The Husband Hunters

by Anne de Courcy

  ‘It was her habit to sit in a window of her sitting-room on the ground floor,’ wrote Edith, ‘as if watching calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors. She seemed in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her confidence. She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries, the one-storey saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens, and the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the advance of residences as stately as her own – perhaps (for she was an impartial woman) even statelier.’ And as society had come to Mary Jones’s door, so it did in the Wharton novel.

  * * *

  Perhaps Mrs Stevens herself could have lived with the veiled disapproval emanating from New York’s old-established families, but by 1871, when her pretty daughter Minnie was eighteen and the time had come for her to be presented to society, society made it clear that it would turn its collective back. Although she kept a carriage at the ready to whisk Minnie from party to party so that she could be seen in all the ‘right’ places, this had little effect. A season at Newport was tried, where a young man called Fred May from Baltimore wooed Minnie, until Mrs Stevens intimated to him that she had a higher fate in mind for her daughter. For in Mrs Stevens’s determination to reach the top, her children were co-opted as stepping stones.

  The death of Paran Stevens in 1872 left Marietta a wealthy widow and her daughter an heiress. Now there was nothing to hold her back. Briskly, she withdrew the beautiful Minnie from the longing gaze of several swains and the pair set off for Europe – and, they hoped, a titled husband.

  Minnie’s looks were of the kind then most in fashion: she had dark hair growing rather low on a broad forehead, well-marked dark brows and brilliant grey-blue eyes. She also had taste, chic and plenty of money. But it seems that Mrs Stevens exaggerated the wealth that Minnie would inherit as there was an embarrassing incident when the most suitable parti cried off at the last moment, citing the disparity between what he had been told her dowry would be and the actuality – four times less. ‘How galling for a girl to be put in that position!’ wrote a friend from New York, where the story was current, to Lady Waldegrave in England.

  All the same, the pretty Minnie received a number of proposals, but both she and her mother hoped for an even grander match than the various French counts and second sons who offered. After trawling Europe unsuccessfully for several years they moved to England and, to make the most of the princely connection, Cowes, where the Prince of Wales invariably spent most of August, although Marietta did not much care for the sea, declaring that she ‘preferred terra cotta’. At Cowes the friendship with the Prince was renewed and the Prince, who found the chic, style, wealth, superb clothes and general sparkle of American girls entrancing, was glad to welcome another of these charmers.

  Finally, when Minnie was twenty-five, which at that time meant she was almost an old maid, when there were no other grander takers she decided to go for the most persistent of her suitors, Captain Arthur Paget, a regular soldier and the grandson of the Marquess of Anglesey, who had earlier courted her in Newport at her mother’s house, the Villa Marietta. Although he had originally pursued Minnie largely for practical reasons – as a younger son, Paget was far from affluent – he soon fell in love with her. ‘When I first asked you to marry me,’ he said, ‘my proposal came from my head. Now it comes from my heart!’

  For the Stevenses, part of Paget’s appeal was his close friendship with the Prince of Wales. Much of this centred on the turf, as Paget owned numerous racehorses and would place bets on favoured horses for the Prince, who could not be seen to gamble. Now the Prince did his best to encourage the match, largely to help his friend. When Minnie accepted him, the Prince wrote to her: ‘Long ago I hoped that Arthur would find favour in your eyes, and now that all is so happily settled, I cannot tell you how I rejoice that he is to be your future husband.’

  As entertaining the Prince was always expensive, Minnie’s inheritance was doubly welcome: one estimate of her dowry reckoned she had brought £200,000 to the match, with her mother contributing a further annual $20,000. Marietta also organised the wedding, which took place at St Peter’s, Eaton Square on 27 July 1878. The day before, as the papers reported, the Prince ‘condescended to pay a visit’ to offer his best wishes, and gave Minnie a gold serpent bracelet set with sapphires, diamonds and rubies as a wedding present; a year later, he became godfather to the couple’s son.

