Authors: Greg King
In 1915, H. Montague was appointed head of the Canadian Overseas Pension Board in London, and Marguerite decided to join him. After discussing it with Martha, she decided that together they would open and run an English hospital for wounded Canadian soldiers.
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And so, in the spring of 1915, Marguerite booked passage aboard
Lusitania
. Anticipating a happy family reunion, she took her youngest daughters with her: sixteen-year-old Anna and fifteen-year-old Gwen, along with two maids, Annie Walker and Emily Davis. The maids were given their own cabin, while the family took the starboard Regal Suite.
Delighted to find so many of their friends and acquaintances from Montreal aboard the liner, Marguerite and her daughters enjoyed the voyage. They laughed with Robert Holt, and were happy to see that family friend Frederick Orr-Lewis was traveling with his valet, George Slingsby. Slingsby knew the Allans very well. Lady Allan and her family had often shared holidays with Orr-Lewis at Villa Edelweiss on the Riviera, and Marguerite used the cooperative young Slingsby to occasionally smuggle her prized dog through customs, rewarding him with a diamond tie pin in the shape of a horseshoe.
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She also once asked him to secretly transport some of her prized jewelry as well, to avoid paying duty on pieces she already owned. Slingsby wore her diamond bandeau tiara, matching necklace, brooches, and bracelets—some £40,000 of jewelry—in a padded belt wrapped around his waist and hidden under his clothing when he passed through customs. As Slingsby divested himself of this cache of jewels, Lady Allan declared, “George, you are a treasure! If you were not such an excellent valet, you could make a fortune as a smuggler!”
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On
Lusitania,
Slingsby entertained Anna and Gwen throughout the voyage. They made him join their deck games, dragged him off to take lemonade, and generally kept the valet rushing from one end of the liner to the other. Sitting in a deck chair and watching Slingsby pulled away by her daughters, Lady Allan gave him a smile, saying, “It’s your own fault, George! You spoil them.”
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One day, crewman Leslie Morton was standing on deck, armed with a pot of gray paint known as “crab fat,” which was to be applied to the lifeboats. As he was working, he noticed two girls, in white accordion pleated skirts and sailor suit blouses with big bows, approach. “I could not help thinking what lovely children they were, and how beautifully dressed,” he recalled. He later insisted that they were Anna and Gwen Allan. They smiled and watched him work for a moment before the older asked, “What are you doing, sailor?”
“I’m painting the lifeboat,” he told her.
“May we help you?” she offered.
“I don’t think this is a job for little girls,” Morton replied.
The girl Morton thought to be Anna, though, “did not take much notice of my refusal” and snatched the brush from Morton’s hand. For a few moments she swabbed the gray coating over the boat, but soon enough it was also “all over her beautiful clothes.” “I was horrified,” Morton recalled. He looked up and saw a member of the deck crew approaching. The girls apparently saw him as well. Deciding that they were about to get into trouble, the older girl dropped the brush and ran off across the deck with her sister.
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Everyone aboard
Lusitania
seemed to notice Anna and Gwen. Harold Boulton thought that they were “most attractive to look at” as they roamed the ship.
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George Kessler agreed, recalling that the “handsome” girls were “virtually the life and soul of the ship.” In the midst of war, and on a liner traveling under threat of torpedo attack, he said, “it did one good to see their smiling faces.”
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Lusitania
boasted eighty-seven special suites, as well as Parlor Suites, each with sitting room and private bath. Paneled in mahogany, satinwood, and veneered walnut, and furnished with inlaid desks, wardrobes, and dressing tables, they represented the taste for historicism so prevalent at sea: styles ranged from Louis XVI to William and Mary, Empire to Georgian, and Sheraton to Adams. Their private, marble-walled bathrooms included white-enameled, cast-iron claw-foot tubs fitted with shower cages and silver-plated fixtures; washbasins ornamented with onyx—as well as toilets—were rimmed in gilt.
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The “delicacy and refinement of detail are eminently suited for the purpose of ship decoration,” promotional literature assured potential passengers.
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Costing roughly $1,500 each way, these suites came with a personal steward to cater to the needs and whims of their travelers.
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Many occupants traveled with their own maids or valets, leaving the stewards to run errands, arrange favors, and meticulously see to the cabins in the hope of a generous tip. Now, five days into the voyage, Walter Wood, the steward assigned to Parlor Suite B 65-67, rapped on the door and handed over a curious telegram: “Hope you have a safe crossing. Look forward very much to seeing you soon.”
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Reading these lines from a British woman named Mary Barwell, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt seemed eager to reach England.
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No one knew if Barwell was the latest in Vanderbilt’s string of beautiful mistresses; everyone knew that few women resisted his charms—and he, theirs. Heir to America’s largest railway fortune, thirty-seven years old, Alfred Vanderbilt was nearly six feet tall, with clear blue eyes, wavy brown hair, a dashing little mustache, and refined features. He always cut a fine figure—“he is almost too perfectly dressed,” a British journal once complained.
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Albert Bilicke represented one aspect of the American saga: the hardworking, self-made man enjoying his riches. Vanderbilt was living proof that a fortunate accident of birth was no guarantee of personal fulfillment.
