Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Provided The Glitter and the Gold is read as a period piece, ‘blue-pencilled’ by many, written in the 1950s before the revival of feminism, it remains a rewarding account. Consuelo’s observations about late-Victorian and Edwardian life in England are a treasure trove of detail for social historians, by whom she is often quoted. Her depiction of the hauteur and insularity of English aristocracy, and her boredom and frustration with the protocol of what was, in many ways, still an eighteenth-century way of life, is all the better for the fact that she was never persuaded by it. Her account of her powerlessness to prevent her own marriage to a man whom she did not love, remains harrowing. Indeed, the strength of feeling with which she tells this part of her life story is the most convincing argument against those who have suggested it was all made up.

  It largely accounts for continued interest in the memoir, and for attempts to tell her story by others, which began almost immediately the book was published. David O. Selznick expressed interest in the film rights seeing it as a star vehicle for his wife Jennifer Jones. ‘I gather that you were highly doubtful about this,’ wrote Cass Canfield to Consuelo, ‘and must say that I agree as to the difficulty of your being able to supervise the making of a motion picture so that you would be assured it was in good taste.’60 When The Glitter and the Gold was finally published in England, one person decided to forgive Consuelo after all. On 8 June 1953, she received a cablegram at Old Fields in Oyster Bay, Long Island. ‘Blenheim Sunday night,’ it read. ‘A wonderful day here. Many memories and thoughts of you. Love Winston.’61

  In 1953, Consuelo watched a British coronation from afar. Her granddaughter Rosemary took her place as a maid of honour to Elizabeth II, and Winston Churchill attended as Prime Minister. Meanwhile, Ivor had married Elizabeth Cunningham quietly in 1947 and they had a son, Robert, in 1954. Although Ivor had worked hard to make The Glitter and the Gold a book of which his mother could be proud, they only met intermittently when she returned to Europe. He hated flying and always found reasons for refusing to travel to the US to see her. The arrival of his son Robert in 1954 meant a further delay, and then it was too late. She was already saddened by his failure to appear when 1956 was darkened by the worst possible news. Often in fragile health, Ivor now had an inoperable brain tumour.

  The autumn of 1956 was a black time. Ivor died in September, aged fifty-seven, and Consuelo was devastated. They had always been very close. After she married Jacques, he had often stayed with them in France. Mother and son developed a very similar taste in painting and painters, particularly the work of André Dunoyer de Segonzac, a friend of Paul Maze and an habitué of St Georges-Motel. Obituaries particularly stressed Lord Ivor Churchill’s role as a collector and connoisseur of French painting. ‘From his casual manner at exhibitions nobody would have supposed that he was keenly interested in and well informed about what he saw, but it was only necessary to exchange a few words with him in front of a picture to find that he missed nothing and had very definite tastes.’62 Others testified to his intelligence and wide range of interests which latterly focused on building up a prize-winning Guernsey herd.

  While he had been close to Consuelo, Ivor shared his father’s drive for perfection. Pale and fragile, he was much more similar in appearance to his father than his elder brother, the 10th Duke, and shared many of the 9th Duke’s mannerisms. ‘It was a puzzle to his admirers why Ivor Churchill should so obstinately have remained a private individual and have never applied to public affairs his exceptional talents and his special gifts of understanding and concentration,’ wrote Harold Nicolson. ‘Was it ill health that debarred him from more overt activity? As a boy, he had been delicate and even frail, but in adult age he was in no sense lacking in vitality. Was it indolence? His languor was apparent only: He was capable of intense application.’ Harold Nicolson went on to list his erudite interests – building up a collection of first editions while still at school, his horses, his pictures, his rare plants and fruit trees at his garden in Steep in Hampshire. ‘How then are we to explain his disinclination for public activity? He was himself worried by his own diffidence and would seek to analyse his self-distrust. Yet his hesitations were due surely to his standard of perfectibility, to his refusal to compete with others in struggles where the best can be but seldom chosen and but seldom attained.’63

