The Glitter and the Gold

by Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan

  "While you are having meetings," he said, "and speaking on the need for better housing conditions, your chauffeur holds street meetings telling everyone that you yourself own the worst slums in London."

  "Well," I said, "put someone in the crowd to ask him to name the slums. Sunderland House is my only possession. Does he complain his hours are too long or has he any grievance against me?

  "None," my agent answered, "but in an election your opponents are ready to give credit to any lie if they can use it against you."

  So I had to get rid of the soldier and went to my meetings in the County Council trams, which was no doubt a good electioneering move. One night, as I left the tram and started down the ill-lighted deserted street on foot, I heard steps behind me and recognized the man who had sat opposite me in the tram. My heart came into my mouth as stories of theft and murder swam in my mind, but he turned out to be a supporter and with relief I saw him later applauding the points of my speech.

  Living at Sunderland House was by no means a sinecure. There was no central heating, owing to wartime restrictions, and I lived in a flat on the third floor which the long gallery, being two stories high, shut off. I worked in a small sitting room where my meals were served on a tray, and for heat I depended more on the sun which occasionally shone than on the miserable coal fire. Often numb with cold at my desk, I would sit on the floor with my back to the grate, sizzling like a fried chicken—and thus spend the morning alternately grilling and freezing.

  Criticism of my occupation of so large a house in wartime had reached me. Of course those who criticized did not know the discomforts I endured and that I lived there only in order to be able to lend the long gallery to the charities and meetings that bespoke my hospitality as well as my personal services as chairman. Servants were becoming hard to find, for girls preferred working in munition factories, and when the tenth housemaid in two weeks gave notice I asked her to tell me frankly what was wrong.

  "Well," she said, "I thought I had come to a private house, but I find it's the Town Hall, and I'm sick of washing that there marble floor after those meetings and refreshments."

  I had for some time entertained the same thoughts, and when I heard a lady remark as she tripped down to tea after a meeting, "I have been looking forward to those chocolate éclairs all afternoon; to tell you the truth it's the only reason why I came," I decided to discontinue the meetings and to place Sunderland House at the disposal of the British government. Early in 1918 the government passed it on to the Inter-Ally Council on War Purchases and Finance as their headquarters in London, and my little flat on the third floor was given to the American Advisory Counsel, Mr. Paul D. Cravath. Much later, on June 25, 1919, Mr. Arthur James Balfour sent me the following letter in which he refers to the eventual birth of the League of Nations:

  British Delegation

  Paris

  June 25th, 1919

  My dear Duchess,

  As the Germans have now told us they mean to sign I presume we are a step nearer the effective establishment of the League of Nations.

  I must take this opportunity of thanking you for the help you have given in obtaining the use of Sunderland House for a body on whose successful working so much of the future history of the world will depend! and so far as I have any title to speak on their behalf, I desire to give expression to their gratitude.

  Yours very sincerely,

  (signed) Arthur James Balfour

  I was now completely immersed in work, and rarely attended social functions. With Ivor, I lived in a little house I had taken near Regent's Park. On leaving Eton, Ivor had failed to pass his medical tests for the Army, and General Sir John Cowan, who was then Quartermaster General and had his headquarters at the War Office, took him on his staff. In the opening years of World War I there was a particularly odious brand of female who delighted in pinning white feathers on young men in the London streets regardless of the sufferings such indignities inflicted on their innocent and helpless victims. I was glad therefore when Ivor was taken by his cousin Winston Churchill on one of his tours of inspection of the front in France, and as was invariably the case when accompanying Winston, experienced a first-class bombardment. Winston with his usual thoughtful kindness wrote to me how well Ivor had acquitted himself. Blandford was in France with his Regiment, the Life Guards. My brother Harold I saw when he passed through London on his way to join sub-chasers at Queenstown. Both he and my brother William K., Jr., were serving in the United States Navy.

  On November 11, 1918 at 11:00 a.m. sirens announced the Armistice. Cheering crowds poured into every street, commandeering taxis and cars to drive wildly about singing and waving flags. The tension of four long, and at times disastrous, years had ended. The glory of peace with victory had dawned. My thoughts inevitably went to those brave and gallant Englishmen who had made the great sacrifice. Among them I had lost many friends. Eventually with the signing of peace came the great Victory Parade of the Allied Armies in London. I saw it from the London County Council Building as it swung down the Mall. It was a proud moment when the magnificent contingent my country had sent over came into sight leading the procession. The men were of perfect alignment and height—they seemed to march as one man. They had, I thought as they passed, the clear-cut features, the keen eyes and shapely heads and the athletic build of the Grecian warriors we see in the friezes of Phidias. The French contingent was small, with Field Marshal Foch in the midst of his generals, the flags of France in massed array. But as their veteran troops bearing their regimental colors marched by I felt the tears coursing down my cheeks and the crowds must have felt the same emotion for their cheers seemed warmer and softer. Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders passed with the fine martial precision we had learned to expect of them. They received a thunderous welcome, but it was for our own Home Army we had waited, and when the Tommies and the Tars loomed into sight everyone went mad. Field Marshal Earl Haig on his charger, the admirals and the generals were cheered to the echo.

