While sitting alone on a piazza one night in Florida, Harry suddenly turned to Gertrude.
“Gertrude, shall we have an understanding?”
Gertrude felt too weak to speak.
“Shall we, Gertrude? Do you care for me?”
“Oh, Harry” was all she could say, giving him her hand, which Harry kissed “over and over again and yet over and over.”
“No, no, Gertrude—it can’t be. Oh, no, Gertrude!” Harry laughed in joy.
Gertrude returned to her room with “a queer swimming in my head and a strange joyful feeling at my heart.”75
“Have you repented?” Harry asked her when he saw Gertrude the next morning.
“No, have you?”
The boy and girl next door were in love. “I suddenly looked at him and could not take my eyes away. He looked down—I could not. He looked at me again—for the first time we looked right into each other’s eyes and saw each other’s soul. Then he leaned forward suddenly and pulled my hands to him. He said: ‘Kiss me’ And before I knew it he had leaned over the table and kissed my mouth. A few moments later he said: ‘I feel better now.’”76
Back in New York City a week later, the two resolved during a long walk together to tell their parents that they were engaged.
“Where did you go this afternoon?” Mamma asked Gertrude as she walked into the parlor.
“I’m engaged,’ Gertrude announced.
“Engaged! Gertrude! Who to?”
“Harry! Do you like it?”
“Yes. This afternoon?”
“Oh no—a long time ago [a week ago] on the trip.”77
Harry wrote a letter to Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was out of the country:
Dr. Mr. Vanderbilt:
As you may have suspected, I am in love with Gertrude and have asked her to be my wife. She has consented and has told Mrs. V. so that I write this to tell you of it and to ask for your consent.
I fully appreciate the responsibility of taking Gertrude from a home like hers but will make it my life’s duty and pleasure to try to make her happy and feel certain that I shall be able to do so.78
By Easter Sunday, Harry had still not heard from Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the couple delayed a public announcement of their engagement, but Esther had gotten wind of it.
“Of course I am glad for you but I love you and really I want to see you,” Esther wrote. “It hurts! And yet I am so glad for you.”79
“I never thought it possible to care for anyone the way I care,” Gertrude wrote to Esther, explaining her feelings for Harry. “Sometimes the way I feel reminds me a little of something you have said and I wonder if you ever could have cared for me anything like this way. I am sorry for you if you did…. Esther, you must get engaged, you don’t know what it is to be absolutely happy until you are.”80
The engagement of Gertrude and Harry, which would be regarded by the press as “a most felicitous outcome of the long and intimate association of the two families,’81 would be announced in June.
3.
Gertrude had been the least of the Vanderbilts’ worries. Much more troubling to Alice and Cornelius was Neily, Gertrude’s older brother, Cornelius Vanderbilt III. As hard as Alice and Cornelius had worked to get their daughter married, they were struggling even harder to stop their son from marrying the wrong woman.
The events that would shatter the Vanderbilt family began that warm, magical summer night of August 14, 1895, the night of Gertrude’s coming-out party at The Breakers. There, twenty-two-year-old Neily had danced with Miss Grace Wilson, the charming southern Grace Wilson with her bright hazel eyes, dreamy complexion, and deep auburn hair. Like his older brother, Bill—William Henry Vanderbilt II—who had been secretly engaged to Grace Wilson at the time he died of typhoid fever in 1892 while a junior at Yale, Neily, too, was hypnotized by the beauty of this woman who was several years his senior.
