Alva would allow none of this. ‘My mother disapproved of what she termed silly boy and girl flirtations … and my governess had strict injunctions to report any flighty disturbance of my thoughts.’91 There were moments when the doll-child found such micro-management truly insulting: ‘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 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”.’92
In America in the 1890s there were many constraints on the lives of well-to-do young ladies: few telephones, no motor cars, corsets, long skirts, hats fixed with pins, gloves and blouses with high whalebone collars. Even at Bailey’s Beach at Newport, Consuelo bobbed up and down in the water in an outfit of dark blue alpaca wool consisting of a dress, drawers, stockings and a hat. It is perhaps not surprising that almost two pages of her memoirs are given over to a long list of the books she read in French, German and English. One German governess in her teens particularly inspired her with a love of German poetry and philosophy – to such an extent that after her marriage Consuelo considered translating Also Sprach Zarathustra into English, only to discover that there were twenty-seven translations already in existence. Meanwhile, she was inspired to secret but short-lived experiments in austerity by Plutarch’s Lives (she spent a night on the floor, but caught a cold) and reached a ‘real emotional crisis’ when she found a copy of Mill on The Floss in the yacht’s library. The picture Consuelo paints of herself as a somewhat sensitive, solitary and rather bookish teenager is reinforced by an entry in the diaries of the household superintendent, William Gilmour. On Thursday 2 March 1893, he wrote: ‘Miss Vanderbilt’s birthday, 16 years old. I went down to Wintons [Huttons] 23 St this morning and bought 3 vols Keats poems for Willie’s present to his sister.’93
For many years, the marriage of Alva and William K. Vanderbilt had been propelled by shared ambition. They had conquered New York society together, paving the way for other Vanderbilts, particularly Cornelius II and Alice, to take their place at the apex of New York society. By the mid-1880s, William K. and Cornelius II were members of all the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs. Between them, the Vanderbilts had a row of magnificent houses on Fifth Avenue. Alva had undermined Mrs Astor’s monopoly to such an extent that it had become a newspaper joke to talk about the ‘Astorbilts’. Alva made her mark on New York’s architectural history too, forging an important creative link with its greatest architect, Richard Morris Hunt. But these achievements came at great emotional expense. Even by 1885, when William Henry’s death made the William K. Vanderbilts one of the richest couples in America, the glue of shared ambition had dried out. Consuelo’s sixteenth birthday in 1892 may have been celebrated with a thoughtful present from her brother; but the next two years would be deeply scarred by the unhappiness already engulfing her parents.
* approximately $13.9 billion today
** approximately $20.7 billion today
WHEN SHE TALKED about the story of her early life in later years, Alva was only prepared to discuss the disintegration of her relationship with William K. Vanderbilt in general terms. She intimated to Sara Bard Field, however, that the start of married life had been dismal. Field, whose feelings about Alva were mixed (at best), wrote to Charles Erskine Scott Wood that Alva had stopped her in the middle of the lawn at Marble House, where no servant could eavesdrop, and had spoken of herself as ‘a girl of barely seventeen who did not fully know the sex mystery’. Alva had alluded to an ‘agony of suffering’. The memory brought ‘tears from her hard heart to her eyes’. She refused to allow Field to write about this, saying that ‘it was the sacred confidence of a woman’s heart’ and that ‘the children would object … and the Vanderbilts’. Sara Bard Field suddenly found herself in tears too, partly because her own experience with Wood was very different and partly because she felt that ‘a heart that could have been loved into beauty … has been steeled against its own finer and softer emotions. O, it is all fascinating what she is now telling me. Really, it is Life.’1
Leaving aside the fact that Alva was twenty-two and not seventeen when she married, it is possible that her wedding night did indeed come as a terrible shock. Her mother had died almost five years earlier, her elder sister Armide was unmarried and such ‘innocence’ was not uncommon. (One can only hope that Mrs Oelrichs, her chaperone at White Sulphur Springs, took it upon herself to have a quiet word.) The historians John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman point out that there were also tensions in the sexual education of young men which did not help the process of marital adjustment. Many young men in New York in the 1870s had their first sexual experiences with prostitutes, ‘a poor training ground for middle-class bridegrooms’.2 In pioneering studies carried out in late-nineteenth-century America, middle-class women talked of finding sex pleasurable, but it depended on the behaviour of their husbands. Young men used to encounters with prostitutes would often ‘bring to the conjugal bedroom a form of sexual expression badly out of line with what their wives might desire. On the other hand, some married men may have continued to visit the districts precisely because they could not find in their wives the kind of sexual availability, or responsiveness, they wanted.’3 The problems caused by this kind of mismatch were often exacerbated by fear of contracting venereal disease. There is some evidence in the later part of Alva’s life that she was familiar with this particular anxiety while married to William K. Vanderbilt.
For several years, the Vanderbilts found a way of resolving these early difficulties which cannot have been helped by the death of Murray Smith two weeks after the wedding. Until about 1885, however, the marriage had such forward momentum and such a triumphantly successful agenda, that both husband and wife ignored its disadvantages. Alva later hinted that the real difficulties set in after about ten years. ‘Not many men are in love with their wives after ten or twelve years,’4 she wrote. Elsewhere she remarked that ‘sex passion’ between man and wife generally lasts about ten years, and that after that time men of her class ‘amused themselves elsewhere’.5 In the case of William K. and Alva, however, ten years of marriage coincided with the death of William Henry in 1885. William Henry’s fondness for Alva may have acted as a check on his son’s behaviour. After his death, this impediment disappeared and William K., always a handsome man, found himself in possession of a limitless fortune and much less to do. By 1885 the Vanderbilts had achieved most of their shared objectives: their yacht, the Alva and Marble House may have kept them busy – but these were opulent extras, icing on a well-baked cake.
In the second set of memoirs that Alva dictated to her secretary, Mary Young, after 1928, she suggests that having fought so hard to extract herself from the snares of genteel poverty,