Her beloved father-in-law had been buried but two months before Alva gave, as her daughter termed it, “full vent to her ambitions.’64 Her latest desire was for a yacht, just like the Astors’.
How do I love thee, Alva? William might have thought. Let me count the ways: an eight-hundred-acre country estate on Long Island, a French château on Fifth Avenue, the most spectacular ball this country had ever seen, the pearls of Catherine the Great and the empress Eugénie, the greatest art treasures of Europe, a private railroad car that was a veritable mansion on rails. It was impossible for Willie to say no to his wife, so once again he said yes, and on February 25, 1886, commissioned the Delaware shipyard of Harlan and Hollingsworth to build a three-masted schooner with steam boilers and a coal capacity of three hundred tons.
On October 14, Alva and Willie, along with a party of their family and friends, boarded their private railroad car at the Grand Central Depot for a ride to Wilmington, Delaware. There at the shipyard docks, surrounded by thousands of workers who had been granted a half holiday at Willie’s expense and who had come to watch with their wives and families, Mrs. Fernando Yznaga, Alva’s sister, christened the new $500,000 yacht with the name that Willie had so aptly chosen: the Alva.
J. P. Morgan’s Corsair was 165 feet long. William Astor’s new Nourmahal measured 233 feet. Jay Gould’s Atlanta was 250 feet. The Alva topped them all at 285 feet: the largest private yacht ever built.
“Mrs. Vanderbilt, who is very generally accredited to be a lady of excellent taste,” the New York Times gushed in describing the Alva, “deems that elaborate and ornate furnishing are out of place on a yacht. She thinks that she is rich enough to afford simplicity in this instance, and that is what she is going to have, in a comparative sense.’65
Comparative was the key word. All of the staterooms, each of which had a private bath, were paneled in mahogany. The French walnut walls of the library featured an oil painting of the Commodore’s North Star over the fireplace. The dining room, of white enamel woodwork trimmed in gold, was thirty-two feet wide, eighteen feet long, and nine feet high. All of the teak decks were covered with Oriental rugs. The Vanderbilts on the high seas would not have to leave behind the comforts to which they had become accustomed on Fifth Avenue, for in addition to a captain, the ship was manned by a crew of fifty-two, including “a chief officer, a second mate, four quartermasters, two boatswains, a ship’s carpenter, eighteen seamen, a chief engineer, first and second assistant engineers, six firemen, three coal passers, three oilers, a donkey engine-man, an electrician, an ice machine engineer, a chief steward, three cooks, two mess boys, and a surgeon,”66 in addition to the French chef and servants they brought with them.
The Alva now made it possible for the world to become the Vanderbilts’ playground. It took them to the West Indies, to Europe, around the Mediterranean, to Greece, Turkey, and Egypt. Travel to distant ports seemed as effortless as visiting a neighboring town. So imposing was the yacht that while it was sailing the Dardanelles, a Turkish warship fired two shots across its bow, believing it to be a navy cruiser of a foreign country. Officials at every port—the American consul in Cuba, the commodore of the Haitian Navy, the United States minister at The Hague, the king of Greece, the commander of the British fleet in the Mediterranean, the sultan of Constantinople—welcomed the Vanderbilts as visiting dignitaries.
Nevertheless, these cruises were “excessively boring” to the Vanderbilt children, whose tutors accompanied them. “Heavy seas provided our only escape from the curriculum of work, for even sightseeing on our visits ashore became part of our education, and we were expected to write an account of all we had seen.”67 And the three young children were terrified in rough weather. ‘On one occasion as we left Madeira and headed for Gibraltar a frightful storm overtook us,” Consuelo later recounted. “The waves broke over the high wooden bulwarks in such rapid succession that there was not enough time for the water to drain out through the freeing ports before the next wave hit us. I was lying in the forward deck cabin with my brother Willie and his tutor, who was both frightened and sick. ‘If we have seven such waves in succession,’ he informed us, ‘we must sink.’ Willie and I spent the rest of the day counting the waves in terrorized apprehension as the green water deepened on our deck.’68
Alva, too, became bored with cruising the world and turned her attention to her next project.
