Amanda Stuart - Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt - The Story of a Mother and a Daughter in the ‘Gilded Age’

For the hundreds of visitors who were not part of the inner circle and who arrived in Newport each summer with the hope of breaking through, it was far, far worse. ‘It is an axiom of Newport that it takes at least four years to get in,’ wrote society author Mrs John Van Rensselaer. ‘Each season the persistent climber makes some advance through a barrage of snubs. The seasoned member of the Newport colony enters into the cruel game of quashing the pride of the stranger with great glee. Eventually, if he will bear all this, the candidate receives an invitation which indicates that he has finally been accepted by whatever particular set he has besieged. Then he turns about and snubs those remaining petitioners as harshly as he himself was snubbed. For the privilege of being a guest at certain houses and the license to affront those not yet in, he has spent perhaps a million dollars.’ 78

In commissioning Richard Morris Hunt to design Marble House as her Newport summer cottage Alva accelerated Newport’s progress towards becoming the social capital of the Gilded Age. It has been remarked that the Vanderbilts only went to Newport in 1885 because of the Astors. Alva would have resented this deeply for though she undoubtedly set up camp in Newport near Mrs Astor’s house, Beechwood, and then proceeded to outshine her architecturally, she had, of course, been to Newport for holidays as a child. She was now a leader of society herself; and by 1885 she would have regarded a Newport summer ‘cottage’ of her own as a matter of entitlement. Having acquired a plot of land on Bellevue Avenue, however, she and William K. set about taking the business of aristocratisation one step further than anyone else. While Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport house, The Breakers, was modelled on the palazzo of a Medici merchant, Alva left the Medicis behind and addressed herself directly to the Bourbon monarchs of the ancien regime.

Often described as Richard Morris Hunt’s masterpiece, Marble House contained allusions to the White House and the Petit Trianon at Versailles. It was certainly not lacking in ambition. In the memoir she dictated to Matilda Young, Alva also made mention of the Acropolis. For Richard Morris Hunt it was one of the great commissions of his life: he had unlimited resources, a client whose historical imagination and ambition matched his own and who had a sense of refinement and taste far more developed than any of his other clients.

Construction of Marble House began in conditions of great secrecy in 1888. By 1889, the contractor, Charles E. Clarke of Boston, had leased a wharf and warehouse in Newport harbour for materials which were brought in by ship. Artisans imported from France and Italy were quartered in separate lodgings and banned from communicating with each other on site. High fences went up round the building plot to hide it from the gaze of curious Newporters. It would take four years to complete. As drawings in the archives of Richard Morris Hunt show, it was very much Alva’s project and she involved herself in every detail. ‘This absolutely disapproved of by Mrs Vanderbilt’ notes an anonymous hand on one drawing of a doorway. ‘This is all wrong,’ declares Alva in her own handwriting on another drawing. ‘Will send photograph of marble to be adopted and each side of mantle to be solid marble panels and no columns on this end of the room.’ 79

While Marble House was under construction, the Vanderbilts kept themselves amused with their other new toy, the steam yacht Alva. Launched by Alva’s sister, Jenny Yznaga, on 14 October 1886, the yacht was 285-feet long and 32-feet wide and had a tonnage of 1,151.27, making her the largest private yacht in America by a good 35 feet, beating J. P. Morgan’s Corsair (165 feet), William Astor’s new Nourmahal (233 feet) and Jay Gould’s Atlanta (250 feet). In fact, the Alva was so large that the Turkish authorities once mistook her for a small cruiser and fired two shots across her bow in the Dardanelles. ‘Mrs Vanderbilt, who is generally credited to be a lady of excellent taste, deems that elaborate and ornate furnishings are out of place on a yacht. She thinks that she is rich enough to afford simplicity in this instance,’ reported The New York Times. 80 It was true that all the walls were simply panelled with mahogany, and the teak decks were simply covered with oriental rugs, but this principle was extended to a dining room which had a piano, a library with a fireplace, seven guest rooms, and a ten-room suite for the Vanderbilts (though the mahogany gave out below stairs in the accommodation for the crew of fifty-three).

