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Even by the standards of the day, Consuelo’s teenage life was highly managed. It is striking that cousin Gertrude Vanderbilt was permitted far more independence, in spite of the fact that Uncle Cornelius and Aunt Alice were serious and strict. Gertrude’s teenage diaries are filled with accounts of close female friendships, sorrow at leaving school, upsets about being too young to take part in ‘tableaux’, quarrels with her best friend and making-up. As Gertrude and her cousin Adele Sloane emerged from the schoolroom and into society, they were encouraged to form views about young men in the circle of aristocratic families in which they moved. Gertrude came home and analysed some of them: ‘You have not enough go. You are trustworthy without being interesting.’ [Mo Taylor]. ‘If anyone ever looked out for No. 1, you are that person.’ [Richard Wilson], ‘You mean well by people, but you will not take very much trouble to make yourself agreeable.’ [Lewis Rutherfurd].
(#litres_trial_promo) Adele was even allowed to go out riding with some young gentlemen, though she was never permitted to be alone with a man indoors (‘Had nobody in the older generation read Madame Bovary?’ asks Louis Auchincloss in astonishment.
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Alva would allow none of this. ‘My mother disapproved of what she termed silly boy and girl flirtations … and my governess had strict injunctions to report any flighty disturbance of my thoughts.’
(#litres_trial_promo) There were moments when the doll-child found such micro-management truly insulting: ‘I remember once objecting to her taste in the clothes she selected for me. With a harshness hardly warranted by so innocent an observation, she informed that I had no taste and that my opinions were not worth listening to. She brooked no contradiction, and when once I replied, “I thought I was doing right,” she stated, “I don’t ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you are told”.’
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In America in the 1890s there were many constraints on the lives of well-to-do young ladies: few telephones, no motor cars, corsets, long skirts, hats fixed with pins, gloves and blouses with high whalebone collars. Even at Bailey’s Beach at Newport, Consuelo bobbed up and down in the water in an outfit of dark blue alpaca wool consisting of a dress, drawers, stockings and a hat. It is perhaps not surprising that almost two pages of her memoirs are given over to a long list of the books she read in French, German and English. One German governess in her teens particularly inspired her with a love of German poetry and philosophy – to such an extent that after her marriage Consuelo considered translating Also Sprach Zarathustra into English, only to discover that there were twenty-seven translations already in existence. Meanwhile, she was inspired to secret but short-lived experiments in austerity by Plutarch’s Lives (she spent a night on the floor, but caught a cold) and reached a ‘real emotional crisis’ when she found a copy of Mill on The Floss in the yacht’s library. The picture Consuelo paints of herself as a somewhat sensitive, solitary and rather bookish teenager is reinforced by an entry in the diaries of the household superintendent, William Gilmour. On Thursday 2 March 1893, he wrote: ‘Miss Vanderbilt’s birthday, 16 years old. I went down to Wintons [Huttons] 23 St this morning and bought 3 vols Keats poems for Willie’s present to his sister.’
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For many years, the marriage of Alva and William K. Vanderbilt had been propelled by shared ambition. They had conquered New York society together, paving the way for other Vanderbilts, particularly Cornelius II and Alice, to take their place at the apex of New York society. By the mid-1880s, William K. and Cornelius II were members of all the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs. Between them, the Vanderbilts had a row of magnificent houses on Fifth Avenue. Alva had undermined Mrs Astor’s monopoly to such an extent that it had become a newspaper joke to talk about the ‘Astorbilts’. Alva made her mark on New York’s architectural history too, forging an important creative link with its greatest architect, Richard Morris Hunt. But these achievements came at great emotional expense. Even by 1885, when William Henry’s death made the William K. Vanderbilts one of the richest couples in America, the glue of shared ambition had dried out. Consuelo’s sixteenth birthday in 1892 may have been celebrated with a thoughtful present from her brother; but the next two years would be deeply scarred by the unhappiness already engulfing her parents.
