Gertrude was baffled by her feelings toward Esther. “I loved her more yesterday afternoon than I have ever done before. I felt more thrill at her touch, more happiness in her kiss.”43 “Do I love her?—that is the question…. I know I am perfectly happy to sit hand in hand with Esther and not say anything, but does that mean very much? I know so painfully little of love that I cannot tell you.”44
Gertrude recorded in her diary an imaginary conversation she had with her mother, who continued her campaign to eliminate Esther from Gertrude’s life. She labeled the entry “What I should like to have out and done with once and for all”:
MAMA: It is enough, Gertrude, you know I cannot stand those people, they run after you, oh Esther is such a friend, she is so fond of you. Now I wish it to stop. You are not to go there any more. I will not have it. Do you hear me? Esther has no bringing up, I will not have you running there all the time and her coming here and staying till I don’t know what hour.
cv.: Of course, you can prevent my going to see her [Gertrude defiantly responded in her diary], but if you think you can change my opinion of her you are mistaken, that’s all there is about it. Because the Hunts are not quite swell enough, of course they are not worth having anything to do with. I know perfectly well that you have been trying for over a year to prejudice me against Esther. You have said as many disagreeable things about her as you dared to, and the best of it is you have imagined you were influencing me. You think you can twist me round your finger, and let me tell you that the only thing you have succeeded in making me do is in telling you less and less about myself and my affairs and something else which I think I had better not say….I am old enough to make my own friends. Because I have seemed to agree with you is no sign that I did. I used to think it was my duty to do in almost everything as you wanted me to, now I think I am old enough to do more as I want and I am going to speak my opinions hereafter and not only think them. You may call me undutiful and all that sort of thing, but if you will take a child the wrong way, I think you have to suffer. I know I have no right to say that, but it is true, and I know Alfred feels the same way about it. That is why we have never told you more. Other children tell their parents almost everything, I never did. Now it’s all out, it’s been there so long I knew it had to come sometime. Thank goodness it is over.45
For her twentieth birthday, Esther gave her good friend a leather-bound album, which she inscribed inside:
To my Gertrude
To see her is to love her,
And love but her forever,
For Nature made her what she is
And never made another.
from
Esther.46
On the pages of the album, Esther had copied love poems through the ages.
Several days later, Esther wrote to Gertrude:
Gertrude dearest, I love you so entirely that if I thought you really liked anyone else more than you do me, I do not know what I should do…. Sweetheart, I wonder if you really know how much you are to me—Do you ever feel blue for me and does your heart ever ache for me? Gertrude, answer this letter in the evening when you have gone up to bed and keep it before you—I love you and I would give anything in this world if you were only Gertrude—anything but Vanderbilt—Somehow I always feel as if your Mother thought you were too good for anyone to know well because of this and yet there are many things that equal money, more than equal it, but America seems given over to nothing but this—Please take this in the right way, my Gertrude, if you are to be open with me, I am going to be entirely so with you—I want you now, all the time, I slept with your letter in my hand under my pillow.47
Within a day or two, Esther sent Gertrude a little book in which she had written eight love letters, one of which read:
My Darling—
It is when the lights are out and when I am all alone and all is quiet, that most I want you—Then, if you could only come to me and lie beside me and let my arms enfold you, and let me feel your dear head so near me, that to reach my heaven I only had to lean a little more towards you and draw you closer—Your mouth—Gertrude, your mouth someday will drive me crazy, I kiss it softly at first, perhaps shortly too, then for longer, then somehow I want you all, entirely, and almost I care not if I hurt you—then gently again, because I am sorry—So I love, even worship you—
Esther—48
Worried about their daughter’s future, Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt went to great pains to launch twenty-year-old Gertrude into society and find her a suitable husband, throwing a coming-out party for her at The Breakers with three hundred guests, including “representatives of the British and French embassies, the Belgian ministry, and the Spanish legation”49 perhaps in an effort to entice a foreign suitor, flooding their home with eligible young men, and sending Gertrude off to ninety-two dinners, dances, evenings, and operas that winter season of 1895. The privacy-loving Vanderbilts even did the unthinkable: They invited reporters into their home to do a feature story on Gertrude, HOW THE PRETTY HEIRESS ENJOYS LIFE was the title of one newspaper article that read like an advertisement for Gertrude Vanderbilt:
Miss Gertrude Vanderbilt, the richest prospective heiress in America, is still a girl in skirts to her shoe tops. Her father’s fabulous wealth is estimated at $150,000,000…. Her portion of the estate will hardly be less than $20,000,000. It must be a pleasant sensation to live in a $7,000,000 house and to have most of the good things of life without even the trouble of wishing for them. This is the goodly heritage of Miss Gertrude Vanderbilt…. The richest debutante in America is as sweet as a May blossom, this fortune-favored young girl, and as modest and unassuming as any little country maid….50
The Vanderbilts’ campaign worked. Gertrude was besieged by suitors and relished every minute of it, awakening after a puritanically repressed adolescence to become infatuated with a new male on what seemed a weekly basis.