  Consuelo was not able to travel to England to see Ivor before he died because Jacques was also in decline. She therefore had the grim task of merely reading the testimonials to her son, which were later pasted into a scrap book. Jacques had a stroke that came on top of the gradual onset of Alzheimer’s. Though he became very quiet, his reckless streak did not diminish. Consuelo’s anxiety about this was shared by Louis Hoffmann, who found him collapsed on a golf course at the age of eighty-eight. He died within weeks of Ivor on 4 November. A burial requiem mass was celebrated in New York in the Roman Catholic Chapel of the Helpers of the Holy Soul at 118 East Eighty Sixth Street for close members of the family: his favourite nephew François Balsan; Harold and his wife Gertrude; Lady Sarah Russell; and Count Jean de Lagarde, the French Consul General. Afterwards, his body was flown to Paris where he was buried in the Balsan family tomb in Paris in the Cimetière Montmartre. ‘Society is deeply mourning the passing of one of its most colourful figures – the kindly and once-swashbuckling Col. Louis Jacques Balsan. It is to the credit of Col. Balsan that he was not only a World War I hero, and one of France’s most daring pilots … but he was also a good husband, which is quite a tribute in our age,’ read one obituary. ‘For there is no question that Consuelo Vanderbilt, who suffered unhappiness at the hands of the Duke of Marlborough, found joy and a happy life with her French husband. And today all her friends feel deeply for her in her bereavement.’64

  Shortly before Jacques’ death, the Balsans had sold Old Fields to the committee of the Pine Hollow Country Club, and bought a smaller house in Southampton, Long Island. Consuelo sold Casa Alva soon after Jacques’ death and bought a smaller house in Palm Beach itself, on El Vedado Drive. ‘One thing I learnt from Granny,’ said one of her great-granddaughters, ‘is that you don’t sit around moping, you get on and change the things that are bothering you’65 – an admirable principle, but less easy at seventy-nine. The courage that had been one of Consuelo’s most striking characteristics throughout her life emerged once again. Valentine Lawford was much impressed by the decisive way in which she moved onwards in the face of a terrible double blow. ‘The manner in which she took these, her deepest losses, like the manner in which she took leave of the two houses which had formed such an intrinsic, living part of her recent life, and set about at once creating new rooms and new gardens, should be enough to shame one out of any incipient, vicarious nostalgia about mere periods or possessions, however irreplaceable,’ he wrote. It was, he thought ‘further proof that real creativity is often most intimately related to self-discipline, and that a clear eye to the future can be a sign that its owner knows just as clearly that the past’s wounds, unsalved by courage, will never even halfway heal.’66

  As Consuelo created two new homes in Palm Beach and Southampton, the past continued to call. On his very first visit to the United States in 1895, Churchill had met a newly married Sunny and dined with the Vanderbilts in New York. In 1959, Winston Churchill, now retired from politics and very frail, decided he wished to make a visit to America in the interests of Anglo-American friendship, a cause to which he had for a long while been passionately committed. In spite of his doctor’s warning that he was mad to take the risk, Churchill flew to the States, in a BOAC Comet, on 4 May 1959. He was given a presidential welcome by Eisenhower, who took three days out of his schedule to entertain one of America’s great heroes, organised two stag dinners at the White House with Second World War generals, and flew him by helicopter to his farm at Gettysburg, giving Churchill a chance to inspect the American Civil War battlefield from the air. After the Washington visit, Churchill travelled back to New York, where it was obvious to his old friend Berna
rd Baruch that he was exhausted. Baruch told reporters that Sir Winston would not be seeing anyone, but a few hours before his departure for England, he confounded everyone by making an exception, and went off to have tea with Consuelo at 1 Sutton Place South. After 1959, Churchill only passed through New York briefly one more time, and they probably both sensed that this was the last time they would meet in a lifelong friendship that had survived many tests.67