Bill had been the golden boy of the Vanderbilt clan. He had, as Gertrude phrased it, “all the brains of the family.”82 Handsome, outgoing, he had been a popular student at St. Paul’s and at his Psi Upsilon fraternity at Yale, bringing home gangs of his friends for post-football game dinners at his parents’ Fifth Avenue mansion. The heir apparent as head of the House of Vanderbilt as the oldest son of the oldest son of the oldest son of the Commodore, he had just reached the age of twenty-one in 1892 and so had begun to receive the income from the trust fund his grandfather had established. He had joined the Knickerbocker, New York Yacht, Seawanhaka Corinthian, Racquet and Tennis, and Westchester Polo and Riding clubs, and had purchased for the summer a forty-six-foot sloop, when he was brought home from Yale in May 1892, stricken with typhoid. All the celebrated physicians that money could summon could not save him. A grief-stricken Cornelius Vanderbilt donated a dormitory at Yale in Bill’s memory, Vanderbilt Hall, and the family went into mourning for two years, a period Gertrude called “a very sad time…which I would rather not dwell upon.”83
Now Neily, a year younger than Bill and also a student at Yale, was the eldest son. Now he someday would rule the Vanderbilt empire. Neily was different from Bill. Plagued with bouts of chronic rheumatism, he was a quiet, studious young man, interested in science and engineering, fascinated by experiments and inventions. But like his brother he was smitten by the charms of Grace Wilson, his first love, and, much to his parents’ dismay, he squired her about Newport the rest of that summer of 1895 after the ball at The Breakers. Alice and Cornelius hoped that Neily’s infatuation with Miss Wilson would soon pass. Grace, who they suspected was twenty-eight, six years older than Neily, was much too old for him, too worldly. This was the first time Neily had been in love; there would be other women.
Great beauty, backed by even a little wealth, opened wide every society door. Grace was a classic beauty, with fine features, a beguiling figure, and a poised, sophisticated personality to match. She was welcomed everywhere. Each winter, she stayed in her parents’ Fifth Avenue mansion for the opera season and the Patriarch and Assembly balls. Early in the spring, she sailed for Europe to select her new wardrobe in Paris, then visited with her sister and her husband on the Riviera, cruising with them on their yacht, White Ladye. Afterward, she would “take the cure” at Bad Nauheim in Germany to prepare for the London season, then travel on to Scotland for grouse hunting, back to Paris in the fall for more clothes, and then return to the United States for the cure at Hot Springs, West Virginia, to get ready again for the winter season in New York.
Courtly Richard Wilson, a southern gentleman who had made a small fortune as a profiteer during the Civil War and now, living in New York, oversaw his railroad and banking interests, doted on his lovely daughter, treating her like a pampered princess. “Father, what shall I do?” Grace cabled from Paris. “I’m supposed to sail on the Teutonic, and Worth doesn’t have my dresses ready.”
“What are we going to do about Grace?” Richard Wilson asked one of his employees as soon as he received her frantic cable.
“Well, Major,” the employee answered, “I guess I better go bail her out again. When do you want me to leave?”
“This afternoon at three,” Wilson replied.
And so the employee set sail for Europe to “take the hide off Worth’s and get Grace’s dresses” so that she could sail as scheduled. “Mr. Wilson just thought it was outrageous that those people should keep his daughter waiting.”84
In September 1895, after courting charming Grace Wilson for several weeks, Neily suffered a severe attack of rheumatism. His father was so concerned that he had another bed moved into Neily’s room and slept there every night until the attack subsided, then sending him to Hot Springs to recuperate.
While he was gone, Mrs. Vanderbilt paid a social call on Mrs. Wilson. Would Grace be going abroad this winter? she casually inquired. No, Grace would be in New York all winter, Mrs. Wilson replied.
Upon Neily’s return to Fifth Avenue, his romance with Grace Wilson blossomed.
At first the Vanderbilts teased h
im about his attraction to Grace Wilson.
Walking home from church, Neily told his parents he would be going out for lunch.
“Where?” asked Gertrude.
“At the Goelets,” Neily answered.
“Ah, to see Grace Wilson!” Gertrude laughed. Grace’s sister had married Ogden Goelet.
That evening, at the family dinner, younger sister Gertrude persisted in having some fun at her brother’s expense.
“Who was at the lunch?” she asked.
“Miss Wilson,” Neily replied in a very grumpy tone.
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
Gertrude looked at her mother and smiled.
“She was afraid to have anyone else,” commented Alice Vanderbilt, who saw fortune hunters everywhere, and considered Grace Wilson one of the most determined.
For the rest of the meal, Neily, according to Gertrude, was “more than usually grumpy” and said hardly a word.
