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(#litres_trial_promo) Another male guest, Augustus Gurney, never managed to resolve his outfit crisis. He went home in the middle of the ball and changed, disappearing as a Moldavian chieftain and re-appearing as a Turkish pasha.
It was, said Alva modestly, ‘the most brilliant ball ever given in New York’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was certainly one of the more surreal. Don Carlos chatted away over supper with Little Bo Peep; Mary Stuart was seen in conversation with Neapolitan fishermen and a Capuchin monk; a plethora of Hungarian hussars mingled with several representatives of the French Bourbons; and the Cornelius Vanderbilts stood for both past and future with Cornelius as Louis XVI and Alice as ‘Electric Light’, in a costume that intermittently lit up, courtesy of batteries secreted in her pockets. Curiously, both Alva and Mrs Astor appeared as Venetian noblewomen, and were seen chatting amiably and publicly on the stairs. Alva’s dress was made of white satin embroidered in gold, with a velvet mantle, and a diadem of diamonds. Many of the costumes, including Lady Mandeville’s as Queen Maria Theresa of Austria, came posthaste from Paris. Perhaps most interesting of all, William K. was dressed as François I in doublet and hose, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the small princely figure whom Richard Morris Hunt once inserted into his earliest designs for the Supper Room.
That evening, the involvement of the guests in the success of the party went further than turning up in elaborate costumes and acknowledging that the Vanderbilts had ‘arrived’. The other huge compliment paid to the hosts was the trouble taken over the quadrilles, which became the high point of the evening. Quadrilles were square dances in five movements which had become elaborate fixtures at society balls, for they were danced in costumes designed round a theme, and took weeks of organisation and rehearsal by teams of guests beforehand. The six quadrilles at the Vanderbilt ball exceeded anything that had ever been seen before, danced by over a hundred of the Vanderbilts’ friends.
According to one authority, ‘the chief attraction was the “hobby horse quadrille,” for which the dancers wore costumes that made them look as if they were mounted on horses. The life-size hobby horses took two months to construct and were covered with genuine leather hides and flowing manes. Tails were attached to the waists of the dancers and false legs placed on the outside of richly embroidered horse blankets, giving the illusion that the dancers were mounted; “the deception”, one observer enthused, “was quite perfect”.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Ward McAllister organised the Mother Goose Quadrille himself (another compliment to the hosts) which involved participation from Jack and Jill, Little Red-Riding Hood, Bo-Peep, Goody Two-Shoes, Mary, Mary Quite Contrary, and My Pretty Maid. He was forced to concede, however, that it was the Star Quadrille containing the ‘youth and beauty of the city’ which was the most brilliant, for all the young ladies wore electric lights in their hair which produced ‘a fairy and elf-like appearance to each of them’.
(#litres_trial_promo) As Alva put it later, the 1883 Vanderbilt ball ‘marked an epoch in the social history of the city’. As well as consolidating the position of the Vanderbilts, it marked a change of pace in two other ways. Alva, ever mindful of maximum visibility, was the first hostess to allow a full report of the ball to be syndicated to the newspapers through the New York World and to allow reporters to wander through the house earlier in the day. It was one of the World’s earliest society scoops and set a precedent for press coverage of similar events in the following decades. The paper calculated that the ball cost $155,730 for the costumes, $11,000 for the flowers, $65,270 for champagne and music, and $4,000 for hairdressers. This meant that Mrs William K. Vanderbilt had also set a vertiginous new standard for just the kind of social expenditure that had come so close to defeating the Smiths when they returned from France to America.
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When writing her memoirs in later life, Consuelo could recall very little of her early childhood. She remembered nothing of the ugly brownstone building where she was born. No-one registered her birth either, an oversight that subsequently caused a great deal of bureaucratic trouble. She moved into 660 Fifth Avenue with her parents in 1883, just before she was six, so the childhood she recollected began in surroundings of extraordinary affluence. She does not seem to have been present at the 1883 ball (unlike Cousin Gertrude who was two years older and went for part of the evening, dressed as a tulip). She remembered other parties, however: ‘How gay were the gala evenings when the house was ablaze with lights and Willie [her younger brother] and I, crouching on hands and knees behind the balustrade of the musicians’ gallery, looked down on a festive scene below – the long dinner table covered with a damask cloth, a gold service and red roses, the lovely crystal and china, the grown-ups in their fine clothes … the ladies a-glitter with jewels seated on high-backed tapestry chairs behind which stood footmen in knee-breeches.’
