Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  One testimony to Consuelo’s charisma as a philanthropist came years later from the actress Dame Anna Neagle who was brought up in a working-class area of East London. ‘I was six when I saw the then Duchess of Marlborough … When I saw her she would have been in her thirties. She came to have tea in our house when we lived near the London Docks, at West Ham. My mother was the honorary secretary of the local branch of the British Sailors’ Society, and I imagine the Duchess was giving her support to some bazaar or sale of work for this. All I remember is her loveliness: not just her face, but in everything about her. The exquisite sapphire blue of the long velvet gown she wore; the touches of fur at her wrists and throat; the pale serene beauty of her face, the charm of her smile. She left some sort of spell over my childish mind so that, when she had gone, I carefully wrote her name on the underside of the chair in which she had sat.’18

  Consuelo also began to attract international attention as a result of her philanthropic work, particularly in America. In the spring of 1908 she made another trip back to the States. As usual, her arrival attracted attention, and this time Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt (wife of her cousin Cornelius and later the Mrs Vanderbilt) gave a well-publicised dinner in her honour at 677 Fifth Avenue, with much of the New York gratin in attendance. A week later, after some arm-twisting by Colonel George Harvey, editor of the distinguished American magazine the North American Review, she made her American public speaking debut at a dinner in honour of Mrs Humphrey Ward to raise funds for children’s playgrounds in America. Consuelo took advantage of this platform – and the attention she was getting – to articulate a new conviction.

  Rich American women were too idle, she said. They should follow the example of their English counterparts and make a useful contribution to society. Life as an English duchess had given her a chance to observe the extent to which, in England ‘the influence of women has permeated every field of human endeavour, political and philanthropic’. In England, said Consuelo, donating money was not enough. ‘Personal direction is exacted and freely given, and it is this expression of human sympathy that knits closely together the widely varying elements of the community.’ America was different because there was no tradition of such activity. ‘But does not the mere privilege of citizenship in a Republic such as this involve personal responsibility and place it on a far higher plane?’, Consuelo asked. ‘Is it not possible for the women citizens of this great Republic to recognise that personal obligation on its ethical basis and to turn it to account in practical works?’19 Alva, who was present at this dinner with Oliver Belmont and several hundred of New York’s finest, can only have been delighted by what her daughter had to say. It was nothing less than a great public vindication of her original decision to marry Consuelo off to an English duke.

  Consuelo sat down to considerable applause, although Mrs Humphrey Ward – soon to emerge as the pre-eminent English anti-suffragist – rose to her feet and remarked somewhat tartly that as far as playgrounds were concerned, America was well ahead of England in all respects. This was largely lost on the New York press. The New York Evening Journal marvelled at the change which had come over ‘the shy little American girl, timid, fearful, unable to realize the immense power of the millions of dollars which were hers’.20 Colonel George Harvey promptly invited Consuelo to expand what she had just said into a series of articles for the North American Review. This was a great honour and a deeply flattering endorsement of her new role as a figure in public life: the Review was a highly distinguished magazine and the leading arbiter of opinion in the United States; its contributors had included no fewer than ten presidents by the time George Harvey acquired it in 1899.

  Consuelo developed her April speech into three articles entitled ‘The Position of Women’ during 1908. The Times printed extracts from advance sheets on 30 December and the three articles then appeared in consecutive issues of the North American Review in January, February and March 1909. The Times’s extracts made it clear that Consuelo was explicitly in favour of women having the vote as one remedy to social welfare problems and anyone reading the articles as they appeared in the Review would have been left in no doubt at all that this was her view.

  The theme of all three articles was the exclusion of women from public life, the ‘gradual narrowing and restricting of her sphere to the present day, when woman is at length attempting to re-establish the balance of primitive rights as well as to gain the economic and political equality civilisation brings in its wake’.21 Much of the first and second articles was taken up with a long historico-anthropological analysis that would not pass muster now. Nonetheless it was a bold attempt to grapple with the historical background to the exclusion of women from public life in the absence of any serious contemporary study of the question. It showed too, quite clearly, how feminist Consuelo’s thinking had become by 1908, and how exercised she was by the question of female exclusion from economic and political influence.

