Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  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’.68 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.’69

  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**. 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.’70

  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.’71 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.72 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’.73 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 la
nd, while those who could not afford it were kept out.74

  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.’75 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.’76 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.77

  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.’78

  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.’79

  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.80 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.81 (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 impr
ession 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.’82