He did, and they married in 1877; to make their union even sweeter, Richard settled $75,000 on the young couple. Then, unexpectedly, Ogden’s rich but parsimonious uncle died, leaving his nephew $25 million. Soon afterwards, Ogden’s father died – and also left Ogden $25 million. Ogden and May, already socially secure, were now among the richest in their set.
Five years later May’s brother Orme achieved an even more stunning coup, marrying into the most exclusive of all the New York families. His bride was Caroline (Carrie) Schermerhorn Astor, the youngest daughter of William Backhouse Astor and his wife, the Mrs Astor. Carrie, a slender – she had an enviable twenty-two-inch waist – sweet-natured girl with a wistful, heart-shaped face that many thought plain, could be said to have been born into the purple; and certainly her mother, though dominating, treated her like a little princess. Carrie and Orme had known each other since both had attended the same New York children’s dancing class and Carrie had fallen in love with him when she was sixteen, to the horror of her mother, who regarded the Wilson family as outside those ‘one knew’ socially, an attitude enhanced by her awareness of Richard Wilson’s shady past. She made it clear to Carrie that such a match was out of the question.
Carrie, like so many girls completely subservient to their mothers, did not openly revolt. But her misery was such that she became pale, depressed and ill. Although uncalculated, this was the best thing she could have done. Mrs Astor, although socially implacable, was a kind-hearted mother who adored her daughter. She became worried and unhappy at seeing Carrie so wretched, and one day – or so she told her friends – seeing the young couple emerge from church hand in hand, thought they seemed so much in love that ‘I felt I could not stand in the way of their happiness any longer’. She did, however, make them wait for two or three years, considered nothing unusual at a time when long engagements were the fashion; partly, perhaps, to ensure that the feelings of her daughter, still so young, had not changed.
It was not until 1884, when Orme was twenty-four and Carrie twenty-three, that they were finally married in the Astor mansion, even its chandeliers hung with pink roses and not a society ‘name’ missing from the thousand-odd guests seated in the house’s art gallery. The Astors had insisted on Richard Wilson putting up $500,000 as a settlement, at that moment a severe strain on the family’s finances, but as the strength of the Wilson clan was that they all worked towards the common good, this hefty price was considered well worth it in terms of the step up it gave them. Carrie’s father gave her what was described as a ‘full set of diamond jewels’ and threw in ‘a handsome residence on Fifth-avenue’. Richard Wilson completely furnished the new house, then added ‘a full table service of silver knives, forks, and spoons’.
Now, the Wilsons were connected through marriage to two of the most important, respected, socially impeccable and richest families in New York. It was the start of the legend of the ‘marrying Wilsons’.
* * *
As she grew up, the youngest Wilson, Grace, slim and honey-blonde with fine, aristocratic features, became a favourite of Mrs Astor. Thirteen at the time of her brother’s wedding, she was developing into a beauty, and, what was probably more important to this doyenne of society, her demeanour was one of distinction and refinement – in fact, a worthy addition to the Astor family circle. When a debutante she was even, honour of honours, asked by Mrs Astor to lead a cotillion at her exclusive annual ball. This approval would stand Grace in good stead in years to come.
Grace was always close to her sister May and May’s husband Ogden, most of whose fortune came from real estate. The Goelets lived at 608 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 49th Street, where their two children, Mary (May) and Robert (Bobby), were born in 1878 and 1881 respectively. May, who like Grace had spent many summers in Europe, collected paintings; Ogden joined the Fine Arts Society and was one of the founder members who bought shares in the Metropolitan Opera House.
The only small cloud on the horizon was Ogden’s health: his physique was frail and he suffered from chronic asthma. Like many of his peers, he was a keen yachtsman – also, his asthma was less troublesome at sea – and owned a superb and beautiful schooner, The Norseman, built for him and launched in 1881.
Gradually both Goelets became disenchanted with the society into which they had the unquestioned right of entrée. The competitive splashing around of money in an attempt to upgrade status or popularity had become insufferable to them, and they set off to cruise round Europe in The Norseman with their children, now seven and five, governess and tutor. They were joined the following year by the second Wilson daughter, May’s sister Belle, on the lookout for a husband of the right sort. She would soon find one.