  In these articles Consuelo argued that women had power in primitive societies which was usurped when men ceased to be hunter-gatherers and took the female agricultural role for themselves. But women had not done enough to resist these and other forms of economic domination, she argued, nor to resist the pernicious ideal of blind obedience to men that had traditionally been imposed on them: ‘It is in my opinion the necessity to adjust herself to man, to be judged by his individual standard and to conform her whole personality to his ways of thinking, that has robbed woman of the power, strength and influence she could have exerted as a united and independent majority.’22 This, wrote Consuelo, was a moral code unfit for anyone other than a slave.

  Although she would later dissociate herself from militant suffragette tactics, Consuelo wrote these articles at a time (1908) when suffragette militancy was still emerging in England and was not the divisive issue between campaigners that it soon became. In these articles Consuelo expressed an understanding of female militancy represented by the Pahkhursts and their organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and was supportive of their attempts to reclaim political power for women. ‘It is because womanly measures have failed to open the gates that they have resorted to more masculine ones,’ she wrote. ‘Not because they enjoy going to prison or making themselves objectionable, but because they know that no great reform has ever been brought about without public agitation of a more or less aggressive character on the part of those directly concerned.’23 As a general principle Consuelo believed that women were most effective in resisting exclusion at times of great upheaval. Once powerful organisations such as the Church achieved stability, however, a woman’s public life ‘became more cramped, and narrowed to one of pure domesticity, and her influence in affairs outside the domain of the home was nil’.24

  The third article, entitled ‘Expanding Activities and Opportunities in America and England’, was the most explicitly political. Having analysed the manner in which women had historically been squeezed out of public life, Consuelo proceeded to suggest a way in which married women in America could reintegrate themselves. Here she returned once again to the same analysis that Alva had used to justify marrying Consuelo off to the Duke of Marlborough. Rich American females were too ready to lead a life of frivolity into which ‘many brilliant women are apt to degenerate into from lack of opportunity and purpose’.25 They should copy their English sisters by setting it aside and taking a role in public life. The presence of women would de-contaminate American public life from scandal. If they did not take up the challenge and socialism took hold, argued Consuelo, the wealthy would only have themselves to blame. Although ‘the responsibilities of great wealth’ were often ‘puzzling, discouraging and strenuous’, such work could be of ‘intense interest’ to the rich women of America, ‘where men leave so much of the distribution of wealth in their hands’.26 This was ‘advancing socialism in its most favourable aspect’, Consuelo thought, an arrangement by which every member of the community had a ‘given task and an appointed place in the working
of the great state machinery’.27 She ended by saying that this kind of public work was an important dress rehearsal for the time when the campaign for female suffrage was ultimately successful.

  Consuelo repeated a slimmed-down version of these views several times throughout 1908 and 1909. ‘American Duchess Condemns Idleness’ screeched a headline in The New York Times in 1909 when she opened a flower show in the East End of London. ‘She said she was a great believer in the sound judgement of the working man,’ the newspaper reported breathlessly. ‘She was a great believer in work as the best discipline and she wished everyone rich as well as poor was obliged to work a certain number of hours every day.’28

  It all gave Alva great satisfaction when she discussed Consuelo’s marriage with Sara Bard Field in 1917. ‘Once when [Consuelo] had come back to America to make me a visit she confessed that she was appalled by the emptiness of the lives of rich American women …’, Alva said. ‘Their lives were vapid and meaningless, starved and bored. “In spite of all that has happened,” said my daughter, “I am glad I married an Englishman.” Looking about me at the ineffectual living of the leisure woman in American, I echoed her gladness.’29 What Alva overlooked, however, was that it was only after Consuelo separated from the Duke that she was able to translate the role of Duchess of Marlborough – and her share of the Vanderbilt wedding settlement – into a position of independent influence.

