The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  All this might have been acceptable, except for a few niggling questions that kept gossips in both the Christian and the Jewish communities busy. For one thing, if his family were large estate owners, why had August Belmont been farmed out to the Rothschilds at a tender age, and not been given a university education, as would befit his station? Why had the Rothschilds advanced the young man so rapidly? Why, contrary to the Rothschilds’ traditional practice—which was to send a Rothschild son or close Rothschild relative to open a new branch of their banking business—had they turned over Naples, Havana, and finally New York City to a complete outsider? Was August Belmont privy to some shameful Rothschild family secret? (Belmont himself would breezily explain that the Rothschilds didn’t consider New York an important enough city to waste a family member on.) Soon an even darker allegation came into circulation, to the effect that Belmont himself was the shameful family secret. According to a Rothschild family custom, it was said, whenever a male Rothschild traveled with a woman who was not his wife, the couple registered at hotels as “M. et Mme. Schönberg.” Was it possible that Belmont/Schönberg was a pet—if accidental—result of one of these extramarital liaisons? This would explain why the Rothschilds, while feeling responsible for his care, would also want him stationed as far from home as possible. As for the documents he claimed to have which proved his Belmont parentage, August Belmont was rich enough to have documents drawn up to prove anything he wanted.

  Over the years, this sort of gossip about the original August Belmont would continue to percolate, with innuendos that Belmont, for all his jolly popularity, was not quite “nice,” that there was something unsavory in his past, and that there had to have been some dirty work at the crossroads back there in the Rhineland Palatinate. Among New York’s Old Guard Jewish community, where name-changing has long been anathema, the story—true or not—that Belmont’s name was originally Schönberg is still believed and repeated, and his family’s quick transition into Christian high society is looked on with lofty disdain.

  August Belmont’s Christianization moved an important step forward in 1849, when he married the blond and beautiful Caroline Slidell Perry. Though not particularly rich or social, Caroline Perry came from a distinguished eastern family. She was the daughter of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, credited with having “opened” Japan to trade with the western nations, and the niece of another naval officer, Commander Oliver Hazard Perry, a hero of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Lake Erie. Presently, August Belmont established his new wife in a huge mansion with a private ballroom—the first in New York, it predated Mrs. Astor’s—on lower Fifth Avenue, and another vast palace in strictly Christian Newport. Soon the Belmonts’ dinner parties were the talk of society. For one thing, with their French-trained chef, they actually served good food, which was a rarity in an era when New Yorkers, if they wanted to eat well, usually went out to restaurants.

  The Christianization of August Belmont continued as he took up the Sport of Kings, and soon he had built up one of the finest racing stables in America, helped build what would become the Belmont Park Race Track on Long Island, and established the Belmont racing colors, scarlet and maroon. The scarlet-and-maroon motif would be carried out in his coachmen’s livery, their maroon jackets piped with scarlet ribbon, with silver buttons engraved with the Belmont “family crest,” which had materialized from somewhere. The Belmont carriages were lacquered in high-gloss maroon, the spokes of their wheels striped with scarlet.

  Nor was Culture overlooked. The Belmont collection of paintings—by Madrazo, Meyer, Rosa Bonheur, Meissonier, Munkácsy, Vibert, and Bouguereau—was unequaled in New York, and in the Fifth Avenue house an entire gallery was lined with vitrines filled with the Belmonts’ priceless collection of porcelains, bibelots, and objets d’art.

  Shortly before his marriage to Caroline Perry, Belmont had been invited to join New York’s most exclusive non-Jewish men’s club, the Union, and he had gone on to found the Manhattan Club and to become president of the American Jockey Club. More honors followed. In 1853, still only thirty-seven, for supporting the Democratic presidential candidacy of Franklin Pierce, August Belmont was appointed United States chargé d’affaires at The Hague. He held this post for two years, and then for the next three was the American Minister resident there. For his support of the Union cause during the Civil War—helping re-establish the Union’s damaged credit in the bourses of Europe—he was even given a special decoration by a Republican President, Abraham Lincoln.