When the party arrived at Cowes for the regatta that August, the spectacular beauty of The Norseman at once caught the eye of the yacht-loving Prince of Wales. He invited himself on board for a closer look and stayed to tea, returning twice that week, once for a luncheon party in his honour and again for tea.
With the Prince of Wales’s open interest in The Norseman and its passengers, it was not long before the Goelets had a circle of acquaintances – and Belle had found her man. On the yacht of the 14th Earl of Pembroke, she met his diplomat younger brother Michael (Mungo) Herbert and the two fell in love. The wedding in 1888 of Mungo and Belle saw the start of a successful and happy marriage – and another triumph for the Wilson family, this time one that took them into the heart of the British aristocracy. His family welcomed her warmly, his sister Lady de Grey writing to Belle that: ‘Now Mungo has got the wish of his heart I have nothing left to wish for, and my gratitude towards the person who has brought us such happiness is beyond expression.’
As did all in their exclusive social set, the Goelets were accustomed to spend summer weeks in Newport, where Ogden Goelet commissioned Ochre Court, second only to The Breakers in size and built at a cost of $4.5 million in 1892. Like the next two largest houses, Belcourt Castle and Marble House, it was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. In this château-like building of grey granite with its sheet-copper roof, gilded magnificence and ballroom that would hold 1,000, crowded near other grand mansions, the family spent eight summer weeks, looked after by twenty-seven house servants, eight coachmen and grooms and twelve gardeners. But May soon tired of the running of such a large establishment, and Ogden was becoming increasingly unwell, needing a nurse’s care and living mainly on hothouse grapes.
So the Goelets turned again to the sea, leasing a large steam yacht, The White Ladye, from Lily Langtry (the former favourite of the Prince of Wales who had, by 1881, become an actress) and set off in her for the winter season of 1895–6. Also on board was the dazzling Grace, at twenty-five the youngest of the ‘marrying Wilsons’ sisters. It was a happy family party, only shadowed by Ogden’s steadily declining health.
Grace Wilson was beautiful, distinguished-looking and extremely well educated: she spoke flawless French and good German, she knew all the great operas and she was used to the sophisticated, cosmopolitan life of European capitals as she had spent most summers abroad since the age of eleven. She had been engaged to Cecil Baring, the son of Lord Revelstoke, who had lost most of his fortune in the crash of 1893. Some said that Lord Revelstoke demanded such a high dowry that Richard Wilson had refused.
By 1895 she had a new admirer, the shy, twenty-two-year-old ‘Neily’ Vanderbilt (Cornelius Vanderbilt III), the eldest son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Neily was just under six foot tall and extremely good-looking, with square-cut features, thick, curly brown hair and dark blue eyes. He was shy and hardworking, but had recurrent bouts of rheumatism. In 1892, his older brother Bill had died of typhoid at the age of twenty, while the two were sharing a room together at Yale. In 1893 Neily had been sent on a world cruise in a chartered yacht – packed with fresh produce from the family farms in Rhode Island – to gain some European polish.
He returned much fitter, aged twenty-one, in time for his sister Gertrude’s coming-out ball in Newport in the summer of 1895
. It was a lavish affair: the favours – gold cigarette cases and fans – distributed to all the guests cost $10,000. For the ball the twenty-four-year-old Grace, surrounded by admirers, looked her best in a deeply décolletée white chiffon dress embroidered with pearls; round her waist was a chain of diamonds from which hung a small ivory fan. Neily was dazzled, and it showed; to anyone watching, it was obvious that he was hopelessly in love with Grace – and overnight the Vanderbilts began to disapprove of her.
She was older than their son, too sophisticated, and she had perhaps been too open in her search for a wealthy husband who could raise her socially: one American onlooker, Jay Burden (later to marry Neily’s sister Gertrude), had written of Grace ‘raking the Solent for dukes’ when the Goelet yacht was at Cowes. One of her potential targets, or so the Vanderbilts believed, had been Neily’s older brother Bill, to whom it was said she had been secretly engaged, and there was also the broken Baring engagement. In short, the Vanderbilt clan looked on Grace as an adventuress, out for what she could get and determined above all to make a rich marriage.