(#ulink_096fcb1f-747b-5394-82ac-839be3201fd4) approximately $13.9 billion today
(#ulink_7b40037a-b54a-5110-89bf-57133af7ecef) approximately $20.7 billion today
3 Sunlight by proxy (#ulink_3ff55d0a-e6ac-55db-865e-0220186c8011)
WHEN SHE TALKED about the story of her early life in later years, Alva was only prepared to discuss the disintegration of her relationship with William K. Vanderbilt in general terms. She intimated to Sara Bard Field, however, that the start of married life had been dismal. Field, whose feelings about Alva were mixed (at best), wrote to Charles Erskine Scott Wood that Alva had stopped her in the middle of the lawn at Marble House, where no servant could eavesdrop, and had spoken of herself as ‘a girl of barely seventeen who did not fully know the sex mystery’. Alva had alluded to an ‘agony of suffering’. The memory brought ‘tears from her hard heart to her eyes’. She refused to allow Field to write about this, saying that ‘it was the sacred confidence of a woman’s heart’ and that ‘the children would object … and the Vanderbilts’. Sara Bard Field suddenly found herself in tears too, partly because her own experience with Wood was very different and partly because she felt that ‘a heart that could have been loved into beauty … has been steeled against its own finer and softer emotions. O, it is all fascinating what she is now telling me. Really, it is Life.’
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Leaving aside the fact that Alva was twenty-two and not seventeen when she married, it is possible that her wedding night did indeed come as a terrible shock. Her mother had died almost five years earlier, her elder sister Armide was unmarried and such ‘innocence’ was not uncommon. (One can only hope that Mrs Oelrichs, her chaperone at White Sulphur Springs, took it upon herself to have a quiet word.) The historians John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman point out that there were also tensions in the sexual education of young men which did not help the process of marital adjustment. Many young men in New York in the 1870s had their first sexual experiences with prostitutes, ‘a poor training ground for middle-class bridegrooms’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In pioneering studies carried out in late-nineteenth-century America, middle-class women talked of finding sex pleasurable, but it depended on the behaviour of their husbands. Young men used to encounters with prostitutes would often ‘bring to the conjugal bedroom a form of sexual expression badly out of line with what their wives might desire. On the other hand, some married men may have continued to visit the districts precisely because they could not find in their wives the kind of sexual availability, or responsiveness, they wanted.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The problems caused by this kind of mismatch were often exacerbated by fear of contracting venereal disease. There is some evidence in the later part of Alva’s life that she was familiar with this particular anxiety while married to William K. Vanderbilt.
For several years, the Vanderbilts found a way of resolving these early difficulties which cannot have been helped by the death of Murray Smith two weeks after the wedding. Until about 1885, however, the marriage had such forward momentum and such a triumphantly successful agenda, that both husband and wife ignored its disadvantages. Alva later hinted that the real difficulties set in after about ten years. ‘Not many men are in love with their wives after ten or twelve years,’
(#litres_trial_promo) she wrote. Elsewhere she remarked that ‘sex passion’ between man and wife generally lasts about ten years, and that after that time men of her class ‘amused themselves elsewhere’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the case of William K. and Alva, however, ten years of marriage coincided with the death of William Henry in 1885. William Henry’s fondness for Alva may have acted as a check on his son’s behaviour. After his death, this impediment disappeared and William K., always a handsome man, found himself in possession of a limitless fortune and much less to do. By 1885 the Vanderbilts had achieved most of their shared objectives: their yacht, the Alva and Marble House may have kept them busy – but these were opulent extras, icing on a well-baked cake.
In the second set of memoirs that Alva dictated to her secretary, Mary Young, after 1928, she suggests that having fought so hard to extract herself from the snares of genteel poverty, she now found herself faced with an even more pernicious form of exclusion. ‘It was a time’ according to Alva, ‘when men of wealth seemed to think they could do anything they liked; have anything, or any woman, they, for the moment wanted. And so, as a matter of fact, they very nearly could, and did. 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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Alva does not mention William K. by name when she talks of women insulted by their husbands’ ‘open and flagrant and vulgar infidelities’, but she comments that the conduct of J. Pierpont Morgan, Colonel John Jacob Astor, and others was notorious. ‘Col Astor’s yachting parties were public scandals. He would take women of every class and kind, even chambermaids out of the hotels of the coastwise cities where the yacht put in, to amuse himself and the men of his party on these trips.’
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And what of the wives of these rich men? These men did not seek divorce for there was no need. They simply set their wives aside, leaving them ‘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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) No-one was prepared to challenge the convention by which a society woman in her prime ignored adulterous behaviour on the part of her husband and withdrew into a kind of half-life, while bravely maintaining a public front of domestic respectability. ‘It was considered religious, dignified and correct for the wife to withdraw into the shadows while her husband paid the family respects to the sunshine … she was supposed to get her sunlight by proxy through the husband.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was, in Alva’s view, an intolerable by-product of monopoly capitalism, a uniquely American form of purdah: the seclusion of cast-off wives enforced by rich men whose solidarity in the matter was perceived to be indestructible.
