Like the Riviera houses of the belle époque, Lou Sueil was designed exclusively for winter occupation. (The idea of going to the Riviera in the summer only started later in the 1920s with the new craze for a suntan and it was not until 1931 that the hoteliers of the Côte d’Azur agreed to stay open all year.) Lou Sueil soon delighted scores of visitors from every part of Consuelo’s life, from her brother Willie K. Jr and Rose Warburton (whom he would finally marry in September 1927), to new Riviera neighbours such as Roderick Cameron. ‘Madame Balsan had immense flair for making anything she lived in attractive,’8 wrote Cameron, though he thought that living at Blenheim had influenced her taste more than she was prepared to concede. ‘One could see at once, as one entered Lou Sueil, that it was a loved house,’9 wrote Gloria Vanderbilt (married to Cousin Reggie). ‘My Darling I am writing to you in bed in this marvellous scented nest – It is really almost too beautiful & too comfortable. One simply wallows,’10 wrote Clementine Churchill to Winston in 1925.
Winston Churchill was one of the Balsans’ first visitors, coming to stay in January 1922. He loved the ‘paintatious’ light and landscape of the south of France, but he was equally happy in the pacier atmosphere of Riviera houses belonging to Maxine Elliott, Daisy Fellowes or Lord Rothermere. Clementine Churchill disliked these establishments, and according to her daughter, Mary Soames, was always much happier staying with the Balsans. ‘Both [Consuelo] and her husband were persons of culture and distinction, and their friends reflected their tastes and characters; with them Clementine found herself in an atmosphere in which she was at ease.’11 At the end of 1924, Winston Churchill re-embraced the Conservative Party, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer; and it became the custom for Clementine to spend February with the Balsans on her own.
Clementine Churchill found Jacques and Consuelo’s love for each other deeply touching: ‘Nothing could be kinder & more charming than Consuelo and Balsan – They love each other very much & it is a most peaceful & restful atmosphere …’12 A year later, on another visit – when Consuelo was forty-eight – she wrote: ‘Consuelo looks younger and more ethereal every year. Her hair is more silvery but on the other hand her cheeks are pinker & and her eyes brighter. Her Jacques surrounds her with petits soins.’13 Jacques was shorter than Consuelo, like the Duke of Marlborough, but there the similarity ended. ‘It is difficult to appraise a character so completely in harmony with one’s sympathies,’ Consuelo wrote later, before going on to say that she loved him for ‘the charm of his personality … the keenness of his varied interests … the subtle intelligence of his understanding … the wit of his conversation, and above all, the profound goodness and kindness of his nature’.14 Although Jacques spoke good English he preferred to speak in French, which could sometimes make him appear remote to the more linguistically challenged English and Americans of their acquaintance. But even those who did not know him well found him warm, charming, hospitable and full of preternatural energy as he ran up and down Lou Sueil’s tumbling terraces.
Clementine Churchill was not alone in finding Lou Sueil agreeable. Elizabeth Lehr was staying with the Balsans at Eze when she heard that Harry Lehr had died. Elsa Maxwell came to stay and (with Consuelo’s permission) asked Charlie Chaplin for lunch. Consuelo noted his socialist tendencies and the ‘melancholy undertone’ of a great clown, but was reduced to helpless laughter by his account of hunting – for the first time in his life – with the Duke of Westminster a few weeks before. Prince Serge Obolensky, a Russian émigré who had known Consuelo since he was an undergraduate at Oxford, found himself playing tennis with Arthur Balfour, who wrote: ‘He could hold a crowd spellbound about philosophy, history, foreign affairs, literature, art, economics, with a relaxed and measured air that was like the art of a great actor. We certainly got an earful during our visit.’ Obolensky did not rate Balfour as a tennis partner either. ‘He was sparing and deliberate, and only played the balls that came near him – I did the running.’15 Perhaps the Balsans were wise to arrange for Balfour to be partnered by the great tennis player Suzanne Lenglen whose repartee, according to Consuelo, was often ‘as good as her volleys’.16
Margot Asquith was another link with pre-war England, arriving to stay at Lou Sueil just after Asquith’s death. Always a law unto herself, she was hyperactive in grief. Consuelo was hard pressed to stop her from wearing a red scarf with her black dress when visitors were expected, knowing that French guests would be shocked. She also managed to scandalise English visitors who arrived to find her executing a high kick over Jacques’ head in time to music. ‘With admirable courage she fought the sharpness of her sorrow, delighting us with the spontaneous and irrepressible gaiety that was her greatest charm,’17 Consuelo wrote in her defence (though Clementine Churchill wrote to Winston suggesting that Consuelo found Margot a far from easy guest).
