Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt
Page 68
Washington Post
‘An intelligent, insightful and highly readable book about the gilded cage of aristocratic marriage at the turn of the last century … With more than an edge of sympathy for the manipulative Alva, she has shown how two individuals can grow and develop’
Daily Mail
‘Mackenzie Stuart is eloquent on the subject of the powerlessness of women in both British and American high society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’
Sunday Times
‘In this well-researched book, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart is a shrewd observer of the goings-on of high society in Newport and on Fifth Avenue’
RAYMOND CARR, Spectator
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply indebted to many people for their help and encouragement as I wrote this book. It would not have been written at all without Candia McWilliam’s kindly insistence that I contact Clare Alexander at Gillon Aitken to discuss the idea; nor without Clare’s consummate professional guidance and support thereafter. Hugo Vickers was generosity itself from the earliest stages. Faced with someone who was patently a novice, he provided invaluable and consistently good advice on how to set about telling the story of another person’s life. I have drawn heavily on his excellent biography of Gladys Deacon and am most grateful to him for allowing me access to her papers. I would particularly like to thank Serena Balfour for her support from the outset, for talking about her great-grandmother Consuelo on various occasions and for lending me Consuelo’s scrapbook and photograph album; the Duke of Marlborough, Lady Rosemary Muir, Lady Soames and other members of the Spencer-Churchill family who kindly agreed to be interviewed at length about their memories; Jacqueline Williams (another great-granddaughter) who allowed generous access to L.H. Prost’s catalogue of the Balsan collection; and William Lee, who was exceptionally magnanimous in making available references from the diaries of Grand Duke Dmitry at breathtakingly short notice.
Others who knew Consuelo provided many valuable insights. Stuart Preston was a fund of information; Mademoiselle Blouin, governess to the daughters of Lady Sarah Russell provided a unique perspective; Aimée Balsan kindly introduced me to members of the Balsan family who remembered Consuelo and Jacques before 1940; and Louis Auchincloss gave me the benefit of his astute judgement over a memorable lunch at the Colony Club in New York. Owners and occupiers of houses belonging to Consuelo and Alva have been both welcoming and knowledgeable. I owe special thanks to the owners of Crowhurst, William E. Benjamin of Casa Alva, Catherine Hamilton of St Georges-Motel, His Excellency Dilip Lahiri, Mark Del Priore of the Pine Hollow Country Club and the staff of the Chateau Golf at Augerville-la-Rivière. Marble House is run by the Preservation Society of Newport County. I am most grateful to its curator, Paul Miller, and to Andrea Carneiro for all their help, but above all to associate curator Charles J. Burns, who arranged access to the Society’s archives and several visits to Marble House over a period of three years, and whose capacious knowledge of the Vanderbilts and interest in the project has enhanced each visit.
Many other people have been magnanimous with their time and knowledge. My special thanks go to Michael Harvey for introducing me to the Balsan family; Jane Lady Abdy for advice about the Souls and the work of Helleu; Eric Homberger for his expert knowledge of New York society in the 1870s; David Gilmour for advice about Curzon; Alastair Gray for bringing the presence of Keir Hardie aboard the Campania to my attention; Eleni Bide for her work on Edwardian jewellery; H.R. Kedward, John Forster (education officer at Blenheim Palace), Jack Renton, Professor Kathleen Burk, Harle Tinney at Belcourt Castle, Newport, Rhode Island, Charlotte Alston, Narayan Naik, Katie Mackenzie Stuart, Virginia Murray of John Murray Publishers, Robert de Balkany, Daisy Hay and James Dunkerley for their help on specific questions; Charlotte Ward-Perkins for her help with selecting illustrations; Candia McWilliam, Martine Stewart, Dr Elisabeth Kehoe, and Erik Tarloff for reading the manuscript with such care and attention and making many valuable suggestions; and Betsy Newell and Peter and Virginia Carry for hospitality in New York over a period of four years. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr Peter Geidel. Writing about Alva’s life would have been much more difficult without his work but my efforts to track him down and thank him in person have so far proved fruitless.
