TWO MAJOR paintings by Irish artist Sir William Orpen are to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in May. The portraits of a Co Meath aristocrat and his glamorous music-hall wife – whose marriage scandalised and enthralled Edwardian society – have never before appeared at auction. Portrait of Rosie, Fourth Marchioness of Headfort and Portrait of Geoffrey, Fourth Marquis of Headfort go under the hammer on May 10th.

In monetary terms, the lady wins hands down. Her portrait is estimated at £300,000-£500,000 and his at £60,000-£80,000.

The commissioned portraits were first exhibited at the Royal Academy’s 1915 Summer Exhibition in London, and are being sold by a family descendent.

…Rose Boote (1878-1958) was, according to Sotheby’s, “the daughter of a comedian from Nottingham and a straw hat sewer” although a report in The Irish Times at the time of her death claimed she was “Irish and was educated in the Ursuline Convent, Thurles”.

Using the stage name of Rosie, she achieved great fame as one of the Gaiety Girls – not of Dublin’s South King Street variety – but rather the chorus-line girls who sang in musical comedy spectacles at the Gaiety Theatre on the Strand, London. The girls attracted the attention of aristocratic young men – known as “Stage Door Johnnies” – and, in 1900, Rosie’s performance in a hit musical The Messenger Boy apparently charmed the eminently eligible young Irish aristocrat, the 4th Marquis of Headfort, Geoffrey Thomas Taylour (1878-1943). She quit the theatre and they married on April 11th, 1901.

The wedding created a sensation in Edwardian London. He was a member of one of the most prominent Protestant families in Ireland with estates of some 22,000 acres in Cavan and Meath while Rose, apart from being on the stage, was a Catholic. They lived in Headfort House, Kells, Co Meath and a London townhouse and had three children.

He had succeeded to the title 4th Marquis of Headfort on the death of his father in 1894 and moved in the highest echelons of British society. He was a lieutenant in the 1st Life Guards and later fought in the first World War. He subsequently served as a senator in the Irish Free State – from 1922-1928. Although a marquess, the family preferred the spelling marquis.

Rose lived until 1958 when she died aged 80. She was one of the very few people who had attended three coronations in Westminster Abbey (Edward VII, George V and George VI). The Irish Times reported that after “lying in state” at Headfort House, her grandson Lord Bective and employees of the estate carried her coffin to an island in the grounds of the house where she was buried alongside her husband.

[Source]

Photos from Arab Women Now

The Making Of A Marchioness: Rose Boote, Marchioness Of Headfort – The Esoteric Curiosa

Gaiety Girls’ Reunion 1946 with Lily Elsie, Edna May and Rosie Boote etc

Town Topics began its life as The American Queen, and under editor Louise Keller (founder of the Social Register), it was a genteel periodical dedicated to “art, music, literature, and society.” The failing magazine was purchased by E. D. Mann, the Colonel’s brother, who renamed it Town Topics and began to change the tone from one of polite obsequiousness to fit the new era of celebrity culture ushered in by social climbing swells like the Vanderbilts. E.D. Mann handed control of Town Topics to the restless Colonel Mann, who pushed the magazine into infamy.

The Colonel, whom acquaintances described as “a kindly looking gentleman,” soon gathered a network of paid spies drawn from servants, telegraph operators, hotel employees, seamstresses, grocers, and vengeful socialites to supply the magazine with gossip. He created a column for these juicy scandals entitled “Saunterings,” where he planted them between seemingly innocuous descriptions of the latest social events in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Anonymous gossip was nothing new to society journalism, but Colonel Mann turned the tables with “Saunterings” by scattering clues about the subject of his “blind items” throughout the harmless society news. And sometimes, he was bold enough to state the persons involved in the scandal outright.

An example after the jump:

Society News
At the Patriarchs’ Ball it was noticed that Ward McAllister devoted himself almost entirely to Lady Sykes, and I hear that he made himself familiar, through his repeated questioning of Lady Sykes, with the proper way of addressing Royalties and English swells in general…

Blind Item
High society has been treated to a sorry spectacle of inebriety during the last two weeks at balls and dinners, and I am glad to say that this shocking example, though unfortunately a woman, is not an American, but a specimen of British aristocracy. Society, far from endeavoring to shield her failings, has been openly discussing her behavior at the dinner party given in the house of one of the newly rich swells of New York, and has freely commented on her calling for a “B&S” (Brandy and Soda) during the progress of the cotillion at one of the most recent balls. If Great Britain is to send us such specimens of her boasted aristocracy, I would advise society to entertain in camera and with a bread and water diet. Clue.