  Married to one of the Prince of Wales’s great friends, Minnie was now installed in the highest echelon of English society, the Marlborough House Set, as the group round the Prince were known – and her mother had risen with her. When the Prince visited Marietta the day after Minnie’s wedding to congratulate her, this put the final seal on her position. Back in New York, as a friend of the Prince of Wales, Marietta had now, at long last, achieved her objective: she was ‘in society’, a fact noted publicly when Caroline Belmont, one of its leaders, called on her.

  To keep hold of her place within the magic circle Marietta Stevens needed money, and plenty of it; all her life this need for money, representing as it did her only strength in the society to which she had been born an outsider, remained with her. At the same time, she spent to the hilt, as a means of impressing those around her and maintaining her position as an exquisitely dressed social leader.

  It was for this reason, undoubtedly, that after her husband Paran’s death and although he had left her $1 million and the sole use of both the New York and Newport houses during her lifetime, she instituted legal proceedings against his estate and endeavoured to have two of the three trustees (the third was herself) who managed his properties removed, so that she could be the sole arbiter of its disposition.

  ‘Collecting dollars wherever she could’ was how newspapers saw this. The verdict for the first case was announced when she was on the way back from a visit to her daughter in England, whither she had gone to try and procure Minnie’s signature on a document that would give her more control over the estate but had failed, as Arthur Paget had objected.

  Her attempt to overturn the will was the first of many further lawsuits. ‘Her denunciation of those who opposed her was both vigorous and bitter,’ said the Boston Evening Transcript: this, coupled with her conviction that she was always right, meant that she took no notice of her numerous defeats and that most of these cases made front-page news. Her lawsuits involved anything from a dispute with tenants to the firing of her French chef; another featured fisticuffs and the bribing of a witness, another the alleged assaulting of the tenant of an art gallery, from which she had to be removed by police.

  It is also likely that she managed to bring her son’s engagement to an end to benefit herself financially.

  Harry Stevens, a handsome and charming young man of twenty-one, had fallen in love with Edith Jones, then a quiet young woman from an old, upper-crust family. In 1880 he spent the summer with Edith’s family in Maine, accompanied them to the South of France the following year – where Edith’s father died – and after the early period of mourning was over resumed his courtship of Edith at Newport in the summer of 1882.

  Here the couple’s engagement was announced in the Newport Daily News with, unusually, the future bridegroom’s name ahead of that of Edith – a fairly definite pointer to the fact that the announcement was placed by Marietta Stevens (about whom there were several other stories in the same issue of the paper) rather than by Edith’s family. For to be thus publicly linked with the patrician Jones family could do Marietta nothing but good, augmenting as it did her social credentials.

  However, although nothing could take away from the benefit brought by the engagement, from Marietta’s point of view there were compelling reasons why the marriage itself should not take place; and a few months later, in late October, the society magazine Town Topics reported that the wedding had been postponed ‘indefinitely’. Quite apart from the fact that most of the Jones family thought that Marietta would make a poisonous mother-in-l
aw, those closest to Edith believed that the couple were still in love and that ‘Mrs S. was at the bottom of it all’.

  What is undoubted was her financial motive. Under the terms of her husband’s will, Marietta was in control of her son’s assets (amounting to more than $1 million) and received the income from them ‘until he married or reached the age of twenty-five’. Determined to keep her hands on the money as long as possible, she had already sought (unsuccessfully) legal means to divert part of her son’s trust to herself; his marriage would put it out of her reach completely.

  Unlike the remnants of ‘old’ New York society, who curled up with embarrassment at publicity, Mrs Stevens enjoyed it, believing that it kept her firmly in the public eye. She had also learnt, to some extent, how to manage it. Since the entire Jones family would have shunned contact with a newspaper, it was clearly Marietta who managed to make it appear that the hapless Edith had caused the break-up. Town Topics stated that ‘the only reason for the breaking of the engagement … is an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride. Miss Jones is an ambitious authoress and it is said that, in the eyes of Mr Stevens, ambition is a grievous fault.’ (Later the magazine remarked that he had keenly felt the breaking of this engagement.)

