Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  During ‘the week’s seclusion custom has imposed upon reluctant honeymooners’16 – as Consuelo later described it – the press continued to hang about the Oakdale area reporting sightings. The couple were kept indoors by Long Island fog in the mornings, but were observed ‘chatting gaily’, with the Duke acting as his own coachman, when they went out driving in the afternoons. They went cycling and made tours of the nearby Southside Club estate and Islip itself, where the Duchess was reported as looking ‘pretty’.

  The coaching drives rather annoyed the residents of nearby Sayville and caused frustration for the Islip Cornet Band which was quite determined to give the Duke and Duchess a surprise concert. The original intention had been to turn up at Idle Hour uninvited until a member of the band panicked and suggested they should seek permission; after which the plan was abandoned. One afternoon, however, the Duke and Duchess seemed about to make an unexpected drive through Islip and the players scrambled to produce a tune – but the Duke, possibly suspecting that he was about to be ambushed by a cornet band, turned the coach round and headed back for Idle Hour before it could organise itself. On Sunday 11 November, the Duke and Duchess attended church at St Mark’s in Islip. When they returned home they found that William K. had arrived to keep them company for the evening; he was doubtless relieved to see his daughter looking more composed.17

  Travelling back to New York, the Duke and Duchess were recognised by other passengers on the ferry who confined their interest to ‘sly glances’. Unfortunately, a group of teamsters were not so discreet. ‘They peered through the glass doors and indulged in a number of rude witticisms at the Duke’s expense, which could plainly be heard in the cabin. The Duke tried to appear unconcerned, but both he and his wife were so evidently embarrassed that they won the sympathy of their fellow passengers. Finally several men sitting near the doors went out and remonstrated with the teamsters and the annoyance ceased.’18 The same intense interest was evident when they went with Alva to the Horse Show, a fashionable society event. Crowds mobbed their box and had to be moved along by the police. Town Topics had no sympathy. Given Mrs Vanderbilt’s publicity campaign ‘it would have been ungrateful and churlish in the highest degree for the people to fail to manifest their interest in articles so extensively advertised’.19

  Before the Marlboroughs left for Europe, the Duke had an unexpected visitor in the form of his cousin, Winston Churchill, on his first visit to America. He was en route to Cuba in the company of fellow subaltern Reggie Barnes, having been given permission by his colonel to observe the rebel insurgency against Spain. Churchill and Barnes had originally intended to stay in New York for three days, but were enjoying themselves so hugely that they extended their visit to a week. ‘What an extraordinary people the Americans are!’ Churchill wrote to his mother on 10 November. ‘Their hospitality is a revelation to me and they make you feel at home and at ease in a way that I have never before experienced.’20 It was a very great country, he told his brother Jack in another letter on 15 November. ‘Not pretty or romantic but great and utilitarian. There seems to be no such thing as reverence or tradition.’ He had seen Sunny the night before and would be dining with the Vanderbilts that evening, he wrote, adding that Sunny ‘is very pleased with himself and seems very fit. The newspapers have abused him scurrilously.’

  Churchill could thus witness the hysteria in New York surrounding his cousin and the new Duchess (on whom, from the evidence of surviving correspondence, he passed no comment), and it both interested and repelled him. ‘The essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth. Their best papers write for a class of snotty housemaids and footmen & even the nicest people here have so much vitiated their taste as to appreciate the style.’ On the other hand he also thought that American vulgarity was a sign of strength. ‘A great, crude, strong, young people are the Americans – like a boisterous healthy boy among enervated but well-bred ladies and gentleman … Picture to yourself the American people as a great lusty youth – who treads on all your sensibilities, perpetrates every possible horror of ill manners – whom neither age nor just tradition inspire with reverence – but who moves about his affairs with a good-hearted freshness which may well be the envy of older nations of the earth.’21

  Winston Churchill may have been interested and perplexed by what he described as the ‘irreconcilable conflicts’ of America, but by now the Duke of Marlborough had had enough. As far as he was concerned, it was his first and last visit. ‘There was in his sarcastic comments on all things American an arrogance that inclined me to view his decision with approval,’22 wrote Consuelo later. But after the experience of the Horse Show she too was ready to leave the United States for ‘the glare of publicity that was focused upon our every act’ was most trying and she would leave the city ‘with few regrets’. The Duke and Duchess sailed for Italy on Saturday 16 November. The Duke of Marlborough had put in hand changes to the private apartments at Blenheim which made an immediate return to England difficult. Less well travelled than Consuelo, he now wished to see something more of the world, so he suggested that they should spend three months on an extended honeymoon before returning to Oxfordshire in the spring. Their eventual destination was to be Egypt.

