Marlborough immediately informed his new wife, “tragically,” that to marry her he had had “to give up the girl he loved,” but that “a sense of duty to his family and to his traditions”—the preservation of Blenheim—”indicated the sacrifice of personal desires.”229 Consuelo thereupon told her new husband that “her mother had insisted on her marrying [him], that her mother was strongly opposed to her marrying Rutherfurd, that she had used every form of pressure short of physical violence to reach her end.”230
As the carriage pulled away from the curb after the wedding breakfast, eighteen-year-old Consuelo looked back. “My mother was at the window. She was hiding behind the curtain, but I saw that she was in tears.”231 For the first time, Alva, too, had begun to understand just what she had done.
On the morning of November 16, “after the week’s seclusion custom has imposed upon reluctant honeymooners”232 as Consuelo later described her first days with Sunny at her father’s Long Island estate, the newlyweds boarded a German steamship docked at Hoboken, New Jersey. The wharf was mobbed with a crowd come to catch a glimpse of the famous young couple and bid them farewell.
Willie kissed Consuelo. “We will meet again in Paris,” he assured her, as she “murmured a few words of farewell and bravely kept back the tears that were ready to flow.”233
When Alva, who had been chatting with some friends, turned to speak to her daughter, she saw Willie. She bowed her head a little and said, quietly and calmly, “Good morning, Mr. Vanderbilt.”
“Mr. Vanderbilt’s face flushed slightly,” the reporters noted, as “he raised his hat and bowed.’234 Alva led Consuelo to another part of the deck, put her arm around her daughter’s waist, and kissed her twice. “The eyes of both were moist when they said farewell.”235
As the steamship pulled away into the harbor, Consuelo and Marlborough stood at the rail watching the crowd watching them. The duke took off his hat and bowed again and again, while the duchess waved her handkerchief.
Later, the New York World pictured all twenty-seven of England’s dukes, with those who were still “eligible” outlined in white. “Attention, American heiresses,” the caption read. “What will you bid?”236
5
ALICE OF THE BREAKERS
1895-1899
1.
On Consuelo’s wedding day, Alva Vanderbilt might indeed have felt herself “the most hated woman on earth.’1 “As soon as my daughter’s engagement was announced, very disagreeable letters began to pour in upon me from persons wholly unknown to me but who evidently disapproved of the marriage and felt called upon to tell me so…” Alva wrote in a draft of her memoirs. “All these letters were clearly from unbalanced people who seemed to think they could interfere with the private lives of others. Some of them even threatened to kill the Duke, others, to blow up my house before the date set for the wedding. Many hinted at a resort to violent measures to prevent the marriage.”2
Alva’s sister-in-law Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Alice Vanderbilt—who had insisted that her family spend the day of Consuelo’s wedding in Newport, as far away from the spectacle as possible—shared the sentiments of many of these letter writers. She readily understood how Alva Vanderbilt could be the most hated woman on earth, for Alice had always hated Alva. Alice reveled in the stories New York City’s Town Topics printed about her sister-in-law. Alva Vanderbilt was “unstable,” it reported. She was “irresponsible.” She was putting on weight. She had worn the same dress to several balls. She used “expletives of a character to turn all the milk in the refrigerators.”3 Alice agreed that Alva was despicable.
Cornelius Vanderbilt II was as different from his brother Willie as Alice was from her sister-in-law Alva.
A lifelong acquaintance of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s remarked that he never once recalled seeing him smile. There is no evidence that this story was apocryphal.
Born in 1843, the first of eight children of William and Maria Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt had grown up on his father’s Staten Island farm long before his grandfather, the Commodore, recognized William’s business acumen. The very fact that William Vanderbilt named his eldest son Cornelius should have tipped the Commodore off that perhaps Billy was not the “blatherskite” he thought. In any event, the Commodore saw more promise in serious young Cornelius than he did in blundering Billy, and took a special interest in his first grandson.
Young Cornelius attended the little country school in New Dorp until he was fifteen, and then decided it was time to earn his living, seeking employment from John M. Crane, the president of the Shoe and Leather Bank.
“I see you are a Vanderbilt,” Mr. Crane said. “Are you a relative of the Commodore?”
“He is my grandfather,” Cornelius replied.
“Why don’t you ask him to recommend you?” Mr. Crane inquired.
“Because I don’t want to ask him for anything,” the young lad replied.
When the Commodore heard this story from Mr. Crane, he was pleased. He later asked his grandson why he had not come to him for employment and received the same reply, which pleased him more.4
Cornelius labored long hours at the Shoe and Leather Bank at a salary of thirty dollars a month, boarding in the city during the week, returning to his parents’ farm on Staten Island on Saturday night to spend Sunday with his family. “Cornelius was one of the best boys we ever had and one of the most conscientious workers,” Mr. Crane remembered. “If anything, he was too conscientious. Trifles that the other clerks would think nothing of would worry him half to death. He was eminently industrious, fair and square, and everybody liked him, although I believe none of the boys knew him well.”5
One day, the Commodore came to visit his grandson at the Shoe and Leather Bank to tell him he was sailing to Europe, and to invite Cornelius to join him.
