Requests came to the new owners from all over the country for a mantel, a door, a cabinet, or some other keepsake. There was some talk of removing the mansion in parts and reassembling it on Long Island as a country estate. But finally, on March 1, 1926, the wreckers’ ball swung into the limestone château, and six weeks later not a trace remained.
4.
Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont had been far away when the house that had changed her life, and the standing of the Vanderbilt family, was reduced to rubble.40 With her battle won when the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution became law on August 26, 1920, providing that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” Alva had decided to return to the favorite country of her youth, France.
After the Civil War, “I was broken hearted that I must leave France. I was in sympathy with everything there. Its musical language had become mine. I loved its culture, art, people, customs.”41 With Willie living there, the country had not been big enough for both of them. Now, with Willie dead and with the suffrage battle won, Alva decided she would go and live in France to be nearer her daughter, Consuelo. Despite all of Alva’s vexatious suffrage activities, Consuelo recognized that her mother’s life was “a lonely one,”42 and that she welcomed the opportunity to grow closer to her daughter whose life she once had so disastrously dominated.
After their marriage in 1895, the duke and duchess of Marlborough had journeyed to England, that ‘land of half-tones and shades, of mists and fleecy clouds, of damp and rain”43 as Consuelo described it, and settled in Blenheim Palace, which, despite its breathtaking size and ancient grandeur, Consuelo found to be “devoid of the beauty and comforts my own home had provided”44 The duke wasted not a moment in remedying these deficiencies. Growing up a Vanderbilt, Consuelo had seen how people would take advantage of her. While shopping in Newport with her governess, “when Marble House was mentioned as our address, the shopkeeper informed me he had mistaken the price he had given me and added a good 50 per cent.”45 But even Consuelo was shocked by her husband’s spending spree. Although Willie Vanderbilt had told the young newlyweds to buy whatever they wanted at his expense, Consuelo “was surprised by the excess of household and personal linens, clothes, furs and hats my husband was ordering,”46 in addition to jewels to replace the heirlooms Marlborough’s family had been forced to sell over the years to maintain Blenheim, the crates of antiques and art treasures the duke was buying to replace those that had been sold, and an extravagant crimson state coach. One lord visiting Blenheim, noting the recent restoration of the grounds, turned to another guest and remarked that “there are uses for American heiresses and their money after all!”47
The passing years had done nothing to bring the couple closer together. After Consuelo had “done my duty”48 and given birth to two sons, “a horrible loneliness encompassed me.”49 So far from family and friends, she soon wearied of a life of formal protocol, of changing her clothes four times a day for different occasions, of interminable dinners during which “as a rule neither of us spoke a word,”50 of walking on “an endlessly spread red carpet.”51 Even more distressing, Marlborough insulted Consuelo “in every possible way” and came to find her “physically repulsive to him.”52 “The problem created by the marriage of two irreconcilable characters is a psychological one which deserves sympathy as well as understanding,” Consuelo reflected many years later. “In the hidden reaches where memory probes lie sorrows too deep to fathom.”53
In 1906, after eleven years of a difficult marriage, the duke and duchess separated, and Consuelo, still in her twenties, went to London to live at Sunderland House, a Tudor mansion Willie had bought for her. “It is very sad about Consuelo, is it not?” Alice Vanderbilt coyly wrote to her daughter, Gertrude. ‘Of course the English will point to the example of her Mother and Father which is unfortunate as that does give M. [Marlborough] a leg to stand on….It’s excessively sad and, as C. will be always an object of observation under any circumstances, the outlook is unpleasant. Her Father will not listen to there being any divorce; queer is it not after his own experience!…The real reason seems to be that she is physically repulsive to him, and that he cannot bear to be near her. What her charges are I don’t know. I heard the final break came when she said about two weeks ago she was going to Paris to get her winter things. Go and stay, he said. She came and saw her Father who went immediately to London and arranged matters. So of course this gives a chance to say that M. wants the separation, that W.K. offered untold sums to stop it. I am repeating gossip, but strange to say I have not a word to say about her charges….”54
By this time, Alva’s ideas about the oppression of women were jelling; she now realized full well that she never should have forced Consuelo into marriage, not because the marriage to the duke was a loveless one, but rather because marriage to any man would be intolerable until there was equality of the sexes.
While Alva had been spearheading the suffrage movement in the United States, Consuelo had formed the Women’s Municipal party in Britain to help women get elected to municipal councils, and from these positions attempt to do something about the conditions under which women worked in sweatshops. She had also developed houses for prisoners’ wives where women were given employment as seamstresses and laundresses while their husbands were in prison, and hostels to provide decent lodging for working women.
