IN HER OWN CASE , Nancy was trapped. The North—Newport, Boston, Bar Harbor—was closed off to her. She was neither married nor unmarried. Mirador, where she had returned with Bobbie in 1903, was at least open all year round, now that Chillie had decided to retire from railroading. He had sold the house in Grace Street and retreated with Nanaire to the Blue Ridge, declaring (now that he had made a million dollars) that work was only suitable for blacks and Yankees. Only Yankees, as he saw it, would go on working themselves into the ground to amass more money than they needed. He now wanted to enjoy himself. He was pleased that Nancy was back, despite their continual clash of wills. Part of him had resented his daughters’ leaving home, thinning out his family.
It was inevitable that, having burned her bridges in the North, Nancy would be looking across the water to England, to the Virginian’s natural second home. The romance of kings and queens was only one factor. Irene and Dana had spent much time being fêted and praised in London since their marriage. Irene had been presented at Buckingham Palace, where Dana had been allowed to sketch the proceedings. She had made some major flirtatious alliances in high society. The amorous Prince Arthur of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s son, had fallen in love with her. Lady Airlie and Lady Minto, two of the most powerful hostesses of the period, had become her intimate friends. Americans were fashionable in England on that high social level and were favored by the Prince of Wales, who became King Edward VII in 1901. Dana had all but dropped what he called his “sensitive patriotic chip” about the English and had swung around to being an ardent Anglophile.
Nancy took all this in as she “knocked around in an old riding habit” with the horses at Mirador. It was almost a cliché that Virginians recorded, on their first trips to England, how they felt they had come home “after a long absence.” The reverse was also true. Mirador was a center for a group of young Englishmen from aristocratic or county families, “making their way” in the apple business or the railroads, who had found their natural home in Virginia and had gravitated toward the Langhorne family. These were the same young second sons who might otherwise have gone to East Africa as pioneer farmers at the turn of the century. There were Ned and Algy Craven, whose father was master of the Pytchley Hunt; Angus McDonnell, a younger son of the Earl of Antrim, who worked for the railway at Manassas and who fell deeply into unrequited love with Nancy, which clearly gave her pleasure. Nancy and her sisters felt a much closer affinity with these young Englishmen than with the beaux from Boston or Philadelphia. They shared an idea of caste, of paternalism, of the horse-centered, mildly dilapidated pastoral life. But Nancy noticed that when visiting Englishmen came to Virginia, they all seemed to have so much money. Their relations seemed to die frequently and leave them more. By contrast, there was no inherited wealth in Virginia. “Nothing came to us free and we all had shoals of poor relations hanging on to us,” Nancy remembered. Some of these, “down at heel, peculiar and untidy,” as she described them, caused her embarrassment. She wanted to disown them—a lapse in her Christian attitudes—but Nanaire insisted on taking them in and helping them.
As the most ambitious of Chillie’s children, Nancy had always outreached herself, tried for the spectacular, competed fiercely, secretly matched herself against Irene. Her present situation seemed insoluble, until a message came from Boston from old Mr. Shaw. Bob Shaw had actually gone through some marriage ceremony with Mrs. Converse—while still married to Nancy—convincing her that he was now divorced. He faced various charges relating to bigamy, and almost certainly a prison sentence, unless the matter could be cleared up, and covered up, quickly.
Old Mr. Shaw now “begged” Nancy to change her mind and agree to a divorce. They wanted it done quickly and quietly on the grounds of incompatibility of temperament. Nancy refused. She stood by the Bible, agreeing only to grounds of adultery. Adultery made news and bad publicity, but Nancy was adamant. It took considerable bravery, at the age of twenty-four, to resist the pressure from the Shaws. There was a struggle and much bad feeling between the parties. Three years later, when Nancy’s luck changed, on the eve of her second marriage, she wrote to Chillie,“I shall never forget how you were when my troubles came & how you took me in yr arms & said as long as I had you I need never fear anyone doing me real harm & you wd shoot Bob & the whole Shaw family if you thought it necessary!” The divorce was put through speedily in a Charlottesville courtroom in the absence of either Bob or Nancy, on grounds of adultery and with a substantial settlement, in February 1903. Three days later, Bob was “re-married” to Mrs. Converse in New York with his mother, Pauline, as a witness.
