Marlene Wagman-Geller

 "I know of no profession, art or trade that women are working in today," she declared, "as taxing on mental resources as being a leader of society." Alva Vanderbilt Belmont

One of the greatest female feuds in history was the sixteenth century fight between frenemies Elizabeth I of England, and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. A nineteenth century tug-of-war was between Gilded Age powerhouses Caroline Astor and Alva Vanderbilt. Although the latter did not end with a decapitation, it forever altered the fabric of The Four Hundred.

While the Astor dynasty started with a beaver, the Vanderbilt empire began with a ferry. Cornelius “The Commodore” Vanderbilt first job was as a sixteen-year-old ferry captain in New York Harbor. Through his iron will, he became the greatest steamship operator in the country. His next venture was railroads-the reason why his Ozymandias statue lords it over the south facade of New York City’s Grand Central Sation. The twelve-foot, four- ton bronze monument depicts one of the first American tycoons, something his ancestor, Jan Aertsen, from the Dutch village of Bilt, the first of his family to arrive in The New World, would never have fathomed. Cornelius founded a dynasty who wore the robe of American royalty.

While the Vanderbilt patriarchy made the fortune, their wives spent their wealth in odes to conspicuous consumption and Gilded Age drama. One of most colorful, Alva Erskine, was born in Mobile, Alabama, the seventh of nine children, (four died in infancy,) of Phoebe Ann and Murray Forbes Smith. On her maternal side, her mother was the niece of Kentucky governor Josph Desha. Phoebe also traced her roots to Scotland’s Earls of Stirling. Her daughter’s name derived from James Erskine, Lord Alva. Although a lawyer, who ran a cotton business based on the South’s “peculiar little institution” the family’s display of wealth was more along the lines of pretension to wealth than income.

The Smiths lived in a classic two-story Southern mansion with a lawn of magnolia trees, and a separate bath house constructed from marble. A childhood pastime was playing in the family’s library where she prophetically arranged books in the shapes of houses. When not involved in architectural make-believe, Alva recalled she was “an impossible child.” In her memoir, she elaborated that she “was probably the worse child that ever lived.” Her irascible behavior led her mother to beat her with a horsewhip on the back of her knees. In the summers, to escape the heat and outbreaks of malaria, the Smiths left for Newport, Rhode Island. Other vacations were in spas in Belgium and Hamburg. A traumatic event of Alva’s childhood was the death of her thirteen-year-old brother Murray Forbers, Jr. As her father displayed more grief over the death of his son than he had the year before at the loss of his daughter, Alva perceived the world valued males over females. Eschewing feminine pursuits, Alva preferred riding her pony Dobin over playing with dolls. Later Alva wrote, “There was a static quality to a girl’s life, a monotony and restriction in it from which I rebelled from the very first.” When Pepe del Valley visited his friend Fernando Yznaga in Newport, he made it clear he did not play with girls. When Alva was sitting on a branch of an apple tree, Pepe removed her ladder and pelted her with apples. After shimmying down the tree, despite bloody hands and skinned knees, she knocked Pepe to the ground and stomped on him while yelling, “I’ll show you what girls can do!” If not for the bystanders who pried them apart, she felt she could have killed him.

With the approach of the Civil War, feeling the South would be in the eye of the storm, the Smiths relocated to New York City. They took along several of their nine enslaved people-three women, two men, and four children, who had been wedding gifts from Phobe’s father. Alva admitted that she often tormented the family’s enslaved children as they could not retaliate. The change of locale did not put a rein on Alva’s behavior. During a beach outing, her governess forbade her to swim in the ocean. In retaliation, Alva used tacks to affix her caretaker’s dress to the bench on which she was sitting. Alva could have taught the Von Trapp children a few pranks.

With the defeat of the South, to recoup financially, Murry sold his Fifth Avenue home, and he found work in Liverpool, England, while his wife and children relocated to a Parisian apartment on the Champs-Élysées. Many wealthy Americans were in France, drawn by the reign of Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie. The gaiety ended when troops congregated to prevent the working-class mobs from attacking the rich.

Due to the escalating violence, after three years in Europe, the Smiths returned to Manhattan where Phoebe passed away two years later from inflammatory rheumatism. Alva was inconsolable at the loss of her mother and in her memoir said she had lost her “best and truest friend.” At the same time, Murray lost his remaining fortune in the postbellum stock market and the demise of his cotton business. The blue-blooded Smiths were so strapped for cash they subsisted on two skimpy meals per day. Although impoverished and homely, Alva felt her family’s salvation with her finding a rich husband. In 1874, her childhood friend Consuelo Yznaga played matchmaker when she brought Alva to a party William H. Vanderbilt threw for his daughter. At the Manhattan affair, Alva met Willie Kassam Vanderbilt, the grandson of the Commodore.  Despite his immense wealth, he needed a strong woman by his side, and Alva was a Category 5 force of nature.