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At other moments, there were distinct disadvantages to living like a princess in a neo-Gothic palace, which, like many houses built primarily for entertaining and display, could feel gloomy and frightening when no-one else was there. The fact that the stairway was carved in Caen stone was quite irrelevant when the princess happened to be cursed with a neo-Gothic imagination. ‘I still remember how long and terrifying was that dark and endless upward sweep as, with acute sensations of fear, I climbed to my room every night, leaving below the light and its comforting rays. For in that penumbra there were spirits lurking to destroy me, hands stretched out to touch me and sighs that breathed against my cheek.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Life in an urban chateau had its compensations, however. On the floor beside her bedroom there was a playroom big enough for bicycling with friends. There were horse-drawn sleigh rides in the streets of New York in winter, trips to the family box at the Metropolitan Opera to hear Adelina Patti sing, and weekly classes at Dodworth’s Dancing Academy marking her out as a junior member of New York’s elect from birth.
Alva always said that she loved motherhood. She remembered a sense of religious joy when she discovered she was to have her first baby. If it ever became fashionable to decry such feelings, she wrote, she would not join in. ‘So long as the world endures there will be women who will quiver to these emotions … no matter what freedom of expression is finally attained.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Consuelo’s birth in 1877 was followed by the arrival of her brothers William Kissam II (known as Willie K. Jr) in 1878, and Harold Stirling in 1884. Alva prided herself on the fact that, unlike members of the English aristocracy, she did not hand her children over to the care of others. ‘I dedicated the best years of my life to rearing and influencing and developing those three little beings who were my links with the future. I gave them an exclusive devotion. I considered their welfare before all else. I lived in their lives and cultivated no other apart from them for myself.’
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In 1909 Alva announced that she was writing a book about her child-rearing methods, and though it never materialised, she told the New York City Journal: ‘[My children] were not put away to sleep in a room with the nurse; they slept in my room. The nursery was next to my room, and when they were older they slept there, but with the door open to I could look after them, and the smallest one slept in my room. I nursed all my children, though I don’t know that anyone is particularly interested in that.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1917, however, she had come to believe that excessive pre-occupation with her children had been misguided, and that mothers should not sacrifice themselves as she had done. ‘I want to say unhesitatingly that I believe this was wrong. I deplore the eternal sacrifice of women for another or others. Motherhood and Individuality should not conflict. Motherhood ought not to kill Personality in the mother and Personality in the mother ought not to injure the child.’
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However much Alva enjoyed motherhood she was also ambivalent about it – largely on the grounds that many women became mothers just at the moment they were finding themselves. ‘It is a formative time for them so far as intellect goes … [A young mother is] in a sense a diamond already cut and ready to sparkle as she can find the light. Yet for the sake of developing the unknown quantity which her children are she gradually slips back into the darkness.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Alva always felt that the equation between the perfect woman and virtuous female martyr was wrong. ‘The whole history of most women’s lives is summed in self-sacrifice. If it is not for a child whose future is uncertain then it is for an aged parent whose life is done. Again and again people have pointed out to me some splendid woman who was burying her talent under care for a decrepit relative. “Isn’t her life beautiful!” they would exclaim. No, it is not beautiful. I think it is disgusting. I think it is wicked,’
(#litres_trial_promo) she told Sara Bard Field.
In Alva’s case, talk of immolating maternal self-sacrifice should be treated with caution. This was not modern hands-on motherhood. Like other affluent households in New York in the 1880s, 660 Fifth Avenue had nursemaids, nannies, housemaids, governesses and cooks. The fact that Consuelo’s earliest years were so unmemorable has much to do with the disciplined and dull world of an affluent nineteenth-century nursery where the emphasis was on avoiding undue stimulation, building up the infant’s strength and avoiding infection. Even when her children were very young, Alva was occupied with other matters: designing and decorating houses with Richard Morris Hunt, ensuring the Vanderbilts were behaving like Medicis, taking her rightful place at the apex of New York society, as well as the complex task of managing two large households.
There is also no sign that Alva’s personality was in any way dimmed by maternity, though as each child left the nursery she certainly exercised an increasing degree of control over its life. Alva saw a direct relationship between building houses and building children: ‘If one can judge of her own self I would unhesitatingly say that the two strongest characteristics in me are the constructive and the maternal. They are or ought to be associated.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Children were, of course, the greater responsibility for here one was building character. Alva’s view of maternal responsibility was first, that the mother was directly responsible for developing the character of each child; second, that each child should be treated as an individual with an independent mind; and third, that it was the parent’s responsibility to ‘guide’ the child to the right course in life, based upon (and this was the rub) parental assessment of the child’s individual characteristics.
This view of maternal responsibility was, in many ways, an extension of the way Alva had described how she played with her dolls as a child (‘I loved dolls … I took them very seriously. I put into their china or sawdust bodies all my own feelings.’