When she recalled working with Richard Morris Hunt on Marble House, Alva remarked that the period from 1886 and 1892 marked ‘some of the saddest years of my life’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is possible that she welcomed long cruises on the yacht as a way of controlling her husband’s infidelities. Later, the New York World recalled that she had looked unhappy for much of this time. ‘She looked both weary and sad, and people wondered why it was. They said it was because she was naturally of a peevish and discontented disposition. They said it was because she had achieved every ambition possible to her, and was made wretched because there was nothing further to achieve … But gradually the truth crept out and it was known that Mrs Vanderbilt was wretched because her husband had broken his marriage vows, not once but over and over again.’
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The tension certainly affected sixteen-year-old Consuelo. ‘I had reached an age when the continual disagreements between my parents had become a matter of deep concern to me. I was tensely susceptible to their differences, and each new quarrel awoke responding echoes that tore at my loyalties.’
(#litres_trial_promo) On 16 July 1892, in an apt metaphor for the disintegrating state of the William K. Vanderbilt marriage, the Alva sank. Bound for Newport from Bar Harbor, the yacht was forced to anchor in dense fog off Monomoy Point where she was accidentally rammed by the mellifluously named freight steamer, H.F. Dimmock. William K. reacted by commissioning an even more luxurious – and rather more seaworthy – yacht, the Valiant.
While the Valiant was under construction, Alva occupied herself with the finishing touches to Marble House so that it was ready to receive its first guests in August 1892. There was plenty to amaze these visitors who were welcomed into the house through an elegant and elaborate bronze entrance grill (weighing 10 tons and made by the John Williams Bronze Foundry of New York). In the hall, warm and creamy Siena marble lined the walls, floors and staircase. Guests were then invited to admire rooms that have been described by one expert as a series of knowledgeable experiments in French decorative style.
(#litres_trial_promo) The dominant theme was the art and architecture of Versailles. In the upper hall a bas relief of Richard Morris Hunt faced a matching bas relief of the architect of Versailles, Jules Hardouin Mansart. The dining room was inspired by the Salon of Hercules, the Siena marble of the entrance hall giving way to walls lined with pink Numidian marble specially quarried in Algeria. A painting of Louis XIV attributed to Pierre Mignard, said to have hung in the Salon of Hercules at the time Alva visited the palace in the late 1860s, dominated one end of the room.
The dining room was only surpassed by the ballroom – the Gold Room – Alva’s miniature edition of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a riot of neo-classical exuberance with panels of Aphrodite, Demeter, Pan and Heracles suggesting a world of love, beauty, revelry and music sadly at odds with the lives of the proprietors. (Only a panel of Heracles aiming an arrow at Nessus who had made off with his wife comes close to reflecting emotional turmoil behind the scenes.) Above the marble mantelpiece, bronze figures bore vast candelabra, while cupids capered playfully and cherubs blew trumpets on the walls and ceilings. The Gold Room was dominated by wood panels gilded in red, green and yellow gold carved by the architectural sculptor Karl Bitter, its dazzling magnificence multiplied many times by vast mirrors hung over the four doors, above the mantelpiece, on the south wall, and by the south windows. Elsewhere in the house, Louis XV replaced Louis XIV in an outbreak of Rococo Revival: swags and garlands of flowers, masks, and somersaulting cherubs prevailed here and in Alva’s bedroom an eighteenth-century four-poster bed stood on a very fine Aubusson carpet.
The anomaly was the so-called Gothic Room, probably inspired by the Bourges house of the great medieval merchant, Jacques Coeur, whom Alva greatly admired. Paul Miller, curator at the Preservation Society of Newport County, suggests that the Gothic Room may originally have been intended for 660 Fifth Avenue. In 1889 the Hunts and Vanderbilts met in Paris to discuss furnishings at a meeting that coincided with the publication of a catalogue raisonné of Emile Gavet’s collection of European works of art from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The Vanderbilts bought half the collection, including a ‘Madonna and Child’ by Luca della Robbia that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Hunt’s design for the Gothic Room was then transferred to Marble House to display objets purchased from the Gavet collection, though the room acquired American accents in the process: the foliate cornice around the room which was inspired by Coeur’s house reappeared with crabs and lobsters to reflect the seaside setting.
