The Woman Who Made The Vanderbilts

The Gilded Age was nothing without Alva Vanderbilt, but the entire time she was hiding the most tarnished secret of all. When Alva Vanderbilt divorced her husband, it was an instant scandal. At first, some blamed a mistress, while others claimed Alva strayed. No one guessed the real sickening reason. Stay tuned to find out. She was a Gilded Age queen, but Alva Vanderbilt’s story is as dirty as they come. Alva came into the world in 1853 in Mobile, Alabama. Her wealthy Southern family were always looking for ways to upgrade their image, and Alva grew up summering in Rhode Island and bonding with other high-ranking socialites like old-money beauty Consuelo Yznaga.

Then, one day, it all came crashing down. By the time Alva was 17, she had seen the world and picked up an array of expensive tastes along the way, but then her perfect reality turned into an utter nightmare. In 1871, her mother passed, and the family fortune took a nose dive. Soon after, when the dust settled, Alva wasn’t just motherless; she was nearly penniless. Yet, a lack of funds wasn’t the only thing standing in Alva’s way. As a young woman, Alva had to face a cruel truth: she was no beauty. Indeed, that’s probably putting it politely; she was homely and square-chinned. And in a world where the two most powerful currencies for a woman were her beauty and her wealth, Alva was coming up short. But anyone who counted her out during this period was making a grave error, because Alva was also extremely cunning and ambitious. Using these skills, she was about to complete one of the greatest social triumphs of her age. Alva may have lost her mother and her money, but she made darn sure to keep her well-connected socialite friends.

One day, her old pal Consuelo Yznaga came through for her in a big way, introducing her to none other than William Kissam Vanderbilt, the rakish grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. Alva knew how to turn on her wit and charm—she never could rely on her looks, after all—and she immediately hooked in the laissez-faire rich boy with her confidence and smarts. Alva made sure things happened very fast from there. In 1875, a New York City wedding official turned Alva into a Vanderbilt. Three children—a daughter named Consuelo, named after her friend, and two sons, Willie Jr. and Harold—followed. She even got a massive stone mansion on Fifth Avenue, the Petit Château. But underneath the beautiful facade, trouble was brewing. Alva quickly found there was one thing missing in her new life: the Vanderbilts could buy almost anything they wanted, but they couldn’t buy class. At the time, only a handful of old-money families sat on top of the New York social hierarchy, and they despised the new-money crowd like the Vanderbilts for earning their wealth through industrial means rather than through inheritance. Alva, so used to engineering everything she wanted, chafed under their disapproval. It got personal fast. The symbolic head of these old New York families was the formidable Caroline Astor, who wasted no time snubbing Alva.

Mrs. Astor refused to call on Alva during the day, and in so doing announced to everyone that she didn’t think Alva and her upstart family were good enough for their attention either. But again, Alva was so used to engineering what she wanted; she was about to put her cunning into overdrive. The ambitious Alva knew that if the Vanderbilts were ever going to get respect, it started with getting Caroline Astor on their side. So she came up with a brilliant plan. First, Alva planned the ball of the century at her chateau, sending out 1,300 invitations and scheduling the soirée just after Lent, which was supposed to be the end of the social season, so that no one else would compete with her. But that was just a setup. Alva then dealt the coup de grâce. Alva’s plans were so opulent, everyone who was anyone wanted to get into the upcoming Vanderbilt ball, Caroline Astor and her family included. But this is where Alva’s plot really kicked into gear. See, Alva specifically didn’t invite Astor’s daughter Carrie. After all, Mrs. Astor had never called on her, and it wasn’t polite to send invitations to strangers. It was a stroke of genius, and it got Alva exactly what she wanted. This was the moment that broke Mrs.

Astor and old New York society in one fell swoop. Waving the white flag, Caroline Astor called on Alva Vanderbilt at last, symbolically ushering in the Vanderbilts and their ilk into the upper echelons of the elite. Astor would admit shortly after, “The time has come for the Vanderbilts.” And all that was because of Alva. But before she could rest on her laurels, her ball brought further trouble. Alva may have conquered the great Caroline Astor, but that didn’t mean she was done feuding. In fact, since her marriage to William Vanderbilt, she’d had a bitter rivalry with her sister-in-law Alice, who was married to William’s brother. This battle was far more intimate than the Astor debacle. Alice, snobbish to the point that she refused to even talk to her own chauffeurs, was determined to outshine Alva any way she could. The night of the Vanderbilt ball, to Alva’s horror, she did. The day of Alva’s ball, on March 26, 1883, crowds of gawkers began gathering before the sunset, hoping to catch a glimpse of what New York high society was wearing that night. Accordingly, Alva’s lavish Venetian noble outfit was designed to turn heads, and she even posed with birds in photos to give it the complete effect.

