Fortune's Children

by Arthur T. Vanderbilt

  “Oh, here’s that dreadful man with the megaphone,” Alva exclaimed. “He’s going to tell all the tourists about our staircase. Do listen to what he says; it really is too funny for words.”

  That particular day, the tour guide did not follow his usual script.

  “Here you see before you the new home of a lady who is much in the public eye,” he began, as Alva’s guests squirmed in discomfort. “A society lady who has just been through the divorce courts. She used to dwell in marble halls with Mr. Vanderbilt. Now she lives over the stables with Mr. Belmont.”99

  Nothing bothered Alva. She went right on blazing trails for others to follow.

  Her latest “first” was a new toy she bought for Consuelo, an electric car her daughter could drive around the grounds of Blenheim. At the same time, she imported for herself a French de Dion Bouton automobile for $1,500. Soon Willie Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Fishes, the Astors, the Whitneys, and the Goelets all had their own horseless carriages, to which they gave names such as Red Devil, White Ghost, and Blue Angel, and which they drove up and down Bellevue Avenue to dinner parties. “Lewis, our coachman, was deeply disgusted when ours was brought home and he was instructed to make a place for it in the coach house,” Alva remembered. “And when, as occasionally happened, our auto stalled on Ocean Drive and we had to send for Lewis to come to our rescue with the horses, he was secretly delighted. Every such manifestation of the inferiority of the automobile was a source of gratification to him, and in his eyes at least a vindication of his low opinion of our latest acquisition. No car ever replaced in his affection the horses in our stables.”100

  On September 7, 1899, Alva held the first car race in the United States, a “concours d’élégance” set up on the lawns around Belcourt Castle, an obstacle course planted with dummy nursemaids, policemen, children, and babies in carriages. Donning scarves, veils, gloves, and goggles, Oliver Belmont with Mamie Fish as his copilot of a car with a stuffed eagle on top, Ambassador James W. Gerard with Alva carrying a whip made of daisies, and Harry Lehr and Mrs. Jack Astor in a car smothered with blue hydrangeas lurched around the slalom course at ten miles an hour to the din of explosions, sputters, and coughs. The driver who struck the fewest pedestrians and navigated the course “without driving over the ‘baby’ “101 won the race.

  Automobiles, “bubbles” as they were called, were soon the latest fad of the rich. Willie built a garage for a hundred cars at Idlehour, where he kept his “de Dion Bouton, his Stevens-Duryea, his Hispano-Suiza, his Mercedes, his Bugatti, his Bentley, his Isotta-Fraschini, his Duesenberg, his Rolls-Royce,”102 attended by twenty chauffeurs and mechanics. “We never dreamed,” Mamie Fish commented later, “that cars would ever become popular with everybody.”103

  Despite Oliver’s aversion to entertaining, Alva resumed her role as a leader of society, throwing even more lavish parties than she had as Mrs. Vanderbilt. Pairs of servants dressed in red breeches, silk stockings, and powdered wigs (if they powdered their own hair rather than wearing wigs, the Belmonts paid them an extra five dollars, almost twice their weekly wage) and holding gold candelabra stood on either side of each of the steps as the guests climbed the grand staircase. There Azar, the Belmonts’ faithful six-and-a-half-foot Egyptian majordomo (who slept each night by Oliver’s bedroom door with a dagger between his teeth), “his air of conscious superiority…unrivalled,”104 flanked by two English footmen in court livery, welcomed the guests “with all the pomp and ceremony of a Grand Vizier.”105 The guests would then proceed into the Gothic ballroom where Oliver and Alva, enthroned in huge carved armchairs, greeted the hundreds of guests. Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont did not object when her friends called her Lady Alva.106

  By 1908, at the age of fifty, worn out from trying to keep up with his driving wife, Oliver died. Under his will, which did not fill a single sheet of paper, he gave everything to Alva, making her several mansions and $10 million richer.