  It was an anticlimax to return to the dull routine of everyday life. The urge we had felt during the years of war no longer was there. Nevertheless for those of us who worked in the slums there was a bitter realization that much had to be done to make England "a land fit for heroes to live in"—the promise on which Lloyd George won his election.

  My vitality was running low and I found it an effort to keep going. I shall always remember my discomfiture when one hot day in an airless committee room of the London County Council I fell asleep sitting on a hard chair in the circle around the table, clutching the numerous reports I had spent hours in reading. Just as I had reached the delicious but ominous moment when one's head nods I felt through my unconsciousness a horrible dread and woke to the fact that every eye was fixed upon me, as the Chairman with a kindly but somewhat ironic smile said, "I am afraid we must take that vote again." Automatically I raised my hand, feeling disgraced and humbled.

  Following my doctor's orders I took a few weeks off on the French Riviera where I joined my mother. She had bought a villa with a lovely little garden full of flowers and orange trees on the shore of the Mediterranean at Eze-sur-Mer. We grew very close during those last years of her life, each sharing the other's interests.

  Early in 1920 my eldest son's marriage to lovely Mary Cadogan, the daughter of Viscount Chelsea, was celebrated in the Church of Saint Margaret's, Westminster, on one of those midwinter days that have the warmth and promise of spring. A fashionable wedding, it was graced by the royal family's presence. It was also my valediction, for steps had already been taken to secure my divorce.

  It was now possible for a woman to divorce her husband for desertion, provided she could also prove that he had spent a night in a hotel with another woman, information that the miscreant at times obligingly supplied. The stain of shame had faded to a gentler hue; society, now less censorious, no longer ostracized a divorcee. The circles from which they were banished were rare. The long vista of lonely years behind me prodded the
courage I needed to face the publicity of an English divorce court. But when I consulted my lawyer, he informed me that a legal separation freed a husband from the obligations contracted by marriage and that to secure a divorce I should first have to live under the same roof with Marlborough again. The humiliating process of the law next required that the husband leave his wife and inform her in writing that he refused to return to her. She then had to appear in court and ask the judge for an injunction granting her a "Restitution of Conjugal Rights." On the judge's pronouncement the husband would be ordered to comply. On his refusal to do so, the woman could bring action for divorce, provided she had the evidence required to secure it. These were the steps I took to obtain my divorce in the year 1920, having first, in order to comply with existing regulations, spent some days at Crowhurst with Marlborough and his sister Lilian Grenfell, who kindly shared our solitude. The shadow of my first marriage was once again to fall across my life when some years later Marlborough, having joined the Catholic Church and wishing to regularize his marriage to Gladys Deacon in that church, asked me to take steps to have our marriage annulled.

  I should like to close this chapter which deals chiefly with my work with the words in which Lord Haldane, in the last pages of his autobiography, sums up his personal philosophy; for his friendship and his counsel had played an important part in critical decisions I had had to make. As a statesman and philosopher, as Minister for War and then Lord Chancellor, as the author of the Pathway to Reality and the Reign of Relativity, he was supremely fitted to give judgment on the true values of life. He says:

  The best that ordinary mortals can hope for is the result which will probably come from sustained work directed by as full reflection as is possible. This result may be affected adversely by circumstances, by illness, by misfortune, or by death. But if we have striven to think and to do work based on thought, then we have at least the sense of having striven with such faculties as we have possessed devoted to the striving. And that is in itself a course of happiness, going beyond the possession of any definite gain.

  9: A Marriage of Love

  THE year 1920 was darkened by my father's ill-health and death. I was with him to the end. Whatever his personal sufferings may have been he made no complaints; not even a gesture of ill-humor troubled the serenity he seemed to emanate. There was a fineness about him that one sensed clearly and it seemed to me that nothing ignoble would ever touch him. In his business and in his life he lived up to the high standard of integrity he had set himself. I remember the tribute the Due de Gramont, one of France's leading sportsmen, paid him when he came to present his condolences; "I wish to express the grief of the French Jockey Club at your Father's death. It is fine and honorable sportsmen such as he, mindful of the best traditions of the turf, we delight in welcoming. His death will be a great loss to the French racing world." From the poor came expressions of affection and esteem and there was sorrow in the clinic he had founded where I had often assisted my stepmother in her work during my visits to Paris.

  We brought him home and laid him to rest in the family vault on Staten Island. The service in our New York house with only the family and close friends present brought poignant memories, as from the gallery, whereas children we looked down on festive scenes, came the haunting notes of death's dirges.

  There followed a few weeks on Long Island where my mother had built herself a medieval castle which dominated the Sound. In spite of her suffrage activities her life was a lonely one and she decided to join me in France, where I had determined to live. After years of intensive propaganda, her ambitions were realized with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, giving the vote to women. She had then become president of the National Woman's party and had presented them with their headquarters in Washington near the Capitol, known as Alva Belmont House. I thought that her 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.