The rise of Town Topics created chaos with American High Society. Socialites and plutocrats knew not which way to turn, suspecting their housemaids, butlers, and dressmakers of supplying the gossip, or even their social enemies. The threat of in-home spies made society so paranoid, many began making up gossip to test the trustworthiness of their servants and circles. Yet, Town Topics was the most widely-read magazine in society–though no one would ever admit to owning a subscription. Colonel Mann quickly upped his bribery to outright blackmail, offering those guilty of indiscretions the opportunity pay for the suppression of certain facts. If a story was particularly damaging, Mann would print up a copy Town Topics and send it to the offender to allow them to correct any errors. On the days before Town Topics went to press, worried members of society arranged meetings with Mann at his favorite place–Delmonico’s–, or in his office, where they could negotiate for discretion. The amounts Mann managed to extort from America’s wealthiest men was staggering ($10,000 was about $230,000 in 2008 dollars):

E. Clarence Jones, $10,000
Russell Alger, Senator, $100,000 in Alger-Sullivan Lumber Co. shares
William K. Vanderbilt, $25,000
Dr. Seward Webb, Vanderbilt’s brother-in-law, $14,000
William C. Whitney, $1,000
J. Pierpont Morgan, $2,500
George Gould, son of Jay Gould, $3,000
Howard Gould, son of Jay Gould, $2,500
Collis P. Huntington, $5,000
James R. Keene, $76,000 (+14,000 repaid !)
John ‘Bet-a-Million’ Gates, the barbed-wire king, $20,000
Roswell Flower, broker & former governor of New York, $3,000
Grant B. Schley, $1,500
Charles M. Schwab, $10,000
Thomas Fortune Ryan, $10,000
Perry Belmont, $4,000

Ironically, Colonel Mann’s downfall came not from his extortion racket but from his 1904 attack in “Saunterings” on the willfully scandalous Alice Roosevelt.

From wearing costly lingerie to indulging in fancy dances for the edification of men was only a step. And then came—second step—indulging freely in stimulants. Flying all around Newport without a chaperon was another thing that greatly concerned Mother Grundy. There may have been no reason for the old lady making such a fuss about it, but if the young woman knew some of the tales that are told at the clubs at Newport she would be more careful in the future about what she does and how she does it. They are given to saying almost anything at the Reading Room, but I was really surprised to hear her name mentioned openly there in connection with that of a certain multi-millionaire of the colony and with certain doings that gentle people are not supposed to discuss. They also said that she should not have listened to the risqué jokes told her by the son of one of her Newport hostesses.

Norman Hapgood, editor in chief of Collier’s Weekly, a popular magazine whose founders were viciously attacked by Mann, used this opportunity to openly attack Town Topics and its creator. Mann fought back in his own editorials, but Hapgood threw down the gauntlet and charged Mann with blackmail. Matters escalated–as Hapgood wanted–until Mann sued Collier’s and Hapgood for libel. The trial, which opened January 16, 1906, laid the inner workings of Town Topics bare, and it took the jury minutes to find Hapgood innocent of libel. The DA’s subsequent charges of Mann for perjury started another circus, and though the Colonel cleared of the charges Town Topics never again held society in abject fear and terror. The magazine limped on until shortly after Colonel Mann’s death in 1920, but he had changed the way newspapers and magazines reported gossip for good.

Further Reading:
The Man Who Robbed the Robber Barons: The Story of Colonel William d’Alton Mann by Andy Logan
A Short History of Rudeness: Manners, Morals, and Misbehavior in Modern America by Mark Caldwell
A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs. Astor in Gilded Age New York by Greg King

The Marlborough House Set, and to a lesser extent, The Souls, largely set the tone of aristocratic Edwardian society—though sticklers such as the Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury (who never followed the common practice of inviting Alice Keppel to a house party with the King) did not approve of their hi-jinks. Based on those aforementioned adages, husbands and wives were permitted to take lovers after filling their nursery with legitimate children, and society respected these extramarital bonds just as much, if not more so in some cases, as they did the couples’ legitimate marriages. The Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII, known as Bertie to intimates), however, was permitted much more freedom for dalliance than his subjects, and everyone knew just whom a certain lady entertained when a particular carriage dawdled at her front steps during afternoon tea (the prescribed hour for affaires d’amour).

But our Edwardian gentlemen and ladies did not enter into affairs lightly. In fact, casual affairs were quite rare, if only because of their impossibility. Not only because of the cumbersome clothing ladies wore, but because they lived under the constant surveillance of servants. They were awakened and dressed by maids, servants were constantly cleaning or attending to the family, and they played their social roles in public—riding in Rotten Row, attending dinners, dancing at balls, paying calls, etc etc—all under the eye of servants and the general public. As a result, a lady and her erstwhile lover could spend months exchanging sighs, heated glances and brief embraces, and scribbling loving letters to one another, before they could arrange a schedule for their assignations. This all appears so bloodless and correct, but human nature doesn’t respect rules, and it wasn’t uncommon for even the most circumspect people to lose themselves in a blaze of passion.

And in stepped scandal.

