Alva began saying her goodbyes. Fellow suffragette and feminist leader Doris Stevens later remembered her last visit to Alva’s château in the summer of 1931: “We parted tearfully at a final tea alone together at which she said she said she feared this would be the last time she would see me. This was the first and only time I ever saw Mrs. Belmont weep. She gave me a rose from her garden which she had picked herself. I tried to comfort her and make her feel that it would not be a final visit. She talked a great deal about death as she had done often during our last few days together, and admitted to me for the first time that she was really ill and feared the end was near. She said she felt there was no one else to whom she could say, lest they think it vain of her, that she would like me to present to her son W.K. at an appropriate time, the erecting to her of a monument. She described exactly what she wanted; a heroic figure of herself in the open air in Washington, the space to be set aside by the government, the base of the monument to contain bas relief depicting various scenes which occurred in Washington—riots by the police and by the mob, women being loaded into patrol wagons, women arrested for petitioning President Wilson—in short, she wanted cut in stone the sacrifices which so many women had made in going to prison for this idea. She said she was sure her son would cooperate in such a plan. She said that she knew I would not think this vain of her to want this, but that I would understand that this was an honor to all women in honoring her for what she had done for women….We kissed each other farewell as usual, but this time with tears.”81
Alva suffered a stroke in May 1932 at the age of seventy-nine and was confined to her wheelchair. Harold came to visit his mother frequently, working out a card game that would hold her interest and buying films for her movie projector, though his visits were usually shorter than he planned because of the stress and trials of living in Alva’s household. Alva was well cared for by round-the-clock doctors, as well as her secretaries, chef, and servants, whose main function it was to keep her entertained.
No longer able to walk, she was drawn around her estate in a carriage made from a bath chair Queen Victoria had used, so Consuelo was surprised when her mother announced that she wanted to build a bowling alley. Consuelo tried to dissuade her, but soon enough a bowling alley arrived from the United States and was assembled at her château.
She had another stroke six months later, in October 1932, but her doctors were optimistic, convinced that with all the care she was getting, it would be impossible to do anything but get better. “Dear Doris” Alva wrote to Doris Stevens, “I was so happy to receive your letter of August 4th which Miss Young read to me out of doors under the trees in the court yard of the Chateau. I am sending you a picture of how I look each morning so that you can see for yourself that I am gradually getting better. It is a long and tiresome process, however.”82
Even after her second stroke, Alva remained Alva, scolding her nurses for letting her hair grow out gray and ordering them to bring in the hairdresser to redye it titian red.
“I don’t want to die with white hair,” eighty-year-old Alva told her friend Elsa Maxwell. “It’s so depressing.” She lay silently for a moment, and then smiled sadly. “It makes no difference now. The important thing is knowing how to live. Learn a lesson from my mistakes. I had too much power before I knew how to use it and it defeated me in the end. It drove all sweetness out of my life except the affection of my children. My trouble was that I was born too late for the last generation and too early for this one. If you want to be happy, live in your own time.”83
Her condition was complicated by bronchial and heart ailments, and at 6:50 A.M. on January 26, 1933, conscious to the end, she passed away in her Paris town house, with Consuelo and Harold at her bedside. At the time of her death, after a lifetime of buying and building, she was down to her last million. Her estate was valued at $1,326,765. She bequeathed $100,000 to the National Woman’s party and $2,000 to her long-suffering servant Azar. Consuelo was the residuary legatee.
After funeral services at the American Cathedral in Paris, Consuelo accompanied the body aboard the steamship Berengaria, for the voyage back to New York City. After the liner docked on February 10 at Pier 54 of the North River, the casket was taken by a National Woman’s party escort of honor to St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue, and there placed under the folds of the old golden picket banner of the suffrage fight, with its great purple letters: FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE.
Representatives of twenty-two women’s organizations escorted the coffin up Fifth Avenue. Harry Lehr’s widow, Bessie, watched Alva’s funeral procession from the St. Regis Hotel where she had stood with Harry to watch the great suffrage parade that Alva had led twenty-one years before. Now the same banners whipped around in the cold winter wind. Women who had marched behind the society leader in their youth, now gray-haired, carried her coffin all the way to Woodlawn Cemetery.
There, years before, Alva had commissioned the sons of her architect, Richard Morris Hunt, to design a burial chapel fashioned after St. Hubert’s Chapel at the Château of Amboise, with stained-glass Gothic windows and a mural of Saint Hubert and the legendary stag with the crucifix in its antlers.
(Alva and a friend had once been at Woodlawn Cemetery, looking at a tomb of pink marble that an heiress had built for her husband. “Ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous!” Alva opined. A workman who was nearby heard her. “Well,” he said, “if you think this is funny, go and look at that tomb over there where the crazy woman who built it has put cats on the roof!” He pointed to Alva’s mausoleum, complete with a roof decorated with stag’s antlers and two cats carved of stone.84)
At the chapel, the women formed a double column through which the casket was borne up the steps and placed in the crypt, while four women buglers sounded taps, just as Alva had ordered in her will.
