Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

Alva’s affection for all things French,

the man Consuelo really loved was not there. His name was Winthrop Rutherfurd, and he had grown up in the same fast and rich universe of New York as Consuelo. He was thirty and handsome, and he thrilled her so deeply that she was powerless to conceal it. On her eighteenth birthday, March 2, he sent her a single red American Beauty rose. He didn’t attach his name, but she knew it was from him.

she readily agreed to a secret engagement,

Though Winthrop was from a prominent New York family, and was a member of the Four Hundred like the Vanderbilts were (now), Alva had determined to marry Consuelo into royalty. No American man would be good enough.

Only later did she learn that he had in fact followed her to Paris as he promised, but he’d been refused admittance when he attempted to call on her. His letters had all been confiscated and destroyed. Hers to him, the same. It was Alva.

The Duke had been invited to visit them in August or September. Until his arrival, Consuelo was never to be out of sight of her mother or her governess. Friends called to see her in Newport but were told she was not at home. Locked away, Consuelo was unable to send word to Winthrop. She couldn’t talk to him or find out what had happened. She didn’t even know if he still felt the same way about her.

Consuelo ran into Winthrop at a ball in Newport. They had one dance together. One. It was long enough for him to assure her that he still loved her, that their plan could prevail. Consuelo was on the point of responding to him when Alva seized hold of her and dragged her away from their conversation.

Alva’s supposed ailment vanished—if anything but rage had ever truly ailed her—but she treated Consuelo coldly all the same.

Alva to launch the greatest divorce case that society had ever seen. The risk to Alva had been prodigious. Women in New York society simply did not get divorced.

“In the hidden reaches where memory probes,” Consuelo would write, much later in her life, “lie sorrows too deep to fathom.”

by 1912, she was past caring about the opinion of New York society. She had flouted the rules before, and now she would thumb her nose at everything that society stood for. The Gilded Age was over, and Alva—the most gilded of them all, the wearer of Catherine the Great’s pearls, the hostess of the most fantastic and expensive costume ball ever given, plotter of the most spectacular royal marriage for her daughter—was ready to burn it all to the ground.

Alva of the women’s suffrage march of 1912.

a leader in the first wave of Progressive Era feminism in her later years?

her sensational divorce from Willie K. Vanderbilt in 1895, the same year she married off her daughter, Consuelo.

This divorce would forever alter the landscape of New York society, just as it remade the trajectory of Alva’s life.

no one—and I mean no one—expected the William K. Vanderbilts to get divorced.

plot of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence

“I always do everything first,” she said, according to her friend Elizabeth “Bessie” Drexel Lehr, wife of Harry Lehr, the society walker who stepped into Ward McAllister’s shoes. “I blaze the trail for the rest to walk in. I was the first girl of my ‘set’ to marry a Vanderbilt. Then I was the first society woman to ask for a divorce, and within a year ever so many others had followed my example. They had been wanting divorce all the time, but they had not dared to do it until I showed them the way.”

In her 1935 memoir of life in Gilded Age New York, “King Lehr” and the Gilded Age, Bessie Lehr paints a dramatic picture of Alva as a “valiant warrior to whom opposition was the breath of life. Nothing made her happier than the knowledge that she was pitting herself against the rest of the world. She loved to see herself as a pioneer, to make others bend to her will, to have them follow her in the end, meek, sheeplike.” But even she couldn’t have anticipated what was to come.

Alva’s sense of herself and her self-worth revolved around two primary spheres, or so she told herself—the maternal and the constructive.

acquiring the plot of land next door to Beechwood, Mrs. Astor’s Newport “cottage,”

Marble House. It may have had fewer rooms than Mrs. Astor’s, but the whole shebang cost $11 million in 1890s money ($310 million today), and its levels of ostentation left Beechwood in its dust. Construction lasted from 1888 until 1892, when Alva celebrated its completion by throwing—what else?—a ball.

The triumph was so complete that within the next year, Alice Vanderbilt, Alva’s sister-in-law and rival, would begin work on The Breakers so as to not be so utterly shown up.