Sometime in the autumn of 1895, Neily’s mother Alice paid a social call on Mrs Wilson, during which she enquired casually if the family were remaining in New York for the winter or, as many did, going abroad. When she heard that they were staying, Neily was quickly despatched on a European holiday. When the Wilsons learnt about this, they were so angered that Grace, too, was sent to Europe where, inevitably, the couple met.
‘There is nothing the girl would not do,’ wrote Gertrude in her diary, claiming that Grace was at least twenty-seven and had ‘unbounded experience. Been engaged several times. Tried hard to marry a rich man. Ran after Jack Astor to such an extent that all New York talked about it. Is so diplomatic that even the men are deadly afraid of her. There is nothing she would stop at.’
To her brother she wrote a frantic plea: ‘Please, please don’t announce your engagement now. You may think because I do not say much that I don’t really care for you. You may think too that I am as narrow as the others and that I don’t understand your point of view. That is not so. I care so much for you that if I were not absolutely sure that you would not be happy I would take your side against the family. I am not narrow and I know how hard your position is and how desperate you feel, but you are not going to do yourself any good by announcing it, and you certainly are going to do Miss Wilson harm. A man may say he does not care what the world says but for a girl it is different – a slight is a hard thing to stand and you will find it is so when it places someone you care for in an awkward position.
‘When you are sure of their feelings it is not such a hard thing to wait. You are positive you won’t change, you are positive she won’t change, why can’t you wait? You will say your position is a hard one. Yes but not as hard as it will be if you announce this engagement. What could be my object in saying all this if I did not care for you. The family have not asked me to speak to you.
‘It’s four years ago tonight you came to New York and found Willie dying. He died and you instead of taking his place … what are you about to do?’
Grace’s sister Belle wrote from Constantinople to her: ‘I am still waiting, every nerve on edge, for further developments … I feel, with your love for Neily and his undoubted and much-tried affection for you, things must some day be right. But the misery you have been through!’
Battle ranks had been drawn up. The Vanderbilts used every weapon in their arsenal to part the two; Neily’s father Cornelius II threatened to disinherit him, while the scandal of this feud within the world’s wealthiest family swirled outwards through friends and acquaintances to anyone who had heard of them – even the Prince of Wales, who knew Grace, asked to be kept informed of developments. When, in June 1896, Richard Wilson announced that the couple were to be married that month, Cornelius II responded with: ‘The engagement of Cornelius Vanderbilt Jnr to Miss Wilson is against his father’s expressed wishes.’
So sharply divided was New York society on the question that only a third of those invited to the wedding accepted, the rest fearing the displeasure of the powerful Vanderbilt family. The matter was solved when, the day before the proposed wedding, a statement was issued by Neily’s father that his son was confined to bed suffering from rheumatism and the wedding was cancelled.
It provoked the comment from one woman of their circle to another: ‘I wager you that as soon as that boy is well enough he’ll be whisked off to Newport and there’ll be no match this summer at least.’ To which her friend replied: ‘My dear, you do not know the Wilsons.’
The last speaker was right. When Neily, who had been ill, learnt what his father had said, there was a violent confrontation – Neily did not intend to abandon Grace. Shortly after this, Cornelius II collapsed with a stroke so severe that he was confined to a wheelchair unable to speak, a catastrophe blamed on Neily by his family. ‘He knows it is his behaviour that gave Papa his stroke,’ wrote Gertrude in her diary. After this she, like almost all his family, cut him off completely.
Neily stuck to his word. He and Grace were married in a small and simple ceremony at her parents’ house in August 1896. Wisely, after it they left to spend some months abroad. Once there, his ill-health surfaced again.
Without Vanderbilt backing, the newlyweds had to economise – a relative term, as Grace’s father gave her a trust fund of half a million dollars that brought in an income of $25,000 a year (a sum she was used to spending on clothes alone). Neily, who had written to his father asking if he could see him in the hope of healing the breach, was flatly turned down. Neither Grace nor Neily could understand the reason for his family’s disapproval of Grace: if Neily’s mother had had any question in her mind concerning Grace, why had she invited this beautiful and well-behaved debutante time and again to her balls and dinners when she had three (then) unmarried sons in the house? But when Cornelius Vanderbilt II had his stroke, it was immediately put down by the Vanderbilt family to Neily’s obduracy in marrying Grace.