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In 1892, those who knew Alva best might have detected her unhappiness in much of this design. She once described Marble House as her fourth child and its interior made few concessions to her husband, other than cartouches bearing the monogram ‘WV’ and a small study reflecting his sporting interests. Meanwhile, Alva’s preoccupations could be found everywhere: on the ceiling painting in her bedroom where the paradoxical Goddess Athene reigned supreme, war-like but the goddess of fine craftsmen, and in many references to the French ancien régime. Even the use of marble suggested a fugitive memory of the Smith house in Mobile. If it is true that the best buildings of the Gilded Age dissolved almost entirely into make-believe, her greatest collaboration with Richard Morris Hunt had this quality in abundance. Even more than 660 Fifth Avenue, Marble House was characterised by a feeling of withdrawal from the world outside. But here there was a sense of unhappy withdrawal from a miserable marriage too, as if Alva has turned in on herself and back towards the world of the ancien régime she loved as a girl before the harsh compromises of adult life took their toll. To some, the Gold Room still stands as a symbol of the heartless, glittering emptiness of the Gilded Age; but it can also be seen as the most heartfelt room in Newport, an intense and private dream.
As far as Consuelo was concerned, however, Marble House was associated with sensations closer to nightmare, claustrophobia and control. It felt like a gilded cage. Even the gates were lined with sheet iron. ‘Unlike Louis XIV’s creation,’ she wrote tartly, ‘it stood in restricted grounds, and, like a prison, was surrounded by high walls.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Consuelo was sixteen when Marble House was finished. In spite of this, Alva conceded nothing to her daughter’s taste. In this instance her vision of the Marble House interior entirely overpowered the section of her child-rearing theory that involved independence. Still a doll in a doll’s-house, Consuelo’s bedroom was designed by her mother down to the last detail and furnished with objects which she scarcely dared to move. ‘To the right on an antique table were aligned a mirror and various silver brushes and combs. On another table writing utensils were disposed in such perfect order that I never ventured to use them. For my mother had chosen every piece of furniture and had placed every ornament according to her taste, and had forbidden the intrusion of my personal possessions.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was this bedroom that inspired one of the most quoted passages about Alva from Consuelo’s memoir The Glitter and the Gold: ‘Often as I lay on the bed, that like St Ursula’s in the lovely painting by Carpaccio stood on a dais and was covered with a baldaquin, I reflected that there was in her love of me something of the creative spirit of an artist – that it was her wish to produce me as a finished specimen framed in a perfect setting, and that my person was dedicated to whatever final disposal she had in mind.’
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When Marble House opened to widespread acclaim during the Newport season of 1892, Alva was less concerned with the final disposal of Consuelo than the state of her own marriage. ‘Sunshine by proxy’ was decidedly not for her. She was only thirty-nine. She refused to accept a scenario in which she tolerated her husband’s philandering and retired to a virtuous life in the shadows. She particularly objected to the way in which rich husbands enforced their wives’ powerless position by reminding them of their financial dependence. ‘If a wife, hungering for love and with more spirit than most of her sex, asserted her right to a lover or to contacts with the outside world, the husband declared she was ruining his reputation along with her own and with the power of the bank resources at his command, bade her retire to the obscurity of respectability.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Alva’s reaction to this was spirited. She acquired a lover of her own.
Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont was the wayward son of financier August Belmont. Married to a socially pre-eminent wife of impeccable pedigree, August Belmont was of Jewish origin, though he had converted to Christianity, and represented the Rothschilds’ interests in New York. He lived flamboyantly, introducing the first French chef to a private New York house, establishing a pace-setting example when it came to wining and dining, and causing wild gossip. He was another of Mrs Astor’s principal bêtes noires, though her resistance to the next generation of Belmonts gradually dissolved.
Before his relationship with Alva, Oliver Belmont was often to be found in the Oelrichs household, charming Blanche Oelrichs as a child. She liked his ‘slow urbanity, his face rutted with lines – from the hopes and disillusions of his life as a lover, I suspected. For certainly he must be a romantic man.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The circumstances surrounding the collapse of Oliver Belmont’s first marriage suggest that his behaviour was not always romantic. After a long courtship which was bitterly opposed by both his parents, Belmont married a beautiful socialite, Sara Whiting. On their honeymoon in Paris they were joined by Sara’s domineering mother and two sisters, who moved in with the newlyweds and refused to leave. Oliver eventually marched out on the ménage – understandable perhaps had he not stormed off in the company of an exotic Spanish dancer, bad form at any time, but especially on one’s honeymoon. On hearing that his new bride was pregnant he returned to Paris to attempt a reconciliation, only to find himself accused of heavy drinking and physical violence – allegations which he rebutted furiously. Sara Whiting later gave birth to a daughter, Natica, whom Belmont refused ever to acknowledge, while Mrs Whiting insisted on a divorce.