But when Alva saw her sister-in-law, her jaw must have dropped. Given that the Vanderbilt ball was Alva’s idea, and given her triumph over Mrs. Astor, this night was supposed to be a personal victory lap. But Alva’s sister-in-law Alice was having none of that. She showed up and completely outdid Alva by dressing up as the new-fangled electric light, a costume the press went wild for. Still, Alva and Alice kept their feud socially civil, if quietly cutting. Alva’s next problems were downright savage. Alva had always been a smart, headstrong girl. Motherhood turned her into a monster. She ran her household with more than an iron fist, particularly controlling her daughter Consuelo in the most chilling of ways. For example, when Alva thought the girl was slouching too much, she made her wear a steel rod to perfect her posture. Except it gets worse than that. Not content with this constant, invisible way of tormenting her daughter, Alva was also prone to physically harming Consuelo when the little girl didn’t do exactly as her mother said. Her weapon of choice, disturbingly enough, was a riding crop, and Alva would brandish it at the drop of a hat. But Alva liked to control her child mentally, too. Alva barely allowed her daughter to have any opinions of her own, and when Consuelo got older and began to crave self-expression, Alva only tightened her grip. Alva always selected the girl’s clothing, and on one occasion when Consuelo objected, Alva snapped back, “I do the thinking; you do as you’re told.” As it happened, this dynamic would plunge both women into a world of pain. By the 1890s, Alva had everything she could have ever dreamed of. She even made her husband buy several yachts for her—one of them appropriately named Alva—and garnered a reputation for constantly building one mansion or another.

As one of her peers put it, she loved nothing better than to be knee-deep in mortar. And still it wasn’t enough for Alva; she wanted more. She always wanted more. And when she looked at Consuelo, she knew exactly what that was. Alva’s homely face had, to her detractors anyway, always recalled the merchant dog she and the rest of the Vanderbilts came from, but her daughter represented something else entirely. Consuelo had grown into a great beauty, with her oval face and high neck representing an aristocratic, slim-type look that was all the rage at the time. But Alva didn’t see a merely pretty girl in Consuelo’s beauty; she saw a priceless opportunity to get more power via the marriage market. The way she did it was monstrous. Alva had climbed to the top of the New York food chain, but there was still something that eluded her: a noble title. Knowing what she had in her daughter’s dowry and face, Alva quickly decided Consuelo had to be a duchess at the very least. In fact, it took her no time at all to manufacture an organic meeting between Consuelo and Charles Spencer Churchill, the English Duke of Marlborough and the owner of the famous Blenheim estate.

But Alva’s false fairy tale soon turned into a horror story. The Duke of Marlborough may have looked like the perfect son-in-law from the outside, but the deal Alva struck with him was rotten to the core. The Duke was on the verge of bankruptcy and agreed to marry Consuelo purely for financial considerations. In fact, he was in love with someone else the day he proposed. None of this mattered to Alva; she was desperate for that title, and the family set Consuelo up with a mind-boggling $77 million dowry in today’s money to cinch the union. But before Alva’s ink was dry on the wedding invites, trouble struck. When Alva set about turning Consuelo into the Duchess of Marlborough, she hadn’t counted on one thing: Consuelo too was already in love with someone else, an American named Winthrop Rutherfurd, and she wasn’t going down the aisle without a fight. Indeed, Consuelo even planned to run away with Rutherfurd, leading Alva to her most chilling act yet. Consuelo’s disobedience gob-smacked Alva, who wasn’t used to her daughter causing much of a fuss about anything—riding crop beatings will do that to you. Maybe that’s why she took it into overdrive.

After finding out about Consuelo’s elopement plans, Alva locked the girl up in her room and made threats on Rutherfurd’s life, swearing to relent only when Consuelo agreed to the royal match. This didn’t go the way she wanted. Despite her mother’s horrifying insults and threats, Consuelo stood firm for quite some time. But then Alva played extremely dirty. She wasn’t going to let this slip of a girl beat her, and came up with her lowest blow of all: Alva pretended she was quite literally dying from the stress of the situation. This at last did Consuelo in, and the girl finally agreed to Alva’s match. But be careful what you wish for. Alva’s machinations supposedly all paid off on November 6, 1895, when Consuelo married the Duke of Marlborough at long last. It hardly mattered that the girl was reportedly crying behind her veil for the entire ceremony. For now, Alva should have been satisfied. Only she wasn’t. The truth is, by the time the wedding finally rolled around, Alva was embroiled in her own scandal, and this was a big one. Just months before Alva watched her daughter become a duchess, she made an announcement that sent shock waves through society: she was divorcing William Vanderbilt.