“This is not the time, in the face of that great mystery of life, the passing of a soul, to frivolously chat about the gold goblets of a dinner party or the visiting cards of the mauve decade,” read an editorial in the Washington News. “Mrs. Belmont will be known wherever the story of woman’s freedom will be read.”85 But it was only after her death that anyone dared thwart Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont. Despite the clear instructions in her will, a woman had not been permitted to deliver her funeral oration at St. Thomas’s Church. No statue was ever erected. And the history books would ignore the fact that there once was a woman whose personality and money sparked a crusade for human equality. Instead, her lasting monument would be Marble House, a relic of a way of life that had died long before her.
8
THE KINGFISHER
1899–1931
1.
As long as Grace Wilson Vanderbilt had anything to say about it, the Gilded Age was not over yet. She hadn’t chased Neily Vanderbilt halfway around the world and sacrificed her reputation for nothing. It was her turn to reign as Mrs. Vanderbilt, and nothing would stop her.
Neily Vanderbilt’s decision to marry the charming Grace Wilson against his parents’ wishes had proved a very expensive act of disobedience, as he learned when his father’s will was read that chilly autumn afternoon in 1899 at The Breakers. As the oldest surviving great grandson of the Commodore, twenty-six-year-old Neily was in line to assume the title of head of the House of Vanderbilt, and with that title, the bulk of the family fortune. Instead, his father’s will had left him but $500,000 outright and the income from $1 million in trust, while his younger brother, twenty-two-year-old Alfred, received the residuary estate of over $42 million, as well as all the other trappings of the head of the family.
Memories of the distressing public spectacle that had surrounded the contest of the Commodore’s will were fresh enough to impel the family to work to reach some amicable settlement with Neily, who seemed sullen and depressed. Several days after the will was read, Chauncey Depew, as executor of the estate, issued a statement: “When Alfred Vanderbilt returned home after his father’s death he decided, from brotherly affection and for family ha
rmony, to take out of his own inheritance and give to his brother Cornelius a sum sufficient to make the fortune of Cornelius the same as that of his brothers and sisters. This has been accepted in the same spirit.” The sum sufficient was $6 million. Neily had his own statement to make to the press the next day to set the record straight. ‘The agreement has been made to appear as a mere gift. It is really a family settlement or adjustment of the situation, which, I am glad to say, my brother met with fairness. I have nothing further to say.”1
Reporters asked for clarification.
“Mr. Vanderbilt, were you quoted correctly in the World as saying that you were to receive not less than $10,000,000 under an agreement made before your father’s death?”
“It is correct,” Neily replied. “That agreement was made prior to my father’s death—yes, prior to my father’s death.”
“With whom did you make this agreement?” they asked.
“It was made between my brother Alfred and myself. The matter since then has been in the hands of my attorneys; they have full charge of my affairs.”
Would he contest the will? the reporters persisted. After all, he had not received $10 million.
Neily took his hands out of his pockets. He looked at the ceiling, and then at the floor. He scratched his head. “Per-haps.”2
Several days later, however, all the beneficiaries under the will signed a waiver, eliminating the possibility of any litigation. But thereafter, the relationship between Alfred and Neily was strained. There was, after all, Neily believed, a significant difference between the $6 million his younger brother had given him and the $8.5 million he felt he was owed to bring his share of his father’s estate up to $10 million. The very day Alfred began working in the treasurer’s office of the New York Central, Neily quit his job with the Central and never returned. And the brothers never again spoke, only nodding coldly when they happened to pass.
Having exiled himself from the familiar world of the family’s railroads, Neily cast about for what to do with his life. The publicity surrounding their marriage had made Grace and Neily the world’s best-known young couple. With this type of recognition, Neily decided he should enter politics, and in 1900, with Grace at his side, he attended the New York Republican Convention at Saratoga Springs. Their arrival made the front page of the New York Times.
“I find politics most interesting,” he explained to reporters. ‘The political field offers great opportunities for practical information of value. I am not an office seeker. I have a penchant for politics, and when I was asked to be a delegate, I gladly acquiesced.”
“Do you propose to take an active part in politics?” he was asked.
“Yes, I think that is the duty of every American.”3
“Would you like to go to Congress?”
“Certainly,” Neily Vanderbilt answered. “But it is not for me to pass upon that sort of question. If called, I shall respond.”
At the convention, Neily was summoned into the proverbial smoke-filled back room to meet with New York’s political leaders.
“Well, young Vanderbilt,” an old-time political boss informed him, “if you want to go into the state legislature, we can put you there. It will cost you a hundred thousand dollars.” He took the big cigar out of his mouth and winked at his colleagues.
“And how much to go to Congress?” Neily inquired.
“Oh, I guess about three hundred thousand,” another of the politicians responded.
“Three hundred thousand dollars!” Neily exclaimed.
‘To become a member of the lower house,” he was instructed.
“And the United States Senate?” Neily asked in disbelief.
“Half a million.”
Neily walked around the room, considering what he was hearing.
“Look, my name happens to be Vanderbilt, but I’m not a Rockefeller, you know.”4
He walked out of the room as the old boys roared with laughter.