Oliver Belmont’s parents were mortified by the publicity surrounding his first marriage. They had in any case long despaired of him: in spite of various attempts to find him gainful employment he appeared to have no greater ambition than to live as a gentleman of leisure. As early as 1888 they were concerned that he was joining a cruise on the Alva, fearing that Vanderbilt sojourns in resorts such as Monte Carlo would do nothing to raise his level of ambition and knowing that his friendship with Mrs William K. Vanderbilt was already a talking point.
(#litres_trial_promo) Oliver joined part or all of subsequent Vanderbilt cruises in 1889 and 1890, however.
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, his obstinacy and readiness to ignore society’s opinion on this matter may have attracted Alva. Here was someone with strength of personality, someone to brace against, unlike William K. whom Alva later described as a ‘weak nonentity’. It may also be true, as Louis Auchincloss has written, that Oliver was attractive because he represented a challenge. He had already caused offence. There was just a whiff of violence about him. He was a Belmont. ‘One begins to suspect that the setting up of hurdles in order to jump them was her way of adding a bit of zest to the sameness of a social game that was already showing itself a drag to her lively spirit. And were not the Belmonts partly Jewish? Better and better!’
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Initially the relationship between Alva and Oliver Belmont raised few eyebrows for it was not unusual for the neglected wives of rich men to acquire ‘walkers’. ‘The Newport ladies of those days were trying hard to emulate their sisters in cosmopolitan Europe,’ writes Blanche Oelrichs; ‘and it would have been thought extremely “bourgeois” for attractive matrons not to have gentlemen about them who were “attentive”.’
(#litres_trial_promo) As the warmth of feeling between Alva and Belmont began to show, however, the gossips got down to work. ‘I used to think Oliver Belmont one of the handsomest men at the Coaching Parade, with his dark eyes, clear-cut profile and slender, faun-like grace,’ wrote Elizabeth Lehr, thinking back to her teens. ‘Mrs W. K. Vanderbilt often sat at his side on the box behind the four famous bays, Sandringham, Rockingham, Buckingham and Hurlingham. The women glanced at her as she sat wide-eyed and innocent-looking, and whispered to one another.’
(#litres_trial_promo)Town Topics also picked up Oliver’s constant presence at Alva’s side and talk persisted into later generations. In a delightful lecture about her childhood on Bellevue Avenue, Eileen Slocum remarked: ‘Down the years I especially remember the gossip about Mrs William K. Vanderbilt’s affair with Mr O. H. P. Belmont … Daddy was very critical … “Poor Willy K. drove up, unexpectedly, one day from the train in his carriage,” Daddy said, “and entered his own house and ascended his own staircase and found Mr Belmont hiding in the closet of his own bedroom. Willy should have shot him.”’
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It does seem perverse, therefore, that in the autumn of 1893, when their marriage was strained to the point of collapse, the Vanderbilts not only decided to go on a long cruise on the Valiant to India but invited Oliver Belmont to join them. It is just possible that Alva and Oliver were not yet lovers, for this would have put Alva, who was always political, at a disadvantage. Perhaps William K. welcomed Belmont’s presence because he improved Alva’s mood. Perhaps the expedition was William K.’s idea and Alva only agreed to go on condition she could take Oliver too. Consuelo later said that it was clear even to her that the cruise was a desperate last attempt to patch things up, one last effort to avoid ‘the rupture which I felt could not be long delayed’. The expedition set off in an atmosphere of ‘dread and uncertainty’ with a party that included ‘my parents, my brother Harold, a doctor, a governess and the three men friends who were our constant companions. Willie, being at school, remained at home. My mother, claiming that my governess gave sufficient trouble, refused to have another woman on board.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The three men friends whose names appear in the ship’s log were Oliver Belmont, Fred Beech and J. Louis Webb.
The cruise began on 23 November 1893 at 3.35 p.m. precisely with a total of eighty-five people on board, seen off by a crowd that ‘surged and pushed and jostled on the pier like animated stalks in a bunch of asparagus’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Valiant arrived in Bombay just over a month later, on Christmas Day. On 30 December, the Vanderbilt party disembarked for a two-week overland journey by special train to Calcutta, while the yacht made its way round from Bombay to await them. Alva was pleased to discover that the Taj Mahal had been inspired by the spirit of a woman. Otherwise, much of what she saw in India appalled her. If Alva was taken aback by what she described as superstition and ‘repulsive religious ceremonies’,
(#litres_trial_promo) Consuelo was frankly terrified by such unusually close proximity to humanity en masse, particularly when it rattled at the doors of the Vanderbilt sleeping cars and tried to force an entry. ‘It was difficult to secure bath water and the food was incredibly nasty. We lived on tea, toast and marmalade … It was wonderful to find all the luxuries of home on the Valiant which had come round India from Bombay and lay anchored in the Hooghly.’
