by gail maccoll
A WEALTH OF STYLE
Worth made the construction of fashion an art, removing it forever from the hands of the local seamstress. He produced between six and seven thousand dresses and four thousand outer garments a year, employing a thousand or more people at his atelier in the rue de la Paix. Just some of the Worth hallmarks are outlined here.
FABRIC
Almost inevitably heavy silk, used in combination with one or two other fabrics. Worth revived, almost singlehandedly, the French silk-weaving industry in Lyons, by persuading Empress Eugenie to wear exclusively dresses made from Lyons silk. (Initially, she thought they looked like curtains.) The fabric was frequently embroidered or brocaded in a large, lavish pattern; roses were favored, as were voided velvet and appliques. Mills always submitted their patterns to Worth and waited for his orders before weaving; many of the patterns were copyrighted.
COLORS
Often rich and brilliant, sometimes subtle, always original, in combinations such as coral and silver, chestnut and bronze-green, black and midnight blue, or fuchsia and royal blue. The Worth forte: combinations of colors in the nougat/shell pink/ cream/pale yellow range, especially in rich silks and brocades that caught the light.
This kind of large-patterned brocade was one of Worth’s specialties.
A lesser artist would have centered the embroidered sunburst.
ASYMMETRY
Bodice draped to one side, train draped to one side, roses pinned to left shoulder, puffs of tulle on right side of skirt. A dress never looked the same from every angle.
Gathering yards of fabric into a graceful bustle took great technical skill.
SILHOUETTE
Always the cutting edge of fashion; always flattering. Worth took credit for having invented the crinoline, a light, cage-like hoopskirt, to replace the layers of hot, heavy petticoats. He brought it to the height of fashion, then dropped it when skirts became smooth in front and gathered into a bustle at the back. The bust was always emphasized, as bodices remained snug for close to sixty years.
TRIMMINGS
Tulle, netting, chiffon, silk flowers; contrasting fabrics such as cream lining on blush-pink grosgrain. Lace was very important—especially machine lace, which rivaled the look of handmade lace and was much less costly. Other machine-made trimmings included passementerie, tassels, chenille fringe, braid, paillettes, galon d’argent and glass pearls. On occasion, real jewels were sewn onto a dress the day of a ball, then cut off and put back into the vault.
A Worth pregnancy dress, designed for Mrs. Stanford White.
HISTORICAL MOTIFS
Dresses in the style of Titian or Rembrandt or Jan van Eyck; stand-up collars a la Medici, Renaissance-patterned brocade, long, pointed basques. Having studied painting extensively, Worth enjoyed purloining from the past (he once commissioned a Lyons mill to weave a brocade patterned with eyes and ears, after a famous portrait of Elizabeth I) and could be relied upon to produce accurate reproductions of historical costumes for fancy-dress balls. He frequently made use of old materials, as in recutting an eighteenth-century embroidered man’s jacket to be worn over a bustle or draping heirloom lace over the skirt of a red silk ball down.
Minnie Paget’s Cleopatra dress required careful research.
* * *
“Silly little fool! All the young wives try me!”
SIR WILLIAM GORDON-CUMMING to Leonie Jerome Leslie, when she wouldn’t let him kiss her
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2. Helpful hostesses. In town, thoughtful hostesses arranged their drawing rooms into “favorable corners” so that lovers were seen to have been brought together not by their passion but by the furniture. At country-house parties, the hostess made certain that her guests would find their current amours not only present but accessible. The corridors of country houses could be long and chilly, their navigation a chore. Bedroom doors all look alike. If sleeping arrangements were not crystal clear, confusion—even pneumonia—could result. (One famous error involved an eager visitor leaping into Red with a cry of “Cock-a-doodle-do!” only to find that he had interrupted the virtuous slumber of the Bishop of Bath and Wells.) Some hostesses had brass card-holders placed at every door so that the identity of current inhabitants could be readily ascertained. Others discreetly informed concerned parties how to get from one room to another without running into servants or other guests, while in some establishments a warning bell rang an hour before morning tea was scheduled to be brought in by the servants. Nocturnal itinerants would thus have a chance to get back where they were supposed to be by the time the maid or footman came in. Of course, there was no guarding against the unexpected, except by abstaining, and people did occasionally cross paths late at night. The polite thing, at such a juncture, was an anonymous salutation, followed immediately by total amnesia.
