Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Convinced that it was now essential to get Consuelo out of the country, the Balsans became mired in the kind of bureaucratic complications which arise when bureaucrats are besieged by too many people in difficult circumstances. They were told by a junior official at the American consulate that they could not have the usual visas to go to Florida but would have to travel as emigrants. To travel as an emigrant Consuelo first had to produce a birth certificate (which she never had), a marriage certificate and divorce certificate (which were both in Paris). They were then taken aside by a friend and told that the best approach was to get visas for Spain and Portugal at Bayonne and to get the American visa in Lisbon. This was a matter of urgency, however, as the border was likely to close at any moment. They made their way to Bayonne, where they were offered a room – and astonishing hospitality under the circumstances – first by a man directing traffic, and later at the home of a garage mechanic, where they slept on two sofas.

  Once again the Spanish and Portuguese embassies in Bayonne were in a state of siege. Once again, they were assisted by a letter from a friend to the Portuguese consul. On the way back to Bayonne in the car, the Balsans gave a lift to a man and his wife who were travelling on foot. This small good turn would soon pay off. When the Balsans reached the Portuguese consul at six the following morning, queues of refugees were already stretching in pouring rain far down the street. They waited for two hours with an increasingly desperate crowd when suddenly, a door opened and they were beckoned up the stairs and past the others by the man to whom they had given a lift. Acting on a chance remark of Consuelo’s that the Portuguese consul could probably do with extra help, this enterprising character had found himself a job. He now signalled to the Balsans to jump the queue. Consuelo and Jacques found themselves having to push through the crowd to reach the consulate door at the top of wooden stairs. The necessary visas were obtained in seconds; it was then a matter of having to descend the same rickety wooden stairs past those whom they had queue-barged. But once again, their new friend proved himself equal to the task by shouting: ‘Look out-look out – the stairs are giving way – they were never meant to bear so great a weight,’ and as the crowd descended the stairs in a hurry, the Balsans were able to make a fast exit. They exercised prerogative once again at the Spanish embassy by waving a letter from another friend who had been a former Spanish ambassador to France in the face of its startled staff. At every turn, Consuelo did the barging since Jacques, who was in his officer’s uniform, refused to resort to such methods – ‘But neither, I shrewdly calculated, could he refuse to follow me, since alone I might easily have been manhandled,’ she wrote later.

  From Bayonne they drove to the frontier with Spain. Here, there were no friends to help. They had great trouble getting seats on the train to Lisbon, for which extortionate prices were now being charged. French currency was no longer honoured in Portugal after the fall of France, and for the first time in her life, Consuelo found herself short of money and in the hands of small-time crooks. The Balsans were forced to sell their car for a fraction of its market price in exchange for train tickets which had been unobtainable a few minutes earlier, leaving Consuelo feeling ‘outraged by the incredible bargain’ won by the haggling dealer. At the Portuguese border there was a further nightmare when their passports (‘now more precious than jewels’) were removed. In the event, they only managed to retrieve the passports in Lisbon and secure the necessary visas twenty-four hours before they left Portugal on a Clipper seaplane, tickets having been arranged by Consuelo’s brothers in America.

  The evening before their departure, they received an invitation to dine with the Duke of Kent who was on an official visit to Portugal. He and Consuelo had met less than a year before at the coming-out ball at Blenheim. The Balsans initially declined because they had nothing to wear – the only clothes they had with them were the ones they had taken for a brief visit to Pau. The Duke of Kent, whose solicitude Consuelo found most touching, assured them it did not matter. When they presented themselves at dinner, however, it turned out that it did, for his entourage displayed no understanding of the ordeals of occupation, and every symptom of the British insularity Consuelo had always so disliked. ‘How odd it seemed to sit at a formal dinner again free of anxiety and care – how little these people knew of the storm and stress of a country overrun by a ruthless enemy. That we had no evening clothes seemed strange to them.’ But the ordeal – slight by many people’s standards due to the Balsans’ network of contacts and influence – was very nearly over. It was Consuelo’s first flight by seaplane. ‘As we moved through the waters and rose to our flight, I looked at the blue sky above and the slowly fading coast beneath and felt I had embarked on a celestial passage to a promised land.’