(#litres_trial_promo)) She frequently expected Consuelo to behave with the submission of a doll, a ‘china body’ on to which Alva projected all her own feelings. Consuelo was to be the princess in Sleeping Beauty’s palace. ‘Gertrude and I were heiresses,’ Consuelo once told Louis Auchincloss. ‘There seemed never to have been a time when this was not made entirely clear.’
(#litres_trial_promo) She was even dressed to stand apart by Alva, forced into ‘period costume’ for parties and sniggered at by other children. However, this often clashed with Alva’s other view, which she held with equal conviction, that her children should be independent-minded individuals – like her, in other words. This contradiction at the heart of her approach to child-rearing was frequently irreconcilable and posed a very difficult conundrum for her offspring, especially Consuelo. Should they please her by submitting to her as doll-children? Or would Alva be more contented if they showed signs of independence? It was often very difficult to know.
In practice, submission to Alva’s will generally took priority. It was, in any case, an age when inculcating obedience in children was widely considered a major parental responsibility, the first step in developing moral character. Childcare manuals of the period recommended that obedience training should start as early as twelve or fourteen months to encourage ‘self-control and self-denial, and advancing a step towards the mastery of [the child’s] passions’.
(#litres_trial_promo) If obedience was important in boys, it was essential in girls. ‘We were the last to be subjected to a harsh parental discipline,’ Consuelo wrote. ‘In my youth, children were to be seen but not heard; implicit obedience was an obligation from which one could not conscientiously escape.’
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Even by the standards of the day, however, Alva was a ferocious disciplinarian, administering corporal punishment with a riding-whip for the most minor acts of delinquency. When Alva was a child, her mother’s whippings had had little effect. But a less headstrong personality like Consuelo could still feel the impact in old age. ‘Such repressive measures bred inhibitions and even now I can trace their effects,’
(#litres_trial_promo) she wrote later. Most difficult of all, perhaps, was the stomach-knotting tension induced by a mother with a volatile and ferocious temper: ‘Her dynamic energy and her quick mind, together with her varied interests, made her a delightful companion. But the bane of her life and of those who shared it was a violent temper that, like a tempest, at times engulfed us all.’
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While Alva certainly took time to be with her children it was not quite the unalloyed pleasure for her offspring that she seemed to imagine. ‘The hour we spent in our parents’ company after the supper we took with our governess at six can in no sense be described as the Children’s Hour,’ wrote her daughter. ‘No books or games were provided; we sat and listened to the conversation of the grown-ups and longed for the release that their departure to dress for dinner would bring.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Alva lunched with her children almost every day for seventeen years, refusing (or so she later claimed) all social invitations in the middle of the day so that she could be available to her children. While she maintained that these lunches were the ‘children’s dining table’, an ‘open forum’ at which ‘everyone’s opinion was gravely received’ even when there were adult guests present, Consuelo remembered longing to express a view but invariably being repressed by a look from Mamma.
Having one’s character developed by Alva could also be a brutal experience. ‘Sitting up straight was one of the crucial tests of ladylike behaviour. A horrible instrument was devised which I had to wear when doing my lessons. It was a steel rod which ran down my spine and was strapped at my waist and over my shoulders – another strap went around my forehead to the rod. I had to hold my book high when reading, and it was almost impossible to write in so uncomfortable a position.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Later, however, Consuelo attributed her famous straight back in old age to this dreadful device.
One result of Alva’s passionate involvement in her children’s upbringing was that, unlike cousin Gertrude who went to school, Consuelo was educated almost entirely at home so that Alva could oversee her doll-child’s educational curriculum. Alva wanted to educate her sons at home too but lost the battle. ‘I regretted very much the sending of my sons to preparatory schools. Personally I did not see the necessity of it. When parents have the intelligence required to guide and direct youth, I think it is better for children to stay at home as long as possible. I neither appreciate nor approve the theory held by many as to the value of outside influence in the rearing of children.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In particular Alva objected to the ‘one-size-fits-all approach to education she felt had failed her badly as a child. It is likely that William K. was just as certain that only boarding school stood four square between his sons and total domination by their mother.
Consequently, Consuelo bore the brunt of Alva’s educational experiments and maternal philosophy. Alva insisted on proficiency in foreign languages, an accomplishment that was also encouraged by William K. ‘At the age of eight I could read and write in French, German and English. I learned them in that order, for we spoke French with our parents, my father having been partly educated in Geneva,’
(#litres_trial_promo) wrote Consuelo. She was made to recite long poems in French and German to her parents every Saturday so that by the time she was ten she was capable of reciting ‘Les Adieux de Marie Stuart’ at a solfège class concert with such emotion that she burst into tears and was thrown a bouquet.
While instruction was given by tutors and governesses, Alva kept a very close eye on her curriculum, saying that she ‘knew the books from which [Consuelo] was being mentally fed as I knew the food that nourished her body.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Alva later told the New City Journal that Consuelo often had three governesses at any one time, but ‘it was a great nuisance to have them around’.