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What Consuelo did not know as she recuperated from this taxing journey, was that the stay in Calcutta would mark a turning-point in her life. While Consuelo, Harold, and the Vanderbilts’ friends remained on board the Valiant, Alva and William K. were invited to stay by the Viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne, at Government House in Calcutta. Sometimes described as ‘the most neglected statesman in modern British history’ Lord Lansdowne (or Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne), had already had a distinguished career as Governor-General of Canada and would go on to become Secretary of State for War, Foreign Secretary, leader of the Conservative and Unionist peers, and a member of Asquith’s wartime cabinet. At the time of the Vanderbilts’ visit to Calcutta, however, his sojourn in India as Viceroy was almost at an end, and, worn out by his tour of duty, he was longing to go home. Nonetheless, Lord and Lady Lansdowne extended generous hospitality to the Vanderbilts with the result that just when Alva was feeling most vulnerable to a life of ‘sunlight by proxy’ she witnessed the life of the Vicereine, Lady Lansdowne, when the British Raj was at its zenith.
‘We might as well be monarchs,’
(#litres_trial_promo) wrote Mary Curzon when she arrived as Vicereine herself three years later. Even aristocrats such as Lord Lansdowne, accustomed to palatial space and waited on since birth, found Government House in Calcutta somewhat grandiose. ‘Words cannot describe the hugeness of this place or the utter absence of anything like homely comfort … [The bedroom with its] colossal bed large enough for half a dozen couples … the ceiling which is so far up that one can scarcely see it,’
(#litres_trial_promo) he wrote to his mother. Historian David Cannadine suggests that the grandeur was a deliberate political ploy: ‘The British now saw themselves as the legitimate successors of the Mughal emperors, and came to believe that their regime should project a suitably “oriental” and “imperial” image. So they set out to construct a new ritual idiom for the government of India, partly based on the appropriation of what they believed were traditional Mughal court ceremonials, and partly invented and developed by themselves, through which they could express their own authority … The ceremonial surrounding the Viceroy, both in Calcutta and at Simla, and as he travelled round India, became increasingly splendid, ornate, elaborate and magnificent – far grander than the state in which British monarchs themselves lived at home.’
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The illusionists of the British Raj found a most appreciative audience in Alva, though even she was startled by the size of the Government House guest suite and the ‘ten native servants who were assigned … in beautiful royal liveries of red embroidered in gold to serve us’.
(#litres_trial_promo) What impressed her most, however, was the quasi-imperial role of both Lansdownes. ‘The numerous house guests and outside friends assembled in an antechamber, and at a given moment the double doors were thrown open and the Viceroy and Lady Lansdowne were announced’. Even at lunchtime. Calcutta House had a throne room and on state occasions the Vicereine took her place on a throne on the dais beside her husband, receiving Indian princes in magnificent ceremony. Alva was even more impressed by the extent to which the British Vicereine made an important contribution in her own right, undertaking charity work in Calcutta and running much of the social life at Government House.
The Vanderbilts’ visit coincided with plans for the handover of power to Lord Elgin and tributes were already flowing in to the departing Viceroy and Vicereine. Lord Lansdowne had been a popular viceroy and the view was frequently expressed that his tour of duty had enjoyed ‘an almost unique popularity, to which the social gifts of Lady Lansdowne had largely contributed’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Alva would also have been aware of the splendid formalities planned for the Lansdownes’ departure, ceremonies which would acknowledge the contribution of them both, just as the ceremonies to welcome the Curzons in 1898 acknowledged Mary Curzon’s American birth. There was no life in the shadows or sunlight by proxy for a Vicereine of India; and just as she had once pictured the Vanderbilts as Medicis, Alva could now visualise her daughter’s future.
‘My mother, whose habit it was to impose her views rather than to invite discussion, had already, on occasion, revealed the hopes she nourished for my brilliant future, and her admiration for the British way of life was as apparent as was her desire to place me in an aristocratic setting. These intentions, I am sure, crystallised during her visit at Government House,’
(#litres_trial_promo) wrote Consuelo later. Worse, conversations between Alva and Lady Lansdowne revealed that there was a most interesting way of moving this vision forward. Maud Lansdowne had a nephew of the right age, with an interest in politics. He was already a duke – the young Duke of Marlborough. Consuelo thought later that it was during her parents’ stay in Calcutta that ‘the possibility of my marriage to him may have been discussed’. Even if the idea was not discussed explicitly, however, ‘it is certain that it was then [my mother’s] ambitions took definite shape; for she confessed to me years later that she had decided to marry me either to Marlborough or to Lord Lansdowne’s heir’.