The Mordaunt and Aylesford divorce cases shook the core of the fun-loving Marlborough House Set since they involved the Prince of Wales, but they did nothing to end Bertie and his circle’s indulgences. In his pursuit of pleasure, many of his set fell to rack and ruin in their attempts to follow his lead:

Lillie Langtry, royal mistress of the Prince of Wales from 1877 to 1880, fell from grace when she became pregnant with her daughter Jeanne Marie, and definitely could not pass the child off as her husband’s. Only her enduring relationship with the Prince of Wales saved her from complete ruin, when in the wake of her divorce from Edward Langtry and their creditors, she became an actress. Though audiences in England and America only purchased tickets because of her notoriety and Bertie’s appearance at her first nights, her success did much to rehabilitate her reputation in society.

Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, 20th Earl of Shrewsbury wreaked havoc when he eloped with the very married Ellen Miller-Mundy. She managed to divorce her husband and marry the Earl only months before the birth of their son, Viscount Ingestre, in 1882. Unfortunately, the Earl and Countess separated soon after, and though Lord Shrewsbury could re-enter society, no amount of support from his powerful sisters–which included Theresa, Marchioness of Londonderry–facilitated her re-entrance. Due to this gross breach of etiquette, Lady Shrewsbury spent the remainder of her life plagued with monetary troubles and largely ostracized from society until her death in 1940.

Lady Colin Campbell, née Gertrude Elizabeth Blood, was a delicious Irish beauty who met and married Lord Colin Campbell, fifth son of the 8th Duke of Argyll, quickly after meeting him in 1880. Despite Lord Colin’s impeccable background, he was a rake of the first order, and their wedding was actually postponed twice because of health issues. Despite this, Gertrude’s social-climbing mother pushed through the obstacles in order to see her daughter become a member of such an illustrious family. Shortly after moving to London, Lady Colin Campbell discovered that her husband had infected her with venereal disease. She filed for and was granted a judicial separation from Lord Colin in 1884 on the grounds of cruelty, that he had knowingly infected her. But that wasn’t the end of their marriage, for both sued one another for divorce that same year, with Lord Colin accusing her of adultery with four prominent gentlemen in the trial which finally took place in 1886. Gertrude was denied her divorce, and under the double-standards of the day, her husband was granted a divorce. A scandalous divorcée, Lady Colin Campbell rebuilt her life along her own lines, becoming a respected journalist in her own right and close friends with James McNeill Whistler and George Bernard Shaw.

Daisy, Countess of Warwick was prone to scandal. When in 1889, Daisy (then Lady Brooke) discovered that Lady Charles Beresford was pregnant with her husband’s child when he was having an affair with her, she dashed off a furious letter to Lord Charles, which his wife intercepted. Lady Charles then refused to return the letter, placing it in the care of society’s favorite solicitor, George Lewis. The beautiful Daisy pleaded with the Prince of Wales to intercede, and it was no surprise when she became his latest inamorata. In the meantime, Lady Charles continued to write about Daisy’s affair with her husband to whomever she could, and her sister wrote an anonymous pamphlet ridiculing Lady Brooke’s tantrum over her lover impregnating his own wife, spreading the scandal far and wide. Nevertheless, as Bertie’s new mistress, Daisy’s position in society was now unassailable, and Lady Charles was forced to retreat into seething silence.

After her affair with Bertie cooled in 1898, she fell in love with Joe Laycock, a millionaire who fathered two of her children, Maynard and Mercy (so named when she discovered she was pregnant at age 41). But Laycock was also seeing Kitty Downshire, the wife of an Irish marquess, and when Kitty’s husband threatened divorce over her affair, this menage-a-trois set society’s pens ablaze with letters deploring, snickering at, and gossiping about such scandalous conduct. Joe and Kitty married after her divorce (a man named as correspondent in a divorce suit was considered a cad if he didn’t marry the divorcée), and the heartsick Daisy was forced to attend to other matters, such as her near poverty. Years of lavish entertainment and socialistic pursuits had depleted the immense fortune she’d inherited from her grandfather. Daisy’s last scandal was her 1913 attempt to sell Bertie’s love letters to her. George V ignored her blackmail, but Arthur do Cros purchased the lot and they were published in the 1960s.

Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, known as the “Dancing Marquess” for his habit of performing “sinuous, sexy, snake-like dances,” packed a lot of scandal into his short life. Upon the death of his father in 1898, he inherited his title and the family estates with about 30,000 acres, which provided an annual income of £110,000. He promptly went on a spending spree, buying jewels, outlandish clothes, and bizarre fripperies. His wife, the former Lillian Florence Maud Chetwynd, filed for an annulment in 1900, claiming non-consummation, and rumor had it he forced her to lie naked while he covered her body with jewels, after which he stood and admired his handiwork. Shed of a wife, Lord Anglesey poured more and more of his money in jewels and building an opulent theater in which he and a hired troupe performed lavishly-decorated plays. He also mortgaged his estates to the hilt, bringing in an additional £250,000, and kept spending. Therefore it was no surprise when in 1904, he had racked up hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt. He was forced to sell his precious clothes, jewels, dogs, railway car, horses, cars, carriages and yachts to pay creditors, and left with £3,000 a year, he moved to Monaco, where he died the following year after a long illness at the age of 30.

