by gail maccoll
Above: The New-York Historical Society was headquartered on lower Second Avenue, a neighborhood long popular with Knickerbockers.
Left: The Academy of Music, Old New York’s clubhouse.
The best feature of the Metropolitan Opera House was the seating; it had terrible acoustics and minimal storage space for sets and costumes. The first tier (inset) was known as “the Diamond Horseshoe” after the occupants’ jewels.
Right: Everyone thought the new museum building ugly but predicted that soon it would be hidden by new additions.
Left: W.H. Vanderbilt donated much of his collection to the new Metropolitan Museum of Art.
AUDACITY & INNOCENCE
If New York society was so crazy about all things European, the social climbers figured they might as well head for Europe. And, more specifically, England. The Buccaneers had already proven that London society could be a good deal easier to crack than New York society. Ambitious heiresses everywhere took heart. No need to either flail against the cliffs of New York indifference or slink home to remain a big fish in a small midwestern pond. They could follow the formula laid out for them by their predecessors in social high adventure—the Stevenses, the Yznagas, the Jeromes. Success, relatively pain-free success, could still be theirs.
A trade card for a steamship line. Fortunately for ambitious Americans, the age of the sail was over and passage to Europe was safe and reliable.
THE SELF-MADE GIRL
But if these new heiresses intended to copy the Buccaneers, they were yet very different from them. For one thing their fathers were richer, sometimes very much richer, than Leonard Jerome or Paran Stevens. And they were American in a way that the Buccaneers with their Paris débuts and European experience were not. These American heiresses had no Pushy Mamas to wheedle invitations on their behalf or to teach them how to fold their napkins properly, much less how to put on an evening’s entertainment following all Mrs. Astor’s tricky rules about white sauces and brown sauces and the correct flavoring for the Roman punch (maraschino or amaretto, not rum). Nor had they the benefit of a Sporting Man type of Wall Street Father, who could at least teach them how to handle a horse.
As naïve Americans discovered Europe in increasing numbers, cartoonists and other commentators (among them Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad) chuckled.
They were, in the phrase of the day, “self-made girls,” whose social successes would be entirely their own doing, built by each on her own charms, her own merits, her own unceasing efforts. Each would raise herself from the depths, would transform herself from American nobody to English aristocrat by what Henry James called “the simple lever of her own personality.”
* * *
“Thirty years ago, in England as well as on the Continent, the American woman was looked upon as a strange and abnormal creature, with habits and manners something between a Red Indian and a Gaiety Girl.”
LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL (1910)
* * *
COMME IL FAUT
In England a young girl must not walk alone in London, take a hansom cab, travel in an unreserved train compartment, sit in a stall at the theater or visit a music hall.
AMERICAN GODDESSES
That personality was indeed something to be reckoned with, as the English were shortly to discover. It was nurtured on adulation, clothed in admiring words and appreciative gazes. Heiresses were the deities of America’s new communities, where the raw civilization’s worship of the vitality and promise of youth and the virtues of womanhood combined to turn young girls into cherished goddesses. A pretty girl with a rich father was automatically a treasured being, a social star, a “belle.” What she wore and what she said, where she went and whom she saw, were of intense interest to the rest of her hometown. Her belledom constituted a matter of civic pride. She and her rich, pretty sisters were, as French writer Paul Bourget put it, “the delegates to luxury in this utilitarian civilization,” elegant antidotes to the pragmatic business of nation building. In their apparent idleness and frivolity, they were living proof of just how hard their fathers, and everyone else, worked.
Cleveland’s Jeannie Chamberlain was a classic American beauty.
* * *
“American youths are pale and precocious, or sallow and supercilious, but American girls are pretty and charming—little oases of pretty unreasonableness in a vast desert of practical common-sense.”
OSCAR WILDE
* * *
But the Self-Made Girl was working, too. Not to make money, but to make herself into a grand lady. Being American, she believed that anything could be accomplished by an act of will and plenty of effort. So, from her power base as a belle, she set out on that most American of paths: a campaign of self-improvement. She went to singing lessons and dancing lessons and drawing lessons. A great believer in book learning, she read constantly. She studied history, and foreign languages, and the “society pages.”
If she decided she needed to attend Miss Brown’s School for Young Ladies in New York, she sent herself to New York. If she decided she needed to become more sophisticated, to see museums and galleries and old churches, then she purchased Baedeker Guides to various foreign capitals, recruited her parents (or at least her mother) and set off on a step-by-step tour of Europe. And when she decided she was ready, this girl from the American Midwest went to London. Husband-hunting. Simple as that.
PROFESSIONAL BEAUTIES
In the 1880s, competition for the Prince’s favor became so fierce that certain society women had themselves photographed professionally and then allowed their pictures to be placed on sale in the shop windows of London. The general public, who, according to novelist Gertrude Atherton, stood on penny chairs in Hyde Park “to see the objects of current worship drive by,” went mad for the photographs. So great was Victorian reverence for physical beauty that these “professional beauties,” as they came to be called, suffered little loss of dignity. After all, perfectly respectable society women had been known to stand on the gilt chairs of ballrooms in order not to miss the entrance of Lillie Langtry, a leading professional beauty of the day.
