“Was I here last Thursday, Mr. Chambers?” he asked.
“No, for I remember having been up to your house that day.”
William Vanderbilt picked up a bill from the janitor who supplied him with lunches for forty cents a day.
“Well, do you know that the janitor has charged me with a lunch on Thursday?”
He took his pen and made a correction on the bill, eliminating the forty cents for the lunch he had never eaten, and handed the corrected bill to Mr. Chambers to be paid.52
The sheer magnitude of his fortune, he told Chauncey Depew, gave him no advantages over men of moderate wealth. “I have my house, my pictures and my horses, and so do they. I can have a steam yacht if I want to, but it would give me no pleasure, and I don’t care for it.”53 On another occasion he spoke of a neighbor saying, “He isn’t worth a hundredth part as much as I am, but he has more of the real pleasures of life than I have. His house is as comfortable as mine, even if it didn’t cost so much; his team is about as good as mine; his opera box is next to mine; his health is better than mine, and he will probably outlive me. And he can trust his friends.”54
Being the richest person in the world brought him, he said, nothing but anxiety. He enjoyed having some fine horses that grazed in a pasture he could see from his office in the Grand Central Depot. (One friend noted that he was so fond of horses that he “probably would have slept with them [and did not] only through fear of the newspapers criticizing his eccentricity.”55) And he was beginning to collect works of art. Other than that, there was nothing he wanted. His fortune was really nothing but a source of headaches.
He believed that his health had been broken by the burden of managing his father’s empire. “I feel pretty well,” he would tell his doctors, “but can’t depend upon myself.”56 “What’s the use, Sam, of having all this money,” he said to his nephew, “if you cannot enjoy it? My wealth is no comfort to me if I have not good health behind it.” He asked his nephew if he thought he looked old, as old as the Commodore right before he died. That was just how he felt: like an eighty-three year old.57
By his early sixties, he was tired and worn out. “The care of $200,000,000 is too great a load for my brain or back to bear,” he confessed to his family. “It is enough to kill a man. I have no son whom I am willing to afflict with the terrible burden. There is no pleasure to be got out of it as an offset—no good of any kind. I have no real gratification or enjoyments of any sort more than my neighbor on the next block who is worth only half a million. So when I lay down this heavy responsibility, I want my sons to divide it, and share the worry which it will cost to keep it.”58
3
ALVA
1875-1883
1.
Willie Vanderbilt, the handsome twenty-six-year-old son of William H. Vanderbilt, married twenty-two-year-old Miss Alva Smith on April 20, 1875. Alighting from the Commodore’s private railroad car in Saratoga Springs for his honeymoon, Willie signed the hotel register: “William Kissam Vanderbilt, wife, two maids, two dogs, and fifteen horses.”1
Writing of this Victorian age, novelist Edith Wharton noted that “brides knew nothing and expected everything. Brides were plunged overnight into what people called ‘the facts of life.’”2 In this marriage, however, it was Willie who was plunged into the facts of life. Neither Willie nor the Vanderbilt family would ever be the same again.
It had all seemed so simple at the outset. Willie’s parents approved of the marriage. In fact, William H. Vanderbilt seemed as captivated by the charming Alva as was his son. So was the Commodore. On the obligatory visit to 10 Washington Place to meet the family patriarch, Alva found the old Commodore “one of the handsomest, most intelligent, and most interesting men I had ever met. His manner was most overbearing and the family more or less stood in great awe of him. I had never known what it was to be awed by anybody, and I think for that reason he had a great deal of respect for me, and we became quite friendly.’3 Alva and the Commodore seemed to sense at once that they were kindred spirits, both “dreamers of dreams.’4 Even the press applauded this marriage to an “honest American woman.” Wrote the New York World: “There has been no attempt on either side to connect titles with the family name by means of a wedding-ring. Mr. and Mrs. [William H.] Vanderbilt have not followed the example of the American aristocracy of wealth, and put their daughters up at auction to be bid for by seedy and needy European titles. Their boys and girls have fallen in love and married like the boys and girls of any honest American mechanic. For this both father and mother are entitled to credit.’5
Like the Commodore’s new wife, Frank Crawford, Alva had been born and raised in Mobile, Alabama. Alva was the daughter of Murray Forbes Smith, a successful cotton merchant of Scottish descent. Her mother was Phoebe Desha, the daughter of General Robert Desha who served as a member of Congress from Tennessee, and the niece of Governor Joseph Desha of Kentucky.
