Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  It should also be noted that Colonel Mann of Town Topics bore particular animus towards the Belmonts, because, to their credit, they consistently refused to surrender to the Colonel’s attempts at extortion. In 1906, Oliver took the stand as a witness in a court case which exposed the Colonel’s blackmail racket and, according to Andy Logan, ‘testified that in 1899 Colonel Mann had come to him and asked him for $5,000 in return for some shares of Town Topics stock, that when he refused Mann had written a letter, which Belmont produced in court, soliciting a straight loan of $2,000, and that after Belmont had again refused (and also turned down an invitation to appear in another magazine, Fads and Fancies), some fifty abusive items about him appeared in the magazine’.37

  This did not mean that all the abuse was untrue, however. The Colonel went to some lengths to make sure that at least some of what he wrote about society’s high fliers was accurate because this gave him power. Oliver Belmont’s stand against Colonel Mann was in marked contrast to that of William K. Vanderbilt, who turned out to have been a leading ‘immune’ from the mid-1890s onwards – a privilege for which he paid out more than $25,000 and which may be a reason why his affair with Consuelo, Duchess of Manchester, was treated gently by the magazine.

  Throughout the years of her marriage to Oliver Belmont, Town Topics constantly poked fun at Alva, who was not an ‘immune’, reminding everyone that she, the Mother of the Duchess, flaunted cables from Consuelo whenever she could – especially at the opera when she thought people were watching – and ‘exhibiting her daughter’ at an exhibition while the Duchess was in New York in 1908 (Town Topics went on to say ‘had Alva worn a yashmak the two of them together would have been beautiful’38). The magazine reserved particular scorn for the time Alva auctioned off Consuelo’s old child’s donkey cart in aid of the Nassau Hospital at Mineóla. This attracted huge attention from ‘thousands of free, virtuous and intelligent American citizens … thoroughly imbued with the democratic spirit’,39 just as Alva must have known it would. The magazine’s correspondent was particularly incensed by the way Mr and Mrs Belmont were then unable to stop themselves from announcing to the assembled company that Consuelo would soon be coming to stay.

  Despite Town Topics’ mockery, and a later change of perspective, Alva looked back at these years with nostalgia. ‘It was an ideal life,’ she said later; ‘thoroughly refined but full of gaiety and fun.’40 By the standards of other periods in her life, however, her achievements during her marriage to Oliver Belmont were slight. Given her strong feelings on the subject of parental involvement in choosing a child’s spouse, it is not surprising that she was said to have orchestrated and encouraged the engagement of her son, Willie K. Jr, to Virginia Fair. After his marriage to ‘Birdie’ in 1899 at the age of twenty, Willie K. Jr pioneered the introduction of the automobile to Newport, a move in which he was publicly backed by Alva and Oliver, who drove a car of their own, decorated with flowers and two large butterflies, at the first automobile parade down Bellevue Avenue. Newport finally objected to the noise and dust of this new invention, repelled, perhaps, by the ‘hilarity’ of new diversions such as automobile obstacle courses involving nurses with dolls in perambulators.

  As a result, Willie K. Jr moved his automobile experiments to Long Island. Alva and Oliver continued to lend their public support as he encouraged American manufacturers to develop high-performance engines by starting the Vanderbilt Cup Races in 1904, and developed the Long Island Parkway in 1908 where cars could race and drivers with a taste for speed could test new engines ‘without keeping one eye on the constabulary’.41 The Belmonts shocked society by introducing the first shower, at Belcourt; and on 18 July 1907 it was reported that Alva had taken control of the Newport Bridge Club. ‘It was a great day for Mrs Belmont,’ wrote Town Topics, ‘and she bustled about with all the importance of a shipwright about to launch a battleship.’42

