The Real-Life Miserable Marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt That Inspired The Gilded Age

Vogue

23-06-2025

The third season of The Gilded Age is not a love story. It is, however, a story about marriage: the first episode is centered around Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga), the teen daughter of Bertha and George, who is head over heels for Billy Carlton (Matt Walker), a well-to-do young man in New York society. He and Gladys want to marry. However, her mother (Carrie Coon) refuses to approach the match. 'It's not happening,' she says in the last minutes of the episode. Why? She wants Gladys to marry the Duke of Buckingham—a British aristocrat who would elevate the family's standing from the top of New York society to the top of European society.
Taissa Farmiga and Carrie Coon as Gladys and Bertha Russell in The Gilded Age.
Photo: Karolina Wojtasik / Courtesy of HBO
As is often the case in his shows, Julien Fellowes was inspired by a real-life historical event for this particular plot-line: the 'marriage of convenience' between Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough.
Consuelo Vanderbilt, the daughter of William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Vanderbilt, was just 19 when she was forced to marry Charles Spencer Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough. Forced is not an exaggeration: her memoir, The Glitter and the Gold, details the lengths her overbearing mother went to ensure the union. Consuelo hoped to marry for love: specifically, Winthrop Rutherford, a handsome American who was a member of Ward McAllister's 'The Four Hundred'—or, the notable New York families that were considered to make up the cream of New York society at the time. Yet, during a trip to Europe, it became clear to Gladys that Alva intended for her to find an aristocratic suitor within the continent's gentry. While the children of her New York peers often married well, none of them had married into titles.
At first, the options were lackluster. 'That summer, I received two or three other proposals from uninteresting Englishmen, which I found slightly disillusioning. They were so evidently dictated by a desire for my dowry, a reflection that was included to dispel whatever thoughts of romance might come my way,' she wrote. But then they arrived for a weekend at Blenheim Palace, the family seat of the Marlboroughs. There, Mrs. Vanderbilt found the socially advantageous bachelor she was looking for.