This was just the tip of the iceberg, though it seemed a nice portion of scandal resulted from the alliances of American heiresses with British peers (as well as the European aristocracy). One scandal which comes to mind is that of Katherine McVickar. The daughter of a Commodore in the U.S. Navy, Miss McVickar arrived in England in 1870, where she met the forty-something Major Charles Grantley Norton and accepted his proposal of marriage. Nine years later, her marriage to Norton was dissolved so she could marry his cousin John Richard Brinsley Norton, 5th Baron Grantley, who was twenty years younger and the father of her unborn child. Katherine and Lord Grantley married only five days before she gave birth to the Hon. Joan Mary Conyers Norton. This bit of scandal was covered up by Debrett’s, who amended their subsequent editions to make it appear that Katherine hadn’t divorced her husband to marry his cousin days before the birth of her daughter. Fortunately for all parties involved, Katherine went on to become a noted society hostess until her death in 1897.

Another noted case was Frances Work, who married James Burke Roche, later 3rd Baron Fermoy, in 1880. Her father was very much against international marriages and as a condition of Frances’ marriage to Burke Roche, her twin sons Francis and Maurice were raised in America. Frances divorced Roche for desertion in 1891, but her father remained mistrustful of his daughter’s sense, and left a will with fifteen codicils, which mirrored her marital career, one of which cut her out of his will when she married Hungarian horse trainer Aurel Batonyi in 1905. She was restated in the will by another codicil, which left her a nice sum if she separated from Batonyi.

As you can see, not even the Edwardians were exempt from messy scandals, bitter divorces, and illegitimate children. The difference between us and them was style with which they carried off their breaches of etiquette. Though, as mentioned above, the double-standards frequently resulted in the ostracism of women, if enough money, power, and position were involved, even the most shocking circumstances could be overcome.

Further Reading:
The Marlborough House Set by Anita Leslie
To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace
Article on the 5th Marquess of Anglesey from the Daily Mail
American Jennie by Anne Sebba

Marguerite Steinheil

When Madame Marguerite Steinheil paid an illicit call on President Félix Faure at the Palais de l’Élysée, no one could have predicted a scandal–and a farce–beyond imagination. Had Mme. Steinheil been your average concerned French citizen, the afternoon appointment with the portly statesman would have aroused little attention save a mention of the woman’s attractiveness. But it was not to be, for within moments of Madame Steinheil’s entrance into President Faure’s office, the bell was rung for his servants, who quickly gathered around the dead body of their master and ruler while the fatale Madame Steinheil adjusted her clothing.

The death of President Faure at the, um, hands of Madame Steinheil came at a critical juncture in French history. Faure’s last years were mired in the Dreyfus Affair, anarchists bombings in Paris, the Fashoda Affair, and a Franco-Russian alliance. With this sort of stress, it is no wonder he found comfort in the arms of Marguerite, but she was even more complicated than diplomatic and domestic contretemps–and this was not the end of her scandalous and deadly reputation. Considering the course of Marguerite Steinheil’s life, it seems a bit ironic that she was born in Alsace two years before the Treaty of Frankfurt ripped it and Lorraine from French hands (these two departments were a source of much bitterness between France and Germany from 1871 until the end of WWII). From birth Marguerite, or Meg, as she was known, was headstrong and independent. Her family hoped she would settle down to become a proper French wife and mother when she married the much-older painter Adolphe Steinheil in 1890, but it was not to be. Meg reveled in her new freedom and began a salon in Paris.

From the start, Meg favored politicians and financiers, gathering around her such luminaries as Gounod, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Jules Massenet, François Coppée, Émile Zola, and Pierre Loti, and fancying herself a modern-day Madame de Pompadour in terms of influence. With this goal in mind she was determined to meet President Faure. Opportunity came knocking when her husband, whose talents were small, yet prolific, was given a contract by Faure in 1897. This of course gave the now-smitten President an excuse to pay her frequent visits. Meg was soon installed as Faure’s maitress-en-tete, but she held little real influence or power save what she thought in her head. After Faure’s sensational death, Meg moved on to other wealthy and powerful men, who, per her Memoirs, entrusted her with state secrets. Her most important lover was the powerful industrialist Borderel, whom she met in 1908.

But Meg’s bid for infamy was not over.

In May of that year, Meg’s husband and stepmother were found suffocated in their beds and Meg herself was bound and gagged to her bed. She claimed to have been tied up by four hooded strangers, and the public speculated (with her instigation no doubt) that her family had been murdered in an attempt to search the house for sensitive papers Faure had left in her care. From the start, the police just didn’t find the story believable. However, since they had no evidence with which to charge Meg, the case was dropped. Oddly enough, Meg would not let the case go and her attempt to frame two of her servants caused the police to arrest her for the murders.

