Unless a girl had her imprimatur, though, she was so apt to get the thumbs-down from Consuelo that even the Prince noticed it. ‘Whenever I ask Consuelo Duchess of Manchester about an American lady,’ said HRH, ‘I am invariably told, “Oh, sir, she has no position at home; out there she would be just dirt under our feet.”’
(Consuelo must have been one of the women to whom the writer Marie Corelli was indignantly referring when she wrote that she could easily name ‘at least a dozen well-known society women, assumed to be “loyal” who make a very good thing out of their “loyalty” by accepting huge payments in exchange for their recommendation or introduction to Royal personages … These are some of the very ladies who are most favoured by notice at Court.’)
Kim’s downward spiral had continued. By now his way of life had taken its toll and his appearance was thoroughly unappetising: as well as being small and insignificant-looking, his skin had become covered with pimples and he seemed far older than his years. In 1889 he was made bankrupt, and the following year his father died, leaving huge debts. Kim and Consuelo were now Duke and Duchess of Manchester. Then, two years later, in 1892, after being ill for some time, Kim too died, probably of cirrhosis of the liver or syphilis – with Consuelo at his bedside.
She was free – but not free of tragedy. In 1895 her daughter Mary died suddenly of double pneumonia. Shattering as it was for Consuelo, a devoted mother, she went on with the way of life she had chosen. In 1897 she brought her beautiful daughter Nell out, to great success, and after the season rented Egypt House in Cowes, as she would do every August bar one thereafter in order to entertain the Prince of Wales. As Commodore of the Squadron, he went to Cowes every year, strolling about among the other men in white flannels and navy blazers on the lawns overlooking the sea with its panorama of yachts.
But the sadnesses of her life were not over. In 1900 Nell died of consumption and her son – also called Kim – married without her knowledge an American girl called Helena Zimmerman whom Consuelo considered an unsuitable nobody.
At forty-seven, Consuelo was losing her fine-skinned blonde looks, and had put on weight. The following year, 1901, her brother Fernando also died. Here there was a silver lining, as he had left her everything – his $2 million fortune and $2 million’s worth of property (on this she had to pay tax of a mere 1 per cent, amounting to about $25,000 dollars).
She was now rich, but she had lost much of what made life worth living. From then on she concentrated on what, now that she was a truly rich woman, she could do better than almost anyone else – entertaining the King, who had acceded in 1901.4 She would organise dinner parties, some with the newly popular game of bridge, which the King enjoyed although he was not a particularly good player. (‘My dear Consuelo, the party you propose for Monday will do admirably. I shall bring Captain Fordham with me as you know he is a “Professor” at bridge…’)
She ordered the expensive delicacies such as pâté de foie gras, lobster and champagne that he adored, she sent him presents, she moved into a larger house, 5 Grosvenor Square, where she could give bigger parties for him and she rented houses wherever he might be, from Cowes to Monte Carlo. If she was not occupied with the monarch, she dined out every night, often going on to receptions and every year joined a party of fifty guests, along with 200 servants, at Chatsworth (when the widowed Duchess of Manchester5 married the Duke of Devonshire as her second husband, house parties were often twice this size).
* * *
The third member of the American triumvirate on whom the King depended more and more was Minnie Paget, the daughter of Mrs Paran Stevens, who had married his friend Captain Arthur Paget.
The first impression Minnie made in London was poor: that of a tough, possibly unscrupulous social climber at a time when the female ideal was softness and submission. Worse still, she had attended various gatherings without her mother; and chaperoning was then essential for a well-brought-up young woman. The reason for this freedom, as the New York Times later pointed out,6 was that there were ‘houses from which Mrs Stevens was pointedly excluded, on account of her oddities of manner and status as wife of a hotel keeper’. This disapproval extended to Queen Alexandra, so that for a long time Minnie was never asked to Sandringham although her husband and children stayed there.
