Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Unsurprisingly, both camps in the suffrage movement claimed credit for the victory. Carrie Chapman Catt’s ‘Winning Plan’ which combined a state-by-state approach with lobbying for a federal amendment from 1916 certainly had more widespread support than the confrontational attitude of the NWP. But even the US Vice-President, Thomas R. Marshall, later conceded that the pressure put on the administration by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party had an important effect. ‘The amendment,’ he wrote later ‘really was submitted to the people in self-defense to get rid of these women in order that some business might be transacted.’80

  By the end of the war Consuelo had temporarily lost interest in society and had become wholly immersed in her philanthropic and political activities: she watched the great victory parade of the Allied armies through the capital from the London County Council offices rather than from the window of a great private house. In 1919 she stood by her commitment to the Woman’s Municipal Party, contested her London County Council seat for North Southwark in the peacetime elections and won on the Progressive ticket once again. She could often be seen escorted in her campaign by children chanting: ‘Vote, vote, vote for Mrs Marlborough!’ though the Daily Telegraph wrote that the Duchess had more motor cars at her disposal than some of the other ‘less Liberal’ candidates.

  She would soon revert to some aspects of her old life, however. In spite of their romance earlier that year, Jacques was not much in evidence during June and July 1919, when Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich Romanov made an appearance. ‘An exceptionally handsome man … he had fine features, and the stealthy walk of a wild animal,’ wrote Consuelo.81 He was exceedingly glamorous. The grandson of Tsar Alexander II, Dmitry had been close to his first cousin Tsar Nicholas II until he took part in the conspiracy to murder Rasputin and put an end to the so-called holy man’s baleful influence over the Tsarina Alexandra. In December 1916, the grand duke had been present when Rasputin was poisoned, shot and drowned at Prince Felix Yussopov’s house. Ironically, Dmitry survived the Russian Revolution because he was exiled by the Tsar to Persia as punishment for the murder. He arrived in England in December 1918.

  Consuelo and Dmitry were introduced by the Curzons. On 28 May 1919 he wrote in his diaries that he had talked to her properly for the first time, had found her ‘very kind and sympathetic’ and added, ‘it happened imperceptibly between us.’ Dmitry was studying political economy with Professor Hugh Dalton at the London School of Economics and in spite of the age difference (Dmitry was twenty-seven while Consuelo was forty-two) their relationship quickly became intense. Six days later he arrived at Crowhurst, which he thought was ‘one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen’. The other guests included Consuelo’s mother-in-law Albertha Blandford and they paid a visit to Winston Churchill and his family. ‘I slept well but very little—???’ he wrote that night, suggesting that he already had expectations of a physical relationship with his hostess. A week later he returned and met Ivor, whom he described as ‘awfully nice … He has broad views and is not at all like a narrow-minded Englishman.’ On 16 June Dmitry was back at Crowhurst again. ‘Went to bed early, but didn’t sleep much!!’82 he wrote, implying that he and Consuelo were now having an affair or – possibly – that he was reduced to sleeplessness by overcharged emotions. He continued to see Consuelo throughout July, though usually in the company of Ivor and other friends. His diaries suggest that after the end of June they rarely met alone and that Consuelo encouraged Ivor to keep him company, but Lady Cunard also asked Consuelo to bring Dmitry to lunch, suggesting that she knew of their friendship.

  Before long, however, warm feelings suddenly cooled. ‘I was much less happy at Crowhurst than before,’ he wrote on 21 July. They played tennis and bridge but he went to bed early, writing that Consuelo was ‘apparently exasperated with me and (in English) therefore she’s all the time snearing (sic)’. He cut short his visit and returned to London. Either Consuelo now regretted an impulsive affair or had decided that her kindness had been misconstrued and that Dmitry’s smouldering attentions were inappropriate and tiresome. She may also have suspected his motives, since he was known to be short of money. Thereafter, his references to her were much less frequent and a great deal ruder. She was ‘stupid’, ‘inelegant’ and a dinner party at her house on 23 October was ‘boring’.83 The episode may have highlighted the drawbacks, as well as the advantages, of an independent life for by September, Jacques had reappeared and was pressing the case for marriage.

