The statuesque Lillie was 5 ft. 8 in. and had masses of red-gold hair. She had a flawless complexion and at the height of her fame appeared in advertisements for Pears soap. One of the first celebrities to endorse a commercial product, Lillie was paid £132, a sum equal to her weight. Her figure, regularly compared to that of a goddess, was maintained through jogging.
Lillie posed for the most famous artists of her day, among them James Whistler, John Millais, and Edward Burne-Jones. Her image—reproduced on postcards—was displayed on the walls of army barracks, student dormitories, and ships’ cabins, thus beginning the pinup picture vogue. When she was 24, all manner of men desired her. The famous 78-year-old French author Victor Hugo once toasted her, “Madam, I can celebrate your beauty in only one way—by wishing I were three years younger.”
She made her theatrical debut in 1881, and although her acting talents were uneven, she nevertheless became the toast of both England and America, playing opposite such leading men as Lionel Atwill and the young Alfred Lunt. In Texas, the infamous Judge Roy Bean renamed his saloon the Jersey Lily and moved it to the town of Langtry. After the judge’s death, Lillie was bequeathed his revolver, which had reputedly been used several times to defend her honor.
In 1897, while Lillie was enjoying international acclaim, her hapless husband died broke in an insane asylum. Two years later she married Hugo de Bathe, who succeeded to a baronetcy in 1907, making Lillie Lady de Bathe. Using £55,000 of her own money, she remodeled a derelict London playhouse, the Imperial Theatre, and spent the next two decades amusing herself with acting, baccarat, and occasional visits to her friend Queen Mary. When she was 64 and a grandmother, most of her admirers had fallen away. On a visit to New York, she was seen visiting public dance halls where she paid gigolos 50¢ to dance with her. Yet, some vestige of her beauty remained. Oscar Wilde had predicted she would “be a beauty still at 85,” and she was certainly a beauty still upon her death at 74. Hugo de Bathe was useful to her as an official escort after her retirement to Monaco in 1918, but for the most part he occupied himself with chorus girls and debutantes in Nice. Lillie died, wealthy and alone, in Monaco in 1929.
SEX LIFE: Lillie enjoyed sex, but not nearly so much as she enjoyed her own glamour and notoriety. Sex was the serious business of her life, her ladder to the top. She believed that scandal was the best form of publicity and provided ample fodder for Victorian gossips.
In Lillie’s heyday, London’s most ambitious hostesses entered her name as a matter of course on any guest list that included her obese lover, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later to become King Edward VII). She was also romantically linked with Yankee millionaire Freddie Gebhard and George Alexander Baird, one of the wealthiest men in England. The mercenary Lillie parlayed these relationships into a fortune in diamonds, townhouses, a racing stable, and plenty of ready cash.
For the most part, Lillie’s men tended to be rich, ineffectual, and easily dominated. “Men are born to be slaves,” she once remarked. Edward Langtry was a sexual dud and a drunkard, and when his fortune dwindled he was of no use to her at all. Freddie Gebhard catered to her every whim, while tolerating her peccadilloes with doglike loyalty. George Baird delighted in beating Lillie, but every time he did so she made him pay her £5,000. She could also be haughty with her lovers. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary once gave her an emerald ring. Angered by an argument with him, she yanked off the ring and threw it into the fireplace. The crown prince fell to his knees, desperate to retrieve the emerald from the burning coals. Disgusted, Lillie told her friends, “I couldn’t love him after that.”
Lillie’s dominant nature and open disregard for Victorian morality enthralled Prince Albert. They would meet regularly at the homes of friends, ostensibly for tea, and were given adjoining accommodations during weekend retreats. The intimate details of their affair were kept discreetly hidden, although the fact that they were lovers was no great secret. When Albert once complained, “I’ve spent enough on you to buy a battleship,” Lillie snapped back, “And you’ve spent enough in me to float one!” Edward Langtry, meanwhile, was bribed into silence. Lillie remained Albert’s mistress until she playfully dropped a piece of ice down his back at a party. The prince was not amused and abruptly ended the affair.
