To Marry an English Lord

by gail maccoll

  Left: Royal Ascot, pictured here in 1900, has long been as famous for the millinery on view as for the actual races.

  Right: Park Lane, the very grand address of, among others, the Earl of Dudley, the Marquess of Londonderry, and the Duke of Westminster.

  Above: Her Majesty the Queen, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the Houses of Parliament, where the business of the nation was carried on between social events.

  Middle: The race meeting at Goodwood, which finished the season.

  Below: The courtyard of Lansdowne House, one of London’s few private mansions with its own gardens.

  In the June fortnight between the Derby and Ascot, the season reaches its peak. Invitations lie in stacks on silver salvers just inside every front door. More dinners, parties, balls, concerts, teas, breakfasts even, than anyone can possibly attend. The aristocracy socializes morning, noon and night, going without sleep for the sake of another dance or one last hand of “baccy.”

  The end of July looms. The sailing has begun at Cowes; in another few weeks, there will be shooting in Scotland. Parliament must recess. The town houses are closed up again; all the great families scurry back to the country. And their friends, those without country houses of their own, go with them. Because everyone knows: better dead than seen alive in London in August.

  PUSHY MAMAS

  Leonard Jerome once claimed that Wall Street was “a jungle where men tear and claw.” But that was nothing compared to what the womenfolk were doing up on Fifth Avenue. The New York Stock Exchange was a far less forbidding environment than the New York drawing room. Social climbing grew ever more difficult. Any aspirant who deviated from the standards laid down by Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister was doomed. A big house, tasteful parties, fine horses, a reasonably presentable husband guaranteed nothing. If Mrs. Astor refused to know you, you might as well be living in Cleveland.

  Clara Jerome as a young bride. Her family, the Halls, attributed their black hair and high cheekbones to their grandmother’s reputed rape by an Iroquois. The “Indian” look got stronger as Clara got older.

  This was a sad fact of life for many wives of social upstarts, and one they might have been willing to accept had it not been for their daughters. For while sons of arrivistes were frequently deemed acceptable to the Astor set, the young ladies hadn’t a chance. And since ambitious parents always hope their children will outshine them, this bleak outlook for their daughters acted, for three New York matrons, as the last straw.

  Even as a little girl, Jennie (shown here with her mother) was strikingly beautiful.

  EXIT CLARA

  For every pleasure in her marriage, Clara Jerome could point to a corresponding unpleasantness. On the one hand, for instance, there was the house. As soon as he’d made enough money, Leonard Jerome had built a mansion in Madison Square. Big and showy, it was the first of New York’s private palaces, a great strawberry shortcake amid blocks of dull brown townhouses. It was lovely for Clara to be able to move out of Brooklyn and have her own house, which she decorated all in red and gold. But attached to the house was a small private theater. Her husband, it seemed, liked opera. And opera singers. Unbeknownst to Clara, he had named their second daughter Jennie after Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano. He launched the century’s great diva, Adelina Patti, in America. Minnie Hauk, another beloved prima donna of the era, also began her career at the Jerome opera house. Unlike Patti, Hauk was included in family life, being much the same age as Jerome’s three daughters—in fact, she was generally thought to be a fourth daughter. Years later, an acquaintance wrote to one of Jerome’s legitimate offspring: “I remember my first opera. I went in 1866 to the début of Minnie Hauk. Your father educated her voice and her morals I believe?”

  Left: The mansion on Madison Square was a distressingly far cry from New York’s standard-issue brownstones.

  Right: Jennie, little Clara and Leonie Jerome would come to be known as “the Beautiful,” “the Good” and “the Witty.”

  * * *

  “It was not the custom in Old New York drawing rooms for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another.”