Perhaps the most touching visitor from Consuelo’s English days was George Curzon who visited the Balsans a few weeks before he died. He enjoyed his time at Lou Sueil far more than he expected and was so enchanted by Eze that he even toyed with buying some property nearby. ‘Consuelo says he was so changed & sad & humble,’ wrote Clementine to Churchill. ‘He is more unhappy than King Lear, for of his 3 daughters not one of them is a Cordelia … Consuelo says he was a charming guest & entertained them with witty anecdotes … When Curzon left for home he shed tears … said he had not had so happy a holiday since he was a young man.’18 This was not surprising since he and Consuelo were close and she had been a superb hostess, laying on everything he needed in order to write to the extent of having black-out curtains made so that he could sleep without being disturbed by light. In the face of such hospitality it is not surprising that the Balsans sometimes had difficulty ejecting visitors. ‘Strong measures were required with such delinquents,’19 wrote Consuelo darkly.
Even without house guests, delinquent or otherwise, there were plenty interesting neighbours between Cannes and Menton. The Balsans built Lou Sueil in the decade when the Côte d’Azur was at its most bewitching, causing all who knew it then to lament the passing of paradise later. The French politician André Tardieu lived nearby, as did the American composer Sam Barlow. Their neighbour Dr Serge Voronoff, whose experiments in transplanting primate glands on to male patients to slow down the ageing process were creating intense interest and controversy, would sit and tell risqué stories on the terrace with Jacques. If one tired of looking out over the cypress, eucalyptus and mimosa there was opera in Nice or ballet in Monte Carlo where Diaghilev spent the winter with the Ballet Russes (his dancers came to parties at Lou Sueil). Consuelo heard Horowitz play for the first time on the Riviera, and his engagement to the daughter of Toscanini, who lived nearby, was the neighbourhood romance. Consuelo counted at least seven nationalities at one of Lou Sueil’s almost daily luncheon parties. Signatures in the visitor’s book included ‘HRH The Duke of Connaught’, and a Japanese prince who took ten minutes to sign his name while everyone looked on in embarrassed silence.
Within two or three years the garden at Lou Sueil attracted as much admiration as the house. The Balsans created a series of terraces and gardens of studied naturalism that reached its peak in late spring before they departed for a second helping of springtime in northern France. ‘Drifts of spring bulbs; carpets of hyacinths and bluebells mixed in with the grass under the olives,’20 wrote Roderick Cameron. ‘The garden is a dream – carpets of purple gold & cream flowers on the emerald green grass,’21 Clementine Churchill told Winston. There was a ‘seasoned order of tulips, peonies and daffodils,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘Almond trees bloomed first, in pink and white showers; then came the prunus and the Judas trees with their bronze and scarlet foliage.’ In reality, the casual aplomb of Lou Sueil’s garden required ‘endless toil’. ‘In September, after the first rains that softened the soil, we scattered thousands of bulbs;’22 a small army of gardeners followed close behind on their knees with trowels – and dug the same bulbs up again each May to protect them from the summer heat when the p
roprietors had gone.
This was an era of Riviera gardening when enthusiasts went plant-hunting by Bentley and Rolls-Royce. The Balsans loved ‘motoring over those beautiful mountains into some hidden valley in search of Alpine flowers’ in the company of gardening friends such as Lawrence ‘Johnnie’ Johnston (whose garden at Hidcote is still one of the great gardens of England), Henry May and Norah Lindsay. One of the other outstanding gardeners of the Riviera with whom they also exchanged notes was Edith Wharton, who had bought the Château Sainte-Claire near Hyères after the First World War. She had already created a beautiful garden at the Mount at Lenox, and was regarded as an expert on garden design after the publication of Italian Villas and their Gardens in 1904, a year before The House of Mirth. After 1919 she set about making another famous garden at the Château Sainte-Clare.