She had married him largely out of social ambition and financial necessity rather than love per se,

One indication that her divorce fueled Alva’s later activism is that in the summer of 1917, she hired a young suffragist named Sara Bard Field to make notes for her second attempt at a memoir.

she had established a soup kitchen in New York City that catered to desperate women and streetwalkers,

“All their standards are of wealth,” she complained to Sara Field, conveniently overlooking her own magnificent expenditures in the course of her two decades as Mrs. Vanderbilt.

she skips right over her Gilded Age social excesses. “I have never met a lower type of women in general attainment, than those [at Newport],” she sniffed.

Around the time of her Marble House triumph, she began her affair with Willie’s best friend, Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont.

1888 he joined the Vanderbilts for a cruise

she tried to assert her right to take Belmont as her lover and that Willie batted her down. Alva, without naming names, implies that Willie used the power of his money to compel her to give up Belmont by making appeals to her responsibility for maintaining the family’s respectability, but that he did this while pursuing, with impunity, whatever extramarital sexual relationships he desired.

Alva was utterly unable to conceal her sense of rivalry with, and contempt for, other women.

Alva’s objection to marriage, ultimately, was that she felt owned by her husband—like a slave, robbed of authority, robbed of personhood. Slavery was the most debased condition Alva—once a slaveholder, born into a slaveholding family, who had played “North and South” the way other children played cops and robbers—could possibly conceive of.

one of Willie’s romantic distractions was someone close to Alva.

His most shocking lover was none other than Consuelo Yznaga—Alva’s best friend, namesake and godmother of her daughter, and sister-in-law of Alva’s sister Virginia.

Alva broke the first rule of being a society wife: she cast aside concern for appearances and laid bare her grievances. In Alva’s world, appearances were everything.

Willie moved out of the Petit Chateau at 660 Fifth Avenue and installed himself at the Metropolitan Club, and Alva engaged Mr. Joseph Choate as her attorney. The first thing Choate tried to do was talk Alva out of a divorce. It was impossible, he said. A defenseless woman, without wealth in her own name, whose influential friends would certainly side with her husband, could not possibly take such a drastic step.

Alva characterized the institution more than once in the notes for her memoir as legalized prostitution.

Alva put it slightly more delicately to Sara Field: “If marriage is a protection for the woman against many wrongs,” she said, “divorce is also an escape from many degrading evils.”

Alva understood better than most people the impossible position in which women found themselves in Gilded Age society—the necessity of conforming to men’s expectations to assure themselves economic and social security—she

The divorce trial began in January 1895 and was over by March. The New York World called it “the biggest divorce case that America has ever known.” Alva understood why there was so much hungry interest in the press. “Gilded sin is so much more interesting than ragged sin,” she reflected. “Scandal dressed in ermine and purple is much more salacious than scandal in overalls or a kitchen apron.”

Willie’s taking the blame allowed Alva’s reputation to remain unsullied, in spite of the open secret of her affair. She was granted a decree of dissolution, together with a settlement of $2.3 million, alimony, and custody of their three children. Alva kept her architectural prizes, too: Marble House and 660 Fifth Avenue.

she had to let the Petit Chateau go.

Alva married her lover, Oliver Belmont, on January 11, 1896, in her temporary home at 24 East Seventy-Second Street.

With her divorce and remarriage, Alva had gotten what she wanted most of all, other than love: she had gotten control—ownership, if you will—of herself.

Oliver Belmont actually pushed Alva in a more politically progressive direction. He published a liberal weekly called the Verdict, which railed against corruption and was doggedly antitrust.

She began lavishing her considerable fortune on soup kitchens, affordable and healthful housing experiments, the promotion of birth control, and most important: the vote for women. In 1909 she founded the Women’s Political Equality League, and she opened Marble House,

“Woman’s emancipation means education of men as well as women,” Alva insisted.

I am very sure it was that quality of meek submission that I then despised as I still do today[,] in women who are wives of tyrant husbands or who live under tyrannous laws.”

in the 1910s, Alva made moves toward integrating the push for women’s equality and helped establish a suffrage settlement house in Harlem.