  “Let us all make the most of the hour with us,” Alva wrote to a friend. “It can be done, it is hard work at times…but even with a broken heart and all the joys faded out of the picture believe me, we can paint anew the old canvas, put it back in the frame that held the real one, hang it on the wall a little below its old place and write in big letters above it: ‘God’s sun still shines for others; give to them what once was ours.’ “107 To heal the wound of Oliver’s death, Alva set out to “paint anew the old canvas” by doing what she did best: building. Time and again, she proved the wisdom of Harry Lehr’s insight that she “loved nothing better than to be knee-deep in mortar.”108 Her projects included an authentic Chinese teahouse built by the sons of Richard Morris Hunt on the edge of the sea cliff of Marble House; a remodeling of Belcourt Castle, removing the stables on the first floor and replacing them with reception rooms, a hall, and a library; a Georgian home at 477 Madison Avenue; Brookholt, a colonial manor at Hempstead, Long Island; Beacon Towers, a medieval castle at Sands Point, Long Island. (Alva once stayed at Blair Castle in Scotland, the ancient home of the duke of Atholl. “It’s not correct,” she declared, staring at the castle’s architecture. ‘There are a lot of mistakes. My castle at Sandy Point is far more authentic!”109)

  “I was never destined, I think, to stay in any one place,” Alva observed.110

  Her favorite housekeeper, Bridget McGowan, who was a devout Catholic, one day mustered her courage to speak up to Mrs. Belmont.

  “Another house, Mrs. Belmont?” she asked in dismay. “Why don’t you build your mansions in the sky?”

  “Because I am going to live in your mansions when I get there.”

  Bridget looked confused.

  “When I get up there,” the practical Alva continued, pointing heavenward, “I am going to say to St. Peter, ‘Where are Miss McGowan’s mansions? She has been living for years in mine and now I want to live in hers.’”111

  Alva continued her frenetic entertaining at each of her homes. Such was her prestige that an invitation to one of her parties was, as an invitation to Mrs. Astor’s had been, a social triumph.

  Remembering her own beginnings, she helped others get their start in society. William Leeds, “the Tinplate King,” and his wife entertained lavishly at Newport for two summers, but were never accepted by the resort’s elite. When the Drexels leased their mansion to the Leedses for the summer, they were castigated by the daughter of the governor of Rhode Island, who was firmly entrenched as part of Newport’s smart set. “How can you lease to those horrible, vulgar people? Why, the whole house ought to be disinfected after them!”112

  The Leedses found a champion in Alva Belmont, who, as her friends recognized, was never happier than when “she was pitting herself against the rest of the world.”113 One summer morning she called Harry Lehr.

  “I like those Leeds people, and the wife is lovely. I am going to take them up and put an end to this silly nonsense about them.”

  Soon invitations to Alva’s ball “in honour of Mr. and Mrs. William B. Leeds” issued forth. No one dared turn down an invitation to Belcourt Castle and risk Alva’s displeasure. “The light of victory shown in Mrs. Belmont’s eyes,” a guest remembered, as she stood in the armor gallery of Belcourt with Mrs. Leeds, greeting each of her guests.114

  Alva had been convinced that there was “no profession, art or trade that women are working in today as taxing on mental resources as being a leader of society.’ But not long after Oliver’s death, she began to question whether “any woman, no matter what her financial condition of life, can lead an idle existence” and whether all her “occupations, for many years, were worthless.’115

  The catalyst of this out-of-character self-questioning was ex-husband Willie’s remarriage in 1903 to Anne Harriman Sands Rutherfurd, the widow of the brother of Consuelo’s old flame, Winthrop Rutherfurd. Alva hated the new Mrs. Vanderbilt and banned from her parties any friends who had invited her to their homes. It was when the new Mrs. Vanderbilt began to devote her time to charities that Mrs. Belmont, feeling a
n intense rivalry, began to perceive that there was more to being a leader of society than entertaining.

  “I must say that it took me many years to find that there was work for me to do.”116 The good cause that sparked Alva’s enthusiasm was the emerging movement for women’s suffrage.

  Alva “delighted in men’s company,” but, strangely enough—for she certainly had never been dominated by either of her long-suffering husbands—she had, as her daughter Consuelo noted, a deep-seated “hatred for the genus man”117 and for the institution of marriage.

  “You ought to be called the matchmaker, Harry Lehr,” Alva once laughed. “This is the fourth engagement you have engineered this season.”