THE MORNING GLORY
The exemplar of the Self-Made type of girl was Jeannie Chamberlain, originally of Cleveland, Ohio. Spectacular-looking in a way that was already recognized as characteristically American, she had honey-blond hair, dark blue eyes with long dark lashes, full lips and a tall, slender, graceful figure. Her sweetly dazzling appearance first created a storm in 1883 when she went to New York, and her photograph appeared in shop windows along with those of other, less respectable beauties such as actress Lillie Langtry. The result was a front-page article in the Times, announcing that her father was prepared to prosecute any photographers caught selling her picture, and more notoriety for Miss Jeannie Chamberlain.
Jeannie’s parents, the classic anonymous American duo, saw their sole function in life as facilitating their daughter’s rise to stardom. Sometimes the Self-Made Girl might want to shuffle the ignominious authors of her being off to one side. If Mother insisted on fanning herself with a vigor more appropriate to the scrubbing of tabletops, if Father was still dropping his cigar ash on his trousers, pray let them do it in the privacy of their provincial and, the daughter was beginning to realize, hideous home. Still, parents were necessary adjuncts to a young girl’s travel, and the Chamberlains were enlisted to accompany their little girl to all ambition’s ports of call.
* * *
“My Transatlantic friends are always welcome; they have what I call ‘the three f’s’: figures, francs, and faith! That is why I like dressing the Americans.”
CHARLES WORTH
* * *
Many women who wore Worth dresses examined the models, dealt with a vendeuse and a fitter, but never merited the great man’s personal attention. This he saved for his best clients, many of whom were American.
Dogged in their parental devotion, patiently protective, they seemed perfectly content to exchange home for a succession of hotel rooms i
n order to serve as spectators for their daughter’s feats of social derring-do. They were the sort of parents parodied as the Spraggs of Apex City in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country: long-suffering servants of insatiable youth and beauty, only barely grasping the daughter’s purpose but too fascinated by her progress to do anything but keep watching—and paying.
A TRIP TO THE RUE DE LA PAIX
Once in Europe, Jeannie captivated the two men crucial to the success of American girls: Charles Worth, the founding father of haute couture, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.
Worth, an expatriate English dressmaker who had set up shop in Paris’ rue de la Paix, was delighted to have Jeannie among his clientele. American women were braver than the staid Englishwomen and considerably more profligate than the Parisiennes, who were liable to choose three exquisite costumes and make them last a season or more—true elegance, but not about to make Worth a rich man. Americans like Jeannie never stopped at three dresses; they were hard put to stop at eighty or ninety.
And the Americans had such a sense of occasion. They seemed instinctively to understand the shades of significance in different bodices or tailoring, this or that amount of lace, a lighter velvet or a heavier brocade. They would never humiliate a reception gown, for instance, by wearing it to the theater. And they didn’t waste the designer’s time. When Charles Worth deigned to dress a woman, she must mind him to the last piece of lace. He didn’t want to pour out his genius on some woman who went home and had her maid lengthen the sleeves and add a ridge of jet to the shoulders. Americans, fortunately, were too loyal, too respectful, to consider such philistinism. They knew one didn’t fiddle with a work of art.
And that’s what a wardrobe by Worth was. He looked a girl over, turned her round, and with a few sweeping gestures conjured up a season’s worth of dresses especially for her. The result was inevitably magnificent. Thus Jeannie Chamberlain left Paris a changed woman, her natural vitality refined by Worth’s sublime tailoring as she set out for the spas. Her all-American body now presented itself in cream silk moiré, her corn-fed good looks framed in taffeta shawls with diamante insets. She positively glowed.
Above: An invitation to stay at Sandringham, the Prince’s country house, would ensure any lucky heiress’s social success in England.
Below: Although he had no power to govern, the Prince had supreme social power, and he wielded it a bit impulsively for his mother’s taste.
THE GENIUS OF CLOTHES
Worth considered himself an artist and dressed accordingly. His headquarters on the rue de la Paix featured a specially lit chamber for choosing ball gowns.
Being perfectly turned out, from kid slippers to lace parasol, including pearl-embroidered petticoats and the third new pair of gloves that day, was the exclusive province of the American woman. More, it was her patriotic duty. The daughters of dukes could indulge in loose-waisted “pre-Raphaélite” dresses, but Americans had to look like aristocrats. Enter Worth, the genius of clothes.
There were other dressmakers, to be sure, on both sides of the Atlantic, but Charles Worth had the monopoly on the American market. However temperamental and autocratic he might be, he had brilliant insight into his customers’ personalities and a wonderful logic lay behind his designs. He knew what colors would revive a fading complexion. He made fashionable clothes for mourning and pregnancy, those inevitable inconveniences of a lady’s life. And Worth was it for wedding gowns: “Was ever an American girl who could afford it,” queried the English magazine Orange Blossoms, “married in a gown built by any other man?”