Fortunately for Minnie, she was not only rich but a friend of Consuelo Mandeville, who helped to smooth her path – her own looks, vitality and immense chic did the rest. She was presented at court by Lady Suffield, whose husband, like hers, was a great friend of the Prince of Wales. Like Consuelo, she supplemented her income by launching young American girls into society or, as the New York Times commented in veiled but unmistakable terms, introduced ‘those of her countrymen and countrywomen who have secured her friendship and her backing into London society, or at least into a certain section thereof, since there are many houses where her sponsorship would not merely be valueless but might be detrimental’.
Minnie, beautiful and determined, was able to shrug off any such criticism, and was soon persona grata with the royal family, all of whom were impressed by her taste and elegance. ‘You were much admired yesterday,’ wrote the Prince’s younger brother Leopold, the young Duke of Albany. ‘I thought you looked better than anyone else (Don’t be offended at my saying so).’
Her friendship with Albert Edward grew warmer, at first through her husband and then in her own right. Thanks to her reputation for perfect taste, he entrusted her with buying small objets and bibelots at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 for him to give as Christmas or birthday presents, and she would arrange exactly the sort of dinners for him that he liked, often at short notice. ‘May I choose Tuesday next for dinner at 8.30,’ runs one typical note from him. ‘And please may it be a small party of friends not exceeding ten or twelve?’ Often there would be bridge afterwards, when the dinners tended to be smaller. ‘Let us be either four or eight at dinner, whichever you prefer,’ runs one note from Sandringham. ‘But they should all be bridge players. I am not sure that our last little party of four could be improved upon.’
Minnie made her intimacy with the King work for her. When she received a signed photograph or a present from him, she would quietly notify the American papers. This served both as an enhancement of her own prestige and a discreet signal to those interested that if anyone could get you the entrée it was Mrs Arthur Paget.
But his affection for her was genuine: when, in 1904, she had a terrible accident, falling down the lift shaft in her home and breaking both legs badly after returning from a dinner party, Edward VII sent a telegram at once and wrote the following day to her husband expressing his concern. ‘Is there anything I can send her? Flowers or fruit, or both? Has she a table to put across the bed for reading?’ (She had fifteen operations in two years but without much success, after which she went to a Berlin specialist, who improved her condition greatly.)
Her money also helped. Her mother so approved of her marriage to Arthur Paget that she had settled an annuity of $10,000 on him as a personal allowance, a help towards keeping up with the King. The cost of entertaining the King had in fact become something of a self-perpetuating cycle: those who could afford it became closer to him and, as more intimate friends, were then expected to entertain him more, with a growing extravagance.
It was not just dinners that had become more lavish. In the new reign, houses were redecorated more frequently and in a more ‘feminine’ style. Out went the heavy Victorian furniture, the solid fabrics in crimson and maroon, the thick fringing; in came French furniture, screens, little tables covered with silver-framed photographs and bibelots, lighter, more luscious colours and fabrics – Minnie Paget’s boudoir had walls of a pale olive-green paper, and matching curtains of pale green silk, with French furniture; in her bedroom, with its toilet accessories of beaten gold, the furniture was carved and white-enamelled.
Ceilings were decorated with plasterwork and cornices, huge palms stood about in pots, china ornaments – rare ging
er jars, Meissen figurines – abounded and almost always there was a profusion of flowers. Chandeliers hung from most of the high ceilings, chairs were often clustered in groups and decorative painted screens could be used to shield from a draught or enhance privacy.
The only rooms that remained determinedly masculine were studies, libraries and a new addition, the dedicated smoking room. With the King’s blessing and as cigarettes became more popular, smoking rooms literally came in from the cold, furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs, often of leather. Women smoked too, though for the most part only in the house; the first woman of the King’s circle to smoke in public was, unsurprisingly, an American, the Countess of Essex (née Adèle Beach Grant), when dining at the Carlton Hotel.
The King himself put many changes in motion; he dispensed with Osborne House and turned the private chapel at Balmoral into a billiard room. The royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, gleamed with gold plate, there were footmen in scarlet livery and flowers everywhere. The Queen’s cabin was large enough for a grand piano; there was a special room for the King’s uniforms so that he could step ashore in whatever costume would most please the people of that country.
