Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Harold, known to his friends as ‘Mike’, was a rather different character, and already a celebrity by the time of Alva’s death. He was regarded as having a brilliant analytical mind by almost everyone with whom he came into contact. He was the last Vanderbilt on the board of directors of the New York Central, where he was responsible for managing a difficult change from steam locomotives to diesel. He is also regarded as the father of contract bridge, creating the system known as the club convention. ‘Some may find it distasteful to contemplate the enormous role that this game plays on social occasions and in the lives of the elderly, retired and ill, or that it was formerly played in the long days of middle- and upper-income women before work became the prerogative of both sexes, but I would argue that Harold, for better or worse, was a major force in American social history,’54 writes Louis Auchincloss. Alva always refused to play bridge by Harold’s new rules, and she would not have approved of some of his remarks in his book Contract Bridge (1929): ‘Many mistakes … are due to the chit-chat which prevails at too many card tables … Ladies, of course, are the worst offenders,’55 he wrote.

  On the other hand, Alva was immensely proud of Harold’s yachting achievements, paying him the ultimate compliment by sticking news of his first America’s Cup victory in the back of her suffrage clippings book. Harold is credited with helping to design a series of J-class sailing yachts, and a formula known as the Vanderbilt start, captaining victorious crews in the America’s Cup no fewer than three times. His first boat, the Enterprise, beat Sir Thomas Lipton’s boat the Shamrock, in 1930, and he followed this up with victories in the Rainbow in 1934 and the Ranger in 1938, until war in Europe put an end to this type of yachting. Harold was not a particularly approachable man. One of his racing crew wrote: ‘It was not too easy to become intimate with Mike. He had a brilliant mind, as proven by his prowess in bridge and his business acumen. He was socially prominent and supremely confident to the point of being overbearing. When I first knew him as a teenager I thought of him with a mixture of awe and fear.’ If Willie K. Jr inherited a large part of his father’s charm, Harold inherited at least some his characteristics from his mother. ‘His mind was razor sharp and the power of his conviction so strong that, even if you thought he was wrong, you sure as hell thought twice before disagreeing. And even on the rare occasions when he was wrong, it was tough to convince him.’56

  Matilda and Mary Young thought that Harold was shy when they met him on his visits to Augerville. But in the weeks following the funeral Consuelo felt that she came to know him better. She and Jacques spent a few weeks at his magnificent new house at Manalapan near Palm Beach in Florida where they also met Gertrude, whom he would shortly marry. ‘From a childhood memory Harold now became a very dear brother, whose sensitive nature I learned to appreciate,’57 she wrote. It seems likely that Consuelo and Jacques also went to stay with Willie K. and Rosamund at their house on Fisher Island, near Miami, which came complete with seaplane hangar and an eleven-hole golf course where each hole was named after one of Willie K. Jr’s yachts. This trip to Florida sowed the seeds of another idea that quickly took root.

  When, in 1934, the Demarest estate on Hypoluxo Island came up for sale just across the waterway from Harold’s new Palm Beach house, the Balsans decided to buy it. The political outlook in Europe was already unsettled, and it seemed wise to keep Alva’s legacy in America. They commissioned Maurice Fatio – a fashionable architect who had built Harold’s house – and by 1936 Casa Alva, as the new house was called, was ready. Built in the Spanish style, the house had views overlooking a long lawn to the south fringed by a lagoon, bamboo and swaying palms. Following Alva’s example, many of the fireplaces and doors were shipped to Florida by the Paris art dealer Robert de Gallea. Consuelo is rumoured to have spent about $2 million – her mother’s legacy and more – in installing the French boiseries she had always loved in eleven of its rooms and creating another refined and elegant house that would turn out to be a haven sooner than the Balsans expected.