(#litres_trial_promo) At the same time, Consuelo’s education as a linguist did represent genuine encouragement of individual talent, though it was along strictly approved lines. She showed an early talent for languages and everything was done to promote it; and when she occasionally did something well enough to please Alva, the praise was worth having.
Physical independence was also encouraged. At Idle Hour, no-one could have been less like a conventional nineteenth-century mother than Alva. The children crabbed, fished and experienced a taste of the autonomy Alva enjoyed as a child, though even here she could not resist instruction. She had a pond specially constructed so that they could learn to sail and she could dispense geography lessons:
As the knowledge of navigation increased a mast and sail were added. The row boat, like a caterpillar, put on wings and became a butterfly of the water, a sail boat. With this craft and the pond we developed the Geography of the whole world. Now we were going from Dover to Calais on the choppy Channel. Now we were coming from New York to Liverpool on the perilous Ocean. William, the elder boy, by continuous exertion rocked the boat so successfully that we believed in storms and what they could accomplish for we were all pitched into the pond … no young friend who ever visited us met me at the luncheon table attired in her or his clothes.
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A governess was also pitched into this pond by the children, who promptly received one of Alva’s more memorable thrashings. In spite of her impulse to control every aspect of her children’s lives, Alva could be great fun, and courageous if things went wrong. At least once she prevented a serious accident when she jumped up and seized the bridle of a galloping pony as it bolted with Consuelo towards a water hydrant.
In a household where the children were waited on hand and foot, Alva thought it necessary to provide a play house where they could acquire some self-reliance. It was called ‘La Récréation’ and was one aspect of childhood which Alva and Consuelo later agreed had been a success. ‘The German governess and my daughter made preserves there and did a great deal of cookery. In fact, they superintended the cooking while my eldest son was the carpenter and waiter. I and my friends often went there for afternoon tea. It was prepared and served by the children and was most excellent,’
(#litres_trial_promo) wrote Alva. These hours in La Récréation gave Consuelo an early taste of the pleasure of running houses where she was in control. ‘This playhouse was an old bowling alley, and when my mother handed it over to us she insisted as a matter of training that we should do all the housework ourselves,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Utterly happy, we would cook our meal, wash the dishes and then stroll home by the river in the cool of the evening.’
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The children were also given a garden where they grew flowers and vegetables which they were encouraged to take to the nearby Trinity Seaside Home for convalescent children, Alva’s first philanthropic undertaking. She told Mary Young that she started the home after watching her delicate eldest son grow into a robust boy and grasped the extent to which wealth had assisted his recovery from precarious health in infancy. Realising that poor mothers lost children because they could not afford the necessary care, Alva purchased land and built a home where convalescing children from poor homes were looked after by Protestant sisters. This was also Consuelo’s first exposure to the lives of those less fortunate than herself.
Consuelo’s nurse ‘as near a saint as it is possible for a human being to be’,
(#litres_trial_promo) was another person responsible for drawing back the curtain a little further so that one of the most protected little girls in America had a glimpse of how other people lived. In conversation with a workman from Bohemia responsible for cutting the grass at Idle Hour, Consuelo discovered that he had a crippled child. Encouraged by her nurse, she loaded up her pony-cart with presents and went over to see the child, an experience which forced her to realise for the first time ‘the inequalities of human destinies with a vividness that never left me’.
(#litres_trial_promo) At other times, the children sold the vegetables they grew at La Récréation to their mother in an exercise in elementary capitalism: ‘I know that they have grown up to profit by these lessons,’
(#litres_trial_promo) wrote Alva. In one respect she was right. Behind her back her children gave themselves elementary lessons in gambling. ‘My brother Willie, who was of an impatient nature, would pull up the potatoes long before they were ripe,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Our earliest bets were made on the number we would find on each root.’
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In 1885 Consuelo’s grandfather, William Henry Vanderbilt, collapsed mid-conversation with an old competitor at 640 Fifth Avenue, and died. He was sixty-four. It is difficult not to feel sorry for William Henry. In addition to vilification as a result of ‘The public be damned!’ incident, he only lived to enjoy eight years of liberation from his father (or six, if one deducts the years spent attempting to settle the Commodore’s will). In the short time available he made up for years of repression. He flung down a challenge to Mrs Astor on his own account as one of the founders of the new Metropolitan Opera Company, set up by a group excluded from the Academy of Music because they were born too late to acquire a box; and he indulged a passion for horseflesh which he inherited from his father. He particularly loved trotting horses, and was often seen driving his famous trotting teams up and down Fifth Avenue. His favourites, Maud S and Aldine, broke the record for a mile at the track at Fleetwood Park in 1883. His stables for the ‘trotters’ were renowned for having gas lamps with porcelain shades, and sporting pictures on the walls.