In an introduction to a book by Harriet Martineau in 1924, Edith Wharton wrote of the northern gardener’s pleasure in encountering the myriad possibilities of the south when walking round Mediterranean gardens. One of these was the garden of Lou Sueil. In Wharton’s papers a list of gardening questions to be asked ‘chez Madame Balsan’ still survives. What was the ‘mélange de graines anglaises et italiennes’ that the Balsans used for their lawns and what was the address of the grainier? What was the name of the white azalea that grew so well beneath their trees? She wanted to know about the ‘oeillets [carnations]’ too (ce sont de beaucoup les plus beaux que j’ae vue); and what was the ‘nom de petit iris bleu ciel plante sous les arbres, pas mauve mais de la couleur d’ime jacinthe bleue’?23
Consuelo had known Edith Wharton slightly for many years. She visited Blenheim at least once, and was photographed with Consuelo and Lady Randolph Churchill on the steps in 1904. Wharton may have been Lady Randolph Churchill’s guest that day, for her New York set was older than Consuelo’s and she knew both Consuelo Yznaga and the Rutherfurds well. She may have had a crush on Winthrop Rutherfurd herself, for she wrote in her autobiography that the Rutherfurd boys were outstandingly handsome and ‘the prototypes of my first novels’.24 Alva appears to have asked Edith Wharton and her husband to lunch in Newport while the Duke was staying in 1895; but Consuelo was certain that Edith Wharton and Alva cordially disliked each other.
Consuelo found her difficult too, though gardening was a common bond. ‘Edith Wharton came often to Eze and we delighted in visiting her at Hyeres on the Riviera or at the Pavilion Colombe near Paris where she had created lovely gardens. She liked to show them, being proud both of her taste and her horticultural knowledge, for she had the faculty of remembering the name of every plant, however rare.’ Remarking that touring gardens with an amateur gardening enthusiast could be tedious, Consuelo remembered that this was never the case with Mrs Wharton who ‘was a passionate lover of flowers and would dissect their mutations with the same ruthless precision she practised in analysing the characters she portrayed’. This was the problem with her novels, thought Consuelo, who felt that her writing ‘lacked the glow of humanity’ and she found Mrs Wharton’s ‘hard, ambitious types of American womanhood’ particularly unpleasant. Like many others, Consuelo found Wharton herself forbidding, ‘reserved and frigid’ even, and wondered whether ‘the warmth of her nature had found its only blossoming in her garden’. Consuelo may also have had the uncomfortable feeling in Wharton’s presence that she was being closely observed – she wrote that Wharton lacked spontaneity and ‘gave the impression of intellectually controlling her emotional contacts’.25 She could have been right, for Consuelo is said to have been the model for Nan St George, the sensitive and dreamy heroine of Wharton’s final novel The Buccaneers.
After the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote was approved in America in 1919, Alva started showing signs of disorientation and she only played a minor role in the campaign leading up to its ratification in 1920. Like others who had expended so much energy on the suffrage battle, she felt ready to focus on her private life again after the struggle was over. Even Alice Paul seems to have toyed with the idea of taking another law degree and several leading members of the National Woman’s Party now got married, or, as the Washington Star preferred to put it: ‘Iron Jawed Angels Succomb [sic] to Matrimony … Majority of Once Prominent Suffragist Pickets, Charged with Being “Unsexed” and “Home Destroyers”, Now Happily Married’.26 Alva felt tired too, hardly surprising for she was sixty-eight and suffering from high blood pressure; her doctors now instructed her to rest.