“I am going myself,” said the Commodore, “and I’ll take you along if you want to go.”
“And give up my salary?” the bewildered young Cornelius wondered.
“Well, I don’t suppose it will go on while you are gone,” the Commodore replied.
“Then I guess I’d better stay,” young Cornelius reasoned.6
The Commodore smiled with delight. What a grandson! “If a boy is good for anything,” the Commodore remarked, “you can stick him down anywhere and he’ll earn his living and lay up something; if he can’t do it he ain’t worth saving, and you can’t save him.”7 In the Commodore’s eyes, young Cornelius was proving worthy of the great name he bore.
Still skeptical of his son William’s ability to step into his shoes, the Commodore began to groom his grandson Cornelius to play a part in the family business, making him assistant treasurer of the New York and Harlem Railroad. His punctuality, politeness, and love of hard work endeared him to his grandfather, who made him treasurer of the New York and Harlem Railroad with a hand in the management of the New York Central, all by the age of twenty-four.
After the Commodore’s death, Cornelius became the vice president of the Harlem and first vice president and chief of the finance departments of the New York Central and Hudson River railroads, and upon his father’s retirement in 1883 he became the chairman of the board of directors of the New York Central.
In a few brief years, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s station in life had changed dramatically. It changed even more on December 8, 1885, the day his father died. As the New York World put it: “It is remarkable how high Cornelius stood in the estimation of men yesterday. The day before he was nobody; to-day he is a king. Everybody speaks well of him, of his conservatism and his executive ability.’8 He was now the most powerful businessman in the United States and one of its wealthiest citizens. Yet his dedication to work was just the same as it had been as a clerk at the Shoe and Leather Bank.
Forty-two-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt was neither tall nor short. He was neither heavy nor thin. With the spectacles and slightly rounded shoulders of an accountant who had spent too many hours poring over ledgers, with his close-cropped d
ark brown hair that was turning gray, a Roman nose, and a high-pitched voice, he would not have made an impression on anyone who did not know who he was. Long before the first of the clerks arrived in the morning, he could be seen at his rolltop desk at the Grand Central Depot in the large office on the second floor that once had been his father’s and before that his grandfather’s, with a full-length oil portrait of the Commodore on the southern wall and one of William H. Vanderbilt above his desk on the northern wall. There he pored over information from all the Vanderbilt railroads, while softly humming to himself some favorite tune. An accountant by temperament and trade, he carried with him at all times a notebook in which he recorded every investment that he made, and many of the minor details of his business interests, keeping careful records of the entire Vanderbilt railroad system, not neglecting a single road. It was said that daily he knew his precise net worth.
As would be expected, he managed his inheritance cautiously and conservatively, never expanding the scope of his personal investments outside of the Vanderbilt railroad interests to include positions in any of the emerging industries of the day, and never taking any bold steps to expand the Vanderbilt railroad empire. In 1892, for example, an officer of the Union Pacific came to Cornelius and his brother Willie for assistance in keeping the railroad out of the grasp of Jay Gould. “I told the Vanderbilts they could have this property, the control of it, for practically a few millions of floating debt. They replied that it was more and more a settled policy that they would not move their management or interests west of Chicago.’9 And so it was that the Vanderbilts blithely passed up the control of a line that would have opened up for them a transcontinental system.
An acquaintance described Cornelius Vanderbilt as “a serious man with a quiet, resolute manner. He worked harder than any of his clerks. We took luncheon at the same downtown club. Vanderbilt never spent more than twenty minutes over his light meal—could not give the time to linger and talk with the rest of us.’10 Like his father before him, Cornelius was finding that running the Vanderbilt railroads, the management of which his brothers had left largely to him, was all-consuming. “I feel tired almost all of the time,” he told a colleague who urged him to take time off more often, “but I would rather be in New York where I can look in at the office, than in the country.’11 It was a full-time job being chairman of the New York Central, the president of seven companies within the Vanderbilt system, the vice president of the Beech Creek Railroad, and a director of forty-two companies. Yet Vanderbilt devoted a full quarter of his time to his charitable interests. A vestryman of St. Bartholomew’s Church, a member of the finance committee of the Protestant Episcopal Board of Foreign Missions, a member of the executive committee of the International Young Men’s Christian Association, a trustee of the Bible Society, chairman of the executive committee of St. Luke’s Hospital, a director of the House for Incurables, a director of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a director of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, president of the New York Botanical Gardens, a trustee of Columbia University—he faithfully attended every committee meeting of each organization and spent additional hours researching and weighing the thousands of requests for assistance that crossed his desk, donating, often anonymously, hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to religious and charitable institutions, as well as to individuals who seemed to need his help. He once noted that in a typical day’s mail he received requests for contributions that exceeded his annual income.
Beyond these responsibilities, he regularly found time to visit the patients in St. Luke’s Hospital, and was never too busy to help those who were aged and poor. One summer afternoon he saw an elderly lady burdened with a heavy basket, trying to make her way from one cross-town streetcar to another, scarcely able to drag herself along. He alighted from his carriage, gently took the basket out of the old woman’s hands, and assisted her aboard the next car.