Earlier that year, Nancy went on her first trip to Europe with Nanaire,“to pull herself together.” They went to Paris and then to England, where Nancy predictably recorded “the strange feeling of having come home.” Irene’s social contacts were there to greet her. But more important for Nancy had been the meeting on the boat with the worldly, formidable, exotic-looking Ava Astor, estranged wife of John Jacob IV, the head of the American branch of the Astor clan, who later went down on the Titanic. Ava, born in Philadelphia, was ten years older than Nancy, and was considered, in society-obsessed America, the most beautiful woman in the public eye. Nancy had never met anyone like Ava, Boston notwithstanding. She had pure white hair, huge dark eyes, and porcelainlike Oriental looks; she dressed impeccably, never wore jewelry. Nature had designed Ava to be admired by men, and this was her occupation. She was also magnificently selfish and spoiled, sharp-tongued, fearless in her pursuit of pleasure, furiously social, and permanently dissatisfied. She was the antithesis of the improving, correcting, Bible-reading side of Nancy’s nature. “Nonchalante et froide” was how Robert de Montesquiou described her. Her son-in-law Serge Obolensky described her as “one of the most courageously uncompromising females that ever lived.” What must have appealed to Nancy was her social power as a single woman and her fearless sharp tongue, especially with men who bored her.
Ava took to Nancy and invited her to stay on in London for a month while Nanaire went home to look after Bobbie during this, the only recorded separation between mother and son. She took Nancy to a ball at Devonshire House, deeply impressing her with “the glitter and atmosphere” on a scale grander than she had ever seen. It was Ava who showed Nancy the possibilities in England for an American divorcée shunned in Boston. The fashion for American wives—dollar princesses—was gaining height among the English aristocracy, beleaguered by agricultural depression and new taxes. The Duke of Marlborough married Consuelo Vanderbilt and $1 million of railroad stock in 1893; the Earl of Essex, the Duke of Roxburghe, the Earl of Ancaster, had all married heiresses from Newport or New York by 1905. The Duke of Manchester had married Consuelo Yznaga, another millionairess from New York in 1879. They were all Yankees, of course, and Mr. Langhorne’s dowry could never match theirs. But only the most hidebound Tories now looked down on American brides as overdetermined and ruthlessly ambitious. They were popular, needed, and welcomed in society.
When Nancy returned home to Mirador, Angus McDonnell, Lord Antrim’s son, noticed not only that she had returned with a complete outfit of Louis Vuitton trunks and suitcases, but also that she now dressed up for her many visiting admirers in slim-fitting, sequined dresses, looking very “soignée.” It was clear that Mirador wouldn’t hold her for long.
The only sister still at home when Nancy came back to Mirador in 1903 was Nora, aged fifteen. Buck, seventeen, was the only brother there, and it began to dawn on the family that, as one of them put it, “Chillie had eleven children but when it came to Buck and Nora there was something left out of them.” Buck was a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute, spending most of his time playing craps, riding horses, dating girls, and failing his first-year exams. He was growing up a country boy, full of “yee-haw” humor and high spirits. When asked by a newspaperman if he was related to the Langhorne sisters, he said, “Hell, I’m one of ’em.” Irene wrote in a letter, “Bless his heart he is a sweet boy but ssh shh! not really bright. His eyes are wide open and also his mouth & full of nigger stories.” And yet Buck deliberately played the part of the dim rustic brother when his sisters were around, partly for comedy and partly, through caricature, to distance himself from their teasing verbal games.
Whatever was “left out” of Nora, however, was amply compensated for in other ways. Nora had a wistful, distant look about her, often with raised eyebrows, which gave her an expression of innocence, or with heavy eyelids, which made her look sad, and disguised at first sight her vivacity and her wild imagination. She could throw a ball overarm like a boy; she was a pitcher in the local children’s baseball game. She was pretty if not beautiful, slight, but not small, with high cheekbones and very fine, almost unmanageable, hair. She was already being criticized for a certain vagueness and a lack of concentration, but her most obvious and disturbing fault was a pathological inability to tell the truth. “It’s not that Nora had no sense of right and wrong,” they would say, “she’s just got no proper sense at all.”
Nora’s school career had come to an end that year, leaving a more or less clean slate and an inability to spell. She had been to a great many schools. From each one she would cry her way home, and the now-lenient Chillie would let her off. Nora was “spoilt,” in the opinion of the others. They noticed her tendency to gaze at herself in every mirror she could find; they noticed her impressionability and her extraordinary talent for mimicry. Later, she told her daughter, the actress Joyce Grenfell, who inherited these talents, that the reason she did so badly at school was that all her concentration was taken up studying the mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of the teachers.