Alva and Willie wed the following year at Calvary Church where Consuelo served as a bridesmaid. Due to the number of onlookers who lined the sidewalk, the police had to hold back the crowds. What dampened the occasion was Murry’s illness that prevented him from attending. On his deathbed, Alva reassured her father she would look after her siblings. True to her word, she always supported her sister Armide who remained single. The Commodore’s private railroad, a mansion on wheels, carried the newlyweds to their honeymoon in Saratoga. The groom signed the hotel register, “William Kissam Vanderbilt, wife, two maids, two dogs, and fifteen horses.” Smitten with his new wife, Willie christened his yacht Alva on which they travelled to destinations such as the West Indies, Europe, and Greece.

Having lived in a series of homes in Alabama, New York, and Paris, Alva longed for “a room of her own.” Her first marital residence was a Manhattan brownstone, a wedding gift from Willie’s father. As a retreat, the Vanderbilts constructed Idlehour, an eight-hundred-acre estate in Oakdale, Long Island that afforded a view of Great South Bay. However, as her primary base was Manhattan, Alva built Petit Chateau on 660 Fifth Avenue- dubbed Millionaire’s Row.  The architecture was an amalgam of the Château de Blois in Touraine, France, and the castle at Bourges of Jacques Couer, the fifteen-century merchant-prince. To furnish the estate, Alva made several trips to Europe the to scour the antique shops of London and Paris. As sometimes flowers and perfume do not always hit right note, for his wife’s birthday he gifted her the Palace of Versailles-inspired Newport home, Marble House, (so called after the 500,000 square feet of marble imported from Italy.) The architect modeled the fifty-room mansion that perched on four acres with views of the Atlantic Ocean after the Petit Trianon near Paris. The dining room resembled the Salon of Hercules at Versailles, the ballroom the Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors whose walls bore sheets of gold leaf. The cost of the estate was $11 million-$310 million today. To “legitimize” her new money, Alva decorated the mansion’s Gothic reception room with medieval stained-glass windows, statues of saints, and Roman sculptures. Of her summer palace Alva claimed, “It was like a fourth child to me.”

With princely pleasure domes, a husband who was one of the richest men in America, and children Consuelo, William Jr., and Harold, it would seem Alva Smith Vanderbilt had everything the geni could serve. However, the fly in her life’s ointment was her name was missing from Caroline Astor’s 400. Although the Vanderbilt’s had the requisite wealth, Caroline looked down her patrician nose as Willie’s grandfather, the Commodore, had been the essence of uncouth. Oscar Wilde explained the allure of acceptance, “To be in it is merely a bore; but to be out of it is simply a tragedy.”

As wily as she was rich, Alva devised a battle strategy to open the Mrs. Astor’s door. She put the word out the notice that she was throwing a masked ball in her Manhattan mansion for 1,000 guests. Carrie Astor, Mrs. Astor’s favorite daughter, was devastated at her exclusion. Mrs. Astor’s right-hand man, Ward McAllister, approached Alva to request an invitation. Alva pointed out she could not accommodate someone who had never paid her a house call. Caroline caved. Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vogue wrote, “And that was how Mrs. Astor, finding herself neatly trapped, first called at Mrs. Vanderbilt's chateau, thereby establishing something like amity between the Montagues and the Capulets.”

Jay Gatsby would have loved to have had Alva host his Long Island soirees as she orchestrated her balls with as much diligence as Napoleon did his campaigns. For  her grand 1883 ball, footmen attired in white powdered wigs and eighteenth century livery unrolled a red carpet outside  the Petit Chateau’s entranceway that ushered in the grandest ball of the nineteenth century According to an 1883 report by the New York World: Alva spent $11,000 on flowers, ($300,000 today) $4,000 on carriages, $65,000 on champagne, catering, and cigars. The price tag for the masquerade was $240,000— $6.4 million today. The venue was the 5^th Avenue ballroom that resembled a fairyland. Part of the fantasy effect derived from the fact the Vanderbilts had been one of the only families to have outfitted their home with lightbulbs, a phenomena Thomas Edison had invented three years earlier. The ladies left their wraps in the boudoir from displayed the painting The Toilet of Venus, once the possession of Madame de Pompadour.