The court case caused a sensation that rippled through Paris. Men thought Marguerite innocent, while the women thought her absolutely guilty. The prosecutors brought forth witnesses from her childhood to the present to recount every sin she’d ever committed, including the names of her numerous admirers. The courtroom was packed on every day of the trial and when Meg took the stand, the obsession with her case reached a fever pitch. Marguerite was a consummate actress, weeping, gnashing her teeth, and wailing about her innocence and her grief over the tragedy. No matter what angle the chief prosecutor came from, she stuck to her story, and after a strange man dressed in a red wig and black cloak made an appearance in court to testify breaking into the Steinheil home, the case was ruined. The jury deliberated for 2 1/2 hours and although the judge called her stories “tissues of lies”, they announced Marguerite’s acquittal on November 14, 1909. She promptly quit France for England, where she “wrote” My Memoirs (1912) and later wed the 6th Baron Abinger. Marguerite was widowed in 1927 and lived in England for the remainder of her life, dying in a Hove nursing home in 1954.

May Yohe

Perhaps it was the possession of the ill-fated and cursed Hope Diamond which destined Mary Augusta Yohé to a life of infamy and ruin. Nonetheless, you must say that her fate was that of a series of missteps and foolish actions–rather in the vein of Lily Bart–with which the ebullient American musical actress chose to guide her life.

Mary Augusta, known henceforth as “May,” was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on April 6, 1866 to William W. Yohé, a former officer of a Pennsylvania Regiment during the Civil War, and Lizzie Batcheller, the daughter of a hotel proprietor. The two separated sometime during May’s childhood, and Lizzie supported the two with a successful business (of which has yet to be revealed) in Philadelphia. May’s father, William, was known for his dark good looks and musical talents, and Lizzie spent her free time singing in church choirs. Lizzie had apparently acquired enough money and success to send twelve year old May abroad for her education, and three years later she returned home, pretty, polished, and poised. However, May wanted to go on stage. She went in as chorus girl, and within a few years she emerged as a star after a well received turn as “Prince Prettywitz” in the Crystal Slipper at the Chicago Opera House in the summer of 1887. From then on, May’s career was a dazzling success, a success which baffled her critics, who found her “an indifferent actress [who] does not possess good stage presence, and has a figure by no means striking.” But perhaps that was what audiences desired: a beautiful woman who was on stage to have fun.

By the early 1890s, May was famous for another reason: her rumored elopement with Lord Francis Hope, the younger brother and heir presumptive to the Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne, who was owner of a half-dissipated estate. Lord Francis himself, who acquired the surname “Hope” and the legendary Hope Diamond from a grandmother’s bequest, was in dire financial straits, and after his quiet 1894 marriage to May, he and she continued their extravagant ways. Not even a year later, the two had frittered away his entire inheritance–the land, the estates, the pictures, the heirlooms, and the Hope Diamond. But as a future Duke and Duchess, Lord and Lady Francis Hope could beg or borrow on their expectations, which they did, further increasing their exorbitant debts.

In 1900, flush with ill-gotten wealth, Francis and May undertook a world tour. On their way home, they acquired an acquaintance, the dashing Captain Putnam Bradlee Strong, who was one of the most popular officers in the US Army and a particular favorite of President McKinley. May took one look at Captain Strong and fell head over heels in love. Rather than continue on to England with Lord Francis and, in the manner of the well-born Englishwoman of the day, keep Captain Strong as a lover, May deserted her husband for her darling Bradlee (American women were much too sentimental and conventional to English eyes). May became Mrs Strong in San Francisco, but within two years, their quarrels and relative poverty tore apart the marriage, and she charged that Captain Strong made off with £20,000 worth of jewelry. Strong appeared in London soon after to denounce this claim, and May followed him, where a reconciliation was had.

May and Bradlee, both penniless but flush with publicity, decamped for America where May returned to the stage in an act created for the two. Unfortunately, May’s theatrical success had been forgotten and Captain Strong had no acting talents whatsoever. Rather than remain shackled to a waning star, the captain filed for bankruptcy and divorce in 1905. After this, May sunk into obscurity, and years of poverty followed, whereupon she took positions as a scrubwoman, a housekeeper, and a janitor. In 1914, she wed Captain John A. Smuts, and remained married to him for quite some time. When in early 1938, LIFE Magazine featured her in a short article, it was only because of her tenuous connection with the Hope Diamond, which by then was in the possession of Washington D.C. socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean, and the novelty of a former owner working for the WPA as a statistics research clerk for $16.50 a week. A few months after this feature, the tempestuous May died at age 72 of “arterial sclerotic heart disease and chronic vascular nephritis.”

In one way, the rise of Expressionism and Cubism could be seen as a reaction to the globalization of society. As colonialism spread throughout Asia and Africa, as well as the South and North poles, Europeans and Americans came in contact with peoples only hardy explorers of the past were able to meet. Also, this time witnessed the birth of modern anthropology. Though scientific racism retained its hold upon greater social thought, exploration began to turn its emphasis from conquer to the study and cataloging of non-European peoples and their customs.

