Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan
- Bobby Kelley
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
(March 2, 1877 - December 6, 1964)
Consuelo Vanderbilt was born in New York City on March 2, 1877, the only daughter of William Kissam Vanderbilt, heir to one of America’s greatest railroad fortunes, and Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt, a southern-born socialite who became a force in New York society and later an ardent suffragist. Her Spanish name honored her godmother, the half-Cuban socialite María Consuelo Yznaga del Valle, whose friendship with the Vanderbilts reflected the tight-knit ties of the Gilded Age elite.
Consuelo grew up in the grand surroundings of her parents’ Fifth Avenue mansion and their country estates, including Idle Hour on Long Island. She was tall, strikingly beautiful, and heiress to a vast fortune, traits that made her one of the most sought-after young women of her generation. Yet her life was shaped less by her own choices than by the iron will of her mother, Alva. While Consuelo was deeply attached to Winthrop Rutherfurd and hoped to marry him, Alva arranged a marriage that would bring her daughter into the ranks of the British aristocracy.
On November 6, 1895, at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in New York, Consuelo married Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. The ceremony was one of the most glittering society events of the age, watched by thousands, but the bride was unwilling. Accounts recall her weeping behind her veil, coerced into the match by her mother’s insistence that it was her duty. The marriage produced two sons, John Albert Edward William Spencer-Churchill, later the 10th Duke of Marlborough, and Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill. Despite heirs and appearances, the marriage soon became one of convenience, as the Duke pursued his own interests and Consuelo, admired for her poise and beauty, adapted to life at Blenheim Palace, the vast ancestral seat of the Marlborough family. She became a popular figure in English society, admired by the public for her grace, but privately she endured a loveless union.
Her relationship with her mother was permanently marked by this episode. Alva later admitted openly that she had coerced her daughter into the marriage, even testifying to that effect during the Vatican annulment proceedings in 1926. Alva insisted she had “absolute control” over her daughter, words that revealed the extent to which Consuelo’s early life had been directed by her mother’s ambitions.
In 1921 Consuelo divorced the Duke of Marlborough, and only months later, on July 4, she married Jacques Balsan, a French aviation pioneer and industrialist.
This second marriage was a source of genuine happiness and companionship. With Jacques, she lived between their residences in France and in the United States, finding the personal freedom and affection that had eluded her in her youth. Their homes included estates in the French countryside and in Paris, where she cultivated a circle of friends in intellectual and artistic society.
Consuelo remained active throughout her life in charitable causes, particularly in women’s welfare and later in war relief. She published her memoir, The Glitter and the Gold, in 1953,
a work that offered both a portrait of Gilded Age society and a candid account of her own life, from a gilded childhood through her years as a duchess, to her eventual independence.
Widowed in 1956, she spent her last years quietly, dividing her time between Europe and Southampton, Long Island.
When she died in Southampton on December 6, 1964, at the age of eighty-seven, she chose to be buried not in the Vanderbilt mausoleum in New York, nor in France where she had made her second home, but at St. Martin’s Churchyard in Bladon, Oxfordshire, near Blenheim Palace. There, she was laid to rest beside her younger son, Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill, who had died prematurely in 1956.