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It was possibly in a spirit of mutual inspection that Consuelo was invited to spend a day with the Lansdownes’ younger daughter, Lady Beatrix, for Lady Lansdowne was fond of her nephew and knew that he had inherited a troubling financial burden in Blenheim Palace. The impression made by Miss Vanderbilt on the Lansdownes is not recorded but the serious-minded Consuelo was astounded (to the point of sounding quite priggish) by the ignorance and ‘homespun education’ of Lady Beatrix. On 19 January 1894 the captain of the Valiant recorded that ‘the Viceroy & party from Government House were entertained on board’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Valiant left its moorings in Calcutta on the same day and headed back to Europe. It mattered not that when she played with her friends in Paris, Consuelo never liked being queen: Alva had decided what she wanted for her only daughter.
It was later claimed by the press that the Valiant cruise broke up in India after a final blazing row between the Vanderbilts; but according to both Alva and the ship’s log, it continued as planned, sailing first to Ceylon, where the entry read: ‘left a fireman behind at Colombo so we are one short’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Apart from the fireman, the party remained intact, winding its way back to the Mediterranean by way of Alexandria, where the yacht was detained by rough seas. Near Rhodes, in another strangely symbolic incident, the Valiant lost its way – the captain took a local pilot on board who turned out to be incompetent. There is no doubt that relations between the Vanderbilts were strained to the limit and these setbacks can have done little to help matters. A visit to Delphi in Greece briefly acted as balm to Consuelo’s troubled soul, but the break came by the time the yacht reached Nice. As the Valiant docked, Consuelo was told that her parents’ marriage was definitely over.
Consuelo’s initial feeling was one of relief ‘that the sinister gloom of their relationship would no longer encompass me’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was only later that she realised how little she would now see of her father and the extent to which Alva would come to dominate her life. In the short term nothing changed. After their yacht moored at Nice on 24 February 1894, Alva took Consuelo to Paris, as she had so often done before. Both Vanderbilts remained in Europe for the rest of the summer, leaving the American press in something of a bother about where they were. Town Topics sneered derisively at newspapers alleging that the Vanderbilts were simultaneously in Newport, New York and Marseilles, asserting confidently that they had left America for three years and had leased a deer forest in Scotland. There was a calm interlude of several weeks before the press grasped what had actually happened.
Meanwhile, Consuelo’s experience of Paris during the late spring of 1894 was happier than it had ever been. She and Alva moved into the Hôtel Bristol. ‘I can still see the view over the Tuileries Gardens from our windows, still enjoy our walks under the flowering chestnuts of the Champs Elysées and our drives in the Bois de Boulogne in our carriage and pair. Every day there were visits to museums and churches and lectures at the Sorbonne, but the classical matinées at the Théâtre Français were my greatest pleasure.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was only with hindsight that she realised that her mother spent the early summer of that year preparing her for an aristocratic setting. Alva chose Consuelo’s dresses from the great French dressmakers – Worth, Doucet and Rouff – and she arranged for her to have elocution lessons, in French, with an actress from the Comédie Française, where there was a long tradition of perfect diction. It seems likely that Alva arranged these lessons to prepare her daughter for a public life such as that of Lady Lansdowne’s, where good voice projection was required when opening bazaars and returning speeches of welcome. ‘Whatever her motive, the lessons produced a voice that carried,’ said Consuelo. (Alva was later frustrated by her own fear of public speaking, brought up in a world where, in the rare event that a woman wrote a speech, she would hand it over to be read by a man.)
While they were in Paris, Alva also commissioned the portrait of Consuelo that now hangs at Blenheim, by Carolus-Duran. Alva’s choice of artist was significant for Carolus-Duran was a fashionable painter particularly renowned for his portraits of aristocratic women. In an early exercise in branding, Alva requested that the background of red velvet which Carolus-Duran normally used should be replaced by a landscape in the classical style of the English eighteenth century, wishing Consuelo to ‘bear comparison with those of preceding duchesses who had been painted by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney and Lawrence’.
(#litres_trial_promo) On its completion, Alva arranged for it to be shipped to America and hung in the Gold Room at Marble House.