After dinner, he rose from the table.
‘Papa, I would like to speak to you and Mamma alone in the other room.’
“I will go,’ Gertrude said. Terribly excited, she was convinced that her brother had become engaged to Miss Wilson.
The next morning, Gertrude could hardly wait to rush down the stone staircase to breakfast to ask her mother what had happened.
“I cannot tell you,’85 Mamma replied in a most serious voice.
That was enough to prick Gertrude’s curiosity. She spent her days thereafter lurking around the halls and doors of the 137-room mansion, trying to “keep her eyes open” and put together the pieces. Neily was not coming down to breakfasts. He left the house each morning by ten and did not return until late at night. A letter arrived for Neily, marked IMMEDIATE. Gertrude brought it to her parents, and said in her most innocent voice, “Why, that looks like Grace Wilson’s handwriting.” When her parents did not reply, she knew she was on to something.86
This situation, Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt had concluded, was getting way out of hand. Reasoning with Neily had not worked. Sending him away for a while had not worked. Being defied was a new experience for Cornelius Vanderbilt. All his life, he had been accustomed to speaking softly and pleasantly and having his suggestions carried out with dispatch. So sure was he of getting his own way that this methodical man customarily laid out his schedule a year ahead, to the day and hour. It unsettled him to be disobeyed, and worst of all, to be disobeyed by one of his children. Fretting and worrying, he had no idea how to cope with this family crisis. At a time like this, when something had become too messy for him to handle, there was only one thing left to do: call in the Vanderbilts’ personal diplomat, Chauncey Depew.
Depew sent a letter to Richard Wilson, asking for a meeting to discuss his daughter. Is this family crazy? Mr. Wilson thought. No, he would not meet with Mr. Depew. He would discuss his daughter only with Cornelius Vanderbilt.
A second letter arrived from Mr. Depew, stating that a meeting had been arranged between Mr. Vanderbilt and Mr. Wilson for November 26, 1895, at Mr. Depew’s house, a neutral arena. There, a frustrated Cornelius Vanderbilt fought in the only way he knew how. He launched from his arsenal of weapons his ultimate threat, telling Mr. Wilson that if Grace would not leave his son alone, if they ever married, it would “alter [Neily’s] prospects.’87
To move Neily out of Grace Wilson’s range, the Vanderbilts arranged for him a grand tour of Europe and the Near East, and tried to persuade him to go. Finally, one morning in November 1895, Neily arrived at breakfast and told his mother he was going to sail tomorrow for Europe.
“Cornelius, come and kiss me,’ Alice Vanderbilt said to her son.
“Well, you needn’t be so pleased,” he replied. “I’ve told Papa.”88
With the matter now safely contained, the Vanderbilts told their daughter what had been happening. Gertrude had been right. Neily had indeed informed his parents he was engaged to Grace Wilson. Alice took her daughter into her confidence and explained to her why Neily’s marriage to Miss Wilson just could not be.
One strike against the Wilsons was that they were good friends of Alva Vanderbilt’s. But that was the least of the problems. A Georgian, Richard T. Wilson had sold cotton blankets and supplies to the Confederate armies during the Civil War, had run cotton to England through the Union blockade, and had been a cotton speculator in London. After the war, he returned to New York with a profiteer’s fortune, purchased Boss Tweed’s Fifth Avenue mansion, and began buying southern railroads at depressed prices. Though not in the same league with the Vanderbilts, he had accumulated a fortune of about $10 million, and his children had married well. His oldest daughter, May, married Ogden Goelet, whose family’s large real-estate holdings in Manhattan were second only to the Astors’. His son Orme married Carrie Astor, Mrs. Astor’s youngest daughter, who had danced the star quadrille at Alva Vanderbilt’s fancy dress ball. Another daughter, Belle, had married the second secretary of the British Embassy in Washington, the son of Lord Herbert and the brother of the earl of Pembroke, and so had entered one of the oldest families of the English aristocracy.