  EDITH WHARTON, The Age of Innocence

  * * *

  This kind of thing might have amused Jerome’s fellow stockbrokers, but it did not go down well with their wives. (It was always easier to be one of the boys than to get in with Mrs. Astor.) Clara’s situation grew even less palatable when Leonard took up with Fanny Ronalds. A society matron manquée, Fanny had decided to trade in her husband for a career on the stage. In the eyes of other matrons, her divorce and her theatrical aspirations disqualified her from society. She was certainly not suitable company for young girls. But Jerome encouraged his daughters to go ice-skating with her, to ride up Fifth Avenue in her carriage, to visit her little house for tea and gooey cakes. She gave them singing lessons, and they attended her concerts at the private theater on Madison Square.

  With his drooping mustaches and extravagant personality, Leonard Jerome was very attractive to women of a certain type—not, however, to the women who ran New York.

  Dark-eyed Jerome protégée Minnie Hauk and dark-eyed Jerome daughter Jennie: New Yorkers drew nasty conclusions.

  If Clara Jerome, proper, boring Clara, ever had a hope of being accepted by New York society, Fanny Ronalds demolished it. Clara sat in her mansion, knowing that the best invitations for the most exclusive dinners and dances would never come her way. And if they didn’t come to her, they surely weren’t going to come to young Clara or Jennie or little Leonie. A new strategy was in order. So, in 1867, she informed Leonard that she wasn’t feeling well and required an apartment for herself and the girls on the Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris. He could visit as often as he liked and would please pay the bills.

  EXIT ELLEN

  Clara was not alone in trading New York for Paris. Ellen Yznaga also took her daughters from heartless New York to the more welcoming City of Light. Like Clara, she had received the cold shoulder from the captious social arbiters of Fifth Avenue. While it was true that there was a perfectly respectable plantation in Louisiana, her husband Antonio sprang from Cuban stock. And while it was true that Ellen Yznaga was a very handsome woman, from a New England family, she was also thought to be “fast” by prudish New Yorkers. The merits didn’t outweigh the demerits, and Mrs. Yznaga took her daughters Natica, Consuelo and Emily to Paris. There, in the late 1860s, she and the girls were frequently seen at the musical parties at the Imperial Palace of the Tuileries, singing duets with great refinement.

  Left: Antonio Yznaga with his wife Ellen (left) and daughter Consuelo. A potent laissez-faire charm ran in the family.

  Right: Consuelo, the future Duchess of Manchester.

  The worldy glitter of the French capital under Emperor Napoleon III held enormous allure. Empress Eugenie mandated brand-new dresses and plenty of diamonds at court fêtes, and didn’t care if these were worn by American women. Least of all did she care what rung of New York’s social ladder these women once occupied as long as they had charm, beauty and plenty of money. The Empress thoroughly understood that a sparkling court was not possible if it received only the out-at-elbows ancien noblesse, so the Yznaga women (sparkling to a fault) were made welcome.

  EXIT MARIETTA

  Clara Jerome and Ellen Yznaga gave up without really trying to conquer New York society, but Marietta Stevens was made of sterner stuff. Furthermore, she had what might, in some circles, have been considered an advantage: her husband, Paran Stevens, ran the famous Fifth Avenue Hotel. So Marietta not only rich but also had some advanced ideas about hospitality.

  She began by giving musicales, featuring some of the city’s noted performers. Cleverly, she scheduled these for Sunday evenings, which until then had been devoted to sober readings in the bosom of the family. Even more cleverly, she dared to flout precedent by serving champagne. The men of Old New York soon began to find that on Sunday nights they were called out of the house and w
ould somehow end up at Mrs. Stevens’. Their wives, respectable matrons observing the Sabbath, stayed home.

  The Fifth Avenue Hotel proved an inadequate launching pad for the aspirations of Marietta Stevens, shown at left in her Queen Elizabeth costume.