  Alva’s pleasure at Consuelo’s acceptance of the benefits conferred by becoming an English duchess was deeply ironic. After her marriage to Oliver Belmont in January 1896 she became the embodiment of precisely the aimless life led by American society women criticised by Consuelo. Her elder son, Willie K. Jr30 had left Harvard to marry Tessie Oelrich’s younger sister Virginia ‘Birdie’ Fair in 1899 (they intended to spend their honeymoon at Idle Hour as Consuelo had, but it burnt down on their wedding night). Harold lived with the Belmonts throughout his teens, though like his older brother he was educated at boarding school and was often away.

  Alva’s marriage to Oliver Belmont had started in controversy when she antagonised her Belmont in-laws by refusing to part with the trust fund set up for her by William K. Vanderbilt at the time of their divorce in 1895. The outcome, however, was that the Belmonts became a spectacularly rich couple with little to do, moving between a house in New York, three estates in Newport (Belcourt, Gray Crags and Marble House) and a house at Hempstead on Long Island where they spent the greater part of each year. This was Brookholt, commissioned by the Belmonts from Richard Howland Hunt, son of Richard Morris Hunt in 1897, an interesting triangular collaboration which resulted in a cross between an eighteenth-century French chateau and an English Palladian house with exceptionally large stables designed in the French manner.

  The lifestyle of the leaders of Newport society, meanwhile, reached breathtaking levels of vapidity in the years before 1914. Many of the worst offenders were the Belmonts themselves and their immediate circle. Mrs Astor’s power had slowly waned in the late 1890s and ebbed away entirely in the years between 1905 and 1908 when her memory began to fail. ‘A legend sprang up that discreet servants still went through the routine of announcing guests and pretending to pass dishes and pour wines at a long empty table, at the end of which the witless old lady – dressed in a Worth gown and festooned with chains of diamonds – continued to converse left and right with imaginary guests long dead,’31 wrote Louis Auchincloss. (The legend of Mrs Astor’s last years would inspire Edith Wharton’s short story ‘After Holbein’.)

  In the vacuum left by Mrs Astor’s slow fade from the real social world to an imaginary one, there was a sharp tussle for Newport supremacy between Alva and Mrs Ogden Mills – for whoever won Newport became de facto queen of New York’s elite. ‘Between Mrs Belmont and Mrs Ogden Mills there existed a perpetual state of feud which extended itself to their respective courts. In temperament they were diametrically opposed … Mrs Belmont, warm-hearted, impulsive, aggressive … Mrs Mills … cold, sarcastic and aristocratic,’ wrote Alva’s friend and fellow socialite Elizabeth Drexel Lehr. There were difficulties with both camps. Mrs Ogden Mills ‘made a cult of rudeness’ and was so extremely exclusive that she slashed the magic figure from ‘the Four Hundred’ to the ‘Two Hundred’ and maintained there were only twenty families in New York who counted. This turned out to be taking exclusivity too far. Alva, on the other hand, was incapable of diplomacy. Here, the general view was that it was ‘impossible to have a Queen of “the Four Hundred” who could sign only declarations of war’.32 In the end, there was no outright winner because, according to Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, Mrs Odgen Mills had too few friends, and Alva too many enemies.

  Before Mrs Astor’s death in 1908, however, the press finally pronounced in favour of a triumvirate. Mrs Ogden Mills was beached by her own exclusivity, and the crown was awarded jointly to Alva, her great friend Tessie Oelrichs and Mrs Stuyvesant – or ‘Mamie’ – Fish. The triumvirate was aided in its social endeavours by Harry Lehr, their pet cotillion leader and Ward McAllister’s natural successor. (McAllister had died, unmourned by most of those he had assisted including Mrs Astor, in 1895.) Lehr’s arrival signalled the end of the solemn certainties of Mrs Astor’s world for he had the nerve to tell her, among other things, that her diamonds made her look like a chandelier. Mrs Astor – after a pause – decided she was amused, and took him up briefly before her decline. Lehr then migrated to the great triumvirate, and to Mamie Fish in particular, whose amanuensis and court jester he became.