Now, not only was William the man who bankrolled Alva’s lavish lifestyle, but divorce also simply wasn’t done in New York in Alva’s day, and people began whispering up and down Manhattan. Following her split from William Vanderbilt, Alva went from the top dog in society to the bottom of the barrel. When she went to church that very next Sunday, all the women in the building cut her, essentially pretending she didn’t exist. It wasn’t just Sundays, either; her invites to the biggest events also dried up for the time being, at least. Then again, the reasons behind her divorce were doozies. Throughout Alva’s career as an ambitious society woman, her marriage had not thrived. She and her laissez-faire husband William had always been largely incompatible, yes, but that was really the least of it. The real problem: William Vanderbilt was by almost all accounts an enormous philanderer. Most famously, William kept a long-term, much younger mistress, Nellie Neider, who was notorious in Europe. Only it wasn’t just his unfaithfulness; it was how he went about it. Alva Vanderbilt was no fool, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on with her unfaithful husband.

William flaunted Nellie wherever he went, blatantly and casually disrespecting his wife in the process. Then, when Alva eventually confronted him about the tryst, he reportedly didn’t even bother to deny it. This was all enough to set Manhattan alight, except they hadn’t seen anything yet. Some people at the time had a more disturbing interpretation of William’s infidelities than just your run-of-the-mill insatiable libido: they claimed that William was so desperate to get out of his marriage without courting the controversy of divorce paperwork, he merely hired a woman to pretend to be his mistress so Alva would divorce him. Then again, as we’ll see, there was one more terrible reason behind their breakup. Either way, William lived to regret it all. Alva’s revenge went so much further than a lawful split. For years, Alva had clawed Vanderbilts all the way up to the top of the food chain, smiling politely all the while, but once she decided to divorce William, the gloves came off. Alva quickly cut William completely out of her children’s lives. In fact, on the perfect wedding day when her daughter became a duchess, Alva had disinvited almost everyone from the Vanderbilt side of the family. While William walked Consuelo down the aisle to keep up appearances, it was just that—an appearance. Alva insisted he’d get out of the church as soon as he did his duty. And she was just warming up. William should have thought twice before spurning Alva, and she got back at her ex tenfold. See, William had a close friend named Oliver Belmont, an American banker who frequently accompanied the Vanderbilts on their yacht trips and pleasure tours. He and Alva got along so well, rumors they were having an affair had circulated for nearly a decade.

The details were juicy: according to people in the know, Alva’s relationship with Belmont started all the way back in 1888 after a yacht trip on her seafaring baby, Alva. From that point on, blind items began appearing in newspapers about the pair, with one rumor even suggested that William Vanderbilt came home one day to discover his friend Oliver hiding in the family closet. It was a serious breach of etiquette for Alva, because while her husband might be able to do whatever he wanted, she was supposed to remain chaste. But William’s reaction to this wasn’t what you’d expect. William seemed almost happy at her straying and easily shrugged off the rumors; after all, it was justification for his own extramarital activities. Of course, Alva’s shock announcement of a divorce changed all that. And less than a year after they officially split, Alva twisted the knife in. In January 1896, Alva completed her revenge on the Vanderbilt family. She had already won a significant settlement and several enormous assets in her divorce, and now she won herself a replacement husband. Just a handful of weeks after Consuelo became a bride, Alva followed her daughter down the aisle and tied the knot with Oliver Belmont.