  WORDS FOR THOSE ON THE OUTSIDE WANTING IN

  Le monde snob was the American heiress’s home turf. A woman was always caught up in the process of getting the cold shoulder and then, at the first available opportunity, giving it. The point of getting in, after all, was to keep everyone else out. Those with one foot in the door were known as:

  Arrivistes

  Bouncers (so called for their bumptious demeanor)

  Climbers

  Comers

  Detrimentals (defined by Rev. C.W. de Lyon Nicholls, author of The Ultra Fashionable Peerage of America, as persons “of however excellent moral character or ability, who do not blend well with either the conservative Knickerbocker element, or the ultra-fashionables”)

  New people

  Nouveaux riches

  Outlanders

  Parvenus

  Shoddees

  Swells (as opposed to Nobs in the social system concocted by Ward McAllister)

  Upstarts

  Vulgarians

  MARCH OF ANGLOMANIA

  In the 1870s, Tiffany & Co. added a special heraldry department to attend to “blazoning, marshalling, and designing of arms.”

  But this was only success of a sort. Mrs. Stevens’ hospitality backfired—she so angered the ladies that they resolutely refused to follow where their husbands so eagerly led. For herself, perhaps, Marietta Stevens could have accepted a partial triumph, trusting to time to bury the vicious rumors that she’d been a chambermaid in her husband’s hotel. (In fact, she was a grocer’s daughter from Lowell, Massachusetts.) Time, however, was just what her daughter Minnie didn’t have. Minnie was eighteen in 1871, of an age to be presented to society. She was very pretty, slender and green-eyed and charming, but society clearly wanted no part of her. So Mrs. Stevens, ever practical, closed up her house and took her daughter off to the greener, nobler pastures of Europe.

  THE AGE OF REVENGE

  The first blow was landed in 1869 by Mary Mason Jones, powerful dowager of a very Old New York family, after the completion of her grand new house on Fifth Avenue. She called it Marble Row, and she dedicated it with the words: “There is one house Mrs. Stevens will never enter.”

  Mrs. Stevens took the punch and bided her time for a dozen years. Then her son Harry fell in love with a relative of Mary Mason Jones, a handsome young redhead named Edith. This gave Marietta Stevens, the social-climbing newcomer, a chance to give Old New York a taste of humiliation. Harry received his instructions, and Miss Jones was unceremoniously dropped.

  In the fullness of time, Mrs. Stevens’ revenge appeared complete. Mary Mason Jones died, and Mrs. Stevens bought the forbidden premises-Marble Row was now one house Mrs. Stevens entered as often as she liked. But the Joneses had the last word. Edith recovered from her broken engagement, married someone else and wrote novels about the New York of her youth. To this day, Mrs. Stevens lives unhappily on as Mrs. Lemuel Struthers of the “bold feathers and brazen wig” in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

  The mansard-roofed Marble Row. Insets: Teddy Wharton and his bride-to-be, Edith Jones.

  AT HOME ABROAD

  In abandoning a lost cause, the ladies Jerome, Yznaga and Stevens were only doing the sensible thing. Little did they think that in packing their trunks and hopping on a steamer for the Old World, they were setting a pattern for hundreds of American women over the next half-century.

  It wasn’t that American women had never before sailed to Europe. It was that they’d never before had fun when they got there. The Knickerbocker families went abroad to look at ruins, cathedrals, pictures or scenery. They did not go to parties or make friends; they did not break into society in Paris or Florence or Geneva. Old New Yorkers were not interested in the approval of Europeans.

  This was because Europeans and their culture were not to be trusted. For years, Old New York lived in dread of what it considered “dubious foreign influences.” It was acceptable to return from abroad with French academic paintings but not with a hint, a whisper, a trace of Old World manners and customs. When, for instance, Ellen Olenska returns to New York to recover from an unhappy Continental marriage in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, she is greeted by her family with worry and doubt. Can they persuade the rest of Old New York to allow the tainted lamb back into the fold? Can they train her back to their simple ways, make her forget the attractions of perfumed boudoirs, powdered bosoms, witty conversation?

  The answer, of course, is no. As Henry James also found, some New Yorkers, having once “bitten deep into the apple of Europe,” were loath to let go. The Pushy Mamas never looked back.

  COMME IL FAUT

  Unlike Americans, who always introduce themselves, the English wait for a formal introduction—which very often is not forthcoming.