  “Well, wasn’t it rather clever of me?”

  “You know perfectly well I don’t believe in marriage. I never shall until we have true equality of the sexes. The marriage ceremony itself shows the unfairness of women’s position. When a woman can get up in the pulpit, mumble a lot of words over a couple and say, ‘Go away and sleep together’ then I’ll uphold marriage. Not before.”

  “But you have been married twice, dear lady,” Harry said with a smile.

  “Oh, well, I have had to fall into line with the customs of my world, but that does not mean I agree with them.”118

  Once Alva had a heart-to-heart talk with Harry’s wife, Bessie Lehr.

  “You are not happy with Harry Lehr,” she began. “You ought to leave him. PU help you. I don’t believe in marriage anyway.’

  Bessie declined. Alva shrugged her shoulders.

  “You are the old-fashioned woman, Bessie. I am the woman of the future.”119

  Alva’s views on marriage were shaped by what she saw around her, and perhaps primarily by Willie’s infidelity. “For years I had witnessed the putting aside of wives of wealthy and prominent men after these men had secured recognition for themselves. Not by divorce. They did not want or need divorces. They left their wives to maintain the dignity of their position in the world, such as it was, and to care for their children, while they amused themselves elsewhere. That, they took it upon themselves to decide, was all that a woman was good for after they had finished with her, in ten years or less of married life. All around me were women leading these half lives, practically deserted by their husbands who not only neglected them but insulted them by their open and flagrant and vulgar infidelities….If a man was rich enough and had enough to offer, there were, unfortunately, women willing and waiting to throw themselves at their heads, women who were younger and more attractive to them than the wives of whom they had grown tired.”120

  Alva was never one to accept the way things were. “I was one of the first women in America to dare to get a divorce from an influential man. I had dared to criticize openly an influential man’s behavior.”121 It had not been easy. The experience focused in Alva’s thoughts the great disparity of the sexes and “led up to my own rebellion against the existing order as it affected women.”122

  “Please forgive me,” said James B. Haggin as he arrived late to one of Alva’s receptions at Belcourt, “but my lawyer kept me. I have just been making my will.”

  “Oh, really?” asked Alva. “Well, I hope you are leaving a nice fortune to that sweet wife of yours.”

  “No, why should I? She is no relative. She is only my second wife. As a matter of fact I have left her practically nothing. I am leaving all my money to my own relations, my children by my former marriage. They have the first claim.”

  “What!” cried Alva. “You mean to tell me that you are going to disinherit Pearl after she has been such a wonderful wife to you, and put up with all your moods and your bad temper for years. I have never heard of such a disgraceful thing! Now listen to me: I won’t allow you to do such a dreadful injustice. You can’t die with it on your conscience; why, you would not rest in your grave! Unless you change that will right away I’m going to tell everyone I know about it, and they will all take Pearl’s part. You won’t have a friend left. Now just think it over and send for your lawyer and have him make a new will. It is the only way you can show your wife that you have appreciated all the kindness and affection she has given you.”

  Mr. Haggin fell under this attack. He had a new will drawn up the next day, and sent Alva a bouquet of orchids. Pinned to the flowers was a little note: “Thank you for opening my eyes.”123

  It was not long before Alva abandoned society (a world of women with “sawdust brains” and “wax faces,”124 she once said. “I only identify myself with this set enough to have some influence with them and to get money for causes out of them”125). She took up the cause of suffrage and became a militant feminist, pledging “my life, my interests, my all” to the women’s movement.126 “It was clear to me that I had always been…an unconscious suffragist. I was a born rebel.”127

  “Quite thoughtfully I enlisted my best in the cause of equal suffrage,” Alva recalled. “I knew that any woman who is exceptional in wealth, social position, or unusual ability has many ways of achievement. I have entered into the battle for woman suffrage, fighting, as best I may, for what seems to me the most worthy cause at hand. Not all the warriors of the world who have couched a lance have been men.”128