Consuelo made her Paris debut that summer at a ball given by the Duc and Duchesse de Gramont for their eldest daughter; she wore a dress of white tulle by Worth. ‘It touched the ground with a full skirt, as was the fashion in those days, and it had a tightly laced bodice. My hair was piled high in curls and a narrow ribbon was tied round my long and slender neck. I had no jewels and wore gloves that came almost to my shoulders. The French dubbed me La belle Mlle. Vanderbilt au long cou.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The party was a bal blanc, as parties for debutantes were known, where all the young women wore white. Elisabeth de Gramont remembered Consuelo as ‘a tall girl whose small head with retroussé eyes like a Japanese, drooped languidly over her shoulder. She possessed great charm.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Such evenings were misery for ‘wallflowers’ for whom any help from artifice was banned. ‘Good girls were dressed in light, insipid colours and the poorest of materials, and all the touches that give “tone” – diamonds, powder, paint and perfume – were rigorously forbidden.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The aces of the period, the grand ‘marrying men’, would sometimes look in briefly at these social gatherings, at the rows of nervous, perspiring debutantes lined up like cattle for their inspection. (On one occasion Elisabeth de Gramont heard one say: ‘This place stinks of armpits, let’s go to Maxim’s.’
(#litres_trial_promo)) There was little opportunity for conversation because permission to dance had to be sought from the young lady’s chaperone and as soon as the dance was over, she was led straight back to her mother.
There was no shortage of partners for a seventeen-year-old American heiress, however, and by the end of June, Consuelo had received five proposals of marriage. ‘When I say I had, I mean that my mother informed me that five men had asked her for my hand … She had, as a matter of course, refused them, since she considered none of them sufficiently exalted.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Consuelo was only allowed to consider one: Prince Francis Joseph, a German prince who was the youngest of the four Battenberg princes, and at the centre of an intrigue to elect him ruler of Bulgaria. Confronted with the prospect of a royal crown rather than an English ducal coronet, Alva seems momentarily to have wavered from her original plan and Prince Francis Joseph was allowed to present his case to Consuelo. She was horrified both by the idea and by the Prince to whom she developed an immediate aversion. Alva too had second thoughts, unsure whether the intrigue would succeed. Nothing more was heard from her on the subject, though news of this potential engagement eventually reached Town Topics in New York who asserted (correctly this time) that: ‘There is a general feeling that the report is not based upon facts, at this time at least.’
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In June, Alva took Consuelo to England. ‘[Alva] did not let her dally long in the drawing-rooms of Paris,’ wrote Elisabeth de Gramont. ‘She intended [Consuelo] for the English aristocracy, which she deemed more advantageous.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Here Alva rented a house at Danesfield near Marlow and asked her old friend Mrs William Jay and her daughters to join them. The weather was so cold that they only went to Danesfield at the weekends and spent the rest of the time in the warmth of a London hotel. Consuelo described it as ‘frowsty in the true English sense’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and thought with longing of their lovely hotel in Paris beside the Tuileries Gardens.
In England, Alva made use of her networks. The two people whose help she enlisted in the summer of 1894 were Consuelo Yznaga, now Duchess of Manchester, and Minnie Stevens, now Mrs Paget – pre-eminent figures in English society, favourites of the Prince of Wales and leading lights of his circle known as the Marlborough House Set. Consuelo did not care for Minnie Paget (later Lady Paget) one jot, however. ‘Lady Paget was considered handsome; to me, with her quick wit and worldly standards, she was Becky Sharp incarnate … Once greetings had been exchanged I realised with a sense of acute discomfort that I was being critically appraised by a pair of hard green eyes.’
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Such scrutiny was all too familiar. In an age when young women were commodities on the marriage market, they were forced to become accustomed to such analysis, which is not to say they enjoyed it.
(#ulink_583fa813-15a1-532a-a55c-d78f8084706a) ‘I was particularly sensitive about my nose, for it had an upward curve which my mother and her friends discussed with complete disregard for my feelings,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Since nothing could be done to guide its misguided progress, there seemed to be no point in stressing my misfortune.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In London, Minnie Paget expressed her views forcefully. ‘The simple dress I was wearing, my shyness and diffidence, which in France were regarded as natural in a debutante, appeared to awaken her ridicule. “If I am to bring her out,” she told my mother, “she must be able to compete at least as far as clothes are concerned with far better-looking girls” … It was useless to demur that I was only seventeen. Tulle must give way to satin, the baby décolletage to a more generous display of neck and arms, naiveté to sophistication. Lady Paget was adamant.’
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Minnie Paget was once described by Town Topics as having ‘watchful eyes ever on someone with money to burn’,
