Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  The affair rumbled on into early December. The New York Times published an editorial on 27 November stressing that whatever the truth of the matter, ‘the voiding of the Marlborough marriage is binding only upon the conscience of Catholic communicants’, with no legal effect, though it pointed out that Father Martindale in London ‘had a just sense of what has happened when he wrote that, though the ecclesiastical authorities had acted strictly in accordance with canon law and precedent, the effect could not fail to be, at least temporarily, unfortunate for the Church’.75 The Vatican responded to suggestions that Vanderbilt wealth played a role by pointing out that the annulment only cost the ex-Duchess $240 (of which $40 went to defray the expenses of the court in Southwark and $200 to defray the cost of the tribunal in Rome) and that anyone who could not afford this did not have to pay at all. It then confined itself to suggesting that Bishop Manning had an imperfect understanding of the principles regarding the annulment of marriages.76 One Mr Charles C. Marshall quoted the letters exchanged by Consuelo and the Duke at the time of the divorce in 1921 when she begged for restitution of her conjugal rights and asked where the evidence of coercion stood now.77 Bishop Dunn’s reply to this was so arcane that everyone suddenly became bored of the whole argument and the storm finally died down.

  So, was Consuelo coerced into marrying the Duke of Marlborough, or were the annulment proceedings based on a lie, as Bishop Manning suggested? Some parts of Alva’s testimony were clearly inaccurate. The Duke did not go off to Canada as soon as the engagement was announced; the Marlboroughs did not separate in 1905, but in 1906. Other parts of the testimony was downright misleading. The impression was given that Consuelo was only seventeen at the time of her engagement when in fact she was a year older (Alva was never strong on dates of birth). In other places there is a non-coercive explanation for what took place: the footman may have been placed outside Consuelo’s door on the morning of her wedding to guard against kidnappers; her tears may simply have been caused by nerves. On the whole, however, it appears that the witnesses in the proceedings told the truth about what happened. The Duke would not have agreed to a conspiracy to deceive the Catholic Church for he wished to join it. Appeals for annulments on grounds of coercion often failed, a serious matter when it prevented Catholics from remarrying. In this instance, there was simply not enough at stake to prompt perjury.

  An equally credible explanation is that the parties agreed to proceed because they felt they had a case if coercion was defined as ‘deferential fear’. It was then up to the Rota to decide whether it was strong enough to justify annulling the marriage. The discussions of the tribunal in Southwark and the Rota remained secret, but the judgement in Consuelo’s favour may have been a closer call than it later appeared. Had the Rota’s members been familiar with Alva’s behaviour at other times, however, they might have felt even more confident that they had taken the right decision. Even in 1917, Alva was still maintaining to Sara Bard Field that Consuelo had no right to choose a husband, that this decision was a major parental responsibility, and that it would have been a sin not to exercise it with due care and attention. Even after a happier life with Oliver Belmont, she continued to take a wholly instrumental view of marriage, urging Sara Bard Field to let Alva find her a rich husband, becoming intensely irritated with Doris Stevens for refusing to marry a rich Florida widower as part of a Belmontesque economy drive, and attempting to convince Clare Boothe Luce she should marry her son, Willie K. Servants, suffragists, secretaries, and correspondents for Town Topics bear ample witness to her imperiousness, her frightening temper and her utter determination to get her own way. She was controllable by very few people, had a long track record of overbearing behaviour towards those over whom she had any authority and little instinct for negotiation when she could have a fight instead.

  Bishop Manning’s allegation that Consuelo did not seem unhappy does not undermine the judgement of coercion defined as deferential fear either. One consistent theme in Consuelo’s life was that she never wished to cause her mother embarrassment. It seems likely that Consuelo was intimidated by her mother to the extent that she dared not risk disrupting Alva’s carefully laid plans and tried not to let unhappiness show in public.