  There were other changes too. Local politics became increasingly frustrating in the face of mounting opposition from the Conservative Municipal Reform Party. Consuelo fell asleep at one committee meeting and regarded the creation of a children’s playground in North Southwark as her only success. Blandford’s enthusiasm for musical comedy actresses was set aside in favour of marriage to the daughter of Viscount Chelsea, Mary Cadogan on 17 February 1920, of whom Consuelo warmly approved. When William K. Vanderbilt died on 22 July 1920 after months of illness, she was at his bedside. This brought a particularly poignant sense of the passage of time as she returned with his body to New York and attended his funeral at 660 Fifth Avenue. In spite of the mood of change, however, Consuelo did not rush to embrace a new identity. It was clear that marriage to Jacques would mean not only a change of nationality but a very different life in France. She had a strong sense of obligation to the organisations with which she was connected and regarded her commitment to them all as her work, her professional occupation.

  When they knew that Consuelo would finally be leaving England, many of those who had worked with her presented her with an illustrated book containing notes of appreciation from seventeen charitable organisations where she had played a role, an idea suggested by Miss Aldrich-Blake of the Royal Free Hospital and London School of Medicine for Women and warmly endorsed by Dame Margaret Tuke of Bedford College. There were entries from the American Red Cross, the Children’s Jewel Fund and many others. ‘Her name will live in the hearts of many for whom she did so much to benefit in this country,’84 read the address in the book, but Consuelo knew it was the name of the Duchess of Marlborough that would linger, rather than that of Madame Balsan.

  Later, George Curzon, who understood Consuelo as well as anyone, asked her if it had been worth the sacrifice, ‘giving up being the beautiful Duchess of Marlborough and all that it meant’.85 She turned aside the question with a jest, amused that snobbish George could find the idea of parting with a grand title so difficult. But Curzon asked the right question, even though he would have been baffled by the answer, for the sacrifice involved stepping back into a private life. ‘Leaving my work was a wrench and saying farewell to my fellow workers saddened me,’86 Consuelo wrote later. But she did not regret saying farewell to the inwardness and snobbery of Edwardian society even if she sometimes missed the pageantry and power that came with her title. She consoled herself with the thought that during her time in England she had least tried to achieve something. “The best that ordinary mortals can hope for is the result which will probably come from sustained work directed by as full reflection as is possible.’ This might be adversely affected by circumstances beyond one’s control she wrote. ‘But if we have striven to think and to do work based on thought, then we have at least the sense of having striven with such faculties as we have possessed … and that is in itself a course of happiness, going beyond the possession of any definite gain.’87

  It had been one of the ironies of her story that, after she left the Duke, the position of Duchess of Marlborough helped Consuelo to evolve an independent life, which in turn brought self-respect, confidence, autonomy and freedom, and quasi-professional roles far beyond anything that Alva had envisaged when she first arranged the marriage. Turning her back on such positions of influence was undoubtedly a sacrifice, and Consuelo had to think long and hard before she finally decided to trade it for ‘the promise of happiness that had now come my way’.88 But she was forty-three: Lord Ivor Churchill had come of a
ge; she and Sunny had finally taken the first steps towards securing a divorce; and, in the end, Blandford’s happiness with his new wife Mary Cadogan gave her the reassurance and confidence to risk it.

  Although attitudes to divorce were less censorious than they had been in 1906, the Duke and Consuelo still had to go through an elaborate charade which made their previous reluctance to proceed more understandable. The problem was that, under English law, a legal separation freed a husband from the obligations of marriage so that he could not then be divorced for desertion with adultery, the most straightforward route. This meant they had to appear to live together again, the Duke had to leave her, and Consuelo had to request him to return. He was then required to refuse to do this (in writing), whereupon she was required to go to court and seek an injunction granting ‘restitution of conjugal rights’. When he failed to comply, she was then free to seek a divorce, provided she had also amassed the evidence to prove infidelity. The Duke of Marlborough had visited Crowhurst the previous December, accompanied by his sister, Lilian Grenfell, and left again. The necessary correspondence, largely drafted by the lawyers who gave it some curious rhetorical flourishes, had been concluded. On 28 February, the Duke spent the night from 10.30 to 8.30 the following morning at Room 193 at Claridges with an unnamed woman.