  Alva’s death in January 1933 was followed by two more in the family. The first was the death of Willie K. Jr’s only son, William K. Vanderbilt III. A big-game hunter and a traveller like his father, he was only twenty-six, and his death was all the more tragic because he was killed in a motoring accident. The second was the death at Blenheim of the Duke of Marlborough on 30 June 1934. He once told Gladys that Consuelo would wreck the existence of anyone with whom she was associated; but it was his own that became wretched. Gladys’s hesitation before their engagement soon proved to be amply justified, for within a few years their marriage had disintegrated in an atmosphere of horrifying rancour. Friends of the Duke such as the Churchills did not warm to Gladys and the antipathy was mutual. Oxfordshire neighbours were frosty too, and although Gladys made new friends such as Lady Ottoline Morrell, she soon missed her old Bohemian life in France. There were moments when she was able successfully to integrate the old life with the new – for instance, by inviting the sculptor Jacob Epstein to Blenheim to sculpt a bust of Sunny. Even this was interrupted by a row and although the work was completed in 1926 – along with a bust of Ivor Churchill – Epstein left Blenheim, like other artists long before him, ‘out of spirits, and out of pocket’.58

  ‘How can you spend all your days in Hyperboria? What are your brain-cells working on?’59 wrote Walter Berry. Increasingly Gladys had no reply to this question. She tried to throw herself into life at Blenheim, creating a large rockery at the foot of the lake near Capability Brown’s ‘Grand Cascade’ while Sunny supervised the construction of beautiful new water terraces designed by Achille Duchêne, but it was not enough to stop their quarrels becoming obvious. ‘There had been an occasion on which he had struck Gladys on the way to a luncheon party, causing her to arrive with a black eye. There were rows about servants, Marlborough claiming that Gladys upset them and they left, and an atmosphere soon reigned in which neither party could do anything right.’

  ‘In her misery, Gladys responded by kicking out,’60 writes Hugo Vickers. Once, when Sunny was talking about politics to guests at dinner, Gladys suddenly shouted ‘Shut up! You know nothing about politics. I’ve slept with every prime minister in Europe and most kings. You are not qualified to speak.’61 Gladys’s beautiful face was now disfigured by her own hand. The paraffin wax she had insisted on having injected into the bridge of her nose in 1903 had slowly run down to her jaw, destroying its shape and giving her chin an ulcerated appearance. Though her eyes never lost their startling blue, Gladys’s looks continued to deteriorate throughout the 1930s so that by 1943, only nine years after the 9th Duke’s death, Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon described her in his diaries as a ‘terrifying apparition’.62

  By 1931 the Duke left Gladys at Blenheim and went to live in London. Gladys took to breeding Blenheim spaniels. Clarissa Churchill remembered visiting the palace as a nine-year old to find the Great Hall divided into dog pens and smelling horribly. Gladys’s trust fund had been badly affected by the 1929 crash and her appearance became more eccentric too, for she took to wearing old court dresses held up with safety pins. When he came to Blenheim the Duke would stay at the Bear Hotel in Woodstock and Gladys startled Anita Leslie by showing her the revolver she kept in her bedroom in case he ever came through the door. The Duke developed a passion (unrequited) for Lady Lindsay-Hogg and attracted unkind comment by visiting nightclubs. Gladys said of him: ‘The keynote of the Duke of Marlborough’s character I found in Brodie in “Hatter’s Castle” and his mood toward me is – “I’ll wipe them out as I destroy all who offend me. I’ll smash everybody that interferes with me. Let them try to do it. Whatever comes I am still myself.” A black vicious personal pride like a disease that gets worse and worse.’63

  The final straw seems to have come in 1932 when the Duke yelled at Gladys at lunch (rather as he had done at Consuelo): ‘Bah! I have no consideration for you and never have had.’64 Gladys, according to Hugo Vickers, found herself deserted on all sides. In the end,
the Duke gave orders to close down Blenheim and evict her. She took photographs as her luggage was loaded into a van. ‘Good-bye to all that!’ she wrote beside them later. As the Duke moved back into Blenheim (where a guest claimed almost to have fainted because of the smell), Gladys moved into their London house at 7 Carlton House Terrace. The Duke cut off the gas and telephone, and the newspapers began to scent a story as she cooked by candlelight and friends smuggled in food. Gladys was evicted from here too, and cut out of the Duke’s will; but when he died a few sensitive relations and friends such as Lily de Clermont-Tonnere wrote to Gladys, realising that in spite of everything, the Duke’s death would upset her.