  WALL STREET FATHER NO. 1: THE SPORTING MAN

  While the parvenu wife found New York too lonely, too humiliating and most of all too dull to be borne, her husband might well be having the time of his life. This newly, hugely rich Wall Street speculator, who wanted to enjoy his wealth, turned to England for inspiration. And England, that country where the social season was just a break squeezed in between the end of hunting and the start of shooting, gave him sport.

  The Sporting Man type of Wall Street Father was, first, last and always, a gentleman. He didn’t cheat at cards, he always paid his debts, and he never discussed business on a boat; he was kind to horses and almost as kind to his mistresses.

  The archetypal Sporting Man was Leonard Jerome. With his confrères August Belmont and William Travers, Jerome thought horse racing (which had fallen into disrepute, being too much associated with rowdy types) should be elevated to British standards. So he built the Jerome Park Race Track and, to get there, a sweeping new boulevard called Jerome Avenue. And in April 1866 he met with Travers and Belmont in his Wall Street office to found the American Jockey Club. Modeled after the English Jockey Club, it would have a membership of only fifty at any one time; no matter how socially prominent, a horse fancier had to wait for death or disaster to make room for him.

  Horses also pull carriages, so Jerome naturally became an early enthusiast of amateur coaching. His friend William Jay imported a coach from England, and together they introduced fellow Sporting Men to the intricacies of driving a stagecoach behind four horses in the proper manner. The sport was meticulously regulated (each horse must have artificial flowers attached to its throat-latch, for instance) and a prime source of Anglomania.

  Rakish, dashing Leonard Jerome brought flair to all his dealings—in money, horses and women.

  Above: Fanny Ronalds, who managed to keep Leonard Jerome and August Belmont simultaneously fascinated. The Four-in-Hand Club dashing off to the races at Jerome Park in 1875.

  Right: One of America’s first polo matches, played at Jerome Park in 1876.

  Like all true Sporting Men, Jerome, Travers and Belmont also raced boats. Jerome and his brother Lawrence proposed the first international yacht race across the Atlantic, with the victory celebration to be held at the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes. The American yacht Henrietta, owned by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., and heavily backed by Jerome, won the race and the $90,000 stake.

  Jerome exhibited another Sporting Man trait: the grand gesture. When the Atlantic cable broke, he offered his yacht to take an engineer to repair it. And he personally got behind a breech-loading machine gun when a mob threatened the Times building (he was part owner of the newspaper) in the Draft Riots of 1863. In his grandest gesture, upon hearing at dinner that his fortune had been lost, he announced to his guests: “Gentlemen, I am a ruined man. But don’t worry—your dinner is paid for.”

  On one occasion, Jerome, Travers and Belmont competed to see which man could host the most perfect
supper. (At Jerome’s dinner, each female guest opened her napkin to find a souvenir of the Henrietta’s victory in the form of a gold bracelet.) The competition ended in a draw-not altogether surprising since Lorenzo Delmonico produced all three meals. It is fitting, then, that the most succinct accolade to the Sporting Man type of Wall Street Father is August Belmont’s tribute to his lifelong rival. “One rode better, sailed better, banquetted better,” said Belmont, “when Mr. Jerome was of the party.”

  THE FIRST MARRIAGES

  “For richer, for poorer . . . ”

  Mrs. Jerome’s eldest daughter, Clara, made her début in Paris. Her suitors were French noblemen, whom she and her mother were adept at assessing—and discarding, since French titles were a particularly unreliable guide to material inheritance and social status. Nevertheless, Mrs. Jerome began to dream of an alliance with a significant French family, her daughter a marquise de Breteuil or duchesse de Noailles.

  The invasion of Paris by the Prussian army in 1870–71 put a halt to such plans. The Second Empire fell. Everyone associated with it fled Paris. Leonard Jerome was summoned from New York to rescue his family from the Germans and find them suitable shelter in London. In no time at all, the gallant husband had installed his wife and daughters at Brown’s Hotel—in rooms with a piano so that Clara and younger sister Jennie might continue to practice their duets—and returned alone to New York. Already in London were the Yznaga women, and Mrs. Stevens and Minnie.