The rift in the Vanderbilt family seemed impossible to overcome. When Cornelius Vanderbilt II died in 1899, in a will dated the day originally planned for Neily and Grace’s marriage, he left the major part of his fortune – $42 million – to his second son, Alfred, while Neily, his erstwhile heir, was left a mere $500,000 and the income from $1 million in trust funds. Alfred settled $6 million on Neily (largely in order to avoid any potential litigation over the will), but the rupture remained: when they met, the brothers did not speak but only nodded at each other. Even Grace’s first child did not bring them closer, Neily’s mother Alice referring to it as ‘that Wilson baby’. None of the Vanderbilts attended the baby boy’s christening.
* * *
Meanwhile, at the end of 1896 Ogden Goelet took delivery of yet another beautiful new yacht, The Mayflower, designed in Glasgow by the man who had built the Prince of Wales’s racing yacht, Britannia. The following year the Goelets rented Wimborne House in Arlington Street for their daughter May’s first London season. Petite and dark, with an excellent figure, she had grown into a charming and accomplished young woman who could read and write in several languages and whose dusting of European sophistication did not hide her youthful high spirits and the warmth of her nature – her family relationships had all been close and loving. She viewed the coming season, during which the family friendship formed with the Prince of Wales would stand her in good stead, with excitement.
‘On Sunday the Prince dined with us,’ she wrote on 1 June 1897, ‘and I’m happy to say it all went off most successfully – you have no idea of what a struggle it was though – Everyone we could think of to ask was going out of town, either to Waddesdon or some other Rothschild’s … After dinner we had Melba to sing and the Prince was simply delighted. I have rarely seen him in such good spirits. He let everyone go at a quarter to one and he stayed till 1:15. He told Mamma it had all been most beautifully done and I don’t think he could have been bored otherwise he would never have stayed so late.�
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The family’s entry into the inner circle of British society was made even clearer by the invitation to the most exclusive event of 1897, the Duchess of Devonshire’s Jubilee Ball on 2 July – an invitation to which confirmed that you were absolutely among the chosen. It was fancy-dress or, as the Duchess decreed, ‘allegorical or historical costume before 1815’, with five ‘courts’ that individuals could join. May went as Scheherazade, the Arabian Nights storyteller, in a Worth gown of golden gauze embroidered with precious stones and a flower-bedecked headdress topped with a large white ostrich plume.
Devonshire House, which stood between Stratton Street and Berkeley Street, facing on to Piccadilly, with views over Green Park, had a large courtyard in front so that carriages could arrive and depart quickly, avoiding congestion. Across the stone floor of the pillared entrance hall glass doors led to the inner hall, from which a curving marble staircase with a crystal handrail led up to the first floor. Here yellow and white silk brocade covered the walls, the gilded furniture was upholstered in dark blue, the light from the myriad candles in the brilliant crystal chandeliers gleamed off heavy polished mahogany doors, huge mirrors and superb paintings. For the party, the large garden was lit by 12,000 lamps and supper was in a marquee carpeted in crimson, with blue and gold walls hung with tapestries and mirrors.
The United States was well represented: nine other heiresses who had married into the nobility were there, from the Countess of Essex as Berenice Queen of Palestine, with a wonderful art nouveau crown shaped like a peacock’s tail, to Mrs Arthur Paget (née Minnie Stevens) as Cleopatra in white and gold, so ablaze with diamonds, rubies and emeralds that when she entered people gasped in astonishment. Jewels were everywhere – many of the 700 guests had their own jewels reset to match their costumes. The Duke of Marlborough’s Louis XV suit of pale gold velvet was thickly embroidered in silver, pearls and diamonds, all sewn on by hand, while his wife the slender Consuelo disguised her seven-month pregnancy in an eighteenth-century pale green satin gown garlanded with roses. Jennie Churchill, as the Empress Theodora, wore embroidered mauve satin by Worth.
The Husband Hunters Page 16