Alva Belmont

However, the Gilded Age elite loved nothing better than a costume ball, a chance to show off wealth and status by outdoing each other with costumes often based on historical figures.

For Alva Vanderbilt's famous costume ball in 1883, Alice Vanderbilt outdid them all by appearing in a gold and silver gown representing electric light, a very new technology.

As a contender in the Gilded Age's Best Costume Ever contest, we are relaunching my show in which we explore Alice's costume and pay a visit to the Museum of the City of New York, where the original gown exists to this day.

¶¶ Being able to have Frederick Wirth, the great British-born couturier, custom-make your gowns was a mark of truly being in the elite social set in the Gilded Age and Belle Époque.

It was said that only Worth could truly capture the personality and allure of any woman by making gowns based on her particular specifications and preferences.

Many of his great creations have been lost to history, but there are a number of Worth gowns from the Gilded Age that survive today in museums and archives, so we can see the exquisite fabrics, detailed handwork, and costly effects that went into some of his creations.

But there is one dress, a worth creation to be sure, that has become legendary in the tales of the Gilded Age, and that is the dress, often called the Electric Light Dress, that Alice Vanderbilt wore to her sister-in-law Alva Vanderbilt's grand costume ball that opened Alva's Petit Chateau on Fifth Avenue on March 26, 1883.

Alice knew that she had to make a statement at that ball.

Same year, same family, darker story.

Alva Vanderbilt, who'd built the nearby marble house, wanted a title in the family.

so she arranged for her 18-year-old daughter, Consuelo, to marry the 9th Duke of Marlborough.

Consuelo was in love with someone else.

Wanting in is human.

Sulking about it and making up stories is not.

Now, if you're the parent with opinions about a child's partner, remember Alva Vanderbilt, who got her duke and lost her daughter for years.

So state your concern once, clearly and privately, and then step back.

Yeah.

Well, at first there are two historical events that are es- effectively the anchor of the play, the Vanderbilt Ball in 1883, which was, um, a sort of the most lavish ball in the history of our country-

[laughs]

... um, and by some scales, maybe in the history of the world.

Yeah, right, that there's, there's something, um...

Well, I'll talk about the very first, and this is, [laughs] this is a little study guide for your listeners, uh, to help sort of understand what's happening maybe more than their neighbor.

Um, the characters are introduced at the beginning, and Alva Vanderbilt is introduced, Mrs. William Vanderbilt right away, and then, um, her lady's maid comes out and to introduce herself, and as she tries to say her name, we just hear this electronic glitch.

And, uh, of course that's strange, but I, I think a piece of the thinking here is that if we just construct the story of the Gilded Age and the Vanderbilt Ball, um, and lean on AI to do it, it, it, some people's names it knows and other people's names it doesn't, right?

I know who that is.

Okay, so then we meet Alva Belmont, who turns out to...

That's

beautiful.

It's society wars

... that Bertha Russell's bed, you know, uh, Alva Vanderbilt did famously divorce her husband.

Yes.

So maybe they're, maybe they're-

And you go from old families like the Astors to new families that have been really made incredibly wealthy by this, the Morgans, the DuPonts, and, and the Vanderbilts all taking over.

A-and maybe the best example of this is the saga of Alva Vanderbilt, who I know you've spoken about on this show before.

She's born to a, a Mobile, Alabama family that has enslaved interests, and after the Civil War, she marries William Kissam Vanderbilt, who's the scion of the Vanderbilt family, and that would have been inconceivable before the American Civil War.

So you really see the power of the country shift from the Mississippi Valley and New Orleans and places like that all the way north to, to New York City, and it will hold that for the next-- Well, some people would say it still has that.

Inheritance battles were common and often vicious.

When Cornelius Vanderbilt died, his son William inherited most of the fortune, but William’s wife, Alva Vanderbilt, later divorced him in eighteen ninety-five, which was social suicide at the time.

She remarried and became Alva Belmont through parties that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and eventually became a suffragette, using her wealth to fight for women’s voting rights.

Her life was basically a soap opera, except real and with more mansions.

Divorces were rare in the 1800s and early 1900s, partly because they were legally difficult and partly because they destroyed your social standing.

When wealthy people divorced, it was major news.

Alva Vanderbilt's divorce from William Kissam Vanderbilt in 1895 shocked society.

Wealthy people simply didn't divorce, especially not women who initiated it.

Not a lot.

You know, we hear that a lot with, you know, most famously Alva Belmont's daughter, Consuela Vanderbilt, who didn't want to marry the Duke of Marlborough.

And her mother just was adamant, like locked her in a room, took to bed, said she was going to, you know, took ill and suddenly she's dying.

So her daughter will come around.