Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt Read online

  The anomaly was the so-called Gothic Room, probably inspired by the Bourges house of the great medieval merchant, Jacques Coeur, whom Alva greatly admired. Paul Miller, curator at the Preservation Society of Newport County, suggests that the Gothic Room may originally have been intended for 660 Fifth Avenue. In 1889 the Hunts and Vanderbilts met in Paris to discuss furnishings at a meeting that coincided with the publication of a catalogue raisonné of Emile Gavet’s collection of European works of art from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The Vanderbilts bought half the collection, including a ‘Madonna and Child’ by Luca della Robbia that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Hunt’s design for the Gothic Room was then transferred to Marble House to display objets purchased from the Gavet collection, though the room acquired American accents in the process: the foliate cornice around the room which was inspired by Coeur’s house reappeared with crabs and lobsters to reflect the seaside setting.14

  In 1892, those who knew Alva best might have detected her unhappiness in much of this design. She once described Marble House as her fourth child and its interior made few concessions to her husband, other than cartouches bearing the monogram ‘WV’ and a small study reflecting his sporting interests. Meanwhile, Alva’s preoccupations could be found everywhere: on the ceiling painting in her bedroom where the paradoxical Goddess Athene reigned supreme, war-like but the goddess of fine craftsmen, and in many references to the French ancien régime. Even the use of marble suggested a fugitive memory of the Smith house in Mobile. If it is true that the best buildings of the Gilded Age dissolved almost entirely into make-believe, her greatest collaboration with Richard Morris Hunt had this quality in abundance. Even more than 660 Fifth Avenue, Marble House was characterised by a feeling of withdrawal from the world outside. But here there was a sense of unhappy withdrawal from a miserable marriage too, as if Alva has turned in on herself and back towards the world of the ancien régime she loved as a girl before the harsh compromises of adult life took their toll. To some, the Gold Room still stands as a symbol of the heartless, glittering emptiness of the Gilded Age; but it can also be seen as the most heartfelt room in Newport, an intense and private dream.

  As far as Consuelo was concerned, however, Marble House was associated with sensations closer to nightmare, claustrophobia and control. It felt like a gilded cage. Even the gates were lined with sheet iron. ‘Unlike Louis XIV’s creation,’ she wrote tartly, ‘it stood in restricted grounds, and, like a prison, was surrounded by high walls.’15 Consuelo was sixteen when Marble House was finished. In spite of this, Alva conceded nothing to her daughter’s taste. In this instance her vision of the Marble House interior entirely overpowered the section of her child-rearing theory that involved independence. Still a doll in a doll’s-house, Consuelo’s bedroom was designed by her mother down to the last detail and furnished with objects which she scarcely dared to move. ‘To the right on an antique table were aligned a mirror and various silver brushes and combs. On another table writing utensils were disposed in such perfect order that I never ventured to use them. For my mother had chosen every piece of furniture and had placed every ornament according to her taste, and had forbidden the intrusion of my personal possessions.’16 It was this bedroom that inspired one of the most quoted passages about Alva from Consuelo’s memoir The Glitter and the Gold: ‘Often as I lay on the bed, that like St Ursula’s in the lovely painting by Carpaccio stood on a dais and was covered with a baldaquin, I reflected that there was in her love of me something of the creative spirit of an artist – that it was her wish to produce me as a finished specimen framed in a perfect setting, and that my person was dedicated to whatever final disposal she had in mind.’17

  When Marble House opened to widespread acclaim during the Newport season of 1892, Alva was less concerned with the final disposal of Consuelo than the state of her own marriage. ‘Sunshine by proxy’ was decidedly not for her. She was only thirty-nine. She refused to accept a scenario in which she tolerated her husband’s philandering and retired to a virtuous life in the shadows. She particularly objected to the way in which rich husbands enforced their wives’ powerless position by reminding them of their financial dependence. ‘If a wife, hungering for love and with more spirit than most of her sex, asserted her right to a lover or to contacts with the outside world, the husband declared she was ruining his reputation along with her own and with the power of the bank resources at his command, bade her retire to the obscurity of respectability.’18 Alva’s reaction to this was spirited. She acquired a lover of her own.

  Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont was the wayward son of financier August Belmont. Married to a socially pre-eminent wife of impeccable pedigree, August Belmont was of Jewish origin, though he had converted to Christianity, and represented the Rothschilds’ interests in New York. He lived flamboyantly, introducing the first French chef to a private New York house, establishing a pace-setting example when it came to wining and dining, and causing wild gossip. He was another of Mrs Astor’s principal bêtes noires, though her resistance to the next generation of Belmonts gradually dissolved.

  Before his relationship with Alva, Oliver Belmont was often to be found in the Oelrichs household, charming Blanche Oelrichs as a child. She liked his ‘slow urbanity, his face rutted with lines – from the hopes and disillusions of his life as a lover, I suspected. For certainly he must be a romantic man.’19 The circumstances surrounding the collapse of Oliver Belmont’s first marriage suggest that his behaviour was not always romantic. After a long courtship which was bitterly opposed by both his parents, Belmont married a beautiful socialite, Sara Whiting. On their honeymoon in Paris they were joined by Sara’s domineering mother and two sisters, who moved in with the newlyweds and refused to leave. Oliver eventually marched out on the ménage – understandable perhaps had he not stormed off in the company of an exotic Spanish dancer, bad form at any time, but especially on one’s honeymoon. On hearing that his new bride was pregnant he returned to Paris to attempt a reconciliation, only to find himself accused of heavy drinking and physical violence – allegations which he rebutted furiously. Sara Whiting later gave birth to a daughter, Natica, whom Belmont refused ever to acknowledge, while Mrs Whiting insisted on a divorce.

  Oliver Belmont’s parents were mortified by the publicity surrounding his first marriage. They had in any case long despaired of him: in spite of various attempts to find him gainful employment he appeared to have no greater ambition than to live as a gentleman of leisure. As early as 1888 they were concerned that he was joining a cruise on the Alva, fearing that Vanderbilt sojourns in resorts such as Monte Carlo would do nothing to raise his level of ambition and knowing that his friendship with Mrs William K. Vanderbilt was already a talking point.20 Oliver joined part or all of subsequent Vanderbilt cruises in 1889 and 1890, however.21 Indeed, his obstinacy and readiness to ignore society’s opinion on this matter may have attracted Alva. Here was someone with strength of personality, someone to brace against, unlike William K. whom Alva later described as a ‘weak nonentity’. It may also be true, as Louis Auchincloss has written, that Oliver was attractive because he represented a challenge. He had already caused offence. There was just a whiff of violence about him. He was a Belmont. ‘One begins to suspect that the setting up of hurdles in order to jump them was her way of adding a bit of zest to the sameness of a social game that was already showing itself a drag to her lively spirit. And were not the Belmonts partly Jewish? Better and better!’22

  Initially the relationship between Alva and Oliver Belmont raised few eyebrows for it was not unusual for the neglected wives of rich men to acquire ‘walkers’. ‘The Newport ladies of those days were trying hard to emulate their sisters in cosmopolitan Europe,’ writes Blanche Oelrichs; ‘and it would have been thought extremely “bourgeois” for attractive matrons not to have gentlemen about them who were “attentive”.’23 As the warmth of feeling between Alva and Belmont began to show, however, the gossips got down to work. ‘I us
ed to think Oliver Belmont one of the handsomest men at the Coaching Parade, with his dark eyes, clear-cut profile and slender, faun-like grace,’ wrote Elizabeth Lehr, thinking back to her teens. ‘Mrs W. K. Vanderbilt often sat at his side on the box behind the four famous bays, Sandringham, Rockingham, Buckingham and Hurlingham. The women glanced at her as she sat wide-eyed and innocent-looking, and whispered to one another.’24 Town Topics also picked up Oliver’s constant presence at Alva’s side and talk persisted into later generations. In a delightful lecture about her childhood on Bellevue Avenue, Eileen Slocum remarked: ‘Down the years I especially remember the gossip about Mrs William K. Vanderbilt’s affair with Mr O. H. P. Belmont … Daddy was very critical … “Poor Willy K. drove up, unexpectedly, one day from the train in his carriage,” Daddy said, “and entered his own house and ascended his own staircase and found Mr Belmont hiding in the closet of his own bedroom. Willy should have shot him.”’25

