In these parties, she would hear constant political conversations – most of the landowners were in government – analysis of questions of the day, discussions about the party leaders and their MPs as well as more general chat about sport or the estate’s affairs. When Jennie Jerome, newly married to Lord Randolph Churchill, arrived at Blenheim she quickly discovered that in the morning an hour or more had to be devoted to the reading of newspapers, ‘a necessity if one wanted to show an intelligent interest in the questions of the day, for at dinner conversation invariably turned on politics’.
Chauncey Depew, a witty lawyer working for Cornelius Vanderbilt and later a senator, said that in American society conversation was not ‘thoughtful, profound, or argumentative; it is but the contact of the moment, a dinner, a reception, or a call, and we separate’. But as the English often visited for up to four months at the same house, met the same people and lived intimately together, ‘conversation becomes discussion of serious and weighty considerations’.
At a London dinner party, though – and it was usually in London or at least in an urban setting that an American girl met a future English husband – it was the American who glittered, with her looks, her polish, her sparkle, her original remarks, while her knowledge of Europe and its languages made her in demand if ambassadors were to be entertained.
There was no doubt that American girls swept all before them: between 1870 and 1914, 102 American women married into the peerage. As one verse of the day put it:
… For there were the strangers, delightful and wild.
With twang well developed and dollars well piled.
And the mothers of Mayfair are loud in their wail,
As their schemes matrimonial hopelessly fail,
Each match of the season, duke, marquess, or Lord,
Is caught in the coils of the alien horde.
How did they meet the men they married? Thanks to the matriarchal character of the society from which they had sprung, American women who had already made good marriages often introduced their countrywomen – provided these measured up to their exacting standards – to London life. As Vanity Fair pointed out (on 6 July 1905): ‘The American hostesses who really play a part in London society are not very numerous … But they entertain with an originality, an entrain and above all with a splendid disregard for money, which our sadly handicapped aristocracy cannot afford to imitate.’
Lady Paget, born Minnie Stevens, daughter of Mrs Paran Stevens, for instance, was a close friend of the Prince of Wales. ‘Once greetings had been exchanged I realised with a sense of acute discomfort that I was being critically appraised by a pair of hard green eyes,’ wrote Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose mother Alva was a friend of Minnie’s mother. ‘I felt like a gawky, graceless child under her scrutiny.’ At the next dinner party at her house, Consuelo was seated next to the Duke of Marlborough, ‘a rather unnecessary public avowal of her intentions,’ thought Consuelo.
Sometimes money changed hands. Many well-born Englishwomen were much worse off after the agricultural depression and the drop in income to the great estates. When in 1894 Elizabeth Banks, an enterprising young American journalist, pretended to be an American heiress looking for a chaperone (‘A Young American Lady of means wishes to meet with a chaperon of Highest Social Position who will introduce her into the Best English Society’, ran her advertisement), she received eighty-seven responses, almost all from genuinely well-connected women, some of them impoverished peeresses, all promising to launch her and some to present her at court. Their prices ranged from £500 to £10,000.
She went to call on one, ‘who had intimated her willingness to chaperone me for £2,000’. Elizabeth arrived, dressed elegantly, at a smart address and found, not the cold-blooded bargainer she had expected but ‘a more aristocratic, refined and interesting woman I had never met. She candidly explained that she was in great need of money, and was obliged to either increase her income or diminish her expenses.’
Elizabeth, still in her persona of wealthy heiress with no social connections, also got several proposals of marriage, some veiled, some explicit. ‘You would possibly desire to marry an Englishman of high social position, who could place you in a certain circle where you would lead others,’ wrote one man. ‘I am a country gentleman, have a fine place, house and estate, have been an officer in a distinguished regiment, and know many people of position and rank.’ He informed her that he would treat her ‘with all honour and respect’ – including silence on the matter – but added, ‘it would be an absolute necessity that you should be a lady of considerable fortune’.