  August Belmont died in New York in 1890, at the not-too-patriarchal age of seventy-four, and was given a Christian burial. If he had any regrets about his remarkable career, they might have been that—despite the elaborate trappings and apparatus of wealth and refinement with which he had managed to surround himself, despite the fact that he had once fought a duel in defense of a lady’s honor—he had never, not quite, attained the rank of gentleman, not even among the thousands of guests who had eagerly partaken of his courtly hospitality. Some magical ingredient of seemliness had eluded him. Mrs. Astor, in her entertaining heyday at the time of his death, had never given the nod. Nor had Belmont’s wife, sadly, ever achieved the status of grande dame. She was beautiful, yes, and her beauty seemed not to diminish through the years. But Caroline Perry Belmont had lacked the emotional wherewithal, the special energy and stamina, the ambition—some said the intellectual equipment—to be anything more than a lovely ornament in a rich man’s collection of costly symbols, which, perhaps, was all he had ever wanted or intended her to be. The Belmonts were reminders that money could buy almost, but not quite, everything.

  After her husband’s death, Caroline Belmont continued to live in the shadow of her flamboyant husband, and under the lingering cloud that hung over the Belmont name. It would take another generation of Belmont women to change all that.

  “Walk erect, young woman!” Isabella Stewart Gardner had commanded the young Eleanor Robson, whom she summoned to her doorstep at 152 Beacon Street with no further message to convey. Miss Robson, then eighteen, had already learned to walk erect, and it is possible that Belle Gardner, sensing a touch of class in Miss Robson’s poised and confident stride, was merely enjoining her to continue walking erect, and was not criticizing her carriage or her posture.

  Eleanor Robson, furthermore, had had to learn to walk erect in a considerable hurry. She had been born in Wigan, Lancashire, England, on December 13, 1879, the third generation of a theatrical family. Her grandmother, Evelyn Cameron, was a star of the English stage, and her mother, who used the stage name Madge Carr Cook, was probably best remembered for playing the title role in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Her father, Charles Robson, who conducted a small orchestra in England, died when she was quite young, and her mother later married the English actor Augustus Cook and moved with him to the United States, where Eleanor attended a convent school on Staten Island. When she was seventeen she followed her mother to San Francisco, where Madge Carr Cook had been hired for a stint with the Daniel Frawley Stock Company, a traveling repertory troupe. Though young Eleanor as yet had no real interest in the theatre, it was agreed that she would perform bit parts and walk-ons—as page boys and chamber maids—for $15 a week.

  About a month after her arrival, however, the ingenue star of the company, Gladys Wallis, resigned in a huff as a result of an argument with Mr. Frawley about being late for rehearsals, and a new ingenue had to be recruited in a desperate hurry. Because she was young and unquestionably pretty, with blond curly hair and wide blue eyes—but mostly because she was there and available—Eleanor Robson was drafted on the spot. In the next thirteen days she was required to learn thirteen different parts in the same number of plays, and one part was sixty pages long and called for a southern accent to boot. While the wardrobe mistress furiously put pins in her costumes, her mother drilled her in her lines, and, with an anxious mother hovering in the wings, Eleanor Robson went on stage and was letter-perfect. Afterward her mother commented that Eleanor d
id not seem to have to study her lines; she absorbed them. Furthermore, the audiences loved her. She had become that legendary thing, an overnight success. Her salary was immediately raised to $35 a week as a new star was born.

  For the next few years Eleanor Robson toured in various stock companies throughout the United States, delighting audiences wherever she went and gaining a considerable national reputation, while her salary rose to $75 a week. At twenty-one she made her Broadway debut in the role of Bonita Canby, the leading lady in a play called Arizona, by Augustus Thomas, whose ambition it was to write a play about every state (or prospective state) in the Union. Both Arizona and its star were a huge critical and popular success, the star’s salary doubled to $150 a week—a considerable sum for a young woman to be earning in 1900—and Arizona settled in for a long run.

