Lillie Langtry: Manners Masks and Morals Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  An Introduction

  I: Brief Lives

  Lillie 1853–1877

  II: Family and Childhood

  III: London

  IV: First Success

  Venus Annodomini 1877–1880

  V: A Muse in Context

  VI: Votaries in Bohemia

  VII: Idolaters in Society

  VIII: Fallen Angels

  IX: The Prince of Wales

  X: End of a Season

  XI: A Dream

  XII: Waking

  Limbo 1878–1882

  XIII: Prologue to the Death of a Goddess

  XIV: Back to Bohemia; Whistler

  XV: Heaven and Hell

  XVI: Oscar Wilde

  XVII: Society

  XVIII: A Gay Light-hearted Nature

  XIX: Storm Clouds

  XX: The Storm Breaks

  XXI: Secret Lives

  XXII: A Voice from the Underworld

  XXIII: Letters

  XXIV: The Stage

  Mrs Langtry and her Repertoire 1882–1899

  XXV: Prologue to the New World

  XXVI: Mrs Renshaw

  XXVII: Down the Primrose Path

  XXVIII: Venus in Harness

  XXIX: Purchasing Paradise

  XXX: Venus Victrix

  XXXI: A Good Woman

  XXXII: Mr Jersey

  XXXIII: Mrs Erlynne at Last

  Lady de Bathe 1899–1929

  XXXIV: Final Act

  Picture Section

  Source Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Author

  * * *

  Laura Beatty worked in the art world in London and New York. She is married with three children and now lives in Buckinghamshire. Lillie Langtry is her first book.

  List of Illustrations

  Lillie with her mother and father. The Hulton Getty Picture Collection

  Lillie at 21. Photograph by C.P. Ouless. By courtesy of the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive, Jersey

  The young Langtrys, newly married. H.T. Porter

  Reggie le Breton, Lillie’s favourite brother.

  ‘The Milliner’s Assistant’, Lillie at the dawn of her discovery. The Hulton Getty Picture Collection

  The Prince of Wales. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

  Alexandra, Princess of Wales. Royal Archives © Her Majesty The Queen

  The Red House, Bournemouth. Pamela Hamilton-Howard

  Lord Wharncliffe, cartoon by ‘Ape’. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

  Frank Miles. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

  Sir John Everett Millais. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

  James Abbott McNeill Whistler. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

  ‘Jersey Lilies’, by Frank Miles. Jersey Museums Service

  Edward Poynter’s portrait. Jersey Museums Service

  Oscar Wilde. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

  Prince Louis of Battenberg. Illustrated London News

  Arthur Jones. By courtesy of the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive, Jersey

  Edward Godwin’s drawings for a house in Tite Street, Chelsea, commissioned by Lillie. V & A Picture Library

  Lillie as Rosalind in As You Like It.

  Lillie in 1880. The Hulton Getty Picture Collection

  Fred Gebhard. Museum of the City of New York

  Lillie in Boston, photographed by James Notman. By courtesy of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities

  Posing for Lafayette in 1899. V & A Picture Library

  Lillie’s sitting room at Cadogan Place. The Hulton Getty Picture Collection

  Lady de Bathe. Lillie photographed by Bassano in 1911. By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

  Merman, Lillie’s prizewinning racehorse.

  Lillie as ‘Goddess of Goodwood’. V & A Picture Library

  Lillie’s daughter, Jeanne. Expressen, Stockholm

  Lillie in her sixties, playing a principal boy.

  Lillie shows her masculine side at the races. The Hulton Getty Picture Collection

  Striding past Claridges. The Hulton Getty Picture Collection

  Lillie in Monte Carlo with her companion, Mathilde Peat. The Hulton Getty Picture Collection

  Lillie, the year before she died. Photographed by Cecil Beaton. By courtesy of Sotheby’s and the National Portrait Gallery, London

  The author and publishers have made every effort to trace the owners of copyright. They much regret if any inadvertent mistakes or omissions have been made. These can be rectified in future editions.

