A highly sensational divorce case, in which a well-known beauty will play a prominent part!
—TOWN TALK
Once Lillie was “out” as a fully fledged member of society, she threw herself into “the orgy of convivial gatherings, balls, dinners, receptions, concerts, opera, which at first seemed to me a dream, a delight, a wild excitement, and I concentrated on the pursuit of amusement with the wholeheartedness that is characteristic of me, flying from one diversion to another from dawn to dawn.”1 Now that she had been presented, Lillie was automatically invited to a succession of grand events at court. While uniform or court dress was de rigueur among the men, the women wore their most resplendent clothes and family jewels, creating a brilliant carnival of color.2 Scarlet-coated footmen scurried around the supper table, which blazed with gold plate, tazzas (shallow ornamental wine cups), and fruit and flowers from the royal gardens at Frogmore. “These balls at Buckingham Palace completely realised my girlish dreams of fairyland,” she recalled.3
Lillie had reached the social pinnacle and mingled with “bejewelled and beautifully clad women who changed their gowns as a kaleidoscope changes its patterns.”4 In her capacity as mistress of the Prince of Wales, Lillie was required to do likewise. “For the first time in my life I became intoxicated with the idea of arraying myself as gorgeously as the Queen of Sheba, and, being accorded unlimited credit by the dressmakers, who enjoyed designing original ‘creations’ for me, I began to pile up bills at all their establishments.”5 Just as Lillie’s previous role had hinted at that of tragic young widow, she now adopted a new persona. She had come a long way from the days when just day dresses and an evening gown were sufficient, and began, as she admitted, to engage in a life of “colossal extravagance.”6
“The days of mourning for my brother being past, the simple black or white that had made dressing economically and becomingly an easy matter was henceforward thrust aside, and I indulged unrestrainedly in a riot of coloured garments.…”7 Lillie required a new outfit for every occasion and became increasingly reckless, allowing “insidious saleswomen to line negligees with ermine or border gowns with silver fox without inquiring the cost.”8
One of Lillie’s most memorable dresses was a yellow tulle gown, draped with golden net under which preserved butterflies of every size and hue were held in glittering captivity.9 Lillie wore this eccentric costume to a ball at Marlborough House and afterward Bertie told her that he spent the following morning picking dead butterflies up off the ballroom floor.10
These astonishing costumes were somewhat at variance with the portrait of Lillie displayed in June 1878 at the Royal Academy. Millais’s portrait of Lillie, entitled A Jersey Lily, caused such a sensation it had to be roped off for its own protection, although Lillie herself had been somewhat disappointed at its content.
“I was surprised, and certainly disappointed, to find that it was [Millais’s] intention to paint me in my plain black gown.… I had hoped to be draped in classic robes or sumptuous mediaeval garments, in which I should be beautiful and quite transformed.”11 Instead, Lillie was depicted in the sober black dress that had attracted so much attention on her first night out in London, and a demure white lace collar, to which was pinned a white gardenia. The black and white acted as a perfect foil for Lillie’s creamy white skin, dark red hair, and “Grecian” features as she stared out into mid-distance, suggesting, if not exactly tragedy, then a nuance of regret: homesickness, perhaps, nostalgia. In one hand, Lillie clutched the Jersey lily that Millais, in a spirit of inquiry, had sent for. Millais was a little disappointed to find the flower was little more than an amaryllis, Nerine sarniensis. But it was this picture that communicated, to the outside world, just how significant Lillie’s role had become. Depicting the woman whom everybody knew to be the mistress of the Prince of Wales, Millais’s portrait immortalized her as “A Jersey Lillie.”12
If Lillie had thought that being presented at court and “received” into royal circles would protect her from press intrusion, she could not have been more wrong. By June 1878, the press had begun to speculate about not only Lillie’s relationship with Bertie, but the future of the Langtrys as a couple.
