by gail maccoll
Outside the city, minus the restraining Knickerbocker influence, the participants’ delusions of grandeur might run riot. Mrs. Leiter’s choice of a lavishly beaded purple dress was a bit ostentatious for a mother of the bride, while every feature of Flora Sharon’s wedding was larger than life. Flora was married in San Francisco, and afterward a special train took 800 guests to her father’s house just outside the city. The reception was held principally in the sixty-eight-foot-long music room, which was lined with mirrors. Floral decorations, executed in camellias, tuberoses and smilax, included festoons on chandeliers, horns of plenty, a marriage bell, and a shield with the letters “H” and “S” in blue and white violets. Supper was served, followed by dancing—a far cry from the modest Eastern “wedding breakfast” of the previous decade.
In America, the land of religious freedom, socialites were always Episcopalians and romantic-looking churches like New York’s Grace Church were the favored venues for worship and weddings.
CHAPTER 3
AMERICAN HEIRESSES: WHAT WILL YOU BID?
He Stoops to Conquer
The Plutocrats’ Daughters
The Match of the Century
She Is Now a Duchess
The American Aristocrat’s Wedding
HE STOOPS TO CONQUER
Not all impecunious Englishmen waited, like George Curzon, for American heiresses to come to them. A certain variety of Poor Peer bypassed the formalities of the London season and took the steamer to New York, hoping his bad reputation didn’t follow him. Men whom even the most jaded of the English social godmothers had rejected might find, in America, the heiress of their dreams—utterly naïve, or completely jaded herself.
THE CASTLE & THE PALACE
At first Englishmen came to the United States hunting game, not heiresses. One hunting party, in 1878, included Irish landowner John Adair, his American wife Cornelia (née Wadsworth, of upstate New York) and Moreton Frewen, second son of an old Sussex family. Frewen was back in 1879 with another hunting party, this one including the Honourable James Burke-Roche (soon to marry New Yorker Frances Work) and the Honourable Gilbert Leigh of Stoneleigh Abbey (whose brother would marry New Yorker Helene Beckwith). This time, Frewen bought a ranch on the Powder River in Wyoming and built a house that would come to be known as “the Castle.”
Left: Frewen’s Wyoming house was known as “the Castle” for the high level of civilization it brought to the wilderness.
Right: Moreton Frewen met with disapproval from Jennie Jerome as a husband for her sister Clara, partly because he’d been one of Lillie Langtry’s most assiduous suitors only a year earlier—going so far as to give Lillie a horse named Redskin.
Clara Frewen was enough of a Jerome to insist on taking her French maid along to rural Wyoming.
The Palace Hotel’s famous courtyard featured a glass roof. Horses and carriages could drive right in and circle the fountain.
The Castle soon featured a female occupant—the former Clara Jerome, whom Frewen had married in New York in the summer of 1881. (Ranching was not so arduous that he couldn’t go home to woo and win a wife.) After losing her first baby, Clara was sent back east in the Deadwood Coach, a feature of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, while Moreton stayed to take care of business. Business was, inevitably, bad, and the Frewens were soon back in London.
Sir Thomas Fermor-Hesketh was another wandering Englishman. In 1879 he had set off from England in his yacht, the Lancashire Witch, to see what he could see. He looped around Africa, disembarking to help fight in the Zulu War, then setting sail again for points east. Several months and a tour of the Orient later, he put into San Francisco Harbor. Here his fate awaited him, in the form of Flora Sharon.
San Francisco abounded in colorful characters, one of whom was William Sharon, Flora’s father. He was a U. S. Senator from the state of Nevada, where he had been the Bank of California’s representative at the immensely rich silver mine known as the Comstock Lode. Sharon was as ruthless and possibly dishonest as any of the “desperadoes” Englishmen loved to meet; it was even said that he’d driven a business partner to suicide, then bought and moved into his partner’s home. He was the owner of the ostentatious Palace Hotel in San Francisco when Fermor-Hesketh arrived in town, and it was here that the young baronet was reported to have met Miss Sharon. She was invited to a dinner on board the Lancashire Witch, one thing followed another, and they were soon engaged.