She agreed to see him and when they met thought he was ‘a fine-looking aristocratic man of middle age’, and ‘a thorough English gentleman’. She discovered that he was a widower and, to her surprise, found when she investigated him that he was exactly what he said – from a titled family and with a large place in the country but whose fortunes were ‘decaying’, as so many were. Another, who thought he ‘might be able to suggest a way by which she could even more than gratify her ambition for a place in English society’, turned out to be a young man she had already met (who was also exactly what he claimed to be). In this case the embarrassment of meeting him in her guise as a coronet-hunter would have been too much and she simply threw his letter into the fire.
Some women advertised openly. ‘A lady of title wishes to borrow £1,000 for six months. Would act as chaperon to young lady.’ Everyone, found Elizabeth, was prepared to overlook her own lack of background and ancestry in return for cash. ‘Had I carried my experiment further and been introduced and presented at court, I should only have been one of numerous Americans who have walked on a golden pavement to the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace.’
Elizabeth Banks also discovered a man prepared to concoct pedigrees, crests and coats of arms for affluent visiting Americans who wanted ‘ancestry’ to go with their new wealth. He warned them, however, only to use one of his creations in America, ‘where people will not put it to a close scrutiny’.
* * *
One of those who made full use of the introductory process was Adèle Beach Grant. Her determination to marry a peer and thus enter the highest society clearly shows through the ins and outs of her romantic history; what is unusual is that once she had succeeded she refused adamantly when asked to perform a similar service, despite a huge financial inducement.
The beautiful Adèle was born in New York, the daughter of David Beach Grant of the Grant Locomotive Works and, as one society paper put it: ‘she belongs to the English set in New York, rides to hounds, is a notable lawn tennis player, and a famous horse-woman in a town said to boast the most fearless and reckless of women riders in the world. The Grants have entertained a great many Englishmen of distinction, the last one being Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Pinafore and Mikado fame.’
Sir Arthur, indeed, was so assiduous in his escorting of Adèle that it was said at one time that they were engaged. Her looks were exactly those that fitted the Edwardian ideal of beauty: she had a mass of black hair, a creamy complexion, vivid colouring and lustrous eyes; so lovely was she that she was later the model for Hubert von Herkomer’s portrait Lady in White. When she made her début in New York society during the season of 1883–4, at the first Patriarchs’ Ball, held in Delmonico’s, she was the acknowledged belle of that season.
What was not so generally known was that her father was a notorious drunkard. During her coming-out ball he had been returned, drunk and dishevelled, by the police, to be smuggled up the back stairs, given a sedative and locked in his bedroom. Enough, Adèle must have decided, was enough. She managed to transport her family – mother, younger sister and brother – to Paris, where she spent a year at the Sorbonne.
The next season, staying in Pau,8 she met the twenty-five-year-old Lord Garmoyle, son of the 1st Earl Cairns, a former Lord Chancellor and distinguished Conservative politician, but the romance did not start until a few months later when Lord Garmoyle arrived in New York and saw her at a
ball given by Mrs Bradley Martin.
Cairns was in New York to escape the furore caused by the result of a breach-of-promise action. When he was twenty-three he had met a lovely young actress who performed under the name of May Fortescue, whom he had first seen on stage in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. May had joined the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1881, when she was nineteen, and quickly became both admired for her beauty and a protégée of W. S. Gilbert.
Garmoyle fell in love with her, and proposed marriage (in August 1883) and she left the theatre. It was a time when marrying out of one’s class was mal vu, and when an aura of immorality still clung about the stage; nevertheless, his family accepted her. His friends, however, were a different matter and this meant so much to him that he broke off the engagement in January 1884, and went travelling in Asia. When he returned she sued him for breach of promise – W. S. Gilbert paid for her lawyers – won the case and £10,000; and went straight back into the theatre, starting her own theatre company.
