Alva’s château was universally admired for the beauty of its design and its striking architectural elegance. The most that could be said for Alice’s new home was that it was much larger than Alva’s. It was a mansion of “depressing, gloomy splendor,”17 as one of Alice’s grandchildren later described it, an imposing meaningless monstrosity, but it served its purpose. Let there be no doubt about it, the house proclaimed, the Cornelius Vanderbilts are richer than the William K. Vanderbilts. The Cornelius Vanderbilts are richer than you. The Cornelius Vanderbilts are richer than anyone.
Passing through sixteen-foot-high wrought-iron gates, intimidated guests were glacially welcomed in a grand hall forty feet long, fifty feet wide, and thirty-five feet high, all of carved Caen stone, a hall that one reporter called a vestibule “larger than the Supreme Court of the United States.”18 Conspicuously opened on a table was a leather-bound book showing Alice’s family lineage; Alice had tried, in vain, to trace the Vanderbilt roots back to some appropriate nobility. (“Alice is happy at last,’ Alva Vanderbilt remarked. “She’s found she’s descended from William the Conqueror.’19) The hall spilled into large connecting salons and a library, all of which could be opened to increase the size of the sixty-four-by-fifty-foot ballroom, with a ceiling forty feet above the dance floor.
Visitors found the mansion chilly and uncomfortable, built for social functions but not for living (though it certainly never became known for its hospitality; one socialite remembered puritanical Alice’s parties “especially for their ornate dullness”20). A houseguest noted that the mansion “was furnished before the day of interior decorators and was done in the worst of the French and Victorian periods. Much application of gilt everywhere.”21 The dining room, which could easily seat two hundred, “was ponderous and heavy with red velvet hangings and atrocious oil paintings of pastoral scenes—badly painted cows and unnatural looking trees.”22 On the walls in other rooms hung “exceedingly bad portraits of the whole family.”23
Two elevators took the family to their suites on the second and third floors, if they chose not to use the massive staircase. Cornelius’s master bedroom had a commanding view over Grand Army Plaza. Looking out one morning, he noticed that the city had erected a fountain with a bronze statue of a nude woman bathing, the Lady of Abundance, with the back of the statue toward his mansion. Shocked and offended, he contacted City Hall and patiently explained the problem, requesting that the indecent statue be removed. When he was told the statue would stay, he moved a block away, changing his bedroom to the other side of the house. “The old boy couldn’t stand the ‘rear’ view,” one of his children chuckled.24
A friend of Alice Vanderbilt’s called her “a woman of arrogant solemnity,”25 and so she was, this Sunday school teacher of St. Bartholomew’s Parish who made the transformation to empress of Fifth Avenue without missing a beat, preaching with her dour husband the Puritan ethic of piety, charity, and hard work while living amid visible riches that were beyond belief. To run this colossal structure of 137 rooms took more than 30 servants—butlers, valets, ladies’ maids, footmen, housekeepers, a chef, assistant chefs, pantry boys, parlor maids, upstairs maids and scrubbing maids, laundresses, chauffeurs, seamstresses, and guards. At least no additional help had to be hired when the solid gold service was brought out for a party of two hundred guests: The Vanderbilts were ready. The menservants were housed in the basement rooms, the women servants on the upper floor. Alice spoke to her servants exclusively through her head butler. The story was told of the evening she arrived late at a party because, though she knew the way to the hostess’s home, she refused to speak directly to her chauffeur who had become hopelessly lost. Once a day, diminutive Alice put on one immaculate long white kid glove and ran a finger over antique furniture, carved mirrors, and heavy picture frames. If the glove was sullied by a mote of dust, the maid responsible for that room was summarily fired.
One of the Vanderbilts’ small children once watched a maid shaking a rug from the window.
“Mother, what’s that lady doing?”
Alice recoiled.
“That is no lady,” she instructed her child. “That’s a woman. “26
Hardly had the work been completed on the addition to their Fifth Avenue mansion when there arose the battle of The Breakers.