When Lillie was newly arrived in London, the gossip magazine Vanity Fair had written tantalizingly about “the Beautiful Lady who has come to us from the Channel Islands.”13 Now Vanity Fair had subtly changed its tone: remarking that Lillie had appeared at a Buckingham Palace ball “dressed gorgeously” in white and gold and with no jewelry at all, it reproached her for her choice of gown. “I have seen a woman who when dressed plainly and simply shone among her fellows as a bright particular star … now competing with all London, not in beauty only but in dress … she did not reflect that her chief charm lay precisely in that modest simplicity which she was so anxious to abandon for rich trappings.”14
Later in the season, Vanity Fair again remarked on the change that had come over Lillie since the days when she was “observed to be extremely modest in dress, very quiet and unassuming in her manner, and discreet in all her actions.”15 Now Lillie had “a house in Norfolk Street and she rides in the Park on a highly trained walking chestnut, on which indeed she looks admirable.…”16 The implication was that Lillie could not afford these luxuries herself, and that she was being bankrolled by a rich and influential protector. The reader was left to make the connection between the suddenly wealthy Lillie and her friendship with the Prince of Wales, insinuating that Lillie was a kept woman. In defense of Bertie, other men were contributing to Lillie’s upkeep: Lord Wharncliffe, the sympathetic older man; Morton Frewen, who had bequeathed the chestnut Redskin before departing for America; and now Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria (1858–1889), described by Lillie herself as “a callow youth who burst upon the horizon of London one spring … tall, fair but not handsome, with deep-set grey eyes and the prominent Hapsburg lip.”17 Accompanied by his tutor, Prince Rudolph was determined to make the most of being freed from the rigid etiquette of the Viennese court.
Baron “Ferdy” de Rothschild decided to throw a dance in Prince Rudolph’s honor at his Louis XVI–decorated house in Piccadilly, at which Bertie would be present. Since the distinctive white ballroom at the baron’s house was “a searching background for doubtfully clean gowns,”18 Ferdy invited his female guests to lunch a week before and offered them all new dresses from Jacques Doucet, a leading French designer noted for his flimsy, translucent, pastel-colored gowns. Lillie’s own dress was a pale pink creation of clinging crepe de chine, heavily fringed.19 At the ball Prince Rudolph insisted on dancing with Lillie after supper until he was hot and sweaty, and the imprint of his hands showed up on Lillie’s dress. When Lillie asked the prince to put on his gloves so that he did not damage her gown, he replied rudely: “C’est vous qui suez, madame!” (“It is you who are perspiring!”)20 Lillie’s response is not recorded, but it did not appear to put him off. Prince Rudolph laid siege to Lillie in a series of regular visits to Norfolk Street, on one occasion arriving at eight o’clock in the morning after overturning his carriage. Lillie continued to resist the prince’s advances, even after he offered her a magnificent emerald ring. Lillie threw the ring into the fireplace in disgust, but swiftly retrieved it as soon as Prince Rudolph had left.21
As if the allegations that Lillie was nothing more than a courtesan were not enough, the man Vanity Fair referred to as “a husband to make her happy” was anything but. According to the same publication, in December 1878, “A lady well-known in society is said to have been seen with two black eyes, not the result of self-embellishment. The question asked is, who, or rather which, gave them?”22 Meanwhile, the scurrilous Town Talk voiced its suspicion that Ned was surplus to requirements. “I wonder how the husbands of the ‘beauties of Society’ like their wives to be shown about in a ‘visitors-are-requested-not-to-touch’ sort of way. I don’t believe they are husbands at all—only dummies. Some of the beauties, I’m afraid, have too many husbands.”23
Town Talk was a cheeky weekly, produced in an alley off Fleet Street. Its editor was twenty-seven-year-old Adolphus Rosenberg from Brixton, who was essentially continuing the tradition of slanderous gossip dating back to the eighteenth century. Such journals had flourished forty years earlier but had been suppressed. Now they were reemerging with titles such as Peter Pry, Puck, and Tomahawk, providing lurid gossip for scandal-hungry readers and mercilessly pillorying the eminent men who were their targets.24
Editing such titles was not a career for the fainthearted. When Town Talk’s competitor, The Queen’s Messenger, ran a series of articles criticizing Lord Carrington for his affair with Nellie Clifden, Carrington lay in wait for the editor, Greville Murray, and challenged him to a duel. When Murray simply smiled at him, Carrington horsewhipped Murray, and then successfully sued him for libel.25
Teasingly, Town Talk asked its readers if they had heard rumors of “a highly sensational divorce case, in which a well-known beauty will play a prominent part? And is it also true that someone occupying a very high position in society will be called upon as a witness?”26
Legally, Rosenberg was on a slippery slope by insinuating that Mr. Langtry was about to cite as correspondent the highest in the land: none other but the Prince of Wales himself. A more prudent editor might have thought twice before including such an item. But not this one. The titillating whiff of a scandal ensured a spike in circulation. Two months later, Rosenberg told his readers that: “About the warmest divorce case which ever came before a judge may shortly be expected to come off. The respondent was a reigning beauty not many centuries ago, and the co-respondents—and they are numerous—are big ‘pots.’ The poor husband is almost frantic. ‘Darn this country,’ he says, ‘nothing belongs to a fellow here. Even his wife is everybody’s property.’ Oh that woman! I myself loved her. I bought her portrait … in thirty-five different positions, and wept over it in the silent hours of the night. And I am not even a co-respondent.”27 It is easy for the modern reader, accustomed to more blatant terminology, to miss the obscene subtext in this paragraph; “weeping” was Victorian slang for ejaculation.