  When Alva determined to give a cause her “all” and her “best,” she meant her all and best. Her ferocious energy galvanized the women’s movement. “The Bengal Tiger,” they called her. The first suffrage meeting Alva attended was held in a small rented room of the Martha Washington Hotel in New York. In attendance were fifteen women. Alva was dismayed. “The public,” she told the gathered women, “knows nothing of this agitation carried on in such an obscure way, and wouldn’t be moved if it did know. Something must be done at once.”129 The time had come “to take this world muddle that men have created and…turn it into an ordered, peaceful, happy abiding place for humanity.”130

  She attended suffragist conventions, worked at the headquarters of the Equal Suffrage League in New York City, gave speeches, and wrote articles (“It is in the power of women to free women, the most exalted task the world has ever set, and the achievement will glorify forever the sisterhood of a new era which heralds a complete unity of the women of the future”131). She fostered picketing (once criticized for encouraging a picket of the White House, Alva Belmont replied that “the sentimental ladies and gentlemen who are so afraid lest we fatigue the President are urged to remember that we ourselves are very, very tired, and perhaps the sentimentalists will confer some pity on the faithful women who have struggled for three-quarters of a century for democracy in their own nation”132). She helped write a suffragist operetta, leased the seventeenth floor in an office building at 505 Fifth Avenue so that the National American Woman Suffrage Association could move its headquarters from Ohio to New York City, and spearheaded campaigns against congressmen who opposed suffrage (“I shall consider you false to our interests,” she wrote to one congressman seeking reelection, “and shall not hesitate to make the fact known in important places”133). She bought a historic mansion in Washington, D.C., to serve as the headquarters for the National Woman’s party and served as its president; in addition, she organized the Political Equality Association and also became its first president. A born leader, she took command of the movement. Though some were put off by her flamboyance and militancy, the women followed, even when she insisted that each agitated suffragette take a formula she called Victory Laxative Tablets once a day, the secret formula for which she had obtained from a German doctor.134

  Alva broke with the peaceful, conservative faction of the movement, the National American Woman Suffrage Association led by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, to head the National Woman’s party, a group of more radical feminists who carried blazing banners of purple and gold, picketed state legislatures, Congress, and the White House, went on hunger strikes, and were happy to be arrested.

  “Brace up, my dear,” Alva consoled one weary lady. “Just pray to God: She will help you.”135

  As those who knew Alva woul
d have expected, her strategy for furthering the cause was direct: a total women’s boycott. “The time will come,” she believed, “when women should and will withdraw from every sort of activity in which they are now associated with men, form themselves into a solid phalanx, bound together with the steel cable of a common purpose, and say to the men of America: ‘Until you give us the ballot, we will not marry you; we will not work in your places of business; we will have nothing to do with you, socially, industrially—any way.’ Woman’s nature enables her to get along better without man than man can get along without woman. She could stand the strain long enough to bring him to her just terms…. Let her withdraw from the church, the world’s greatest civilizing influence. The church cannot stand without her…. Then, let her walk out of the hospitals. A man is almost of no use in attending the sick. About all he can do is to carry a stretcher. Nursing is essentially a woman’s work. Let women do all of these things and I ask you, as a man, what would happen?”136 With men unable to stand the strain, Alva believed, the battle would be over in short order.137

  “This infusion of power into the movement that had been dragging along for half a century,” the New York Times wrote of Alva’s suffrage work, “has resulted in an astonishing extension of vigor and energy and the campaign this winter will be something the like of which has never been seen before.”138

  If Alva’s society friends were shocked to see her lending her support to further the rights of women, they were horrified when they learned that she planned to open up Marble House to a suffrage conference. “Families are rather apt to make things difficult for their younger and unconventional members. Mine did…when I went into the woman suffrage movement. I was quite literally an outcast with my family and most of my friends.” But guess what? “With me it made no difference.”139

  The last party Marble House had seen was the ball for the duke of Marlborough on August 28, 1895. At the end of that season, the mansion had been closed up and never reopened. Now, fourteen years later, Alva hung its marble walls with the great purple and gold banners of the suffrage movement declaring FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE, the last words of Susan B. Anthony, which Alva had selected as the battle cry of the movement. On August 24, 1909, she opened the great bronze doors to her fellow suffragettes. To raise money for the cause, she charged five dollars for admission to the mansion. For one dollar, a woman could enter the gates and walk around the grounds and sit under the tent to hear the speeches.