Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt Read online

  On the other hand, Murray Forbes was elected to the Union Club in New York in 1861. This was a significant social success since one of the most important developments in the emerging exclusivity of New York society was the expansion of gentlemen’s clubs. Like gentlemen’s clubs in London, New York clubs were, to quote the historian Eric Homberger, ‘rooted in an ethos of exclusion’.47 The Union Club was the first of the gentlemen’s clubs from which many others emerged as a result of splits and disagreements. Membership was limited to a thousand members and lasted for life unless one chose to resign. By 1887 an observer noted that ‘membership in the Union implies social recognition and the highest respectability’.48 Founded purely for social (as opposed to political or sporting) purposes, the Union Club’s early membership tended to favour merchants over ‘gentlemen of leisure’, but even here, Murray Smith was several steps ahead of the Vanderbilts. The Commodore had become a member in 1844, resigned and then rejoined only in 1863. William Henry Vanderbilt would not become a member until 1868, and William K. Vanderbilt was only elected to the club after his marriage to Alva and the death of his grandfather in 1877.

  The outbreak of the Civil War, however, brought real difficulties for the Smiths. They were slave owners; Murray Forbes Smith did not believe that slaveholding was wrong, and took the view that emancipation was only possible if it happened gradually. As hostilities began, tension with northern neighbours escalated. One of the first places this manifested itself was in the Union Club itself. According to the club’s historian: ‘feeling rose high against the South in New York … Many Southerners, including Benjamin [the Confederate Secretary of State] and Slidell [the Confederate Commissioner to France] resigned, and more were dropped for non-payment of dues.’49 Such clashes were not surprising in view of the fact that the Union Club’s membership also included General Ulysses S. Grant, General William Sherman and General Philip Sheridan, as well as twenty-four Confederate major generals. The abolitionist views of the rector at the Smith’s church, the Church of the Ascension, caused such offence to the southern members of the congregation that they all withdrew. Mounting tension affected the children directly too – this was a time when Jennie Jerome, later Lady Randolph Churchill, remembered pinching little southerners with impunity at dancing class.50

  The turning point, according to Alva, was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln just after the end of the war on 15 April 1865. The Smiths felt obliged to sign up to the general mood of mourning, putting black bows of bombazine in their windows to avoid attack. By now, Alva recalled, ‘feeling against southerners had risen from unfriendliness and suspicion to active antagonism and enmity,’51 scarcely surprising considering that the city had lost over 15,000 men to the war and, in a last desperate throw of the dice, Confederates attacked New York itself by setting fire to ten hotels in November 1864.

  Bows in the window, it turned out, were not enough to prevent unpleasantness. After the President’s funeral, life became so difficult for the family that Murray Forbes Smith decided they should not remain in New York and sold their fine house on Fifth Avenue to a Mr McCormick of Chicago, inventor of the reaping machine. Social and business networks in New York once plaited closely together were torn apart by wartime antipathies. The cotton trade was disrupted by the war, and so was the transport system from south to north.

  From 1866, Murray Forbes Smith based his business activities in Liverpool, the main English port for cotton from the southern states. That summer, when Alva was thirteen, the Smith family briefly took a villa on Bellevue Avenue in the resort of Newport, Rhode Island, where they probably met the Yznaga family for the first time. Mr Yznaga was Cuban and owned a cotton plantation in Louisiana that had been worked by over three hundred slaves before the Civil War. Mrs Ellen Yznaga was of New England stock but was thought ‘fast’ by some. These attributes were enough to disbar them from certain aristocratic New York households after the Civil War. At one point the Yznagas owned a house in New York on 37th Street, but in the post-war years their fortunes fluctuated so dramatically that they ended up living in Orange, New Jersey and the Westminster Hotel in New York. In the summer of 1866, however, they were still in a position to spend the summer in Newport. This was almost certainly the time of Alva’s fight as a thirteen-year-old with a male tormentor, for her opponent was a Yznaga houseguest. She spent much of that summer fearlessly rolling down a hill that ended in a cliff face in the company of Fernando Yznaga, her future brother-in-law; and started a long and important friendship with Consuelo Yznaga, who was about three years her junior, and almost as high-spirited.