LAND-POOR
The more or less coincidental marital successes of Frewen, Burke-Roche and Fermor-Hesketh inspired their fellow aristocrats. Englishmen began to visit America with a purpose more serious than sightseeing or sport. A trip across the Atlantic—and a few months in the new country’s provincial drawing rooms—did not seem such a high price to pay for a lifetime free from financial worry.
That worry was often substantial. Take, for instance, the situation faced by Blandford, eighth Duke of Marlborough. Blandford’s father, the seventh Duke, had been unable to make ends meet. There were six plain but aristocratic Churchill daughters to dower, and the Blenheim estate yielded only £37,000 a year. First he sold land: in 1874 Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bought the estates of Wichendon and Waddesdon. Then in 1875 it was the Marlborough Gems, which fetched £10,000 at Christie’s. In 1882–83 the Sunderland Library was dispersed for £60,000, and in 1883 the Blenheim Enamels brought in £73,000. Despite the gradual stripping of Blenheim’s splendors, the seventh Duke’s will was proved at a mere £7,000.
* * *
During the agricultural depression, the income from the Duke of Manchester’s estates dropped from £95,000 a year to an annual deficit of £2,000.
* * *
Lord Randolph Churchill’s brother, still known to his family as Blandford after he became 8th Duke of Marlborough.
The fact was that Blenheim, the only non-royal palace in Britain, drank money. John Vanbrugh had designed it in the early eighteenth century, in honor of the first Duke of Marlborough’s military achievements, with “Beauty, Magnificence, and Duration” in mind. It took one man a year to wash all the windows, and when he finished he went round again. There were fourteen acres of roof that needed to be releaded, over and above daily concerns such as feeding and paying the scores of servants required to keep the place running.
Raphael’s Ansidae Madonna fetched £70,000 for the Marlboroughs (and ended up in England’s National Gallery) but still didn’t make a dent in their debts.
Her Majesty Queen Anne contributed £240,000 toward the construction of Blenheim. It took its name from the battle in 1704 where the 1st Duke of Marlborough defeated the French army.
When the eighth Duke inherited, more treasures were sold. Eighteen canvases by Rubens, additional Van Dycks, two Titians, two Rembrandts, and paintings by Claude Lorrain, Poussin and Watteau brought £400,000. It still wasn’t enough. So, in the spring of 1888, prompted perhaps by the financial security Jennie Jerome had brought his brother Randolph, the new Duke set sail for New York.
A NOBLE RAKE
Blandford had every reason to expect a fulsome reception. By now, Anglomania had gained a real foothold in New York. Visiting English peers were welcomed effusively by eager hostesses and their daughters. (This enthusiasm did not go unnoticed in the press: when the Marquess of Stafford visited the United States, the New York World marked his arrival with the headline “Attention, American heiresses, what will you bid?”) But indiscriminate as they usually were toward noble Britons, the ladies of New York couldn’t bring themselves to welcome Blandford. He might be a duke, he might be lord of Blenheim Palace, who cared if he was bankrupt—but he was not a nice man. As one newspaper acerbically put it, “Everything His Grace of Marlborough brought with him was clean, except his reputation.”
The Duke, as Marquess of Blandford, had married the eminently respectable daughter of the first Duke of Abercorn. He always had an eye for a pretty woman, and caused some uncomfortable ripples in the family when he gave sister-in-law Jennie Churchill a ring
that belonged to his wife. That was smoothed over soon enough, but his next peccadillo was not, for he was very indiscreet about his affair with the Countess of Aylesford.
In 1876, the Earl of Aylesford heard from his wife Edith that she intended to elope with Blandford. So Joe Aylesford threatened to divorce her. Divorce meant public knowledge of the affair and a major society scandal. The Prince of Wales attempted to intervene, castigating Blandford for taking advantage of the husband’s absence—while on a trip to India with the Prince—to woo the wife. He asked Blandford to give up any notion of running away with Edith. Blandford responded by brandishing before the Princess of Wales a packet of rather indiscreet letters H.R.H. had himself once written to Edith Aylesford.
COMME IL FAUT
Port is passed round the table counterclockwise. If a gentleman changes his mind and decides to fill his glass once the decanter has passed him, he must wait till it goes all the way round before reaching him again. The decanter is never lifted, but slid. The first toast in Etigland is “Gentlemen, the Queen.”