It just wasn’t fair, she pouted to Willie. All her friends had cottages in Newport to get away for the summer. Mrs. Astor went to Newport every summer. The Belmonts were there. The Cornelius Vanderbilts had just bought the Lorillards’ house, The Breakers, right on the sea. For goodness’ sake, even Ward McAllister summered at his farm in Newport, though it was on the unfashionable side of town. It wasn’t fair. Willie thought only of himself.
From experience, Willie had become adept at discerning the distant rumble of approaching battle. To placate his wife, on her thirty-fifth birthday Willie gave Alva a special present. He commissioned the Vanderbilts’ favorite architect, Richard Morris Hunt, to build for Alva in Newport, on Bellevue Avenue (which was to Newport what Fifth Avenue was to New York City), on four acres of land next to Beechwood, Mrs. Astor’s summer cottage, “the very best living accommodations that money could provide.”69 Before beginning work on the house, Alva told her husband that she would not devote the long hours it would take to design and oversee the construction of the house “unless it was given to me out and out, at once…. I insisted that it should be put entirely in my name. This was done.”70
On a trip to Greece aboard the Alva, “I made my best studies and got my inspiration for the building afterward of Marble House,” Alva recalled in remembering the origins of her summer cottage. “The germ of the Marble House idea was born at the foot of the Acropolis.”71 Having worked together on Idlehour and the château on Fifth Avenue, architect and client knew everything about one another. Richard Hunt guessed that Mrs. Vanderbilt would want a house to top her other homes, and probably every other house in existence. He guessed correctly. Alva decided that for her summer cottage, set in a community that prided itself on its summertime simplicity, a temple of white marble would be most appropriate. “Bellevue Avenue on the East, its high grounds sloping toward and mounted above the ocean, was,’ Alva believed, “the very spot for a reincarnation of the Greek ideal. The same siren waves which sang to Odysseus, to Alcibiades, to Sappho and to Sophocles could here be heard.’72 And so Richard Hunt began drawing plans, remarking in a letter to a friend that “it is as much as one man’s brain can do to keep up with the Vanderbilt work.’73
Hunt admired Mrs. Vanderbilt’s architectural vision, but her impatience and her involvement in the most minute details of the plans for what she was calling Marble House nearly drove him mad. Every day, Alva “spent many delightful hours in his office,”74 looking over his shoulder, making changes, researching historic precedents, refining his specifications for each room. Hunt’s notes on a pair of drawings for the wainscoting in a corridor of the second floor of the mansion convey his exasperation. On one drawing he scrawled in large script: “This absolutely disapproved by Mrs. Vanderbilt.” On the other he wrote with relief: “This accepted by Mrs. Vanderbilt.”75 Alva had the greatest respect for the genius of Richard Hunt, but this did not stop her for one moment from fighting with him. “We often had terrific word battles. With fiery intensity he would insist on certain things. I would, with equal eagerness, insist on the contrary. Once…we had had a long and heated argument over some detail of measurement. Finally he turned to me in a rage and said, ‘Damn it, Mrs. Vanderbilt, who is building this house?’ and I answered, ‘Damn it, Mr. Hunt, who is going to live in this house?’ “76 Alva found that “the work we did together was for me always an endless delight.”77 “She’s a wonder,” Hunt sighed to his wife.78
Whatever the cost of Marble House, Willie reasoned—and the cost was escalating daily—it was worth it. Alva was busy, she was occupied, she was happy. As one of her friends
, Harry Lehr, once told her, she “loved nothing better than to be knee-deep in mortar.”79 He was right. “One of my earliest recollections,” Alva wrote in memoirs of her childhood in the South, “is of a big library with books piled from floor to ceiling, myself on a rug building imaginary houses with books taken from shelves within my reach. For me, this was ever a favorite amusement and great pleasure. The constructive element in my nature thus early asserted itself—the desire to create, to fashion dwellings, imaginary structures with spaces denoting rooms and halls, and openings indicating what would be doors and windows. All took shape even under the small hands of this young child, the foreshadowing of one of my future life works.”80
Construction began in the fall of 1889, immediately necessitating the purchase of a wharf, a warehouse, and a ten-ton derrick at Newport Harbor to handle the five hundred thousand cubic feet of white marble for the facade of the house. This was being shipped in from a quarry on the Hudson. Several tons of yellow marble from a quarry near Montagnola, Italy, would line the entrance hall. And shiploads of pink Numidian marble from a quarry in western Algeria that had not been used since Roman times were needed for the dining room. In fact, the only room lacking marble was Willie’s tiny study, which would feature a wooden mantelpiece painted to look like marble.