When his new house at 640 Fifth Avenue was completed, it was clear that William Henry had finally lost all inhibition when it came to shopping. It was stuffed with enormous pieces of Renaissance furniture (in line with proto-Medici thinking), suits of armour, marble statues, bronzes, mirrors, tapestries and oriental rugs. His front doors were an exact copy of the Ghiberti bronze doors in Florence. There were Japanese rooms, early-English rooms, Grecian rooms. The walls were hung with paintings by Alma-Tadema, by Fortuny, Millet, Munkacsy, Bonheur and Bouguereau, and his great favourite, Meissonier. Those who regarded this favourably saw it as ‘regal magnificence’. Edith Wharton, on the other hand, described such Vanderbilt excess as ‘a Thermopylae of bad taste’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Amidst it all, William Henry is said not to have seemed entirely at ease, boxing himself into one corner of his library in his old rocking-chair.
In William Henry’s hands the Vanderbilt fortune had continued to grow and multiply. Though assisted ably by Cornelius II and William K., as well as the Vanderbilt man of affairs Chauncey Depew, he found it hard to delegate and therefore much of the credit for this must go to him. He shepherded the railroads through a difficult period of unregulated competition, appalling accidents, organised protest at exploitative and abusive freight rates, and serious labour unrest (much of it justified). He improved Vanderbilt trains and managed to keep the Vanderbilt workforce largely on side during a violent railroad strike in 1877. As Alva put it: ‘He lacked the commanding qualities of the Commodore who had founded the family fortune, but he had a quality of genuine kindness – almost an extreme kindness and a dogged persistence and thoroughness which father had either instilled or encouraged in him and which made [it] possible for him to handle the great Rail road business left in his care.’
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A few days after his death, William Henry Vanderbilt’s will was the source of even greater astonishment than the Commodore’s. In the short time that he had been responsible for the family fortune, dogged persistence and careful control had doubled its value from about $100 million to $200 million
(#ulink_cfec339d-34ba-50a2-bcdb-d16d1fb06445). This made him the richest man in America and the poet-statisticians of New York’s newspapers went into overdrive. In gold, the estate would weigh 500 tons and would need 500 strong horses to pull it down Wall Street; if paper, it would take a man eight hours a day for thirty days to count it. The New York Sun declared: ‘Never was such a last testament known of mortal. Kings have died with full treasuries, emperors have fled their realms with bursting coffers, great financiers have played with millions … but never before was such a spectacle presented of a plain, ordinary man dispensing of his own free will, in bulk and magnitude that the mind wholly fails to apprehend, tangible millions upon millions of palpable money. It is simply grotesque.’
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William Henry altered his will nine times in six years, as he fretted over how best to bequeath such a legacy. He was determined to prevent the embarrassment of another will trial, and he felt strongly that the burden of such a fortune was too great for one man alone. ‘The care of $200 million is too great a load for any brain or back to bear. It is enough to kill a man. I have no son whom I am willing to afflict with the terrible burden,’ he is quoted as saying. ‘I want my sons to divide it and share the worry which it will cost to keep it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) At the same time, he appears to have been anxious to respect the Commodore’s wish that the family fortune should remain intact. Within his own family everyone was treated generously. His daughters were all given the houses in which they lived, and each of his eight children received $5 million with a further $40 million in trust for them jointly with arrangements made for grandchildren. Maria Kissam Vanderbilt, his widow, received 640 Fifth Avenue, its contents and an annual allowance of $200,000, as well as a bequest of $500,000 which she used to help her Kissam relatives. There were donations to Vanderbilt University and a range of smaller bequests.
(#litres_trial_promo) However, it was the two sons with the longest experience of managing the family enterprise who received the bulk of the estate between them: Cornelius II and William K. now discovered that they had inherited about $50 million each.
Because William Henry died prematurely, his sons and daughters-in-law were unexpectedly young when they inherited his fabulous wealth. Cornelius II was only forty-two, William K. was thirty-six, and Alva thirty-two. Under normal circumstances, they would all have had to wait at least another ten years before coming into such riches. But William Henry’s early demise meant that Alva and William K. could now have whatever they wanted. The consequences for Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt were even greater. She became one of the world’s greatest heiresses at the age of nine. This gave Alva plenty time to think about her daughter’s future; and this made the impact of her grandfather’s bequest on Consuelo’s life almost incalculable.