Alva’s decision to purchase the villa at Eze-sur-Mer in 1921 had been the first step in a slow process of re-aligning her life to Europe from America, where she still had three substantial homes: Marble House, Beacon Towers and a house in New York. As Consuelo settled into married life with Jacques, Alva continued to cross the Atlantic on post-suffrage business and often summoned her suffragist protégée, Doris Stevens, to be with her. Doris was eight years younger than Consuelo and had been a full-time organiser for the National Woman’s Party since 1914. Over the years Alva’s admiration for Doris had deepened and it had become an informal but established practice for Alice Paul to send Doris Stevens to Alva when she needed help. As Doris Stevens later wrote: ‘Because of her alleged oft-expressed fondness for me and the trust she placed in my work, more demands were made upon me than upon any other of my colleagues. She always wanted me to execute her plans.’27
In spite of her affection for Doris, Alva’s association with her eventually became complex and difficult, as Doris would later testify. Doris’s testimony has to be treated with great care for it was written during litigation after Alva’s death but it seems that her relationship with Alva slowly became a reverse image of Alva’s with Consuelo: Alva began by being impressed by Doris’s independent spirit, but was subsequently unable to stop herself from trying to dominate her. Part of the problem was that the financial basis of their arrangement was never clarified. Sometimes Doris Stevens worked for Alva as a representative of the National Woman’s Party, though her small salary was paid for indirectly by Alva. At other times, she acted as Alva’s personal companion but never received a regular salary. Unlike Alva, and indeed Alice Paul, Doris Stevens had very limited resources of her own. Alva knew this, appreciated that payments made to Doris Stevens by the NWP were pitiful in relation to the work she did and would sometimes give her a generous cheque or a large present. On other occasions Doris would be asked to act as Alva’s companion, staying with her in smart hotels with her expenses paid but receiving nothing in the way of salary. According to Doris, Alva promised to smooth out financial inconsistencies by treating her generously in her will. In her lifetime, this promise was enough to give Alva considerable power over the impoverished Doris. Conversely, Alva exploited her financial power to ensure that Doris kept her company.
The relationship was more complex than this however. Doris Stevens was often described as beautiful and dynamic. She was also young. Another beautiful, young and dynamic woman, Clare Boothe (later Clare Boothe Luce) was also briefly taken up by Alva and prevailed upon to work in the NWP headquarters in Washington in the early 1920s. Clare Boothe only lasted in headquarters for ten days (though she maintained a relationship with the party itself for longer than that) because she detected an undertow of lesbianism that she found disconcerting.28 There is no suggestion that she is referring to Alva here, and her reaction may have been confused by the presence of Elsa Maxwell when she first met Alva. It would be too easy in a post-Freudian age to characterise Alva’s enthusiasm for younger women as sexual, but it is probably wide of the mark. As Sara Bard Field put it, Alva was ‘gluttenous [sic]’ for qualities she perceived in others and felt she could exploit. Outliving many of her friends, her children busy with their lives in Europe and America, she enjoyed the company of intelligent, independent and attractive feminists more than the company of her tired narrow-minded circle in Newport, even if she had to pay for it.
Enthusiasm for these qualities in the young was not in itself problematic. It posed no particular difficulty t
hat Christabel Pankhurst and Doris Stevens partly represented that militant suffragist daughter that Alva never had. The problems only started when Alva forgot that Doris Stevens was neither daughter nor servant and tried to control her life. Doris exasperated Alva intensely in the winter of 1918–19, for example, by refusing to marry a ‘rich but very commonplace widower’ in Florida, whom they met when they were campaigning together. This was a man, according to Doris Stevens, ‘whom she was determined to have me marry in order that I might have enough money to help her continue the work. She very carefully explained to me how much he had, secured an invitation from him for me to be his house guest with her in Florida, which I declined, and explained that a marriage to him would help relieve her of the burden of having to carry on what she considered a heavy financial load.’29 Clare Booth Luce had a similarly alarming experience which may be another reason for her precipitate departure from NWP headquarters. ‘The thing that scared me,’ she later told Elsa Maxwell, ‘was Mrs Belmont’s wild desire that I should marry her son, Willie K. – who, though charming, appeared rather an elderly gentleman to me at the time.’30
The role of Alva’s companion was not to be envied. Consuelo and Alva may have drawn close in 1920 but Alva seems to have saved her temper for Doris, summoning her to Paris for a most trying two months in November and December. ‘I stayed with her in the Hotel, accompanied her on shopping expeditions, sightseeing expeditions, theatre with her, provided dinner and recreational companions when she desired, read aloud to her the whole of Wells’ “Outline of History” as a sample etc. During all this time she was under a doctor’s care taking a cure, subject to the most rigid diet, which kept her in an almost constantly irascible state of temper. I was a nervous wreck at the end of two months of hearing her quarrelling with the servants, waiters in the hotel, trades people and finally with me.’31 Harold, according to Doris Stevens, stayed with his mother for three days during this time and then escaped.
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt Page 45