In The Gilded Age season three, tensions are high between George and Bertha Russell. While in past seasons, George has been tolerant of Bertha’s social schemings, he seems to have hit his limit after Bertha forced their daughter Gladys to marry the Duke of Buckingham for his title—despite her being in love with another man.
The fate of their union will unfold over the next several episodes. However, if Fellowes follows the real-life story of William K. and Alva Vanderbilt—the historical inspiration for the fictional George and Bertha—there’s unlikely to be a happy ending.
Alva Vanderbilt married William “Willie” K. Vanderbilt in 1875. They met months earlier at a party his father, William H. Vanderbilt, threw for one of his daughters in New York City. Alva’s best friend, Consuelo Yznaga, introduced her to the wealthy scion. It was something of a lifeline for Alva: her family had lost their fortune, and she needed an advantageous marriage to provide economic stability. Willie, whom she found handsome and charming, fit the bill—both figuratively and literally.
Yet Alva was a woman subject to her times: in the Gilded Age, women were viewed as inferior to men, relegated to the domestic sphere and mostly valued for their beauty. As their marriage progressed, Willie’s eye began to wander. "Given the circumstances, she could not have been surprised when her husband began to spend more time at his club, the racetrack, and the gaming table than he did at home,” wrote Sylvia Hoffert in her book Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women’s Rights. “Experience had shown her that, like many of his friends, he was a man easily flattered by women who wished to benefit from a relationship with him.” In other words, Willie began to have affairs.
One with a woman in Paris, Nellie Neustretter, became particularly egregious. William regularly took her out in public to the theater, or drove with her through the streets of Paris. It was Alva’s last straw: “Alva was not prepared to play second fiddle to anyone, let alone her husband s mistresses,” Hoffert wrote. “And she certainly was not willing to suffer public humiliation at his hands.”
In December 1894, Alva filed for divorce. This was explosive news: divorce meant ostracization from upper class society, who prided themselves on a stable family life—or, perhaps more importantly, the appearance of a stable family life. Her lawyer even begged her to reconsider, as it would air the dirty laundry of the family: at the time, no-fault divorces did not exist… meaning you had to prove fault, which, in this case, was adultery. (“I think now we take divorce for granted, whereas back then it was almost like a death sentence. They were trapped,” The Gilded Age executive producer Sonja Warfield tells Vogue.) Still, she went forth.
It caused a national scandal. When their divorce was settled in March 1896, it made the front page of the New York Times. “W.K. Vanderbilt Loses,” read the headline. “His Wife Gets an Absolute Divorce and Custody of Children. She Is Allowed to Marry Again.” The paper reported she took home a settlement of somewhere between $3 to $10 million (adjusted for inflation, between $97 million to $325 million today.) She also received several of their country properties.
Alva faced social ostracization almost immediately; many of her old society “friends” stopped inviting her to dinner parties, or ignored her Trinity Church in Newport. Yet, undeterred, she refused to be dropped. Instead, she orchestrated a marriage for her daughter, Consuelo, to the cash-strapped Duke of Marlborough—making her the first American duchess in the process. And everyone wanted to attend a party with a British aristocrat.
In the process, her forthright attitude to the dissolution of marriage helped destigmatize divorce more broadly. Other well-to-do women, realizing that her life hadn’t turned to shambles, in turn filed for divorce against their own husbands.
Although it would be quite some time before divorce was an option for women not in high society—and who had money for lawyers, as well as (soon-to-be-ex) husbands who would provide them with large financial settlements—it did begin to pave the way for the wider social acceptance of divorce. “I always do everything first,” Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe reported that Alva once said in their best-selling book Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. “I blaze the trail for the rest to walk in. I was the first girl of my ‘set’ to marry a Vanderbilt. Then I was the first society woman to ask for a divorce, and within a year, ever so many others had followed my example. They had been wanting divorce all the time, but they had not dared to do it until I showed them the way.”
Within a year of her divorce, Alva Vanderbilt remarried to a banker named Oliver Belmont. From all accounts, the marriage was a happy one.