Society called the family the “marrying Wilsons.” A joke that was making the rounds at this time asked: “Why did the Diamond Match Company fail? Answer: Because Mrs. Richard T. Wilson beat them at making matches.”89 “By her matchmaking skill,” the papers reported, “Mrs. Wilson has brought into her family more money than the original J. J. Astor or Commodore Vanderbilt gained. That shows what may be accomplished by a woman without resorting to the business occupations of men. No financier in the world controls as much money as Mrs. Wilson and her son and daughters. No American matron has ever approached her record as a matchmaker. Only Queen Victoria and the Queen of Denmark can compare with her.’90 There were those unkind enough to say that the only thing left for Mrs. Wilson to do was pass away so that her husband could marry Queen Victoria.
After Bill’s death from typhoid in 1892, Grace had been engaged to Cecil Baring, the son of Lord Revelstoke, but she broke off the engagement when he lost most of his fortune in the crash of 1893. When she next set her sights on Neily, it appeared to Alice and Cornelius that this worldly young lady, who had been “out” for several seasons and whom the Prince of Wales called “pet,” certainly was bound and determined to capture a Vanderbilt.
“There is nothing the girl would not do,” Alice told her daughter Gertrude. “She is at least 27…has had unbounded experience. Been engaged several times. Tried hard to marry a rich man. Ran after Jack Astor to such an extent that all New York talked about it. Is so diplomatic that even the men are deadly afraid of her. There is nothing she would stop at. There is no one attentive to her, she thinks. Aside from it being a Vanderbilt, it will be her last chance.” It is, Alice Vanderbilt concluded, shaking her head sadly, “the most dreadful thing of its kind that has ever happened in society.”91
Gertrude was persuaded. “Oh, I pray he has not married her yet,” she wrote in her diary on November 27, 1895, the day before Neily was to sail for Europe. “I fear it is so. His eyes had such a strange look today. He was much more cheerful than he has been for a long time. I feel as if I were living in a book. It’s terrible. Mamma and Papa have hardly slept the last ten nights. Everything is wrong.”92
No wonder Neily looked so cheerful the day before he sailed. Several days after his departure, Grace would be following him to Europe aboard the White Ladye, the yacht belonging to her sister and brother-in-law. Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt were furious. The Wilsons, they swore, had “behaved like liars and cheats”93 when they had told the Vanderbilts that Grace would remain in New York that winter.
The Vanderbilts considered their options. They wrote to a friend in London and told him to meet Neily as he arrived and to take him anywhere as long as it was far from the spell of Miss Wilson. They thought of sending one of Neily’s friends to Europe to meet him, as if by accident, and to bring him home. They planned to wire him to return home immediately, but co
ncluded that he would never comply.
Before they knew it, the Parisian papers reported that Cornelius Vanderbilt III and Grace Wilson were both in Paris and had been seen holding hands in a carriage on the Champs Elysees. Together they went on to Constantinople to visit Grace’s sister Belle and her husband, Michael Herbert. The trip the Vanderbilts had planned for their son was not working out according to plan. In fact, it had backfired.
Two days after Neily’s arrival, the Herberts received a telegram from Cornelius Vanderbilt: “Is my son in Constantinople?”
‘Yes,” the Herberts wired back, “Pera Palace Hotel.’94
Soon cables and letters were flooding into Constantinople from Chauncey Depew and every member of the Vanderbilt family. Gertrude wrote to her brother
Dear Neily,
I can’t say what I want to half the time—the words stick in my throat. Please, please don’t announce your engagement now. You may think because I don’t say much that I don’t really care for you. You may think too that I am as narrow as the others and that I don’t understand your point of view. That is not so. I care so much for you that if I were not absolutely sure that you would not be happy I would take your side against the family. I am not narrow and I know how hard your position is and how desperate you feel, but you are not going to do yourself any good by announcing it, and you certainly are going to do Miss Wilson harm…. When people are sure of their feelings it is not such a hard thing to wait. You are positive you won’t change, you are positive she won’t change—why can’t you wait? You will say your position is a hard one. True, but not as hard as it will be if you announce this engagement. What could be my object in saying all this if I did not care for you. The family have not asked me to speak to you.
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