SPOILER ALERT! This story contains plot points from the season 3 finale of The Gilded Age on HBO.
All’s well may have ended well for the newly-hitched Gladys, but the celebration didn’t last long for her mother Bertha.
After throwing a triumphant ball that showcased the now happily-married duke and duchess and her newly-healed husband who was shot in the previous episode, Bertha would soon learn that George was in no mood to party. The railroad tycoon never got over the idea that his daughter was forced to marry someone she didn’t love, so he walked out on Bertha at episode’s end.
Here, creator Julian Fellowes and executive producer Sonja Warfield explain what drove George to leave his wife and why Bertha’s actions toward Gladys earlier in the season shouldn’t leave 21st Century viewers clutching their pearls.
DEADLINE It seems like more than ever this season drove home the point that this period was absolute hell on women. Was that the goal all along?
JULIAN FELLOWES I don’t really agree with you, actually. I think that it was hell for weak women, but I think life was hell for weak women until comparatively recently. But look at women like Alva Vanderbilt and various others who were the queens of Newport and really ran the gilded age. I mean, society in most countries has always been run by women, but not any women. It’s been run by these very strong and tough women, I suppose one would say. I think they were interesting characters. I mean, Alva Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman. She went through the period of wanting to be prominent socially and have her daughter be a duchess and all of that stuff. She came out the other end and got very interested in women’s rights and in the Constitution and other, more serious areas, and indeed made a difference.
SONJA WARFIELD I mean, if you look at where modern women are, clearly there’s been growth and change.Are you referring to the fact that Aurora was shunned because she was divorced?
DEADLINE Yes, and what poor Gladys went through.
SONJA WARFIELD Bertha knew what she was doing with Gladys.
DEADLINE On that subject, was there a part of you that was tempted to have Gladys prevail and not marry the duke? Did you worry that a forced marriage might now resonate with 21st century audiences?
JULIAN FELLOWES God knows Consuelo Vanderbilt [who her mother, Alva, forced to marry the Duke of Marlborough in 1895] did her best. I mean, how do you deal with a mother who’s faking a heart attack in front of you? She was put to the ultimate test. [As she got older] the duchess chose her second husband for herself. She wasn’t a fool at all. And she later wrote a rather sanitized version of what she’d been put through. But nevertheless, she got involved in a lot of interesting stuff, and she was one of the big patrons of her time in different charities and different rights issues. I don’t recommend Alva’s behavior, and I don’t think we would get away with it now. But these women, they did make a difference. Alva did made a big difference, however much it’s hard to like her when you read about her and study her.
SONJA WARFIELD I will tell you, we had a screening a few weeks ago, and it was the wedding episode. I went out with a group of high powered women after that episode, and we discussed it, and half of them were Team Bertha and the other half were worried for Gladys. Team Bertha said they moved mountains and done all sorts of things in the interest of their children so their children could get ahead. One of them said to me that Bertha knew exactly what she was doing and how she wasn’t doing anything wrong. I believe that this season, Bertha empowered her daughter through this marriage because in 1884, that is how women had power. And then she also empowered Aurora and Mrs. Astor’s daughter as divorced women by bringing them back into society.
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JULIAN FELLOWES She did, I mean, she really made divorce acceptable in American society 30 years before it was acceptable in Europe. That was Alva, too. I mean, she did that herself. We are an odd generation for judging earlier generations by our own standards and our own beliefs. It seems to me a completely ridiculous exercise that you must judge people in the context of their own time. It’s not at all a sad story that Bertha stated’s goal was to give Gladys a position from which she can have real influence and make a real difference. I don’t think that was dishonest. Marrying some banker and having a weekend house in the Hamptons would not have been the same.
DEADLINE Well, I did think it was a little unfair of George to leave Bertha because he still sent those checks to the Duke. He still went along with it!
JULIAN FELLOWES That’s what he hates himself for. He feels that she made him act against his instincts and he did it. That’s what he can’t forgive, of course. Bertha is more pragmatic on the whole than George. For Bertha, Gladys and the duke are happy, they’re getting along, what’s the problem? Everything’s fine. Whereas for George, it’s a deeper consideration. But what almost frightens George is that his wife has been able to manipulate him into doing something with which he completely disagrees.
A lot of his robber barons, towards the end of their careers, started worrying about their lives and how they would be remembered. So they started opening art collections and giving libraries all of this stuff. And to a certain extent, it was successful. I mean, Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie were among the most ruthless of the robber barons. Frick was prepared to open fire on his own workers, but now he’s more or less remembered for The Frick Collection and everything else has been forgotten. I was rather interested because it chimes with certain businessmen you see today who have made enormous amounts of money. And at the end, clearly they want to be remembered for something more than that. So they give this and they give that and they sponsor the other. And you can find that quite a lot, actually, in the Gilded Age people. So we have built on that because we’ve made George look at his life more searchingly after the attempt on his life.
DEADLINE The death of Oscar’s lover was rather grim. Why did you decide to go that route and take him out, and with a buggy, no less?
JULIAN FELLOWES Well, we wanted to explore in different ways the difficulties of being homosexual in that period when it was still illegal. And of course for me, I can remember when it was still illegal when I was young. It’s not long ago, any of this. And part of it was that you couldn’t show grief, you couldn’t show emotion. You had to keep that in a room with a closed door. There’s no reason to believe that the proportion of men and women who were homosexual in 1885 was significantly different from the numbers now. It’s just that most of them learned to live in hiding and to have artificial emotional lives. And I think that was the point we were trying to make.
DEADLINE Can you talk about Peggy’s storyline this season, especially the introduction of Phylicia Rashad and her character’s discrimination against light-skinned people?
SONJA WARFIELD Colorism is a big issue in communities of color, whether it’s Black communities or latino communities. It’s just not something that I’ve ever really seen on screen. I had two grandmothers, one who was of a fair complexion and one who was of a darker complexion. They both were very concerned about how much time I spent in the sun. The idea of having light skin privilege is very much real in this country and beyond. And Elizabeth Kirkland, played by Ms. Rashad, embodies all of that. She is a bit like the Black Mrs. Astor of Newport.
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