While writing this book I consistently underestimated how much research there was to do, usually after I’d packed up and arrived home again. I am extremely grateful to all those who came to my aid: Jessie Carry Saunders and Elizabeth Sodel in New York; Stephane Porion in France; Daisy Hay in Oxford; Matthew Brown and Andrea Cox during the final stages in London; and Flora Joll and Anthony Cummins who scrutinised the proofs. I would particularly like to thank Dr Chloe Campbell for her invaluable help, which drew on her expertise as a historian of Edwardian England and involved many trips to the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale on my behalf; Bryn Harris for assistance with Latin translation; Aoife Ní Luanaigh for her help with translation from French, particularly the short stories of Paul Morand; and Gareth Prosser.
Staff of libraries and archives in both the U.S. and the U.K. have been unfailingly helpful. I would like to express my gratitude to Jennifer Spencer, collections manager at Sewall-Belmont House in Washington, for much assistance including access to Alva’s books of suffrage clippings; Florence Ogg, director of archives and collections at the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum, Centerport, New York; Bertram Lippincott at Newport Historical Society, Newport, Rhode Island; John Sledge, architectural historian at Mobile Historic Development Commission for his help and advice about Alva’s early years in Mobile, Alabama; Mari Nakahara for assistance with the Richard Morris Hunt Archives at the Octagon Museum in Washington; Cate Lynch at the Surrogate’s Court of Suffolk County, Riverhead, New York; Peter J. Blodgett, H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Elizabeth J. Dunn at the Rare Book, Manuscript and Collections Library at Duke University, North Carolina; John Pinfold and his staff at the Vere Harmsworth Library in the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford; Mike Bott at Reading University Library; Dr Kate Fielden, Curator, Bowood House; the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the staff of New York Public Library; the staff of the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress; the staff of the New-York Historical Society’s reading room; the Historical Society of Palm Beach County; Alan Packwood and his staff at the Churchill Archives; and the staff of the British Library and the London Library.
I am deeply grateful to Michael Fishwick at HarperCollins for his outstanding editorial guidance, and to Terry Karten for all her help from New York. It has been a pleasure to work with Kate Johnson, Kate Hyde, Annabel Wright and Cathie Arlington during the production of this book. The support of my family throughout has been unflagging and magnificent. Daisy helped with research, read the book in draft and was indisputably my sternest critic. Marianna accompanied me cheerfully on several trips to New York and Newport where she made enthusiastic attempts to emulate a Vanderbilt lifestyle. As always, Janet Fenton held things together and saved everyone from neglect. My husband Michael Hay combined a demanding job with executive-producing trips to America and France on my behalf and driving hundreds of miles on arrival. His evenings and weekends were interrupted for months by endless demands that he critique yet another draft. He could not have given me more help and sage advice with more good humour and I cannot thank him enough.
I would also like to thank the following for allowing me to quote material:
George Mann Books for permission to quote from The Glitter and the Gold; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, for permission to quote from the papers of Charles Erskine Scott Wood; the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library at Duke University for permission to quote from the papers of Matilda Young; the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University for permission to quote from the papers of Doris Stevens; Country Life for permission to quote from ‘Blenheim Fifty Years Ago: Mem
oirs of Gentleman’s Service’; Hugo Vickers for permission to quote from the papers of Gladys Deacon; the Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California for permission to quote from oral histories of Alice Paul and Sara Bard Field; Curtis Brown for permission to quote from the letters and works of Sir Winston Churchill, Clementine Churchill and Lady Soames; New-York Historical Society for permission to quote from the Vanderbilt family papers.
Copyright
Fourth Estate
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
Copyright © Amanda Mackenzie Stuart 2005
Amanda Mackenzie Stuart asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Epub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007445684
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