Unsurprisingly, the Commodore’s wealth inspired great jealousy as well as admiration. Some of the stories about his coarse behaviour came from his aforementioned competitors, and from embittered members of his own family contesting his will; he may also have played up to his image as a farmyard peasant when it suited him. Whatever the explanation, Frank Crowinshield could still write in 1941: ‘The most persistent myth concerning the family was that they were all, if not boors exactly, at any rate unused to the social amenities. The myth was so pervasive that one may still hear it from the lips of decrepit New Yorkers who, in discreet whispers, recite the risks their fathers ran in crossing the portals … Such people still speak as though their sires had risked calling upon Attila, or visiting, without benefit of axe or bludgeon, the dread caves of the anthropophagi.’13
The force of the Commodore’s personality was so great that it affected society’s perception of his children and grandchildren. For his own part, he left no-one in any doubt that his sons were a disappointment to him, and he was much exercised about the best way to hand on his great fortune until he felt he had solved the problem in the 1870s. There was naturally no question of giving any kind of financial control to his daughters; his favourite son died of malarial fever during the Civil War; and Cornelius Jeremiah, who not only suffered from epilepsy but also an addiction to gambling, was regarded as beyond redemption. This left Consuelo’s grandfather, William Henry Vanderbilt, who was treated with utter contempt well into middle-age, and was habitually addressed as ‘blatherskite’, not to mention ‘beetlehead’. William Henry – or ‘Billy’ as he was known to his family – made matters worse by kowtowing to his father at every turn. Even on the North Star cruise, he responded to the Commodore’s offer of $10,000 if he would give up smoking by refusing the money saying: ‘Your wish is sufficient,’ and flinging his cigar overboard. This tactic was so perfectly calibrated to irritate the Commodore that he slowly lit a cigar of his own and blew smoke in his son’s face.14
William Henry was a far more careful, painstaking and methodical man than the Commodore, showing little of the latter’s startling entrepreneurial flair – one of many causes of the Commodore’s profound scorn. During his early career at a banking house, William Henry worked himself into a state of nervous collapse, attracting further contumely, and was promptly expelled with his wife Maria Kissam to work a small and difficult farm on Staten Island. (The Kissams were an old and distinguished family, and although Alva Vanderbilt later claimed to have propelled the Vanderbilts into society, this match could certainly have taken them into its outer circles if either party had been interested.)
On Staten Island, Maria Kissam Vanderbilt carried on the family tradition by producing a large family of her own – nine children in all. Three of her sons would later become Consuelo’s famous building uncles: Cornelius II of The Breakers, Newport; Frederick of the Hyde Park mansion, New York; and George, who created the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. The fourth – though not the youngest – was Consuelo’s father, William Kissam Vanderbilt, often known as ‘William K.’
In the family mythology, William Henry, the father of these sons, only finally won respect from the Commodore after many years with one of the double-crossing japes over a deal that nineteenth-century Vanderbilts seem to have enjoyed. It involved the definition of a scow-load of manure. William Henry offered to buy manure for his farm from his father’s stables at $4 a load. The Commodore then saw him pile several loads on to one scow and asked him how many he had bought. ‘How many?,’ William Henry is said to have replied; ‘One, of course! I never put but one load on a scow.’15 Finally impressed that his son was capable of getting the better of him, the Commodore, who was a shareholder in the near-bankrupt Staten Island Railroad, decided to turn it over to William Henry to see what he could make of it. Within two years the Blatherskite had put the little railroad on a secure financial footing and proved his value in the only vocabulary the Commodore truly understood by turning worthless stocks into $175 a share.16
The Commodore then moved William Henry and his growing family back from Staten Island to New York, made him vice-president of the newly acquired Harlem and Hudson Railroad, and put him in charge of the daily operation of the lines. Once again, William Henry responded magnificently to the challenge, finding economies and efficiencies wherever he looked, whereupon his father made him vice-president of the New York Central after 1869. The Commodore remained in overall strategic control of the enterprise until the day he died, but increasingly left the day-to-day management to William Henry. In coming to trust his eldest son’s managerial capabilities, the Commodore, always in the vanguard of entrepreneurial capitalism, grasped that the qualities needed to build a fortune were not the same as the qualities needed to maintain it. ‘Any fool can make a fortune,’ the Commodore is said to have told William Henry before he died. ‘It takes a man of brains to hold on to it after it is made.’17
The difficult relationship that existed for so many years between the Commodore and William Henry would have repercussions for Consuelo: her father, William Kissam Vanderbilt (later one of the world’s richest men) grew up in modest circumstances on Staten Island during the period when his parents were out of favour with the Commodore. Munsey’s Magazine found this reassuring, thankful that the humble circumstances principle would hold good for another generation or two: ‘The decline of ancestral vigour and the dissipation of inherited wealth, which sociologists claim is almost inevitable among the very rich, has doubtless been deferred for a very few generations, among the Vanderbilts, by the sturdy plainness in which William Henry had brought up his sons and daughters,’18 it said pompously. This may have been true, but it also meant that William K. would spend much of his adult life having as little to do with sturdy plainness as possible, an attitude to life with considerable implications for his own children.
William K. was also raised in a very different atmosphere from his father, who was a kind and mild-mannered man, an affectionate husband and not in the least given to domestic tyranny. A charming painting of the William Henry Vanderbilt family by Seymour Guy in 1873 suggests a large family at ease with itself, and even allowing for polite obituarists and nineteenth-century sentimentality, there appears to have been none of the contemptuous atmosphere that blighted the youth of the Commodore’s children. Maria Kissam came from a cultivated background and both she and her husband saw to it that their children were properly educated. Willie (as he was known) was taught by private tutors and his parents took the unusual step of sending him to Geneva in Switzerland for part of his education. According to architectural historians John Foreman and Robbe Pierce Stimson: ‘Few Americans of the time possessed the means, let alone the inclination, to send their sons abroad to school. Willie became a true sophisticate at an early age. He was fluent in French, and a connoisseur of European culture, art, and manners. The scandal-mongering tabloids of the era loved to portray the Vanderbilts as coarse parvenus. However, the truth in the case of Willie’s generation – and especially in the case of Willie himself – was precisely the opposite.’19
William K. Vanderbilt grew into an outstandingly good-looking young man who later became famous for his charm, hospitality and agreeable manners. Consuelo adored him. ‘[He] found life a happy adventure …,’ she wrote. ‘His pleasure was to see people happy.’20 The problem for such a gregarious young Vanderbilt was that while his grandfather the Commodore was alive there was little possibility of making an entrée into New York society, or of enjoying a life of leisure. The Commodore’s reputation as a vulgarian put paid to contact with New York’s emerging social elite; and while his grandfather retained an iron grip on the family fortune, it was essential to behave as he wished. ‘What you’ve got isn’t worth anything unless you have got the power,’ was one of the Commodore’s favourite financial saws.