“A born dictator,”6 young Alva enjoyed nothing so much as “tyrannizing over the little slave children”7 on her father’s cotton plantation. She was “of fighting stock,”8 as she liked to say, her ancestors having fought in every war that had taken place in the United States, and her “combative nature rejoiced in conquest.”9 She recalled discovering at the age of seven that boys looked down upon girls. “I can almost feel my childish hot blood rise as it did then in rebellion at some such taunting remarks as: ‘You can’t run.’ ‘You can’t climb trees.’ ‘You can’t fight.’ ‘You are only a girl.’ But no young would-be masculine bravado ever expressed twice such slurring belittlements of me.’10 for Alva would beat the daylights out of any boy who teased her.
One boy in church school made the mistake of laughing at Alva’s Sunday hat. Outside “we fought and I pushed him in the gutter. He never laughed at me or at my clothes again.’11
That young man should have considered himself lucky. On another occasion, Alva had climbed a large apple tree, using a ladder to reach the first branches. Along came her friend Pepe, whose “masculine superiority was unbearable.” Pepe took away the ladder and began to taunt Alva, pelting her with apples. “I came down that tree like a monkey, scaling the rough bark. By the time I was on the ground I think I saw red. I ran after Pepe who by this time felt the approach of a Fury and had begun to make his escape. I caught him and threw him to the ground. I choked him and banged his head upon the ground. I stamped on him screaming ‘I’ll show you what girls can do.’ In my rage I think I would have killed him but for the intervention of some of the spectators who had gathered to watch the fight. Pepe was completely vanquished.”12
Sassy, with two long braids draped to her waist, Alva was by her own admission “probably the worst child that ever lived,” and believed she deserved the regular whippings her mother administered “whenever I did things I should not have done. There was a force in me that seemed to compel me to do what I wanted to do regardless of what might happen afterwards.” Later in her life Alva wondered “at the great leniency of my teachers. Perhaps they realized that I was impossible, and thought the best thing to do was to ignore an impossible condition.”13
Alva’s parents, the Smiths, were ruined at the outset of the Civil War and fled to Paris with their five children. Although Alva would later tell her own children that her mother’s sister “made her debut at one of the last balls given at the Tuileries by Napoleon III,”14 when the Smiths returned to the United States after the war, they never recovered their fortune or social standing. Phoebe Smith set up a boarding house in New York City, as her husband struggled to make some money trading cotton to support his family in genteel poverty. It would be up to the Smiths’ children to marry well if they would ever live again the life they had known in the antebellum South.
“Youth,” wrote Euripides, “is the best time to be rich, and the best time to be poor.’ Alva had seen enough of both to know that rich was for her. She realized that she needed a wealthy husband to help her family and to fund her own ambitions.15 But how to catch on
e?
No one would have called Alva beautiful. Attractive? Not really. A little too short, a little too plump, her face a little too severe, her mouth a little too set, her long brown hair, which reached the ground, tinged with gray even in her twenties. Some remarked that she looked like a cute Pekingese. But intelligent? Yes, without question. “Her conversational powers are rather remarkable.’16 one observer noted. Vivacious? Yes, indeed. Pert, sassy, a tease, she was a bundle of energy, “quick at repartee, witty and somewhat sarcastic.’17 Charming? Without a doubt. And “credited with considerable sex appeal.”18 Beneath the southern charm of this cute Pekingese beat the heart of a pit bullterrier. Alva lunged right at what she wanted, grabbed on, and never let go, and no one, no one ever dared stand in her way.
What Alva wanted was Willie Vanderbilt.