And then there were the fashions that demonstrated how the Gilded Age Gals dressed to extreme excess. Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt (wife of Cornelius) wore an “electric light dress” of white satin trimmed with diamonds, complemented with a diamond headpiece and a literal lightbulb. Others arrived as Marie Antoinette, Madame Pompadour, and the Roman goddess Diana. Kate Fearing Strong’s costume was a gown made of white cat tails; her headpiece was of a taxidermized white cat. Around her neck was a black velvet ribbon with a bell and the word puss (her nickname) emblazoned on a chocker in large diamond letters. The hostest with the moistest, Alva’s designer had taken inspiration from Alexandre Cabanel’s painting of an Italian Renaissance royal.  Her dress had a light blue satin train interspersed with red while its underskirt consisted of white-and-yellow brocade. On her head, was a cap from that held the likeness of a peacock crafted from an array of gems. Pearls, once the possessions of Marie Antoinette glimmered on her gown. In her hands were taxidermized white doves. Taking her cue from Mrs. Astor, Alva received her guests while standing under a full-length portrait of herself. For the first dance, a Hobbyhorse quadrille, participants entered the ballroom carrying wooden hobbyhorses upholstered with genuine horsehair, including manes and tails, each one took two months to fashion, that made it seem as if the equines were moving to the music. In the societal chess game, Alva had defeated the rival queen.

Alas, an 1894, the storm clouds gathered. Over the years, Willie developed a wandering eye. While Alva might have been willing to look the other way, she was no longer willing to do so when Willie started publicly canoodling in Paris with Nellie Neustretter to whom he provided $200,000 a year as well as homes in Paris and Deauville. While Nellie was the public face of Willie’s adultery, another lover was Consuelo Yznaga, whose marriage had made her the Duchess of Manchester. Willie’s callous treatment of his wife, and by extension, his children, showed he was a chip off the old block of his grandfather. After the Commodore had commandeered his father’s Staten Island ferry business, after the two men argued, Cornelius refused to help his destitute parent. He stated, “There ain't nobody alive kin talk to me like that. Find some one else to feed ye.” After nineteen years of marriage, Alva declared that her husband was nothing but a “weak nonentity.” In an era when ladies left the room at the mention of divorce Alva filed for the dissolution of her marriage. Of the unheard-of move for the upper echelon, Alva declared, “I always do everything first. I blaze the trail for others to walk in.”  The Vanderbilt divorce resulted in a national scandal that made the front pages of the New York Times. The wife scorned received a settlement of somewhere between $3 to $10 million-between $97 million to $325 million today as well as Petit Chateau and Marble House. However, she also received social ostracization. Her society crowd withdrew invitations and ignored her at Newport’s Trinity Church. Of her public demonization she wrote, “I got my divorce and just as in childhood days when I accepted the whipping my mother gave me for taking the forbidden liberty, so I bared my back to the whipping of Society for taking a freedom would eventually better them as well as myself.” Of the avalanche of press coverage, Alva explained, “Gilded sin is so much more interesting than ragged sin. Scandal dressed in ermine and purple is much more salacious than scandal in overalls or a kitchen apron.”

Once again, Alva achieved conceived a plan to regain her social footing. Just as she had thrown her iconic ball to gain entry to the 400, she orchestrated a marriage to regain her social footing. Knowing how the elite worshipped British bluebloods, Alva arranged a wedding for her daughter, Consuelo, to the cash-strapped Charls Richard John Spencer-Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough who was desperate for cash to save Blenheim Palace, his ancestral estate near Oxford. The title of duchess was a swoon-worthy one for the Gilded Age set. Desperate for an invitation to the wedding, the elite allowed Alva to return to its fold. And she did not enter it alone.

Alva fell in love with Willie’s best friend, Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, avid horse breeders whose name lives on in the Belmont Stakes, one stage of the acclaimed Triple Crown of horse races. The marital home was Belcourt, a Newport mansion famous for its stables. When he died at age forty-nine of peritonitis, Alva channeled her grief into her life’s great second act when she transformed into a fervid feminist who worked with British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst who she described as “the greatest woman of her age. (In Mary Poppins, Mrs. Banks was a supporter of Mrs. Pankhurst.) Society women must have consumed their smelling salts when Alva described wives as “paid legitimate prostitutes.” The newly minted suffragist played an important role in the National Women’s Party in which she supported Alice Paul and her followers who chained themselves to the White House fence during World War I.

After women achieved the vote, Alva moved to Paris where she died in 1933 with her daughter at her side. Directing events regarding her death as assiduously as she had in her life, she left instructions for her New York City internment. Twenty feminists served as her pallbearers in St. Thomas Church; over her coffin was a banner that bore the slogan of the last public words of supreme suffragist Susan B. Anthony, “Failure Is Impossible.” The quote also served as Alva’s lifelong philosophy. The grand dame ‘s burial was in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery beside Oliver in the Belmont chapel, modelled after the Chateau at Amboise-Alva’s final act of architecture. For her advocacy, the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument serves as a memorial to its namesakes: Alice Paul and Alva Belmont.

In William Shakespeare’s “The Seven Ages of Man” from As You Like It, stated “and one man in his life plays many parts.” Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont indeed played many parts: impoverished Southern belle, the glittering Gilded Age matriarch, and suffragist. But her most enduring incarnation was how she appeared on the evening of the grandest ball of the Gilded Age-as a Venetian princess.