Chauncey Depew’s office at the New York Central adjoined Vanderbilt’s, with a door between the two that was always open. “He was a man who loved work for work’s sake,” Depew noted. “Work seemed to be his recreation. He would transact what business there was to do, attend to all the matters relating to the various philanthropic and charitable enterprises in which he was interested and finally clear up his desk. As soon as he had done so he would come into my office and fairly beg for work to do. He never seemed to tire of it.”12 And, indeed, he did little else, having no interest in horses like his father and grandfather, or in yachts like his brother Willie, or in any other sport or hobby.
Cornelius Vanderbilt was, as a contemporary well described him, “always courteous, considerate and gentle…. He is never heard to use a harsh or impure word and is known for his blameless, upright life.”13 He found in 1867 the perfect wife in a fellow Sunday school teacher at St. Bartholomew’s: tiny, not quite five-foot Alice Claypoole Gwynne. Quiet, reserved to the point of seeming shy or cold, Alice Vanderbilt acted like the Sunday school teacher she was. The Commodore, it was said, was disappointed with this petite, plain lady his oldest grandson had married; but if he had lived to see the pluck of which she was made, he would no doubt have been proud. The couple lived unostentatiously, raising their seven children—Alice born in 1869, William in 1872, Cornelius in 1873, Gertrude in 1875, Alfred in 1877, Reginald in 1880, and Gladys in 1886—and attending Episcopal services daily, twice a day if their schedules permitted.
Only one person destroyed the quietude of their life: Alva Vanderbilt.
The trouble all began, Alice always believed, when Alva, that little southern snippet, curried the favor of her father-in-law, William H. Vanderbilt, and wheedled her way into his will. Had it not been for Alva’s influence on her father-in-law, Willie would never have received half of his father’s residuary estate; he would have received $10 million just like the rest of his brothers and sisters, while Cornelius, as the oldest son, would have received the entire residuary estate. Alva and Willie therefore had cheated her husband, Cornelius, out of an extra $55 million. But even worse, in Alice’s eyes, was that her father-in-law’s division of the bulk of his estate between his two oldest sons—Cornelius and Willie—left it ambiguous as to exactly who was to be the next head of the House of Vanderbilt. And that was when the real trouble began.
It was to his grandson Cornelius that the Commodore had bequeathed the cherished portraits of his mother, Phebe, and his first wife, Sophia, and it was on Cornelius that he had conferred $5.5 million in railroad stocks, leaving only $2 million each to Cornelius’s brothers, Willie, Frederick, and George. And it was to his son Cornelius that William Vanderbilt bequeathed the portrait and the marble bust of the Commodore, and to whom he gave an extra $2 million. Surely there could be no clearer signs that Cornelius had been crowned patriarch of the family and the Vanderbilt empire.
The problem was that Willie, spurred on by that vixen Alva, was acting like the head of the House. This impression could not be allowed to stand. And so the two Sunday school teachers from the parish of St. Bartholomew’s were drawn into a race to spend money and flaunt their wealth, the likes of which the world had never seen.
When Willie’s carriage was seen traveling up Fifth Avenue with two footmen on the box, Cornelius and Alice assigned two footmen to their carriage. When the Willie Vanderbilts stationed a watchman in front of their home, Cornelius and Alice stationed two of the biggest servants they could hire, dressed in Vanderbilt maroon with black silk breeches and black silk stockings, to open their front door.
And then there was the matter of Alva’s French château at 660 Fifth Avenue. Until then, Alice and Cornelius had been quite content to live at their house at 72 Park Avenue, quietly raising their children. But if Alva was trying to proclaim to the world through grandiose architecture that she was Mrs. Vanderbilt, they would teach her a thing or two.
It was a common belief at the time that Alice Vanderbilt set out to dwarf her sister-in-law’s Fifth Avenue chateau, and dw
arf it she did. Designed by George P. Post, a student of Richard Morris Hunt, the Cornelius Vanderbilts’ own five-story French château of red brick with gray limestone trim and a red slate roof, with great stone gabled dormers, chimneys, turrets, and balconies, rose on the parcels of land they had acquired at 742-746 Fifth Avenue and 1 West Fifty-seventh Street. It was a structure that newspapers called “the largest dwelling-house occupied by a single family in the city of New York,”14 designed to show just how millionaires should live. “The city now possesses a private house which must for a century or two elevate the standard of such houses,” one paper reported, “and tend, at least, to the improvement of domestic architecture.”15
Larger! The house must be made larger! Several years later, in 1887, Cornelius bought up adjoining land on Fifty-eighth Street for $414,000, tore down five town houses and expanded his mansion, until it and a tiny formal garden occupied the entire block of Fifth Avenue between West Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth streets, providing a superb view over Grand Army Plaza into Central Park. “I want to dominate the Plaza,”16 the pious Cornelius modestly explained, as he paid hundreds of laborers extra wages to work into the night by the leaping flames of huge bonfires, so that the renovations would be completed quickly.
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