Alva and William K. immediately reacted to the unexpected improvement in their circumstances by commissioning two new accessories: their own private yacht, the Alva, and a summer cottage in the fashionable summer resort of Newport, Rhode Island, which would become the backdrop to much of the drama ahead. At first glance it seems odd that the charming and refined colonial town of Newport, expressly founded on the principle of religious tolerance during the seventeenth century, should be the locus of titanic social struggles in the Gilded Age. The town manifests something of a split personality to this day, with elegant small colonial houses nestling together round the harbour and strenuously competitive nineteenth-century palaces on the slope above scarcely conceding existence to the throng below. The explanation for its singular history lies partly in its geography: a cool summer breeze which has always attracted visitors in search of a ‘healthy climate’ and a deep natural harbour which made it accessible to steamships from the south from the early nineteenth century. It is not surprising that Alva was brought to Newport as a child by her southern parents, nor that it should have been in Newport that she first made friends with the Yznaga family who came from Cuba and Louisiana.
For much of the nineteenth century, Newport was a holiday resort for writers, artists and intellectuals of modest means. After the Civil War however, Newport fell victim to the noisy arrival of the urban rich, ‘quick to pick up the scent and take over the land, driving up prices to push out the eggheads’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The transformation of Newport into the epicentre of social warfare at its most vicious was largely the work of two enterprising speculators: Alfred Smith and his associate Joseph Bailey. Spotting an opportunity in a manner of which Commodore Vanderbilt would have been proud, this duo acquired 140 acres of land on the slope to the north of the colonial town and began to develop terrain along Bellevue Avenue, creating large tracts of building land amid broad tree-lined streets in an informal exclusivity zone. This development paved the way for competitive snootiness unparalleled anywhere in America. In the hitherto smart resort of Saratoga, for example, society stayed and entertained in hotels, making it easier for those on its fringes to find a foothold. In Newport, on the other hand, rich families built their own ‘summer cottages’ on Smith and Bailey’s land, while those who could not afford it were kept out.
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The summer cottages of Newport were, of course, nothing like cottages at all. Those that remain range from the elegant, to the ludicrous, to the very slightly mad. Henry James famously described them as ‘white elephants … all cry and no wool … They look queer and conscious and lumpish – some of them, as with an air of brandished proboscis, really grotesque.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Several of the most famous were designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Uncle Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s house, The Breakers, had seventy rooms; the gardens of The Elms required twelve gardeners simply to keep them in order; and every Gilded Age cottage along Bellevue Avenue had a ballroom large enough to accommodate several hundred guests. This was the point of being in Newport in the first place. Even allowing for the appearance of the Casino (where one played tennis or croquet, rather than gambled) and swimming at Bailey’s Beach, the focus of activity during Newport’s short summer season was private entertaining by society figures, creating a vicious circle – or a virtuous one, depending on your point of view – of aristocratic exclusivity.
It only took the arrival of a few rich society families in Newport in the post-war years to attract others, turning Newport for a few brief weeks in July and August into New-York-by-the-Sea. By the end of the nineteenth century almost every wealthy family of the industrial age had established some kind of presence there. ‘They were the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Paran Stevenses, the Lorillards, the Oelrichses, the Belmonts, the Goelets, the Fishes, the Havemeyers, the Burdens … There were several hundred of them in Newport in any one summer season – a magical inner circle of those powerful few who called the social tune and those newly arrived families who desperately danced to it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Even for its aristocrats, Newport was anything but a holiday. For six short weeks the social competition of New York was transferred to the seaside, twisted, condensed and inflated. By 1890 the unwritten rules of competitive display required a twice-daily appearance in a phaeton on Bellevue Avenue in a different dress, a swim at private Bailey’s Beach from one’s own cabana (one of the least pleasant beaches in Newport by all accounts), luncheon on a yacht moored in the harbour, or a fête champêtre at a farm, attendance at the polo field, dinner and a further change of costume, then a ball at the Casino or, if one was of the elect, in a summer cottage on Bellevue Avenue. A season could require over ninety new dresses.
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For the hundreds of visitors who were not part of the inner circle and who arrived in Newport each summer with the hope of breaking through, it was far, far worse. ‘It is an axiom of Newport that it takes at least four years to get in,’ wrote society author Mrs John Van Rensselaer. ‘Each season the persistent climber makes some advance through a barrage of snubs. The seasoned member of the Newport colony enters into the cruel game of quashing the pride of the stranger with great glee. Eventually, if he will bear all this, the candidate receives an invitation which indicates that he has finally been accepted by whatever particular set he has besieged. Then he turns about and snubs those remaining petitioners as harshly as he himself was snubbed. For the privilege of being a guest at certain houses and the license to affront those not yet in, he has spent perhaps a million dollars.’