Wealthy Consuelo Yznaga, Alva’s best friend from her childhood days in Mobile, was spending part of the year in New York City. By all accounts, Consuelo was “beautiful, witty, gay and gifted,” a woman who, “wherever she went…attracted rich and poor alike, solely through her fascinating personality.”19 Consuelo’s brother had married one of Alva’s sisters, and Consuelo was determined to see to it that her best friend began moving in the New York social circles of which she was a part. Consuelo introduced Alva to young William Kissam Vanderbilt at a party for one of Commodore Vanderbilt’s daughters. And so it came to pass that Alva lunged at Willie.
Willie. Willie was wonderful. Willie had the build of an athlete, just like his grandfather the Commodore. Willie was good-looking. His face had none of the cragginess of his grandfather’s or the bloatedness of his father’s, but more the beauty of his mother’s, with his beveled lips and flashing smile, his short, neatly combed brown hair and humorous eyes. Willie was bright. Willie was polished. He had studied with private tutors and attended school in Geneva, Switzerland. Willie had a good job. The Commodore was convinced that only “hard and disagreeable work” would keep his grandsons from becoming “spoilt,”20 and had put Willie to work at the age of nineteen at his Hudson River Railroad. Now Willie was second vice president of the New York Central. Willie was easygoing and a lot of fun. He had “the look of happy expectancy one sees on the faces of those who love life,” and “found life a happy adventure.’21 And God, was Willie rich! And his dear old, very old, eighty-one-year-old grandfather was very rich indeed, richer than anyone. In the foreseeable future (it couldn’t be long now), Willie would inherit a fortune.
On April 20, 1875, a year after meeting him, Alva married Willie Vanderbilt, with Consuelo Yznaga as her bridesmaid. “I always do everything first,” Alva later would brag. “The Smiths of Alabama cut me dead for marrying W. K. Vanderbilt because his grandfather peddled vegetables. I blaze the trail for the rest to walk in. I was the first girl of my set to marry a Vanderbilt.”22
Alva didn’t waste a moment now that she had won a Vanderbilt as her first trophy. First on her agenda was a country house for the early summer and autumn months, an escape from their fashionable brown-stone at 5 East Forty-fourth Street, a wedding present from Willie’s father. Less than a year after their marriage, they purchased eight hundred acres of peace and solitude in Oakdale, Long Island, on Great South Bay. Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was developing in the United States a new architecture of grandeur that appealed to the rich. It was therefore naturally Hunt, a Francophile just like Alva since her days in Paris, whom Willie and Alva retained to build a large rambling shingled villa overlooking the bay.
The next year, Alva gave birth. She named her daughter Consuelo in honor of her best friend, Consuelo Yznaga, who had just married Lord Mandeville, the son of Britain’s seventh duke of Manchester. In marrying him, lovely Consuelo Yznaga became Viscountess Mandeville, Lady Mandeville, a member of a family of English nobility that traced its roots directly to the monarchs of the sixteenth century. Alva regarded Consuelo Yznaga’s transformation into Lady Mandeville as wondrous indeed. There was, alas, no American nobility, but there certainly was no reason why the Vanderbilts couldn’t live like the English nobility, just like the duke and duchess of Manchester.
Willie had just received $2 million in railroad stocks from the Commodore’s will when Alva announced in 1878, three years after marrying Willie, that it was time for a new home. During her teenage years in Europe, she had marveled at the great châteaus of the Loire Valley. France had its châteaus, England its ancestral country estates, Germany its Rhine castles, Italy its magnificent villas, Venice its Renaissance palazzi, Russia its summer palaces. Where were the American equivalents of these homes? Even as the work was still in progress at Idlehour, their country estate on Long Island, Alva convinced Willie to retain Richard Hunt to design yet a second project, a new town house. And what Alva wanted, Alva got.
Alva and Willie liked the work Richard Hunt was doing for them at Idlehour. They also liked his personal philosophy. “The first thing you’ve got to remember,” the architect once remarked, “is that it’s your client’s money you’re spending. Your goal is to achieve the best results by following their wishes. If they want you to build a house upside down standing on its chimney, it’s up to you to do it.”23 Richard Hunt knew his new young clients very well, and he understood the function of architecture as a reflection of ambition. He sensed that Alva wasn’t interested in another home. She wanted a weapon: a house she could use as a battering ram to crash through the gates of society.
