Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  At one point, Harold Vanderbilt appeared. Like his brother, Willie K. Jr, he had joined the US navy after war was declared and was now a first lieutenant in charge of nearby Block Island. Sara Bard Field was surprised to find she liked him, and that he shared her views about the pointlessness of war. She was intrigued by Alva’s relationship with her sons. Alva flushed with pleasure when Harold turned up unexpectedly, and was proud that he seemed to enjoy talking to an intelligent suffragist so much. At the same time, Field wrote to Wood, Alva seemed determined not to let her affection show. ‘She is a strangely loving mother who had denied herself the luxury of showing it till her boys should respect her views.’ Later that day, Sara Bard Field had the greatest trouble turning down an invitation from Alva to come to dinner and get to know Harold better. Field had not felt like it, she told Wood, because it was her ‘sick time (aren’t you relieved – I am)’, but it had taken all the force of character she possessed to stand up to a furious Alva even on such a minor matter: ‘What! I return the invitation of a Vanderbilt – sought as the most desirable eligible in all the land … Everyone does as he asks. That was all implied in her displeased replies to my refusal.’64

  There were moments when Sara Bard Field was touched by Alva’s vulnerability and loneliness. At other times, she was horrified by Alva’s materialism. When Sara spoke of her love for Wood, Alva responded by saying angrily that she was a fool, and that she ought to let Alva find her a rich husband. ‘If he [Wood] loved you as he says he does, he ought to hope and pray you would find a man who could give you an honourable place as his wife … It’s all very well to talk about the beauty of free love but you pay too heavy a penalty for it – the woman, I mean.’65 Later, Sara Bard Field was treated to an insight into Alva’s relationship with Newport society.

  I remember one day when I was still working in her library … she came back from a bridge party and she was in a very, well, angry state of mind. She threw her gloves down on the table and said, ‘I loathe these people!’ I said, ‘Well, why do you go to them, Mrs Belmont? If you’re not happy?’ And she said, ‘I’m determined to keep my position among them.’ And I said, ‘Well, why do you loathe them?’ She said, ‘They care for nothing but money.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I would say that it was strange that you feel that way, because of course you have a great deal of money.’ And she looked at me fiercely and she said, ‘Surely I have. Money is power.’ I can’t tell you with what angry sense of arrival at a conclusion that was just impossible for her to escape from, even though she had met women who thought there were things other than power.66

  The aspect of Alva’s personality which most repelled Sara Bard Field was the sharp discrepancy between her support for the feminist movement and her treatment of women she regarded as ‘inferior’. ‘I remember one night when I was still there and had refused to go out to some elaborate party, her personal maid came into my room, knocking on the door, of course, first, and flung herself down in a chair weeping, and I said, “What is the matter my dear?” She said, “Oh, she struck me so hard with her hairbrush because I didn’t get her hair up in a hurry” … I had a feeling of the chasm between her attitudes towards the individual and her attitude toward women in general, when they were fulfilling her desire, which was always, it seemed to me, based on some kind of revenge.’67 This story resonates with another in the archives of the Preservation Society of Newport. Elsie Powers told an archivist in 1997 that her parents John and Ruth Townsend worked as a married couple at Marble House in 1914, until her mother became pregnant with Elsie. When she was told about the pregnancy, Alva was furious, telling the Townsends that she did not want a baby in the house, and that when it was born they must give it up for adoption. The Townsends chose to leave her service.68

  In the end, Alva seemed to lose interest in publishing the memoir she started in 1917 and it was never revised or completed. Sara Bard Field later remembered that she departed from Newport that summer ‘extremely depressed’ about the realities of wealth, feeling that it ‘was not only insignificant but inimical to people’s development and growth’. But though she never warmed to Alva she felt that, in retrospect, Alva had been one of the very few to use great wealth constructively. ‘Without resigning her social position and giving a great deal of her life to the social activities, she really had a desire, probably from her will to power, to perform the work she did for women, and it is not to be despised by any means.’ At the same time it should not be confused with a ‘great self-giving for its own sake’. ‘Perhaps,’ she continued, ‘I have no right to look into motives, only into results, and the results were good. She was a force throughout all the effort for national suffrage.’ Sara Bard Field believed that deep down, however, Alva harboured a secret dream. ‘She believed ardently that some day we would have a woman president,’ said Field. ‘I think she had dreams of being president one day.’69

  Consuelo first met Louis-Jacques Balsan, or Jacques as he was always known, on the night of her Paris debut at the party given by the Duc de Gramont in 1894, when she was seventeen. He is said to have gone home and told his mother that he had just met the girl he wished to marry, but he correctly surmised that his suit stood no chance whatsoever with Alva who was then toying with the prospects of a German princeling for Consuelo.

