This story of the liaison refused to go away for several months. It was noted that Alva did not attend her namesake’s funeral. By April, Town Topics was reporting that the rumour mill had it that the death of Lady Alva Montagu had marked a turning point in the relationship between William K. and Consuelo Manchester, and that there was a persistent story ‘that will seemingly not die down … to the effect that Mr Vanderbilt would have become the husband of the Duchess of Manchester had it not been for her bereavement in the loss of her twin daughter Lady Alva Montagu’.78 By the middle of June, a consensus seemed to be emerging in the society press that Nellie Neustretter had indeed simply been engaged by William K. as co-respondent, though this does not wholly explain why he felt obliged to spend several months in her company.
The affair caught the attention of Henry James, also in Paris in the summer of 1895, who thought that William K.’s relationship with Nellie was part of a complicated strategy to force Alva into divorce, and that it had the makings of a short story: ‘The husband doesn’t care a straw for the cocotte and makes a bargain with her that is wholly independent of real intimacy. He makes her understand the facts of his situation – which is that he is in love with another woman. Toward that woman his wife’s character and proceedings drive him, but he loves her too much to compromise her. He can’t let himself be divorced on her account – he can on that of the femme galante – who has nothing – no name – to lose.’79 This would become the starting point for James’s novel, The Special Type, published in 1903.
Under the terms of the divorce, Alva kept Marble House, which had already been made over to her at her insistence, and refused William K.’s offers of both 660 Fifth Avenue and Idle Hour, which were ‘rendered disagreeable by unpleasant memories’.80 The terms of the divorce settlement were never made public, in spite of furious efforts by the press to find out, but Alva received a sum close to $2.3 million and an income of about $100,000 a year, with provision that specified amounts of the capital sum should be transferred to each of the children on marriage or at the age of twenty-eight.81
Predictably, Alva faced a harsh reaction from some elements in society, but as ever, she presented herself as having toughed it out: ‘I did not fail myself at this stormy time. I got my divorce and just as in childhood days I accepted the whipping my mother gave me for taking the forbidden liberty, so I bared my back to the whipping of Society for taking a freedom which would eventually better them as well as myself.’82 In spite of Choate’s warnings about the viciousness of hegemenous males, society women were worse. ‘Yes, and they put on the lash, especially the women, and especially the Christian women. When I walked into Trinity Church in Newport on a Sunday soon after obtaining my divorce, not a single one of my old friends would recognize me.’83
On Wednesday 13 March, Alva departed for Europe with Consuelo and Harold, seen off by William Gilmour. The New York Tribune reported that Alva travelled in her usual style with five maids, one man servant and seventy pieces of luggage.
By now, Alva had another compelling reason for sailing to Europe. Preoccupied by her divorce, she had failed to take seriously Consuelo’s growing attachment to a man of thirty-three, which was threatening to undermine her plan to place her daughter in an aristocratic setting. It is impossible that Alva failed to notice the warmth between Consuelo and her American admirer since the indefatigable World had picked up the scent as early as the middle of February that year. On Valentine’s Day, it chose to run the story as a romantic tale of shattered hopes: ‘A young man, bearing an old family first name, prefixed with a prominent Boston family surname, has been all devotion to Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt and she apparently was most happy in his attentions. This joyousness must now be relegated to the saddest of “might have beens”.’84 Two days later the same paper explicitly linked Consuelo and the Duke of Marlborough asking: ‘Is she to be a Duchess? It is quite generally recognised that the Duke must marry money if he is to keep up Blenheim. His income is only £8,000 ($40,000) a year and Blenheim costs £14,000 ($370,000) a year.’85
The young man who had been all devotion to Consuelo was Winthrop Rutherfurd, son of the eminently respectable Mr and Mrs Lewis Rutherfurd, a New England family of impeccable pedigree (Lewis Rutherfurd was one of the earliest Patriarchs in 1872). Through his mother, Winthrop Rutherfurd was a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, colonial governor of New York, and John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts. ‘Winty’ Rutherfurd was tall and famously good-looking. Though trained as a lawyer, he spent much of his youth playing polo and golf, for which he had something of a reputation. He was a member of the elite Newport Golf Club and has been described as suitable for Consuelo in every way.
As far as Alva was concerned, however, he was not suitable at all. The first problem was that he simply represented the wrong marital path. In America in the 1890s, there were two routes to dynastic marriage open to the new phenomenon, the American heiress. One was to marry into the network of American families enriched by industrial capitalism, further consolidating vast fortunes, creating an aristocracy of money but effectively embracing the ‘new’. The other was to marry into one of the European aristocracies, depleting the industrial fortune but ennobling the American family through association with nobility and centuries of tradition, elegance and culture.86 This trend had been started in Alva’s generation by Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill and by Consuelo Yznaga, though as it happened neither of them had huge dowries. By 1895, the European route to aristocratising one’s family had become highly competitive. That year alone there were nine marriages between heiresses and English aristocrats** while Anna Gould’s marriage to Frenchman Count Boni de Castellane set new standards for lavish New York weddings. By 1914 commentators calculated that over 500 American fortunes had been transferred to Europe through this route.87 Alva, always ambivalent about the ‘crude’ and ‘unfinished’ nature of American life, embittered by the power structures of American society, drawn to those parts of European history where aristocratic marriages were arranged as a matter of course and a great admirer of British aristocracy was, of course, determined that it would be the European and not the American route for Consuelo.
A further problem with Winthrop Rutherfurd, however, was that he was far too close – and far too similar – to William K. Vanderbilt, the ‘weak nonentity’ whom she had just divorced. According to Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr, ‘the Rutherfurds lived well, dressed expensively, and did little else’, though Winthrop’s father, Lewis Rutherfurd, was a distinguished astronomer who took some early photographs of the surface of the moon. As far as Alva was concerned, Winthrop Rutherfurd was a fine example of the new breed of useless male now emerging, like her ex-husband, from three generations of plutocratic wealth. Alva also suspected him of being a gold-digger. American society had evolved to a point where it was impossible to participate without being very rich. Consuelo’s dowry was a clear temptation to a young man from a good family with social ambitions but without great wealth. Alva, of course, took the view that almost all rich American men were serial adulterers who left the business of keeping up respectable appearance to their wives, while they romped like young colts in ‘the world-wide field’.88 In Consuelo’s case there was a real danger that she would facilitate ‘romping’ by financing it. Alva always maintained that her divorce had no effect on her children’s lives. In reality, the bitterness and cynicism engendered by William K.’s philandering profoundly coloured her plans for Consuelo’s