  13

  Harvest on home ground

  ALVA MAY HAVE CONSIDERED her daughter’s attitude towards losing her nationality on marriage ‘supine’, but Consuelo finally came round to her mother’s point of view by the time she wrote her memoirs in the early 1950s. She was now back in her native land after a long life under three flags ‘having regained a citizenship I would never have resigned had the law of my day permitted me to retain it’.1 On arrival in the United States in 1940 she had to change herself back into an American by way of a naturalisation certificate. Some of Consuelo’s characteristics listed on the certificate had changed remarkably little in the forty-five years she had lived outside America though her hair was now white, and she had gained half an inch in height on the World’s long-distance estimate before the wedding in 1895. The immigration authorities were either not interested in whether her nose was ‘rather slightly retroussé’ or did not feel it was appropriate to mention it:

  Age: Sixty-three

  Sex: Female

  Color: White

  Complexion: Fair

  Color of Eyes: Hazel

  Color of Hair: Gray

  Height: 5 feet 8½ inches

  Weight: One hundred and thirty pounds

  Visible distinctive marks: None

  Marital status: Married

  Former nationality: French2

  The naturalisation process signalled that the Balsans intended to live in America regardless of the outcome of the war, for certificates were only issued to those who intended to take up residence permanently. Consuelo and Jacques now settled themselves into a new life. One of their first purchases was another magnificent house, also designed by Maurice Fatio (the architect of Casa Alva) and his partner William A. Treanor – Old Fields, near Oyster Bay on Long Island, New York. The house and its 135 acres of landscaped gardens and golf course had been designed by Fatio and Treanor in 1934 and had been sold to the Balsans by Dorothy Schiff, the Kuhn, Loeb heiress and publisher of the New York Post.3 Its exterior was designed in American neo-Georgian style, but its interior quickly became unmistakably Consuelian, its main rooms filled with French boiseries, French eighteenth-century wall panels and mirrors, and rooms leading elegantly from one to another through Louis Quinze double doors. From the time they bought Old Fields, the Balsans followed a pattern typical of some rich Americans, spending the winter in Florida and the summer months on Long Island, an arrangement supplemented by the lease of an apartment in New York, first at 825 Fifth Avenue, and later (by way of the Carlyle) at 1 Sutton Place South.

  By January 1942 they were entertaining again. On her first visit to Palm Beach in over twenty years, Elsa Maxwell stayed with the Balsans. Always impeccable hosts, they excelled themselves on 10 January by producing for lunch the one thing Elsa Maxwell liked more than anything else – a celebrity guest in the form of (Prime Minister) Winston Churchill. America had entered the Second World War the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and Churchill had come to America for talks with President Roosevelt. He travelled to Florida to give his hosts at the White House a few days’ rest, accompanied by his doctor, Lord Moran. They stayed in a secluded bungalow close to Pompano Beach, closely guarded by Secret Service men and kept at a dis
tance from the press who were told, somewhat unconvincingly, that Churchill was a ‘Mr Lobb’, an English invalid requiring peace and quiet, and that his Principal Private Secretary, John Martin, was the butler. Lord Moran wrote in his diary: ‘Oranges and pineapples grow here. And the blue ocean is so warm that Winston basks half-submerged in the water like a hippopotamus in a swamp.’4

  Elsa Maxwell ‘strained slightly an acquaintanceship of thirty years’ standing’5 by asking Churchill his opinion of her idol General de Gaulle. According to her account of the conversation at lunch, Churchill replied: ‘My greatest cross is the Croix de Lorraine’6 – an estimate of de Gaulle that Elsa Maxwell later discovered to be correct. During this lunch she attempted to lift Churchill’s mood by asking him about Rudolf Hess: ‘The Prime Minister chuckled when he described the pink polish Hess wore on his toenails. He clenched his famous bulldog jaw and murmured grimly, “The Nazis will lose.”’7

  After lunch at Casa Alva, Churchill and his entourage returned to Washington by train. (Warned to be extremely careful about what he said on the telephone, Churchill told Roosevelt: ‘I mustn’t tell you on the open line how we shall be travelling, but we shall be coming by puff puff.’8) Lord Moran reported in his diaries that after they left the Balsans, ‘Winston mused a little, and then said half to himself: “Wealth, taste and leisure can do these things, but they do not bring happiness,”’9 indicating that he may have thought that Consuelo and Jacques were far from content.