  Jacques Balsan’s background was affluent haut bourgeois rather than aristocratic. The Balsan fortune was derived from a great textile factory in Châteauroux in the Indre, where the wool of the local sheep provided such fine cloth that Louis XV had created the Manufacture Royal du Chateau du Parc in the town in the eighteenth century. The enterprise was eventually bought by the Balsan family in the mid-nineteenth century, and flourished as it cornered an international market in cloth for military uniforms. In an age of intense nationalism, large armies and constant warfare, this became a highly lucrative business. As the enterprise flourished, the Balsans built large houses, one of which incorporated an earlier chateau, in the park near the factory, and the family came to dominate the town of Châteauroux, building houses for its workers, schools and a hospital. In Jacques’ generation, the sons were still expected to work for the business – but they were also able to enjoy life as wealthy young bachelors of the belle époque.

  Jacques’ glamorous younger brother Etienne was a lover of Coco Chanel, whose career he helped to launch. Jacques himself was a friend of Count Boni de Castellane, a French rake who married Anna Gould, another American heiress of fabulous riches, in the same year that Consuelo married the Duke of Marlborough. As a young man Jacques moved in international high-society circles, staying at Blenheim at least once, in 1898, but the Balsan family did not allow him to dawdle. Much of his early twenties were spent travelling round the world on behalf of the Balsan enterprise, finding new sources of wool for the ever-expanding business – journeys which took him to South America, Russia, Australia, China, the Far East and included a period when he was said to have lived with a tribe in the Philippines. After 1900 day-to-day management of the Balsan business passed by agreement to Jacques’ brother, Robert, his cousins Henri and Jean, and a brother-in-law, Roger de la Selle, leaving Jacques time to pursue a long-standing passion for aviation.

  Jacques already held ‘Balloon Pilot Certificate No 90’ and had his own balloon, St Louis, in which he set a record in 1900 by remaining airborne for thirty-five hours and nine minutes. He then set an altitude record a month later by taking the St Louis to a height of 8,558 metres – about five miles. A month after that he flew the balloon another record distance of 850 miles from Vincennes, near Paris, to Opoezno in Russia. This enthusiasm for flight soon transferred itself to an interest in the experiments conducted by the Wright brothers on heavier-than-air craft in Biarritz in 1910. Jacques bought his own plane and became ‘Pilot No 18’ to hold a licence in France.

  Jacques was not simply an aviation pioneer. He was one of the first to grasp that this new invention, the aeroplane, would play a critical part in twentieth-century warfare. He volunteered for tw
o tours of duty during the French campaign in Morocco (from March to June 1913 and for six months in the first half of 1914), taking part in early attempts at aerial bombardment. ‘Très courageux, plein de sangfroid’ said his note de service afterwards, ‘il a rendu de très grands services a l’aviation du Maroc par sa grande connaissance des choses techniques de l’aviation, par son sens de l’adaptation de ce moyen au but pour suivi’.70

  This experience stood him in good stead when war broke out in August 1914. He became a captain in the new French air force, making long and dangerous flights to reconnoitre German troop movements on the eve of the Battle of the Marne and contributing information about General von Kluck’s advance on combined French and British forces which eventually led to a crushing German defeat. As the war progressed, Jacques was promoted to colonel and commanded a group of Scout planes. Before one particularly dangerous mission he sent Consuelo a postcard wishing her well – he feared he might not return and told her later that he wished to greet her before he died.

  It may have been Consuelo’s father, William K. Vanderbilt, who finally brought them together. Living mainly in France after 1903, William K. was vocal in his opposition to America’s position of neutrality up to 1917 and became a generous supporter of the American war effort in Europe. When some Americans in Paris formed a squadron of volunteer air pilots known as the Lafayette Escadrille, he gave it generous financial support. The credit for founding the squadron is given by aviation historians to three rich Americans – William Thaw, Norman Prince and William K.’s doctor, Edmund L. Gros. For some time, the reaction of the French authorities to a volunteer American squad was negative. As one American airman said: “There was really no place of need for volunteer aviators. Hundreds of young Frenchmen were clamouring for admittance to this new and romantic branch of the service,’71 but after the French air force sustained serious combat losses, the French authorities relaxed their attitude. Edmund L. Gros secured financial help from William K., who began by donating $20,000 and continued to bankroll the Lafayette Escadrille until the end of the war, helping to pay the passage of American volunteers who wished to join. (In her memoirs, Consuelo wrote that Jacques was also a founder of the squadron, but its historian does not support this and, in a memorandum of his war service drawn up for the French government at a later date, Jacques makes no such claim either. It is more likely that as a distinguished French military aviator his championship of the idea was important in convincing the French authorities to allow young American volunteers to fly. He certainly tried to revive the idea at the beginning of the Second World War, which may account for the mistake.)

  When Jacques was sent on a mission by the French military authorities to England in 1917, William K. Vanderbilt may well have encouraged him to call on Consuelo. Forty-nine years old to Consuelo’s forty, Jacques was unmarried – he had contracted a civil marriage to Marie Odile Destors in 1903, possibly to legitimise a child who died, and they divorced in 1906. He was soon a guest at one weekend house party at Crowhurst, when Consuelo had invited Asquith to stay, and courtship soon began in earnest. (When he was home on leave, the twenty-one-year-old Marquess of Blandford spent much of his time in London theatres pursuing musical comedy actresses. He once said: ‘… I used to sit in a box every night, and one night, my mother, who disapproved, was sitting in the next box being courted by Jacques Balsan.’)72 Although they would be separated again during the last few months of the war, Jacques and Consuelo were an established couple by the time it ended, appearing together at a party in Paris given by Elsie de Wolf to celebrate the Armistice.

