The Glitter and the Gold Read online

  TITLE PAGE

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  EPIGRAPH

  FRONTISPIECE

  THE VANDERBILT FAMILY TREE

  INTRODUCTION

  FOREWORD

  1: The World of My Youth

  2: A Debutante of the '90’s

  3: A Marriage of Convenience

  4: Mistress of Blenheim Palace

  5: Red Carpet and Protocol

  6: The Queen Is Dead, Long Live the King!

  7: Deed of Separation

  8: A New Life Unfolds

  9: A Marriage of Love

  10: Lou Sueil - Friends and Neighbors

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  COPYRIGHT

  The Marlborough family, painted by Sargent in 1905. Charles Spencer Churchill, Duke of Marlborough; Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough; John, Marquess of Blandford (left); Lord Ivor Spencer Churchill.

  THE VANDERBILT FAMILY TREE

  ‘Hit is not al gold that glareth’

  Chaucer, “The House of Fame”, I, 272

  ‘All that glisters is not gold’

  Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 7

  ‘All, as they say, that glitters is not gold’

  Dryden, ‘The Hind and the Panther’

  To Jacques

  INTRODUCTION

  Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan was an enormous influence in my life. My earliest recollections were of Casa Alva in Lantana Florida where I spent almost every winter holiday during my school life. It was the house Granny and Jacques Balsan bought after the war.

  Consuelo (or ‘Granny’ as we knew her) was born in 1877, the eldest daughter of a very socially ambitious mother and a fabulously wealthy father who was kind and indulgent.

  Her early life would have been unbearable to later generations. It was extraordinarily strict. If she failed to stand or sit up straight enough she would be made to wear a steel rod down her back strapped to her shoulders and waist. When she was eighteen, she was taken on a grand tour by her parents in their yacht ‘ALVA’ where they visited Europe, Russia and India. While she enjoyed the sights with her younger brother Willie, her mother was plotting her future. She was determined that her daughter should marry an Englishman. Consuelo at the time was in love with a suitor from Newport in America but her mother had other ideas. Alva decided that the Duke of Marlborough would fit the bill and, as he was looking for a rich American heiress, it seemed to be a good arrangement for everyone – except, of course, Consuelo.

  Having settled on an English duke, Alva set about arranging the marriage, much to Consuelo’s misery.

  Consuelo married her Duke and moved to Blenheim Palace where she was intensely lonely and everything seemed strange. She produced two sons in quick succession, John and Ivor. But the marriage was not happy and, soon, both were looking elsewhere for companionship. Consuelo almost caused a scandal – she had determined to run off with a lover - but Winston Churchill, her close friend and ally (and her husband’s first cousin), stepped in and persuaded her to do no such thing. He enlisted the support of her father who organised an orderly separation and built her a house in London.

  In this next phase of her life, she threw herself into public work, was elected to the London County Council and became a suffragette.

  Eventually she was granted a divorce and was able to marry the love of her life – a charming French airman who had, apparently, set eyes on her many years earlier when she was on her grand tour in Paris and had told his mother he was going to marry her. They moved to France, entertained lavishly and cultivated painters and writers, setting up a school near Paris on their property, St George-Motel. They also bought a spectacular house in the South of France at Eze. They managed, with great difficulty, to escape from France after the German invasion and they resettled in the United States.

  My sisters and I were very spoilt by both of them. Jacques regularly took Mimi and me to Le Pavillion for lunch where the famous chef, Henri Soule, would make pomme soufflé for us. Granny was always invariably soignée and beautifully dressed, and always saw that we were well dressed too. She included us in many of her grown up lunches where we were made to sit ramrod straight in itchy organdie dresses talking to famous men from the worlds of business, letters and politics. It must have been most unusual (and deadly boring) for them.