  Otherwise, Alva’s battles were restricted to taking up the cudgels on behalf of those whom she felt were suffering unfairly from the playground ethics of Newport society. One example was the manner in which she championed the cause of Mr and Mrs William Leeds, the ‘Tinplate King’ and his wife. For two years their fate in Newport hung in the balance. They made all the right moves, arriving quietly, and renting large houses while their owners were away, but acceptance seemed to elude them. One socialite who had let them her house was roundly castigated by the ultra-exclusive Edith Wetmore who is alleged to have said: ‘How can you lease to those horrible, vulgar people? Why, the whole house ought to be disinfected after them!’ In her memoirs, Elizabeth Drexel Lehr relates how Alva saved them: ‘The Leeds found a champion in Mrs Oliver Belmont, that valiant warrior to whom opposition was as the breath of life. Nothing made her happier than the knowledge that she was pitting herself against the rest of the world. She loved to see herself as a pioneer, to make others bend to her will, to have them follow her in the end, meek, sheep-like … ’43

  In spite of the empty tenor of her lifestyle, Alva’s marriage to Oliver Belmont was far happier than her years with William K., despite all their achievements. As his resistance to Colonel Mann suggests, Oliver Belmont was a powerful as well as an eccentric character, well able to stand up to his wife’s assertive nature. He was also more complex than his fondness for stuffed horses, his insistence on leading a life of leisure, his architectural priorities and his social antics suggest. In 1899, three years after he married Alva, he entered politics endorsing Populist policies and the candidature of William Jennings Bryan, who had often attacked August Belmont, another Democrat. He published a newspaper, the Verdict, which broadly endorsed the Populist programme, and after a series of manoeuvres with the party’s political machine attended the 1900 Democratic National Convention as a congressional candidate, serving one brief term.

  The Populist Democrat programme that Oliver Belmont endorsed was remarkably close in spirit to the reforms proposed by the Liberal Party in England – a surprising platform for such a wealthy man. Their measures included the introduction of income tax, inheritance tax, a church tax, unions for workers and a strong anti-imperialist line – the latter almost certainly influencing Alva’s avowed support for the Boers during the South African War. As ever, Oliver’s interest in politics soon fizzled out, but it is reasonable to suppose that Alva took an interest in his activities and would apply some of the lessons learnt in the years ahead.44

  Because they were well matched, Alva was prepared to give ground to Oliver. Her changes to Belcourt, for example, did little to alter the guiding principle of its design (which was Oliver’s) – at least in his lifetime. (On one occasion a tourist guide was heard to bellow through his megaphone: ‘Here you see before you the new home of a lady who is much before the public eye … A society lady who has just been through the divorce courts. She used to dwell in marble halls with Mr Vanderbilt. Now she lives over the stables with Mr Belmont.’45) She also accepted Oliver’s manservant, Azar, and even promoted him to major-domo on her arrival. Azar was a fixture at every Belmont event, welcoming guests between two English footmen in court liveries with powdered hair, and standing beside Oliver’s chair at dinner ‘tall and handsome in his picturesque zouave jacket and embroidered fez’.46 Once again, the splendours of pre-war Newport and Edwardian England ran closely in parallel.

  Even Town Topics had to concede reluctantly that the marriage was happy, writing later that ‘when everything was running smoothly there is little doubt that she looked upon … [Oliver] as the grandest man in the world’ – before going on to say ‘the problem was that bliss seldom reigned in the Belmont domicile’. According to Colonel Mann and his correspondents, dishes flew, tempers frayed and one of Oliver’s tactics when he was annoyed with Alva was to sing: ‘Would someone kindly tell me, for I would like to know, why I got a lemon in the garden of love, where only peaches grow’,47 and to request this ditty wherever he found an orchestra. Overall, however, Alva was not simply being sentimental when she characterised the difference
between her two marriages thus: ‘We were interested not primarily in what each could get out of the other but what each could put into it and from the blending get the most satisfying results.’48 One clue to the scale of Oliver’s affection for Alva was his present to her for her forty-ninth birthday. It was a life-size statue of Joan of Arc sculpted by Prosper d’Epinay (it had been exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1902); a solid marble love token which suggests that however tempestuous the relationship may sometimes have been, he understood his wife’s fiery and determined nature and admired her for it.