  In the end, however, even funeral eulogies and obituaries could not entirely disguise the difficulties caused by the Duke’s temperament throughout his life. Lord Castlerosse wrote in the Sunday Express that he would miss him but that: ‘To me he was a pathetic figure like a lonely peacock struggling through deserted gardens … The Duke of Marlborough was the last duke who firmly believed that strawberry leaves could effectively cover a multitude of sins.’65 Winston Churchill was, of course, more sensitive: ‘He was always conscious that he belonged to a system which had passed away, and he foresaw with not ill-founded apprehension that the world tides which were flowing would remorselessly wash away all that was left.’ But even he observed that his cousin ‘sacrificed much – too much – for Blenheim’.66

  In France, by contrast, Consuelo’s life moved forward happily. The idea of a purely social life had always made her uneasy and by the mid-1920s this was set right when French social workers approached her for help with fundraising for a splendidly French project – a hospital for the bourgeoisie who could not afford to use clinics patronised by aristocrats and were thus forced to resign themselves to beds in public wards alongside the working classes.

  Consuelo leapt at the chance of deploying her old professional skills, drawing on her international circle for help. Even President Lebrun was charmed into attending one event, solemnly telling her that his presence added many hundreds of francs in value to the occasion. When the Fondation Foch finally opened, Consuelo was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. ‘It was all so very French,’ she wrote later. She had refused any kind of public function, so the Minister for Public Health came to the Paris house and presented it to her in front of the assembled household. Since he was not decorated himself he asked Jacques, who was, to pin on the cross. He would not, however, ‘be denied the accolade, which he begged my husband’s permission to confer’.67 The Fondation Foch rapidly acquired a reputation as a leading French hospital. (A further – unwelcome – accolade was conferred by the Germans in 1940 when they ejected the French patients and reserved it for themselves.)

  If St Georges-Motel was intended as a retreat it was far from lonely, and not always peaceful. The gardens were brought back to life along with the house; parterres restored, boxwood traceries planted, water gardens created and fountains playing, the estate was thrown open to the village for the annual fête champêtre, ‘to which chatelaines from properties near-by brought their households, and peasants came in all their finery. The village priest and the lady of light virtue were equally welcome.’ The children ate at long tables set out under trees decked with bunting, laughing at clowns to the sound of the village band. Shocked by how little French children seemed to play, Consuelo opened up one corner of the estate for a vacation school she started in the village, and one year its children danced a minuet for her benefit, emerging from the chateau ‘like little ghosts from an elegant past’.68 Although Consuelo and Jacques had no grandchildren of their own, they soon made up for it. In addition to the vacation school, Consuelo set up a sanatorium for eighty children recovering from operations or requiring preventive care. At the request of the Ministry of Health, she then opened an open-air shelter in the woods nearby for children in the early stages of tuberculosis.

  Smaller houses on the estate were often lent to friends, notably the Moulin de Montreuil which was occupied by the painter Paul Maze and his family in the summer months (in the view of one authority Paul Maze did some of his best work at St Georges-Motel). His presence there attracted other painters including Dunoyer de Segonzac, Simon Levy and Odette de Garet. The pianist Yvonne Lefebure spent the last summer before the war in one of the cottages. Paul Maze’s daughter, Pauline, was also a talented pianist and could be heard practising her scales across the fields. Sometimes, the manifold activities at St Georges-Motel caused problems of their own. One (temporary) lady superintendent of one of the children’s houses – for whom the children did not care – had a daughter who was a ballerina with the Paris Opera. ‘The ballerina, alas, could not practise her entrechats as did Pauline her scales. Jealousy therefore marred what might have become a friendship. In the frustrated idleness of an enforced seclusion the children had got on the ballerina’s nerves. Paul’s nerves were also taut, and there were sharp encounters in which Mme La Directrice’s authority suffered, greatly to the children’s joy.’69 But these were small difficulties caused by a concentration of artistry in one space, and Consuelo later wrote that it forever caused her a pang to think of the careless gaiety of those pre-war summers.