In New York, with the case behind him, and by now Earl Cairns (his father had died that April), he began to pursue Adèle, following her to Europe. ‘He has no indication of the possession of any intelligence beyond that required for the customary languid intercourse of fashionable society,’ wrote the Daily Alta of California scornfully in June 1886. ‘In dress, manners and expression of feature he is nothing more than the typical English youth of fashion.’ Nevertheless, the idea of being a countess clearly overwhelmed any scruples Adèle might have had, and in the summer of 1886 she accepted his proposal. Nor was he taking any chances: for the ‘Battle of Flowers’ at the Nice carnival, he went as far as Genoa to buy camellias, filling the carriage of his new fiancée fuller of flowers than any other in the procession.
The invitations to the wedding were sent out to all the bride and groom’s friends in London and New York, a splendid trousseau was ordered in Paris, wedding presents poured in – including expensive jewellery from Lord Cairns – and a house taken in Grosvenor Square for the wedding breakfast.
Then, suddenly, the marriage was called off. The reason, everyone agreed, was financial; some said it was because of the prospective bridegroom’s extortionate demands for a settlement, others that he was so hopelessly enmeshed in such deep financial complications that Adèle’s relatives did not think it worthwhile to extricate him for the sake of gaining her his coronet and title. Although she had to send back the presents and cancel the house, the trousseau, at least, was not wasted: during the following London season she appeared in the gowns ordered for it.
She was steadily moving upwards in English society, by now being helped by Consuelo Mandeville. Lady Mandeville, unhappily married to the Duke of Manchester’s heir, who was flagrantly unfaithful and gambled much of her money away, had decided to make a life for herself in England. The first step was to become a close friend of the Prince of Wales, which she managed quickly and successfully. The second was to accept large fees to groom and school American girls anxious to enter English society – provided they measured up. Adèle’s wealth and exceptional beauty ensured that she did.
In 1891, Consuelo Mandeville had succeeded in having Adèle and her mother, now living in Cumberland Place, presented at one of Queen Victoria’s Drawing Rooms by a Mrs Lincoln, and by the following year Adèle had been introduced to the widowed Earl of Essex, then thirty-four. He was a strikingly attractive, well-dressed man, who turned up the ends of his moustache every morning with a tiny pair of curling tongs while his valet waited for him to select a buttonhole from a tray holding a rose, carnation and violets. But he was also, as his daughter Iris recalled, ‘first and foremost, an angry man’, often breaking anything that happened to annoy him – clouting his caddy over the head if he moved by the tee or breaking his putter over his knee if he missed a shot on the green.
His family seat, Cassiobury Park, an Elizabethan house in Watford, Hertfordshire, was one of the showplaces in eastern England, with a wonderful collection of porcelain and pictures, some by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was not, otherwise, considered a rich man, and Adèle’s fortune as the heiress of her wealthy uncle Suydam Grant helped offset some of his financial problems.
Their wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in 1893 was the social sensation of the year, with Adèle’s old admirer Sir Arthur Sullivan accompanying his own anthem ‘Sing O Heavens’ during the signing of the register. The town of Watford was illuminated and decorated with triumphal arches. An escort of the Herts Yeomanry Cavalry, of which Lord Essex was Captain, met them at the station, and after they entered their carriage the horses were unharnessed and the equipage was drawn by tenantry the two miles to the gates of Cassiobury.
* * *
As Lady Essex, Adèle quickly made her mark in society, her beauty smoothing her path and forming a pleasing contrast to the coarseness of her husband, whose ribald conversation once made Balfour leave the room – although it did not stop his visits to Cassiobury. When Edith Wharton, a great friend, went down to Cassiobury one Sunday at the end of the season she found there Balfour, Lady Anne Dickson-Poynder (later Lady Islington), John Singer Sargent, Henry James, Lady Elcho and Lady Desborough – Ettie Desborough thought Adèle ‘top’ for elegance of any woman she had ever known.
