The Tragic Life Of The Million Dollar Duchess D
Consuelo Vanderbilt’s marriage to the Duke of Marlro was horrific and it all began with the deranged confession he made on their honeymoon. On the surface, Consuelo Vanderbilt looked like she had it all. The beautiful to the massive Vanderbilt fortune, her future had shone like a diamond from the moment she was born.
But this American princess and milliondoll duchess didn’t get a happy ending. In certain echelons of New York society, the upper ones, the birth of Canuelo Vanderbilt in 1877 was akin to the coming of a messiah. The eldest child and only daughter of the main Vanderbilt heir, William and his wife, Alva, Canuelo was all the hopes of the gilded age of America rolled into one.
Her mother, Alva, was one of the great battle axes in history, and she was determined to force old money New York families like the Aers to accept the Vanderbilt name into their ranks, despite its brutish nuvoish associations. A Confederate loyalist, Alva was infamous in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama for being a spoiled little girl who enjoyed mistreating the slaves she and her family owned.
And soon, the powertripping Alva turned her gaze on her daughter. Consuelo’s privilege came with nightmarish punishments. From the beginning, Alva expected her daughter to be nothing short of perfect and from a young age forced Consuelo to wear a steel rod along the length of her spine to improve her posture. If Consuelo said one word out of line, the matriarch was liable to whip her with a riding crop.
When Canuelo once complained about the clothes her mother had chosen for her, Alva snapped back, “I do the thinking. You do as you’re told. The stunningly beautiful Consuelo was barely in her teens when she began getting offers of marriage from almost every man who met her. To the ambitious Alva, only a prince or a duke was good enough to marry her daughter and lift up the Vanderbilt dynasty, whether Canuelo liked them or not.
During the course of her debutant season, Canuelo had met and fallen in love with the handsome Winthrop Rutherford, a young man of similar or even greater New York social standing as the Vanderbilts. Still, he was no prince and no Duke, and Canuelo was terrified of her mother finding out about their relationship.
Just after her 18th birthday, Canuelo committed her biggest act of rebellion yet. She met Winthrop for a bicycle ride along with her mother and some other friends in Riverside Park in Manhattan. But when they drew back from the rest of the crowd, Winthrop quickly and clandestinely proposed to Canuelo, and she accepted.
If it sounds like the lovers were in a hurry, it’s because they were. The very next day, the young girl was to embark on a long European sojourn with her mother, ostensibly to broaden her horizons, but really to snag a husband with a title. Undeterred, Winthrop promised to trail her to Europe and alope with her once they returned.
Consuel spent months soaking up European hospitality, going to tea party after tea party, and meeting prince after Duke. But after 5 months, her fianceé still hadn’t shown up, nor had he written or called or done anything to hold on to the promise they’d made each other that day.
It was only much later that she found out what had happened. Winthrop had followed her to Europe and had even called at where she was staying in Paris. But Consuelo hadn’t managed to fool her mother, who cottoned on to what was going on and refused to let Winthrop near her daughter. When he wrote frantic letters, she intercepted and destroyed them.
Alva had one man on her mind. Charles Richard John Spencer Churchill, the 9th Duke of Marlro. The Dukes of Marlro had a storied history. And Alva, who had secured Consuelo an introduction to the noble at a dinner party on their trip, was dying for Consuelo to be a part of that history. It wasn’t that Canuelo disliked Marlro.
It’s that she had almost no opinion of him at all. He was inoffensively and blandly handsome, and she thought he was somewhat smart and somewhat nice, but not much more. But the Duke had a dark secret he was hiding. When he inherited his title 2 years before, he found out he was practically bankrupt.
In a twist on a historical theme, the Duke was fortune hunting her, and her mother Alva couldn’t have been happier. Sure that her daughter would try to make a break for it with Winthrop the minute the opportunity arose, Alva locked her up in her room like a princess in a tower. Isolated and beaten down, Consuelo couldn’t even get in touch with Winthrop to tell him what was going on.
