Rumors had already been circulating about Lillie’s theatrical intentions. The previous January, the Sporting Times, informally known as the Pink’Un because it was printed on pink paper, had written: “Mrs Langtry is well advised to go on the stage. She will thus justify her claim to the title of ‘Professional Beauty.’”7
This beautiful beauty in persona,
By kind permission of her owner,
May now be viewed by every baker
Or butcher who is a ticket-taker,
At a playhouse kept by Mr Baker.8
This was a knowing reference to the fact that Mr. Baker was the licensee of a playhouse known as none other than the Prince of Wales Theatre.9
Lillie invited Ellen Terry to visit her, to see if she could help Lillie become a real actress. “Nell Terry came and spent a precious hour of her time, outlining the different aspects of the vocation I was being so persistently advised to follow. The difficulties and disappointments that I might encounter, and what she termed the ‘rough side,’ seemed to her almost insurmountable for one who had been so petted and spoiled and idle as myself. On the whole, she was discouraging.”10
In many ways, Ellen Terry was correct. Later in life, Lillie would admit that the day-to-day business of theater bored her. And although Sarah Bernhardt had made a stage career look so easy, it was anything but. At the end of the nineteenth century, actors themselves were regarded as less than respectable, while the word “actress” was synonymous with “prostitute.” As an actress, Lillie would become a bohemian, an outsider, and less than respectable. But she could also earn a great deal of money.
Oscar Wilde, who had more faith in Lillie’s capacity to fill a theater, introduced Lillie to “Mrs. Labouchere,” or Henrietta Hodson, a professional actress with over twenty years of experience on the stage, who had played the West End and endured grueling tours of the provinces with barnstorming Henry Irving. “Mrs. Labouchere” was actually an honorary title, as Henrietta was already married, to a solicitor named Henry Pigeon. Long estranged from Mr. Pigeon, Henrietta now lived with the Liberal MP Henry “Labby” Labouchere. Henrietta, a mannish woman with “a square jaw, short curly grey hair, and a dominating personality”11 saw possibilities in Lillie. Henrietta was keen to further Labby’s political career, and knew that Lillie was on good terms with the prime minister, William Gladstone, who had a soft spot for “fallen women.” Lillie herself greatly admired Gladstone, once observing that “one could not be in his company without feeling that goodness emanated from him,”12 while Gladstone, in turn, had given Lillie a piece of advice: “In your professional career, you will receive attacks, personal and critical, just and unjust. Bear them, never reply, and, above all, never rush into print to explain or defend yourself.”13 It was advice that would prove invaluable in the years to come.
Henrietta wanted to exploit Lillie’s links with Gladstone, as her somewhat unrealistic ambition was to see Labby made ambassador to Washington, although he had been thrown out of the diplomatic service years before. But when she met Lillie, Henrietta realized that Lillie herself was a potentially more rewarding project, and took on the role of Lillie’s manager.14 Once again, Lillie had met the right person at the right time. Usually, that person was male; but in Henrietta Hodson Lillie had met someone who was as forthright and assertive as any man. This inevitably sparked rumors of a Sapphic affair. “The scandal-mongers, who let nothing Lillie did escape them, murmured about lesbianism, but that was the wildest kind of conjecture.”15 Lillie, her usual courage and resourcefulness shaken by the combination of financial disaster, the birth of Jeanne-Marie, and separation from her child, allowed Henrietta to dictate her future.
Lillie moved in with the Laboucheres at their Twickenham home, Pope House, a gothic villa on the banks of the Thames originally designed by the poet Alexander Pope. Here, Lillie worked on her lines as Lady Clara in A Fair Encounter, “a duel of wits between two women, and, as Henrietta Hodson played the other character, we rehearsed incessantly.”16 Lillie prepared for a fortnight for her first performance, in soaring temperatures, while Labby grumbled that a flock of sheep would have done less damage to his lawn and belittled Lillie’s attempts at acting every time she tried a new gesture or a different inflection.
Lillie did not know quite what to make of Labby. As she was a friend of Oscar Wilde and the Rothschilds, she found his rabidly anti-Semitic, antihomosexual views “preposterous” and described him as a “paradox,” constantly amusing and given to telling stories against himself.17 Labby seems to have been one of the rare men who remained indifferent to Lillie’s charms; or perhaps suffered a sense of wounded pride on knowing that Lillie had no use for him whatsoever.