Alfred was born in 1877, into “the nearest thing to a royal family that has ever appeared on the American scene.”
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His great-grandfather Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as the Commodore, had come from Holland, earned a fortune in shipping, and consolidated small railway lines to form the New York Central Railroad. In financial terms, Alfred wanted for nothing: his father’s $67 million estate annually earned some $3.6 million in interest alone.
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He was brought up in gilded splendor: his father’s French Renaissance château at 1 West 57th and Fifth Avenue was, at over 130 rooms, the largest house New York City had ever seen. It was an ugly, ungainly place, bristling with fussy carvings, tall chimneys, and ornate windows concealing cavernous, glacially cold rooms meant to impress “with grandeur” rather “than with beauty.”
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At least summers in Newport offered some relief from this architectural oppression. The Breakers, the seventy-room Vanderbilt “cottage” designed in imitation of an Italian palazzo, wasn’t lacking in grandeur: there was a fifty-foot-square arcaded hall; a silver and gold music room from Paris; and a forty-two-foot-high, marble-walled dining room fringed by immense columns of red alabaster, where the family ate at a sixteenth-century Italian table precariously perched below two twelve-foot-tall ormolu and Baccarat crystal chandeliers.
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The Breakers had one thing the New York château lacked: twelve serene acres of gardens overlooking the Atlantic. Here Alfred and his siblings—older brothers William and Cornelius (known as Neily), sister Gertrude (who later married Harry Payne Whitney and founded the Whitney Museum of American Art), and the two youngest, Reginald (father of designer Gloria Vanderbilt) and Gladys—could enjoy ordinary pursuits—at least they were ordinary by Vanderbilt standards. They had a little playhouse, though it came with call bells for servants and its own monogrammed china for afternoon tea.
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The boys had to care for their toys, even if, in this case, their toys included a yacht their father had given them. There was even a printing press, so that the industrious brothers could typeset and produce their own newspaper,
The Comet
—replete with paid advertisements from family railways, Wall Street bankers, and Tiffany and Company.
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Cornelius and Alice, Alfred’s parents, were a severe, rather dour couple; the father, it was said, had never been known to smile.
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Courteous and even-tempered in public, Cornelius took himself very seriously: there was something “stern” about his character, and he “expected to be obeyed, and instantly.”
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Alice, “glacial and forbidding,” as one of her grandsons called her, was so arrogant that she refused to speak to servants except through her butler: she once spent hours being endlessly driven around New York City because she felt it beneath her dignity to give her chauffeur directions.
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“We cannot always control other people’s desires,” Alice warned her children. “Most certainly we can control our own.”
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The young boy and his siblings had been brought up “in the firm belief that they were American aristocracy, embodying in their lives and actions all that was fine, honorable, and Christian. Theirs was a sacred, God-given trust to maintain these standards.”
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When he was eighteen, Alfred got a lesson in the brutal consequences of ignoring these standards. The 1892 death of his eldest brother, William, had left second son Neily as his father’s heir. But in 1895, Neily took up with beautiful Grace Wilson. Her siblings had married well—into the English aristocracy, into Gilded Age fortunes, even into the pinnacle of society itself, the Astor family; “the marrying Wilsons” people called them.
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With her disconcerting habit of pursuing—and then dropping—potential beaux when their fortunes fell, Grace carried more than a whiff of the adventuress about her; there were even stories that she had briefly enjoyed the favors of Alfred’s father.
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Neily’s parents were horrified; the usually reserved Cornelius even took to the pages of the
New York Times
to declare that any such union was against his “expressed wish.”
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A meeting between father and lovesick son reportedly ended in blows; when Cornelius suffered a debilitating stroke, the entire family blamed “inhuman, crazy” Neily.
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Every bit as proud as his proud parents, Neily married Grace in a ceremony his family boycotted: Alice ordered that her other children must never attend a party, dinner, or ball at which her disgraced son and new daughter-in-law might be present.
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Alfred learned how deep parental disapproval stretched on the 1899 death of his father. The family sat in the Breakers’ Library, with its Circassian walnut bookcases, hand-tooled Spanish leather walls embossed in gold, and sixteenth-century, $75,000 stone fireplace ironically inscribed, “Little Do I Care for Riches, and Do Not Miss Them, Since Only Cleverness Prevails in the End,” as Cornelius’s will was read.
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Alfred received some $42 million; each of his siblings inherited $7 million; Neily got $500,000 in cash, and the income on a $1 million trust.
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Although Alfred eventually gave Neily an extra $6.5 million, his older brother was furious, publicly complaining that he’d been cheated and even threatening to take the matter to court.
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After this unpleasantness, the two brothers rarely spoke. Neily was conspicuously absent when, in January 1901, Alfred married society beauty Ellen French; ten months later, she gave birth to a son, William Henry Vanderbilt II. For a time, Alfred settled into acceptable passions: he kept four yachts; traveled aboard a private Pullman carriage called
Wayfarer,
replete with marble bathroom and velvet-draped parlor; escaped to his Camp Sagamore in the Adirondacks, where he could create “an illusion of wilderness hardship at great expense”; and imported a $30,000 Fiat to race along the beaches of Florida.
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His true interest, though, centered on horses.