During this Rapunzel period, Alva did let Consuelo out to attend the Best Society balls. Naturally, it was at one of these events that Canuelo happened to run into Winthrop at long last, and they shared a single dance together. In a flurry, he told her he still loved her and wanted to elope. Meanwhile, Consuelo’s eagle-eyed mother watched from the sidelines.
She quickly swooped in to separate the pair as soon as possible. When they got home that night, Alva demanded Consuelo see her in her private chambers, ready to give her daughter a piece of her mind. Certain of what her mother was going to say, the mildmannered Consuelo finally put her foot down and stated her intention to marry Winthrop Rutherford.
Alva exploded with rage, insulting Canuelo and Winthrop alike for their stupidity. When Consuelo woke up the next morning, it was to gut-wrenching news. Her defiance of her mother had caused Alva to have a heart attack, and the matriarch was currently clinging to life in her bedroom.
Consuelo couldn’t bear the thought of causing fatal stress to her mother. So instead of holding her ground, she asked her mother’s emissary to inform Winthrop that she couldn’t marry him and that she’d cancelled their engagement. Almost as soon as she heard about her daughter’s broken engagement, Alva miraculously recovered from her deathbed.
Alva had gradually stripped Canuelo of all her independence. Now she went in for the kill. Starting in late August of 1895, Alva Vanderbilt accepted the Duke of Marlro as her guest as she had always planned and began drumming up publicity for the marriage between her daughter and a British peer.
Soon Canuelo was going everywhere with the Duke with Alva throwing lavish balls to show her daughter off to both him and society. The Duke proposed to Canuela at the family cottage, but he was more like a beautiful cadet than a passionate lover. As soon as the engagement hit the papers, the press crudely characterized Canuelo as yet another milliondoll duchess, American’s who traded their wealth for a European title.
As if that humiliation weren’t enough, the Duke’s true feelings soon became obvious. As plans for the massive, extravagant, and expensive wedding coalesed, Canuelo and her mother held a rehearsal to make sure everyone in the wedding party knew exactly what to do on the big day.
The Duke decided he didn’t need to attend the rehearsal, especially since he thought the American custom was vulgar. He did however make sure to show up to the settlement meeting the very next day where he finalized Canuelo’s $3 million dowy. On November 6th, 1895, Canuelo’s nightmare finally became a reality. Laced into a wedding gown her mother had chosen before her engagement and walking beside bridesmaids her mother had handpicked, she entered the church to marry the man her mother had insisted on.
During her perfect wedding in front of some of the most influential people in the world, it was patently obvious that Canuelo had been crying. Canuelo’s honeymoon had barely started before the Duke of Marlro made a stunning confession. First, he outright admitted with characteristic bloodlessness that he’d only married her to save Blenheim, his ancestral home.
He claimed that not only had he married her for her money, but he was also fully in love with another woman and had no intention of developing any kind of romance between the two of them, except that is to produce an heir. By the time Consuelo’s honeymoon wrapped up and she arrived at Blenheim Palace, she was a thoroughly broken woman.
Terrified his American wife was going to come off ignorant and coarse. Canuelo’s husband had spent most of their honeymoon drilling her on his Spencer Churchill family tree as well as on other people of importance and rank in society. As it turned out, Consuelo arrived in England as the toast of the town, and commoners and aristocrats alike fell in love with her.
Soon enough, she gave birth to a son, John Spencer Churchill. Her duty done, Consuelo might have settled into a quiet, unassuming life. Instead, the exact opposite happened. It all started with a high society invitation. Glattis Deacon, the newest young American on the market, secured herself an invite to Blenheim one day and became fast friends with both the Duke of Marlro and Consuelo.
But Glattis had a reputation as something of a wild child and things escalated fast. It wasn’t long before Glattis had completely supplanted Canuelo at Blenheim and she and the Duke struck up a torid affair that lasted over a decade. As it happened, Canuelo wasn’t exactly bothered by her husband taking up with another woman because she was far from faithful herself and one of her first lovers was scandalous.
After their agonizing will they won’t they, she eventually did get together with Winthrop Rutherford shortly after her marriage. In 1898, Consuelo gave birth to another son, Lord Ivor Spencer Churchill, fully completing her duty by providing her husband with an heir and a spare. Many believed Ivor was actually Winthrop Rutherford’s son, given that the boy had very little resemblance to either the Duke or his older brother.