Neily filled his days tinkering with his experiments in an office jammed with ten thousand scientific books. He obtained patents on thirty of his inventions. He went along on one of the early Wright brothers’ flights and exchanged wireless messages with Marconi. With August Belmont, he organized the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, serving as a consulting engineer in the building of the first New York City subway. He sat on the boards of directors of twenty corporations and joined many exclusive gentlemen’s clubs. He signed up for service as a second lieutenant with the Twelfth Regiment of the New York National Guard. In his leisure time, he painted watercolors and took photographs and speculated in the stock market to try to build up his fortune to real Vanderbilt levels, or at least to levels to support the lifestyle his wife was pursuing.5
Just like Alva Vanderbilt, Grace Wilson Vanderbilt had something to prove and set out at once to prove it. While Neily busied himself with his inventions, Grace began to blend together their modest fortunes with her royal contacts and their worldwide notoriety. The mixture was just right. With three magic strokes, she transformed herself from Grace Wilson, the southern belle whom Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt had felt was not good enough for their son, into Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Queen of Society.
Grace’s first coup took place when the German imperial yacht, Hohenzollern, dropped anchor in New York Harbor in February 1902. Every society matron aspired to be asked to entertain Prince Henry, the kaiser’s brother. The long-reigning Mrs. Astor assumed she would be requested to do the honors, and so postponed her trip to Europe. But at a special opera performance at the Metropolitan for Prince Henry, the prince made a beeline for Grace Vanderbilt’s box. “The visit of Prince Henry to the box of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt on Tuesday evening at the gala opera performance and his marked attention to her have been matters of current discussion since that event,” the papers reported the next day. ‘The recognition was so marked and the singling out of this young matron so obvious that it took many by surprise.”6
Grace had received a cablegram from the kaiser, who had entertained her some years before when she had been in Germany. The cable requested her to invite Prince Henry to dinner so that he might “dine with a representative American family.”7
This was to be the only dinner the prince attended in a private home on his trip to the United States. “The mere honor of entertaining Prince Henry…is a trifle,” stated Town Topics. “The real triumph is that Mrs. CV has become the Mrs. Vanderbilt. She is recognized as the head of the family by the Kaiser. It is her branch of the Vanderbilt family which is to carry out its traditions. Mrs. Alfred Vanderbilt may hurry back from Palm Beach, and Mrs. Vanderbilt Senior may storm and fret in her 57th Street mansion. Young Mrs. Cornelius, in the few years of her married life, has…succeeded beyond cavil in establishing herself as the representative of the most powerful family in America. Mrs. Astor,” Town Topics added, “will sail before the dinner takes place.”8
Grace’s second coup occurred in Newport that summer at Beaulieu, the three-story, faded red-brick William Waldorf Astor estate on Bellevue Avenue, between Marble House and The Breakers. Grace and Neily had rented Beaulieu for the season.
One afternoon at tea, after days of carefully considering her next campaign, Grace announced her plans to her husband.
“I think I’ll have the Wild Rose come to Beaulieu. It’s a marvelous play. I know every tune by heart,” she said, softly humming “Cupid Is the Captain.”
“But it’s still playing in New York!” said Neily.
“Yes, I know. Won’t it be fun, though! I’m so tired of amateur theatricals and clambakes and picnics and costume balls. This will be something absolutely new and different!”
“Oh, come now,” Neily protested. “Why not the Götterdämmerung? Grand opera in July would really be new.”
“August,” Grace said with a distant look in her eyes, ignoring her husband’s sarcasm. “End of August, I think. It’s the last party of the season that’s best remembered.”9
Still infatuated with G
race, Neily gave in. He arranged for the Knickerbocker Theater in New York to close for two days, with all performances canceled, so that the troupe could come to Newport for a special performance of the season’s most popular play. Two hundred invitations to what Grace called her “at home” were distributed around Newport.
Radiant in a pale green gown accentuated by her emeralds and diamonds, Grace stood greeting her guests on the manicured lawn of Beaulieu, bright with the glow of a harvest moon and dozens of shaded fairy lamps. The guests proceeded over a red velvet carpet through a midway, an enclosed area 275 feet long covered with red calico, hung with garlands of flowers and laurel leaves, and illuminated by red calcium lights. The midway was filled with amusement park sideshows: booths for games of chance, wheels of fortune, a wooden duck-shooting gallery, strength-testing machines, Gypsy fortune-tellers, dancers and singers. At the end of the avenue stood Harry Lehr, wearing the false waxed moustache of a concessionaire, handing out reservation tickets for the hit Broadway musical, The Wild Rose. The tickets were replicas of those sold at the box office in New York, except that the name of the theater was not the Knickerbocker, but Beaulieu Theater.
At midnight, the guests took their tickets and were ushered into the theater that carpenters and electricians had constructed on the lawn at the edge of the sea cliffs during the past week. The star of the Broadway show came down the center aisle; Neily helped her up onto the stage. The crimson velvet stage curtain rose, the orchestra in the pit struck up the first notes of the year’s most popular score, and for an hour the actors performed to the continual applause of the amazed guests.
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