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October 16 - October 30, 2023
Alice of The Breakers, kept a tight control over her seven children and reveled in her husband’s wealth, wasting no time throwing it into the creation of enormous palaces on Fifth Avenue and in Newport.
Alice and Cornelius II had the money, to be sure, and were enough generations removed from the Commodore to claim the respectability necessary for social success according to Caroline Astor and Ward McAllister. What they lacked, however, was “ease of manner,” perhaps what in subsequent generations might be termed “cool.”
other at the beginning of the 1880s, by the end of the decade he began to lose his grip on the orb and scepter of New York society. First, in 1889, he alienated the powerful society hostess Mamie Fish, also known as Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, when he had the audacity to publicly criticize a dinner she gave, and he further humiliated her husband when he joked about an event the family was planning, by saying, “I am glad I had nothing to do with such a Fish ball.”
fatal error. McAllister let slip that he was writing a memoir about his society friends.
His book, Society as I Have Found It, was published in 1890, a meandering mishmash of breathless gossip, reminiscences about parties and costumes and conversations, and opinionated remarks on entertaining and fashion, heavily padded with advice on letter writing and stationery. McAllister craved the attention the book would bring, but frankly, he also needed the money. Reaction was swift and total: Ward McAllister was out.
Mrs. Astor would never forgive him. McAllister’s situation worsened in 1892, when, in a flagrant bid for relevance, he gave a list of the Four Hundred to the New York Times. The release of the closely guarded list caused a furor, not least because it contained just over three hundred names instead of four hundred. McAllister basked in the press attention and the seeming confirmation of his status as social arbiter.
McAllister, after all, who paved the way for the ultimate Vanderbilt triumph, as we shall see. But even worse than his influence being available for a fee, McAllister had also violated a cardinal rule of society: he was freely spilling details about his fancy friends to reporters.
early February 1895, word shot through the throngs of revelers at the annual Charity Ball that Ward McAllister had died.
Ward McAllister was the first and greatest of what would later be called a “walker,” a gentleman friend whose special skill lies in escorting society ladies whose husbands have other interests or limited time and yet whose comportment does not leave the ladies vulnerable to intimations of scandal. He was married and had produced three children, though his wife, Sarah Gibbons, was rumored to be an invalid and was never seen in society. She presided neither at his farm dinners in Newport nor his smart evenings in New York, but her invisible existence was enough to render McAllister socially safe
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Mrs. Astor? Her seemingly infinite iron reign over New York society lasted only about twenty years, from around 1872 to around 1892,
As society shifted and changed around her, Caroline Astor’s primacy waned. Around 1895, she decamped farther north, to a lavish, elegant palace at 841 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Sixty-Fifth Street, facing “the Central Park,” as it was then known. That same year, she gave a ball in her new home, hosting six hundred people, a newsworthy event in that she hadn’t done it for some time. All went off in true Gilded Age, Old World, Astor style. The ball didn’t begin until midnight, as all the guests were first attending a performance of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera. The ball was held in the
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In Society as I Have Found It, without naming her explicitly, McAllister calls Caroline Astor a “true and loyal friend in sunshine and shower.” Mrs. Astor did not attend his funeral.
March 26, 1883, both sides of the street outside the grandiose mansion at 660 Fifth Avenue
The greatest ball of the nineteenth century, the Vanderbilt ball, was about to begin.
the entire face and trajectory of New York society was changed in one evening, at a costume ball in which some of the attendees wore electric lights in their hair, in 1883, a time when virtually all homes and spaces were lit by gaslight and candles—before
Alva Erskine Smith? In 1883, on the night of her infamous ball, to which around thirteen hundred invitations were issued and which she deliberately scheduled after Lent, so there would be no competing balls or entertainments to distract public attention from her bid for social domination—traditionally, Lent brought the city’s high social season to its end, but Alva had very little patience for tradition—Alva was known as Alva Vanderbilt. The wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, one of the two surviving sons of Billy the Blatherskite and a grandson of the Commodore, she was mistress of a
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Alva was already years into a rivalry with Alice Vanderbilt, her sister-in-law, over which of them would mount the most serious challenge to Caroline Astor’s iron rule over New York society.
Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”
At last, by the early 1880s, there was a Vanderbilt wife with the will and guile necessary to crack New York society.
She would need someone on the inside. She would need Ward McAllister. Any society lady worth her salt cellars wanted McAllister’s advice on décor, menu, and arrangements for music and dancing. He was the man who mattered. Alva knew that the first step to her social success would involve consulting with him.
the Astor brownstone at 350 Fifth Avenue,
shortly before the ball was scheduled to take place, Alva let it be known that, unfortunately, because Mrs. Astor had never called on her, she would be unable to invite Carrie.