  The Duke and Duchess arrived at the pier at Hoboken shortly after 10 a.m. and went at once to their quarters aboard the steamship Fulda where a party came on board to bid them farewell. ‘The Duchess was attired in a blue serge steamer costume, lined with yellow satin, the collar of the jacket being trimmed with fur. Her cap was a jaunty-looking turban-like affair with fur trimmings. The Duke wore a black derby hat, a grey mixed suit, blue Newmarket coat with velvet collar and cuffs and tan shoes,’23 and they both carried bunches of violets. Much to the excitement of the press, the farewell party included both Alva and William K., as well as Miss Duer and Miss Post, two of Consuelo’s bridesmaids. ‘Mr and Mrs Vanderbilt met at the side of their daughter, and in answer to Mrs Vanderbilt’s greeting, her former husband merely raised his hat. They exchanged no words,’24 wrote the New York Herald. It reported that William K. Vanderbilt left the ship early and returned to New York. Mrs Vanderbilt and the young women went to the end of the pier where they waved farewells as the ship was warped out. When the Fulda cleared the end of the pier the Duke and Duchess were seen forward on the hurricane deck, and, according to one reporter, handkerchief signals were waved from ship to shore. On the pier, members of the Vanderbilt party did not leave their places until the ship was well on her way down river.

  As soon as the Duke and Consuelo left New York, Alva turned her attention to marrying Oliver Belmont, and immediately encountered an obstacle in the Episcopal Church. It was explained that it was permissible for Alva to marry again because she had been granted a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s adultery. The problem lay with Oliver Belmont, who had been divorced by his first wife for desertion, a state of affairs which the Church refused to recognise. ‘Neither of us had even thought of it as having any possible bearing on our own marriage,’ Alva said later; ‘But the Church thought otherwise. No Episcopal clergyman could marry us.’25 In the end a solution was found. The ever-reliable Colonel Jay talked to the Mayor of New York who agreed to perform the ceremony at Alva’s house on 11 January 1896.

  Not everyone was pleased. The Belmonts, as they now became, were much criticised for announcing their marriage the day after the death of the sixteen-year-old daughter of Florence Twombly, William K. Vanderbilt’s sister. Town Topics was adamant that this was Alva’s own doing, insisting that she had given the news herself to the New York Herald and the World: ‘Mrs W. K. Vanderbilt and Mr O. H. P. Belmont organs [sic] during the last year.’26 Oliver’s brothers also reacted furiously. They were not concerned by Oliver’s decision to marry a divorced woman (his brother Perry would do the same thing in 1899); what really angered them was Alva’s insistence on holding on to her alimony from William K. Vanderbilt, which was unprecedented. William K. was said to be quite untroubled by the matter –
Town Topics thought this was because he was anxious to get rid of Alva at almost any price and ‘would think a long while before engaging in any proceedings that might disturb his present delightful sense of freedom and holy and halcyon calm’.27 There was probably some truth in this: the Vanderbilt divorce settlement included complex arrangements for the support of their three children until each was independent, and William K. would have had no interest in starting negotiations all over again.28 The Belmonts, on the other hand, regarded Alva’s decision as such a humiliating blow to family pride that they refused to attend Oliver’s wedding. He then added insult to injury by giving Alva all his Newport property as a wedding present. This included both Belcourt and the Gray Crags estate valued at over $1 million. For many years, Oliver’s brothers refused to have anything to do with him or their new sister-in-law.

  Alva’s decision to fly in the face of all convention by retaining her alimony was part of a determined attempt never to find herself in a position of financial dependence again. She and Oliver were marrying for love. They would be equal partners financially, and there would be no repeat of the humiliating dependence of wife on husband and the lack of financial power she had suffered with William K. In old age she described her relationship with Oliver Belmont as deeply happy. ‘It was a marriage of mature people who had mated not on the basis of a passing attraction but on the basis of like interests, like choices, like hopes and aims … It means that each is always eager to be better and greater in order to have more to give … It is the only sort of union which can possibly endure.’29

  On top of this, Consuelo’s marriage had the desired effect. It was clear that Alva’s position as a leader of society was secure in August 1896 when le tout Newport accepted an invitation to a Belmont ball. Personal happiness calmed Alva down. Her marriage to Oliver Belmont would turn out to be the least active phase of her life. From 1896 to 1908, when her life changed again, Alva was content to derive most of her power from her new-found status as Mother of the Duchess of Marlborough.

