So far we've looked at how media-star Anderson Cooper, newly out and proud, is the great-great-grandson of William Henry Vanderbilt and his wife, Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt, who had four sons and four daughters. William Vanderbilt died in 1885, the world's richest man, with close to $200,000,000. All of this money has come to confer on the Vanderbilts a status akin to Great Britain's royal family. Much as sorting out which royals might have been gay in the past is challenging, so it is with the Vanderbilts. To date we've considered possibilities among six of Cooper's Vanderbilt great-grandaunts and uncles and their families. Already four candidates suggest a strong possibility of having been L, G, B or T. In the list below, lavender-colored letters indicate Vanderbilts already examined. Two remain, the two elder brothers who inherited the lion's-share of their father's millions.
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1. Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843–1899) who married Alice Claypoole Gwynne
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2. Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt (1845–1924) who married Elliot Fitch Shepherd
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3. William Kissam Vanderbilt (1849–1920) who married Alva Erskine Smith
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4. Emily Thorn Vanderbilt (1852–1946) who married William Douglas Sloane and later Henry White
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5. Florence Adele Vanderbilt (1854–1952) who married Hamilton McKown Twombly
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6. Frederick William Vanderbilt (1856–1938) who married divorcee, Louise Holmes Anthony Torrance
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7. Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt (1860–1936) who married William Seward Webb
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8. George Washington Vanderbilt II (1862–1914) who married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser
The second son of William Henry Vanderbilt, from whom he inherited $55,000,000., William Kissam Vanderbilt helped transform New York most, by marrying Alva Erskine Smith. Far more intelligent and determined than she was beautiful, Miss Smith was a southerner from Mobile, Alabama whose extended family had owned a small plantation. Ruined by the Civil War, the Smith's took a common expedient of formerly rich Americans and moved to Europe. While this gave Alva a decided polish and she spoke fluent french, her family's instability due to poverty effected her greatly. Coming to feel that independence offered by wealth and position were what mattered most, some biographers contend she made a bad bargain marrying Willie Vanderbilt who, despite Alva's willfulness was acustomed to having his way in every situation.
For a while, Willie K.'s passion for building, derived in part from his father, was common ground shared by the eventually combative couple. Well before he came into his fortune, Alva shrewdly understood, that eager for his family to be acknowleged as social leaders, Willie's father would gladly pay for building projects, as well as jewels, dresses and parties, that reflected favorably on the Vanderbilts. Like other Vanderbilts, she built magnificent houses and always with the object that they be the most extraordinary houses possible. In effect, a building competion prevailed among the Vanderbilts. Because of Willie's and Alva's combined superior aesthetic sense, though several family members built houses that were larger or more elaborate, none were as distinctive as theirs. This could particularly be said of their city house at 660 Fifth Avenue, just north of his father's triple brownstone mansion.
Built from pale-gray Indiana limestone, free-standing, sculpturaly-complex and richly, intensely ornamented, where her father-in-law's house conformed as to its outward appearance, Alva's defied it. Completed in 1883, it immediately set a new architectural standard, making all other house, including 640 Fifth Avenue seem dated.
If exterior embellishments included craved putti, bowing, reading, eating, acting out the function of rooms inside, what set the interior of 660 apart was the quality of its unmatched contents. March 26, 1883, the elite were bidden to view these treasures at a spectacular costume ball. Alva appeared as a sixteenth century Venetian princess in a gown by Worth. By compelling even the head of New York society, Mrs. William B. Astor to take notice of the Vanderbilts, Alva scored a coup and social presence she never relinquished.
Country houses, Idle Hour, built on Long Island; refined and added to over a long period extending well after 1900 and Marble House, at Newport, Rhode Island; completed in 1892, were also designed by the Vanderbilts' favorite architect Richard Morris Hunt. A literal manifestation of its name, inside and out, Marble House was conceived by the designer, as a tribute to a queen. How odd, that in our American republic, from their houses to their tiaras, employing ermine liberaly, readily selling their daughters to impoverished noblemen and royalty, our nineteenth century millionaires so eagerly aped the attitudes, airs, taste and insignia of kings and queens. A premium was proudly paid for art and antiques with a regal provenance, like Willie K. Vanderbilt's Boucher, the Toilet of Venus, painted for Louis XV mistress, Madame de Pompadour. The deference accorded Vanderbilts can only be compared to the obsequiousness of commoners for kings. So in Hunt, her Beaux Arts-trained fellow-Francophone, Alva Vanderbilt found a worthy collaborator then, who encouraged her creative input, but never scrupled to disagree if they differed.
Alva Vanderbilt's instrumental part in breaking her daughter's secret engagement to Winthrop Rutherford, forcing Consuelo to marry instead the 9th Duke of Marlborough in 1895, was key in the dissolution of her own marriage. Not long after this, the Vanderbilt's divorced and Alva, defiant of opprobrium, married Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont.