In 1885, Cornelius Vanderbilt had purchased for $450,000 the Lorillard family’s Newport summer cottage, The Breakers, a large wooden-frame mansion on Ochre Point, a twelve-acre headland jutting into the Atlantic. The Vanderbilts added a new wing, a greenhouse, and a playhouse for the children that was actually the size of a small house. In his spare moments, the French chef came to the playhouse and taught the Vanderbilt girls how to cook on the miniature stove, serving the meals on monogrammed plates. The children were also able to gain some practice in the playhouse for someday running The Breakers; the two rooms of the cottage each had a button, so that the children could summon the butler or upstairs maid from The Breakers to handle any unpleasant problems.
The Vanderbilts fell in love with Newport and The Breakers, which was one of the grandest houses of the resort, and often were the first family to arrive in the late spring, the last to leave in the fall. It was their purchase of this mansion that led Alva to ask Willie for a Newport cottage for her thirty-fifth birthday present in 1888. When it opened in the summer of 1892, it was obvious to Alice that Marble House far surpassed The Breakers, as it did every other Newport mansion. Alva had won the battle again.
But the war was not yet over. On the cold, windy afternoon of November 25, 1892, a fire started in the overworked heating system of The Breakers and roared through the wooden frame structure, completely demolishing it within an hour. No one was injured in the blaze, and Cornelius was not very concerned about the loss of his summer cottage. “Nothing can be done but let it burn,” he told the firemen.27 “I don’t care so much for the house; that can be rebuilt—but I hate to lose my pictures,’28 and the priceless tapestries, furniture, linen, and silver with which The Breakers was stuffed, he might have added.
Cornelius Vanderbilt immediately summoned Alva’s architect, Richard Morris Hunt, and told him he wanted a modest two-story residence to replace The Breakers. Alice had other ideas. Within a month after the fire, Hunt submitted plans for a French Renaissance château, similar to the Vanderbilts’ Fifth Avenue mansion. Cornelius rejected this plan. By January 12, 1893, Hunt came back with new sketches for a mansion modeled after the sixteenth-century palace of a Genoese merchant prince. The Vanderbilts settled for this plan—a seaside palace that would occupy one full acre of the twelve-acre site.
Richard Hunt soon concluded that working with Alva Vanderbilt had been a sheer delight compared to dealing with her sister-in-law Alice. According to Hunt’s wife, Alice Vanderbilt did not practice “the courtesy to which Richard had hitherto been consistently accustomed,” and as a result “he chafed under [her] unconscious rudeness, and it made the work trying occasionally, not only for him but for [her] husband.” She was an “exacting” lady, “insistent in [her] demands.”29
Her first demand was that the new home, which she had already named again The Breakers, be fireproof, and fireproof it was, constructed of a steel-beam framework covered with brick, stone, and tile, with a buff Indiana limestone exterior and red tile roof. The kitchen, as large as an average home, was isolated in a separate wing. The heating plant was buried near the caretaker’s cottage several hundred feet from the house, with a boiler room and storage rooms for hundreds of tons of coal, and a connecting tunnel to the mansion big enough to drive through with a team of horses.
Her second demand was that it be bigger than Marble House. And it was, with its four stories, seventy rooms, thirty baths with hot and cold fresh water and salt water piped in from the sea, and thirty-three rooms for servants. The eleven acres surrounding the mansion were covered with sod imported from England, and numerous thirty-ton trees planted around gave the place an appropriately venerable look.
; A visiting Englishman pointed to the huge structure and asked his hostess what it was.
‘That is The Breakers,” she replied.
“Ah, The Breakers,” he repeated. “I knew it must be a hotel.’30
Newport society soon dubbed Alice Vanderbilt “Alice of The Breakers,” the tiny lady with the big house, to distinguish her from the resort’s other preeminent builder, sister-in-law Alva Vanderbilt.31
Her third demand was that her new summer cottage be more luxurious than Marble House. If The Breakers didn’t surpass Marble House in conspicuous extravagance, it at least equaled it.