  Knowing Harry Lehr as they did, it seemed extraordinarily naive (at best) of Alva, Tessie Oelrichs and Mamie Fish to have encouraged Lehr to propose to Elizabeth Drexel, a young heiress from Philadelphia. Elizabeth’s wealth enabled Harry Lehr to live comfortably as a gentleman of leisure, but she endured years of unhappiness when he rejected her savagely on their wedding night, saying that he hated women, had lied about loving her, and would only tolerate a mariage blanc. ‘He delighted in women’s clothes and was never so happy as when he was helping some woman or other of his acquaintance to choose dresses … In his diary he wrote “… Oh, if only I could wear ladies’ clothes; all silks and dainty petticoats and laces, how I should love to choose them,”’33 according to his wife. Few people (in her version of the story) ever suspected how vicious he was to her in private; but her mother hated the idea of divorce and Elizabeth remained married to him until he died. Her unhappiness, however, caused her to view Newport society with an unusually detached eye while moving at its centre, resulting in two memoirs written several years later which are among the best of the period.

  The parties Harry Lehr organised with the triumvirate hovered uneasily between magical fantasy and teasing cruelty, complicated by a collective streak of ambivalence on the part of its new leaders towards Newport society in the first place. Mamie Fish in particular saw herself as a social anarchist. ‘Make yourself at home, and believe me, there’s no one who wishes you there more heartily than I,’34 she is said to have told one caller. To another, searching for her niece before leaving a party, Mrs Fish is said to have enquired silkily whether she had looked under her (male) secretary. On the magical side of the balance sheet, Mrs Oelrichs gave a bal blanc where everyone came dressed in white, white swans swam in her fountains and a white flotilla of illusory, illuminated boats shimmered on the ocean just beyond her garden balustrade to create a mirage of a house beside a harbour. On the debit side, Mrs Stuyvesant Fish almost sacrificed her position as a leader of society when she conspired with Harry Lehr to give a dinner in honour of ‘Prince del Drago’. Newport society flocked to meet him, only to discover that the ‘Prince’ was a chimpanzee.

  Part of the problem was boredom. The summer season became dull, the social competition tedious. ‘Newport again! Another season; the same background of dinners and balls, the same splendours. The same set, the same faces, here and there a few lines on them carefully powdered out – no-one could afford to get old, to slip out of things,’ wrote Elizabeth Drexel Lehr. Th
ere was an infamous ‘Dog’s Dinner’ where owners fed foie gras to their dogs, while the poor starved; and, in just as poor taste, a ‘Servants’ Ball’. ‘The door of “The Rocks” was opened by Henry Clews, attired as a valet and holding a duster in one hand and a kitchen pail in the other.* Behind him was Mrs Oelrichs with a large mop, industriously polishing the floor. Oliver Belmont, a little feather dusting brush stuck into his cap, was acting as cloakroom attendant, taking charge of coats. The funniest part of the evening was the dinner, cooked by the guests.’35 The servants, who presumably had to clear up the mess, were given the night off in a late outbreak of sensitivity but they could have been forgiven for thinking that this was a grim sort of fun.

  Town Topics kept up a campaign against the Belmonts from the time of their marriage onwards. The magazine’s preferred line was that Oliver and Alva were a seedy couple who did little to earn the respect that they felt they deserved, who more or less wrote their own publicity material in the New York World and the New York Herald, and who had high hopes for the benefits conferred by their relationship with Consuelo. It particularly liked to publicise moments when it looked as if these had been dashed. In June 1897, for example, a correspondent wrote that ‘the home-coming of Mr and Mrs Oliver Belmont before the Jubilee celebrations together with the absence of their accounts of their entertainment at Blenheim, has naturally given rise to the notion that the worthy couple were just a little disappointed in their reception by the Marlboroughs, and that the rift in the lute, which, it was predicted, would start as soon as the young Duchess had become at all acclimatized, is already visible’.36 Any suggestion of a rift should be treated with caution, for Alva was back at Consuelo’s side for the birth of Blandford in September 1897. However, Town Topics’ implication that the Marlboroughs were wary of providing an entrée for the Belmonts into English society may contain more than a germ of truth, as may its allegation that the Duke found William K. Vanderbilt the more congenial in-law. The Blenheim Palace visitor’s book certainly suggests that he was a far more frequent visitor than Alva, though it is equally possible that he simply signed it more often.