Historical Novelist Renée Rosen on “The Social Graces”

Renée Rosen is the bestselling author behind “Windy City Blues” and “Park Avenue Summer.” She grew up in “a very traditional Jewish household” in the Midwest. It took her seventeen years to write her debut novel, “Every Crooked Pot,”a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story about a Jewish teenager from Ohio.

Her latest work, “The Social Graces,” published April 2021, is a look at New York socialites at the turn of the twentieth century. Readers are transported to a Gilded Age full of lavish masquerade balls and exclusive clambakes. The novel revolves around Alva Vanderbilt’s infamous rivalry with the grande dame herself, Caroline Astor. Alva, a tenacious social climber, shocks everyone when she divorces her husband and marries a Jew, “a rarity in their circles.”

The Journal spoke to the author over the phone about literary themes and her creative process.

Jewish Journal: I didn’t know Alva Vanderbilt’s second marriage was to a Jewish businessman [Oliver Belmont].

Renée Rosen: Yeah, she broke many taboos with that. My Jewish heritage finds its way into my work. There’s no doubt about that… I just gravitate to wherever its applicable. My character ends up being Jewish. Like in “Park Avenue Summer,” [the protagonist] Alice, was Jewish. In “The Social Graces,” the only opportunity to even bring that in was through the Belmonts. I’m not sure exactly why they were, as a Jewish family, allowed into society, but they were.

JJ: I appreciated the fact that you addressed the anti-Semitism of the period.

RR: Yeah, it was clearly there. It’s been with us for a long, long time. Unfortunately, it’s still with us.

JJ: Mother-daughter relationships are a central theme of “The Social Graces.” Which of the characters do you think had the healthiest bond with her daughters? 

RR: Neither of these women — Alva or Caroline — would’ve gotten “Mother of the Year.” Alva definitely had an agenda for her daughter, Consuelo. She really didn’t care what Consuelo wanted. She was going to marry her off to a duke. She basically sold her to a duke, so she would have a title and a place in history, even though she was going through a divorce in the midst of this, so talk about the hypocrisy there. She didn’t love her husband and wanted away from him, but she was going to force her daughter into a loveless marriage.

In terms of Caroline and her daughters, I think each of her daughters represented something different in the evolution of love matches and marriage. The whole idea of a love match was a very new concept to someone like Caroline Astor. You didn’t marry for love, you married because it made sense. They were from the right family, your parents agreed, and you were going to make babies and just continue the bloodline.

[Caroline] had one daughter who, G-d forbid, married “railroad money” and mortified [her]. She had another daughter who tried to be the obedient daughter and follow in her mother’s footsteps. Charlotte, the middle daughter, was really a rebel. She probably didn’t want to marry at all, but got forced into a marriage and then created all kinds of scandals for her family because she just wasn’t happy… Then you had Carrie, who was the youngest and probably the most like Caroline in the fact that she sort of moved in a quiet but very determined way. She had seen what her older sisters had gone through, and she was going to do it her way. Even if that meant she had to go on a hunger strike, she was going to marry the man she wanted to marry.

I think that those four girls really represented all the different possible paths that a young woman could’ve gone in that time period in terms of finding a husband. I think in the end, Caroline realized, after so much loss in her life that… them just them being happy [was] more important than belief in society and bloodlines.

JJ: Is it true that you rewrote the entire novel three times?

RR: Yes, top to bottom, three times. The most difficult part of this book was trying to make Caroline and Alva relatable to readers today because it was so easy to draw them almost as stick figures of these incredibly wealthy women, who were so preoccupied with society and balls and clothes… I really owe the credit to my editor… because she really held my hand through this one. Once we started to think of Caroline Astor as a CEO of a big corporation, which is really how she ran society, that started to click. From there, both women started to sort of open up to me a little bit. I started to think of them more as, “What are they like as wives and daughters and sisters?” I really had to dig to find the humanity in that, but they surprised me.

JJ: Why do you think the press and society are so enthralled by female rivalries?

RR: The thing that was really interesting was until 1880, there was no society news. The newspapers would only carry a really significant wedding announcement or the announcement of a birth. But it wasn’t until 1880 that this whole business of society news and gossip sprang up. People just could not get enough of it to the point where if you were a valet or a lady’s maid, for a few bucks, you’d say who was getting into the brandy and who was canoodling in the brothels on Murray Hill.

Why [are we] still so fascinated? I do not know. Someone asked me, “Are there modern-day equivalents of Caroline and Alva?” And I said, “Well, I guess you’re talking like a Paris Hilton or the Kardashians,” but I just don’t know why we’re supposed to be fascinated by the Kardashians.

You have to also take into account that back then, there were no other outlets for women. So, if you have any ambition at all, if you ever [have] any sense of ego or wanting to have control, society was the one place that you can sort of flex your muscle. So, it made sense that they created — they really just engineered society. It did not exist before that. They just needed something for them to do, a reason to get up in the morning. So, why not plan a nine-course dinner party?

JJ: What can you tell us about your upcoming book on Estée Lauder, the famous cosmetics tycoon and daughter of Jewish immigrants?

RR: The Estée Lauder book covers 1938 to 1946. We follow her from the early days, when Estée went from being an aspiring actress to cooking face creams and lotions in her Upper West Side apartment. She started her cosmetic empire by hawking her wars in the New York beauty parlors before landing her first major account with Saks Fifth Avenue. That was in 1946, and it marked the beginning of Estée Lauder’s incredible success. I don’t want to give too much away, but rest assured that her journey was filled with lots of controversies about her background, her marriage, even her Judaism. There’s also lots of fun, juicy details about the cosmetics industry and Saks Fifth Avenue. I’m still searching for a title, but the novel will be published by Berkley/Penguin Random House in Spring 2023.

This interview was edited for brevity.

Eve Rotman is a writer on the West Coast.