The seeds for the Armory Show were sown at one of the artistic “Evenings” held by Mrs Mabel Dodge, a “400″ socialite who worked her darndest to become the “queen of Greenwich Village.” The 69th Regiment Armory for the National Guard located at on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets was chosen by organizers Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach as the perfect venue for this show of modern art. Though the Metropolitan Museum of Art bravely purchased Paul Cézanne’s Hill of the Poor to symbolize their willingness to accept modern art, others were not so happy with the descent of art from nice, safe portraits, landscapes and still-lifes into dots and dashes across the canvas. Despite the rumbling of dissent, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors trundled on. The date for the show was from February 17th to March 15th, 1913, and the armory was home to approximately 1250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 European and American artists.

Among the artists whose work was to be shown were Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Dufy, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Many of the artists were known and respected, so the audience and art critics waiting to view these 1250 paintings were not too alarmed by the roster. But when they did feast their eyes upon the exhibition, most of New York was stunned. Lloyd Morris recounted the “outrage and protest [which] flared up in newspaper headlines” and “Cubism, futurism, post-impressionism became issues in a battle that engaged the general public.” Critics were baffled by Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and were incensed by Matisse’s nudes, Picasso’s cubist paintings, and Constantin Brancusi’s roughly-hewn block. Former President Theodore Roosevelt condemned all modernists as lunatics, and many critics considered the more provocative art exhibited to be the work of degenerates, and described the Armory Show a “bedlam in art,” comparing cubism to prehistoric cave drawings.

In the midst of this furor, modern art did have a small, but growing number of supporters, which included Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who was to receive lasting fame for her art studios in Greenwich Village and the museum she founded in 1931. Many art collectors found much to admire in this new art movement, and more than a few wealthy art patrons included early Picassos among the then-priceless works by Rubens and Holbein the Younger. Ironically, for all the castigation the show received in the press and the public, it went on to tour Chicago and Boston to equal doses of acclaim and horror. The outcome of the Armory Show was but one of the many pre-WWI forces that shaped both modern culture and society in the coming decades. The Modernists took inspiration from non-European arts and looked forward rather than looking back to old masters, thereby forging not only a new path for art, but enabled them to stand on their own merits as artists.

Further Reading:
1913: an End and a Beginning by Virgina Cowles
Online exhibition recreating the Armory Show
ArtLex on the Armory Show
The 69th Regiment Armory Show
The 69th Regiment Armory

While Rome–or in this case, New York City–burned, the Bradley-Martins fiddled. The year was 1897 and since the Panic of 1893, America had been mired in a depression which had its roots in a banking crisis of twenty years before. As a result, Americans were inclined to look upon the lavish spending of the Gilded Age’s idle rich with a jaundiced eye. Having struck a social coup years earlier by marrying their 16 year old daughter Cornelia to the Earl of Craven, the Bradley-Martins moved easily within both New York’s “Four Hundred” and England’s “Marlborough House Set.” During a visit to New York, Mrs. Bradley-Martin was moved by the plight of the city’s thousands and thousands of unemployed, impoverished and hungry, and began to form an idea for alleviating the financial burden of New Yorkers–and their boredom.

According to Bradley Martin’s brother, Frederick:

One morning at breakfast my brother remarked–

“I think it would be a good thing if we got up something; there seems to be a great deal of depression in trade; suppose we send out invitations for a concert.”

“And pray, what good will that do?” asked my sister-in-law, “the money will only benefit foreigners. No, I’ve a far better idea; let us give a costume ball at so short notice that our guests won’t have time to get their dresses from Paris. That will give an impetus to trade that nothing else will.”

Mrs. Bradley-Martin was the former Cornelia Sherman, and daughter of a wealthy Albany merchant. She met Bradley Martin at the wedding of Emily Vanderbilt to William Douglas Sloan, and they quickly set out to conquer the exclusive society of New York. Besides marrying young Cornelia to an earl, Mrs. Bradley-Martin added a hyphen to her husband’s names and set about throwing the most spectacular, lavish parties society had ever seen. A ball held in 1885 was so massive they built a huge temporary supper room in their backyard just for the ball, and the enclosure was so enormous that the insurance companies required that that the Bradley-Martins buy fire insurance for the entire city block. Their balls had always been a hit with both the Four Hundred and the gossip-hungry press, so Mrs. Bradley-Martin rightly divined a gigantic ball held that winter would go over just as easily.

She was largely correct. The second the invitations were spent, tidbits about the ball leaked from all corners. It was to be held at the magnificent Waldorf-Astoria, which had unveiled the Astoria side earlier that year, and guests were to arrive attired in costumes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Each day brought new reports of the stunning flower arrangements, costumes and decorations to be seen, of the sumptuous feast to be served, and the glittering jewels to be on display at the ball. The news excited most of the dazzled city who lapped up each nugget of gilt eagerly, and those who opposed the spectacle. “Yes,” one cleric raged, “you rich people put next to nothing in the collection plate, and yet you’ll spend thousands of dollars on Mrs. Bradley Martin’s ball.” A few other clergymen denounced the ball, and soon, “threatening letters arrived by every post, debating societies discussed our extravagance, and last, but not least, [the Bradley Martins] were burlesqued unmercifully on the stage.”

