When Alva was twenty-one, her father’s health started to fail as a result of acute financial strain, and possibly because of a drink problem. In the summer of 1874, Alva travelled to White Sulphur Springs in Virginia, a popular resort since the eighteenth century on account of its mineral waters, and a well-known spot for southern belles wishing to secure proposals of marriage. She knew that William K. Vanderbilt was also on his way there and she was under immense pressure. Although Alva may appear as coolly cynical as Edith Wharton’s Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, her anxious manipulations in 1874 seem much closer to those of the orphaned Lily Bart in The House of Mirth – who knew that she had to ‘calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance’ if she were to succeed, and who ‘hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch’.79 At twenty-one, it was clear that Alva already felt that her years were against her for she would lie to William K. about her age, telling him that she was a year younger than she actually was – an error which continued to appear in Vanderbilt legal documents long after his death.
Much later, Town Topics would recall the gossips’ story about the way Alva netted her husband at White Sulphur Springs in 1874. According to the whisperers, she had decided that a grand gesture was required so she went to the village store and bought yards and yards of black tarlatan which she and her old nurse turned into a dress in the course of the afternoon: ‘At dusk when everyone was upstairs dressing for dinner, the gay young girl and the old bent black woman took a mountain trail over the hill and half an hour later slipped back into the hotel laden with goldenrod.’ Together, Alva and her nurse stitched tiny Dresden bouquets of yellow goldenrod flowers all over the black tarlatan dress to spectacular effect. ‘The charming brunette, her beauty well framed in the black and gold, made her appearance in the ballroom. She was the sensation of the evening.’80 When the group returned to New York in September, Alva Erskine Smith and William Kissam Vanderbilt were formally engaged.
IN SPITE OF Murray Smith’s failing health, the family rallied to give its saviour a smart wedding. Some press reports suggest that Murray Smith felt well enough to give his daughter away in marriage, but Alva was adamant in her memoirs that he was too ill to attend, telling Sara Bard Field: ‘When I was all dressed up for the ceremony and about to leave the house he kissed me with great tenderness and told me I was taking a great burden off his mind and that he knew that if anything happened to him I would look after the rest of the family.’1 This notion that she had rescued the Smiths – and had done as well as any absent son – was important to Alva’s view of herself in later life, allowing her to think of herself as a heroine rather than a gold-digger. In a letter to her lover, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Sara Bard Field remarked that Alva’s ‘terrible marriage to Mr Vanderbilt with its sordid selling of her unloving self but with the truly noble desire to save her Father’ was much like life itself: ‘a pathetic mixture of good and bad’.2
Whatever her reasons for marrying William K. Vanderbilt, Alva went to some lengths to ensure that her wedding on 20 April 1875 was impressively exclusive. It was reported as ‘the grandest wedding witnessed in this city for many years’,3 and even in old age she was anxious to stress that Calvary Church was the most fashionable church in New York and that Dr Washburn who conducted the marriage service was the most fashionable divine. Her bridesmaids included Consuelo Yznaga and Edith Cooper, but Minnie Stevens was too ill to attend and had to be replaced at the last minute by Natica Yznaga. Alva’s wedding dress from Paris failed to arrive in time (or so she said) and another was run up by Madame Donovan of New York using Phoebe’s antique lace flounces. The New York Times remarked that the wedding guests included ‘hundreds’ of the ‘wealth and fashion of the city’,4 although most of those it listed were in-laws to the Vanderbilts. Four policemen had to escort the bride through crowds from her carriage. Significantly, Alva was the first bride in New York to issue cards of admission to her wedding guests, a move guaranteed to bring crowds of the excluded flocking to the church door.
The account of her wedding that Alva dictated to her secretary, Mary Young, after 1928 suggests that she grasped early the Faustian bargain emerging between publicity and social success in Gilded Age New York – a development deplored by Henry James a decade later. ‘One sketches one’s age but imperfectly if one doesn’t touch on that particular matter: the invasion, the impudence and shamelessness, of the newspaper and the interviewer, the devouring publicity of life, the extinction of all sense between public and private. It is the highest expression of the note of “familiarity”, the sinking of manners, in so many ways, which the democratisation of the world brings with it,’5 he expostulated in 1887.
In a democratised world with few other navigational aids, visibility was rapidly becoming the key to social success and it was largely in the gift of newspapers (now becoming big businesses in their own right), and later assisted by the invention of photography. Almost everyone with social ambitions had to come to terms with this. Alva and William K. were part of a younger group. They were already much less inhibited about using publicity as a weapon than their elders, though even they would find it difficult to manipulate by the 1890s. ‘Unable to control the press, and unwilling to consider life without heightened visibility, the late nineteenth-century aristocrats were America’s first celebrity-martyrs,’6 writes Eric Homberger. If heiresses such as Gertrude Vanderbilt and Consuelo later complained that they hated being watched, they had good reason to blame their parents’ generation for seeking out publicity twenty years earlier.
Two weeks after her wedding in 1875, however, Alva had to attend to sadder matters than publicity, for her father finally died. His daughter’s change in circumstances had come too late to help him. ‘Had he died sooner, the whole course of my life might have been other than it was. But who is there living who cannot say that of some event in his or her life?,’7 Alva remarked to Sara Bard Field. After Murray Smith’s death she was shown great kindness by William Henry Vanderbilt who told Alva that he regarded her as a daughter and that she should turn to him for whatever she needed. The affection was mutual for Alva always held him in great regard. This relationship was not the problem however. Even after marriage, Alva continued to experience the effect that the power of money has on the powerless as she watched her in-laws tiptoe round the ageing Commodore. Though she always maintained fiercely that she was not overawed by him, Alva also took great care to avoid giving offence, for no-one knew how his fortune stood, nor what he proposed to do with it after his death.
Fortunately, the Commodore took to his pugnacious new granddaughter-in-law from the outset, perhaps divining qualities which were less apparent in his handsome grandson. When she expressed a fondness for country life, he shocked everyone by giving her the use of his old family home on Staten Island. ‘Much to his surprise, and I believe also his interest and gratification,