On the rebound, Lillie consoled herself with yet another prince, Louis Alexander of Battenberg, Albert’s nephew. Louis, an officer in the Royal Navy, was perhaps the only man Lillie ever really loved and the father of her only child, a daughter named Jeanne-Marie.
To Lillie’s credit, she was never a hypocrite about her many affairs and could even be amused by bawdy items such as this one from a scandal sheet of the time: “We heard that Mrs. Langtry has lost her parrot…. That the lady possessed such a bird we were unaware, but we knew she had a cockatoo.”
HER THOUGHTS: “We women begin the world with such limited prospects, and we surprise ourselves sometimes.”
—M.S.
Unlucky In Love
LILLIAN RUSSELL (Dec. 4, 1861-June 6, 1922)
HER FAME: In the era just before radio and motion pictures, when the great medium of entertainment was the stage, Lillian Russell was the ranking American star. Celebrated for her great beauty, her clear soprano voice, and her flamboyant lifestyle, she specialized in light operatic and musical comedy roles.
HER PERSON: Helen Louise Leonard’s parents were advanced thinkers for their day. Her father was a midwestern publisher of agnostic tracts, her mother an ardent suffragette. At 17, accompanied by her mother, Helen left Clinton, Ia., for New York to study voice with Dr. Leopold Damrosch. Too impatient to endure the long years of training for a career in grand opera, she made her debut as a teenage chorine in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. A golden blonde with cornflower-blue eyes, a peaches-and-cream complexion, and an exaggerated hourglass figure, she soon came to the attention of impresario Tony Pastor, who promoted her to overnight stardom as “Lillian Russell, the English Ballad Singer.” Russell went on to sing the role of D’Jemma in The Great Mogul: or, the Snake Charmer, to star in Jacques Offenbach’s The Grand Duchess, and to appear in the vaudeville and burlesque vehicles Whoop-dee-doo and Hokey Pokey. But such was her stature that, whatever the role, her arrival onstage was greeted by a “rush of pure awe.” She reigned as the toast of Broadway for some 30 years.
LOVE LIFE: Russell, who was said to possess the enchantment of a Dresden shepherdess and the radiance of Venus emerging from her bath, exuded a sexual magnetism comparable to that of Marilyn Monroe. She was surrounded by wealthy and titled suitors who showered her with flowers, furs, jewels ($100,000 worth from one anonymous admirer alone)—even cold cash. But like the latter-day sex goddess, Russell also had a streak of vulnerability, which involved her in a succession of disastrous marriages.
Russell married at 18. Her husband was Harry Braham, the musical conductor of her first show, and she bore him a child, who died while in the care of a nursemaid. (The parents were busy at the theater at the time.) The Brahams’ marriage never recovered from this loss. Seduced again by music, she eloped a few years later with Edward Solomon, a composer and conductor who neglected to tell his bride that he was already legally married, and also failed to provide for Russell and their daughter. Husband number three was Giovanni Perugini (real name: Jack Chatterton), a caricature of the handsome tenor, vain, fatuous, and, as it happened, gay. Theirs was derisively called “a marriage of convenience—his,” for Perugini was so absorbed in the advancement of his career that he left Russell a “kissless bride.” (“I love you too much to defile you,” he claimed.) Russell, who passed her wedding night playing poker, was not amused, particularly when her husband began verbally abusing her in public. She left Perugini after two months of marriage when he tried to throw her out of a seventh-story window. “When the woman is the breadwinner, the superior in both intelligence and disposition,” Russell complained, “she should at least be respected and not nagged at and worried….” But Perugini had his side too. In
his defense, he told a newspaper reporter: “Do you realize the enormity of this woman’s offense—her crime? Do you know what she did to me? Why, sir, she took all the pillows; she used my rouge; she misplaced my manicure set; she used my special handkerchief perfume for her bath; … Once she threatened to spank me, and she did, with a hairbrush, too. You can’t expect a fellow to take a spanking with equanimity, can you?”