  Soon after this, and quite possibly speeded on their way by some of Newport’s matrons, Phoebe took her daughters to Paris, rented an apartment on the Champs Elysées and set up home. Although the Smiths kept smaller houses in New York throughout the period, they were based in Paris for much of the time between 1866 and 1869. Like other southern families who appeared in Paris during and after the Civil War, they were able to live well in reduced and uncertain circumstances. Apparently affluent, they were welcomed by the imperial court of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, at a time when the Second Empire was at its most brilliant and glamorous. Precise gradations of wealth and social distinction of New York meant little to society circles in Paris. The Smiths were able to mix on easy terms with French aristocracy, equally untroubled as to how or when the latter had acquired their noble titles, some more recent than others. Lilian Forbes of the Forbes family, who had been a neighbour of the Smiths in New York, married the Duc de Pralin. Prince Achille Murat, distantly related to the Smiths by marriage, called at the house. The Marquis Chasseloup Loubat, who was Napoleon III’s Ministre de la Marine, and married to an American, Louise Pelier, was particularly cordial in his invitations, inviting Phoebe and Alva’s eldest sister, Armide, to select dances, and inviting the children to the Ministere de la Marine to watch processions. In Paris, Phoebe arranged a debut for Armide (who would never marry) and launched her into French society.

  The impact on Alva of the move to Paris would have many consequences in the decades to follow: for American architecture, for the Vanderbilts and for Consuelo. Now in her early teens, she fell passionately in love with France, and above all with its history, art and architecture. In New York she had been just as resistant as the Commodore to attempts at formal education (‘I could not learn from impersonal pages. I wanted the contact of mind with mind. I liked the friction of thought it engendered,’52 she remembered later.) Now she responded to the clarity, rigour and competitiveness of French schooling which appealed to both ambition and pride; she particularly liked the French approach to learning history which she thought made sense. At one point she even demanded to go to a boarding school run by one Mademoiselle Coulon. She enjoyed this too, though she continued to prove a most difficult girl to handle and only stayed for about a year.

  Much of Alva’s French education, therefore, was a freelance affair in the hands of French and German governesses, with trips to places that appealed to Miss Alva Smith. Thanks to the ever-expanding French railway system, there were frequent visits to the great Renaissance chateaux on the Loire, and to Versailles. It is understandable, given her dominant personality and her love of history, that Alva would be drawn to the magnificent architecture of both the French Renaissance and of the Bourbons. It is easy to imagine her walking in awe through the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, or believing that the apartments of Madame de Pompadour really belonged to her, or sketching the Petit Trianon for the umpteenth time – doubtless followed by a breathless governess much relieved to have found a way of passing the time in such an acceptable manner.

  At the height of the Second Empire there was much to grip the imagination of such a child: French history was invested with a magical quality of particular intensity. As Alistair Horne writes: ‘The haut monde escaping from the bourgeois virtuousness of Louis-Philippe’s regime had sought consciously to recapture the paradise of Louis XV. In the Forest of Fontaineb
leau courtesans went hunting with their lovers attired in the plumed hats and lace of the eighteenth century.’53 The retrospective mood was set by Louis-Napoleon himself who loved to appear as a masked Venetian noble (masked balls being a particular feature of the Second Empire’s illusory and fantastic world).

  There were times, indeed, when the imperial court reminded observers of an endless Venetian carnival, with every ball outdoing the one before in dazzling display. One of the most extraordinary balls was given in 1866 by the Smiths’ friend, the Ministre de la Marine, where the guests formed tableaux vivants of the four continents and ‘a procession of four crocodiles and ten ravishing Oriental handmaidens covered in jewels’ entered in front a chariot in which one English guest noticed the Princess Korsakow was seated en sauvage. Africa was represented by Mademoiselle de Sevres, ‘mounted on a camel fresh from the deserts of the Jardin des Plantes, and accompanied by attendants in enormous black woolly wigs’; finally came America – ‘a lovely blonde, reclined in a hammock swung between banana trees, each carried by Negroes and escorted by Red Indians and their squaws’.54 Three thousand guests came to this ball which cost about 4 million francs. Although there were balls and assemblies a-plenty in New York before the Civil War – indeed they were deeply embedded in the structure of society life – there was certainly nothing that came close to such a ball in terms of fantasy or expense until, that is, Alva threw one herself in 1883.