  By 1960, at the age of eighty-two, Consuelo had become a star of Southampton society, her silvery elegance as celebrated as ever. That summer, Southampton’s society magazine the Diplomat called her ‘the acknowledged beauty of the Southampton season’,68 saying that her social appearances were now rare and made any party she attended an occasion. She also contributed an article on entertaining to the New York Journal. ‘To be a good hostess, one’s dominant preoccupation should … be the pleasure of one’s guests, not the vanity of one’s person. The woman who entertains because of her Lowestoft service, her lace tablecloth, her old English silver, her hothouse flowers, her epicurean meal and the vision of herself in her newest gown and jewels is not likely to produce happy reactions,’ she wrote. The quality of the food was more important than the table décor, for ‘hunger cannot be assuaged by a display of china’. A party of six or eight was the ideal number because conversation could be kept general. Music should not be an adjunct to conversation – this was an insult to the musicians as well as the conversational powers of the guests. Asked by the magazine to provide a perfect luncheon menu for a warm June day she suggested ‘Cold madrilène soup, coulibac de saumon made with salmon, rice, eggs and pastry – a chaudfroid of chicken with a salad, and an orange dessert’. One could reduce the likelihood of problems by never accepting invitations one did not wish to return, and ‘eliminating bores and bounders’.69

  In 1961 there was more sadness when Consuelo’s daughter-in-law, Mary, Duchess of Marlborough, died of cancer. By now, Consuelo was dogged by ill-health herself and was unable to attend the funeral, though she made suggestions for the music at the funeral service which was later used at her own. Increasingly frail, she was visited frequently by her granddaughter, Lady Sarah Russell, with an ever more watchful eye. Her engagement with life around her continued, nonetheless. She topped up a scholarship for French students at Harvard Business School that she and Jacques had started some years before; she leapt to defend Louis Auchincloss when a rude review of Portrait in Brownstone appeared in the Herald Tribune; but she was too unwell to travel as far as Newport to look round Marble House in 1963 after Harold Vanderbilt bought it back from the Prince family and handed over Alva’s greatest architectural achievement to the Preservation Society of Newport County (though she offered to pay for the restoration of the parquet floor in the place where she had so often felt that her person was dedicated to whatever final disposal Alva had in mind).70

  In 1962, when she was eighty-five, Consuelo became the subject of one more story – her own. It was told at the behest of a different kind of storyteller – Diana Vreeland, editor-in-chief of Vogue, then at the beginning of a legendary association with the magazine. Consuelo’s trousseau had provided an early editor of Vogue with the scoop of her career in 1895. Now Consuelo gave the career of the latest editor of Vogue another helpful boost. Joining the magazine in 1962, Diana Vreeland selected Consuelo as the prototype for one of her first commissions – a series of profiles of the ‘lifestyle’ of the elegant and wealthy, an approach that seems commonplace now but was pioneering in its time. Vreeland immediately decided to use photographs of Consuelo taken by the photographer Horst P. Horst (always known as ‘Horst’), and asked him to take some more. She also asked Horst’s partner, Valentine Lawford, to write a profile of Consuelo that was to be ground-breaking in style. ‘Horst was told to photograph not only Madame Balsan’s paintings, furniture, and objects, but her door handles, her flowers, her plates and knives and forks, and the bathroom details – even the soap. I myself was to write down everything I knew about Consuelo, and to describe in depth the extraordinary refinement of her taste.’71

  Horst and Valentine Lawford were well placed to do this. They had both known Consuelo for years. A personable and charming British diplomat before he became a writer, Valentine Lawford knew many of Consuelo’s younger relatives and friends on both sides of the Atlantic and was invited to stay at Casa Alva in 1948, where he asked permission to take Horst after a trip they made together round Mexico, Guatemala and Cuba. In spite of her prejudice against Germans, Consuelo took to Horst, though she complained his voice was pitched so low that she could not understand what he said. While they were staying she allowed him to take as many photographs as he wanted of Casa Alva and thereafter he photographed Consuelo and her houses many times. This was particularly easy to arrange on Long Island for Horst owned a house in Oyster Bay himself after 1947, and they became neighbours. His photographs included a black-and-white portrait photograph for Vogue which accompanied publication of The Glitter and the Gold in 1952.