There were still the nagging doubts. Even though each of the carefully selected young men to whom she was introduced was of exactly the proper background and wealthy enough not to be a fortune hunter, she sometimes wondered if each eligible bachelor “talked to me because I am Miss Vanderbilt.’51
“If I wanted, I could make him propose in less than a week,” she wrote of one suitor.52 And then she wondered why this was so. “I am an heiress,” she wrote in her diary, “consequently I know perfectly well there are lots of men who would be attentive to me simply on account of that. When I first fully realized that to be the case I was terribly unhappy and wished I might be a poor girl so that people would only like me for myself. Now I have become used to the thought and I face it boldly, as I must, and try to make the most of it. What I want to know is this—do you think it possible for anyone to love me for myself entirely? That the money would—no, could—make no difference? That anyone in all the world would not care for the money but would care as much as his life for me?”53
Gertrude was sure of one thing: “I could never marry without love. I couldn’t. Absolutely.’54 Gertrude would not marry “for anything except love because I have everything else.”55
All her doubts disappeared when she was with a man who made her fall head over heels. Just in her twentieth year, there were, among others, Bobby Sands, who ordered flowers for every day of the transatlantic voyage she took with her family; Jim Appleton, “who was so nice that I believe in the whole world there is no one quite as nice…. He is the best looking man I have ever known and he is simply a brick”;56 “when Lispenard Stewart leaned over to speak to me and pressed his shoulder against mine, it almost undid me entirely”;57 Jim Barnes: “tonight he will be at the house—tonight I will be near him, I will hear his voice, will look in his eyes, will sit at the same table with him, will breathe the same air that he breathes.”58
That particular night, after dinner, as Jim Barnes and Gertrude sat in the drawing room with the other guests, “something happened,” Gertrude confided to her diary. “I don’t know if I ought even to tell you. But still, ther
e is no harm and I tell you he is the only man in the world I have ever allowed to do what I allowed him to. Of necessity, we were very near. He was rather restless and his foot pushed up against mine. First, I moved it away, but it happened again and this time I could not resist. I left it there. And for the rest of the evening we were thus off and on. I would have taken mine away but he always came back, not in a horrid, pushing way—but—oh my God, if I was wrong forgive me. It flashed through me that he might think less of me for it, and imagine I allowed other men to do the same, but when I looked into his face, his eyes, and saw there something that made me almost tremble, I could not resist and I let my foot rest against him to show him my life was his to make or mar, just as he chose. Well, the evening came to an end only too soon—oh God, if it could only have lasted forever—and I went home.”59
And then there was the boy in the mansion across the street, Harry Whitney. “Harry Whitney is a brick! There is no doubt about that. Harry is bully and we are going to be friends. I was just thinking, now suppose Harry did ever care for me. I know he likes me very much now, but there would be no reason to be nice to me if he didn’t really care.’60 Gertrude recorded in her journals precisely the amount of time she was with the current object of her affections. For example, one list was headed “When I have seen Mr. (Jim) Barnes”:
December 8th, 1894, Sokes dinner, introduced only.
June 15th, 1895, Lenox Golf Links, 1¼ hours.