Consuelo found herself possessed by “a perverse desire to condone all men’s errors” when she was with her mother, always finding the extremes of “female self-sufficiency” advocated by Alva “somewhat ridiculous,” as she railed against the male sex “as if their presence in this world were altogether superfluous,”55 but on the stump herself, Consuelo delighted her mother. “Many persons wonder why wealthy women want the ballot,” Consuelo once told one of Alva’s gatherings of suffragettes at Marble House. “There would be little wonder if they knew the story of women whose sons-in-law have squandered the last penny. Legislation is the only protection for the wealthy mothers-in-law of many a young spendthrift. It is the only way in which they can save themselves from ruin….Women sorely need the ballot here, or rather the country needs women voters. Votes for women is a movement for the uplift of the sex, and I am for it, heart and soul.”56
Unlike her mother, Consuelo had not concluded that marriage was intolerable, and on July 4, 1921, married Lieutenant Colonel Louis-Jacques Balsan, a retired officer of the French Army, with whom she lived in Paris and found great happiness. Two years later, “my mother came from America to be with me; her sympathy was precious”57 Alva and Consuelo reunited, growing closer than they had ever been, “each sharing the other’s interests”58 spending together “many pleasant hours.”59
Consuelo knew that her mother’s decision “to live in France might be actuated by more than just the desire to be near me; always an inveterate builder, she welcomed, I knew, the opportunity to build a new home in a new country, being really happy only when thus employed.”60
“I was never destined to stay in any one place,” Alva said.61 “Perhaps it is the Huguenot blood in us, perhaps the love most Americans feel for France, but always the members of my family seemed to drift back to Paris. Both of my sisters spent the remainder of their lives in Paris. Very likely I shall do the same. France is now my daughter’s adopted country, and always it has been a second home to me.”62
She closed up her Georgian home at 477 Madison Avenue in New York City, Beacon Towers on Long Island, and Marble House in Newport (she had sold Belcourt Castle in 1916 to Oliver Belmont’s brother, Perry), and in 1923, at the age of seventy, moved to France.
Consuelo had been right; Alva divided her time among a town house in Paris, a villa on the Riviera at Eze-sur-Mer, and a fifteenth-century château at Augerville-la-Rivière, which her secretary described as an idyllic retreat with “a bright sun, a delicious breeze, and no sound here save what the breeze makes in the leaves overhead, the in
sects’ murmur, the swans’ occasional wing-flapping, and the lapping of the water.”63 Swans glided after the rowboat on the nearby quiet river and tame deer came to the château at twilight for bread and chocolates. There, Alva at last seemed to have found contentment. “There are days when years mean nothing, the sun is so vivid, so warm, the sky so blue, the trees so strong and green and the air so full of life. We are…just children, careless with joy, knowing nothing, forgetting to feel, smiling not knowing why”64 But never, of course, was she content enough to stop building. There, at her château, Alva “proceeded to let her fancy roam, creating improvements.”
Walking in the garden with Consuelo, she suddenly stopped.
“This river is not wide enough,” she said pointing to the watercourse that went past the château. “It should be twice as large.”
The next time Consuelo visited, an army of workmen had already widened the river.
“This is all wrong,” she said another time of a courtyard that was sanded rather than paved. “It should be paved.”65
Soon paving stones were ariving from Versailles to cover the courtyard.
Alva might grow old. Her short hair, which was no longer red, was “turning gradually to the color of faded American Beauty roses and finally to a rich purple.”66 Her interests had turned from society to suffrage. But she never changed, and certainly never mellowed.
Alva was, if anything, direct. She was “not one thing to your face and another behind your back,”67 Bessie Lehr had commented. As Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, she had funded the Seaside Home for Children, which was located near her Long Island country estate, Idelhour, and at the request of its director, Bishop William T. Manning of the powerful Episcopal diocese of New York, had served on its board of trustees, always contributing generously to all his fund-raising efforts. As Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, she had received a form letter from Bishop Manning requesting her usual donation. She noticed that her name no longer appeared on the letterhead as a member of the board of trustees. Why had her name been dropped? Alva demanded of the Protestant clergyman. After beating around the bush, the bishop told her that it did not seem proper for the list to be headed by a divorcée.
“I suppose it’s perfectly proper, though, for you to accept my tainted money,” Alva snapped. “To spare your future qualms of conscience, Γ11 give it to organizations more concerned with charity than appearances.”68
Some years later, when Bishop Manning was sure she had cooled off, he approached her again, seeking a contribution toward the completion of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. “I am still a divorced woman” Alva huffed.69 She at that time had just received a cable from her grandson, Consuelo’s son John, the marquess of Blandford, asking her to stand with King George as godparent to her first great-grandson, who was to be christened by the archbishop of Canterbury. “Bishop Manning repudiates me and accepts my gift,” Alva acidly noted, “but the Archbishop of Canterbury permits me to stand with his monarch at a christening”70
The first to marry a Vanderbilt. The first society lady to seek a divorce and not lose her social standing. The first to advocate the rights of women. Alva continued to do just as she pleased, adding to her long list of firsts when she was pictured in magazine advertisements endorsing Pond’s Cold Cream, her accompanying testimonial signed “Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont.” The money she received for these ads, and others for a Simmons bed, was donated to women’s causes. Soon, other society ladies were featured in advertisements in the pages of popular magazines.
Guests at Alva’s French homes learned to close their ears to her continuous bickering with her servants, as she complained constantly and upbraided them whenever a plate did not reach the table noiselessly. Once at a luncheon party she gave when she was well into her seventies, she broke into a fit of rage, picked up a plate, and threw it at Azar, her faithful Egyptian head butler. One of her guests immediately left the table and went home, determined never again to be around such a volatile hostess. Soon the guest received a bouquet from Alva and then a telephone call.