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In commissioning Richard Morris Hunt to design Marble House as her Newport summer cottage Alva accelerated Newport’s progress towards becoming the social capital of the Gilded Age. It has been remarked that the Vanderbilts only went to Newport in 1885 because of the Astors. Alva would have resented this deeply for though she undoubtedly set up camp in Newport near Mrs Astor’s house, Beechwood, and then proceeded to outshine her architecturally, she had, of course, been to Newport for holidays as a child. She was now a leader of society herself; and by 1885 she would have regarded a Newport summer ‘cottage’ of her own as a matter of entitlement. Having acquired a plot of land on Bellevue Avenue, however, she and William K. set about taking the business of aristocratisation one step further than anyone else. While Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport house, The Breakers, was modelled on the palazzo of a Medici merchant, Alva left the Medicis behind and addressed herself directly to the Bourbon monarchs of the ancien regime.
Often described as Richard Morris Hunt’s masterpiece, Marble House contained allusions to the White House and the Petit Trianon at Versailles. It was certainly not lacking in ambition. In the memoir she dictated to Matilda Young, Alva also made mention of the Acropolis. For Richard Morris Hunt it was one of the great commissions of his life: he had unlimited resources, a client whose historical imagination and ambition matched his own and who had a sense of refinement and taste far more developed than any of his other clients.
Construction of Marble House began in conditions of great secrecy in 1888. By 1889, the contractor, Charles E. Clarke of Boston, had leased a wharf and warehouse in Newport harbour for materials which were brought in by ship. Artisans imported from France and Italy were quartered in separate lodgings and banned from communicating with each other on site. High fences went up round the building plot to hide it from the gaze of curious Newporters. It would take four years to complete. As drawings in the archives of Richard Morris Hunt show, it was very much Alva’s project and she involved herself in every detail. ‘This absolutely disapproved of by Mrs Vanderbilt’ notes an anonymous hand on one drawing of a doorway. ‘This is all wrong,’ declares Alva in her own handwriting on another drawing. ‘Will send photograph of marble to be adopted and each side of mantle to be solid marble panels and no columns on this end of the room.’
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While Marble House was under construction, the Vanderbilts kept themselves amused with their other new toy, the steam yacht Alva. Launched by Alva’s sister, Jenny Yznaga, on 14 October 1886, the yacht was 285-feet long and 32-feet wide and had a tonnage of 1,151.27, making her the largest private yacht in America by a good 35 feet, beating J. P. Morgan’s Corsair (165 feet), William Astor’s new Nourmahal (233 feet) and Jay Gould’s Atlanta (250 feet). In fact, the Alva was so large that the Turkish authorities once mistook her for a small cruiser and fired two shots across her bow in the Dardanelles. ‘Mrs Vanderbilt, who is generally credited to be a lady of excellent taste, deems that elaborate and ornate furnishings are out of place on a yacht. She thinks that she is rich enough to afford simplicity in this instance,’ reported The New York Times.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was true that all the walls were simply panelled with mahogany, and the teak decks were simply covered with oriental rugs, but this principle was extended to a dining room which had a piano, a library with a fireplace, seven guest rooms, and a ten-room suite for the Vanderbilts (though the mahogany gave out below stairs in the accommodation for the crew of fifty-three).
While Alva’s mother, Phoebe Smith, had once travelled with two maids and a southern mocking bird, the Vanderbilts found it necessary to take along a crew that included a master officer, a first officer, a second officer, a boatswain and a boatswain’s mate, a storekeeper, four quartermasters, a ship’s carpenter, twelve seamen, a chief engineer, first and second assistant engineers, six firemen, three coal passers, three oilers, a donkey engineman, an electrician, an ice machine engineer, a chief steward, a ward-room steward, a firemen’s mess-man, a sailors mess-man, two mess boys, a baker and a doctor.
(#litres_trial_promo) (The crew total of fifty-three does not include the French chef, family friends, household servants, or tutors and governesses for the children who were frequently present.) Labour unrest was dealt with in peremptory fashion. On 4 December 1887, the ship’s log noted that men who had demanded better rates of pay and who refused to work were ‘quickly landed’. Replacements were then picked up in Constantinople. The Vanderbilts and their guests, meanwhile, not only travelled in the lap of luxury but were treated as visiting dignitaries wherever they went, greeted by consuls, admirals, ambassadors, and kings. Even the Sultan of Turkey made recompense for the shots fired across the yacht’s bows in the Dardanelles by granting William K. an audience and arranging a tour of his private palaces which included a visit to his harem; (the abject dependence of the women there would make a lifelong impression on Alva).