  It does seem perverse, therefore, that in the autumn of 1893, when their marriage was strained to the point of collapse, the Vanderbilts not only decided to go on a long cruise on the Valiant to India but invited Oliver Belmont to join them. It is just possible that Alva and Oliver were not yet lovers, for this would have put Alva, who was always political, at a disadvantage. Perhaps William K. welcomed Belmont’s presence because he improved Alva’s mood. Perhaps the expedition was William K.’s idea and Alva only agreed to go on condition she could take Oliver too. Consuelo later said that it was clear even to her that the cruise was a desperate last attempt to patch things up, one last effort to avoid ‘the rupture which I felt could not be long delayed’. The expedition set off in an atmosphere of ‘dread and uncertainty’ with a party that included ‘my parents, my brother Harold, a doctor, a governess and the three men friends who were our constant companions. Willie, being at school, remained at home. My mother, claiming that my governess gave sufficient trouble, refused to have another woman on board.’26 The three men friends whose names appear in the ship’s log were Oliver Belmont, Fred Beech and J. Louis Webb.

  The cruise began on 23 November 1893 at 3.35 p.m. precisely with a total of eighty-five people on board, seen off by a crowd that ‘surged and pushed and jostled on the pier like animated stalks in a bunch of asparagus’.27 The Valiant arrived in Bombay just over a month later, on Christmas Day. On 30 December, the Vanderbilt party disembarked for a two-week overland journey by special train to Calcutta, while the yacht made its way round from Bombay to await them. Alva was pleased to discover that the Taj Mahal had been inspired by the spirit of a woman. Otherwise, much of what she saw in India appalled her. If Alva was taken aback by what she described as superstition and ‘repulsive religious ceremonies’,28 Consuelo was frankly terrified by such unusually close proximity to humanity en masse, particularly when it rattled at the doors of the Vanderbilt sleeping cars and tried to force an entry. ‘It was difficult to secure bath water and the food was incredibly nasty. We lived on tea, toast and marmalade … It was wonderful to find all the luxuries of home on the Valiant which had come round India from Bombay and lay anchored in the Hooghly.’29

  What Consuelo did not know as she recuperated from this taxing journey, was that the stay in Calcutta would mark a turning-point in her life. While Consuelo, Harold, and the Vanderbilts’ friends remained on board the Valiant, Alva and William K. were invited to stay by the Viceroy of India, Lord Lansdowne, at Government House in Calcutta. Sometimes described as ‘the most neglected statesman in modern British history’ Lord Lansdowne (or Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne), had already had a distinguished career as Governor-General of Canada and would go on to become Secretary of State for War, Foreign Secretary, leader of the Conservative and Unionist peers, and a member of Asquith’s wartime cabinet. At the time of the Vanderbilts’ visit to Calcutta, however, his sojourn in India as Viceroy was almost at an end, and, worn out by his tour of duty, he was longing to go home. Nonetheless, Lord and Lady Lansdowne extended generous hospitality to the Vanderbilts with the result that just when Alva was feeling most vulnerable to a life of ‘sunlight by proxy’ she witnessed the life of the Vicereine, Lady Lansdowne, when the British Raj was at its zenith.

  ‘We might as well be monarchs,’30 wrote Mary Curzon when she arrived as Vicereine herself three years later. Even aristocrats such as Lord Lansdowne, accustomed to palatial space and waited on since birth, found Government House in Calcutta somewhat grandiose. ‘Words cannot describe the hugeness of this place or the utter absence of anything like homely comfort … [The bedroom with its] colossal bed large enough for half a dozen couples … the ceiling which is so far up that one can scarcely see it,’31 he wrote to his mother. Historian David Cannadine suggests that the grandeur was a deliberate political ploy: ‘The British now saw themselves as the legitimate successors of the Mughal emperors, and came to believe that their regime should project a suitably “oriental” and “imperial” image. So they set out to construct a new ritual idiom for the government of India, partly based on the appropriation of what they believed were traditional Mughal court ceremonials, and partly invented and developed by themselves, through which they could express their own authority … The ceremonial surrounding the Viceroy, both in Calcutta and at Simla, and as he travelled round India, became increasingly splendid, ornate, elaborate and magnificent – far grander than the state in which British monarchs themselves lived at home.’32

