Lily Elsie

With her button nose, piles of heavy, lustrous brunette locks, and doe eyes, Lily Elsie walked across the stage as a child star and into the hearts of Victorian and Edwardian audiences, where she remained for the majority of her life. She was born Elsie Hodder to an unmarried seamstress in West Riding, Yorkshire in 1886, and made her debut in music hall and variety entertainments as “Little Elsie” as a child impersonator in the mid 1890s. Her voice was thin but sweet, and her stage presence undeniable, and yet, despite her immense success and talent, she remained hopelessly shy.

Little Elsie later acted in Salford theatres in pantomimes and concerts, and scored the title role in Little Red Riding Hood at ten, which remained onstage for six weeks, and met with success on tour for an additional six weeks. Elsie made her London debut in 1898, and toured in the music comedies which were to mark the history of Edwardian theatre. She changed her name to “Lily Elsie” sometime around 1900, and promptly joined George Edwardes’ company at Daly’s Theatre in London as a chorus girl. She caused a stir in 1903, in the role of “Princess Soo-Soo” in the hit musical A Chinese Honeymoon, when she was made up to appear Chinese, for until then, white actors portraying characters of color invariably played them with only an “ethnic” costume to denote their non-European ancestry. She was briefly fired by Edwards after he caught her pulling a prank while on stage, but he quickly rehired her in smaller parts, topping off her career between the years 1903 and 1906 in fourteen shows.

Her big break came by accident. Edwardes wanted to put on The Merry Widow and took Elsie with him to Berlin to see the original German version, Die Lustige Witwe. He convinced her to take the part–she demurred, thinking her voice too slight–and recruited Lucile to design her costumes and coach her in movement and grace. The production, with English lyrics by Adrian Ross, opened in June 1907 at Daly’s Theatre and ran for an astonishing 778 performances. Elsie’s celebrity was sealed when the operetta went on tour in 1908, and she became the most photographed actress of the Edwardian era, also becoming intrinsically linked to the wide-brimmed Merry Widow hat designed by Lucile.

According to the Atlanta Constitution newspaper in America, writing in 1915:

Perhaps her face is nearer to that of the Venus de Milo in profile than to any other famed beauty. There are no angles to be found about her any place…. If she came to America, she would undoubtedly be called the most beautiful woman In America. Nature never made a more brilliant success in the beauty business than she did with Lily Elsie. It was mostly from the nobility that her suitors came. Everyone agrees that Lily Elsie has the most kissable mouth in all England… she possesses the Cupid’s bow outline with the ends curving upward delicately, all ready for smiles…. Strangely enough, the women of the land were among her most devoted admirers.”

After her astounding success with The Merry Widow, Elsie performed in sixteen more musical comedies, including The Dollar Princess in 1909; as “Franzi” in A Waltz Dream; and as “Angèle” in The Count of Luxembourg, both in 1911. She left The Count of Luxembourg to marry Major John Ian Bullough, who was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer. Bullough wanted her to retire from the stage, which the shy Elsie did, and she only returned to the stage for charity performances during the Great War. In 1920, Elsie and Bullough moved to Gloucestershire and she greatly enjoyed country society, but her marriage had never been happy, and she returned to touring in the late 1920s before retiring for good in 1929 after playing against Ivor Novello in his The Truth Game. She and Bullough’s painful marriage ended in 1930, and what could have been Elsie’s golden years were filled with illness and hypochondria as she drifted through nursing homes and Swiss sanatoriums. After brain surgery, which was said to have improved her health a little, Elsie spent her remaining years in St. Andrew’s Hospital in London, where she died at age 76 in 1962.

Read more about Lily Elsie’s life in Anything But Merry! The life and times of Lily Elsie by David Slattery-Christy

The Edwardian era was home to many fads and fashions which hearkened to bygone days, and the Merry Widow hat craze was no exception. The hat was just another part of the costume designed by Lucile for statuesque English theater star Lily Elsie, who was to play the main character, Hanna Glawari, in the 1907 English adaptation of Franz Lehár’s operetta, Die lustige Witwe. The play was an immediate sensation, and its wonderful, frothy signature tune, the Merry Widow Waltz, became the craze of the Season. However, it was the hat worn by Elsie, that black, wide-brimmed, hat covered with filmy chiffon and festooned with piles of feathers, became the look for fashionable women over the next three years.

The hat, reaching such widths as eighteen inches, and topped with all kinds of trimmings (even whole stuffed birds!), was a direct descendant of the “Gainsborough” hat worn by the Duchess of Devonshire in that artist’s portrait of the famed Georgian beauty. It’s resurgence was quite timely, as the silhouette of the Edwardian lady moved away from the languid, S-curve of the early 1900s to the streamlined, athletic look of the late 18th century/early 19th century. Predictably, the increasing fashion for this hat resulted in endless jokes in popular magazines like Punch, whose issues frequently poked fun at the difficulties one could get into when wearing a Merry Widow hat or being near a lady wearing one. In New York, the Merry Widow craze extended to not only the hats, but corsets, dogs, cigars, chocolates, perfumes, scallops, liqueurs, et cetera, and early American film companies rushed to produce snappy one-reelers based around “merry widows” in Merry Widow hats to cash in on the hat and the operetta’s popularity.

The Merry Widow retained its popularity until the eve of World War One, though it vied for supremacy with the smaller toques and turbans made popular by Paul Poiret. Surprisingly, the operetta and the waltz composed for it remain quite popular, with revivals occurring quite frequently. As for Franz Lehár, this one operetta made him a multimillionaire, and his career was never the same.

Further Reading:
Accessories of Dress: An Illustrated Encyclopedia by Katherine Morris Lester, Bess Viola Oerke & Helen Westermann
Hats: a history of fashion in Headwear by Hilda Amphlett
The “it” girls: Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, the couturière “Lucile”, and Elinor Glyn by Meredith Etherington-Smith & Jeremy Pilcher