  Granny was always positive and active – regularly remodelling her houses and, indeed, ours in Southampton. She stayed young by being curious and interested in everything new. Were she alive today, she would, I am sure, have been computer literate. She would have found modern technology fascinating. Her deafness might have held her back with mobile phones but she would have taken to texting, which her beautiful manicured hands would have found easy. She lived through the extraordinary events and changes of the twentieth century with balance and enthusiasm. I never heard her complain. She was never negative or cross. She knew how to have fun and managed to live her life with great dignity and elegance. She gave great pleasure to many people and all her family loved and respected her.

  Serena Russell Balfour, 2011

  FOREWORD

  FRIENDS HAVE often told me that I should write my story and describe the world of my youth, which was so different from that of today. There are no journals to help me – there are but the meagre notes of engagements made; the press cuttings of recorded events. But the portraits of my friends are etched in memory and stand like figures in a Paul Veronese, brilliant and festive against backgrounds of space and colour where architectural pleasances and an ordered courtesy add beauty to the zest for life.

  Looking back to 1895, when I married the ninth Duke of Marlborough and went to live in England, I recall a society whose conventions were closer to the eighteenth than to the twentieth century. Queen Victoria’s reign was nearing its end, but those who, like myself, witnessed the splendid pageant of her Diamond Jubilee could not have foreseen that her death would close an era. There are few of us left who can recall that world with its complete acceptance of aristocratic privileges. There are still fewer to whom such anachronisms remain justified. Even then, whispered doubts of their rightfulness could be heard. So is it surprising that an American girl who held democratic views found it difficult to accept the assumption that birth alone confers superiority? Is it not natural when my marriage foundered and I was able to lead my life in the comparative freedom a legal separation ensures that, influenced by the more liberal doctrines of the twentieth century, I should, in the English tradition, have sought a greater usefulness in social service?

  Years later, when divorce brought complete freedom, I found happiness in marriage with Jacques Balsan. In writing of those years I recall the homes we made together, the kindly people we lived among, the country I loved. And now back in my native land, having regained a citizenship I would never have resigned had the law of my day permitted me to retain it, I look back on a long life under three flags. The scenes pictured I have witnessed; the impressions recorded were true of their day. I can tell no story but my own. I hope it may interest my readers.

  Without the constant encouragement of friends I should have found it difficult to carry this work to a conclusion. Among them I should like particularly to thank Mr. Henry May for helping me sketch out the original plan of the book. I am grateful to the present Duke of Wellington for refreshing my memories of a ball at Apsley House; and I am greatly indebted to Mr. Stuart Preston for his careful scrutiny of my proofs. My final thanks go to Miss Mae Lovey who has performed the onerous task of typing the book and of keeping track of the numerous successive corrections in my manuscript.

  Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, 1953

  1: The World of My Youth

  IN TRY
ING to recount events that have influenced my life, it is humiliating to find that I remember very little of my childhood. Watching my great-grandchild Serena Russell at play, so sure of herself, even at the age of three, I wonder if, when she reaches my age, she also will have forgotten events that now appear important to her. That we are both in America—she the child of my granddaughter Sarah Spencer-Churchill, who married an American, and I the wife of a Frenchman—is due to World War II, and to events little anticipated at the turn of the century when I left my native land.

  Memories of myself at Serena's age recall a picture painted by Carolus Duran of a little girl against a tall red curtain. She is wearing a red velvet dress with a square décolleté outlined with Venetian lace. A cloud of dark hair surrounds a small oval face, out of which enormous dark eyes (much bigger than they were) look out from under arched brows. A pert little nose and dimples accentuate the mischievous smile. There is something vital and disturbing in that small figure tightly grasping a bunch of roses in each fist. "You were un vrai petit Diable, and only kept still when I played the organ in my studio!" Carolus Duran exclaimed, when again he painted me, this time at seventeen. The second portrait was a very different affair from the first, for the red curtain which had become his traditional background was at my mother's request replaced by a classic landscape in the English eighteenth-century style, and I am seen a tall figure in white descending a flight of steps. For my mother having decided, in the fashion not uncommon at the time, to marry me either to the man who did become my husband or to his cousin—generously allowing me the choice of alternatives—wished my portrait to bear comparison with those of preceding duchesses who had been painted by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney and Lawrence. In that proud and lovely line I still stand over the mantelpiece of one of the state rooms at Blenheim Palace with a slightly disdainful and remote look as if very far away in thought.