  However well-intentioned, an extended honeymoon made for a difficult start to married life. Consuelo was far from intrepid; the Duke was a poor sailor and the Fulda was a simple ship.30 The captain gave up his cabin and slept near the hurricane deck, but his quarters provided a ‘minimum of comfort’ according to Consuelo, who found herself cooped up on a gloomy boat with a seasick husband for whom it was difficult to feel sympathy given that he was so very sorry for himself. ‘Sea-sickness breeds a horrible pessimism, in which my husband fully indulged, and it took all the optimism I possessed to overcome the depressing gloom of that voyage,’31 she wrote later. By the time the Fulda reached Europe, all optimism had more or less evaporated. The Duke’s seasickness was so severe that the couple changed their plans, disembarked at Gibraltar and arranged to travel through Spain.

  This turned out to be almost as disagreeable as sailing on the Fulda. The weather was freezing. The great cathedral of Seville struck Consuelo as both dismal and gaudy, its decorated Madonnas shocking to a New England Protestant. The galleries in Madrid were unheated, pierced by an icy wind and filled with second-rate paintings badly hung. Tension was never far from the surface. Three weeks into their honeymoon it erupted in a furious quarrel that was etched forever on both their memories. Consuelo informed her new husband that she had been forced to give up the man she loved by her mother and had been ordered to marry him. Sunny told Consuelo that he had renounced the woman he loved because he felt obliged to save Blenheim.

  It was probably the moment when they both suddenly realised what they had just done. Stripped of any tattered illusions of romance, depressed, and only just coming to terms with her new role as a wife, Consuelo may have been a trying travelling companion while Sunny was ill-equipped to deal sympathetically with a homesick girl of eighteen. Even in Spain, the clash between American respect for democracy and patrician respect for tradition loomed large and the formal demands of life as an English duchess were never far away. The Marlboroughs spent a pleasant evening in Madrid at the home of the British ambassador, Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff, where Consuelo was introduced to Lord Rosebery, leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. Rosebery had been prime minister briefly from 1894 to 1895, when his main achievement had been to fulfil a dream of winning the Derby – twice – while prime minister.

  Consuelo described Lord Rosebery as possessing an aristocratic arrogance in spite of a bourgeois appearance, with a keen sense of the ridiculous (her reactions were not always as democratic as she liked to think). She warmed to him, however, and was much relieved when he told her that he would be sending a good account of her to Sunny’s formidable grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough. This was uncharacteristically decisive on the part of Lord Rosebery who was famous for being unable to make up his mind about anything. The evening also had more stressful consequences. When Sunny heard that Lord Rosebery had been received by Queen Christina, then Regent of Spain, he pressed for a similar introduction. Etiquette at the Spanish royal court was known to be extremely strict. Consuelo managed to make the three ceremonial curtsies and acquit herself as protocol demanded, but she resolutely refused to enjoy it.

  A visit to the racier atmosphere of the French Riviera in the company of her new husband was no more acceptable, though here Sunny also seems to have displayed a lack of sensitivity. Confronted by blue skies and azure sea, Consuelo’s spirits rose as they made their way to the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, but she soon found herself eating among an unfamiliar crowd of exotic people, many of whom Sunny seemed to know. ‘When I asked him who they all were I was surprised by his evasive answers and still more startled when informed that I must not look at the women whose beauty I admired. It was only after repeated questioning that I learned that these were ladies of easy virtue whose beauty and charm had their price. It became increasingly complicated when I heard that I must not recognise the men who accompanied them, even though some of them had been my suitors a few months before.’32