Alva’s birthday present would be used for no more than seven or eight weeks of the year. This house of brilliant white marble, its four towering Corinthian columns fashioned after those of the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, only larger, cost Willie $2 million. But that was just the exterior. Alva also spared nothing to create as opulent an interior. The dining room was fashioned after the Salon of Hercules at Versailles, the ballroom after Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, with carved paneling covered by hundreds of sheets of gold leaf. The rooms at once exuded classic formality, with their cool marble, gold, gilt, and bronze, and dazzling, dizzying visions of carved dragons, cherubs, cupids, satyrs, nymphs, garlands, oak leaves, acorns, and masks of Dionysus, which adorned every inch of space. “I like to think,” Alva reflected, “that some of the treasures of Europe accumulated in her eras of splendid achievement have been brought to this Greek dwelling as gifts to her temple.”81 Alva’s rapture with the ancien régime was evident throughout the house, with a bust of Louis XIV here, a palace-sized portrait of Louis XV there, masks of Apollo, sunbursts, and, in case anyone missed the connection, a portrait medallion of the long-suffering Richard Morris Hunt hanging next to a portrait medallion of J. Hardouin-Mansart, the chief architect of Versailles, above the landing of the grand staircase.
When the house was completed in June 1892, a niece of the Vanderbilts told of her visit: “No description can possibly give one an idea of how marvellously beautiful it is,” she exclaimed. “It is far ahead of any palace I have ever dreamed of.”82 Another visitor remarked, “I am waited upon by footmen, butlers, maids and chauffeurs. I am…treated with a sort of sumptuous consideration, fed delicacies by soft-moving servants, given delicious drinks when suffering from heat and generally coddled and made soft.’83
The interior decoration of Alva’s fantasy had consumed $9 million of Willie’s fortune. At a total cost of $11 million, Alva’s summer cottage, Marble House, had cost nearly four times as much as the Vanderbilts’ Fifth Avenue residence. But it was worth it. “It was like a fourth child to me,” Alva sighed.84 And, after all, Alva was just trying to help Willie and the Vanderbilt family. “I had always had tremendous respect and great appreciation for the Medici family,” she explained. “They originated as apothecaries. Later their great wealth was used to encourage art of every kind…. So I felt about the Vanderbilt family. These houses were not merely beautiful private residences. They were the means of expression in outward and visible terms of the importance of the Vanderbilt family. They represented not only wealth but knowledge and culture, desirable elements for wealth to encourage, and the public accepted them in that way.”85
“Personally,” Alva once said, “I’m a believer that this is a pretty good old world.”86 The fantasy she was living was, in her estimation, “an ideal life.”87
But as glorious as Marble House was, it would not be enough to please Alva for long.
4.
Once Alva had created her visions of American aristocracy at Idlehour, on Fifth Avenue, and at Marble House, “her restless energy,” Consuelo later reflected, “must have turned to other projects. It was perhaps then that plans for my future were born.”88
So preoccupied was Consuelo with the growing tension between her parents that at first she did not even discern that she was becoming her mother’s next project. By the time she reached her teens, “the continual disagreements between my parents had become a matter of deep concern to me.” She found that she was “tensely susceptible to their differences, and each new quarrel awoke responding echoes that tore at my loyalties. Profoundly unhappy in my home life [because of the] constant scenes that so deeply wounded my father and harried my mother beyond control—scenes that embittered the sensitive years of my girlhood and made of marriage a horrible mockery.’89 Consuelo awaited the split between her parents that she now felt was inevitable.
Sailing from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Newport, the Alva was forced by a heavy fog to anchor off the coast of Chatham on the elbow of Cape Cod early in the morning of July 23, 1892. Two hours later, a steamship loomed out of the fog and plowed into the Alva, breaching the steel hull of the luxury yacht. Willie and his guests were awakened by the stewards, rushed onto the deck in their pajamas, and were lowered into a launch, as water poured into the stricken vessel. The Alva very quickly settled to the bottom of the sea.