But the show went on–with Assistant Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt sending ten squadrons of police to surround the hotel against any troublemakers and to cordon off the walkway into the Waldorf. At ten o’clock, tall footmen with powdered hair spread a crimson carpet for guests, and half an hour later, carriages clip-clopped down Fifth Avenue carrying their time-traveling occupants through the jammed streets. Contrary to fears, the crowds pressing against the cordons cheered and clapped rather than booed and hissed, as the lavishly-attired socialites and their spouses stepped onto the carpet laid for them and entered the hotel. Inside, Mrs. Bradley-Martin and her husband, costumed as Mary of Scots and Louis XV respectively, greeted their guests from atop a crimson dais. The room was filled with hothouse flowers, twinkling electric lights, gilded candelabra, potted palms and crystal and ormolu chandeliers hung with pink roses and asparagus vines.

The grande dame of the Four Hundred, the Mrs. Astor came as Mary Stuart in a gown of dark-blue velvet and some $200,000 worth of jewels (Right: her son, Titanic victim John Jacob Astor IV). Among the hundreds of guests invited, there were duplicate costumes, with three Catherine the Greats, eight Madame de Maintenons, ten Madame de Pompadours, and a host of courtiers, cavaliers and courtesans. Oliver Belmont took another route, arriving in a suit of gold-inlaid armor worth about $10,000, that was so heavy, he could barely move. Soon after arrival, the guests began to dance, opening the ball with the quadrille de honneur, and several hours later, they sat for a 28 course supper that included caviar-stuffed oysters, lobster, roast English suckling pig, terrapin, canvasback duck stuffed with truffles, and plover’s eggs–all washed down with four thousand bottles of 1884 Moët et Chandon. By the time the evening had ended, the Bradley-Martin’s spent $369,000 (apprx $8.5 million in 2008 dollars).

The following morning, all was well. Newspapers enthused over the display and the opulence, each one fighting for exclusive details of the ball with which to regale their less fortunate readers. Soon however, the press began to look for a new angle to keep the story fresh and as lavishly as they praised the ball, they rushed in to condemn it. Within days, the Bradley-Martin ball had taken on monstrous proportions and the couple and the ways of the Four Hundred were viciously condemned. Many current accounts have the Bradley-Martins fleeing the attacks, but in reality, though smarting by the volte-face, their decadent party caught the attention of the New York City tax authority, who brought a suit in court in which they asserted that the Bradley-Martins’ property wealth was higher than reported and the city could collect a higher property tax from them. The suit was dismissed as the couple lived in both England and America and rarely stayed in NY longer than the social season. In the aftermath of the scandal, the Bradley-Martin’s remained in England, to return to American shores but once fifteen years later.

Further Reading:

A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs Astor in the Gilded Age by Greg King
The Elegant Inn: The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 1893-1929 by Albin Pasteur Dearing
King Lehr and the Gilded Age by Elizabeth Drexel Lehr

A native of the Isle of Jersey, that same island from which the equally alluring Lillie Langtry sprung, Elinor and her sister Lucy, who became the first socialite couturier Lucille, also came from humble backgrounds to take London society by storm. Glyn turned to writing after her marriage to landowner Clayton Glyn soured due to his spendthrift ways and their incompatible personalities. She quickly produced a series of light, frothy peeks into high society that proved successful with the public: The Vicissitudes of Evangeline (a series of vignettes detailing a young debutante’s observations of the love affairs of high society, which scandalized the reading public not by its subject, but by a scene where Evangeline is described as becoming in her lingerie!), The Visits of Elizabeth and its sequel Elizabeth Visits America, The Reflections of Ambrosine and The Reason Why.

It wasn’t until she published Three Weeks however, that Elinor Glyn began to rhyme with sin. Three Weeks was the story of a clandestine affair between Englishman Paul Verdayne and a mysterious older woman he meets while on vacation, whom he only knows as “The Lady.” The most sensual and enduring scene which made Elinor immortal took place on a tiger skin, which inspired the doggerel:

Would you like to sin
With Elinor Glyn
On a tiger skin?
Or would you prefer
To err with her
On some other fur?

The resulting scandal “helped to ensure worldwide sales of more than five million in the 25 years after it was first published.” The furor surprised the demure Mrs. Glyn who, in an article with the New York Times, mere said she merely attempted to “show what an educated Slav in love would think and do.” Because of this book, Glyn was considered the leading expert on romance, passion and sex, and was asked around the world to discuss such topics, where she left audiences of both men and women hanging onto her every word as she uttered such pronouncements as “Love is a trinity–body and soul and the desire to reproduce love’s image.” In time, Elinor’s flamboyant persona and flair for words brought her to Hollywood of the 1920s where she promptly coined another enduring word: “It,” that is, the innate sexual appeal some people had and most others didn’t. “It” was the title of her 1927 release and also that of a movie adaptation starring Clara Bow, which helped Glyn parlay her Edwardian success far past that era, where she convinced the cynical post-Great War generation that theirs was not the only period for love and sin.

