Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

But a dalliance with a pretty young thing, even an entanglement as expensive and indiscreet as Willie’s, would hardly have been enough of a crime by the standards of the day for 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. They looked the other way. They enlisted other men as husband substitutes, walkers like Ward McAllister and Harry Lehr, who were content to dress up and go to parties and gossip and snipe. Or they recruited lovers like Oliver Belmont, the kind of men who would be invited on cruises in the Mediterranean, where flirtations could simmer to life under the hot sun glinting over deep, blue European water. Or, as in Alva’s case, they contented themselves with both walkers and lovers, and leaned on their husbands for money and status only, letting them scamper off to dinners at Delmonico’s and evenings at the Metropolitan Club free of prying, wifely eyes.