  Two of the great demimondaines whom Consuelo observed from afar were La Belle Otero, ‘a dark and passionate young woman with a strong blend of Greek and gypsy blood’ who was later named by heiress Anna Gould in her divorce proceedings from Boni de Castellane, and Liane de Pougy, ‘who looked the grande dame she eventually became by her marriage to the Rumanian Prince Ghika’.33 These women, often more beautiful than the ladies of the Faubourg, had their own elegant houses, smart carriages and stunning jewellery, and entertained the intelligentsia of Paris in their salons. There was great rivalry between them and wild bets were placed on the value of their jewels and other less decorous statistics. Consuelo considered it most unfair that these women were allowed to wear make-up, while respectable ladies had to be very discreet about it. ‘How different was this life from the prim monastic existence my mother had enforced. The goddess Minerva no longer sat enthroned. Beauty rather than wisdom appeared to be everyone’s business.’34

  The blinkers were further ripped from her eyes, to borrow Consuelo’s phrase, when she was introduced in Monte Carlo to another bride, a young Englishwoman who was astounded by Consuelo’s lack of worldliness. ‘I listened to her vitriolic gossip with mounting concern. Seeing with her eyes those I was to meet, gauging as she meant me to the enmity of certain of my husband’s friends, the future loomed complex and difficult. Finally, emphasising the need for fine clothes, with rich jewels and a lavish expenditure she added, “With our money, our clothes, our jewels we will be the two successes of the coming London season, and all the women will be jealous of us.”’35

  Though Consuelo was deeply dismayed by these remarks, and by Sunny’s increasingly apparent taste for display, both expressed the prevailing spirit of the belle époque. The onward march of industrialisation had created a new international class of fabulously rich and assertive plutocrats in Europe as well as America. International wealth had given birth to its own ostentatious, international style, reflected in the glittering jewels of the demimondaines
, in ocean-going yachts, dresses by Worth and Doucet, in racehorses and new casinos. In architecture, the European millionaire drew on a mixture of French classicism, French renaissance, the Jacobean and the Italianate – a style which had a trajectory of its own in England from the 1860s onwards. The international playground of the new plutocrats was Paris, a city more tolerant of plutocrat pleasures than anywhere else. By the time the Marlboroughs were on their honeymoon, the new opulence was dominant, sweeping aside the anti-vulgarian stance of the British landed classes. It was a sign of the times that on his one and only attempt to enter the Casino at Monte Carlo, the patrician Lord Salisbury was refused entry because he was unsuitably dressed, to the very great glee of his family.

  One reason for this change in fashion was that the de facto leader of English society, the Prince of Wales, was captivated by wealth himself to the extent of insisting that ostentatious display was now an aristocratic duty. ‘Marlborough House [his London home] was essentially cosmopolitan, its habitués as much at home at Auteuil, Longchamps, Chantilly as at Newmarket, Ascot, Goodwood; the Prince and Princess of Wales were accustomed to spend several months of the year abroad, their regular routine including Biarritz, Homburg, Marienbad, with frequent appearances in Paris or at Monte Carlo’,36 wrote A. L. Rowse. Sunny was therefore right to believe that creating an opulent setting for the Marlboroughs would do much to win royal approval and restore the tarnished family image.

  His point of view may now meet with little understanding, and at the time it never made much impression on his new bride whose enthusiasm for her husband’s Marlborough restoration project was lukewarm at best. Since she hailed from one of the richest families of plutocrats in the world, it may seem odd that Consuelo chose to regard her new husband’s taste for display as a symptom of crass European materialism quite at odds with her more innocent set of values. Part of the explanation may lie in her growing antipathy to the man she had married, who was also evincing a marked tendency to see things entirely from his own point of view (famously summed up by a postcard he once sent to an estate worker at Blenheim from the Riviera which read: ‘Pray press on with the haymaking while this glorious weather lasts.’37) Consuelo’s view of herself as an innocent Jamesian heroine abroad in the corrupt world of old Europe also stemmed partly from her autocratically sheltered childhood. As a child ‘her prim monastic existence’ kept her at one remove from her mother’s campaign of aggrandisement, and she was never allowed to make purchases for herself. Moreover, Alva never quite set aside her own thrifty, puritanical streak. She often challenged tradesmen when she thought they were overcharging and turned down great works of art if she thought they were overpriced. When she discussed it at all, Alva chose to express her enthusiasm for spending Vanderbilt money in terms of a high-minded mission to bring European culture to American vulgarians. The Duke was rather more clear-sighted. Even in 1921, he would urge his second wife, Gladys Deacon, to keep in touch with her wealthy cousin, Eugene Higgins, because everyone in England from the Royal Family downwards was impressed by money’.38 Consuelo may have found such attitudes distasteful, but in 1895 the 9th Duke of Marlborough was right.