  In order to write the Vogue profile, Valentine Lawford caught up with Consuelo at Garden Side in Southampton in 1963, the year before she died. This was a story of ‘the return of the native, the completion of a circle, the harvest on home ground’,72 he wrote. Even her closest friends had wondered whether she could recreate the atmosphere of her other American houses in this one, aged eighty, but they need not have feared, he said. Though Garden Side had no garden to speak of when Consuelo bought it, there were now vistas, lawns, begonias, roses the size of dahlias and dahlias the size of cabbages. Windows had been enlarged and a long drawing room had been added to the side, lined once again with boiseries from a French chateau, and hung with yellow silk curtains. It was somehow typical of her that this was the house that her long-serving domestic staff liked best, he thought, but both houses – Garden Side and the smaller house at Palm Beach ‘enclose and encourage the same way of life, even if on a smaller scale, as it were in a lower key, than their predecessors’.73

  And Consuelo herself? Her patina was not one of old age, nor even of rarity, wrote Lawford. The keynotes of her personality remained self-discipline and youthfulness. Entertaining was on a lighter scale and she was grateful for ‘the stair rail on a downward journey and the elevator on her way up’,74 but there were times when she struck those who watched her with her great-grandchildren ‘as being at heart as untouched and unprejudiced as the smallest of them’,75 and family photographs suggest that children were always quite at ease with her. There were many grace notes of the younger Consuelo. At eighty-six she had just launched an appeal for the Southampton Hospital Building Fund and he noticed that she hurried to the front door when the mail arrived, feeling each envelope for contributions. Valentine Lawford found her modernity astonishing. ‘How hard it is sometimes to remember that the woman who has just been commenting, let us say, on Lolita, was twice commanded to “dine and sleep” with Queen Victoria.’76

  She still had a circle of admirers, especially bachelors who sat at her feet and worshipped her. ‘Her incisive opinions on world affairs, and her warmth draw men, young and old, to her side, as was the case in her Edwardian heyday and after the briefest of encounters, even a college boy will concede her lovely appearance,’77 wrote the Diplomat in 1960. One of Consuelo’s favourite elderly bachelors (belonging to the group whom she liked to describe as ‘safe’) was a Southampton neighbour, Edward Crandall, who came to call, played bridge and kept her au courant with everything that was happening – New York exhibitions, new writers, new plays, new books. Lawford noticed that she still read three or four books each week. Her great-granddaughter Serena, who lived with her for six months when she was seventeen, also found Granny’s engagement with contemporary life remarkable. ‘She was very, very modern – she had always read the latest book, seen the latest movie.’ Serena felt slightly envious when two young men – Horst and Lawford – called for Granny in an elegant sports car and whisked her off to the cinema in the afternoons. ‘If she were al
ive today, she would have a word-processor. And she would use it. She would have loved e-mail.’ She had the appearance of a grande dame, but ‘if you sat down in front of her and talked to her directly, you could soon find yourself talking about all kinds of things you wouldn’t dream of discussing with another adult. She was a huge influence.’78

  Consuelo died at Garden Side on Sunday 6 December 1964, aged eighty-seven, with her granddaughter Sarah at her side – the 10th Duke was already on his way but arrived too late to see her before she died. Her American funeral was held at St Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue – the same church in which she had married the Duke and said farewell to Alva, though it had been rebuilt after a fire in 1906. There were flowers from Harold who was too unwell to attend, and from Consuelo’s only surviving bridesmaid, Daisy Post, now Mrs Louis Brugiere of Newport. As Harold Wilson flew into Washington for talks on nuclear defence with President Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King called for a grand alliance of American intellectuals in the fight for civil rights, hundreds of mourners came to the church and sat in pews that had only just ceased to be reserved for Morgans, Goelets, Belmonts and Vanderbilts three years beforehand, in 1961. The list of mourners in The New York Times read like a roll call from an American social history book: Jays, Whitneys, Huttons, Fords, Aldriches, Astors, Szechenyi, Szapary. This time there were Vanderbilts a-plenty: Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt II and his half-brother, William H. Vanderbilt, were ushers and honorary pall-bearers. So was Colonel Serge Obolensky, guest at Blenheim, guest at Lou Sueil and now a neighbour in Southampton. There was a sixty-voice choir which sang hymns of Consuelo’s choosing. As was customary in American Episcopalian services, there was no eulogy.