Above all, he refurbished the ‘Mausoleum’ (as he called Buckingham Palace in his mother’s day), installing electric light, new bathrooms and a telephone switchboard, so that it was no longer a neglected and gloomy building but the centre of fashionable life. Both Edward and Alexandra were determined to bring back proper royal entertaining: evening Courts rather than afternoon Drawing Rooms became the rule, with the King’s throne on a new dais in the ballroom, there were glittering court balls and dinners, while Alexandra’s beauty, style and clothes were emulated.
Again, it was an American who helped with some of the most important of these, including Alexandra’s Coronation dress, for which Mary Curzon found the materials under oath of secrecy. ‘The Queen wishes me to … ask you not to tell anyone in England about the dresses ordered in India,’ wrote Charlotte Knollys, Alexandra’s Private Secretary, ‘or else they will be wanting to have some also.’
‘H.M. is enchanted with them,’ she wrote later. ‘The one for the Coronation is being made up over cloth of real gold and will I am sure look magnificent. The black & silver is already made up and is to be worn at the next Court & the mauve & gold is in the dressmaker’s hands & will also be worn for the Coronation festivities.’ Alexandra herself sent a telegram apologising for her delay in writing to thank Mary, adding, ‘am delighted with dresses and most grateful to you’.
* * *
What kept these American peeresses so firmly at the centre of the highest social circles in England was a factor that would have seemed nothing out of the ordinary in the more rigid society of New York: their extreme wealth and their willingness to spend it. The adoring Mary Curzon gladly underwrote her husband George’s glittering career. Equally happily, other American women – especially in the King’s circle – poured out their fortunes in an effort to outdo each other in entertaining the sovereign and his intimates.
The New York American estimated that Bradley Martin had spent $15 million on stalking, his daughter Lady Craven the same sum on shooting parties – both attended by the King – while her small dinner parties for him had cost Minnie Paget $6 million. The result was that, as so few could keep up with this spending level, as Jennie herself put it, ‘the effect on society as a whole is towards exclusiveness’. Whether the English who perforce dropped out would have agreed is another matter.
CHAPTER 14
The Bradley-Martins
Cornelia Bradley Martin, daughter of parents determined to make their social mark once they had the means, was snapped up even before she was out of the schoolroom – the wonder is that her parents agreed to her marriage at just sixteen. But then, her husband-to-be was an earl. And her mother was very determined …
* * *
The Martins were people who, although well-born, had leapt from comparatively unobtrusive beginnings to an established position in both English and American society. Cornelia’s father, Bradley Martin, born in Albany, New York, in 1841, was the son of a well-off merchant and her mother, also Cornelia, was the daughter of another, Isaac Sherman. The two had met at the wedding of a Vanderbilt daughter to whom Cornelia Sherman, a very pretty blonde, was a bridesmaid.
They began married life modestly, living with Cornelia Sherman’s parents in West 20th Street in the winter and spending summers at Saratoga Springs, with occasional trips abroad. They seldom entertained and went out little.
Then came the surprise fortune that changed their lives. When Cornelia’s father Isaac died in 1881 it was found that, far from being worth only the $200,000 everyone expected, he had instead left almost $6 million to his daughter Cornelia, his only child.
Almost at once, she and her husband began their upward trajectory. As well as acquiring a Long Island mansion near Wheatley Hills they bought the house next to the parental one in West 20th Street, joined the two together and organised an extensive refurbishment, commissioning the high-end decorators Marcotte, of Union Square, at a total cost of $85,072.20. As the marble floors, gilded mouldings, mahogany and brass furniture, blue silk walls (for Cornelia’s bedroom), Venetian mirrors and yellow silk music room complete with instruments were being installed, they took an extended trip abroad.
The setting prepared, they began to move into society. With Bradley Martin now a Patriarch, Mrs Martin cultivated the ‘right’ people by appearing with them as patroness of various fashionable entertainments such as the then new Assembly Balls. When Cornelia Martin formed one of the reception committee for these with Mrs Astor, her position was established, and duly acknowledged by Alva Vanderbilt with an invitation to her famous ball of 1883.
