Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

by Hugh Brewster

  As a divorceé, Lucy was not invited to country house gatherings and preferred, in any case, the company of “café society” as London’s haute Bohemia was then called. Yet in this milieu, Lucy did not lack for admirers. One was the artist Philip Burne-Jones, son of the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones; another was the distinguished throat surgeon Sir Morell Mackenzie, who hosted Thursday evening gatherings of notables from the artistic world. At one of Mackenzie’s salons, Lucy met Oscar Wilde, whom she thought was “the oddest creature I had ever seen,” wearing black velvet knee breeches and a sunflower in his buttonhole.

  Another theatrical figure, the actress Ellen Terry, would make a far greater impression. Lucy became one of the actress’s female acolytes, and Terry consoled and encouraged her in the aftermath of her divorce. She also introduced Lucy to friends in the theatrical world which led to her being asked to design costumes for plays. At the time, clothes worn on the stage tended to be made of stiff brocades and velvets, but by using lighter fabrics and creating clothes that could have been worn offstage as well as on, Lucy brought a new realism to theatrical design. Cecil Beaton would recall her costumes as “masterpieces of intricate workmanship” and claim that her influence was enormous. Many years after seeing a “Snow Princess” dress Lucile created for the actress Lily Elsie to wear in The Merry Widow, Beaton would use it as the inspiration for the white ball gown he designed for Audrey Hepburn in the film of My Fair Lady.

  Lucy introduced some of the effects she learned in the theater into the world of fashion retailing. When Lucile Ltd. moved to a town house on fashionable Hanover Square in 1897, she decorated the rooms with gray silk wall coverings and installed gilt chairs and couches where customers could sip tea while choosing clothes. And instead of wax dummies displaying her frocks, Lucile had living mannequins, girls she carefully groomed into her own lovely creations with names like “Hebe,” “Dolores,” and “Gamela.” Although some of the Paris couture houses already had “mannequin parades” where models would walk about the showrooms, it is Lucile who can be credited with creating the first real fashion shows.

  Shortly after she had moved to larger quarters on Hanover Square in the spring of 1904, Lucy sent out engraved invitations to her first staged fashion “parade,” “keeping the illusion that I was inviting my friends to some afternoon party.” She realized that “on this parade of mine I would stand or fall and as the day grew near I was terribly anxious.” On April 28, however, a good number of Lucile’s friends and faithful clients turned up at Hanover Street to find the premises decorated with three thousand handmade silk roses. In the carpeted showroom, Ellen Terry ushered attendees to their seats before a stage that was “all hung with misty olive chiffon curtains … which created the effect I wanted.” Heads turned when Lillie Langtry took her seat alongside aristocratic luminaries like Princess Alice of Albany and the Duchess of Westminster. Also in attendance was one of Lucy’s friends, the always “vivid and amusing” Margot Asquith, whose husband, Herbert Asquith, would later become Britain’s prime minister.

  As the lights dimmed, a string orchestra began playing, and then the first of the models appeared. “I shall never forget the long-drawn breath of admiration which rippled round the room as the curtains parted,” Lucy later wrote, “and the first of my glorious girls stepped upon the stage, pausing to show herself a moment before floating along the room to a burst of applause.” The next day the newspapers raved about Lucile’s “gallery of exquisite creations,” and Lucy herself wrote, “There was never such a triumph for me as that afternoon. Orders flowed in by the dozen, so that saleswomen could hardly cope with them.” Within months she was putting on as many as three shows a day, and in the spring of the following year, she began hosting parades of outdoor wear in the garden at Hanover Square, sometimes with models accompanied by pedigreed dogs on jeweled leashes, each “matched” to the model’s dress. One newspaper dubbed Lucile’s unique style as “Lady Duff and Her Stuff” since by then Madame Lucile had become equally well known as Lady Cosmo Duff Gordon—though it had very nearly turned out otherwise.

  By the time Cosmo’s mother died in early 1900, he had almost missed his chance with Lucy. That spring she had gone to Monte Carlo with her mother for a holiday during which a titled (and married) Irish landowner began being very attentive to her. When Lucy and her mother moved on to Venice, the Irish baron followed, and rumors soon reached London that he was planning to divorce his wife in favor of Lucy. On catching wind of this, a furious Cosmo sent a telegram to her hotel saying, “If you are going to marry anyone it is going to be me.” He then rushed to Venice, had a noisy confrontation with his rival in the hotel lobby, and persuaded Lucy to marry him instead.