  The illusionists of the British Raj found a most appreciative audience in Alva, though even she was startled by the size of the Government House guest suite and the ‘ten native servants who were assigned … in beautiful royal liveries of red embroidered in gold to serve us’.33 What impressed her most, however, was the quasi-imperial role of both Lansdownes. ‘The numerous house guests and outside friends assembled in an antechamber, and at a given moment the double doors were thrown open and the Viceroy and Lady Lansdowne were announced’. Even at lunchtime. Calcutta House had a throne room and on state occasions the Vicereine took her place on a throne on the dais beside her husband, receiving Indian princes in magnificent ceremony. Alva was even more impressed by the extent to which the British Vicereine made an important contribution in her own right, undertaking charity work in Calcutta and running much of the social life at Government House.

  The Vanderbilts’ visit coincided with plans for the handover of power to Lord Elgin and tributes were already flowing in to the departing Viceroy and Vicereine. Lord Lansdowne had been a popular viceroy and the view was frequently expressed that his tour of duty had enjoyed ‘an almost unique popularity, to which the social gifts of Lady Lansdowne had largely contributed’.34 Alva would also have been aware of the splendid formalities planned for the Lansdownes’ departure, ceremonies which would acknowledge the contribution of them both, just as the ceremonies to welcome the Curzons in 1898 acknowledged Mary Curzon’s American birth. There was no life in the shadows or sunlight by proxy for a Vicereine of India; and just as she had once pictured the Vanderbilts as Medicis, Alva could now visualise her daughter’s future.

  ‘My mother, whose habit it was to impose her views rather than to invite discussion, had already, on occasion, revealed the hopes she nourished for my brilliant future, and her admiration for the British way of life was as apparent as was her desire to place me in an aristocratic setting. These intentions, I am sure, crystallised during her visit at Government House,’35 wrote Consuelo later. Worse, conversations between Alva and Lady Lansdowne revealed that there was a most interesting way of moving this vision forward. Maud Lansdowne had a nephew of the right age, with an interest in politics. He was already a duke – the young Duke of Marlborough. Consuelo thought later that it was during her parents’ stay in Calcutta that ‘the possibility of my marriage to him may have been discussed’. Even if the idea was not discussed explicitly, however, ‘it is certain that it was then [my mother’s] ambitions took definite shape; for she confessed to me years later that she had decided to marry me
either to Marlborough or to Lord Lansdowne’s heir’.36

  It was possibly in a spirit of mutual inspection that Consuelo was invited to spend a day with the Lansdownes’ younger daughter, Lady Beatrix, for Lady Lansdowne was fond of her nephew and knew that he had inherited a troubling financial burden in Blenheim Palace. The impression made by Miss Vanderbilt on the Lansdownes is not recorded but the serious-minded Consuelo was astounded (to the point of sounding quite priggish) by the ignorance and ‘homespun education’ of Lady Beatrix. On 19 January 1894 the captain of the Valiant recorded that ‘the Viceroy & party from Government House were entertained on board’.37 The Valiant left its moorings in Calcutta on the same day and headed back to Europe. It mattered not that when she played with her friends in Paris, Consuelo never liked being queen: Alva had decided what she wanted for her only daughter.

  It was later claimed by the press that the Valiant cruise broke up in India after a final blazing row between the Vanderbilts; but according to both Alva and the ship’s log, it continued as planned, sailing first to Ceylon, where the entry read: ‘left a fireman behind at Colombo so we are one short’.38 Apart from the fireman, the party remained intact, winding its way back to the Mediterranean by way of Alexandria, where the yacht was detained by rough seas. Near Rhodes, in another strangely symbolic incident, the Valiant lost its way – the captain took a local pilot on board who turned out to be incompetent. There is no doubt that relations between the Vanderbilts were strained to the limit and these setbacks can have done little to help matters. A visit to Delphi in Greece briefly acted as balm to Consuelo’s troubled soul, but the break came by the time the yacht reached Nice. As the Valiant docked, Consuelo was told that her parents’ marriage was definitely over.