Along with the Duchess of Sutherland, the Countess of Westmorland, the Countess of Lytton and the Countess of Warwick, Adèle was one of the so-called ‘Lovely Five’, and she was a favourite of the Prince of Wales, a friendship that continued when he became king. In 1905 there she was, in a house party arranged for the King, Queen and Princess Victoria at Chatsworth, that included the King of the Belgians, Arthur Balfour, the Marquis de Soveral, the Earl and Countess of Mar and Kellie, Lord and Lady Elcho, Evan Charteris, Consuelo Duchess of Manchester, Lord Montagu, Mr R. Cavendish MP, Lady Moyra Cavendish and the Earl and Countess de Grey, who wrote of it to her brother Mungo.
‘We had a very pleasant weekend at Chatsworth last week. The old King of the Belgians … made propositions to all the ladies, and even non-plussed Ettie who is pretty clever at warding off awkward requests! But he had no success with anyone. Hugo walked into his bedroom by mistake one evening, & said he was only made aware of what he had done by hearing a bitter groan of disappointment from the bed.’
Her own experience did not, however, encourage Adèle to help others up the social ladder. When her husband’s aunt by marriage, Lady Meux, the immensely rich widow of the brewer Sir Henry Meux (Lord Essex’s uncle), asked her for such help she refused to give it. As Valerie Reece, Lady Meux had been a bar girl – and possibly worse – before becoming a burlesque star. Sir Henry, heir to something like £3 million, doted on her and when he died she inherited everything he possessed, from two estates and wonderful jewellery to 15,000 acres of land.
Valerie Meux was a controversial figure, given to driving herself around London in a phaeton drawn by a pair of zebras. Never accepted by her husband’s family or by the social world in which they moved, she must have felt that now, bejewelled, independent and enormously rich, was her chance; and all she needed was the entrée. She begged Adèle to introduce her to polite society, saying that she would make Lord Essex her heir if she did so. But Adèle’s disapproval of the flamboyant widow was such that even this bribe failed to move her.
* * *
Chauncey Depew neatly summed up the reasons why Englishmen selected American wives: ‘I should say that the American girl has the advantage of her English sister in that she possesses all that the other lacks. This is due to the different methods in which the two girls are brought up …
‘The American girl comes along, prettier than her English sister, full of dash, snap and go, sprightly, dazzling, and audacious, and she is a revelation to the Englishman. She gives him more pleasure in one hour, at a dinner or a ball, than he thought the universe could produce in a whole lifetime. Speedily he comes to the conclusion that he must marry her or die. As a rule he belongs to an old and historic family, is well educated, travelled, and polishe
d, but poor. He knows nothing of business, and to support his estate requires an increased income. The American girl whom he gets acquainted with has that income, so in marrying her he goes to heaven and gets – the earth.’
CHAPTER 3
Jennie
One of the women who turned towards Europe was Clara Jerome, wife of Leonard Jerome, a flamboyant, sporting financier who made and lost several fortunes. Unable to achieve the social success she longed for in New York, on the flimsy pretext of benefiting her health she took her three daughters to Paris, where entry, through them, would be much easier. It was a stratagem that worked out perfectly both for Clara and the Jerome daughters.
Once in Europe, the most popular destination for Americans was Paris – the Paris of the Second Empire, under the sway of Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III) and his wife the Empress Eugénie – and here the four Jerome women arrived in 1867.
Louis-Napoleon was born in 1808, the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland and of Hortense de Beauharnais, the Empress Josephine’s daughter by her first marriage. He was physically unattractive, though with great charm and a kind nature. He had seized power in a coup d’état in December 1852, declared himself Emperor a year later and then set out to make Paris the most glorious capital in Europe. Until then it had been a medieval city, with narrow streets, winding alleys, slums and open drains in the middle of each road. Under the Emperor, by the 1860s it had been transformed into the Paris we know today, with splendid boulevards designed by George Haussmann. The same year that Louis Napoleon declared himself Emperor he took the step that made his court the most glamorous in Europe: he married the beautiful twenty-seven-year-old Spaniard, Eugénie de Montijo.
The Husband Hunters Page 5