  To C.E.L.K.

  We may have lost courteous manners, gentle voices and upright figures, but we have gained in luxury and freedom. The emancipation of women has saved thousands from the life of hopeless apathy which the girl of the last century had to live, tied to her parents by a foolish convention until all vestige of youth and good looks had vanished. Everything she wanted to do was vetoed as being ‘fast’ or ‘peculiar’, and it took a very strong character to strike out and make a fight for liberty.

  Augusta Fane

  …. it takes an exceptional woman, one gifted with an overwhelmingly strong personality, irresistible charm and astonishing brains, to ‘get away’ with complete originality and informality of conduct in this world. Unless you are, in effect, a sort of superwoman, you had much better stay inside the safe, though boring, boundaries of social behaviour defined by the English county families.

  Claude Beddington

  AN INTRODUCTION

  Chapter I

  Brief Lives

  THIS IS THE story of a woman who sold her human nature for a legend.

  It tells of a girl who looked enough like a goddess to want to be one; a girl who was born more human than most, but who found herself so susceptible to the adulation she inspired that she would go to any lengths to preserve it. London called her Venus Annodomini, and that was what she wanted to stay. Nothing was too great a sacrifice: not family, nor reputation, nor friendship, nor love. Whatever held her back or did not fit she shrugged aside. The needs and the affections, that so inconveniently accompany and define humanity, she trimmed away, burnt like offerings in the blaze of her ambition. For she was brave and not afraid of difficulty.

  To be a goddess of beauty and love she would endure all hardships and endure them alone – or so she thought. But once she was set on her course of myth-making she found there was no going back. In her adopted role, she was wondered at, criticized, judged and ridiculed. Nor could she drop the mask, even for a moment, to disabuse her critics. When people were jealous or sniping there was no solace, no chance to climb down from her pedestal to explain her position, no possibility of companionship or of sympathy. She had sold her humanity and she had paid the price.

  Familiar though the concept is, wholesale self-invention is rare; its demands terrible. Stepping so lightly into her role, she did not see the trap that closed about her; did not guess the toll of the discipline that her fiction would demand for its maintenance. She forgot in her haste – if she ever knew – that goddesses are inscrutable and therefore misunderstood, that they are set apart from mankind and are therefore lonely. Too late she found that the centre of her invention was ever the old self which suffered the inevitable hurt, in silence and in isolation.

  Not every
beautiful girl feels it incumbent upon her to become a goddess. Why Lillie Langtry did was a mixture of bad luck and bad timing. There were several factors. The first was the nature of Society when Lillie made her first appearance in its midst in 1877. The second was Oscar Wilde, who saw an opportunity in her deification and grabbed it. And the third, of course, was Lillie herself, and the way that she was at the outset. Without the first two Lillie would not have thought of making a reputation out of her looks alone. She was, in those days, not vain enough. When London first knelt at her feet, she was genuinely astounded.

  It is a strange city that is so happy to be fooled. What was it like this London in which Lillie found herself, and which she grew half to love and half to despise? Since the accession of Queen Victoria1 things had begun to change. Railways were being built, making the capital more widely accessible. There was more and cleaner popular entertainment. There were exhibitions for rich and poor alike and the first organised sports. The franchise had been widened, with the passing of the Second Parliamentary Reform Act in 1867. The Cabinet had absorbed its first radical working-manfn1, and Disraeli, who was Jewish, was poised again for premiership. There was money and position to be made. So, there was a rising middle class, but however powerful the new men were they were not acceptable at Court. London was still led, and, to a degree, the country still governed, by Society, and Society was closed. Trade, actors, Jews, the professional middle classes, all were debarred. Only the aristocracy was allowed, and yet even that suffered, in its way. Its old freedoms had no place under the sombre cloud of Prince Albert’s influence. He and the Queen had set a tone of sobriety and mutual affection that the fast set, with one foot still in the Regency, found hard to accept. Adultery, bawdy conversation, immodesty of dress or behaviour were all out, and piety of all kinds was in. Among the Prince Consort’s more arcane rules for conduct were the avoidance of the ‘foolish vanity of dandyism’ and a decorous horror of the practical joke.

