Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

It is a truth readily acknowledged that a Vanderbilt heir in possession of a great fortune must be in want of ways to spend

initiated its fall, by inaugurating the Vanderbilt siege on the gilded gates of New York society that ushered in the truly astonishing excess for which the Vanderbilts would become famous. In the Gilded Age—the name given by Mark Twain to the glittering years from the 1870s until around 1900—New York society was personified by two inscrutable consuls, leaders elected by their own guile and consenting to reign together, ruling over the patricians who cowered at their feet: Caroline Astor and Ward McAllister. They were the keepers of the gates, the makers of the taste, and the arbiters of who could be said to belong and who would be excluded.

that had originally made its fortune in fur trading. (The Astor Place subway station mosaics today feature silhouettes of beavers in homage to the family’s roots.)

Throughout the 1890s, the flesh-and-bone Mrs. Astor, who was nicknamed Lina by her friends, hung this portrait in her palatial home, and she would stand under it to receive her guests, creating the impression of a doubling of her power to anyone privileged enough to approach her.

In 1862, Mrs. Astor and her husband built a brownstone town house at 350 Fifth Avenue, hastening the movement of fashionable New Yorkers northward from their former strongholds around Washington Square. From there, and from her summer cottage in Newport, Mrs. Astor watched as New York City grew and changed at a whiplash-inducing pace in the years after the Civil War.

Whereas the Old World enjoyed clear arbiters of class and distinction in the form of art, music, culture, and aristocratic titles and heritage, the United States of the immediate postbellum period was suffering an identity crisis.

She also recognized early on the importance of money in a country without landed aristocracy. In New York, society and money would never be divorced again.

With the growth of lithography and the rise of illustrated weekly magazines such as Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s, fame unlike anything seen in the years before the war was suddenly possible, and it became its own currency. Lavish balls and parties could be seen as an extension of a nationalist project, for even though the guest list was restricted, rampant coverage in the press meant that anyone with a penny to spare could read what Mrs. Astor had served her rich and glamorous guests for dinner.

Caroline Astor was a “nob,” someone with a long pedigree and old money. The Vanderbilts, in contrast, were “swells,” nouveau riche arrivistes who were ready to lavish their fortunes on social climbing.

Mrs. Astor determined that for acceptance into society, one must be at least three generations removed from whoever’s hands had been dirtied in the making of money. As her own husband was living off the fortune made by his grandfather, whose hands had been stained with beaver blood, Mrs. Astor herself was just in the clear. And then, of course, there was the amount of money under consideration. The consuls didn’t settle on a specific number, unless that number was “more.”

Ward McAllister’s biggest triumph of branding, however, was not the institution of the Patriarchs, but the naming of a number: four hundred. Ostensibly referring to the number of people who could fit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom (a rumor that has since been put to rest), McAllister determined that New York society was led by “the Four Hundred,” no more and no less.

Under Billy’s stewardship, the Vanderbilt fortune ballooned, and while Billy himself was only one generation away from his father’s rough beginnings on the Staten Island waterfront, his own children—including Cornelius II (who would finish building The Breakers in 1895) and William Kissam—qualified for inclusion in society by Mrs. Astor’s rules. They had the distance. They had clean hands, so to speak. And they certainly had the money. All they needed was the polish. By the 1870s, Billy stood ready to use his fortune to land himself and his children on New York’s social map. But where to begin?

The new-money people bounded in with a fat checkbook and bought the taste and distinction they had neither the time nor the inclination to cultivate.

What they lacked, however, was “ease of manner,” perhaps what in subsequent generations might be termed “cool.”

While no New York society figure would disavow the importance of publicity, they felt it must be rigorously controlled, and the indiscreet McAllister was clearly speaking out of turn.

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.

And what of Mrs. Astor? Her seemingly infinite iron reign over New York society lasted only about twenty years, from around 1872 to around 1892, when any pretense to patriotic or cultural values would be wholly eclipsed by the gross orgy of excess that Thorstein Veblen would name “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899.