  One person who would have been fascinated by the coverage of the annulment proceedings was Edith Wharton. She began thinking about what would be her final novel, The Buccaneers, in 1928 – two years after the annulment proceedings. Its story concerns the marriage of a young American heiress to a kind but dull English duke and focuses on a group of young American women and their mothers who are shunned by New York society in the 1870s, but whose success in English society prises society doors open back in America. The youngest of the Americans, Nan St George, enters into an unhappy marriage with the Duke of Tintagel, but is eventually helped to escape by her English governess, Miss Testvalley, into a new life of ‘deep and abiding love’ with Guy Thwarte. Miss Testvalley, however, sacrifices her own chances of romantic happiness by helping her charge, an act of expiation for having moved Nan towards the Duke in the first place.

  Edith Wharton undoubtedly based some of the characters in this novel on people she knew, besides Consuelo. The character of Conchita Closson, one of Nan’s friends, is a thinly disguised (and highly sympathetic) portrait of Consuelo Yznaga, Duchess of Manchester. The ambitious mothers, however, bear no resemblance to Alva, and seem to be more closely modelled on Mrs Paran Stevens, mother of Minnie Paget, who was responsible for breaking off an engagement between the young Edith Jones and her son Harry. It may have been as a result of the annulment proceedings that Edith Wharton became aware of the fascinating but shadowy figure of Miss Harper, Consuelo’s governess. One commentator thinks it likely that Edith Wharton then transposed her into the figure of her own governess Anna Bahlmann, who later became her literary agent and secretary and supported Edith Wharton emotionally through her divorce in 1913. It is also possible that Edith Wharton’s glimpses of the Balsans at Lou Sueil suggested that ‘deep and abiding’ love was possible and helped her towards the ending she proposed in a synopsis of the novel.

  During the writing of The Buccaneers Wharton suffered a stroke which caused her to lose the sight in one eye; she worked on with increasing difficulty and had another stroke two years later. In the view of the one editor, Candace Waid, she had drafted about two thirds of the novel at the time of her death. In 1938 a decision was taken to publish it accompanied by Wharton’s original synopsis. In spite of attempts to ‘finish’ it by others, this remains the most satisfactory way to read it. Before she died, Edith Wharton wrote to her friend Bernard Berenson quoting a passage from her diary two years earlier. She had asked herself: ‘What is writing a novel like?’ and told her diary that the answer was: ‘The beginning: A ride through a spring wood. The middle: The Gobi desert. The end: Going down the Cresta run.’ As far as The Buccaneers was concerned, she told her diary, ‘I am now in the middle of the Gobi desert.’78

  Shortly after the annulment was granted, Consuelo enjoyed a short Cresta run in relation to the Balsan family. She married Jacques in a Catholic ceremony and was then taken to meet members of his extended family at Châteauroux for the first time. About twenty brothers, sisters and cousins were assembled in a room dominated by Madame Charles Balsan, Jacques’ aunt and head of the family. ‘Greeting me with affection, she then called her children by name and presented them, with a word of kindly appraisal for each.’79 She presented Consuelo with a family heirloom, and later, when Consuelo wrote to thank her both for the gift and to say that she understood Madame Balsan’s reasons for excluding her from the family circle before her Catholic marriage, Madame Charles read the letter aloud to the assembled family. It would perhaps have been easy, given Jacques Balsan’s warmth and worldly charm, to underestimate his attachment to his French roots, but Consuelo never made this mistake and after his death she commissioned a memorial to him for the park at Châteauroux.