Town Talk’s insinuations must have put the fear of God into Bertie. Once again, the Prince of Wales faced the prospect of public exposure. Worse still, he might have to attend court, not just as a witness but as the correspondent in a divorce case. If there was any truth in this rumor, Bertie would need to keep his solicitor, George Lewis, close at hand. Meanwhile, Lillie experienced “tall poppy syndrome,” as the newspapermen who had made her famous shredded her reputation in the interests of sales. Ned Langtry, after months of being publicly cuckolded by Lillie’s string of lovers, finally decided he had had enough and resolved to sue the editor of Town Talk, not without “considerable opposition” from Lillie, who had “a great horror of being dragged before the public.”28 The “atrocious statements” circulated in Town Talk had left her unable to leave the house. “I became so morbidly sensitive that I dared not walk in the street & I am still utterly miserable.”29
In response, Adolphus Rosenberg, Town Talk’s editor, reported: “I am informed that Mr Langtry has announced his intention of breaking my neck. Now, if the brave gentleman wants to go in for neck-breaking, surely he can find plenty of his friends (?) who have injured him more than I have.”30
Following this came an official retraction from Rosenberg, suggesting that he had been threatened with legal action. “There has been lately a rumour that Mrs Langtry was about to appear in the divorce court, with more than one illustrious correspondent. The rumour is, like many others, without the least foundation.”31
This had a double purpose: it got Rosenberg off the hook, or so he believed, and it served to keep the budding scandal high in the news agenda.
The wild rumors circulating about the Langtry divorce case placed Lillie’s relationship with Bertie under pressure. Lillie knew that it was only a matter of time before Bertie tired of her and sought consolation elsewhere. The prospect of Bertie being summonsed as the correspondent in Lillie’s divorce case put their relationship under intolerable strain, and the reputational damage Lillie suffered made itself manifest in other ways. The dressmakers who had offered Lillie an unlimited line of credit started to bill her for all those extravagant gowns. The blue pencil hovered over Lillie’s name on the grandest of guest lists. Lillie might have been the mistress of the Prince of Wales, but the rumors grew that she was also the mistress of several other men. The running costs of 17 Norfolk Street and keeping Redskin and a coach and horses at the livery stables were eating up Ned’s limited income.
“I knew little about his income except that what remained of it was mainly derived from inherited Irish land,”32 Lillie confided in her memoirs. “Still, I gathered from ominous signs that the tenants thereon paid less rent and demanded more outlay every year. Indeed, the tales of woe wafted from Ireland to the absent landlord were so staggering that they made me wonder how these unhappy tenants existed at all. Roofs fell in; pigs died; farms were inundated, and cottages became uninhabitable … that at last my husband buckled on his armour and went to the Green Isle to investigate the cause in person. But, money, seeming scarcer than ever after that rash expedition, I suspected the good-natured happy-go-lucky Irishman of refilling the pigsties and rebuilding the entire village of Parkgate.”33
Driven to distraction by financial anxieties and the attentions of the gutter press, Lillie decided to beat a strategic retreat to the Red House in Bournemouth, emerging only for short trips to London. It was on one of these excursions that Lillie encountered the woman who was to become her rival for Bertie’s affections: Sarah Bernhardt.
From the moment that Sarah Bernhardt set foot on English soil, the French actress was treated like a celebrity. Oscar Wilde took the train down to Folkestone so that he could be among the first to greet Sarah as she stepped off the boat, laying a bouquet of lilies at her feet. Lord Dudley displayed Sarah in his open carriage as they drove around Hyde Park. Others were not quite so enthusiastic. Lady Cavendish thundered that: “London has gone mad over Sarah Bernhardt—a woman of notorious, shameless character.… Not content with being run after on the stage, this woman is asked to respectable people’s houses to act, and even to luncheon and dinner; and all the world goes. It is an outrageous scandal.”34 This did nothing to diminish Sarah’s reputation. On the contrary, she flourished on outrageous scandal. The world knew that Sarah’s mother had been a courtesan, and Sarah did nothing to dispel rumors that she, too, had undertaken a little light whoring as a starving young drama student at the conservatoire. Sarah had an illegitimate son, Maurice, a string of lovers, some female, was addicted to opium, and slept in a coffin. All this simply enhanced her myth; unlike poor Lillie, Sarah could not be torn apart by gossip columnists and cheap rumormongers because she had a bohemian disregard for social convention. Sarah had come into the world with nothing apart from her outstanding talent. Illegitimate, Jewish, female, Sarah was a born outsider, with nothing to declare but her genius. Inevitably, Bertie found Sarah completely irresistible.