July 3d, 1895, Dinner at Home, 1 hr.
July 5th, 1895, Sokes dinner, 5 minutes.
July 6th, 1895, Barnes lunch, 20 minutes.
July 7th, Call, Lenox, 25 min.
Nov. 24th, Church, 3 min.
Nov. 30th, Sloane dinner, 1 hr.
Dec. 2d, Home dinner, 11/2 hr.
Dec. 6th, Opera, 10 min.
Dec. 8th, Walking from church, 15 min.
Total 3 hrs. 23 min.61
“I was in ‘Jim’s’ house today!” Gertrude exulted in her diary after a visit with Jim’s sister, Charlotte Barnes. “I mean the house he lives in, and my excitement was—? I sat on the sofa I thought it most likely he sat on. Charlotte kept me waiting five minutes….I wish she had kept me waiting half an hour, then I could have sat on every chair in the room so as to be sure and make no mistake. Tomorrow, thank goodness, is Sunday and I can be under the same roof with him for an hour and a half, that is if he goes to church.”62
In January 1896, Jim Barnes invited Gertrude and her parents to his electrical laboratory to show them some of the experiments he was performing. Gertrude confided to her journal: “I am going to do nothing but read electricity from now till we go. Two hours a day. I promise it.”63 Esther sensed that Gertrude’s interest in Jim was becoming all-absorbing, and invited her to dinner on a day when Esther’s mother would be in Newport. “…I love you and want you—Dearest, we will not go upstairs unless you suggest it and you will act just as you wish—I am waiting for a letter tomorrow morning telling me when I am to see you—Ever yours, Esther.”64
“Not so long ago,” Esther wrote again when she received no response from Gertrude, “you certainly seemed to love me and now really I might not exist—It is hardly fair to treat me in the way you do when you know how much I love you, Gertrude—You always said that if ever you stopped loving me you would tell me, and then you used to say you never would—What is it, dear? I want to see you so much, tell me when you will come and see me…. Why are you so queer to me? Someone certainly has come between us.’65
Mamma must have voiced some criticism of Jim Barnes, for on January 17, 1896, Gertrude wrote in her diary: “I shall put it down in black and white or die—I hate her. Her! Who? My mother. Yes, ha, ha, I have never allowed myself to say it, to think it scarcely before. Now I know it is true and say it, I would say it to her if she gave me the chance. I am happy, am I not—oh yes, living in an atmosphere of worldliness and suspiciousness—no matter. Well today has made me make up my mind to one thing and that is that I will not stop my love for Jim but I will do all in my power to make him love me in return. And if he does I will marry him. I won’t take a cent from the family if he can support me quietly and happily. Oh God, riches make more unhappiness than all the poverty in the world….I only live at times. Most of my life is simply existence. That is what she tries to make it. There is no more sympathy between us than there is between the table and myself, perhaps less, ha ha. Perhaps less. And I am young and longing and dying for sympathy, for feeling, for human love, and there isn’t any for me—none—none…. Tell me, why am I rich—oh if I could only be poor—very, very poor and Jim would love me….I don’t believe I will ever be happy in my life. I will be an old maid—but I won’t live at home, and do good among the poor, oh my, such work was never meant for me. I’ll do it just the same. Then some day they will say, your money does good even if you don’t, and after that I suppose I will die contented. And no one will care, why should they? Not even the poor people because I will leave them my money. Money, money, money, money…”66
Gertrude felt no closer to her father. “I am sure Papa hates me. Perhaps not exactly that, but he does not like me. I don’t know what I have done, but I think it is more what I have not done. He does not think anything I do is right, he thinks me still nothing but a child and—lots more, I know it, I feel it. My instinct tells me it is so, and a woman’s instinct is right. I am a woman now, I know that too. I have changed lately, perhaps Papa feels that. That is maybe what he does not like.”67