Taken by steamship to Boston, Willie immediately located a telegraph operator. His first message was not to tell his wife of his safety, nor was it to his brother and business partner Cornelius to assure him that he was well; rather, his first message was to the Laird Shipyard on the river Mersey in England to arrange for the immediate construction of a new yacht to replace the Alva. Twenty-seven feet longer, weighing in at twenty-four hundred tons, the steamship, fully rigged for sail, could cross the Atlantic in seven days. The sleek black yacht, again the largest in the world, so large that it was at times mistaken for a man-of-war, was christened the Valiant, not the Alva II7 a fact that said quite a bit about the deteriorating state of the Vanderbilts’ marriage.
Alva decided that a long cruise aboard their new yacht was just what was needed to bring the family closer again, and to stop the rumors in society that their marriage was in serious trouble. “It was in such an atmosphere of dread and uncertainty,’ Consuelo recalled, “that our last and longest yachting expedition was undertaken in my seventeenth year.’90 Alva was then forty; Willie was forty-four. Consuelo and Harold, their younger son, would accompany them. In addition to the crew of seventy-two and a French chef, the passenger list included a doctor, a governess for Consuelo and Harold, and “three men friends who were our constant companions.’91 as Consuelo discreetly phrased it. The three men were Willie’s friends, and included Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the thirty-five-year-old son of the famed international banker August Belmont, as well as twenty-nine-year-old Winthrop Rutherfurd, scion of an old New York family. Alva found Willie’s friends delightful company for a long cruise and “refused to have another woman on board.”92
The several-month cruise turned out to be one of Alva’s worst ideas. It was a disaster.
Setting sail from New York on November 23, 1893, the Valiant plowed across the Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, and on to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Mooring at Bombay, where the heat was almost unbearable, the Vanderbilts and their friends continued across India by train. This was not the Vanderbilt railroad system, and their private sleeping car was not one of the Vanderbilt mansions on wheels. For the first time, as the train rumbled across the poor continent, “we realized what discomfort in a train could amount to. At every station angry natives seeking transportation tried noisily to force their way in
to our bedrooms which opened directly onto the station platforms. Luckily the doors were locked, but the din was formidable. And in the night those angry mobs seemed threatening. No one slept…. We knew little comfort, for it was difficult to secure bath water and the food was incredibly nasty. We lived on tea, toast and marmalade.’93
The Valiant sailed around India and met the group at the port of Hooghly, reuniting them with their French chef and the luxuries of home. There the Vanderbilts spent a week as guests of the viceroy and Lady Lansdowne.
It was here that Consuelo first became clearly conscious of her mother’s “admiration for the British way of life” and of “her desire to place me in an aristocratic setting.”94 What Consuelo would not learn until much later was that Alva had begun to seal her fate that week: She had decided to arrange a marriage between her daughter and their hostess’s nephew—the most noble Charles Richard John Spencer Churchill, duke of Marlborough, marquess of Blandford, earl of Sunderland, earl of Marlborough, Baron Spencer of Wormleighton, Baron Churchill of Sandridge, prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and the twenty-three-year-old master of England’s grandest palace: Blenheim.
It is unlikely that Alva ever mentioned her plans for Consuelo to her husband, for by the time the voyagers returned to Bombay, Willie and Alva could not stand the sight of one another. In fact, they were not even speaking. The other passengers aboard the Valiant had not been drawn into the Vanderbilt squabble. Alva was growing rather fond of Oliver Belmont, and Consuelo was quite bewitched by the “outstanding looks”95 of Winthrop Rutherfurd. Leaving the Valiant in India, Alva and Willie proceeded on to Paris separately.
Reunited at the Hotel Bristol in that spring of 1894, the Vanderbilts were trying to mend their fraying marriage when Alva heard a rumor that Willie had given a Parisian lady, blond twenty-six-year-old Nellie Neustretter, “a woman notorious in Europe,”96 forty thousand francs he’d won in a bet on the Grand Prix de Paris, and that he was providing her with an apartment and servants, outfitted in the same maroon uniform as servants of the House of Vanderbilt. ‘The capture of the purse and affections of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt…is a story of the hunting of big American game on the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean,” cackled the New York World. “All of the employees of the New York Central,” the newspaper continued, “are bound to take an interest in the fact that the fares which they collect, the freight money which they earn and any trifling reduction that may be made in their number or in their wages must pay some little tribute to Nellie Neustretter.”97
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