For a brief time, it looked like Canuelo was going to get her happy ever after with Rutherford. He once again proposed that they alope and Canuelo rushed to her husband and confessed everything, hoping now she could finally be free. The Duke, indifferent to the better end, even allowed her to visit Winthre again to decide what she really wanted to do.
The very next day, she rushed to the arms of her lover, hopeful that her whole future was in front of her. Instead, Rutherford dealt her a heartless betrayal. He had apparently changed his mind and presented her with one of the worst excuses for not marrying someone. Apparently, he felt too attached to her to alope.
Brokenhearted, Canuelo went back to her husband with her tail between her legs. She may not have had much attraction to the Duke, but she certainly seemed to like his family line. Once while he was away fighting in the Boore war, Consuelo took up with his cousin Freddy Guest, who was in fact staying at Blenheim as a guest.
By this point, Canuelo had given up on ever fully escaping her marriage. So, she had to fall back on merely hurting her husband any way she knew how. When the Duke arrived back home from the conflict, she coolly informed him that she’d been sleeping with his cousin and that she never wanted to see him in her bedroom ever again. Canuelo actually had affairs with no fewer than three of the Duke of Marlro’s cousins over the course of her marriage, to the shock and horror of the respectable Spencer Churchill family.
In some ways, this very particular promiscuity was a continued cry for help from the dank cell of her loveless marriage. When Consuelo married into the Spencer Churchill family, she inadvertently changed the course of history. Before she had an heir with the Duke, none other than his cousin Winston Churchill was next in line to inherit Blenheim.
As such, the birth of Canuelo’s first son helped free Winston to go into politics, something he was apparently very grateful for, and the pair became fast friends. In 1906, Consuelo Vanderbilt stunned the world when she and her husband separated. It had been a decade of utter misery for them both, but it still wasn’t the done thing in the aristocracy.
A separation was one thing, but Canuelo and the Duke wanted to file for divorce. It was a grueling battle that required years in and out of courtrooms, even with both parties very sure that they were doing what was best. In fact, it was in one of those courtrooms that Canuelo’s mother, Alva, made a heartbreaking confession. Since Canuelo’s separation from the Duke, her doineering mother had made a strange late in life pivot.
She had transformed into, of all things, a vehement suffragette. While this was more than a little ironic given her childhood owning slaves and her motherhood controlling her daughter, it did seem to provoke twinges of feminist guilt in the matriarch. And she showed it by testifying in Consuelo’s divorce. On the stand, Alva confessed that she forced Consuelo into the union, begging the judge to grant the divorce for a marriage that had so obviously happened under juress.
In 1921, Canuelo became a free woman, and she wasted no time enjoying that freedom. On July 4th of that year, before the ink on her divorce papers was dry, she married again. Her second husband was the dashing French pilot and man about town Jack Balsan, who was her lover in the days leading up to her official divorce. Heartwarmingly enough, he’d been in love with Canuelo since he first saw her just before her 18th birthday.
The next period of Canuelo’s life was everything she hoped for and more. Later in her life, she wrote her autobiography, The Glitter and the Gold, where her life with the Duke of Marlro was the glitter with all its hollow opulence, and her time with Balsan was the true gold.
They were blissfully happy together, with Balsan doting on his wife. In 1956, Consuelo’s youngest son, Lord Ivor Spencer Churchill, developed a brain tumor, and his health quickly went downhill. He died that September at just 57 years old. In November, her beloved husband Jacques, now frail and 88 years old, also died.
In the span of 2 months, Canuelo had lost two of the people she loved the most, and she was well and truly alone for the first time in her life. She spent her remaining years living like a ghost of a bygone age. Living out the next decade in Long Island, she followed her husband and son to the grave on December 6th, 1964 at the age of 87.
With her went some of the last living memories of the Gilded Age. Thanks for watching History Expose. If you love uncovering the best stories in history, hit like and subscribe to keep exploring with us. Don’t forget to visit our main page, Factinate, for more incredible facts about everything.