“The Breakers,” one guest noted, “was imposingly and magnificently Vanderbilt.”32 The house was constructed around a great hall, an open space forty-five feet high onto which second- and third-floor galleries opened, suggesting an Italian courtyard, with its trompe l’oeil ceiling painted like a blue sky with summer clouds. The great hall set the tone for the style of the house: huge, open, and airy, with ornate paneling, pilasters, columns, and chandeliers. Opulent Italianate interiors surrounded the great hall, including the spectacular two-story formal dining room, twenty-four hundred square feet, highlighted with twelve red alabaster columns topped with Corinthian gilded bronze capitals, a ceiling canvas of the goddess Aurora, two 12-foot Baccarat chandeliers, and royal-red damask draperies. An adjoining billiard room was paneled in twenty varieties of marble. (This room contained a ceiling mosaic of a mother and children in a Roman bath; the prudish Alice insisted that the nudes be draped before she would move into the house.) Entire rooms were constructed, carved, painted, and gilded in France, disassembled, shipped to Newport in huge packing crates, and reassembled in The Breakers by the French workmen who had constructed them, thereby helping Hunt to meet Alice Vanderbilt’s overriding demand that this masterpiece be finished in record time, no matter what the cost.
Construction began in the spring of 1893. With the work of two thousand laborers and artisans and artists, some working during the day, others at night with the aid of electric lights, The Breakers was ready for occupancy in the summer of 1895, an amazing accomplishment in a day when all work was done by hand, by pick and shovel, and with horse-drawn carts. Limitless wealth could indeed accomplish anything. It had been worth the $7 million it cost (plus the millions more to furnish it), for the summer of 1895 would prove to be the only summer Cornelius Vanderbilt would ever enjoy his new cottage.
2.
Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt could click their tongues and sigh to themselves about what Alva had done to their niece Consuelo; they could show their disdain for Alva’s royal matchmaking by not attending the wedding; but they really could not say a word about it, for the problems they were experiencing with their own children were vexing and embarrassing.
Alice and Cornelius never knew what to make of their daughter Gertrude, who was born in 1875, a year after their first daughter, Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, had died in childhood.
Gertrude was so strange. She idolized her two older brothers, William and Cornelius, imitating everything they did. ‘One of the first things I remember was how I longed to be a boy. I was four years old when unable to resist the temptation longer I secreted myself in my mother’s room and proceeded to cut off my curls. This it seemed to me was what distinguished me most from my brothers; they said only girls had curls, so mine were sacrificed and all I gained was a severe punishment.’33 When a third and fourth son, Alfred and Reginald, were born to the Vanderbilts, Gertrude “longed more than ever to be a boy. But even though Fate had given me this burden to bear I certainly rebelled at it by letting my actions be entirely those of a boy.”34 While Gertrude’s younger cousin Consuelo was strapped to a chair in Marble House, tutored in foreign languages, and trained to walk like a duchess, Gertrude and her brothers were gathering wild blackberries, picking strawberries in the Newport fields, climbing the rocks along the ocean, playing tennis, and swimming in the surf at Bailey’s Beach.
Alice had decorated her daughter’s bedroom in their palace on Fifth Avenue in a decidedly feminine style. “She opens her eyes on the prettiest room in all New York,” reporters marveled. “It is on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street…. The wall is hung with white silk and so is the ceiling, where the rich material is drawn up in the center in canopy fashion. The little single bed, the dainty dressing-table, the dressing-stool, desk and some of the easy chairs are of white mahogany, inlaid with quaint wreaths and garlands of mother-of-pearl. The canopy and curtains for the snowy bed are of the filmy bolting cloth, embroidered in pink roses and blue forget-me-nots. All the brushes, mirrors, combs and toilet bottles on the dressing-table are of Dresden china, covered with roses and forget-me-nots, and with the monogram ‘G.V.’ in gold.’35 Gertrude would retreat to her bedroom for hours on end to write, from her youngest days filling pages of diaries and journals with the questions and problems she could not raise with her brothers, and certainly not with her distant parents. And from her earliest writings right through those of her teenage years, the thoughts and reflections she committed to paper repeatedly grappled with the torment of being the daughter of the richest parents in the world. Was a friend a true friend, or only a friend because Gertrude’s father was so wealthy?