Her sisters couldn’t fathom Nora, although her mythomania, which was inventive and got her into serious trouble, no doubt originated as a defense against their intruding, dominating ways, their truth games, and their fighting. Her main interests, if one could pin them down, were dreaming and music. She learned to play the guitar and banjo, to tap-dance better than the others, and to tell stories. Even when she was only fifteen, younger children loved her, and found in her a special, wayward magic. Letters between the sisters describe their concern: “Nora’s behaviour grows more and more utterly hopeless”; Nora needs a “strong firm hand”; Nora is “wrong in the head”; “Nora knows only one God and that’s Nora.” Nora had begun to show a keen interest in her sister Nancy’s beaux who came and went from Mirador. But, with Nora, whatever remained of the beau system was about to spin out of control.
When Nancy’s divorce was published in the newspaper, Lizzie drew down the blinds in her house on Franklin Street as if it were a funeral. Oral legend had it, wrongly, as “the first divorce in Richmond,” and she saw it as a disgrace. Despite ten years of publicity in the papers about the Langhornes, Lizzie still insisted it was vulgar to reproduce photographs of them. Lizzie called an editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, invoking the old convention, outraged that he should use the divorce story, and was told bluntly that they couldn’t keep out what had already been in the national press.
Lizzie’s world was falling apart. Her marriage was foundering and she was permanently in debt, which led to fights not only with Moncure but with Chillie, too. Moncure had retreated prematurely from the rough-and-tumble of life, taking his stand in the Commonwealth Club in Richmond, “drinking like a gentleman.” The club was conveniently situated a few steps from their house on Franklin Street, from where his children were occasionally sent to summon him home for meals, and the trouble that he wanted to avoid.
Poverty didn’t matter so much in Richmond. Its gentry could all be poor together. But Chillie’s wealth had undermined Lizzie’s universe and her family relationships. Her daughter Alice said, “It was like farmyard girls suddenly grew wings and they kept marrying rich people whereas my mother had a great feeling for family, felt that she was head of the family and she very much resented that all her family were very rich and having a wonderful time and she was pinned down.”
Nancy Lancaster recalled her parents’ fights over money and thinking, “Oh God, could you stop them fighting?” But there was another, deeper root to this “fussing.” “Sex was a forbidden thing in those days,” said Nancy Lancaster. “It was supposed to be perfectly terrible and ladies were not supposed to enjoy sex but mother must have been rather passionate. She was jealous of Father. She was madly in love with him and when he came in late she would say ‘Where have you been? I know you’ve been to see so-and-so.’ And he was a tease. He would just laugh at her. She couldn’t fight Father and that annoyed Mother. It was like hitting a sponge bag.”
Extravagance was one way Lizzie kept her spirits up, a high level of spending that would oblige Chillie, from time to time, to bail her out. He had, after all, poured gifts in the direction of his favorite daughter, Irene, even paying for the town house on East Seventy-third Street in New York, designed by Dana’s close friend, Stanford White. But Lizzie was permanently in the doghouse about money. Gifts were not appropriate for such a backslider as she. Lizzie’s passion was for clothes and hats, which she wore well, and antique furniture, for which she had an original eye: Nancy Lancaster later attributed all her talents as a decorator to her mother’s taste. When asked why she always went for the most expensive items, she replied, “Because I’m bound to have them.” The problem was that Lizzie couldn’t stop buying, couldn’t keep out of the auction rooms. It was a major source of debt. She would explain that she was “collecting for a house in the country,” assuming that this, too, she was bound to have.
* * *
In October 1903, as Nanaire was getting out of a victoria outside the entrance to the Lynchburg horse show, where she had come to watch Nancy ride, she had a stroke. By the time she was brought back to the cousin’s house where they were staying in the town, she was dead. There had been no warning, no preparation.
Her death, at the age of fifty-five, traumatized her family. Phyllis was to dream of her vividly every night for the next six months. But Nancy, aged twenty-four, was by far the worst affected. At first, she wondered whether she had killed her. Nanaire always suffered watching Nancy jump the five-foot-gate fences and would say, “One of these days I shall die.” But it touched Nancy on some deeper psychic nerve, beyond natural grief, as if she had been cut off from Nanaire at a crucial moment in her development and left with an impossible standard. She suffered a depression that made her ill and wretched for months; she felt “sorrow such as I had never known or imagined. The light went out of my life.” In some ways, she never got over it. Fifty years later, she still declared that it was “a shadow” on her heart. The sister with the greatest nerve and independence, with the boldest ability to reinvent her life later on, was the one, as it turned out, most reliant on her mother.
