Alva, That Vanderbilt-Belmont Woman: Her Story as She Might Have Told It

The book is not well written, but it is written. The book doesn't develop the role Alva Belmont's racism played in shaping her dictatorial attitude. Try to get a copy of Alva Belmont's autobiography to compare with Rector's book. Alva Belmont, the daughter of an Alabama cotton planter, was a brazen racist. "I was a natural dictator," she wrote of herself. "I enjoyed nothing so much as tyrannizing over the little slave children on my father's cotton plantation."

Rector joins the legion of writers who have perpetuated the myth of Alva Belmont as the wave, not the float. This myth is a gross exaggeration. The author doesn't grasp that Alva Belmont's lack of scruples did put Caroline Astor, a woman of principle, at a disadvantage in the social arena. I did enjoy the book as semifiction.