Further Reading:
The It Girls: Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon and Elinor Glyn by Meredith Etherington-Smith and Jeremy Pilcher
Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn by Joan Hardwick
Montacute’s Tigress (BBC)
Books by Elinor Glyn

That day the young women stretched their arms and cramped fingers, joking and chatting with one another as they tidied their workstations and shoved their arms into their coats as the clock’s hands pulled closer to 4:45. Then someone yelled “Fire!” Within moments panic broke out amongst the workers and everyone scattered, jamming doorways and halls in an effort to escape. Outside, United Press reporter William G. Shepard happened to stroll near the area when he suddenly saw smoke:

I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound–a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.

Thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead. Sixty-two thud—deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.

The first ten thud—deads shocked me. I looked up—saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me—something that I didn’t know was there—steeled me.

I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud–then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.

To his horror, and that of the crowd rushing to the scene of the fire, more young women jumped from the burning building. Firemen appeared on the scene, but the ladders were too short, and the life nets held aloft for the jumping girls to land on tore upon impact. All around the building lay dead bodies, broken, charred and covered with blood. The fire was put out not an hour later, and firemen rushed to the top three floors and were met with dozens of burnt bodies. They cleared the building of the last body by 11 that night.

The following day, grieving relatives and curious onlookers streamed through the morgue set up on the 26th Street pier to identify the dead. By April, the public outcry against the unsafe working conditions in New York forces the authorities to do something about this long-neglected blight on the city. That same month, owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck are indicted for manslaughter in connection with the fire deaths. Further reports indicated that the escape route from the ninth floor was blocked by a locked door. Harris and Blanck were brought to trial in December and to the horror of the crowd, they were found “not guilty” after a deliberation of two hours. The family of the victims and the survivors took Harris and Blanck to court in a civil suit and in 1914, the twenty-three individual suits for damages against Triangle were settled for an average of just $75 per life lost. In the aftermath of the fire, New York created a Factory Investigating Commission to examine the need for new legislation to prevent future fire disasters. In part because of the work of the Commission, “the golden era in remedial factory legislation” was launched and over the next three years, New York enacted 36 new safety laws.

Today we are linked to the tragedy through Rose Freedman, last living survivor of the fire, who died in 2001 age 107 and the designation of The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Building (Brown Building) as a National Historical Landmark. For more information, please visit the following websites:

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Trial
The Triangle Factory Fire
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Building
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Memorial

The fire in fiction:
The Locket: Surviving the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire by Suzanne Lieurance
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory by Charity Barger
Triangle: A Novel by Katharine Weber
Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch

“Booker T. Washington, the well known negro educator and President of the Tuskegee, Ala. institute , was a guest of President Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt at dinner at the white house tonight.”

It was a day like any other when the White House Social Calendar, a regular column in the newspapers of Washington D.C, inserted a tiny line stating that on October 16, 1901, Booker T. Washington had been a guest of President Roosevelt at dinner. overnight the dinner became a sensation. Southern newspapers who had previously held Washington as an example of a “good negro” after his infamous Atlanta Compromise address in 1895, now felt betrayed, and turned to attack both Washington and President Roosevelt with a rabid fervor. Men who had never supported Roosevelt swore to never vote for him again, and many whites revoked their trust in Washington.

In the ensuing silence from both the White House and Tuskegee, it fell to the nation’s newspapers to publicize the opinions of Americans. One southerner sent the President a possum with a card around its neck bearing the name “Booker Washington.” To one of his callers the next day, a friend of the President reported him as saying “I do not need to give you an explanation of the Booker Washington affair, do I?” President Roosevelt went on to say that he was amazed that he could be so misunderstood by those who had criticized him. Maryland Democrats seized upon this to ridicule the President and the Republican Party, and many claimed that the Booker Washington incident would usher in a Democratic victory.

What made this dinner so remarkable?

Firstly, because it was a private, family affair. Washington had previously dined with a president (McKinley), and President Cleveland had invited Frederick Douglass to the White House, but both were in official, public capacity. By inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner as though he were just another honored guest was shocking, repulsive, outrageous, offensive. Secondly, because it implied that President Roosevelt was opposed to racism and the ever-expanding Jim Crow laws. And lastly, because it implied, for W.E.B. DuBois-supporters, that Washington’s socio-political stance had been granted sanction by the highest in the land.

President Roosevelt’s invitation to Dr. Washington was provocative. Though Roosevelt, like most Anglo-Saxon Americans of that time period, still held to certain assumptions of and prejudices against blacks, the fact that he was willing to break bread with a black man–and that his family were present as well–was astounding in a time period where the advances and tentative healing made during Reconstruction were receding to the point of memory.

Further Reading:

“The First President to Entertain a Negro, Booker T Washington Dined”
Roosevelt, the Happy Warrior By Bradley Gilman
Booker T. Washington By Louis R. Harlan