  On May 24, 1900, they were married at the British Consulate in Venice, and on the honeymoon that followed Lucy would write that they were both very much in love. It would not be long, however, before she would be complaining that Cosmo was “most extraordinarily dull to be with.” She found visits to his Scottish estate at Maryculter in Aberdeenshire to be “deadly, deadly dull,” since he was a keen sportsman and she was not. At house parties, Cosmo’s idea of good fun was to have some of the guests don fencing masks while he shot at them with wax bullets. Cosmo himself had lost an eye in a shooting accident but this did not lessen his expertise as a fencer, and he would lead the British fencing team to a silver medal in the 1906 Olympics. He was also tall (six-three) and quite presentably handsome behind his handlebar mustache, and his title unquestionably raised Lucy’s status.

  Her husband’s baronetcy notwithstanding, as a divorcée, Lucy could not take part in the society ritual of being presented at court. Her sister, Elinor, however, was presented at Buckingham Palace in May of 1896, a fact that Lucy would always bitterly resent, though she designed a lovely white satin court dress for her sister to wear along with the requisite white ostrich plumes. By then Elinor was four years into her marriage to Clayton Glyn and had a daughter, Margot, who was almost three. But the romance with Glyn had evaporated; in the style of many men of his class, he had begun being unfaithful after only two years of married life.

  While recovering from the difficult birth of her second daughter, Elinor began penning a comic novel entitled The Visits of Elizabeth, which satirized some of the manners and mores she had observed at country house parties. Her friend Daisy Warwick found the manuscript highly amusing and used her connections to have it serialized in a London newspaper. The excerpts were published anonymously, but after they became a much-talked-about success, Elinor couldn’t resist stepping forward to take the credit. When The Visits of Elizabeth was published in book form in 1901, the career of Elinor Glyn, novelist, was launched. Several more novels followed, but it was the publication of a steamy love story in 1907 called Three Weeks that would make her both famous—and notorious. The story of a three-week affair between a handsome young Englishman and an exotic older woman (the queen of an unnamed Balkan kingdom), the novel was based on Elinor’s own short-lived but passionate attachment to a young Guards officer named Alistair Innes Kerr, a son of the Duke of Roxburghe. Friends who read the manuscript urged her not to publish it, but she needed the advance money, as Glyn’s finances were rapidly proceeding from precarious to calamitous. The book was a runaway bestseller—it would eventually sell more than five million copies and be widely translated internationally. But it was a succès de scandale—the novel was condemned as unfit for the young and was banned in Boston and, for a time, in Canada. Though tame by modern standards, Three Weeks shocked not just because it described adultery and an out-of-wedlock birth, but because it was the story of a brief affair that was initiated, controlled, and finally ended by the female. This contravened all the sexual power conventions of the day, but by so doing Elinor launched a new publishing genre—the erotic romance novel.

  Elinor Glyn (photo credit 1.39)

  The key seduction scene in Three Weeks takes place on a couch draped in a tiger skin, which prompted an anonymous bit of dogge
rel that would forever dog Elinor:

  Would you like to sin

  With Elinor Glyn

  On a tiger skin?

  Or would you prefer

  To err

  With her

  On some other fur?

  Along with the undulations on tiger skins, clothes are ubiquitous in Three Weeks, and many of the shimmering garments described are unmistakably Lucile in style. Lucy would return the compliment by naming a provocative new frock “the Elinor Glyn.”

  For her first American publicity tour, Elinor packed several trunks of Lucile-designed clothes, and on arrival in New York harbor on October 5, 1907, she was garbed entirely in purple, including a hat with trailing purple chiffon veiling—all evoking the heroine of her book. The press was captivated, and soon invitations from leading hostesses began arriving at her suite in the Plaza. When Lucy heard of Elinor’s success, she decided to come over in December to scout prospects for a New York branch of Lucile Ltd. While staying with her newly famous sister at the Plaza, she wrote home to Cosmo: “I’m sure we can make a fortune here, if we can find the money. There are such opportunities of wearing good clothes here.” Lucy returned to London in January while Elinor stayed on in New York, relieved to no longer have to share the spotlight with her sister.