  On my return to Europe I spent a few weeks in London to pack my belongings, to arrange for the sale of Sunderland House, to transfer a house I had leased in Portman Square to my married son, to give up Crowhurst and to wind up the many activities that had become dear to me. Leaving my work was a wrench and saying farewell to my fellow workers saddened me. Working for others breeds a sense of altruism to which, as time goes on and the habit grows, one unconsciously submits one's decision, weighing the amount of personal happiness one can justly consider one's due. Having voluntarily removed the blinkers self-indulgence creates, I found it became more difficult to hoodwink selfish desires, and fears assailed me about the rightness of my decision. But looking back on the long years of solitude, ranging as they did from my twenty-ninth to my forty-fourth year, I felt I could not give up the promise of happiness that had now come my way, a decision that my eldest son's happy marriage helped me to reach. Moreover, as I ruefully reflected, if I waited for my second son to marry it might be too late for me to follow a similar course.

  After the war, he had gone to Oxford to complete his education; and I felt that with both my sons once more ensconced in the niches prepared for them by tradition I could flee to freer spheres, for niches gave me claustrophobia.

  Consequently, after Blandford's marriage I went to live in the lovely house my father had given me in Paris. Though his death had robbed me of the happy companionship I had envisaged, my mother's arrival brought a measure of consolation; and with her sister Jenny Tiffany, who had always been a favorite aunt, we spent many pleasant hours.

  Meanwhile, while awaiting my divorce, I leased a villa near the property my mother had acquired at Eze-sur-Mer and as frequently as possible went to England to be with my children.

  On July 4, 1921, I was married to Jacques Balsan in the Chapel Royal Savoy at nine in the morning. This unusual hour had been chosen to avoid the glare of publicity which had been focused on the marriage of Marlborough and Gladys Deacon earlier that spring in Paris. In order to conform to French law we also went through a civil ceremony with Colonel George Harvey, then American Ambassador in London, and my cousin General Cornelius Vanderbilt as my witnesses. In shedding the luster of the coronet it was my hope to avoid publicity. If not quite successful in that respect, in every other, life with Jacques Balsan has brought me the profound happiness companionship with one equally loved and honored means. It is difficult to appraise a character so completely in harmony with one's sympathies, but it can be said that whether in France, in England or in my native land I have rarely met a man or a woman, certainly never a child, who has not succumbed to the charm of his personality, to the keenness of his varied interests, to the subtle intelligence of his understanding, to the wit of his conversation, and above all, to the profound goodness and kindness of his nature.

  It is perhaps not out of place here to give my readers a short account of his life. He had been an airman in the true sense of the word, since before airplanes were invented he owned a balloon in which in 1899 he flew from France to Prussia. The following year he won a high altitude record in France. He has often told me how, on another occasion, he landed in North Prussia on the borders of Lake Leta. As his balloon came to ground he was surrounded by peasants and conducted to the Castle of the Baron of Bandemer, who received him with the courtesy one officer accords another, even though they be traditional enemies. The Baron, an ancient chamberlain of the Emperor Frederick, and the Baroness entertained him by taking him for drives through the forests of their vast possessions, and one day they came to a monument. Reining in his horses, the Baron proudly said, "I am going to show you something very interesting. This monument has been raised to celebrate the defeat of the French armies at Sedan." On returning to the castle, Jacques Balsan wished his hosts farewell. He had not realized until his hostess explained it "that no insult was meant, since the Baron as a Prussian had a special mentality."

  In 1909—be
fore Blériot made his historic flight across the Channel—Jacques bought his first airplane, and received his license as Pilot No. 18. Convinced that aviation would play a prominent part in future wars, he went to Morocco as a volunteer airman in the war against the Moors in 1913 and 1914. It was a brave decision, for the Moors were known to kill their captives by slow torture and airplanes were then monoplanes with a 65-horsepower engine. For exceptional service rendered to the Ministry of War he received the Legion of Honor. His experience in Africa had prepared him for the First World War, and in 1914, then a captain in the Air Force, he was appointed by General Monnoury to reconnoiter the first Battle of the Mame. I have often heard him speak of his emotion on seeing the German Army, commanded by Von Kluck, advancing in an effort to destroy the French Army at its point of juncture with the English, a maneuver that proved to be their undoing.

  During the war Jacques commanded a group of Scout planes. In 1915 he, together with my father who undertook to pay for the transport of any American who wished to fight in the French Air Force, and Dr. Gross of the American Hospital at Neuilly, raised and formed the Escadrille Lafayette which later was integrated into the American Army. In the last month of the year 1917 he was sent on a special mission to London.

  We had met sporadically since my coming-out ball at the Due de Gramont's in Paris. Balsan had come to Blenheim as our guest on several occasions, and the large toy lion he brought my babies adorned a recess in the great hall for many years. I remember receiving a post card from him during the war, and when we met again he told me that he had sent it because he had not expected to return from a mission to bombard a certain town and had wished to greet me before his departure.