Lillie made her stage debut in a charity performance at Twickenham Town Hall. The hall was packed with friends, well-wishers, and the frankly just plain curious, but disaster struck. The moment Lillie set foot on the stage, she “dried,” the actors’ term for completely forgetting one’s lines. Looking across the hastily improvised footlights, “I stood with a forced smile on my lips and a bunch of roses in my arms, without the vestige of an idea of what was going to happen next.”18
This awkward start didn’t seem to do Lillie’s reputation any harm. According to the London World, Lillie was perfectly at her ease and her voice “full, round and vibrant, filled the large town hall.”19 A New York gossip columnist noted that if Mrs. Langtry was intending to come to America, “she will be very welcome, especially as it seems that she has talent to back her beauty.”20 The Whitehall Review of November 22, 1881, concluded that the critic had gone along, as one of Lillie’s million humble admirers, expecting nothing more than a succès d’estime, but after seeing her achieve a “remarkable triumph” … “we could all imagine the tempest of cheers which would have greeted her had the debut been made at a London theatre, crowded as it would surely have been, by social leaders and that incongruous herd usually lumped together as the representatives of art and literature.”21
Lillie’s next role was that of Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer at the Haymarket, with a professional cast. Henrietta Hodson had convinced Squire Bancroft and his wife, a successful theatrical couple, to give Lillie the role of Kate Hardcastle in a fund-raiser for the Royal General Theatrical Fund at the Haymarket on December 15. Although casting an amateur in a lead West End role put the Bancrofts in an awkward position, it was a charity performance and Lillie’s involvement would guarantee the presence of the Prince of Wales, maximizing ticket sales. Squire Bancroft was sanguine about the prospect. “After all, the extraordinary popularity which has been Mrs Langtry’s lot for several London seasons must remove all fear of complete failure, since she has already often and gracefully passed through the ordeal of facing the public.”22
Lillie would be supported by a professional cast, including such West End luminaries as Kyrle Bellew, Lionel Brough, Arthur Pinero, Charles Brookfield, and Sophie Larkin. All the same, the performance came as something of an ordeal. On the afternoon of the show, as crowds gathered outside the theater long before the pit and the gallery doors opened, Lillie was telling the Bancrofts that “my best friends will be anxious to get as near as possible, and crowd into the front rows of the stalls, all more or less amused, and disinclined to take me seriously.”23 Standing in the wings, Lillie was terrified: the house was packed to capacity, overflowing with rank, fashion, and celebrity, including Bertie and Alix in the royal box, and Louisa, Duchess of Manchester, with a large party.
Lillie’s immediate impulse was to run away. Was it too late to back out, or hand over to her understudy?24 Then, in the distance, Lillie heard her cue, and somehow managed to get out onto the stage, to be greeted by a tremendous burst of applause, “a willing, eager homage to the far-famed beauty.”25 Abraham Hayward, an elderly lawyer who combined journalism with the bar hailed Lillie’s West End debut in The Times, and suggested that Lillie’s next role should be Lady Teazle, from School for Scandal. “It strikes us she possesses all the leading qua
lifications, and it is a part which only a lady born and bred can play well.”26
The critic at Punch magazine was not so easily impressed. In a withering review, he observed that:
Mrs Langtry intended us to suppose by this performance to put herself up for hire to the highest managerial figure in the theatrical market, and therefore we are justified in strongly and honestly reminding her that without positive genius there is no royal road to eminence, even in the histrionic art; and that a novice must stoop to pick up the rudiments and master them before she can conquer its difficulties. Mrs Langtry is of too solid a physique for any skittish movement; her laugh not yet being under control appears forced and painful; and her action is as constrained and mechanical as that of an Eton sixth form boy on speech-day.27
The Pink ’Un reported the event like a race meeting, listed all the members of the nobility present, and reported that there were “howls from the young dukes and earls sitting in the gallery—nothing under a Hon—cries of ‘Up with the rag!’ and ‘Speak hup Lily!’ were heard during the performance. Nobody bothers to look at the stage, they have one and all come to see Mrs Langtry.…”28