The Prince did not take kindly to being blackmailed. He refused to attend any social function at which he might be faced with either Blandford or his brother Randolph. The Churchill brothers—in fact, the entire family—were for all practical purposes exiled from London society. This, despite the fact that by now Joe Aylesford had calmed down and agreed not to try to divorce his wife. However, Lady Blandford had had quite enough—she moved out of Blenheim and, in 1883, successfully sued her husband, recently become the eighth Duke of Marlborough, for divorce. She was not received in society thereafter. The final twist in the affair came some years later when Joe Aylesford, living on a ranch in Texas, fell in love with someone else and asked permission to divorce the troublesome Edith. The Queen’s Proctor stopped the case—although Edith had already borne Blandford an illegitimate son.
THE OTHER ASTORS
At Cliveden (middle), William Waldorf Astor added the famous Borghese balustrade to Charles Barry’s 1850 house; to Hever Castle (below), a dilapidated farm when he bought it, he brought Ann Boleyn’s bedposts, Queen Elizabeth’s clothes-brushes and Martin Luther’s Bible.
While a handful of Englishmen were crossing the ocean to America in the 1880s and ‘90s, one notable American crossed the other way. He was William Waldorf Astor, son of John Jacob Astor III and nephew of William and Caroline, and he took his family to England because his native land was not, he felt, “a fit place for a gentleman to live.”
Astor had suffered a series of blows to his ego, including failure in his U. S. Senate campaign and, the ultimate insult, his aunt Caroline’s refusal to step down and allow his wife Mamie to become simply “Mrs. Astor”—her proper designation after he became head of the family. (He’d even been compelled to inform the Newport post office, in the summer of 1890, that any mail addressed to “Mrs. Astor” should be delivered not to Caroline but to his wife.) Once in England, however, he made little headway in his quest to be accepted by society. Indulging his mania for security, he installed a special system in his London estate office that allowed him to lock all the interior doors from a button on his desk, and he built a huge wall around Cliveden on the Thames after discovering its attractiveness to boating parties. (The latter effort earned him the nickname “Walled-Off Astor”) Then, in July 1892, the New York papers reported his death of pneumonia and heaped on the praise in long obituaries; Willie himself read the obituaries with relish, for he was alive and well—and probably the source of the hoax.
Becoming a naturalized Briton in 1899, Astor bought Hever Castle in Kent and promptly spent some $10 million on restorations. He even went so far as to erect a complete “Tudor Village,” adjacent to the castle, to house his guests. His aspirations were now plain, and he made them plainer. In 1911 he appeared at a fancy-dress ball in a peer’s robes of state and a coronet. Not until 1916, however, after massive contributions to the Red Cross and other causes during World War I, was he finally ennobled. (In 1917 his title was upgraded, for no very clear reason, from Baron Astor of Hever to Viscount Astor.)
Willie Astor’s long-awaited recognition was by no means welcome news to his son Waldorf, who was appalled at the implications for his own future. Raised as an English boy, attending Eton and Oxford, he had married the bewitching, outspoken Virginian Nancy Langhorne Shaw, and the pair had devoted themselves to his career as Tory M.P. from Plymouth. Elevation to the House of Lords would, he feared, finish his further political aims. But in 1919, after Willie Astor’s death, the new Lady Astor was able to fill Waldorf’s vacant seat since British women had been given the vote and the opportunity to stand for Parliament the year before.
Thus, she became the first woman to actually sit in Parliament. Over the years, her quick wit and vitality earned her a fame that eclipsed that of her father-in-law—and perhaps even that of the Mrs. Astor of New York.
Nancy and Waldorf Astor (left), shortly after their 1906 marriage. Nancy (right), one of three Langhorne sisters legendary for their beauty, could take her pick among her English suitors.
Lilian Hammersley paid for the grand organ in the library at Blenheim. The inscription reads:
In memory of happy days
and as a tribute
to this glorious home
we leave thy voice
to speak within these walls
in years to come
when ours are still
LM and MM
1891
LILIAN (RHYMES WITH MILLION)
Much as New York loved English aristocrats, loose aristocratic morals were entirely unacceptable. While the Aylesford scandal was by now ancient history in London (the Churchills were back to being bosom friends of the Prince), Americans found it appalling.
