As we watch the characters of season three of HBO series The Gilded Age,

for those of us who spend a lot of time training our gilded spectacles on the period,

it's been fascinating to see the on-screen portrayals of real-life movers and shakers like Mrs. Astor,

Ward McAllister, and Stanford White.

But it's more fun to try to figure out on whom or on what parts of whom various other characters

are built.

Perhaps for many of us, one of the most fun to watch, since we really don't know what she

will do next in her climb to the top, is the fearless, domineering, deeply focused, and unrelenting Bertha Russell.

Bertha, along with her husband, George, are outsiders. Well, at the moment. In that tightly

controlled gilded world, and it's pretty clear that she will not stop sledgehammering her way

into the coveted center of society.

It's also pretty clear, if we look closely, that in many ways her real-life counterpart and

social sister may well have been inspired, at least in part, by the controversial, social-scaling,

relentless domestic dictator, Alva Vanderbilt.

Alva, it has been said, was responsible for nearly single-handedly putting the whole

Vanderbilt clan on the social map, and her beginnings in a genteel southern world led her

to end up, if not overtaking Mrs. Astor, certainly running parts of the

show in the next lane. The real story of Alva, who she was, what motivated her, it's complicated,

and perhaps she is written off too easily and too simplistically. She was not simple, and the stories about her are jaw-dropping,

cringe-worthy in some cases, but they're memorable. In this show, I want to take a look a little bit

more deeply into who she really was, as much as we can possibly know, and what she really

had to fight against, and what it cost her, and what she really

...