  If so, Churchill’s judgement was shrewd, for though the Balsans adored each other and led a halcyon existence compared to anyone in Europe, there were tensions because Jacques was deeply uneasy at being in America while France was at war. His anxiety was compounded by his faith in Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, who had emerged as the leader of defeated France in June 1940 and who then negotiated the armistice with Germany that divided France into two zones: a northern zone (which included Paris and St Georges-Motel) under German occupation, and a southern unoccupied zone administered by the French government, under Pétain, from Vichy. Jacques’ confidence in Pétain’s actions was characteristic of many who had fought in the Great War and remembered him as the hero of Verdun. Moreover, support inside France for both Pétain and the armistice of June 1940 was almost universal. ‘Survivalism had its own irrefutable logic and those who said “no” to the Armistice and rejected Pétain seemed a greater danger to society and appeared to be acting more blindly and absurdly than those who accepted him,’ wrote one commentator.10

  This did not mean that Jacques – or Consuelo – in any way supported fascism, unlike some of her old friends in England such as Lord Castlereagh, (now Lord Londonderry). Jacques’ attitude towards Pétain and the 1940 armistice could be best described as nationalisme germanophobe. He already had a gallant war record in fighting Germany from 1914–18. His attempts to re-form the Lafayette Escadrille had been designed to bring America into the war early in order to defeat Nazism. But in June 1940, he saw a negotiated settlement with Germany that allowed millions of French refugees to return home as the only realistic solution. Jacques also appears to have shared the view of many that Pétain was playing an elaborate double-game with the Nazis, and would ultimately outwit them. Such views led to a serious quarrel with Elsa Maxwell who saw Pétain as the ringleader of French defeatists. ‘When the French capitulated and Vichy became no more than a political maison de passé under the cunning manoeuvres of Laval, I did not spare my pen to heap abuse on Marshal Pétain,’ she wrote. ‘As a result I received a note from Colonel Jacques Balsan, “I shall never forgive you. Marshal Pétain will prove to be the saviour of France.” I replied, “History will record who is right.”’11 If Elsa Maxwell is to be believed, this quarrel was never mended and their friendship ended.

  As the war progressed, Jacques had to go through the painful process of facing up to his misplaced faith in Pétain, as the Vichy government entered into full collaboration with the Nazi regime. This made him even more frustrated at being exiled from the theatre of war, as a letter written to Myron Taylor on 17 May 1942 indicated. After Pearl Harbor, Jacques seems to have had hopes of setting up an American version of the Foreign Legion. ‘Dear Friend,’ his letter read, ‘I want to tell you how much I want to serve the United States. I have tried in vain to find the means of succeeding. Please read my letter to the President which I attach hereto, and if you do not find it useless, will you post it?’ In his letter to President Roosevelt Jacques wrote: ‘We are in the United States a great number of foreigners who are attached to the American nation with all our hearts. It is impossible for us, we confirmed it, to be incorporated in the American Army but you might form a Foreign Legion in the American Army so that it would be possible for us to devote ourselves to the American nation as we would ardently like to.’12

  Jacques’ age was against him. At seventy-four he was unable to find a satisfactory role and had to content himself with helping Consuelo chair a fundraising exhibition of French and English art treasures in New York in aid of the American Women’s Voluntary Services. The exhibition was held at the end of 1942 in the Parke-Bernet Galleries, run by a society committee which was chaired by Consuelo and included her cousin Ruth Twombly. The lenders included many names from Consuelo’s past – Sloan, Wilson, Auchincloss, Crowinshield, Goelet, Dupont, Webb and Lady Ribblesdale, formerly Ava Astor. The exhibition included over a hundred paintings from private American homes by Boucher, Chardin, David, Greuze, Fragonard, Lancret and Hubert Robert, but it was not, said its catalogue, merely an assemblage of the past. It was ‘a manifestation, a declaration of faith in the principles of the eighteenth century. For in the age of reason man knew that democracy was a political impossibility unless it was accompanied by an aristocracy of thought.’13