While Alva’s mother, Phoebe Smith, had once travelled with two maids and a southern mocking bird, the Vanderbilts found it necessary to take along a crew that included a master officer, a first officer, a second officer, a boatswain and a boatswain’s mate, a storekeeper, four quartermasters, a ship’s carpenter, twelve seamen, a chief engineer, first and second assistant engineers, six firemen, three coal passers, three oilers, a donkey engineman, an electrician, an ice machine engineer, a chief steward, a ward-room steward, a firemen’s mess-man, a sailors mess-man, two mess boys, a baker and a doctor. 81 (The crew total of fifty-three does not include the French chef, family friends, household servants, or tutors and governesses for the children who were frequently present.) Labour unrest was dealt with in peremptory fashion. On 4 December 1887, the ship’s log noted that men who had demanded better rates of pay and who refused to work were ‘quickly landed’. Replacements were then picked up in Constantinople. The Vanderbilts and their guests, meanwhile, not only travelled in the lap of luxury but were treated as visiting dignitaries wherever they went, greeted by consuls, admirals, ambassadors, and kings. Even the Sultan of Turkey made recompense for the shots fired across the yacht’s bows in the Dardanelles by granting William K. an audience and arranging a tour of his private palaces which included a visit to his harem; (the abject dependence of the women there would make a lifelong impression on Alva).

Cruises on the yacht between 1886 and 1890 took William K., Alva and the children to the West Indies, Europe, Turkey, North Africa and Egypt and often lasted several months. One voyage started in July 1887 and only ended on 31 March 1888, stopping at Madeira, Gibraltar and at Alexandria – where the party left the Alva and engaged one of Thomas Cook’s steam dahabiyehs, the Prince Abbas , for a trip up the Nile. Alva later remembered that while they were in Cairo, one of their regular travelling companions, Fred Beach, became the object of Baroness Vetsera’s attentions when they met her in Shepheard’s Hotel – attentions to which he showed no objection at all, but allegedly did not respond. (The following year the Baroness Vetsera would be found dead of gunshot wounds alongside her lover, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, at Mayerling.) Alva shopped for furniture for Marble House during cruises on the Alva , and on at least one occasion left the children at Nell Gwyn’s house in London while she went to look at potential purchases. On one cruise, the men of the party hunted deer at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and stalked them in Scotland where the Vanderbilts took Beaufort Castle for the shooting season. Its owner, Lord Lovat, died while they were in residence and they witnessed a Highland funeral. This added to the general gloom of the experience, which Alva never wished to repeat: ‘I always found the climate very trying in Scotland, and caring nothing for sport, found little to do there of interest.’ 82

The benefits of this style of international travel were not always clear to Consuelo. Extended cruising put paid to any chance of conventional schooling and it isolated Consuelo from the company of children her own age for months at a time. Life on the largest private yacht in America could be dull for a child, due in part to Alva’s relentless emphasis on improvement. ‘Heavy seas provided our only escape from the curriculum of work,’ Consuelo wrote later, ‘for even sightseeing on our visits ashore became part of our education, and we were expected to write an account of all we had seen’. 83 In spite of her magnificence, Alva was not a particularly seaworthy boat. There were extended bouts of seasickness (noted in the ship’s log when they moored off Burntisland in Scotland in 7 August 1887), and life at sea could sometimes be positively frightening. ‘Ship rolling a great deal and shipping quantities of water, which found its way below … Both large tables in forward and after saloons carried away,’ 84 read an entry in the ship’s log of an early cruise. During one storm an idiotic tutor maintained that it would only take seven huge waves in succession to sink the boat. ‘Willie and I spent the rest of the day counting the waves in terrorised apprehension as the green water deepened on our deck,’ 85 recalled Consuelo.