Not, however, Marietta Stevens. Minnie’s indefatigable mother was back in New York and as ambitious as ever. The eighth Duke of Marlborough was a friend of her daughter. Furthermore, Mrs. Stevens subscribed to the more sophisticated English view of his old indiscretions. She, at least, was happy to entertain him.
So was Leonard Jerome, still every inch the Sporting Man though less of a power on Wall Street. Jerome, knowing full well the reason behind the Duke’s visit, had someone he wanted him to meet. She was Lily Hammersley, a rich, attractive, thirty-four-year-old widow. Born Lilian Price of Troy, New York, she had married Louis Hammersley of New York City, noted for his large fortune and his large head. She changed her name from Lilian to Lily, it was said, to avoid the unfortunate rhyme with “million.” Although Jennie Churchill would later write snide letters about her new sister-in-law’s weight and mustache, Lily was widely remembered as a beauty who usually wore white to set off her rose-gold coloring. She was also known for having her entire opera box hung with orchids.
* * *
“The Duke has gone off this morning with Lawrence [Jerome] and a party to the Adirondacks trout fishing, to be gone a week. I rather think he will marry the Hammersley. Don’t you fear any responsibility on my part. Mrs. H. is quite capable of taking care of herself. Besides I have never laid eyes on the lady but once.”
LEONARD JEROME, in a letter
* * *
Randolph Churchill wrote to his mother, the Duchess of Marlborough, that Lily’s “mustache and beard are becoming serious,” but other men considered her strikingly handsome.
“I hope the marriage will come off,” Leonard wrote to his wife, “as there is no doubt she has lots of tin.” Although Hammersley’s will was under dispute at the time of the Duke’s visit, it was rumored that Lily had $100,000 a year as well as $1 million of her own. By the end of June, a “friend” of Mrs. Hammersley had told The New York Times: “The Duke is very fond of money and I know for some time that he was making inquiries as to Mrs. Hammersley’s fortune . . . . I am only sorry that Mrs. Hammersley is not better acquainted with the Duke’s little affairs in England than she is.”
THE PRINCESS DIANA CONNECTION
Regal reflections: Mrs. Burk-Roche (left) and Dian
a, Princess of Wales, whose middle name is Frances after her mother and her American great-grandmother.
The Hon. James Burke-Roche, younger brother of an Irish baron named Lord Fermoy, was a classic example of the broke aristocrat. The title, just a generation old, carried with it only some 16,000 acres in County Cork and County Waterford, land that brought in roughly £7,000 a year. The family seat, Trabolgan, was a long Georgian house facing the sea near Cork Harbor. Its mile-long drive passed under a triumphal arch, but the effect was somewhat spoiled: in a southeast gale, it was impossible to open the front door against the wind. After around 1880, this was no longer the Fermoys’ problem, since Trabolgan was then sold by Burke-Roche’s elder brother.
An income of £7,000 would not go far. It would certainly rule out a lavish allowance to a younger brother. What, then, was the younger brother to do? Being a gentleman of an enterprising nature, he did the logical thing. He left England. His good looks and good manners, his little bit of money and plenty of address, would be worth a lot more off British soil. Always adventurous, he wound up in Wyoming with aristocratic younger son Moreton Frewen, attempting to raise cattle and enjoying the occasional tussle with hostile Indians.
After that, Burke-Roche found his way to New York, where the glamour of his adventures heightened his appreciable charm. In the summer of 1880 he visited Newport, where Commodore Vanderbilt’s stockbroker, Frank Work, had a house. Work also had a remarkably beautiful daughter named Frances, who, in September of 1880, became the Hon. Mrs. James Burke-Roche. The newlyweds lost no time in sailing for England, where the life of a gentleman would now be made possible by the hard-earned dollars of a Wall Street Father. Though the course of true love ran, in this case, anything but smoothly, the pair had twin sons—the elder of whom was the maternal grandfather of Diana, Princess of Wales.