  It is well that my Aunt Florence Twombly, now ninety-eight, could remember not only the street but also the number of the house where I was born, for my birth had never been officially recorded. This information was required when I took back my American citizenship after the French armistice in World War II. It was in one of those ugly brownstone houses somewhere in the forties, which was then the fashionable district of New York, that I first saw the light of day.

  My father's family was Dutch and had its origin in the Bilt— that northern point of Holland, whence comes our name. It was about the year 1650 that the first member of the family came to the New Netherlands, and succeeding generations lived in the vicinity of New Amsterdam, as New York City was then called. In the first part of the nineteenth century my great-grandfather Cornelius Vanderbilt founded the family fortune, moved from New Dorp, Staten Island to New York and changed the spelling of our name from van der Bilt to its American version. In later years I met a Professor van der Bilt who taught at the Hague University. He told me that there was only one family bearing our name in Holland, and in looking through his-family archives he had become convinced that the Dutch and American branches had descended from a common ancestor. In the Patriciat, a book that is the Dutch equivalent of the British Landed Gentry, the Professor pointed out our coat of arms, the three acorns, and the names Gertrude, Cornelius and William, which repeatedly figure in our family Bible.

  My grandfather, William H. Vanderbilt, had, considering his numerous philanthropic gifts, an unmerited reputation for indifference to the welfare of others. It was, as is often the case, founded on a remark shorn of its context. This is the version of the "public be damned" story that was given me by a friend of the family. Mr. Vanderbilt was on a business trip and, after a long and arduous day, had gone to his private car for a rest. A swarm of reporters arrived asking to come on board for an interview. Mr. Vanderbilt sent word he was tired and did not wish to give an interview, but would receive one representative of the press for a few minutes. A young man arrived saying, "Mr. Vanderbilt, your public demands an interview!" This made Mr. Vanderbilt laugh, and he answered, "Oh, my public be damned." In due course the young man left and next morning his article appeared in the paper with a large headline reading, "Vanderbilt says, 'The Public be damned.'" That he was not so black as painted I have from a cousin to whom my grandmother after her husband's death said, "Your grandfather never said an unkind word to me during all the years we were married."

  In the "House of Vanderbilt"* [* Vogue Magazine, November 15, 1941] by Frank Crowninshield, I find a reference to my grandmother in which he says, "She was an amazing woman who brought up her children to become people of the greatest cultivation and taste. She had been born Maria Louisa Kissam, the daughter of a clergyman of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Kissams were an old and distinguished family, Mrs. Vanderbilt's father having descended from the Benjamin Kissam who, in 1786, married Cornelia Roosevelt, the daughter of the patriarchal Isaac, and the President's great-great-grandfather." Of my grandmother's eight children my father, W. K., as he was known to his friends, was the second son. I remember my grandmother very well, and our visits to her in the big house on Fifth Avenue directly opposite St. Patrick's Cathedral where she lived. She was a lovely old lady, gracious and sweet as old ladies should be. All her grandchildren—we were, I think, twenty-six—loved her. After my grandfather's death in 1885 she lived alone with her youngest son George. Uncle George was quite different from my other uncles and aunts. With his dark hair and eyes, he might have been a Spaniard. He had a narrow sensitive face, and artistic and literary tastes. After my grandmother's death in 1896 he created Biltmore, a great estate in North Carolina where he built model houses and fostered village industries.