  The annulment proceedings, however, left Alva stra
nded in a ‘Gobi desert’ of her own. Her reputation never recovered from the highly coloured version of the story filtered through witness statements, ecclesiastical summaries and layers of re-translation that appeared in 1926. The tribunal had been allowed to think that Alva’s insistence on marrying Consuelo to the Duke had been ‘driven by her desire for a title of nobility’,80 for no ecclesiastical judge would have understood her desire to liberate Consuelo from the ‘great gilt cage’ of life as the wife of an American plutocrat, and it might have undermined the case. Now, any attempt to argue that her motives were something other than tyrannical ambition also undermined the argument that there had been coercion. ‘There is nothing so stimulating as opposition’,81 she wrote in 1922. But the peculiar circumstances of the annulment proceedings meant that this time opposition was impossible. Although Consuelo wrote that Alva, ‘with her usual courage, remained undaunted’, it seems likely that the whole episode left them both feeling deeply miserable. ‘I suffered to see her in so unfavourable a light, knowing that she had hoped to ensure my happiness with the marriage she had forced upon me.’82 But if Consuelo was appalled at the damage she had inflicted on her mother, Alva would have found being muzzled almost unbearable. She would have been the first to realise that without the mitigating factors – her own experience, her desire to empower Consuelo – she looked cruel, shallow and foolish, both to her fellow feminists and to the many people ranged against her and now enjoying her discomfiture.

  It would have been little consolation that this trashing of her reputation was partly her own fault. The annulment would never have caused the storm it did, had Alva not assiduously courted publicity for the best part of five decades, sweeping up both Consuelo and the Duke in her wake whether they liked it or not. She was also the victim of her own taste for belligerence for without Bishop Manning’s reaction and the subsequent row in the press, the Vatican would not have felt compelled to release the text of its judgement with all its damaging detail. It is highly unlikely that Alva agreed to give evidence in a spirit of expiation, for she was never on record regretting her decision to manoeuvre Consuelo into marriage with the Duke of Marlborough. But it must have felt harsh that in trying to help her daughter, she ended up being punished as if she had indeed wished to expiate a crime.

  The punishment, in the end, was not that the world would now regard her as a wicked woman and insanely ambitious mother. She had ridden out this kind of criticism before. To Alva, it was arguably much worse that all her years of activity in the ‘theatre of life’ since Oliver’s death were now to be swept away by a tide of detritus from an earlier life, pushing her back – in the perception of the world – inside the very cage from which she had tried to free Consuelo. From now on she would go down in history not as an important feminist and influential public figure, but as a tyrannical society woman from the Gilded Age, operating in that enclosed space where there was only sunshine by proxy. For a woman who suffered from claustrophobia it was an unhappy thought.

  One of the most extraordinary things about Mrs Belmont, Sara Bard Field once said, was her power of analysis, her ‘strange grasp’.83 So it is perhaps not surprising that as the furore raged on both sides of the Atlantic, Alva was spotted alone on the SS Berengaria sailing from America to Europe; and that even though it was Thanksgiving she did not join Queen Marie of Rumania and the captain for luncheon. ‘Mrs Belmont avoids all the other passengers and spends considerable time alone in the salon reading,’ reported a correspondent. And when Alva finally returned to Paris, all she could say to the press she had courted for so long was ‘Please go away.’84

  12

  French lives

  SHORTLY AFTER SHE DECIDED to support the American suffrage campaign in 1909, Alva started a collection of newspaper articles which were divided into two sets of bound volumes. The first concerned the progress of the American suffrage movement as a whole. The second set of clippings, painstakingly glued in and dated by a secretary even when they were downright rude, related to Alva’s own suffrage activities. Before she died, Alva became worried about the fate of these volumes. ‘Writers on the Suffrage Campaign in the future will be able to find every important item in them, and I trust the headquarters will appreciate the importance of taking great care of the clippings,’1 she wrote, having decided to leave them all to the National Woman’s Party. Her concern was also driven by another impulse. The volumes relating to Alva herself represented the way she wanted her story to be told, and the historian Peter Geidel suggests convincingly that both her attempts to describe her life before suffrage, and her account of meeting the Pankhursts, were designed to supplement them. When she thanked the National Woman’s Party for its gift of a volume of clippings about the opening of Alva Belmont House in Washington in 1931, Alva wrote: ‘I think my family in years to come will appreciate what it all means.’2