  During her New York stay with Elinor, Lucy had noted the value of publicity in making a splash in America. “The one thing that counts,” she would write, “is self-advertisement of the most blatant sort.” For the New York branch of Lucile Ltd., she found a brownstone on West 36th Street and in late 1909 asked her friend, the pioneering interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, to decorate it in the style of her shop on Hanover Square. Elsie also hired a publicist who generated such a flurry of articles with headlines like LADY DUFF GORDON, FIRST ENGLISH SWELL TO TRADE IN NEW YORK that one newspaperman waggishly dubbed Lucile “Lady Muff Boredom.”

  Yet the press went into raptures when Lucy arrived on the Lusitania in early March of 1910 with four of her statuesque models and a new collection of what she called “dream dresses.” This was a variant on her theme of “personality frocks” or “emotional gowns” where each dress was given a name to reflect its “personality,” whether it be “When Passion’s Thrall Is O’er,” “The Sighing Sound of Lips Unsatisfied,” or “Red Mouth of a Venomous Flower.” In a crasser mode she dubbed part of her American collection “Money Dresses,” and, in case anyone missed the point, explained in her advertising copy, “because it takes so much to buy them.” Such blatancy seems to have discouraged very few, since on opening day orders were taken for over a thousand gowns, none of them costing less then $300 (the equivalent of $6,000 today).

  Her fashion shows were so mobbed that lineups of elegant ladies stretched down West 36th Street and Lucile came up with a plan to sell tickets and donate the proceeds to the Actors Fund. Sitting on a divan next to Lucy at the first New York fashion show was her good friend Anne Morgan, daughter of J. P. Morgan and a principal investor in her New York venture. “Ours was a new playhouse for rich American women,” one of Lucile’s employees would recall. “Never had we seen such extravagance, or seen so little importance attached to the price of clothes.” Lucile’s American clients would range from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Alice Roosevelt Longworth to the dancer Irene Castle and the stars of the Ziegfeld Follies. Madeleine Force and her mother would also visit the 36th Street salon to shop for a Lucile trousseau before her 1911 wedding to John Jacob Astor.

  Having conquered New York, Lucile’s next pinnacle was Paris. The Parisian designers looked askance at the English invader, but after the opening of her new salon on April 4, 1911, Lucy had the satisfaction of reading in a French newspaper, “The dramatic performance with which Lady Duff Gordon startled Paris today will be copied by every self-respecting couturier here before long.” Even French Vogue would eventually succumb, noting: “We are so accustomed to having everything of value come out of Paris, that we are amazed to find an Englishwoman making some of the greatest contributions to fashion anyone ever made.” For the girl from the Canadian backwoods who had been thrilled to receive a barrel of cast-off clothes from Paris each year, this must have been a very sweet victory indeed.

  The following April she was required in New York to sign the lease for her new shop. “As business called me over in a great hurry,” she recalled, “I booked passage on the first available boat. The boat was the Titanic.” On the platform at the Gare St. Lazare a group of her shopgirls and mannequins showed up to give her a surprise send-off, pressing a basket of lily-of-the-valley into her arms. Usually, a contingent of employees would have traveled with her: “The designer was accustomed to traveling grandly,” writes her biographer Randy Bryan Bigham, “complete with an armful of Pekinese and an entourage of beautiful models dressed in her latest fashions.” This time, no doubt in deference to Cosmo, she had brought along only her personal assistant, Laura Mabel Francatelli, familiarly known as either “Mabel” or “Franks.”

  Lucy would later claim that she had felt some anxiety about making the crossing on a new ship, but once settled in her Titanic stateroom, she relaxed. “Everything aboard this lovely ship reassured me, from Captain Smith with his kindly, bearded face and genial manner … to my merry Irish stewardess with her soft brogue.” Lucile was also delighted with her “pretty little cabin, with its electric heater and pink curtains” that made it “a pleasure to go to bed.” When Lucile did retire for the night, however, it was not with Cosmo, who had his own cabin across the corridor. The relationship that had begun as business now appeared to be mostly about business; in a drama in which she held center stage he had become a supporting player. In photographs, Lucy usually stands apart from Cosmo, staring out at the camera while he casts a puzzled but adoring gaze in her direction.