  Shortly afterwards, Mrs Jones took Edith away to the South of France; and in 1885 Edith married Teddy Wharton in Newport. Few were deceived, and Mrs Stevens was less popular than ever. ‘Mrs Stevens is such a universal favourite among all Newportians that when it was heard that her jewels had again been stolen the propriety of clothing the town in black and hanging all suspicious characters to the lamp posts was seriously considered,’ said Town Topics sarcastically (the jewels were later found under her pillows).

  Harry Stevens died a few months later at his mother’s home in Newport. A few days after his death, she took the highly unusual step of commissioning an autopsy by three top New York doctors; the results – the cause of death was ‘a cancerous stomach tumour’ – appearing on newspaper front pages.

  This deliberate revelation of something so private in the midst of grief displayed, as perhaps nothing else could, her determination to manipulate events for her own benefit: what she wanted was to make it clear that Harry had not died of a broken heart – and above all that she herself had not played any part in the affair.

  After the requisite mourning period, she resumed her life as a respected member of the society she had fought so hard to enter. Her daughter Minnie came to visit her at Newport but without her husband because, according to The Saunterer, the acid-tongued gossip columnist of Town Topics, ‘it is pretty well known that she is not averse to strong language, and her son-in-law has come in for a share of it on occasions’.

  Town Topics was a society magazine with a difference. As it punched far above its weight, this rates an explanation. Founded from the ashes of a failing social journal, by 1887 it was a sophisticated weekly that reached most subscribers on a Thursday morning, to be opened with a mixture of excitement and dread. It was run by Colonel William d’Alton Mann, a Civil War veteran who had made and lost a fortune. The Colonel was a Father Christmas-like figure with thick white hair and whiskers, a large red nose, sparkling blue eyes and a genial and gregarious nature, who would invite his employees to lunch at Delmonico’s, giving sugar lumps to the horses he passed en route.

  Benevolent as he may have appeared, under the Colonel’s editorship the magazine was anything but. Taking it rapidly upmarket, he quickly built up an unparalleled network of informers, from telegraph operators to caterers, from bandsmen to those in the smart set with a grudge against one of their number. Then, in pungent, witty and usually mocking prose, these revelations would emerge under the title ‘Saunterings’, written by the Colonel under the pseudonym The Saunterer, and occupying the first twelve or fourteen pages.

  These jottings, as the Colonel liked to call them, went in both for the sharp dig and the scabrous innuendo. Thanks to Mann’s no-holds-barred remarks, in four years the circulation rose from 5,000 to 63,000. ‘Mr Drexel’s head is gradually assuming the smoothness and polish that is so familiar on a billiard ball.’ ‘Lady Sarah4 is humpy, pudgy and homely, and no chicken.’ ‘I observe that the Misses Paton are gaining materially in weight since their mother’s death.’ A hat in magenta ‘makes [Lillie Langtry] look ghastly’. ‘The Marquis [of Queensberry] looks exactly, with his red face and black side-whiskers, like a butler in a small family…’

  When Mann remarked: ‘To save the sinner by rebuking the sin is an achievement over which the angels rejoice,’ readers could be sure that one of their number was in for some merciless exposé. It did not matter if the name was left out: in that small group who all knew each other identification was easy. Innuendo was constant: ‘I venture to predict a startling sensation in a pending Newport divorce suit … The evidence involves a detailed account of a supper party for six, and its sequel, which will probably plunge two more happy households into most serious trouble.’

  ‘Seldom does a brunette make a pretty bride, and Miss Maria Arnot Haver was no exception,’ was a typical offering, as were ‘Miss Van Alen suffers from some kind of throat trouble – she cannot go more than half an hour without a drink,’ and ‘Mr Henry Sloane has been looked on as a complaisant husband who wears his horns too publicly,’ while ‘Mr Bend’s Wall Street career has been marked by many picturesque ups and downs.’