“Speaking of best friends makes me think that I always said I had none,’ Gertrude wrote in her diary, “and perhaps it was true. My first real friend was Alice Blight. I think she loved me as much as I loved her. Sometimes I used to imagine it was not for myself she loved me and then I think I was the most unhappy girl that ever breathed.’36
“I look into the future,” Gertrude wrote at eighteen, “and imagine I see myself, grown up and out. I meet a man. I love him. He is attentive to me for my money. He proposes, makes me believe he loves me. I accept, since I love him. We are married. Now, since money is secure, he shows me that he does not love me. I love him still and am wretchedly unhappy. We lead separate lives, he going his way, I mine. And thus we grow old.”37
What but money did Gertrude have to offer anyone? she wondered time and again. “How anyone can see anything in you I am sure I don’t know,” she wrote to herself in her diary. “You are only nice looking, you are not one bit entertaining or amusing, you are stupid, you are conceited, and you are tiresome, you are weak, you are characterless, you are cold and reserved, small and narrow minded, ignorant and unwilling to learn, you think you are always in the right, you are shy and foolish, your waist is big, your hands and arms badly formed, your features out of proportion, your face red, your legs long, now—what have you to say for yourself?
“I have something to say in spite of all that,’ Gertrude answered herself. “You know my hair is curly, my mouth small and red, my complexion very good, my movements graceful, my expression sweet.’
But she was not yet through with her self-abuse.
“Stop, that is nothing, you exaggerate. Your hair is curly but not a pretty color, simply a dull brown. Your mouth may be small and red, but it is weak, your complexion is too red and spotty, you are not graceful, your expression, when you have any, is stupid.
“My voice, then, it is said to be silvery?
“Yes, perhaps by some idle talker who wanted to flatter you.’38
“I cannot remember when I first realized who I was,’ Gertrude, when she was eighteen, wrote in a notebook she entitled “My History.” “It must have been very slowly brought about, this realization, for I can put my finger on no time when it burst upon me. At any rate when I was eleven I knew perfectly that my father was talked of all over, that his name was known throughout the world, that I, simply because I was his daughter, would be talked about when I grew up, and there were lots of things I could not do simply because I was Miss Vanderbilt. That I should have to go through life being pointed at, having my actions talked about, seemed too hard. That I should be courted and made a friend of simply because I was who I was, was unbearable to me. I longed to be someone else, to be liked only for myself, to live quietly and happily wit
hout the burden that goes with riches. Of course time made all this easier to bear, and when I was eighteen I felt as if I could hold my head up under it, and that I would act my part well for God had put me there, just where I was, and if He had not meant me to have strength to go through He would never have put me where I was. So I became to a certain extent reconciled to my lot. If I was liked for my worldly possessions, why I gave nothing in return and lost the respect I might have had for the person. It was a simple arrangement and for anyone as self-centered as myself it was not such a hard one. For let me tell you I had friends in spite of the terrible obstacle which stood in our way. There were girls who liked me for myself, I know it. I was not altogether unlovable, I think.’39
Gertrude never doubted that Esther, the daughter of the Vanderbilts’ architect, Richard Morris Hunt, liked her for herself. At nineteen, Esther, like Gertrude, was tall and attractive. Gertrude counted it among the “thrills of my life when Esther kissed me.’40
One evening in September 1893, when Gertrude returned home late from a long drive with Esther, Alice Vanderbilt called her daughter into the parlor. There, “in a terrific tone as if very, very much provoked,” Alice forbade Gertrude to go to Esther Hunt’s again for a month.
Why? Gertrude asked.
“Because I don’t like the way you act—with her.”41
Gertrude ran up the great flight of stone stairs to her room, locked the door and cried, confiding to her journal the agony of having to “sit by and hear your best friend picked to pieces or the fact of your having three letters in the same week from the same girl laughed at and mockingly alluded to. Listen to your friend being called a runner after rich girls, with a knowing look in your direction…If I have children of my own, they will tell me everything because they know I will understand and sympathize, yes, if my prayer is granted, I will live over my youth with them.’42
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