For the next twenty years or so, Nancy would express—only to Phyllis and Irene—this deep, unhealable regret. In 1923, at the age of forty-four, when she had already been an MP for four years, she wrote to Irene,“Mother Oh how I long to see that woman, mother, mother the one love of my life, no one will know how I miss her, she dwarfed all other love for me.”
Nancy associated Nanaire with a happiness that could never come again. She came to see their mother-daughter relationship as the only ideal of earthly love, and she invested her with near-divine qualities in her imagination, consigned her to a compartment separate from other mortals. “I feel if anyone on earth or in heaven was getting near the truth, it’s mother,” she wrote, “mother, with her yearnings and longings & always for something higher.”
When Nancy tried to replace Nanaire and take charge of Mirador, she ran it, according to Angus McDonnell, like Chillie’s “Battalion Sergeant Major.” She tried to garden, but she had never done it, and had a “thorough” (and un-Virginian) dislike of it. A housekeeper Chillie hired to relieve her was ejected by Nancy in a short, furious battle. Irene, who took over Nanaire’s peacemaking role, was brought down to try to mediate in the crises that Nancy created. Lizzie was angry and hurt that the housekeeping job hadn’t been naturally given to her: it would have solved her problems perfectly, and her battles with Nancy became worse than ever. McDonnell noticed that Nancy was always, unlike Mr. Langhorne, setting herself tasks beyond her capacity, and seemed to be constantly fighting a “civil war” within herself, between her generous, gentle side and an ambitious, abrasive superego, which would make her “do and say dreadful things.” She clashed often with her father. She felt “ill with misery” and depression. She also felt keenly her separation from Phyllis, who now inherited the unqualified, uncritical love that she had previously reserved for Nanaire. Phyllis was her twin, her alter ego, her “better half,” who, in Nancy’s eyes, had all the virtues to which she aspired.
Out in Long Island, soon after the birth of her son Peter in 1902, Phyllis was beginning to wonder about her own marriage. The house Reggie had planned to buy at Aiken had never materialized. Instead, his parents had rented, but refused to buy them, a large house called Meadowbrook Park at Westbury, Long Island, twenty miles from New York, in a newly developed series of estates for the very rich designed for hunting. It had been a secluded community of Quaker farms, of wooded, rolling hills and meadows, which had been turned into huge self-contained private domains with polo fields, steeplechase courses, racetracks, tennis courts, golf courses, swimming pools, and formal gardens. Phyllis wrote, “How sane people buy and build here I cannot imagine …” She was trying to persuade Reggie to buy a place farther down the Island (“As long as I know I can never live in Virginia I get depressed when I think of the rest of my life being spent on this uninteresting island … . Saturdays and Sunday are dreadful here with people dropping in all days. Westbury is just now very busy with polo, racing and so forth, but I am so sick of seeing people that I don’t leave this place except to ride. I am sure I shall end my days a recluse, caused by an overdose of people”).
Phyllis loved the polo and the riding, and she was still very fond of Reggie. But Reggie didn’t like her leaving these otherwise demoralizing surroundings to make her occasional trips to Mirador, even when he was away on his hunting expeditions. Phyllis longed for company, especially that of her sister Nancy. “I do so hate the idea of Newport,” she wrote to her. “It will be dreadful this year judging from the people I hear are going there. Do you get blue? I hope not, but I do keep thinking that I might be with you and ain’t but you know dear Sis it is where I would rather be than any place in the world.”
Occasionally, Phyllis did manage to persuade Reggie to come to Mirador, but he was gone almost immediately. He wrote from Georgia, “My mind is pretty well busied with Mr. Quail bird … I hope the little lady won’t get gay in my absence and go to kicking her heels.”
That was prescient of Reggie. Chillie had already suggested that one way out of Nancy’s gloom might be to go to England for the hunting season, to mix, under Irene’s management, with some of English society. She would go with Phyllis in the winter of 1904-1905 and they would take their children. Nancy was eager to get back to England and this was the best way: to have three months’ hunting in Leicestershire. In fact, there were no similar options in America for her now. Chillie would stay at home, and Nora, having recently lost her mother at the difficult age of fifteen, would do her best to look after him. He would join them for Christmas—his first trip to Europe. It took a long time for Chillie to persuade them to go: Nancy felt at first that she was forsaking her mother’s duties; Nora’s new role worried the other sisters, who realized that she wasn’t up to any ordeal of this sort despite “a grave talk on her new duties.”“Now father you know Nora,” Nancy wrote before she sailed. “You will know her well enough to know a few corrections are pretty necessary.”