Once she was acknowledged by Mrs Astor and Alva Vanderbilt, Cornelia Martin could move on to the next step, knowing that it would not be resented as an attempt to insinuate herself into the inner circle. This was to give a series of grand, elegant dinners at the newly renovated and embellished house on West 20th Street. At about the same time, Bradley Martin leased a large house and estate in Scotland, Bal Macaan, fifteen miles from Inverness with its railway station, and thus convenient for guests.
It was a shrewd move. The castle of Bal Macaan was situated on a 46,000-acre estate that ran for nineteen miles along Loch Ness; it was known for the beauty of the scenery and its wonderful shooting, stalking and salmon-fishing – a great draw for the sort of people the Martins wanted to meet – and it was surrounded by other, nearby, estates. The fact that it was supposedly haunted, by the sounds of the spectral carriage of a former Lady Seafield (the Seafields were the original owners of the house) drawing up at the front door, gave no one pause.
In the winter of 1885 the Martins gave the first of the two great balls for which they became known. Cornelia Martin was anxious firstly to outdo the most famous one yet, that given by Alva Vanderbilt two years before, and secondly, as they now planned to spend most of their time in Scotland, to leave New York in a blaze of glory. Excitement rose as the date drew nearer. ‘The Martins’ ball has been the talk of the town for weeks,’ said Anna Robinson.
The Martins asked around 400 people – whether or not in a conscious echo of Mrs Astor’s Four Hundred is not known – to a ball that had one so far unique feature: an enormous temporary wooden supper room, sixty-eight feet long by twenty-five feet wide, built over the gardens of the two houses they owned at West 20th Street. It was entered from the billiard room that stretched along the whole of the rear of the double house, the three long windows of which, converted into doors for the occasion, overlooked it. The ceiling was painted as if it were a starry sky and the walls covered with red fabric and hung with antique armour. It was heated by steam and lighted by three great chandeliers and many side lights, and a long supper table was arranged in the centre.
Unfortunately, the night of the ball, 26 January 1886, was the coldest night of an exceptionally bitter winter. Not only did the Martins
have to pay an enormous premium for insurance because of the possible fire risk to the adjoining buildings, but the steam heating of this sumptuous room proved inadequate when the thermometer plummeted to zero. After the guests had been received by Mrs Martin, wearing a gleaming white satin dress with a long train and holding several bouquets of flowers, they passed through the library and dining room to the billiard room and then on to the vision of the astonishing supper room before them. But most merely stood briefly on the broad flights of steps leading down into what must have seemed like a glamorous refrigerator, then turned back towards the warmth of the main hall – where two bands played continuously – to dance, possibly casting an admiring glance towards the stags’ heads and other trophies of the chase from Bal Macaan glimpsed through a doorway. Alva’s ball remained the ne plus ultra.
* * *
Gradually the Martins began to spend more and more time away from the US, visiting Europe in the early spring (a convenient time for those who wished to refurbish their wardrobes chez M. Worth). In June they would go to London for the English season, then set off for their Scottish home in the first week of August, where they stayed until December, and where they could be sure of meeting many of those they had encountered or danced with in London. Soon they began to regard Bal Macaan as their real home, although they would generally return to America for the first two or three months of the year. Here Mrs Bradley Martin would pay calls on friends, driving out in her black and red victoria, attended by footmen in the Bradley Martin livery of maroon breeches, with black and gold waistcoats.
During these years Cornelia Martin filled her jewel box. For Gilded Age wives, it was impossible to be over-jewelled: a wife festooned with gems was admired both as displaying her husband’s wealth and being a credit to the society in which she moved, so that most loaded themselves with as many diamonds as they could lay their hands on. Mrs John Jacob Astor III wore so many that when she went out publicly it was always with a detective; when he accompanied her to her sister-in-law Caroline Astor’s annual ball his practised eye estimated that there was, unsurprisingly, nearly $5 million in jewellery in the ballroom.
The Husband Hunters Page 23