  By now Consuelo’s sons were old enough to look after themselves (though the Marquess of Blandford’s taste for musical comedy actresses – especially one Betty Barnes – worried both his parents, with the Duke attributing his tastes to his ‘common American blood’73). Consuelo had other commitments however. In 1917 a vacancy came up for the North Southwark seat on London County Council and it was pointed out by her fellow members of the Women’s Municipal Party that its president ought really to stand. Unlike her mother, Consuelo had no dreams of high political office or even of entering politics. She did, however, have a strong sense of obligation. She agreed to stand as a Progressive, part of a radical ginger group committed to pushing the Liberal Party in a more socialist direction. Her candidacy was supported by E. A. Strauss, the Liberal MP whose constituency included North Southwark. (Coincidentally, the Duke also went back into the national wartime government as Joint-Parliamentary Secretary to the Department of Agriculture, representing it in the House of Lords.)

  Since all elections were suspended for the course of the war, Consuelo’s candidacy was assessed by a selection panel. She was introduced to its members by Mr Strauss and met about sixty of her potential constituents, to whom she made a speech lasting over an hour. Consuelo was then sent outside the door to await the committee’s decision. It was almost an hour before they announced their decision, making Consuelo rather despondent for although she had no particular wish to stand ‘there was now a question of pride involved in the issue’.74 Eventually Mr Strauss emerged to say that she had indeed been selected and that the delay had been caused by the number of people who had leapt to their feet ‘to explain that they could not see how a Duchess could be a Progressive nor how she could understand a working-man’s point of view, but since hearing your speech they were convinced of your sincerity’.75

  Women had been empowered to sit on London’s County Council since 1907, and its remit covered the whole of inner and outer London from Hackney in the north to Norwood in the south. Its wartime work suited Consuelo for debates – which she would have found difficult because of her deafness – were rare. Instead, important decisions were taken by committees on health, education and housing and included planning the new garden suburbs. It was hard work nonetheless, for hearing problems meant much extra preparation. ‘I have often been asked how I could sit on committees and do the work I did, handicapped as I was. I had some help from an instrument I wore under my hat, but it was mainly an effort of concentration. In preparing a subject on which I was to speak I invariably had answers ready for the questions I thought I might be asked.’76

  As Consuelo entered local government, Alva continued to do battle on behalf of American woman’s suffrage. New York State finally agreed to a referendum on the issue in 1917, and Carrie Chapman Catt was correctly credited with its success for she ran a highly professional political campaign. This in itself might not have irritated Alva as much as it did had not Catt and Anna Howard Shaw continued to attack the National Woman’s Party, to the extent of supporting beatings, arrests and the administration’s attempt to have Alice Paul certified. Alva was eventually unable to stand the way Catt edited her out of the New York victory story any longer. ‘I brought the National Suffrage Association to New York from Warren, Ohio … Dr Shaw was practically unknown here till I brought her to New York … Dr Shaw and Mrs Catt have forgotten who was the person responsible for this victory. But I don’t care if they have. I shall go down in history,’77 she told the World.

  A Senate vote on the suffrage amendment failed by two votes on 1 October 1918, and a further attempt was postponed as President Wilson went to the Versailles peace conference. Alva, realising that all important political activity would henceforth be located in Washington, donated the New York PEA headquarters to the Salvation Army for demobilisation work, and closed the PEA down. This made the New York Tribune positively nostalgic: ‘Mrs OHP Belmont’s suffrage shop … famous for the votes-for-women cold creams and lip salves, which did so much to make women suffrage and beauty synonymous in New York City, and for the votes-for-women beef stew and apple pie, which made many a convert to the cause before the suffrage orators got in a word, passed into history yesterday,’78 it wrote mournfully.

  As the prospect of a federal amendment becoming a reality edged ever closer, NWP members impatient with slow progress took to burning President Wilson’s speeches as ‘watch fires f
or freedom’ outside the White House and sporadic attacks by mobs started up once again. Alva had private reservations about civil disobedience when the cause was now so close to victory but, as ever, she supported them publicly. ‘Whenever men fight for their political freedom they are willing to kill thousands and thousands of people, guilty or innocent alike. Women are unwilling to sacrifice human life, but we will fight for our liberty with every weapon at our command.’79 The NWP launched a ‘Prison Special’ of members who toured round the US giving talks on their treatment at the President’s hands. Wilson, concerned to defuse a situation which could have ended by handing a victory to his political rivals, finally came out strongly in favour of an amendment in May 1919. The House approved it on 21 May; the Senate on 4 June. It then went out to the states for ratification, a process which took over a year with the decisive vote coming from Tennessee on 18 August 1920.