  Understandably perhaps, there is not one word in her clippings books about the controversy surrounding the annulment, though one exchange of letters in the New York press was thought sufficiently relevant to the position of women to be collected into a pamphlet which has surfaced in a collection in New York Public Library relating to women and religion.3 Significantly there is a long gap in Alva’s clippings books after the annulment controversy died down, lasting nearly a year. Alva spent most of 1927 in France completing a realignment of her life so that she would be close to Consuelo, to whom she seems to have borne no animus over the affair. This rearrangement required some organisation for by early 1926 the Balsans had felt that they would like a retreat from the demands of their house in Paris in the summer months. They had found what they were looking for in the chateau at St Georges-Motel near Dreux in the Eure, the house that Consuelo would later say she loved most. ‘It was a tall and elegant house built of pink bricks and was capped by a high roof of blue slates. In its narrow centre were evenly spaced windows through which one saw running water and green parterres beyond. At the two ends were towers bathed in a wide moat whose waters were deep and clear. These waters also enclosed the forecourt, which one entered across a bridge through an iron grille that bore the stamp of Louis XII,’ she wrote. It was said that Henry of Navarre had stayed at the chateau the night before the battle of Ivry. The woods that surrounded it had been ‘planted for pleasure in days when life had an unhurried ease’ and where ‘one saw down an alley a stone boar on its pedestal, recalling scenes of past hunts’ and where even now ‘a stag from the forest beyond would be driven to bay in our river.’4

  Alva was so taken by the Balsans’ chateau at St Georges-Motel that in September 1926 she bought her own, the Domaine d’Augerville-la-Riviere, near Malesherbes in the Loiret, about two hours away by car. This was another enchanting moated house, dating from the fifteenth century, built from white stone with grey slate towers standing in a park which Alva furnished with small spotted deer who were fed chocolate at dusk. Consuelo thought the legend that this house had once belonged to the French merchant Jacques Coeur, and that he had willed it to his daughter, particularly appealed to her mother. ‘From this,’ wrote Consuelo, ‘she derived the vicarious pleasure any tribute to the female hierarchy gave her.’5 Jacques Coeur’s great house in Bourges had been one source of inspiration for 660 Fifth Avenue, and according to another legend, he had known and supported Joan of Arc which pleased Alva even more.

  From 1927 the lives of both Alva and Consuelo were split between winters in Eze and summers in the countryside of northern France with sojourns in their Paris houses throughout the rest of the year. For Alva life had now come full circle. She would spend her final years in the country she had loved as a girl and which had inspired so much in New York. Consuelo was under no illusion that she made the move just to be closer to her daughter: ‘Always an inveterate builder, she welcomed, I knew, the opportunity to build a new home in a new country, being really happy only when thus employed.’6 Alva’s compulsion to rearrange everything around her showed no sign of abating. Once she had restored the chateau at Augervi
lle to its former glory there was still scope for improving the French landscape. ‘She was for ever critically surveying her demesne. Walking in the garden with Jacques and me, she would suddenly stop us and, pointing to the river which flowed past the house, would say, “This river is not wide enough; it should be twice as large”; and when we next came an army of workmen would have enlarged it. A great forecourt separated the village from the house. It was sanded instead of being paved. “This is all wrong, it should be paved,” my mother commented severely; and the year of her death old paving stones brought from Versailles covered the court.’7

  The other reason for Alva’s self-exile from America was that she had become isolated from her former society friends most of whom she now despised. She had returned to Newport for what turned out to be her last summer season in 1922 while she was still convinced that the National Woman’s Party could become a serious third force in American politics, only to be disgusted yet again by the apathy of society women. In spite of the fact that she had ‘tried over and over again to explain to them how they might contribute through influence and interest to the removal of injustice imposed’8 they simply would not be roused. At seventy-one and feeling that she had no wish to grow old in Newport society, Alva sold her house at 477 Madison Avenue in 1924 and Oliver’s extensive book collection the following year. In 1925 she closed Beacon Towers permanently and put it on the market. This long disengagement left only Marble House, which she was reluctant to part with after the demolition of 660 Fifth Avenue by developers in the early 1920s. Detaching herself from America was one thing; seeing her great American architectural creations razed to the ground was quite another.