As we watch the characters in the New Jillian Fellow series The Gilded Age, whose first season is just premiered on HBO,

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 sledge-hammering 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,

cringeworthy 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 possibly know, and what she really had to fight against,

and what it cost her, and what she really gained in the end. I'm Carl Raymond, host of the Gilded Gentleman History Podcast.

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