A 1910 photograph of the King abroad with a lady whose identity has been carefully obscured so as not to give her away.
3. A letter to my love. Edwardians were mad letter-writers. When lovers couldn’t manage to be together, they were busy scribbling notes to each other. Every day. Any serious set of lovers was duty-bound to start up a heated correspondence. In fact, it seems likely that some affairs were consummated on the page rather than between the sheets. Certainly a great deal of passion was expended there. Packets of compromising letters, usually tied up with pink or blue ribbon, thus became the centerpieces of a number of liaisons. It was such a packet that a malicious noblewoman had delivered to Lord Londonderry—letters written by his wife to the great Edwardian cuckolder Harry Cust. It was with such a packet (letters from the Prince to Lady Aylesford) that Lord Randolph Churchill tried to blackmail H.R.H. into easing up on his brother Blandford. In any case, if it was a long time between house parties, it was only polite to flatter a lady, or pour out one’s heart to a gentleman, with regularity and gusto. And just hope it didn’t come back to haunt one.
4. Sentimental keepsakes. Edwardian love affairs were often similar to the romances of the very young, filled with sentimental gestures, the regular exchange of darling little gifts, the celebration of secret anniversaries. Couples were capable of thinking of their affair as a marriage and wearing the lover’s “wedding ring.” Sex without sentiment was for the serving classes, the reason morality had been invented in the first place—to channel their animal spirits. The aristocracy need not bother itself with such concerns, enlightened as their baser instincts always were by elevated emotions. The prevailing theory seemed to be that as long as you were being faithful to someone, it didn’t really matter whether you were married to that someone or not.
COMME IL FAUT
A gentleman receives letters from his mistress at his club. They are brought to him on a silver salver, address-side down, so no one else may see a possibly familiar handwriting.
CHAPTER 5
THE NEW HEIRESSES
Vivat Rex
Entertaining Edward
The Last Marriages
Till Death or the Judge Do Us Part: The American Heiress Divorce
Epilogue
VIVAT REX
On January 22, 1901, Winston Churchill was in Winnipeg on a lecture tour. Far as Winnipeg was from England, it was still part of the British Empire, and when word of Queen Victoria’s death arrived, flags were hoisted to half-mast and black bunting appeared on the cold gray buildings. Winston, in a letter to his mother, called the Queen’s death “a great and solemn event.” But he was also curious about its effect on Edward: “Will it entirely revolutionise his way of life? Will he sell his horses. . . . Will he become desperately serious? . . . Will the Keppel [maîtresse en titre Alice Keppel] be appointed first lady of the Bedchamber?. . . Will he continue to be friendly to you?”
Winston was not alone in his curiosity. What kind of king was Albert Edward going to make? Would he reform utterly? Would he be a sober monarch like his mother? Or would he remain loyal to his friends? Would his love of fun transform court ritual into a glittering fantasy? Was England, with a �
��corpulent voluptuary” (in Kipling’s phrase) on the throne, to become the Promised Land for rich socialites?
Left: Queen Victoria’s funeral took place on a suitably mournful day in February. Many of the Empire’s denizens had known no other monarch.
Right: The service book for the funeral, specially bound in purple velvet. The Queen, a connoisseur of mourning, would have been gratified by the public display of grief at her death.