Her fourth and final husband was Alexander P. Moore, a politically ambitious Pennsylvania newspaper publisher, who offered her stability and respectability if not grand passion.
Russell was painted in the press of the Gay Nineties as a scarlet woman, a modern Jezebel. It was rumored that she smoked cigarettes (which ladies simply did not do), conducted orgies on the tiger-skin rugs in her New York townhouse, and went out with a circus strong man. Actually, she was involved in a long-standing affair with Jesse Lewisohn, heir to a copper fortune and a fellow poker player. Together they made up a frequent foursome with “Diamond Jim” Brady, the corpulent salesman of steel railway cars, and Edna McCauley, a woman whom Brady passed off as his niece for 12 years. Unhappily for Russell, however, this was to be another star-crossed love affair. Lewisohn eloped with McCauley, leaving Russell to console herself with Brady.
In fact, theirs was a unique friendship. It centered on their huge appetites. One appetite they shared was a taste for high living. Brady overindulged himself in everything except alcohol. It was his habit to give away everything he owned once a year and then to replace it all in a flurry of buying. He customarily wore up to $250,000 worth of precious gems. Their second shared appetite was for the pleasures of the table. Russell was by now a well-upholstered 165 lb., and Brady was a king-size 250 lb. Russell was the only woman he had ever met who could keep up with him at the table; the two of them often got together just to gorge themselves on several trays of well-buttered sweet corn. (Brady often single-handedly depleted the entire pantry at Charles Rector’s restaurant on Broadway. After his death, his stomach was found to be six times normal size.) Brady proposed marriage to Russell several times, once by spilling a million dollars into her lap. She declined with thanks, fearing it would wreck a beautiful friendship, but she often took him along on her dates with other men.
In her 50s Russell retreated from the stage to a second career as a syndicated columnist, offering advice on health, beauty, and love. She also lent her celebrity to the cause of women’s suffrage. When, as the greatest sex symbol of her day, whose profile was practically a national institution, she marched the length of New York’s Fifth Avenue in the great suffrage parade of 1915, it was one of her proudest performances.
—C.D. and M.S.
III
Painting The Town
Painter In Paradise
PAUL GAUGUIN (June 7, 1848-May 8, 1903)
HIS FAME: Generally regarded as the best Postimpressionist painter to come out of France, Gauguin gained fame and honor, albeit posthumously, for brilliantly colored, highly subjective works of art depicting unspoiled Polynesian life. His paintings include Daydream, Two Tahitian Women, and the sprawling canvas Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
HIS PERSON: Born in Paris, three-fourths French and one-fourth Peruvian Creole, young Paul was taken to live in Lima, Peru, in 1851 when Napoleon III staged a coup d’état in France. Nudity was commonplace in South America, and these early experiences affected him strongly. All his life he felt most comfortable among naked women. Paul returned to France with his mother in 1855, and at age 17 he decided to explore the world as a sailor. Six years later he quit the sea for the more respectable but no less uncertain life of a stockbroker. The French Bourse enriched him for a time, but when the Paris exchange crashed in 1883, he decided to chuck it all and concentrate full-time on his hobby—painting. The decision ruined his marriage, doomed him to a life of penury, and gave the world some of its most treasured art. Gauguin’s vivid, primitive canvases represented a departure from traditional art. Instead of reproducing an image with photographic fidelity, he chose to project his mind’s eye and turned to primitive cultures for inspiration. He made little money at it.
Gauguin in 1888
Gauguin befriended other painters of the period, among them Pissarro, Cézanne, and Van Gogh, and joined in the Impressionist exhibitions of the 1880s. For 10 weeks toward the end of 1888 he lived and worked with Van Gogh in “the yellow house” in Arles, France. Their incompatibility drove Gauguin to Paris. Increasingly alienated from his wife as well as from Western civilization, Gauguin managed to sell 30 paintings in 1891 and booked passage to Tahiti. Except for a brief return to Europe in 1893, he spent the rest of his life in the South Seas, painting and sculpting. He died bitter and broke, on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands.