  Preferring action to representing an aristocracy of thought, Jacques finally found a solution to his problem in 1943 when General Cochet of the French air force escaped from France via Spain and made his way to London. Cochet had chosen to remain in Vichy France after the armistice, calling for resistance against the Nazi regime as a moral act based on French values which crystallised as a series of tracts entitled Tour d’Horizon. Each of these started by expressing loyalty to Pétain while calling for opposition to Nazism. Cochet’s position eventually became so untenable that he was arrested, but then escaped. It is likely that Jacques’ reaction to the Nazi occupation of France followed the same trajectory as his old air force colleague. Soon after General Cochet went to London to join the Free French in the spring of 1943, Jacques crossed the Atlantic to join him, installed himself in the Ritz and assisted Cochet with the coordination of the numerous resistance groups now converging on London, working from one of the many Free French administrative offices scattered around Mayfair. He also helped General Sice in planning the feeding of French children after liberation. Ivor too had a relationship with the Free French, as honorary secretary of the Association of Friends of French Volunteers, a welfare organisation that looked after members of the Free French forces while they were in London.

  However relieved Jacques may have felt to be in England making a contribution to the eventual liberation of France, Consuelo was wracked with anxiety about him. In September 1943 her nerve finally cracked. She wrote to Winston Churchill on 23 September and congratulated him on his ‘masterly conduct’ of the war before coming to the crux of the matter. ‘I am writing to you because I am anxious about Jacques. He has never stood the cold and damp of northern winters and at his age I fear he might easily get pneumonia. I know he is bent on following the French General Staff but if he could (without his guessing outside intervention) be sent here on a mission and return to England in the spring it would be a very great relief to my anxiety. He is 75 and although young and well for his years – imprudent. Don’t answer this letter and if you feel unable to interfere I shall understand and please let it remain a secret between us.’14

  Churchill’s capacity to attend to such requests from relations in the face of his commitm
ents as Prime Minister of a country at war was one of the most extraordinary things about him (or the most regrettable, according to some). November 1943 saw the start of the Tehran Conference in which the ‘Big Three’ met to discuss the direction of the war, and during which Churchill was deeply involved in negotiations with Roosevelt and Stalin over Operation Overlord – the Allied cross-Channel landing in France planned for the summer of 1944. However, he still found time to pass Consuelo’s letter on to an attaché, Major Morton, and entered into the spirit of the plot by scribbling: ‘You might like to know how this stands, and where this officer is likely to be sent. Seventy-five is certainly old for the war. On no account let it be known that I am making any inquiries.’15

  As it happened, Jacques called on Major Morton soon afterwards in an attempt to see Churchill with ‘a Frenchman just out of France’.16 (Though Major Morton did not mention this in his minute to Churchill, Jacques’ anonymous companion was likely to have been a member of the French resistance pleading the cause of Leon Noel, French ambassador to Poland and one of the signatories of armistice.17) Major Morton reported back to Winston Churchill: ‘I took the opportunity of enquiring tactfully on the lines of your Minute without disclosing your interest … Though working in London at present, he is going to America in about a fortnight’s time in connection with the children’s relief work. I submit that it would be up to his wife to try to keep him there when he gets there. Incidentally he seems very well at present, surprisingly so for his age.’18

  Churchill immediately dictated a telegram to Consuelo which read: ‘I understand Jacques will be with you soon and that he is surprisingly well.’19 History does not relate whether Jacques ever heard about Consuelo’s attempts to get him back to America, or if she ever discovered just how little Churchill had to do with it, but the Prime Minister received a delighted telegram expressing her heartfelt thanks.