  On 22 March 1920, Consuelo was obliged to go to court to enter the plea for restitution of her conjugal rights, a step which naturally attracted a great deal of attention. She stood in the well of the court, rather than the witness box, on account of her deafness, while Sir Edward Carson took her through the facts. ‘Only as she described receiving the letter telling her that her husband had left her for the second time did her dull, lifeless tones betray any emotion,’89 reported The New York Times, completely carried away. The decree was granted and Consuelo then managed to give the battery of photographers waiting by a large black car outside the slip and left in a taxi waiting by a side door. In April, Consuelo resigned her membership of London County Council on grounds of ‘ill-health’ paying the statutory fine of a sovereign on 28 April. Later that summer, Consuelo moved out of Sunderland House and Crowhurst, going to a house in Paris that her father had given her shortly before he died.

  On 10 November the divorce petition was finally entered. ‘Thank heavens it is all over,’ the Duke wrote to Gladys. ‘The last blow that woman could strike over a period of some 20 years has now fallen – Dear me what a wrecking existence she wd have imposed on anyone with whom she was associated.’90 The decree finally became absolute on 13 May 1921, with all sides believing that the matter was now settled.

  The Duke was the first to re-marry. The wedding took place in Paris, with a civil ceremony at the British consulate on Saturday 25 June, followed on the Sunday by a religious ceremony at the Paris home of Gladys’s cousin, Eugene Higgins. Gladys had a sudden attack of nervousness: ‘I feel again the thrill of terror which ran through me when I read it in the D. Mail. I loved him but was fearful of the marriage,’91 she wrote later. The Duke was astonished when she hesitated. ‘Haven’t you had time to make up your mind?’92 he asked. The engagement was announced on 1 June and for four weeks the wedding was the subject of much press interest. This time, however, the Duke was pleased about the excitement it was generating, even though the old Deacon family dramas were resurrected once more. His immediate relatives were charming to him about it all, even Lady Sarah Wilson who said that she thought Gladys was ‘very beautiful’, though in Paris, Marthe Bibesco was upset about ‘the conquest of an historic castle by one American over another, the latter very lovable and much loved’.93

  Consuelo and Jacques married quietly on the morning of 4 July 1921 in London. They too were married first in a civil ceremony, at the registry office in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, and then in a religious service at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, just off the Strand. Consuelo was determined both to avoid the publicity surrounding the Duke’s remarriage and to ensure that her second wedding was as unlike her first as possible. This time everything was done to avoid the attentions of the press. ‘In shedding the lustre of the coronet it was my hope to avoid publicity,’94 she wrote in her memoirs. The witnesses were Consuelo’s cousin, General Cornelius Vanderbilt (present at this wedding even if he had been excluded from the first), and the American ambassador, George Harvey – the former editor of the North American Review who had helped to propel Consuelo into public life by persuading her into her American public-speaking debut and commissioning her articles.

  Consuelo wore a dress of deep grey satin charmeuse and was accompanied to the registry office by Ivor, with the Marquess and Marchioness of Blandford in attendance. After the service at the Chapel Royal the wedding party went back to the Blandfords’ house at 1 Portman Square. Alva was absent from the ceremony which, twenty-six years later, saw her daughter surrender the power that came with being Duchess of Marlborough. Instead she busied herself with the Newport season, entertaining her grandson William K. Vanderbilt III, knowing that her appearance in England would mean the end of the secret. There was, therefore, no opportunity for tears as Colonel and Madame Louis-Jacques Balsan left England for France, appropriately enough, by aeroplane.