Sarah and Bertie were old friends, having already encountered each other in Paris. So it came as no surprise that, when Sarah arrived in London, Bertie took a box at the Gaiety Theatre for the entire tour of the Comédie-Française. The company’s repertoire consisted of two comedies by Moliére, Le Misanthrope and Les Précieuses ridicules, in which Sarah did not figure, and one act from Racine’s tragedy Phèdre, in which Sarah finally appeared, long after ten o’clock at night. Bertie led the applause as Sarah reappeared for her curtain call, so exhausted by her performance that she was almost too weak to stand and had to be supported by her leading man.
As the critics raved that there had been no one like Sarah since the late Rachel, the French actress who had London at her feet a generation earlier, Sarah was borne away to her rented house in Chester Square, where she spent the night vomiting blood. Sarah’s doctor, summoned from Paris, immediately banned her from all future performances. The following day, self-medicated with opium, Sarah threw on her cloak and ran off to the theater. Unfortunately, due to the side effects of the opium, audience and cast alike appeared to be shrouded in a luminous mist.
According to Sarah, “The opium that I had taken in my potion made my head rather heavy. I arrived on the stage in a semiconscious state, delighted with the applause I received. I walked along as though I were in a dream.… My feet glided along on the carpet without any effort, and my voice sounded to me far away.… I was in that delicious stupor that one experiences after chloroform, morphine, opium, or hasheesh.”35
Sarah also cut two hundred lines from her script without informing her fellow actor, who collapsed in shock.36 This episode did much to enhance Sarah’s personal myth, as did the fact that she kept a menagerie. Sarah’s animals included a cheetah, a wolfhound, and seven chameleons, which she wore like brooches on her shoulder, the chameleons changing color to fit in with her gowns. Sarah also had four dogs, a parrot, and a caged monkey named Darwin.
Much to Sarah’s amusement, Bertie swiftly became her stage-door Johnny. Unlike Lillie, Sarah was never afraid of Bertie and even told him off when he entered her dressing room without removing his hat.37 In terms of appearance, Sarah Bernhardt was certainly not Bertie’s usual type. Bertie favored curvaceous women, while Sarah embodied the decadent ideal with her ethereal looks and druggie stare. But Sarah, like Lillie, was a character: sexy, clever, funny. She possessed tremendous spirit and for that Bertie was prepared to overlook such minor eccentricities as opium addiction, pet cheetahs, and sleeping in a coffin. Indeed, such was Sarah’s hold over Bertie that, in years to come, she would persuade the prince to appear live on stage with her. Sarah was performing in Fedora, a melodrama about Russian Nihilists, when Bertie confirmed something that Sarah had always suspected: he said that he would have loved to have been an actor. Sarah promptly dressed Bertie in the costume of Vladimir, Fedora’s husband, whose corpse is returned to her in an early scene. So Bertie finally made his theatrical debut lying in a coffin on stage at the Vaudeville Theatre.38
Soon after arriving in London, Sarah began to visit Marlborough House at Bertie’s request. After one such visit, she wrote a scribbled apology to Edmond Got, director of the Comédie-Française: “I’ve just come back from the PoW. It is twenty past one. I can’t rehearse any more at this hour. The P has kept me since eleven … I’ll make myself forgiven tomorrow by knowing my part.”39
It would have been understandable if Lillie had regarded Sarah as a threat. But Lillie seems to have become as infatuated with Sarah as all her other admirers. Lillie was introduced to Sarah at a breakfast party hosted for the Comédie-Française by Sir Algernon Borthwick, editor of the Morning Post and a great patron of the drama. The vision that was Sarah appeared in one of her trademark embroidered white robes, with a large tulle bow tied around her slender neck, her fluffy auburn hair a nimbus of curls around her pale white face, her eyes rimmed with kohl.