NEW YORK ON PARADE
American women, particularly the ambitious variety, had never been in greater need of a Promised Land. Even in New York’s most captious moments (as when pretty, well-dressed Mrs. John Mackay, with her newly minted silver-mining fortune, was cut dead at a musicale given by Mrs. Paran Stevens), both parvenus and Old New Yorkers had acted out of conviction. The gatekeepers knew that guarding the purity of New York society was crucial, and aspirants such as Mrs. Mackay knew that New York was worth assaulting. But by the turn of the century, their conviction had failed. Mrs. Astor, though still in New York, had retired from her throne. She’d gone mad, in a singularly appropriate fashion: gowned and jeweled as if for one of her balls, she wandered around her great house, graciously greeting a crowd of imaginary guests.
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“This having to keep en evidence all year! We society women simply drop down in harness!”
MRS. JOHN R. DREXEL
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The Fifth Avenue Easter Parade typified New York society’s aimlessness. New Yorkers were perpetually all dressed up with nowhere to go.
It took three women to replace Caroline Astor. Society was ruled now by “the Great Triumvirate”: the acid-tongued Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish; Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs, whose father had been a rough-and-tumble miner in the Comstock Lode; and, inevitably, the indomitable Alva, who had become Mrs. Oliver H.P. Belmont shortly after Consuelo’s wedding. These women cared less about keeping society pure than about keeping society entertained, and the result was a great deal of silliness. There was the famous “Dogs’ Dinner,” at which canine guests in their best collars ate pâté. There was the episode of Prince del Drago, a guest of Mrs. Fish, for whom a lavish party was given—and enjoyed, even though the Prince turned out to be a monkey. There was the Servants’ Ball, to which all the guests came dressed as their own maids, footmen and cooks. There was the Belmonts’ famous Automobile Parade, for which the novel “motors” were decked with flowers and drivers had to negotiate a course set with obstacles such as the dummy of a nursemaid with a carriage. As Betty Leggett, an exiled New York matron, wrote to her husband, “There seems no dignified social leadership in New York at all.”
Mamie Fish, Aha Belmont and Tessie Oelrichs, the Great Triumvirate, made amusement their top priority.
Betty had not “taken” in New York, so there was an element of sour grapes in her comparison. But she was not alone in noticing the emptiness of American social life. Henry James, visiting the States after a long absence, complained that there was nothing, in the evenings, to “go on to”—no state balls, no political receptions, just another evening of dressing up and eating too much and toddling home again. Ralph Pulitzer, in his sardonic New York Society on Parade, describes a typical conversation in an opera box, opening with a lady’s remark to a young man that “she sees his grandmother is wearing her Pearls tonight. He professes surprise, as he had understood the Pearls were being cleaned at the jeweller’s, and had therefore taken for granted that she would wear the Sapphires. They then remark with interest which of their jewels several other women are wearing. For hostesses and their social clients . . . are very much more familiar with their friends’ gems than with their children, and take a deep and affectionate interest in their families of precious stones.”
MARCH OF ANGLOMANIA
Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish had a famous English butler named Morton, who frequently set her on the right path by saying: “Just as you wish, Madam. But I can only assure you it is not done in the best English households. . .”
THE BRADLEY MARTINS GO TOO FAR
At the same time that American society was becoming both ostentatious and empty, the lower orders were becoming uppity. It was a restless period of labor disputes and discontent, which occasionally, as in the episode of the Bradley Martin Ball, punctured even the complacency of the rich. The Bradley Martins, having married their daughter Cornelia so advantageously to the Earl of Craven, had a fine position in London. Yet they still, in the late 1890s, maintained ties to New York. Cornelia had been married from New York, greatly to everyone’s inconvenience but as a matter of principle.
Left: Lady Craven, née Cornelia Martin, photographed by Alice Hughes. Her parents moved in next door to her home in London.
Right: The ill-fated Bradley Martin Ball, depicted in Harper’s Weekly. The fair hostess is shown at top left of drawing.
Then in the winter of 1897—a particularly hard winter, when unemployment in New York was very high—the Bradley Martins gave a costume ball at the Waldorf-Astoria to stimulate the economy. Creating work for hairdressers, florists, costumiers, caterers, waiters and jewelers might not have done much for the destitute, but it attracted enormous attention of the nastiest nature. Anarchists, it was said, tried to blow up the Bradley Martin house a few days before the ball, and the windows of the hotel were boarded up, either to prevent the hoi polloi from throwing bombs or simply to keep them from peeking in and seeing their betters at play.