Adolphus Rosenberg, the editor of Town Talk, took the opportunity to lash out at Lillie in retaliation for his libel conviction the previous year. “I don’t like to say nasty things of this lady, but I don’t think that she is quite as good looking as she is represented to be. Unless your attention were specially directed to her, she would, popularly speaking, ‘pass in a crowd.’ As a matter of fact, Mrs Langtry’s beauty has been much exaggerated. ‘The Life of an Actress, by Her Husband’, is the title of a forthcoming book. I think the work will be written in a very acrimonious and pungent style.”29
Reactions in the interval range from “wretched,” “easy,” “angular,” “a born actress, my boy,” to “with about five years hard work may play singing chambermaid.” At the end, “there were a number of curtain calls and great applause for Mrs Langtry.”30
Era, a theatrical journal, took a more jaundiced view, concluding that “Mrs Langtry is a respectable amateur”31 but her reputation for beauty was not “discoverable behind the footlights.”32 As to her acting abilities, compared with the professional talent of the rest of the cast, she was like “a candle to the sun.”33 Lillie’s own verdict, once she was safely back in her dressing room and surrounded by admirers and bouquets of flowers, was that she would have to stop looking at the audience. “I’ll have to practice that. I must admit all those familiar smiling faces out in front considerably disconcerted me.”34
Sustained by mostly favorable reviews, Lillie went on to appear in another Bancroft production, Ours, retaining Henrietta as her acting coach. What Lillie lacked in talent she made up for in application, rehearsing tirelessly when her professional colleagues admitted defeat. Hiring Lillie proved no real ordeal for the Bancrofts. Bertie was a regular visitor backstage, and in 1897 recommended Squire Bancroft for a knighthood.
Ours proved to be another triumph, although, as The Times admitted, her role was not much of a stretch. All that Lillie was required to do was “fall in love with an officer, faint when he goes to Russia and play at soldiers in his hut in the Crimea in a number of becoming costumes.” This Lillie did, with great success.35
Lillie did not think much of Ours. One night, entreating her lover not to leave for the Crimea, she fainted away and toppled backward into the ample lap of a lady seated nearby. “I thought the play silly, and old-fashioned; so did the Duchess of Edinburgh, who one night sat in the royal box shaking with suppressed laughter at the absurdity of the Russian scene.”36
But Lillie did not enjoy theater life. She had never really been star-struck, never felt “the glamour of the stage.” Unlike a born actress, who “cannot but feel added zest in the stimulus of emerging from private life, and even obscurity, to become famous on the boards and a figure in the artistic world,”37 Lillie hated “the dreary rehearsals, hour after hour, day after day, in a cold and darkened theatre. To make matters worse, Henrietta sat in a corner of the stage almost nightly in a highly critical frame of mind, which added to my natural self-consciousness…”38
Lillie soon grew tired of appearing in the same play every night, “speaking the same words, wearing the same gowns at the same time every evening; it seems a very dull and monotonous existence.”39 She was already accustomed to more than her fair share of publicity. “There’s no novelty in facing the crowded audience. I know most of the occupants of the stalls and boxes, and all in the cheaper parts know me.”40 The biggest drawback, as far as Lillie was concerned, was the fact that being on stage every night wrecked her social life. How was one supposed to cope with an existence when one dined at five, before the show, and was not properly free again until eleven?
In May 1882, Lillie embarked on her first tour of the provinces. In something that resembled a royal progress across the country, she opened in She Stoops to Conquer at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Birmingham, on May 29, 1882. Lillie also appeared in a play by the dramatist and editor of Punch, Tom Taylor, entitled The Unequal Match. There were no cheap seats. Next came the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool, the Bradford Theatre Royal, and the Princes’ Theatre, Manchester, where, after Saturday night’s performance, exuberant members of the audience unfastened the horses from Lillie’s carriage and dragged her to her hotel themselves.41 “With that damned steep hill down from the theatre, I got here more rapidly than safely, and at the moment the anxiety outweighed the honour. Still, I’m sure I should feel very proud.”42
This was certainly not the usual provincial tour as experienced by professional acting companies. At every railway station, there was a top-hatted station master to greet Lillie with a red carpet and a brass band. At the theater, another red carpet ran from her dressing room to the stage, and she did not even appear in the wings until the way had been cleared by her dresser, the stage manager, and the callboy.43 Lillie herself had called for the red carpets: firsthand experience of royalty had shown Lillie how to make an impression. To be treated like a queen, Lillie knew, one had to behave like a queen.