Clothes by Worth were instantly recognized, even without the label sewn into each waistband.
Thus, quite happily, the American heiress made the twice-yearly pilgrimage to Paris, undergoing weeks of strenuous fittings and, in between, shopping for the proper accessories to complete each outfit. For an entire season’s wardrobe, she might pay as much as $20,000 (over $500,000 in today’s dollars) and then half again the cost in duty when the clothes were shipped back to New York—exquisitely packed in yards of tissue paper, resting on networks of tape so as not to crush the layers of dresses beneath. Of course, to the heiress, price was no object. Worth gowns were one of the necessities of life.
Above: A Worth display of mannequins called “Going to the Drawing Boom” showcased a court dress with its long train.
Right: The Comtesse Greffuhle, one of Proust’s models for the Duchesse de Guermantes, in a pearl-trimmed gown by Worth.
Far right: Mary Leiter (Lady Curzon) in Worth’s beaded “Peacock Dress”; the center of each peacock’s eye was an iridescent green beetle shell.
THE CHASE IS ON
Inevitably this apparition attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales, also on the Continent for his annual R&R at Baden-Baden. The Prince, veteran of so many love affairs, had never met a girl like Jeannie Chamberlain. European girls were held close to the bosom of the family, sheltered from society, from books, from boys. European girls stayed home. And European girls were virginal in a pronounced, emphatic way. They wore white with high collars and low heels and pastel ribbons in their hair.
The social rules were relaxed a bit at the German spas, where the Prince went to recover after a year of overeating. A girl might even meet him on a stroll through the grounds.
* * *
“Every American girl is entitled to have twelve young men devoted to her. They remain her slaves and she rules them with charming nonchalance.”
OSCAR WILDE
* * *
Jeannie’s open, easy, flirtatious manner, as much as her well-dressed beauty, entranced the Prince. He was unaccustomed to finding such audacity in usually unapproachable virgins, such innocence in a woman of fashion. But Self-Made Girls knew the value of the hunt, and Jeannie was careful not to be too accommodating. The Prince was forced to follow Cleveland’s one-and-only from resort to resort, and never permitted to see her alone. The press, who had labeled Jeannie “the American Beauty” and “the Morning Glory,” kept pace with his pursuit. Journalists interviewed the beauty’s doughty progenitors, as affable and unassuming as ever, and quoted them as finding the Prince to be “a homely man” and “the most agreeable gentleman” they had ever met.
The Prince must have been truly smitten: he not only put up with the ubiquitous parents but allowed Jeannie to address him as “Prince Tum-tum” and “Jumbo.” (In retaliation, the Princess of Wales was known to refer to Jeannie as “Miss Chamberpots.”) By the time she arrived in London for the season, Jeannie had snagged the all-important invitation to stay with the Prince at Norfolk.
Whom the Prince of Wales invited, all of London wanted to entertain, so Jeannie’s success was assured. A belle must finally select among her suitors, and Jeannie chose one of the Prince’s friends, a Captain Herbert Naylor-Leyland of the Grenadier Guards. The pair married and moved into Hyde Park House in London, and Jeannie was finally able to send her devoted parents packing.
LA BELLE AMÉRICAINE
Jeannie Chamberlain’s story was by no means unique. There were lots of American girls traipsing around Europe, seeking knowledge, invitations, proposals of marriage. In the 1880s they were as superabundant, in European eyes, as the huge quantities of cheap American wheat that was ruining agriculture on the Continent and in England. To the English in particular, American heiresses were an alien horde, more and more of them confidently jumping off every steamer that docked from across the pond, heading straight for London and the season and the men.
As a group, these girls were serving a larger purpose than each girl’s desire to marry well. Just as it was up to the American rather to make America rich and powerful, it was up to the American heiress to make America respectable. That was what New York and the rest of American society were after—respect.
Because she was young and rich and pretty, and because her rather and brothers were too busy making money to take on the job, the American heiress was the New World’s ambassador to the Old. She prese
nted, in her perfect little person, America’s coming of age. If the English gentleman was the emblem of his civilization, its fondest creation and most identifiable representative, so la belle Américaine was fast becoming the emblem of hers. She had it in mind to be the best-dressed, best-educated, most refined and utterly acceptable woman those foreigners had ever seen. She would show them. She would prove that Americans were just as good at being aristocratic as anyone else. And possibly better.
The staff of the Harvard Lampoon in 1885. Compared to European men, Americans were earnest, boyish and, above all, dull.
WALL STREET FATHER No. 2: THE SILENT PARTNER
Above: Ticker tape was to the menfolk what Burke’s Peerage was to the ladies.
Left: Sooty, urgent and noisy, America’s railroads paid for Worth dresses but were not drawing-room material.