  “One can only amuse oneself when one has a nice young man,” Lucy had once observed, and she indeed cultivated a constant stream of young male admirers. Cosmo was fairly complaisant about this since most of them were homosexual; a granddaughter remembers that Lucile was “regularly surrounded by queer gentlemen who were designers in their turn, picked up pins and did her bidding.” Edward Molyneux, whom Lucy called “Toni,” was just one of the protégés who would later become a celebrated designer in his own right. Among her female friends, lesbians were particularly prominent: her closest friends in New York were Elsie de Wolfe and her partner, the theatrical agent Bessie Marbury, as well as Anne Morgan and her lover Ann Harriman Vanderbilt, and in Paris she was friendly with the lesbian novelist Natalie Barney and her circle. Lucy admired these independent, forthright women, and according to Randy Bryan Bigham, “a sexual ambiguity on Lucy’s part is possible.”

  DURING THE TITANIC’S “dressing hour” on Saturday, April 13, Charlotte Cardeza, our lady of the fourteen trunks, may have instructed her maid to select her rose-colored Lucile evening dress from the eleven gowns she had with her. Mrs. Cardeza also owned one of Lucile’s exquisite satin petticoats trimmed with lace and flowers and would list it on her liability claim with a value of $300 ($6,000 today). Marian Thayer, the wife of the Pennsylavania Railroad vice president John Thayer, may also have worn a Lucile gown that evening since she was both a client and a friend of Lucy’s. But no passenger was a better exemplar of the Lucile look than the designer herself. Vogue noted that her personal style was very simple though “smart to the last degree.” Black remained a favorite color, recalling the hand-sewn dress she had worn to her first Government House ball.

  On that Saturday evening, therefore, one can imagine Lucile in a black evening gown, accented by the pearl earrings she often favored, taking Cosmo’s arm as they descended the grand staircase to the dining saloon on D deck. As they stepped onto the blue-and-red-carpeted expanse of the Palm Room, they were greeted by what she described as “the hum of voices, the lilt of a German waltz—the unheeding sounds of a small world bent on pleasure.” But what she calls in her next sentence the “disaster swift and overwhelming” was now only one night awa
y.

  The church service was held in front of a carved oak sideboard (top, at center) in the first-class dining saloon. The piano installed there was reserved for Sunday services. (photo credit 1.29)

  The old English hymn “O God Our Help in Ages Past” received a full-voiced rendition at divine service on Sunday morning, since “quite one-half” of the 329 first-class passengers, as noted by Margaret Brown, were in attendance. It was held at 10:30 in the center section of the dining saloon, where a large and elaborately carved oak sideboard with a piano set into it provided a fittingly ecclesiastical-looking backdrop. Captain Smith no doubt cut an impressive figure as he stood before it in his gold-trimmed blue uniform reading from the White Star Line prayer book. It is generally assumed that the captain conducted the service since it was the first of a maiden voyage and there was nothing urgent requiring his presence on the bridge. A message from the Cunard liner Caronia had been received in the Marconi Room at 9 a.m. warning of “bergs, growlers and field ice,” but its estimated position lay well ahead of the ship’s course.

  Archibald Gracie was impressed by the reading of the “Prayer for Those at Sea” that morning, and also by the words to “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” W. T. Stead admired the old Isaac Watts hymn as well, and had included it in a collection of songs of worship he had compiled in 1897 entitled Hymns That Have Helped. For the book, Stead had asked prominent people to name their favorite hymns, and “O God Our Help” had been selected by the future prime minister Herbert Asquith, while the future King Edward VII had chosen “Nearer My God to Thee,” a hymn that would become forever associated with the Titanic. Archie Butt had asked Theodore Roosevelt to name his favorite hymn after church during his visit to Sagamore Hill in July of 1908. Archie described to his mother how the president and first family members had mentioned several hymns, and then, with eerie foreshadowing, he wrote, “At my funeral I should like to have sung ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ … it appeals to the sentimental side of me.”