  There is every reason to suppose that if Oliver’s life had run its expected course, Alva would have disappeared from view, relegated to memoirs of the Gilded Age as one of its more colourful and powerful female figures like her friend Mrs Stuyvesant Fish, with a well-deserved footnote in histories of American architecture and a question mark over her behaviour regarding her daughter’s choice of husband. This was not to be. Her second marriage only lasted twelve years. Oliver became ill at Brookholt on 1 June 1908. At first his doctors thought he had developed an ailment of the liver, and it took another three days before he underwent surgery for appendicitis. In the days before antibiotics this was a fatal delay, for he developed peritonitis and septic poisoning. In spite of a weak heart and considerable excess weight, Oliver rallied briefly on 6 June. Alva was at his bedside when he died at Brookholt on 10 June 1908.

  Neither of Oliver Belmont’s brothers came to his funeral, though one of his nephews did attend – a gesture which touched Alva so deeply that she left his sons and daughters a legacy in her will. Oliver’s death also marked the beginning of an uneasy rapprochement between Alva and the Belmonts after they offered her burial space for Oliver in the family plot in Newport – an offer she turned down with great care, for she and Oliver had already bought a burial plot at Woodlawn Cemetery.49 Alva was undoubtedly devastated by Oliver’s sudden death. William Gilmour, still superintendent of Marble House in 1908, in spite of coming close to resignation many times, reported in his notebooks that Alva ‘looked very badly indeed’ when she appeared in Newport eight days later on 18 June. Her grief appears to have touched him, for in a rare display of emotion he also commented: ‘I found her very nice however.’50 Understandably reluctant to stay in Newport for the summer season, Alva told Mr Gilmour that she planned to sail for Europe and return in September. Accompanied by Azar (who would stay with her for many more years) and by her daughter-in-law, ‘Birdie’ Vanderbilt, Alva departed on the Mauritania for Europe on 24 June, where, she later wrote bleakly: ‘I was ill for a long time.’51 Town Topics’ only mention of Oliver Belmont’s death was to question whether there could truly be a Newport season without ‘Alva the magnificent domineering the bridge players’.52

  By 3 September the magazine was speculating as to how Alva would now occupy herself. ‘Not since her divorce has there been so much interest exhibited in Mrs Alva Belmont … There is a keen desire to know if Mrs Belmont will retain all her properties … and finally what disposition she will make of Mrs Belmont herself.’53 Alva remained in Europe until late September when she returned to take a health cure at Hot Springs, Virginia, where, it was rumoured, she intervened to shore up the now floundering marriage between her son Willie K. Jr and ‘Birdie’ (once again it was reported that she had been assisted by the pliable Mrs William Jay in piling on the pressure.) There were other rumours too. Alva was planning to sell Belcourt and Brookholt; and she had plans to open a colony for a group of social intimates at Hot Springs, Virginia, although Town Topics felt obliged to point out that because Alva had so many enemies, such a group would be very small.54

  None of these rumours materialised. Nonetheless, the twelve months between June 1908 and June 1909 undoubtedly marked the greatest upheaval in Alva’s life. She suddenly found herself widowed, bereft of one of the few men she had ever loved. Both marriages she had arranged for her children had either collapsed publicly or were on the point of doing so, for Willie K. Jr and his wife finally separated in 1909, embarking on a period of separation that lasted until ‘Birdie’, a Roman Catholic, agreed to file for divorce in 1927.

  The social world that Alva had dominated for so long was already the focus of widespread criticism and without Oliver it is easy to see how it lost much of its charm. Although she would continue to build, restore and alter houses well into old age, this now became part of her life rather than an all-absorbing interest. Town Topics’ barbed remarks about her small circle were partly true, for Alva was now more isolated than she had once been. Her sister, Julia, who had married the Comte de Fontenilliat, died in 1905, while her eldest sister, Armide Vogel Smith, died in 1907. Jenny Tiffany lived in France; and Alva was on uneasy terms with two important and extended New York families, the Vanderbilts and the Belmonts. On top of this there was the conventional view of widowhood itself – a retreat to the shadows, another kind of exclusion from the theatre of life, another kind of purdah where pale rays of ‘sunshine’ would be few and far between.