  Then, in 1863, with Albert dead, and the Queen sunk in mourning, the Prince of Wales took a beautiful foreign wife and set up a court at Marlborough House. He was young, dissolute and full of charm, and suddenly it was not enough just to be virtuous and well-born. The Prince’s restlessness, held so long under the yoke of his father’s taboos, was infectious. With the first touch of this freshening breeze Society awoke, and found itself in an agony of boredom. Concessions were made. The Rothschilds, Sir Blundell Maple, the Sassoons, Sir Thomas Lipton and Colonel Astor were taken, like a tonic, and there followed a decade and a half of vain and frantic pleasure. But pleasure was not the answer. Sated, but never diverted for long, Society searched for something out of the ordinary; something that would lift it from its torpor and yet still be allowed, something that would fit within the rigid conventions and yet somehow refresh, revitalize, transcend.

  When Lillie was ‘discovered’, Society’s surprise and its adulation knew no bounds. Socially, aesthetically, carnally, she answered all its prayers. Certainly, she was beautiful. She was also poetically impoverished. Most potent of all, she was a stranger. To a world whose houses, parents, horses and possessions were all numbered and ticketed, mystery was an intoxicating commodity. And London drank deep. For four years it gave itself up to a frenzy of devotion. Commoners, painters, aristocrats, aesthetes, all trampled each other in the scramble for the shrine, and among them happened to be Oscar Wilde.

  Wilde worshipped with his eyes open and he was quick to see Lillie’s potential. He drank in her unearthly beauty that was so conveniently in the Ancient Greek mould. He knew the boredom of Society, its longing for the mystery that its conventions forbade. And he saw that the suddenness of her arrival on the London scene had about it more than a touch of the godsend. There she was, as goddesses always are, with no identifiable background, without the inconvenience of parents, just in time, and quite out of the blue. But, if Society had spotted that she was a goddess, he could tell it which one. Mrs Langtry2, he announced, ‘arose from Jersey like Venus from the foam’.

  In fact there was a good deal of wryness mixed with the extravagance of Wilde’s claims for Lillie. In a different way, though he was only 23, he too had subjugated London. He was known to have confided in the wife of Julian Hawthorne, who confided in Harper’s Bazaar, ‘I should never have believed, had I not experienced it, how easy it is to become the most prominent figure in Society.’ He knew how far Lillie had come and he probably knew too how far she had to fall.

  When they became friends, in 1879, Lillie was embarking on her third season. For two years she had enjoyed an unprecedented popularity. But her star was already, though imperceptibly, on the wane. True, she was still the centre of attention, but she was hopelessly entangled both emotionally and financially. The sands were running out and she knew it. So she looked for someone who could shore up her position, for a promise that she would never be demoted – and the same luck that had brought her to London at just the right moment now introduced her to Oscar Wilde.

  Wilde, too, was treading the path from obscurity to stardom. It was he who showed Lillie how to manage and maintain her profile, he who fanned the flame when it wavered. Wilde helped her to create a persona for herself and he stripped away the last vestiges of her fear of notoriety. Most important of all, while he taught Lillie, he also taught Society at large. He showed it how to treat its divinities. His version of aesthetics – just popular enough for the uninitiated to know what they were missing, and to desire it – created the language by which Lillie was to be worshipped. Rose petals were to be strewn in her path by poets in buckskins, a single amaryllis carried to her door, armfuls of water lilies thrown into her carriage by dripping marquesses in evening dress. Meanwhile he, the acknowledged high-priest of beauty, would shout her credentials from the rooftops. He lay on her doorstep all night when composing her poem. He spent his money on flowers, which he carried in state, on foot, across London. He told the world that she was the mind of Phidias incarnate, and soon, when a lecture was given in the British Museum, it was necessary to have Lillie sitting in profile on the dais. Whatever Lillie actually was or had been was irrelevant. Wilde swathed her in his vision. By the end of the year Lillie did nothing without consulting him first – not even dress herself for a dance. He, of course, revelled in his influence, enjoying the decadent conflation of slave and master, so evident in his camp complaint to the painter Graham Robertson:

