announced plans for a wedding on November 6, 1895.
6.
“It is probable,” the papers predicted, “that the Vanderbilts, with their characteristic reserve, will avoid as much as possible the publicity that attaches to an international match of such importance.”181
It was only early on her wedding morning when Consuelo looked outside to the streets of New York City that she realized her marriage to the ninth duke of Marlborough had become a spectacle. Through the “heavy gray curtain of Indian summer mist that made all the surroundings gloomy.’182 she saw that their mansion was being patrolled by fifty policemen and twelve detectives holding back the crowds. (This was a new mansion. In her divorce settlement with Willie, Alva had been given enough money always to live like a Vanderbilt. Alva kept Marble House in Newport and Willie kept Idlehour on Long Island. Alva had also been given the château at 660 Fifth Avenue and all of its contents. This she spurned. “I don’t want this house!” she declared.183 It had been “rendered disagreeable by unpleasant memories.’184 The only thing she took from the château was the large portrait of herself, the one in front of which she had greeted her guests. This she cut up into pieces, a gesture that seemed to say that her old life, her life as Mrs. Vanderbilt, Queen of Society, was over.185 Alva bought a mansion on Seventy-second Street and Madison Avenue.) By 10:30 there were two thousand onlookers, mainly women, armed with opera glasses, camp stools, and lunch bags, thronging the streets around the mansion. And every window in the neighborhood from which the Vanderbilt house could be seen was filled with spectators, watching through opera glasses for a sight of the bridal party.
Move on! Move on! the policemen shouted, trying to keep the crowds at least one hundred feet back from the house. But they proved hardly a match for the women who were intent on seeing the young Vanderbilt bride. They used every subterfuge to get closer, telling the police they were going through to Fifth Avenue, but when they reached the front of the Vanderbilt house they would stop and stand there and stare until ordered to move on. One woman so strenuously resisted moving that a policeman had to “take her almost in his arms.”
“How dare you lay hands on me?” she screamed.
“I wouldn’t, madam,” said the policeman, “if you would go where you belong.”
“Beast!” she cried at the policeman a
nd walked into the crowd.186
Whenever it was rumored that Miss Vanderbilt was about to appear, the women would sweep across the street in a wild rush to see the future duchess of Marlborough. For several hours, small lively battles were waged between the police and curious women, all the way down Fifth Avenue from Alva’s new house past the mansion of the Cornelius Vanderbilts at Fifty-seventh Street, with every window shuttered while the family stayed at Newport to avoid the wedding, past Alva’s dream château at Fifty-second Street, where all the windows were shut and not a face was to be seen.
Outside of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-third Street, three hundred policemen struggled to maintain some semblance of order. The sidewalks and streets around the brownstone church were mobbed with seven thousand sightseers, many of whom had been standing there for hours as the morning mist lifted over the church. The sidewalks, reporters noted, were “tightly packed with young women, old women, pretty women, ugly women, fat women, thin women, all struggling and pushing and squeezing to break through police lines. Then imagine all those women quarreling one with another for struggling and pushing and squeezing, and begging, imploring, threatening and coaxing the police to let them pass.’187 Many of the police “felt a strong temptation at times to club some of the women, but their commander took pains that the gentlest means possible should be employed.”188
Two young women dressed in black with tan jackets and passé black feather boas alighted from a hansom “with an amount of dignity that would have sufficed for a dozen empresses.” They haughtily paid the cabman, bade him begone, and turned with majesty to sweep past the police into the church.
“Cards?” a policeman asked.
“Sir-r-r-r! No!” they said, raising their eyebrows far aloft.189
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