Ward McAllister’s “Four Hundred” was a codified, publicized version of such a list—and passed set times in the afternoon creaking along in landaus from brownstone to brownstone, as often as not sending a footman to the door to leave cards on behalf of themselves, their husbands, and their children without bothering to try to step inside for an actual visit.
Society hostesses were expected to maintain hours when they would be “at home,” which meant they were prepared to receive visitors, not just physically in their houses.
Calling was as much about reaffirming networks of power and acquaintanceship as it was about actually passing pleasurable time in one another’s company—perhaps more so.
That Mrs. Astor had never deigned to call on her suggested that she believed Alva Vanderbilt did not socially exist.
Mrs. Astor rode in her carriage the one long mile from her mansion in Murray Hill to 660 Fifth Avenue.
Carrie Astor would be invited to the masquerade ball and would perform her quadrille. And New York society would never be the same again.
Alva’s triumph could not have been more complete: Mrs. Astor herself attended the ball.
As always, Ward McAllister accompanied her,
Alva had out-Astored Mrs. Astor on every level.
“We here reach a period when New York society turned over a new leaf,” wrote Ward McAllister ten years later, reflecting on Alva’s ball in the book that would be his undoing. “Up to this time, for one to be worth a million of dollars was to be rated a man of fortune, but now, bygones must be bygones. New York’s ideas as to values, when fortune was named, leaped boldly up to ten millions, fifty millions, one hundred millions, and the necessities and luxuries followed suit.”
These two events—Alva’s ball and the recovery of the bodies from the Diamond coal mine tragedy—shared equal space on the front page of the New York Times for March 27, 1883. The following year, 1884, Alva Vanderbilt appeared at Caroline Astor’s annual opera ball for the first time. The arrival of the Vanderbilts was complete.
Willie and Alva Vanderbilt, separated. The divorce was finalized in March. The stories had been horrid, of course, full of gossip and innuendo. But once the wedding was announced, the attention had shifted to Consuelo.
great-granddaughter of the Commodore. We have a window into how Consuelo felt on her wedding day because of a ghostwritten memoir she published in 1952 called The Glitter and the Gold.
It was the worst day of Consuelo’s life.
She had first met Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, Ninth Duke of Marlborough, in 1894, just a year before. She was seventeen; he was twenty-three. They’d been seated next to each other at a dinner, by the design of one of her mother’s friends.
Consuelo’s namesake and her mother’s best friend, Consuelo Yznaga, would even go on to inspire the character of Conchita Clossen in Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel of transatlantic husband hunting, The Buccaneers.
the exchange of her millions for the Duke’s title and some property of uncertain value and encumberment,
Some years earlier, Willie had met a lovely blond woman named Nellie Neustretter at a racetrack in France and had installed her in apartments in Paris and Deauville. He’d not only kitted her out in finery and servants, but he carried on with her publicly and didn’t even have the decency to deny it when Alva confronted him. Nellie was twenty-five with a toddler and a weeks-old baby.
Consuelo’s father, this man on whom Consuelo now leaned, as she followed the whispering skirts of her bridesmaids and approached the start of the nave, from which all of New York waited to watch her be married. Alva had forbidden her daughter from having any interaction with the Vanderbilts at all since the divorce. Consuelo wasn’t allowed to accept any gifts from that side of her family, and none of them, save her grandmother, Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt, Billy’s widow, was even invited to her wedding. Because the others weren’t invited, though, her grandmother had refused to come.
Alva had been keeping some secrets of her own, not the least of which was a budding relationship with Willie’s best friend, Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the son of the financier and horse breeder August Belmont. Now that she was divorced, she no longer had to conceal it. Short, more pleasure-loving even than Willie, Belmont had been the subject of rumors, with regard to Alva, since 1888,
“He’s only marrying you for your money,”
Duke the princely (dukely?) sum of $3 million. They’d both receive a promise of $100,000 a year for life, provided she went through with the wedding.
had no opinion on women’s suffrage
Consuelo seemed to have no opinions of her own whatsoever.
the Washington Post had published a roundup of the most eligible millionaire girls on the scene in Newport and Bar Harbor, shamelessly pointing out that it was Consuelo’s mother’s ambition driving her daughter’s rumored engagement to the Duke, and not the young lady’s own heart. The Post also made sure to mention that the bride would have $15 million upon her marriage (not true) and the white marble palace on Fifth Avenue where she was born (she hadn’t been born there).
Once, Consuelo had dared express her own opinion about the clothes her mother had chosen for her. Alva informed her that she had no taste, and so, her opinions weren’t worth considering. “I thought I was doing right,” Consuelo said. “I don’t ask you to think. I do the thinking, you do as you are told,” Alva countered.
“How full of tedious restraint was this artificial life!”
On August 28, 1895, after weeks of preparation and speculation, and after their tour of Europe during which she had first met the Duke, Consuelo was officially presented to society at a triumphal debutante ball hosted by Alva at Marble House, their summer house in Newport.