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.

And the fact that 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 we get to all that, we have to talk about Alva. Where to start with Alva Erskine Smith?

Alice was so snobbish and removed that later in her life people would say she’d rather be driven around the city for hours than condescend to speak to her chauffeur to give him the exact address for where she was headed. Alva, by contrast, was brilliant, witty, cunning, and utterly ruthless. Her daughter, Consuelo, would later write that her mother was a “born dictator.” There could be little doubt that Alva would triumph; the only question was: how and when? William

“My life was never destined to be quite happy. . . . Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

and then Harold in 1884. At last, by the early 1880s, there was a Vanderbilt wife with the will and guile necessary to crack New York society.

One of Alva’s greatest insights was to recognize the power of the press, and as she schemed with McAllister on the plans for the ball, she used her instinct for publicity carefully. She arranged for details to slip out—a whisper here, a hint there. Anonymously sourced tidbits of information bubbled up in the press. First, she let slip the rumor that the ball would take place after Easter, well past when the usual social season was over. Alva arranged for the rumors to be officially confirmed the week before Lent, which meant an entire month of not much happening during which anticipation could build, among not only potential attendees, but also the general public.

Those six weeks were a crucial preparation time for young attendees, not only because of the necessary, pleasurable, but also stressful details of arranging one’s sumptuous historical costume, but also because of the need to practice the steps for the various thematic dances, called quadrilles, whose performance was an integral part of the spectacle of balls during the Gilded Age. Broadly speaking, a quadrille is like a square dance, with rigidly choreographed steps.

For young women of marriageable age, performing well in a quadrille at a ball as hotly anticipated as Alva Vanderbilt’s would have acquired colossal significance. Knowing the quadrille and being able to perform it well was part of the all-important quality of being “at ease in a ballroom,” which Ward McAllister had cited as a crucial trait for social success.

The practice of paying calls was one of the more arcane, time-consuming instances of social theater practiced by upper- and upper-middle-class women in the Gilded Age. Women maintained visiting lists of people on whom it was appropriate to pay calls—in effect, 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

Mrs. Astor had a choice: stick to her guns and risk New York society’s leaving her behind while bitterly disappointing her marriageable daughter, or give in.

But delivery of the calling card, according to the complex set of rules they lived by, meant that Alva Vanderbilt had won. She had forced Mrs. Astor to acknowledge her. Carrie Astor would be invited to the masquerade ball and would perform her quadrille. And New York society would never be the same again.

Though Alva’s father-in-law, Billy Vanderbilt, at that time the richest man in the world, appeared in simple white tie, his wife, Louisa, came dressed as a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette.

Alva’s rival for preeminent Vanderbilt hostess, Corneil’s wife, Alice, went in a more abstract direction for her costume: she came dressed as an electric light. Her gown was made by the famous dressmaker Worth, of yellow and white satin (the same colors and textures as her husband Corneil’s costume), with skirt panels of dark blue satin embroidered with pearls. Her bodice, made from cream satin, was trimmed in diamonds, silvered lace, and feathers. Most remarkably, Alice carried a gilded torch in her right hand, its light powered by a concealed battery. Wittingly or not, the Vanderbilts were giving an entertainment that paid homage to the past while single-mindedly lighting the path of the future of society—her torch and tiara preceded the Statue of Liberty by three years.

The real Duc de Guise had been assassinated in 1588 at the Château de Blois, which was the architectural inspiration for the house at 660 Fifth Avenue where they all stood talking, laughing, and drinking champagne, their feet grinding the occasional fallen orchid into the floor. No clearer equivalence could possibly be drawn between the old aristocracy of Europe and the new, self-crowning industrial aristocracy of New York.

Most notable, though, in her outfit was the rope of pearls that had belonged to Catherine the Great stretching to her waist. At this moment in time, before the advent of culturing, a string of perfectly matched pearls was rarer, and more expensive, than diamonds. Alva had out-Astored Mrs. Astor on every level.