At Edinburgh, students packed the King’s Theatre and protested at any scene of The Unequal Match in which Lillie was not present. In an appalling breach of theatrical etiquette, Lillie would walk on stage and greet the audience even if her character was not due to appear in the scene. Henrietta Hodson was horrified by this lack of professionalism, but of course Lillie was delighted and the audience lapped it up. When Henrietta remonstrated with Lillie afterward in the dressing room, Lillie’s unimprovable reply was that “it isn’t a very good play, so it doesn’t much matter!”44 Lillie was escorted to the station in a torchlight procession and not allowed to depart for Glasgow until she had delivered a speech from the train window. At Glasgow, more students harnessed themselves to her carriage, but, having endured this experience once already in her short and eventful life, Lillie quietly slipped away through the front entrance.45
The tour crossed the Irish Sea to Dublin, and then on to Belfast, Ned’s birthplace. Playgoers in the gallery took the opportunity to throw pheasants and hares onto the stage at moments throughout the play, either as a comment on Lillie’s acting or as a gesture of sympathy with her husband—it was hard to tell. Lillie splendidly rose above it, adhering to her personal philosophy of “let us not make a fuss” and telling her fellow actors that “at least we shall eat this week!”46 Belfast University students presented Lillie with a huge cage of doves, tied with blue ribbons.
The tour returned to London in September, where, on September 16, 1882, Lillie appeared in The Unequal Match at the Imperial, the same theater that was part of the aquarium where she had had that life-changing encounter with Lord Ranelagh. Lillie followed up this triumph with her own production of As You Like It with herself in the role of Rosalind. Inevitably, the prospect of the Prince of Wales’s mistress live on stage with her legs on view was box office gold, and Bertie himself was there on opening night. What did it matter tha
t The Times declared that Lillie’s Rosalind was “entirely lacking in feeling” or that she never “touched the common chord of humanity”? 47 Lillie had arrived. And there were rumors that she was planning another tour: in America!
It had been Henrietta Hodson’s idea. An experienced theater professional, Henrietta knew that Lillie’s stage career was founded on novelty, and that once the British public had tired of her, that career would be over. Henrietta wired the American impresario Henry Abbey in New York. The charismatic Abbey, dark-eyed and dashing, with his black moustache and charming manners, “though a little flabby of figure, perhaps, to an English eye,”48 had made Sarah Bernhardt a star in America two years earlier. Knowing that sex sells, Henry had enabled Sarah to make her stateside debut, and both had made an astonishing amount of money out of the venture. As Bernhardt was denounced from the pulpits as a ruthless European courtesan out to corrupt public morals, the box office receipts piled up. The streets outside Booth’s Theatre, where she played, were lit up with electric light for her opening night; she was serenaded by ecstatic crowds in the Albermarle Hotel on Madison Square.49
Now Henry turned his attention to Lillie, who might not be much of an actress but had one unique selling point: her well-publicized affair with the Prince of Wales. Before Lillie could change her mind, Lillie and Henrietta negotiated a fee with Henry even larger than Sarah’s, and Lillie made plans to emigrate. In a debilitated condition, exhausted by a year’s performing without a break, Lillie could at least look forward to a relaxing sea voyage. But she confessed she was not “wildly enthusiastic over the prospect.”
“The States, at that time, seemed to me to be about as far off as Mars, and nearly as inaccessible … my many friends and relations were within easy reach, and to leave them for unknown lands gave me a feeling of utter depression.”50 The Red House in Bournemouth was rented out, and Lillie’s mother took little Jeanne-Marie back to Jersey. Henrietta Hodson, intending to accompany Lillie to America, mothballed the villa in Twickenham, covered the furniture with dustcloths, and dismissed the cook and most of the servants. When Labby protested, Henrietta responded by taking out her anger on Labby’s wardrobe and cutting all the buttons off his shirts.51
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