  In accounts of her conversion to the suffrage cause, a move that would rescue her from the half-life of a rich widow, the number of months Alva spent in Europe immediately after Oliver Belmont’s death has generally been overlooked. So is the fact that in the summer of 1908, when she travelled to Europe, both Alva and Consuelo were living alone for the first time in either of their lives. Though this was almost certainly irrelevant to Alva in the first stages of grief, Consuelo’s interest and involvement in social welfare problems, her range of activities and successful consolidation of her position in society cannot have been lost on Alva as the weeks went by; nor can the work Consuelo was undertaking for her articles for the North American Review during the second part of 1908. Consuelo had made her speech criticising idle American females at the dinner for Mrs Humphrey Ward in April 1908; Oliver died in June; and throughout that summer and early autumn, Consuelo was drafting and rewriting ‘The Position of Women’ so that The Times could print advance extracts by December 1908.

  Alva remained in Europe throughout the summer of 1908 and was back there again in February and March 1909, which coincided with the publication of Consuelo’s articles. There is no record of exactly how much time they spent together during the months Alva was in Europe, but it is reasonable to suppose that it amounted to a period of several weeks, and that they would have discussed Consuelo’s work. Alva may well have contributed her own ideas while Consuelo was drafting the articles, but at this stage Consuelo was well ahead of Alva in her thinking. It is likely that it was Consuelo who persuaded her mother that if she did not wish to lead a half-life as a widow, she would have to take a step outside the ‘great gilt cage’. At the very least, Consuelo’s example made Alva consider the proposition that the public life of the English aristocratic woman might now apply to her too.

  Put in the context of Consuelo’s views about the position of women, the exclusion of women from power, her support for the English suffrage campaign and her involvement in social welfare issues affecting women, Alva’s subsequent decision to throw her energies into the fight for the woman’s vote in March 1909 seems less like an overnight conversion. Soon after her return to New York in March 1909, Alva accepted an invitation to a lecture on woman’s suffrage by Ida Husted Harper in the home of Consuelo’s bridesmaid, Katherine Mackay (nee Duer), the only American society woman of any standing already taking an interest in the cause. Ida Husted Harper was the press chairman of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the leading suffrage organisation in America. On 18 March 1909, its president, Anna Howard Shaw, was invited to dinner by Alva and they talked about female suffrage till one in the morning. This caused Anna Howard Shaw to miss her train and spend another night in a hotel, but the expense was worth it, she told her board because ‘I got her for a life member of the National Association before leaving’.55

  Later Alva wrote that she had taken time over her decision to embrace the suffrage cause and that it had not been taken lightl
y. ‘When it dawned on me that there was some serious humanitarian niche in life which I, with my opportunities, might fill, it was not a matter which I could decide in a day,’56 she wrote. She and Consuelo both shared the view that happiness could only be achieved through ‘self-subjugation’ and that this was the best way to deal with profound misery. ‘Don’t think of yourself, it is the greatest medicine of all,’ Alva once wrote to Harry Lehr when he was feeling depressed.57 ‘It is this I saw years ago, when the light of my life burnt out with him,’58 she wrote to Sara Bard Field years later. Alva also agreed with Consuelo about the dangers of female idleness. ‘It is a mistake to believe that any woman, no matter what her financial condition of life, can lead an idle existence. It is merely a question of the worthiness of her activities,’59 she wrote.

  Alva also suggested that she had given serious thought to becoming involved in some great philanthropic undertaking. But between Oliver’s death in June 1908 and the spring of 1909 when she joined the National American, she gradually came to the conclusion that her daughter and her philanthropist colleagues were approaching social problems from the wrong direction. ‘[Some] of my personal acquaintances, with money at their command, had gone into the slums, and I assure you that many of them did ameliorate the hardships of those among whom they worked, until here and there the eddy widened to a whirlpool,’ she wrote. Alva believed that improvements achieved by philanthropists were only ever temporary and superficial. ‘In the end, after much deliberation, I was forced to the conclusion that the uplifting of the slums could, at best, be but ephemeral unless the very conditions which created the slums were overcome,’60 she wrote in 1911. These conditions, she argued, had evolved entirely at the behest of men and were a direct result of ‘their strength and directness’ without the compensating balance of female ‘delicacies of perception and intuitive forms of reasoning which the masculine mind lacks’.61 As a result (and here her argument did coincide with Consuelo’s), any woman concerned with issues of social welfare was deprived of influence over the matters which most directly concerned her as wife, mother and philanthropist. The difference was that Alva argued that the female vote was needed before the fundamental causes of poverty could be tackled.