“I know there’s no excuse for my behavior, but Azar drives me out of my mind. The man is a sex maniac. He keeps my maids in a constant turmoil with his advances. You didn’t see it, but during lunch today he pinched the waitress while she was serving me. There are days and days I have to keep Azar locked up in a closet. If I don’t he’ll turn my house into a harem.”
“Why don’t you just fire him?” the amazed guest asked Alva.
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. He was so devoted to my husband. I’ve soothed Azar’s ruffled feelings by giving him an extra week’s pay. That will hold him until the next seizure.”71
Alva also complained about her children in front of her guests, talking of Consuelo’s “unloving attitude, her spinelessness about men, her indifference to losing her nationality, first on marriage to a British subject and later on marriage to a French subject”72 She took a special delight in needling her youngest son, Harold—the Professor, she called him—who had invented contract bridge. ‘The Professor goes crazy when I’m his partner, but he cannot make me obey his hidebound rules. As long as I pay my losses, I’ll bid any way I please.”73 Only her handsome, carefree son Willie K. avoided her censure, because, as she explained, “he’s the only Vanderbilt in captivity who ever got over his accident of birth.”74
Her houseguests themselves often learned to be on their best behavior when staying with Alva. After one guest had left, Alva’s maids found that from smoking in bed, his sheets had several holes in them.
“Very good,” Alva said. “Have them washed and then just draw the holes together with the coarsest darning cotton you can find. When he comes again, see that he gets them on his bed.”
Several days into his next visit, he spoke to Alva about a problem he had encountered.
“Everything is so perfect here. You have such wonderful linen, Mrs. Belmont, that I think I ought to tell you that it is not being taken care of as it should be. You ought really to see the sheets on my bed!”
“Ah, yes, those sheets!” Alva drawled. “You’re quite right. Those are the sheets you burned holes in with your cigarettes. I had them darned especially for your personal use.”75
Alva once entertained a houseguest who did nothing but get in her way, trying to redecorate rooms in her house, and giving orders to her gardeners. By the end of the first week of a two-week visit, Alva was desperate.
“If that woman does not leave,” she told a friend, “I shall go mad!”
When the guest returned from a walk, she found Alva standing in the guest room with several workmen. The rug had been rolled back, and all the furniture moved to one corner, as they stood in dismay watching water dripping from the ceiling into several buckets set on the floor.
“That leak again!” Alva cried. “And the plumber not even in town—gone to San Raphael for a funeral and won’t be back for three days. We can’t do a thing until he comes back!”
The guest looked around the room for her belongings.
‘Tour things?” Alva asked. “I have had them taken to the hotel where I engaged a room for you. I could not—I simply could not let you stay in this room. For goodness’ sake, Jean,” she ordered one of her servants, “get another pail!”76
Jean had spent the previous hour sponging water onto the ceiling, spilling it onto the floor, and positioning buckets to set the stage for the peremptory departure of the troublesome houseguest.
When she was almost eighty, Alva decided that she wanted “to take a last look around,”77 and invited her children Consuelo and Willie K. to join her and several friends on a seven-week tour of Egypt. The group went up the Nile aboard houseboats and toured the Valley of Kings with Howard Carter, the man who had discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb.
Soon thereafter, she was increasingly troubled by her loss of energy and strength, though never her spirit. “During the long hours of the night when I do not sleep, I realize what I am unable to do out here, it is dreadful to grow old, to know
that the body stops the will, I never expected this. I have been so strong. I am timid about overdoing myself. I want to stay a little longer, so much is still to be done.”78
Knowing that time was getting short, she finally began to yield to her children’s arguments and one by one sold some of her homes. In August 1923, she sold her Georgian town house at 477 Madison Avenue in New York City for $500,000 and presented the collection of rare armor from its gallery where she had held so many receptions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Next to go, in 1927, was Beacon Towers, her stone castle at Sands Point on Long Island Sound, sold to the press mogul William Randolph Hearst. An auction in January of 1928 at the American Art Galleries disposed of some of her French furniture and interior decorations, with the highest prices paid for a Brussels tapestry ($5,000), a large Kermanshah carpet ($5,400), and an eleven-by-sixteen-foot Persian carpet ($1,500). A collection of her curios and jewelry was bought by John Ringling, the circus maestro, and graced Ca’ d’ Zan, his extravagant Venetian palazzo in Sarasota, Florida.
But she could not bear to part with Marble House, even though she had not seen it for more than a decade and had not lived in it for more than several weeks during the last twenty years. Marble House “was like a fourth child to me, and I felt, and feel, that it properly belongs to me, and to my children after me.”79 Her children made it clear to her that none of them wanted it because of the great expense of keeping it up, but nevertheless she provided in her will that it would pass to her youngest son, Harold, who had enjoyed it for more summers than her older children. But finally she relented, and in 1932 sold it to Frederick H. Prince, the head of Armour Company, for the Depression price of $100,000—less than one hundreth of what Willie had paid for Alva’s thirty-fifth birthday present.80
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