  My father's eldest brother Uncle Corneil, as we called him, was a stem and serious person, or so we thought. He was not gay like my father and Uncle Fred. Of my four aunts I loved my Aunt Emily Sloane best for, like my father, she was of a joyous nature and had the look of happy expectancy one sees on the faces of those who love life. She and my Aunt Florence were always perfectly dressed, and, with their slight figures and quiet distinction, reminded me of Jane Austen's charmingly prim ladies. Sometime before her death I went to see Aunt Emily. She was sitting at a window overlooking Central Park. It struck me that her days must have been very long, now that she was widowed and that the bridge game she loved was no longer possible because of her failing memory. But when I sympathized with her, she folded her hands and softly smiling answered—"I have such lovely thoughts to keep me company," and when I crept away fearing to disturb them, I heard her murmuring, as if conversing with ghosts of the past. She lived to be over ninety. At her memorial service, the Rector of St. Bartholomew's in New York paid a well-deserved tribute to her lovely character and generous charity.

  My maternal grandfather, Murray Forbes Smith, was descended from the Stirlings, and both my mother's given names— Alva Erskine—are Stirling names. The Scotch tradition of large families is borne out in two volumes on the Stirlings in America. This prolific family overflowed from Virginia into the more southern states and produced several governors and people of importance. All this accentuated in my mother a pride in her Southern birth and a certain disdain for the mercenary spirit of the North. Her father, who owned plantations near Mobile, was ruined by the liberation of the slaves and, after the Civil War, moved to Paris. There my mother's eldest sister made her debut at one of the last balls given at the Tuileries by Napoleon III. My mother and I used to attribute our love for France to a Huguenot ancestor who escaped to America after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Indeed we were happier in France than in any other country, and, following the example of an aunt and a great-aunt, we both returned to live there.

  Why my parents ever married remains a mystery to me. They were both delightful, charming and intelligent people, but wholly unsuited to each other. My father, although deep in his business interests, found life a happy adventure. His gentle nature hated strife. I still feel pain at the thought of the unkind messages I was made the bearer of when, in the months that
preceded their parting, my mother no longer spoke to him. The purport of those messages I no longer remember—they were, I believe, concerned with the divorce she desired and with her wishes and decrees regarding custody of the children and arrangements for the future. My father had a generous and unselfish nature; his pleasure was to see people happy and he enjoyed the company of his children and friends, but my mother —for reasons I can but ascribe to a towering ambition—opposed these carefree views with all the force of her strong personality. Her combative nature rejoiced in conquests. She loved a fight. A born dictator, she dominated events about her as thoroughly as she eventually dominated her husband and her children. If she admitted another point of view she never conceded it; we were pawns in her game to be moved as her wishes decreed. I remember once objecting to her taste in the clothes she selected for me. With a harshness hardly warranted by so innocent an observation, she informed me that I had no taste and that my opinions were not worth listening to. She brooked no contradiction, and when once I replied, "I thought I was doing right," she stated, "I don't ask you to think, I do the thinking, you do as you are told," which reduced me to imbecility. Her dynamic energy and her quick mind, together with her varied interests, made her a delightful companion. But the bane of her life and of those who shared it was a violent temper that like a tempest at times engulfed us all.

  One of her earliest ambitions was to become a leader of New York society. To this end she gave a fancy dress ball for the opening of her new house, 660 Fifth Avenue, on March 26, 1883. In contemporary newspapers I have read how eagerly invitations to this party were sought after. It proved to be, they said, the most magnificent entertainment yet given in a private house in America. My parents, gorgeous in medieval costumes, received the élite of what then was New York society. My godmother, who as Consuelo Yznaga had been my mother's bridesmaid, was our house guest and the ball was given in her honor. She was then Viscountess Mandeville and soon after when her husband succeeded to the dukedom became Duchess of Manchester. Beautiful, witty, gay and gifted, with the ability to play by ear any melody she had heard, she delighted us with her charm. Her lovely twin daughters who died so tragically young and her son Kimbolton spent that winter with us. Kim had early acquired the sense of importance a title is apt to confer, and one day when the postman left a letter for Viscount Mandeville with the comment, "How I would like to see a real live lord," he was astonished to see a diminutive figure in a sailor suit approach him exclaiming, "Then look at me."