  As Blanche Oelrichs later remarked: ‘Town Topics … played an enormous part in everyone’s life. Climbing matrons were driven to despair by its jibes; indiscreet young married couples went in terror of its insinuations; hardy financiers whose pile concealed a more than ordinary toll of ruined persons hastened to try and buy off the editor.’5

  Marietta Stevens was a favourite target, although unlike many she was indifferent to its jibes. With a social life that was all in all to her, she quickly resumed attendance at fashionable weddings and receptions and gave musicales and she entertained visiting English nobility. One such visit, in 1887, caused a scandal, although Marietta, being Marietta, fought back indignantly.

  In her Newport mansion she had entertained the Duke of Marlborough, cited when he was Lord Blandford as one of four co-respondents in the sensational divorce trial of Lady Colin Campbell, described by the newspapers as ‘the filthiest case ever reported’. One newspaper, it was said, gave the trial only 1,258 fewer words than were in the entire New Testament.

  The beautiful, witty, Irish-born Gertrude Blood had married Lord Colin Campbell, a brother-in-law of Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, and the fifth son of the Duke of Argyll, whom she had met while visiting friends in Scotland. They married in 1881, after the wedding had been twice postponed because of his health. Her father, Colonel Blood, suspected that Lord Colin was suffering from a venereal disease and the Duke also opposed the match, though not because of any such suspicion – he simply thought his son was marrying below his station in life.

  Once married, it turned out that Lord Colin did indeed have a venereal disease and had infected Gertrude. She was granted a judicial separation from Lord Colin in 1884 on the grounds of cruelty, that he had knowingly infected her. Both parties then filed for divorce, Lord Colin accusing his wife of adultery with four men, one of whom was Lord Blandford (already a notorious adulterer with an illegitimate child or two to his credit).

  Gertrude lost her suit. As the suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst was to write later: ‘According to man-made law a wife who is even once unfaithful to her husband has done him an injury which entitles him to divorce her … On the other hand, a man who consorts with prostitutes, and does this over and over again throughout his married life, has, according to man-made law, been acting only in accordance with human nature, and nobody can punish him for that.’

  With the scandal of the attempted divorce Lady Colin was ostracised by the society she had longed to enter but her talent, cleverness and wit made her popular in literary and artistic circles – Shaw saw her as �
��a goddess’ and she posed for Whistler’s painting Harmony in White and Ivory. Lord Blandford (now Duke of Marlborough) took himself to America where Marietta, ever on the lookout for assistance up the ladder, promptly invited him to stay at her Newport home, for which she was castigated by the press, then almost always astride its moral high horse.

  Marietta simply rose above it. Here she is in 1891, as recorded by The Saunterer, who encountered her on a visit to Madison Square Garden. ‘With her glasses raised to her eyes, her nose en l’air, and a lovely aspect of serene unconsciousness of the existence or propinquity of anybody else, Mrs Stevens’ look, bearing and movements made up a vision and a lesson.’

  A final triumph came in 1893, when she bought the marble house built by Edith Wharton’s aunt, Mary Jones – the woman who had declared in 1869: ‘This is one house Mrs Stevens will never enter’ – redecorated it and moved in. Here her quest to become a social leader succeeded. Her ballroom would see the city’s most prominent names, just as it had during Mary Mason Jones’s time, and in March 1893 it was the scene of a ‘salon concert’ by the entire sixty-member Boston Symphony Orchestra.

  A month later Marietta Stevens scored an even greater social coup. In 1890s New York nothing caught the attention of society like a title, and when the Duke and Duchess of Veragua (a Caribbean duchy) with their retinue were in New York, she was the hostess who managed to give a reception for them, receiving her guests in her second-floor ballroom. Her invitations were accepted by around 150 of the ‘best’ names in New York society. It was, perhaps, the apogee of her entire career as a social climber: she had hauled herself up the slopes, inch by painful inch, until she now breathed the rarefied air at the summit.