Great Lady's Death

Her sporting sons, Harold Stirling and William Kissam II, were in the southern U. S., but her daughter Consuelo, one-time pawn of her most amazing social gambit, was there. Outside in the Rue Monsieur the dove-colored Paris dawn was brightening. The old lady, appearing to suffer no pain, lay comatose. But on her square, wide-mouthed face there was a look of concentration, as though, desperately pressed for time, she must reconsider, revalue the countless acts and decisions of her extraordinary lifetime. Suddenly, at 6:50 a. m., her features relaxed. . . .

Dr. Edmund Gros. head of the American Hospital, hurried downstairs to where a group of reporters huddled in the half-light. He said: "The grandest lady of France and America died with a suffragist smile. There were no last words." Thus last week died Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, of bronchitis and heart disease, having lain ill since a paralytic stroke last May.

In 1853, to a cotton planter named Murray Forbes Smith at Mobile, was born this daughter Alva. Not every young lady from Alabama went to school in France. And not every U. S. schoolgirl in France met William Kissam Vanderbilt. But somehow, strong-chinned Alva Smith did. What was more she married Vanderbilt in Manhattan when she was 21. From then on, plump, ambitious, fabulously energetic Alva Vanderbilt was to find that her successive environments were always just a little too confining. The ever-present temptation was to burst out of them as she would an over-snug bodice.

In those days New York City's Society was the private hobby of Mrs. William Astor. The Vanderbilts were unassuming folk whose father, the old Commodore, had helped push the nation's frontier into the Pacific Ocean. The Vanderbilts were rich in money but Mrs. Astor's jewel was her master of ceremonies, Ward McAllister, who limited the number of Manhattan's citizens who "wouldn't make it uncomfortable in a ballroom for others" to 400.

Alva Vanderbilt soon found that one's social stature was measured by the success of the balls one gave. Very well. She would give a ball. Furthermore, she would build the most impressive house in town to give the ball in. The house, an adaptation of the Chateau de Blois, cost $3,000,000. And no one in Manhattan since has given a party as impressive as the one which warmed her house on the night of March 27, 1883. Alva Vanderbilt received her guests in an elaborate renaissance costume, fetchingly set off by the photographer with white doves. Even the Astors came and, satisfied that New York was hers, Alva Vanderbilt turned to Newport.

Her Newport technique ran true to form. In 1892 she built the most impressive house in the colony, Marble Hall. It cost $8,000,000. She warmed Marble Hall with the most sensational engagement announcement of the decade, that of her daughter Consuelo to the Duke of Marlborough. (When Consuelo wanted an annulment in 1927, her mother frankly admitted coercion.) Next Alva Vanderbilt erected another towering social milestone by divorcing her husband. A year later she became the wife of Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont. In 1908 he died, and Mrs. Belmont abruptly redirected her talents. "No profession," said she, when someone asked her why she had retired from the social battleground, "no art or trade is as taxing in mental resource."

In 1915 she attended the San Francisco convention of the National Woman's Party. She went abroad to see Christabel Pankhurst, who would gladly break an umbrella over a constable's head if it would help her get a vote. In the U. S., Mrs. Belmont's fight for equal suffrage took place on many fronts. She badgered Congressmen. She wrote a propagandist operetta which was produced at the old Waldorf in 1916 with Marie Dressier in the cast. Just as she had nudged Mrs. Astor out of Manhattan's social leadership, so did she outstrip Carrie Chapman Catt in the militancy of her agitation for woman's suffrage. And just as she had built her palaces, she gave $100,600 for the National Woman's Party headquarters in Washington's B Street. The passage of the 19th Amendment was her reward. In 1931, aged 78, she also had her finger in the passage of the Cable Act which enables U. S. women to retain their citizenship when married to foreign nationals.

Most publicized of her quarrels was with Bishop Manning. Because she had been divorced and remarried 30 years before, in 1926 he suddenly asked her to resign from the board of the Home for Children which she had endowed. To this Mrs. Belmont had not only her usual last word, but two last words. A cable from her grandson, the Marquess of Blandford, asked her to stand with George V at the christening of her great-grandson. "Bishop Manning repudiates me and accepts my gift," said she. "But the Archbishop of Canterbury permits me to stand with his monarch at a christening." And when Bishop Manning imprudently asked her for a donation to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Mrs. Belmont snapped: ''I am still a divorced woman."

Last week plans were made to bury Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont in New York's Woodlawn Cemetery. She will be interred beside her second husband* in the celebrated Belmont chapel, modeled after that of the Chateau at Amboise. She built that, too.

* Her first married twice-widowed Anne Harriman in 1903, died in 1920.

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