SEX LIFE: From his early days as a teenage seaman to his last months as a dying syphilitic on the Marquesas, Gauguin had an extremely active sex life, even though a large, bumpy nose dominated his angular face and he could hardly be called handsome. With his marriage in 1873 to Mette Sophie Gad, a tall, blond Danish governess, he settled into what promised to be a life of respectability and comfort. Then one day in 1883 Gauguin came home from the stock exchange and announced, “I’ve handed in my resignation. From now on I shall paint every day.” Mette, stunned and outraged, hoped that this was just some phase Gauguin was going through. His in-laws in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the couple lived for a time, ridiculed his aspirations. The resultant strain and lack of money caused the Gauguins to separate. Still, even after leaving for Tahiti he clung to the hope that his wife and five children would one day join him there. They never did.
In Tahiti in 1891, Gauguin found artistic inspiration and all the breasts he could fondle. At first he reveled in the local custom of welcoming a different native woman into his hut each night, but he soon learned that such promiscuity hindered his work. He longed for his own vahine (“woman”). He set out to find one, and at a neighboring village he was offered the hand of a nubile native, barely into her teens, named Tehura. Gauguin was instantly attracted to her. Assured that she was entering the union willingly and that she was free from disease, Gauguin took her to his hut. After a week’s trial marriage she agreed to remain permanently. With Tehura by his side, frequently as his model, the artist turned out much work. Inspired one night by her fear of the tupapau, or evil spirit, he created The Spirit of the Dead Is Watching.
In 1893 he sailed for France, leaving a pregnant Tehura behind. In Paris he renewed his relationship with a former mistress, a simple, withdrawn seamstress named Juliette Huet. He also began an affair with a 13-year-old waif known as Anna the Javanese, who was half Indian, half Malay. Anna turned out to be disastrous for him. She kept him from his work, and, when they went to Brittany, her unpopularity among townspeople was immediately evident. One afternoon she stuck out her tongue and thumbed her nose at a group of children who were making fun of her outlandish clothes. The incident touched off a melee that ended with Gauguin’s being kicked unconscious by a gang of 15 fishermen. Gauguin had barely recuperated when Anna deserted him after carefully stripping his studio of all valuables except his paintings.
When Gauguin returned to Tahiti in 1895, he expected to resume housekeeping with Tehura. But she had meanwhile married an islander. Although she did visit the painter for about a week as a sort of hut-warming present, she was frightened by his syphilitic sores and went back to her husband. Gauguin had lost his mate, but many others filled the void. “My bed has been invaded every night by young hussies running wild,” he complained at one point. “Yesterday I had three.” Looking for a “serious woman for the house,” he briefly settled down with a pretty 14-year-old named Pahura, but she was not as stimulating as Tehura. Still, he did a nude of her, Arii Vahine (“The Noblewoman”), which he considered “the best I have ever painted.”
In 1901 he moved to a 1 1/4-acre lot on one of the Marquesas, where he built a hut that he decorated with pornographic photos. In a bed into whose wooden frame Gauguin had ca
rved an erotic scene, he slept with virtually any native woman willing to overlook the open sores festering on his legs. Whenever a new girl entered his hut, he would explore her body underneath her dress and say to her, “I must paint you.” Although his syphilis grew progressively worse, it was a heart attack that eventually killed him in 1903.
Gauguin’s son by Pahura, named Émile, boasted of his illustrious parentage and always hoped to become a painter of some note himself, but he died in poverty at the age of 80, in January of 1980.
HIS THOUGHTS: “In Europe intercourse between men and women is a result of love. In Oceania love is a result of intercourse. Which is right? The man or woman who gives his body is said to commit a small sin. That is debatable…. The real sin is committed by the man or woman who sells his body.”
“Women want to be free. That’s their right. And it is certainly not men who stand in their way. The day a woman’s honor is no longer located below the navel, she will be free. And perhaps healthier, too.”
—W.A.D.
The Dejected Dutchman
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 11