Whether or not Alva knew it, her new husband wasn’t exactly an upgrade from William Vanderbilt. Oh, sure, he had almost as much money, but he also had a similar character issue in abusive lust. He preferred absence to child-rearing. Belmont’s first marriage began with physical altercations and ended with him abandoning his own wife and child. Soon after her marriage to Oliver Belmont, Alva underwent a shocking change. With William Vanderbilt, at least at the beginning, Alva played the conservative society wife to a tee, but Belmont was quite a progressive for his day and ran a liberal magazine called Verdict. Alva followed suit, slowly loosening up her previously more rigid beliefs. As we’ll see, this had huge consequences. In 1906, one of Alva’s many houses of cards came tumbling down. The marriage Alva had brokered between Consuelo and the Duke of Marlborough had been crashing and burning since the beginning, and that year it finally exploded. After infidelities on both sides and a fundamental incompatibility at their foundation, the pair officially separated. By all rights, Alva should have been furious. Something else happened entirely. Just as Alva’s own marriage shocked New York society, Consuelo’s split from her Duke floored the British people and caused a mountain of legal drama to go with it. To help facilitate the split, Consuelo asked her mother to testify in court to the unsuitability of the match. To everyone’s shock, Alva agreed. Still, no one was prepared for her testimony. When it was Alva’s time to testify, her confession left jaws on the floor. The Iron Lady of midtown Manhattan admitted not only that she had coerced her daughter into marrying the Duke of Marlborough, but also that she had been wrong to do it. As she told the investigator mournfully, “I have always had absolute power over my daughter.” It seemed like a change really was coming over the former Mrs. Vanderbilt, but a change was coming for her, too.

Alva and Oliver Belmont were two of the most vigorous members of the New York elite, and most people likely thought they would reign over their domains forever. But in 1908, that association splintered into a million pieces. That summer, Oliver was struck with a horrific bout of appendicitis. The end was swift and brutal; almost before anyone could realize it, Alva’s second husband was dead. True to form, Alva had him buried in the enormous Belmont Mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery, but no amount of pomp and circumstance could change the fact that she was a single woman alone in the world for the first time in decades. Only Alva had one more surprise left in her. Shortly after Oliver’s passing, Alva underwent her most incredible transformation yet. In a move that went against the grain of almost everything she had accomplished so far, the middle-aged Alva became one of the most prominent voices in the emerging women’s suffrage movement. But this period of her life also brought a new shine to an old relationship. Since testifying on Consuelo’s behalf during the girl’s divorce, Alva had grown much closer to her daughter. Indeed, Consuelo also helped Alva in much of her suffragette work, and the mother-daughter matriarch now enjoyed many calm, intimate years with the girl she had once cowed into marriage. That said, the aftereffects of Alva’s early parenting style echoed throughout the family in disturbing ways.

Call it the Vanderbilt curse, but very few of Alva’s brood made happy marriages. Her eldest son, William Vanderbilt II, what was supposed to be a brilliant match with leading socialite Virginia Graham Fair, but after 10 years and three children together, they too split up. However, by the 1930s, that wasn’t the only thing about the Vanderbilts taking a dip. Alva’s heyday had coincided with some of the greatest heights the Vanderbilt family ever reached, both personally and financially. Yet she also lived to see the beginnings of its downfall. In 1920, her ex-husband William Vanderbilt passed, and less than a decade after that, the railroad money that had sustained the family for years began to show signs of dwindling. Alva, it turned out, was dwindling too. In 1932, the indomitable Alva met an enemy she couldn’t fight: the frailty of age came for her, and she suffered a debilitating stroke that spring. In January of 1933, she finally passed at the age of 80. Still, she went out in style. For her last wishes, she demanded that after a church ceremony in the middle of New York City, an all-female cattery of pallbearers take her to her final resting place beside her second husband in the Belmont Mausoleum.

But like so many of her victories, it was a hollow one. The very same year that she passed, her grandson William Vanderbilt III perished in a violent car accident when he was only 26 years old. By the 1940s, the dwindling Vanderbilt wealth started freefalling, and by the 21st century, the dominance was a thing of the past. That past, though, still held the dark secrets that Alva took to her grave. Although she ended up at the top of the New York food chain, Alva Vanderbilt’s beginnings were about as far from the Northeastern elite as you could get. We know by now she grew up filthy rich, but there was a huge emphasis on the filthy. Her family made their money in cotton off of the backs of enslaved African-Americans. Somehow, though, this wasn’t the worst of it. Alva freely admitted at one point that when she was a child growing up in Alabama pre-abolition, she enjoyed hurting the children of the people her family kept captive on the property. Suddenly, her turn toward equality for women is a whole lot more disturbing. Alva’s divorce was the split heard around the world, but it wasn’t until much later people guessed at the real reason their marriage dissolved. There was a betrayal much closer to home. According to rumors, William Vanderbilt hadn’t stopped at Nellie Neider in his infidelities; he also went and seduced Alva’s childhood best friend, Consuelo Yznaga. If true, maybe it’s no wonder that Alva hit a wall in her marriage and filed for divorce. If you’ve enjoyed these stories, don’t forget to show some love by hitting that like button and subscribing to our channel. Stay tuned, because we’ll be back with more incredible narratives soon. Thanks for joining us today, and until next time.