  Eleanor Robson next demonstrated that she had a shrewd and sensitive feel for material that might be suitable for dramatization. Vacationing in London in the summer of 1903, she met the English Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, whose most recent offering had been an unsuccessful play called Children of the Ghetto. With Zangwill she toured the London ghetto, and during the course of the afternoon he mentioned a novelette he had written about a London slavey called Merely Mary Ann, which Miss Robson asked to read. Touched by the bittersweet story, she suggested to her producer that Zangwill be commissioned to write a version of it for the stage. The producer agreed, Zangwill wrote the script in record time, and Merely Mary Ann, with Eleanor Robson in the title role, opened on Broadway in 1904 to thunderously rave reviews. After a long run she carried the play to London, where it was also a huge success.

  In London, at the time, audiences were appauding the plays of Arthur Wing Pinero, James M. Barrie, and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was a writer who liked to keep track of what the competition was doing, and the surprise acclaim given to this “problem” play—dealing with poverty, by a Jewish playwright—particularly intrigued him. He went to see Mary Ann and, though not particularly impressed with the drama, was overwhelmed by its star. After seeing Eleanor Robson’s performance, he wrote to her: “I have just seen Mary Ann; and I am forever yours devotedly. I take no interest in mere females; but I love all artists. They belong to me in the most sacred way; and you are an artist.” It was high praise from an even higher source.

  The misogynistic George Bernard Shaw’s distaste for “mere females” was well known. On the other hand, he often developed passionate, if platonic, crushes on leading ladies, and his infatuation with Eleanor Robson would become one of the most ardent of these. His initial letter included an invitation to lunch at his house at 10 Adelphi Terrace, and, having once met her, he was even more smitten. He followed this meeting by sending her two snapshots of himself. On the back of one, showing him looking merry and jaunty, he wrote, “This is how I looked before I met you.” On the other, which showed him looking downcast and lovesick, he wrote, “This is how I look now.”

  They met several times again in London, and, when she left for a holiday in Paris, he began bombarding her with a series of long, fiery, and amorous letters, which began, typically, “To the Gifted, Beautiful & Beloved—Greeting. My dear Miss Eleanor.” Erratically spelled, they went on for pages, and closed, “Yours ever & ever … ever devoted G. Bernard Shaw.”

  Eleanor Robson returned to the United States to tour with the road company of Merely Mary Ann, which audiences couldn’t seem to get enough of, and the impassioned letters from G.B.S. followed her wherever she went. In San Francisco in the spring of 1905, she received a particularly excited missive nearly a thousand words long: “Fate has done its work. I have put you out of my mind and settled down hard to my business since you left England. After weary months of mere commercial affairs & rehearsals, I have begun another play—half finished it, indeed; and lo! there you are in the middle of it. I said I would write a play for you; but I did not mean in the least to keep my promise. I swear I never thought of you until you came up a trap in the middle of the stage & got into my heroine’s empty clothes and said Thank you: I am the mother of that play. Though I am not sure that you are not its father; for you simply danced in here & captivated me & deserted me & left me with my unborn play to bring into existence. I simply dare not count the number of months. Anyhow the heroine is so like you that I see nobody in the wide world who can play her except you.…”

  The play was Major Barbara, the story of the brave and idealistic young Salvation Army officer Barbara Undershaft; her rich, materialistic gunpowder-manufacturer father; and the handsome Greek professor and poet who loves her, and joins the Army just to be with her. Shaw confessed that he had written much of himself into the character of the lover. The play was finished within weeks and, with characteristic imperiousness, Shaw then cabled Miss Robson’s producer, George Tyler, demanding that Tyler release his star immediately so she could return to London and begin rehearsals for what would be a pair of matinee try-out performances. To Eleanor Robson, Shaw wrote, “One thing is essential—that you should know how to play the trombone—it would add greatly to the effect if you played it prettily. By the way, trombone players never get cholera or consumption, never die until old age makes them incapable of working the slide.”