Carrie Astor made her long-anticipated appearance in the Star Quadrille. This dance, which a contemporary described as “containing the youth and beauty of the city, was the most brilliant. The ladies in it were arrayed as twin stars, in four different colors, yellow, blue, mauve, and white. Above the forehead of each lady, in her hair, was worn an electric light, giving a fairy and elf-like appearance to each of them.” The effect of these tiny lights, in the soft glow of candles and Chinese lanterns strung between forests of lush tropical foliage, orchids, and roses, together with the cold glint of diamonds against youthful skin, would have been nothing short of magical to a nineteenth-century participant.

was rumored that the Vanderbilt ball cost a quarter of a million dollars, about $6.4 million in today’s money. Six-point-four million dollars for a party. For comparison, one of the maids who left Alva’s ball to await her mistress in a carriage parked on Fifty-Third Street as the spring evening grew cold and sharp, maybe stealing a nip of gin from the coachman, maybe flirting with a valet to pass the time, would have been paid around $350, in a year.

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.

Consuelo felt she was always being watched, observed, and judged, which made

The ball that night was given for three hundred guests, and the whole of Marble House was alit with small, multicolored globes dotting the pathways, marble terraces, and cliff face like fairy dust glowing in the night.

For the first time, Consuelo began to understand that she had married into an ironclad social structure, one much older and deeper than the pretend aristocracy found in New York. She had thought she understood snobbishness, but she’d never seen it like this. The Duke explained to her that she would have to learn the lineage and rank of some two hundred families to which the Spencer-Churchills were connected, together with all the tenants of Blenheim, its employees, and its army of servants, all of them meticulously attuned to subtle shadings of rank.

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.

No one knew how many marchers to expect, but it was rumored to be almost ten thousand. Carriages and automobiles had been organized to carry the oldest suffragists, women in their eighties and nineties who had been marching for decades.

Now actresses, Quakers, Socialists, trade unionists, and even some men waited for the stroke of five, when the greatest parade in favor of women’s suffrage was set to begin.

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.

How does a woman go from being a society figurehead, famously prodigious spender, and publicity maven in her early life to being a leader in the first wave of Progressive Era feminism in her later years? How does that trajectory make sense?

A man of the period was almost expected to have mistresses—well-appointed yachts could be very convenient for just such an intimate rendezvous—and a canny society woman might even get away with keeping a lover of her own, if she was especially careful. But no one—and I mean no one—expected the William K. Vanderbilts to get divorced. The plot of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence turns on the social impossibility of divorce for a certain class of women. But then again,

They had been wanting divorce all the time, but they had not dared to do it until I showed them the way.”

“We had terrific word battles. Turning to me[,] he said[,] Damn it, Mrs. Vanderbilt, who is building this house? And I answered[,] Damn it, Mr. Hunt, who is going to live in this house? Our friendship was most beautiful . . . When they buried him, I felt he had been the most resourceful and cherished friend of some of the saddest years of my life.”

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.

The separate spheres of the era were stifling, at least for the women imprisoned within them, and empty.

Think of Alva, still a young woman at thirty, all bedecked in her diamonds and jewels and faux-Venetian princess tiara, posing stock-still with stuffed doves in her hands as she waited for the photographer to snap her picture for her grand fancy dress ball in 1883, her stare vacant from her keeping her eyes open long enough for the exposure to take.

By the time of their conversation, Alva’s involvement with women’s suffrage had brought her in contact with some women who actually knew something about poverty. In 1917, as part of her political work, she had established a soup kitchen in New York City that catered to desperate women and streetwalkers, and had been shocked when some of them came with newspapers for petticoats, their dirt-blackened toes sticking out of battered shoes, owning nothing but their coat and a dented straw hat, complaining that the war had robbed them of all their work. “But I also know that Spiritual Poverty produces as great evils even among the rich. The idle useless lonely woman of the leisure class is a thing spiritually dead.”