The house Alva felt would fit her bill was what she called “a little Chateau de Blois.”24 Richard Hunt shared her vision precisely. And there, on a lot at the corner of 660 Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, surrounded by uninspired brownstones “cursed,” as Edith Wharton wrote, with the “universal chocolate coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried,”25 there arose during the next several years with the labor of one thousand workmen and artisans, a fairy tale palace of white Indiana limestone, a palace reminiscent of the Château de Blois in Touraine and the castle at Bourges of Jacques Coeur, the fifteenth-century merchant prince. During its construction, Alva and Richard Hunt made several trips to Europe, scouring the great antique shops of London and Paris, pillaging the ancient homes of impoverished nobility, gathering tapestries, chandeliers, paneling, floors, fireplaces, suits of armor, alabaster bathtubs, and anything else they could find to decorate the interior of her new town house in a way that would complement the splendor of its exterior.
Three years and $3 million later (Alva’s constant alterations of the original plans tripled its cost), the Vanderbilts’ house was complete. It was hailed as an architectural masterpiece. Even rival architect Charles F. McKim, of McKim, Mead, and White, said that he liked nothing better than strolling up Fifth Avenue in the evening and gazing at the Vanderbilt palace. “I can sleep better at night knowing it’s there.’26
Everyone was entranced by this château that seemed to have been lifted from the rolling countryside of the Loire Valley and planted on a corner of Fifth Avenue. Everyone except Alva. Alva was disappointed. Society still was not beating a path to her new front door. In fact, the leaders of New York society, the people who meant the most to Alva, were still barring their doors to the Vanderbilts. As always, what Alva wanted was what she did not have. And now, what she wanted most of all was the acceptance of the elite social set, the recognition by society that the Vanderbilts had arrived.
As Oscar Wilde once said of society: ‘To be in it is merely a bore; but to be out of it is simply a tragedy.” It was a tragedy to Alva that she, Alva Smith Vanderbilt, who could trace her ancestors back to the Scottish aristocracy, was being excluded from the finest homes and the most prestigious balls in the city, just because she had married a Vanderbilt.
2.
Mrs. William Backhouse Astor. Mrs. Astor (early on she had dropped the troublesome Backhouse as well as the dreary-sounding William and was known forevermore as Mrs. Astor) was definitely the problem. Mrs. Astor would have nothing to do
with social upstarts like the Vanderbilts, and Mrs. Astor was the undisputed queen of New York society. She had been crowned by a southern dandy named Ward McAllister, a young sycophant who had once curried the favor of Commodore Vanderbilt, and who, in the decade of the 1870s, all but created the rarefied world of New York society.
Very early in his life Ward McAllister had realized that there was little work for which he was suited, and that his greatest happiness lay in living well. The son of a prosperous Georgia attorney, Ward had set out for New York City to make a name for himself. There he lived with “an old maiden lady, my relative and godmother, whom I always felt would endow me with all her worldly goods, but who, I regret to say, preferred the Presbyterian Church and the Georgia Historical Society to myself, for between them she divided a million.”27
Before this blow, McAllister found that “as the supposed heir of my saving godmother, the portals of New York society were easily open to me.’28 Receiving an invitation to his “first fancy ball,’ McAllister promptly went out and spent all of “a legacy of a thousand dollars paid me by the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company” on “fancy dress, which I flattered myself was the handsomest and richest at the ball.”29
As Ward McAllister “was dancing and reciting poetry to beautiful women,” and “breathing soft words to lovely Southern maidens,”30 his ambitious brother, who had traveled to California during the gold rush, was prospering as a lawyer in San Francisco and urged Ward and his father to join him. The two left for San Francisco in 1850. There, the family agreed that Ward was much better at entertaining the law firm’s clients than he was at practicing law, and he was put in charge of these social responsibilities. “Such dinners as I then gave,” Ward recalled with fondness years later, “I have never seen surpassed anywhere.”31
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