Willie K. Vanderbilt defied convention as well. In In 1903, he married Anne Harriman, daughter of banker Oliver Harriman. She was a widow to sportsman Samuel Steven Sands and to Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, Jr. Cultivated and neutering, she was a delightful hostess besides being a patron of music. A commited philantropist concerned about the poor, learning of the connection between drug addiction, crime and imprisonment spurred her to lobby for treatment for addicts a century ago. Despite considerable inherited means and the contentment she and Vandrebilt found together, her life was beset by tragedy. The chief cause? : her children. Two sons died in automobile accidents and her two divorced daughter's lives were unusually troubled. Compared to this, Alva Belmont's decree, that no one receiving or entertained by her replacment, would be received by her, was a mere amusing annoyance. It did not prevent the new Mrs. Vanderbilt from becoming a leading American hostess in France, nor did it apply to Alva's daughter. Apart from being made happy to see her father enjoying life, another conection bound the unhappy duchess to her stepmother. Namely, she Anne Vanderbilt was also the stepmother of Consuelo's first love, Winthrop Rutherford. Seven years after they were pulled apart, Rutherford wed another heiress, Alice Morton, whose banker father had been vice president. Once she died he was to marry Lucy Mercer, Eleanor Roosevelt's disloyal social secretary.
Might Anne Harriman Sands Rutherfurd Vanderbilt, a wife and mother several times over, really be thought of as a person of interest in an investigation seeking LGBT Vanderbilts? Only knowing how history always proves more improbable than fiction makes the romance of the widowed Mrs Vanderbilt and lifelong bachelor, Miss Anne Morgan, the great financier's daughter seem plausible.
Alva Vanderbilt's social challenge to become Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont meant an exchange of 660 Fifth Avenue, for 477 Madison Avenue in New York and a move from Marble House to Belcourt, her new husband's Hunt-designed house in Newport. Her intensifying involvement at the helm of the Women's Sufferage Movement following Mr. Belmont's death meant she frequently used Marble House to entertain or raise funds.
To better facilitate entertaining in 1913 Alva Belmont built a Chinese Tea House. Overlooking cliff walk and the sea, from the southeast corner of the grounds, it was designd the by now deceased Richard Morris Hunt's sons, Joseph and Richard Howland Hunt. The architects modeled the picturesque teahouse, with vermillion columns supporting a roof of terra cotta tiles that are glazed in pale green, after twelfth century Sung dynasty temples in southern China. What an enchanting setting it made for parties, such as Alva's Chinese Ball, held in 1914, where the grass covered floor was strewn with Persian carpets and innumerable paper lanterns were hung among standard roses, tree boughs and palms.
Consuelo, Duchess of Marblrough her mother and others on the steps of Mrs. Belmont's tea house in 1914.
1914: Alva Belmont inaugurated her new tea house with a Chinese Ball.
1901: Coonsuelo was a canopy bearer for Queen Alexandra at the coronation of Edward VII.
Always exquisitely dressed, bedecked by important jewels with historical association, Consuelo Vanderbilt's loveless marriage to Sunny, the 9th Duke of Marlborough was as much of a sham as the suicidally coerced marriage of Anderson Cooper to some Junior League member would have been Transfering millions from America to England, it did help restore Blenheim Palace, an incomperable example of baroque majesty. Even today, so long after her death the American duchess's introversion's are still present. In the First State Room for instance of course there is her poised portrait to consider, but more telling, is silk cut-velvet upholstery and curtains, which bear the Louis XIV motif of Apollo in a sun burst. This is the same fabric, made by Prelle & Co. in Lyon, France, for the dazelling Gold Room at Marble House.
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1950
Alva and William K. Vanderbilt's sons were, William Kissam Vanderbilt II (1878–1944) and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt (1884–1970). Made incredibly rich through his father's adherence to primogenitor, a conventional yachtsman, who raced and raised horses, marrying Comstock Lode heiress Virginia Graham Fair, having childern, divorcing and remarrying, William Kissam Vanderbilt II is best remembered for establishing the Vanderbilt Cup automobile race. He also turned his fanciful Long Island country house into a marine museum.
As for his younger, rich, but less rich younger brother, Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, known as Mike, he was the last member of his family to be active in railroads, losing a proxy battle for the New York Central Railroad in the 1950s. Of greater interest is how this avid sailor, who successfully defended the Americas Cup three times, also invented contract bridge. Having no children, he was 49 before he married Gertrude Conway. Mike Vanderbilt also built two superb houses at Palm Beach. By his mother he was derided, she called him 'the Professor'. Is that the same as saying he was gay?
To Be Continued...
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