page_title: Consuelo Vanderbilt
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Consuelo Vanderbilt / Life / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Consuelo Vanderbilt in her youth
context_page_description: Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan was a member of the prominent American Vanderbilt family. Her first marriage to the ninth Duke of Marlborough has become known as one of the advantageous, but loveless, marriages common during the Gilded Age. The Duke obtained a large dowry by the marriage. Although the teen-age Consuelo was opposed to the marriage arranged by her mother, she became a popular and influential Duchess. For much of the marriage they lived separately and the marriage was finally annulled. She went on to marry a wealthy French aviator and continued her charitable endeavors.
context_section_description: Born in New York City, she was the only daughter and eldest child of William Kissam Vanderbilt, a New York railroad millionaire, and his first wife, a Mobile, Alabama, belle and budding suffragist, Alva Erskine Smith (1853–1933, who later married Oliver Belmont). Her Spanish name was in honor of her godmother, Consuelo Yznaga (1853–1909), a half-Cuban, half-American socialite who created a social stir a year earlier when she married the fortune-hunting George, Viscount Mandeville, a union of Old World aristocracy and New World money that caused the groom's father, the 7th Duke of Manchester, to openly wonder if his son and heir had married a "Red Indian". Consuelo and her friends were the inspiration for Edith Wharton's unfinished novel The Buccaneers.
  Consuelo Vanderbilt was largely dominated by her mother, who was determined that her daughter would make a great marriage like that of her famous namesake. In her autobiography, Consuelo Vanderbilt described how she was required to wear a steel rod, which ran down her spine and fastened around her waist and over her shoulders, to improve her posture. She was educated entirely at home by governesses and tutors, and learned foreign languages at an early age. Her mother was abusive and whipped her with a riding crop for minor infractions. When, as a teenager, Consuelo objected to the clothing her mother had selected for her, Alva told her that "I do the thinking, you do as you are told."
   
  Like her godmother, Consuelo Vanderbilt attracted numerous title-bearing suitors anxious to trade social position for cash. Her mother reportedly received at least five proposals for her hand. Consuelo was allowed to consider the proposal of just one of the men, Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg, but she developed an instant aversion to him. None of the others, however, was good enough for Alva Vanderbilt, herself the daughter of a cotton broker. Consuelo Vanderbilt was considered a great beauty, with a face compelling enough to cause the playwright Sir James Barrie, author of Peter Pan, to write, "I would stand all day in the street to see Consuelo Marlborough get into her carriage." Oxford undergraduate Guy Fortescue later described how he and his friends were captivated by her "piquante oval face perched upon a long slender neck, her enormous dark eyes fringed with curling lashes, her dimples, and her tiny teeth when she smiled." She came to embody the "slim, tight look" that was in vogue during the Edwardian era.
caption: Consuelo Vanderbilt as a child.
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