According to Lillie, “the Divine Sarah” was almost too individual, too exotic, to be completely understood “all at once.” Lillie praised Sarah’s “superb diction, her lovely silken voice, her natural acting, her passionate temperament, her fire—in a word, transcendent genius,” and reflected that “Bernhardt’s personality was so striking, so singular, that, to everyday people, she seemed eccentric; she filled the imagination as a great poet might do.”40
Lillie’s generosity extended to her rival’s appearance, so very different from Lillie’s own. “Her beauty, frankly, was not understood by the masses. It was a period of tiny waists, large shoulders, larger hips; and this remarkable woman, who possessed the beautiful, supple uncorseted figure—the long lines we all admire today—was called a skeleton.”41
Oscar Wilde, as besotted as everyone else, dragged Lillie off to the British Museum to hunt for Sarah’s profile on coins and vases, upon some of which they found almost exact replicas of her symmetrical Latin features. It must have been difficult to share Oscar with Sarah, having already lost Bertie, but Lillie remained magisterial in her tolerance. “Like all great beauty however, it did not blaze upon one’s vision, but grew upon acquaintance. And hers, being a combination of intelligence, of feature and of soul, remained with her until the end of her life.”42 Lillie’s generous attitude toward her rival would later pay dividends. Sarah proved a source of inspiration for Lillie when she herself decided to take to the stage. There is a photograph of both women, taken in New York, when they were touring in different shows. In this picture, Lillie bears an astonished expression, and Sarah a mischievous glint, having pinched Lillie’s arm at the critical moment.
But however friendly with Sarah Lillie became, she must have felt hurt by Bertie’s latest craze and realized that she was slowly and surely losing him. One incident in particular would have left Lillie in no doubt.
At the end of July 1879, Lillie and Sarah both attended a fundraiser held at the Royal Albert Hall to raise money for the French hospital in Leicester Square. The money would guarantee a bed for any French actor who needed treatment while in London. Sarah sold her own sculpture and paintings, and some of her animals. Lillie, in a brocade dress and yellow bonnet, was stationed at the refreshment stall run by the Countess de Bulow, wife of a German diplomat, selling flowers and cups of tea. According to Vanity Fair magazine, a cup of tea with milk and sugar was priced at five shillings, or a guinea (one pound, one shilling) if Lillie took the first sip. When Bertie arrived, with Princess Alexandra and two of their daughters, two policemen had to part the crowds so that Bertie could buy a box of bonbons.43 Bertie moved on to Sarah Bernhardt’s stall, and purchased one portrait and commissioned another, while Alix bought two white kittens with blue eyes. At the end of the afternoon, it emerged that Sarah’s stall had made £256, more money than anybody else’s. From Sarah’s stall, Bertie returned to Lillie and asked for a cup of tea. Lillie poured out the tea, then lifted the cup to her lips. Bertie did not touch it. Instead, he merely said: “I should like a clean cup, please.” Her cheeks burning, Lillie served tea in a fresh cup. Bertie gave her two gold sovereigns and walked away.44
Well might Lillie blush. She had been blatantly indiscreet by alluding to their relationship in front of Princess Alexandra. The matter was quite simple: Bertie might, if he wished, indicate that Lillie was his mistress. Indeed, he left people in little doubt about the matter. However, for Lillie to do so, in public, in front of his wife and daughters, was quite another matter, particularly as the rumors swirled thicker than Scots mist that Bertie was about to be cited as a correspondent in the divorce courts. Lillie had overstepped the mark. Not only was Bertie losing patience with her: Lillie was becoming an embarrassment.45
In August, an invitation to Scotland from Sir William Cunliffe Brooks allowed Lillie some respite. A self-made man and Conservative MP, Sir William had recently secured his place in society by acquiring the estate of Glen Tanar, Aberdeenshire, in close proximity to Balmoral. One afternoon two of Sir William’s guests, Hugh Rose, Lord Strathnairn, and Lady Errol, decided to drive over to Balmoral to look at the extraordinary castle fondly referred to by Queen Victoria as “my dear paradise in the Highlands.”46 While “dropping in” on Queen Victoria would have been a dreadful breach of protocol, taking a look at the castle was a legitimate activity. When the visitors had finished their tour and it was time to write in the visitors’ book, Lillie had some reservations. But her companions persuaded Lillie that, since she had now been presented at court, she must inscribe her name or risk offending the queen. Lillie duly wrote in the book and left the castle. Twenty minutes after the party had left, Queen Victoria appeared and glanced with curiosity at the book. “I should have liked to have seen Mrs Langtry,” the queen said to Lady Ely, one of her ladies-in-waiting. A servant was sent off on a horse to try to overtake Lillie, but he was too late. Lillie later confessed that she had not enjoyed what she had seen of Balmoral, finding the castle “bleak and unappealing.”47