  The Lily is so tiresome3 … She won’t do what I tell her … I assure her that she owes it to herself and to us to drive daily through the Park dressed entirely in black in a black victoria drawn by black horses and with ‘Venus Annodomini’ emblazoned on her black bonnet in dull sapphires. But she won’t.

  Whether or not she always obliged him, Wilde’s myth of Lillie was potent. The world believed it and Lillie herself, though too sensible to believe, saw its value. After two years as Society’s darling Lillie found she could not go back. She needed the adulation and the flattery. She needed the luxuries that the Court circle took so easily for granted. She was used to idleness and pleasure and vapid exchange, and she had forgotten that there was ever anything else. Venus Annodomini was born, but her birth, though it had been so easy and so unconscious, had stifled the old self from which she had sprung. For Lillie, unlike real goddesses, did have a background.

  Lillie was born on the island of Jersey, in October 1853, during an autumn of freak storms. She was christened Emilie Charlotte Le Breton, but called ‘Lillie’ from childhood, and she was the last but one in a family of six boys. Home life, on which the foundations of all character are laid, was for her particularly happy and affectionate. The Le Bretons were close and self-sufficient. She had a liberal and educated father, and a mother who, we are told, was adoring, though semi-invisible. Liberality and invisibility resulted in a childhood that for Victorian times was remarkably free from parental control. Running with the boys in all their games, their escapades a constant test, Lillie strove to match them in endurance, in independence and in dar
ing. Pleading weakness was never an option, and she would not be left behind. The effort of living up to her brothers left an abiding legacy. For the rest of her life she kept up, whatever the conditions and whatever the cost to herself or to others.

  The idyll of her childhood was sacred to Lillie but it was soon over. By the time she was twenty-six, five of the Le Breton boys had died. An influence that had been, as that of siblings always is, unconscious and mercurial was at once embalmed, and her childhood enshrined with their memory. Even in the disaffected twentieth century the dead are perfect. How much more so must they have been in an age when death was fashionable. After the Prince Consort’s death, Queen Victoria, with a little help from Dickens, had endowed her nation with a whole aesthetics of mourning and enshrining. There were hierarchies of death in which the mother, the innocent and the serviceman came out on top. Four of the Le Breton boys had died heroes’ deaths in foreign countries. They were preserved for ever in their promise, perpetually free from the wrack of failure or disillusion. This, when Lillie looked back from the emotional shipwrecks that constituted her adult life, gave her childhood a double potency. These memories belonged not just to another country but to other, and lost, lives.

  We are now culturally in revolt against sentimentality and the soldier’s sacrifice, but it is clear that Lillie did not have to be particularly sentimental to regard her childish happiness as talismanic. In fact she warred all her life with sentiment. Her catchphrase ‘Don’t let us fuss, please’, delivered in ‘a soft, plaintive voice’, was a danger signal, not just to those around her, but also to herself. If she was to survive the slings and arrows – and she was a survivor – she must stifle her own Victorian tendencies. But memory is the most intractable of opponents and the brothers’ influence lived on. In all the adult world Lillie either could not, or would not, find anyone as big as her brothers had been.

  This, then, is the case from the outside, and it resulted, between the years 1879 and 1882, in a form of nervous crisis. No one could have protected Lillie against her collapse but Wilde could and did teach her the rudiments of self-invention. When Lillie rose, like a phoenix, from the ashes of her failure, it was in Wilde’s plumage.