The Obscenely Lavish Vanderbilt Ball That Inspired the Season Finale of ‘The Gilded Age’ (2024)

As much of The Gilded Age does, episode nine of the HBO show centered around who—and who was not—invited to a party. In this case, those excluded were members of the Astor family. “You wouldn’t call on her if your life depended on it. I worked on the dance for weeks. Did you think of that? You must have known she’d drop me when you wouldn’t let her into the house,” daughter Carrie Astor snarls at mother, Mrs. Astor, after the impressionable teen is disinvited from Gladys Russell’s debutante ball because her socialite family matriarch refuses to welcome Mrs. Russell into her home. Spoiler alert: Mrs. Astor eventually concedes to Carrie’s demands, and gives the Russells a call. The Astors then attend the ball, and the “new money” Russell family is accepted into New York society.

It’s a seemingly low-stakes yet high-drama moment—and also one that’s very much rooted in reality.

Oh, yes. Like much of The Gilded Age, the plotline takes inspiration from a historical socialite scandal back in the 1880s. The players in question? The actual Mrs. Astor and her daughter, Carrie, as well as Alva Vanderbilt (who bears a striking similarity to Carrie Coon’s Mrs. Russell.) Except in real life, it was even grander, more dramatic, and over-the-top than its fictional recreation.

In 1883, Alva Vanderbilt—wife of railroad tycoon William Kissam Vanderbilt—was on the cusp of breaking into New York society. However, the scene’s ring-leader, Mrs. Astor, still considered her “nouveau riche” and therefore didn’t acknowledge her and her family’s presence. So Alva decided to throw a costume ball so grand for her then-six-year-old daughter, Consuelo, that not even Mrs. Astor could refuse its invitation.

She spent outrageously. According to an 1883 report by the New York World: $11,000 was spent on flowers, $4,000 on carriages, $65,000 on champagne, catering, and cigars, and $4,000 on hairdressers. The biggest expense? The night’s costumes, clocking in at $155,730. In total, the whole affair cost an estimate of $240,000—which, accounting for inflation, would be over $7 million today. “The masquerade to which we have alluded—Mrs. W.K.’s housewarming on March 26, 1883—was the most extravagant affair of its kind which America had ever seen,” social chronicler Frank Crowninshield wrote in a 1941 issue of Vogue.

So what does a $7 million ball look like? Thanks to Alva’s fondness for the press—she invited reporters from outlets like the New York Times and the New York Sun to preview the space—we have an excellent idea.

There were roses upon roses upon roses, with names of a suitably aristocratic air: “Throughout the hall and parlors on the first floor, were distributed vases and gilded baskets filled with natural roses of extraordinary size, such as the dark crimson Jacqueminot, the deep pink Glorie de Paris, the pale pink Baroness de Rothschild and Adolphide Rothshild, the King of Morocco, the Duchess of Kent, and the new and beautiful Marie Louise Vassey,” reported The New York Times. The columns in the entry hall were adorned with palms, ferns, and masses, all accented with Japanese lanterns.

Most of the evening took place in the ballroom of their Fifth Avenue home, which, according to the Times, had been completely transformed into a “fairyland.” “It had not the appearance of an apartment last night; it was like a garden in a tropical forest,” they reported. “The walls were nowhere to be seen, button their place an impenetrable thicket of fern above fern and palm above palm, while from the branches of the palms hung a profusion of lovely orchids, displaying a rich variety of color and almost endless variation of fantastic forms.” Cuban vines hung from the ceiling, and the doors were covered in roses and lily of the valley.

Yet, for some, it wasn’t even the flowers that were the most spectacular decoration of the night: The Vanderbilts were one of the first families to have their home completely outfitted with lightbulbs, which had been invented a mere three years earlier by Thomas Edison.

Then, there were the outfits. The exuberant amount spent on costumes should give one an idea about how outrageous they were: “Mrs. Vanderbilt’s costume was inspired by Alexandre Cabanel’s painting of a Venetian princess. Her dress was embellished with a light blue satin train, magnificently embroiled in gold and lined with Roman red. It likewise had an underskirt of white-and-yellow brocade, shading from the deepest orange to the lightest canary,” recalled Crowninshield. “On her head, she wore a Venetian cap from which there shone, among other jeweled miscellanea, a miniature peacock of many-colored gems. A covey of lifelike doves served her also as minor accessories.”

Meanwhile, Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt (wife of Cornelius) wore an “electric light dress” of white satin trimmed with diamonds, complete with a diamond headpiece and a lightbulb as a jewelry accessory. Others dressed like Marie Antoinette, or as peacocks, or the Roman goddess Diana. One even came as a cat: “The overskirt was made entirely of white cats’ tails sewed on a dark background. The bodice was formed of rows of white cats’ heads and the headdress was a stiffened white cat’s skin, the head over the forehead of the wearer and the tail pendant behind it,” described The New York Times. “A blue ribbon with ‘Puss’ inscribed upon it, from which hung a bell, worn around the neck and completed the dress.”

The lead-up to the ball was both frantic, and, well, a little ridiculous. “The Vanderbilt ball has agitated New-York society more than any social event that has occurred here in many years,” The New York Times wrote dramatically. “Since the announcement that it would take place, which was made about a week before the beginning of Lent, scarcely anything else has been talked about. It has been on the tongue and a fixed idea in every head. It has disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks.” Women fretted over choosing medieval, ancient, or modern costumes, whereas several distinguished guests fastidiously practiced their quadrilles (or, a choreographed dance in costume.) Feuds erupted over hairdressers—especially when Ruth Ogden Mills dared to encroach on the appointment of a woman named Mrs. Cutting.

One person, however, was noticeably left off the guest list: Carrie Astor.

It was Mrs. Vanderbilt’s grand play against her queen bee mother. Carrie, assuming she would be included, had been practicing the quadrille with her friends for weeks. Yet, while other invitations arrived one by one, nothing ever arrived at the Astor brownstone. “One of its diverting episodes was that, before the invitations had been issued, Mrs. William Astor’s daughter, Caroline, under the illusion that she would be one of Mrs. Vanderbilt’s guests, had begun regularly rehearsing a court quadrille designed especially for that much-heralded revel,” recalls Crowninshield. “But Mrs. Vanderbilt, hearing what was brewing, was quick to point out that since Mrs. Astor had never left so much as a pasteboard at her gates, the inclusion of her daughter at the gala was, most regrettably, inconceivable.”

Suddenly, the Astors found themselves in a predicament they’d never seen before: they, for once, were socially irrelevant. Worried about losing her position at the top of New York society, Astor succumbed and finally acknowledged Alva Vanderbilt. “And that was how Mrs. Astor, finding herself neatly trapped, first called at Mrs. Vanderbilt's chateau, thereby establishing something like amity between the Montagues and the Capulets,” wrote Crowninshield.

The party started at 11 p.m. Within half an hour, Fifth Avenue was so crowded with carriages that the police had to intervene. The party and its antics stretched late into the night—by some estimates, past 4 p.m. In his 1941 Vogue essay on Consuelo Vanderbilt, Crowninshield summed up its legacy as thus: “The masquerade gave rise, particularly as it was the means of casting her parents, as well as her three uncles and four aunts, upon the troubled waters of New York society.” Like their fictional counterparts in The Gilded Age, no one in the city ever, ever doubted the social prowess of the Vanderbilts again.