Cruises on the yacht between 1886 and 1890 took William K., Alva and the children to the West Indies, Europe, Turkey, North Africa and Egypt and often lasted several months. One voyage started in July 1887 and only ended on 31 March 1888, stopping at Madeira, Gibraltar and at Alexandria – where the party left the Alva and engaged one of Thomas Cook’s steam dahabiyehs, the Prince Abbas, for a trip up the Nile. Alva later remembered that while they were in Cairo, one of their regular travelling companions, Fred Beach, became the object of Baroness Vetsera’s attentions when they met her in Shepheard’s Hotel – attentions to which he showed no objection at all, but allegedly did not respond. (The following year the Baroness Vetsera would be found dead of gunshot wounds alongside her lover, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, at Mayerling.) Alva shopped for furniture for Marble House during cruises on the Alva, and on at least one occasion left the children at Nell Gwyn’s house in London while she went to look at potential purchases. On one cruise, the men of the party hunted deer at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and stalked them in Scotland where the Vanderbilts took Beaufort Castle for the shooting season. Its owner, Lord Lovat, died while they were in residence and they witnessed a Highland funeral. This added to the general gloom of the experience, which Alva never wished to repeat: ‘I always found the climate very trying in Scotland, and caring nothing for sport, found little to do there of interest.’
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The benefits of this style of international travel were not always clear to Consuelo. Extended cruising put paid to any chance of conventional schooling and it isolated Consuelo from the company of children her own age for months at a time. Life on the largest private yacht in America could be dull for a child, due in part to Alva’s relentless emphasis on improvement. ‘Heavy seas provided our only escape from the curriculum of work,’ Consuelo wrote later, ‘for even sightseeing on our visits ashore became part of our education, and we were expected to write an account of all we had seen’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In spite of her magnificence, Alva was not a particularly seaworthy boat. There were extended bouts of seasickness (noted in the ship’s log when they moored off Burntisland in Scotland in 7 August 1887), and life at sea could sometimes be positively frightening. ‘Ship rolling a great deal and shipping quantities of water, which found its way below … Both large tables in forward and after saloons carried away,’
(#litres_trial_promo) read an entry in the ship’s log of an early cruise. During one storm an idiotic tutor maintained that it would only take seven huge waves in succession to sink the boat. ‘Willie and I spent the rest of the day counting the waves in terrorised apprehension as the green water deepened on our deck,’
(#litres_trial_promo) recalled Consuelo.
The cruises often ended in Nice, and the party travelled to Paris, where the Vanderbilts spent May and June with their retinue. As a child Consuelo fell in love with Paris just as Alva had done. Here she could ride on the carousel, watch Punch and Judy on the Champs Elysées and sail her toy boat in the gardens of the Tuileries. Like her mother, Consuelo came to associate Paris with liberation. After months on the yacht she could play with friends from New York on the same international circuit – Waldorf Astor who would marry Nancy Langhorne, May Goelet who would be her bridesmaid and later marry the Duke of Roxburghe, and Katherine Duer, later Mrs Clarence Mackay, already demonstrating that she had a bossy streak. ‘She was always the queen in the games we played, and if anyone was bold enough to suggest it was my turn she would parry “Consuelo does not want to be Queen” and she was right,’
(#litres_trial_promo) wrote Consuelo later. For several years in succession the early summer months were spent in Paris, followed by a brief return to New York; Newport in June and July; and a few weeks at Idle Hour in the early autumn before returning to New York for the confined world of the winter season.
When Consuelo reached her mid-teens, Alva finally allowed her to attend ‘Rosa classes’ when they were in New York. These were classes given by a Mr Rosa to a group of six young ladies in the home of one of the pupils – in Consuelo’s case, the classes took place at the house of Mrs Frederick Bronson on Madison Avenue and 38th Street. Blanche Oelrichs attended the Rosa classes a year or two after Consuelo, and remembered Mr Rosa as ‘a very stylish gentleman, with sideburns and a heavy watch chain, whose ambition to die in Rome was eventually gratified’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The classes lasted from eleven till one while Mr Rosa fought to cram in as much English, Latin, mathematics and science as he possibly could. Consuelo preferred studying English and history and kept her early essays for Mr Rosa on the Punic Wars until she died. Two hours each morning with Mr Rosa were followed by French, German and music lessons with governesses, and an hour of exercise in Central Park.
None of this meant that Consuelo was gradually permitted greater independence. Instead, such freedom as she had enjoyed as a child was steadily curtailed in her teens, and gave way to a life that was increasingly controlled and introspective. Her brothers became more distant as they went away to boarding school and as she grew older she was forbidden to join in with their holiday activities. By the time Consuelo was sixteen there were ‘finishing governesses’ in residence, one French and one English. Since French and English views about finishing young ladies were sharply divergent if not contradictory (and probably still are), these governesses had to be handled with great tact. Alva spent many hours in the schoolroom supervising the curriculum and directing the finishing governesses. Unable to resist a competition, she sent off for the entrance papers to Oxford University and ‘found that so far as [Consuelo’s] equipment went she could enter with a condition in three live languages and one dead one’.
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