No one, Gertrude felt, could understand her. “You don’t know what the position of an heiress is! You can’t imagine. There is no one in all the world who loves her for herself. No one. She cannot do this, that, and the other simply because she is known by sight and will be talked about. Everything she does or says is discussed, everyone she speaks to she is suspected of going to marry, everyone loves her for what she has got, and earth is hell unless she is a fool and then it’s heaven. The few people who are not snobs, but the very ones she wants, will not be seen with her because they won’t be called worldly. Her friends flatter and praise her to her face, only to criticize and pick her to pieces behind her back. The world points at her and says ‘watch what she does, who she likes, who she sees, remember she is an heiress,’ and those who seem most to forget this fact are those who really remember it most vividly. The fortune hunter chases her footsteps with protestations of never ending devotion and the true lover (if perchance such a one exists) shuns her society and dares not say the words that tremble on his lips. Of course, worldly goods surround her. She wishes a dress, a jewel, a horse—she has it, but not all the money in the world can buy her a loving heart or a true friend. And so she sits on her throne, her money bags, and society bows to her because her pedestal is solid and firm and she doesn’t seem perhaps quite human. But she has a heart just the same and the jeers or praise thrown with bows at her feet cut her and make the hours that should be spent happily pass in dreary succession on and on. Oh! Will they ever end?”68
Her fantasies of the ideal life she would like to lead were miles from the world of privilege on Fifth Avenue and in Newport:
A big establishment is one thing I will not have. This is in case I should ever marry—
A house to which mine and my husband’s friends were always welcome. No matter the time or place.
Our house would be rather small, or very small would suit me better, homelike in the true sense of the word, with one delightful library with a divan and easy chairs. That would be a private room for my husband and myself alone.
We would travel a great deal without much baggage or any servants.
When we were at home we would ride a great deal, take long walks, have delightful times together, little sprees of all kinds.
I wouldn’t care about going out, but we would see our friends in an informal way.69
Several days after bringing her journal up to date with the total number of hours and minutes she had been with Jim Barnes, Gertrude noted that in February
1896 the boy who lived in the ivy-covered mansion across Fifth Avenue, Harry Whitney, had stopped in. (His father was William C. Whitney, a prominent attorney who had married the daughter of a Standard Oil Company magnate. He had served as secretary of the navy and then made a personal fortune pursuing his business interests.) Soon Harry Whitney was stopping in to see Gertrude quite often, including twice the last week. He had a little dog that he let Gertrude keep while he was attending Columbia Law School. In no time she wrote in her journal that “Harry and I are having a desperate flirtation. It’s splendid. We understand each other perfectly. I told Harry all about Jim. He understood. I wouldn’t have told him if I hadn’t cared for him even more—perhaps than Jim? Who knows? Certainly not I? This book is getting to be the outlet of a crazy mind—crazy is the only word for it.”70
Mamma found Harry, who was tall, athletic, and intelligent, to be a fine young man. “If Harry keeps straight,” she told her daughter, “[his uncle] is going to leave him all his money, and he is supposed to be worth about $30,000,000.”71
Soon, Gertrude and Harry were sleigh riding and ice skating together, and Harry had answered Gertrude’s deepest concern directly:
Dear Gertrude,
You are a brick—really you are—& you need never be afraid of an insincere “yes” from me.
Of course it is possible for someone to love you simply and entirely for yourself. We have been made to go through an existence here, God knows for what—it is hard enough & unsatisfactory enough—but there is one, just one, redeeming feature & that is the possibility of love.72
In the winter of 1896, the Vanderbilts arranged for a trip to Palm Beach aboard their private railroad cars, a trip to include Gertrude and a number of her wealthy girlfriends and boyfriends, including Harry. They excluded Esther. ‘Truly to the cars which bear the Vanderbilt party southward the chariot of Midas would be but a huckster’s cart,” wrote the New York Journal “Although not given to match making, it is shrewdly guessed that Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt have arranged their party with thought for the future welfare of several of these young people, and that they are willing to remove every obstacle in the course of true love if all other things are consistent and proper. That we shall have announcements of early summer weddings with June roses galore is a foregone conclusion.’73 Gertrude seemed to know exactly what she was doing on the trip south. “I am going to make him care for me when we are off on the trip. Make him by being indifferent and oh, various other little tricks that I have learnt in my career. I have been pretty successful so far—and, strange as it may seem it is not only my money!”74
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