  As a young lady protected from the seamier side of Second Empire life, Alva could see only enchantment in the Paris of Napoleon III. It seemed to embrace a great international vista, a future of scientific wonders as well as a magical past, encapsulated in the Great Exhibition on the Champs de Mars in 1867. The Great Exhibition was an extraordinary, opulent, dreamlike, awe-inspiring spectacle: As dusk fell, the Goncourts exclaimed that ‘the kiosks, the minarets, the domes, the beacons made the darkness retreat into the transparency and indolence of nights of Asia’.55 Alva particularly remembered the astonishing exhibits of Thomas Edison, and looking on in wonder from the windows of their apartment on the Champs Elysées at the great reviews held in honour of visiting kings and emperors by Napoleon III. ‘The people seemed to worship their Imperial family,’56 she later said wistfully. Alva may have spent her year at Mademoiselle Coulon’s school in 1868–9, while her parents moved back and forth between houses in New York and Paris.57 In 1869, however, Murray Smith decided that the whole family must return permanently to the United States. Sixteen-year-old Alva was utterly distraught. ‘I was broken hearted that I must leave France. I was in sympathy with everything there. This musical language had become mine. I loved its culture, art, people, customs. Child that I was, America struck me in contrast to France, as crude and raw.’ France, unlike America, was a ‘finished product’.58

  The New York to which the Smiths returned in 1869, was a very different city to the one before they left for France in 1866. Capital markets were already centralising in New York by the end of the Civil War in 1865. Commodore Vanderbilt’s consolidation of his railroads in 1869 was a harbinger of things to come. The drive to expand the economy for military purposes had created a national market for the first time and war precipitated an almost limitless demand for goods that only increased with peace. This was the beginning of what Mark Twain termed ‘The Gilded Age’, the period spanning the final third of the nineteenth century that ended when Theodore Roosevelt became President in 1901, determined to control its worst excesses.

  Twain’s novel The Gilded Age satirised what he described as ‘the inflamed desire for sudden wealth’,59 and came to define the period of about thirty-five years of economic boom centred on New York, characterised by rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and technological invention, harsh social inequity, grandiloquent, competitive opulence and by a relentless drive towards economic monopoly and big business. A new phenomenon, the industrial corporation, emerged quite suddenly, driven forward by intensely competitive individuals with energy as great as the Commodore’s, whose corporate power was unrestrained and who were assisted by corrupt politicians and a regime of virtually non-existent taxation – inheritance tax expired in 1870, income tax was abolished in 1872 and tax on corporate profits did not exist. Labour costs were low, and workers had yet to organise themselves efficiently against exploitation. The potential for vast personal fortunes suddenly became limitless. Those who did well out of the war continued to fare very well after it was over. Wealthy men became richer; others suddenly acquired fortunes overnight.

  The fact that Murray Forbes Smith had sold his Fifth Avenue house to new money from Chicago was significant. The newly rich flocked to New York, often accompanied by wives determined to partake of the delights of New York society. Before long, ‘old’ New York felt itself besieged by outsiders, an impression born out by the demographics of the period and a range of expressions for the new arrivals: ‘social climber, men of new money, arriviste, bouncer, (as in the Yiddish Luftmensch, air man, someone who has arrived apparently from nowhere). The parvenus, objects of fierce social mockery, were assumed to be rich, crude, half-educated, and were seen as embodying the raw hunger for social distinction.’60

  The Smiths had put down a marker in New York society between 1861 and 1865, but after absenting themselves for nearly four years, they came back to the city to find themselves at a remove from its inner circle. Worse, they discovered that there were far more people knocking on high society’s door demanding admission and that the financial cost of re-entry had gone up sharply. In the early 1870s, according to Eric Homberger, ‘New York was literally swirling with cash. Prices rocketed, but even inflated costs seem to have no effect upon the ton … The holdings of the New York banks had risen from $80 million in the early 1860s to $225 million in 1865. When the Open Board of Stock Brokers merged in 1869 with the New York Stock & Exchange Board, forming the New York Stock Exchange, membership increased from 533 to 1,060. There were many more millionaires in the city than there had ever been before.’61