The ball matched Alva Vanderbilt’s 1883 costume ball in splendor. Mrs. Bradley Martin again went as Mary, Queen of Scots, this time wearing a cluster of diamond grapes, formerly Louis XIV’s. Oliver Belmont wore a $10,000 suit of armor inlaid with gold, Anne Morgan was costumed as Pocahontas, and one Infanta of Spain had to dress at the hotel because her dress wouldn’t fit through the door of her house. The difference, however, between Alva’s ball and the Bradley Martin Ball was that Alva got away with hers. The Bradley Martin festivities were accompanied by hundreds of column-inches of newsprint and followed by denunciations from editorialists and clerics all over the city. The party was estimated to have cost $370,000 and, according to the rector of St. George’s Church (J.P. Morgan’s place of worship), would increase discontent among the poor.
The Bradley Martins, shocked by such harsh judgments and reassessed by the tax collectors, left New York for good. They may have remarked with chagrin that the Devonshire House costume ball, an even more lavish affair held in London less than six months later, was not the least bit controversial.
It is no wonder, then, that turn-of-the-century American social life, even for those at its very peak, seemed somewhat less than all-absorbing. Mrs. Ogden Goelet complained to her sisters about opening Ochre Court in Newport for the summer: “It will mean such a lot of trouble and endless domestic worries, running that big establishment—just a housekeeper for the 27 servants, the 8 coachmen and grooms and 12 gardeners. . . . ” In fact, more and more people like Grace Wilson Vanderbilt (and like the Bradley Martins before their debacle) routinely spent the winter season in New York and the summer season in London. The “Steamer Set,” the early version of the jet set, had come into being.
MARCH OF ANGLOMANIA
In 1887, when Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin returned to New York after three months in London, their name was suddenly spelled Bradley-Martin.
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“‘I like to lead a well-rounded life,’ was an expression Mother used all the time. By this she meant she liked to be in various parts of the world when the social season was on.”
CORNELIUS VANDERBILT IV, in The Queen of the Golden Age
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ROYAL CIRCLES
In the spring of 1901, American women crossed the Atlantic more eagerly than ever. The Prince of Wales, their chief patron in England, would soon be crowned king. With the rest of the international set, they waited for signs that Bertie’s version of court life would prove as sumptuous and grand as his mother’s had been austere and sober. A heartening signal came right away. On January 23, the
day after Victoria’s death, His Majesty announced to his Privy Council that he intended to be called “Edward, a name carried by six of our ancestors.” He was dropping “Albert,” his father’s name, the name his mother had tried to insist on for all of her grandchildren. Whether or not he actually commanded his sisters to “Get this morgue cleaned up!” when he first visited Buckingham Palace as king, major alterations were soon underway: modern plumbing, an extended telephone system, garages for His Majesty’s motors. His father’s rooms, left intact since Albert’s death, were turned out, and cartloads of photographs and bric-a-brac hauled away.
King Edward’s sitting room at Buckingham Palace. His Majesty was swift to put his stamp on his new residence.
For the State Opening of Parliament, Edward decreed that the peers wear full state robes, and the procession to Westminster glittered as it hadn’t done for years. The Drawing Rooms, where presentations to the Queen took place, were moved from the middle of the afternoon to the evening, and dance music was played afterward in the Palace. No longer did one arrive home from court at five in the afternoon, all dressed up with no place to go; one stayed and danced in the presence of the monarch. In royal residences, smoking was allowed, the conversation at dinner became general (as opposed to the Queen’s system of individual inquisitions) and guests were permitted to sit in the presence of Their Majesties. Bridge tables appeared at the Palace, and the King even tried to end the men’s custom of sitting at the table drinking port and talking politics for half an hour after dinner. (Force of habit defeated him on this point.)