  PART FOUR

  11

  A story re-told

  THE SUMPTUOUS AND ELEGANT HOUSE in Paris that William K. Vanderbilt bought for Consuelo shortly before he died in 1920 was an idyllic setting for the newly married Balsans. Standing near the Eiffel Tower at the corner of Rue du Général-Lambert and Avenue Charles Floquet, it had been built by the French architect Sergent a few years earlier and overlooked the gardens of the Champ-de-Mars near the Ecole Militaire. Consuelo had always loved France and the French, drawn by the unabashed sensuality of Gallic life, writing that here ‘there was no false shame in their frank acceptance of life’s joys’.1 Now she was part of the va et vient of Paris in her own right. ‘In the mornings I awoke to the gay gallop of cavalry officers as they rode past our windows on the bridle-path that encircles the gardens … At midday workmen ate their luncheon on the benches that lined the paths … Men and women sat reading their papers under the trees … In time I came to know the papers they read and the children who answered their call.’2

  Jacques enjoyed creating houses as much as Consuelo and building a collection for the Paris house together was a new experience for them both, helped by the trust fund of $2,500,000 set up by William K. for Consuelo before she remarried, and an additional $450,000 of United States Liberty Loan Bonds transferred in December 1919, shortly before his death.3 The Balsans were drawn to eighteenth-century French art and furniture in the grand manner, but they were set apart by the refinement of their taste. ‘We used to wander up and down the quays and streets with eyes glued to shop windows for a find … Later, but still casually, we would draw near to our find, and the inevitable bargaining would begin,’ Consuelo wrote in her memoirs. This was not bargain hunting as understood by most people, however. ‘I will never forget the excitement with which we first came upon Renoir’s “La Baigneuse”,’4 she commented blithely at one point. A great Boucher tapestry in the dining room came from the estate of William K. and the Boldini portrait of Consuelo with Ivor came from England and hung in the hall. Elsewhere, Aubusson and Savonnerie carpets, Gobelin tapestries, busts by Clodion and Houdon, “Berthe Morisot” by Manet, drawings by Hubert Robert, portraits by Nattier, paintings by Ingres, Boucher and Fragonard, chinoiserie screens, walnut bergères, brûle-parfums, marquetry-inlaid cellarets, and gilt bronze guéridons in the style of Louis Quinze, were lovingly collected and arranged by the Balsans themselves.5

  Once the house was ready, Jacques and Consuelo became stars in the Parisian social firmament. They often invited friends from elsewhere to meet their French acquaintances, knowing that foreigners were rarely asked to Parisian homes. Consuelo particularly enjoyed parties at the British embassy where she was amused to observe the protocol headaches caused by the separation of French society into the old aristocracy of the ancien regime, the noble
sse d’Empire created by the Bonapartes, and the diplomatic corps. The most memorable Parisian parties were those given by remnants of the ancien régime in its own style, in houses that had been spared from looting and had changed little since the 1770s, though she stressed in her memoirs that she and Jacques also consorted with the bourgeoisie. ‘It was not only aristocratic parties that pleased us. A luncheon in a bourgeois home stands out with equal charm,’6 wrote the American democrat, without a trace of irony, as she recalled the wife of the Minister of Public Health asking in an anxious whisper whether it would be a breach of etiquette to check the chef’s progress in the kitchen.

  Meanwhile, work began on a house at Eze on the Riviera, just above Eze-sur-Mer, where Alva had recently bought the Villa Isola. Consuelo had been enchanted by the region when she stayed with her mother just before her divorce from the Duke and soon afterwards she and Jacques set about trying to buy the land in the hills above Alva’s home. Jacques had to bargain with around fifty peasant owners for small plots, a process impossible for anyone but a Frenchman. ‘I marvelled at my husband’s persistence as he bantered and bartered with them, for they were cunning and cautious, and, although anxious to sell, were loath to part with their land. Just as we thought a bargain had been made we would find one parcel had not been included, and inevitably it was the choicest bit … and negotiations would start again.’7 Lou Sueil (meaning ‘the hearth’), was modelled on the Convent of Le Thoronet in Provence, and was designed with assistance from Achille Duchêne. Cloisters opened on to an inner garden on a rocky promontory looking out over the Mediterranean. Rooms were panelled as a background for the furniture from Crowhurst and the Balsans spent ‘joyous weeks’ arranging Chippendale chairs and Ispahan rugs when they finally turned up from England in vans.