  Understandably, Mr. Tyler found Shaw’s demands unreasonable. He replied that he had no intention of relinquishing the star of a hit play in the middle of its run, shipping her six thousand miles to London so that she could rehearse for two performances of a play no one had even read. Shaw’s response to this rebuff was typical. Calling Tyler “a most audacious ruffian,” he added, “You’ll be sorry!” As for Eleanor Robson, she was now being deluged with offers of parts and contracts. She would go on to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer, Constance in Robert Browning’s In a Balcony, and the title role in Bret Harte’s Salomy Jane; and among her co-stars would be Gerald du Maurier and John and Lionel Barrymore.

  If anyone was sorry it was George Bernard Shaw. Forced to rely on another actress, Major Barbara opened in London to poor notices. Though the play would later have many successful revivals, and become a motion picture—and though his adoration of Eleanor Robson remained undiminished—he maintained for the rest of his life that the initial failure of Major Barbara was due to the fact that the curmudgeonly George Tyler had refused to let Miss Robson leave Merely Mary Ann to perform the title role.

  Surprisingly, perhaps, considering their overpowering father and indolent mother, at least two of the three sons of August and Caroline Belmont had matured into rather active and independent men. With large inheritances from their father, all three might easily have preferred play to work. Perry Belmont, the eldest, married a woman named Jessie Robbins, who died young, leaving Perry a popular widower who enjoyed the clubs and parties of Newport, where he died in 1947 at the age of ninety-seven. But Perry Belmont was not a total idler. Between 1881 and 1889, he served in the United States House of Representatives, and was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 1885 to 1887. In 1889, having switched his allegiance to the Republican Party, he was rewarded by President Benjamin Harrison with an appointment as United States Minister to Spain. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the youngest, was less distinguished. He married, first, Sarah Swan Whitney and, second, Alva Smith, the former wife of William K. Vanderbilt and the mother of Consuelo Vanderbilt, later to become the Duchess of Marlborough. The second Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont was a political activist, a suffragette, and a doer of Good Works who helped, among other things, to form the Women’s Trade Union League. This was an organization of rich women which, in the early 1900s, periodically swept downtown to join the picket lines of the “Shirtwaist Girls” who were striking for higher wages and better working conditions in the garment-industry sweatshops.

  August Belmont, Jr., the middle son, had added to the family fortune by helping to finance and build the New York subway system. Like his father, however, he preferred a more aristocratic means of transportation, and was interested prim
arily in breeding and racing horses. He had a plantation in South Carolina; an estate in Hempstead, Long Island, and a nursery farm in nearby Babylon; a bungalow in Kentucky’s Blue Grass country. He also had a cottage in Saratoga called The Curcingle, set in the middle of a small private training track that adjoined the Saratoga race course. Then there was a big place in Newport called By-the-Sea, and a big house in New York. His wife, the former Elizabeth Hamilton Morgan, by whom he had three sons, died suddenly in 1898. August Belmont, Jr., then became what in those days was called a Stage-Door Johnny. One of the actresses upon whom he showered huge bouquets of roses, and to whom he sent worshipful notes backstage, was Eleanor Robson.

  In her memoir, The Fabric of Memory, Eleanor Robson Belmont is a little reticent about the details of her meeting with, and her courtship by, August Belmont, Jr. He drops rather casually into the pages of her book, as does her “decision” to marry him. One gathers that this decision was based on practicality more than passion. He was twenty-seven years older than she. On the other hand, he was a very rich man, and it was obvious that he adored her. In her book Eleanor Robson Belmont never fails to speak kindly of her husband, and it is clear that he was always kind to her. A father figure? Perhaps, but there was probably a little more to it than that.

  By 1910, when it was clear that he had become a serious suitor, there were certain facts to which she no doubt gave serious thought. She was thirty, getting a little old to play the ingenue roles which had made her famous. A sensible woman, she certainly realized that the kind of parts she had been playing would not go on being offered to her forever. Her career had reached a delicate stage. Professionally, she was at the Rubicon. Also, she had been working since her mid-teens. She may well have felt that she had earned retirement to a life that promised a certain amount of luxury and ease.