  By 1935 a constant undertow of anxiety about the international situation had begun to disrupt the idyll. ‘An Englishman told me this summer that he had heard Vansittart tell the Prince of Wales that the situation was far too serious for the Prince to cruise on the M. and as a European war was due within the next 10 years if it came now rather than later it made little difference. If Vansittart and Eden are responsible for England’s foreign policy Heaven protect us,’70 Consuelo wrote to Churchill on 12 October 1935. At this point they were briefly in the same camp. Consuelo, who increasingly saw international politics exclusively from the perspective of French security, was worried that France would be forced into war with Italy over its stance on Abyssinia at a time when Churchill, who was out of office after the defeat of the Tories in 1929, was also arguing for sanctions against Italy, rather than resolute military action. ‘Good Luck to you and may you soon be Minister of Defence to protect the peace,’71 wrote Consuelo.

  Winston and Clementine Churchill visited St Georges-Motel several times during the 1930s. Paul Maze’s presence in the Moulin de Montreuil was an added draw. Though Clementine Churchill did not greatly care for him, Winston regarded him as a close friend and warmly welcomed his advice on painting. At St Georges-Motel they could meet on neutral ground, surrounded not only by ‘paintatious’ scenery but by staff available to improve on nature when artists ran into difficulties. On one visit, Churchill decided he wished to paint the moat with ripples in the water. When a lack of wind meant that ripples were not forthcoming he sent to Dreux for a photographer and deployed two of the Balsans’ gardeners to row out in a boat and make ripples with the oars. ‘I can still see the scene with Winston personally directing the manoeuvre,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘The photographer running around to do the snapshots – the gardeners clumsily belabouring the water. With characteristic thoroughness Winston persisted until all possibilities had been exhausted and the photographer, hot and worried, could be heard muttering, “Mais ces Anglais sont donc tous maniac”.’72

  St Georges-Motel was also the scene of one of Churchill’s more curious artistic creations. He was painting a view of the long canal from the lawn on the front of the house when Paul Maze and three other artists whom Consuelo had invited for lunch crowded round him to observe his work. ‘Undaunted by such critical observers, he drew four brushes from his stock and handing them round said, “You Paul, shall paint the trees – you, Segonzac, the sky – you, Simon Lévy, the water and you, Marchand, the foreground, and I shall supervise.” Thus I later found them busily engaged. Winston, smoking a big cigar, a critical eye on the progress of his picture, now and then intervened – “a little more blue here in your sky, Segonzac – your water more shadowed, Lévy – and, Paul, your foliage a deeper green just there”. It was all I could do to drag them away t
o luncheon.’73 Ivor and Jacques also pitched in to help, and the painting was signed by them all.

  Consuelo’s long-standing friendship with Churchill, however, was not enough to prevent their views on how to tackle the threat posed by the rise of Hitler from diverging sharply. By the late 1930s she was seeing European politics exclusively through the eyes of the French and taking on many of Jacques’ views. Her support for the Munich Agreement was based partly on her view, shared by many, that France was in no state to confront Nazi aggression. Just before the signing of the agreement in September 1938, she wrote to Churchill to thank him for sending her a copy of the final volume of his biography of the 1st Duke of Marlborough. ‘Mr Chamberlain has we hope saved the present situation, but how about the future of the Balkans!’ There was also an unmistakeable whiff of anti-Semitism in the sentence which followed, typical of many French conservatives in the late 1930s who preferred to blame ‘Jewish disloyalty’ than face up to less palatable reasons for France’s travails. ‘The Jewish press in the USA is very disappointed that there is to be no war – sentiment is hardening against them everywhere.’74