  In his memoir Society As I Have Found It, the southern gentleman Ward McAllister made the same point: ‘New York’s ideas as to values, when fortune was named, leaped boldly up to ten millions, fifty millions, one hundred millions, and the necessities and luxuries followed suit. One was no longer content with a dinner of a dozen or more, to be served by a couple of servants. Fashion demanded that you be received in the hall of the house in which you were to dine, by from five to six servants, who, with the butler, were to serve the repast.’62 In an era of conspicuous consumption, this had an immediate impact on modish womenfolk. The newspapers began to notice, for example, that the cost of dressing fashionably was reaching breathtaking new levels. ‘Ladies now sweep along Broadway with dresses which cost hundreds of dollars,’ noted the New York Herald. ‘Their bonnets alone represent a price which a few years since would more than have paid for an entire outfit. Silks, satins and laces have risen in price to an extent which would seem beyond the means of any save millionaires, and yet the sale of these articles is greater than ever.’63

  As often seems to happen in periods of intense social mobility, a self-defined social elite emerged quite suddenly, as those who had been there longest, and felt they had the best claim to be top of the pile, pulled up the social ladder. It was the queen of this society resistance movement who swept up the aisle of St Thomas Church as guest of honour at Consuelo’s wedding on 6 November 1895. Mrs Caroline Schermerhorn Backhouse Astor, the Mrs Astor, was born into the Schermerhorns, an old Dutch family who were already entertaining and patronising the arts when the Commodore started the Dispatch Line. A generation older than Alva (there was a twenty-three year difference), Caroline married new money in the form of William Backhouse Astor in 1853. She immediately set about de-vulgarising Mr Astor, whose fortune was derived from furs, pianos and Manhattan slums. She persuaded him to drop the ‘Backhouse’ and ‘Jr’ and moved him north to 350 Fifth Avenue. This house famously had a ballroom into which she could squeeze 400 people, event
ually giving rise to the idea that New York’s elite comprised ‘the Four Hundred’.64

  Caroline Astor was essentially a conservative. Though she was aware that society needed new blood, she felt that New York social life should be conducted much as it had been by her great-grandmother a century earlier. Many in her close circle were descended directly from Dutch settlers. But even the ‘Knickerbockers’ could fall out of favour with Mrs Astor, however, and some simply refused to opt-in. It was Mrs Astor’s considered opinion that New York society would be fatally undermined if vulgar wealth alone was allowed to dictate the social agenda. In her view, it was essential to harness the power of money, tame its owners, and show them how to behave if standards were to be maintained. Unharnessable individuals such as the Commodore, and by extension, his family, were not to be admitted to the Four Hundred. Indeed, Mrs Astor regarded the Vanderbilts as just the sort of people New York should rally round to exclude. At the same time, however, Mrs Astor was not immune to the effect of the new money swirling round New York. She was, after all, married to Mr Astor. The effect of this was that, with very few exceptions, wealth became a sine qua non for anyone wishing to participate in Mrs Astor’s elite circle.

  By 1870, when the Smiths had returned to New York, Mrs Astor’s power was reinforced by a symbiotic relationship with Ward McAllister, a southern gentleman of quite remarkable fatuity who self-consciously modelled himself on Beau Nash, arbiter of society elegance in another period of intense social mobility in eighteenth-century England. Confronted by rows of post-war millionaires, this self-styled dandy took it upon himself to tell them quite explicitly how to stop living like vulgarians, acting as spokesman for Mrs Astor – who never pronounced in public (he referred to her as his ‘Mystic Rose’). His advice extended to how to dress, what to eat, how to serve wine, how to provide suitable music, correct etiquette, and forms of address – in short, he provided ‘a code of manners that would act as the constitution of upper-class social life in America’.65