May Yohe, 1890. (photo credit 2.5)
May Yohe performing in The City Directory, 1891. (photo credit 2.6)
Perhaps to gain some control over the libidinous and free-spirited May, Lizzie took her across the Pacific Ocean to Australia in 1890. In Australia, May starred in a production of Josephine Sold by Her Sisters, appeared in other plays in Melbourne and Sydney, and earned notice from the public and the press as “a bright, sparkling, pretty, piquant, little brunette” with a “wonderful contralto voice.”32 The Sydney papers reported that May, dressed in “Eastern costume, sang in a very pleasing manner” and that she “was loudly applauded.”33
Returning to the United States, May performed in a number of productions in 1891: The City Directory, U and I, Hoss & Hoss, and various testimonials and variety shows. Though she was not accorded the same reverential status as the leading actresses of the day such as Sarah Bernhardt and Lillian Russell, May thought herself a rising star. She was a strong performer who was popular with audiences and generated high billing and good reviews. She was sought after for stage roles, toured Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and had a following for both her onstage career and offstage antics. In the spring of 1892, she went to England, hoping to find a manager to arrange theatrical appearances, but was unsuccessful.
Rumors of other supposed affairs and marriages cropped up again, some quite absurd. One news story alleged that May had married one of Massachusetts’ U.S. senators—highly unlikely given the status and visibility of both Senator Henry Davis, who was 76, and Senator George Hoar, who was 66. The New York Times and other newspapers exuberantly sang May’s praises, touting her good looks, her jewelry, and her talents, while at the same time acknowledging her exuberant, romantic escapades, both truthful and alleged. Her refreshing eccentricity earned her a nickname: “Madcap May,” a timely moniker she herself only rarely used, but no doubt deeply enjoyed.34
Goodness Maysie, you’ve caught a Lord!
—Lizzie Batcheller Yohe1
CHAPTER THREE
Nobly Courted
NO VISION OF DIAMONDS OR OF DUKES troubled my early days,” wrote May.2 Such would have been unfathomable, even as May courted stardom in her young career, had she not chanced to meet Francis Hope at a dinner party at the famed Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City in November 1892. The meeting cast her in the role of a real-life Cinderella and eventually sparked the growth of one of the greatest urban legends of our times.
May always claimed that when she first met him, she did not know that Francis was a wealthy English lord, in line to inherit one of the most prestigious dukedoms in Queen Victoria’s British Empire. To her, he was a well-spoken, British-accented, kind and attentive dinner companion who politely offered to accompany her to the Horse Show at Madison Square Garden. May was charmed by this “Mr. Hope.” He was poised, polite, and entertaining. Instead of “talking down” to the actress, he impressed May by treating her as an intellectual equal as they discussed politics, world affairs, art, and society.
May’s narcissistic desire to be the center of attention was apparent in her account of their first evening together. At Madison Square Garden, May enjoyed Francis’ discussion of the horses and the rapt attention he paid her. As she wrote,
I began to notice lorgnettes from all over the seat tiers turned in my direction. In the boxes near me, the splendidly coiffed heads of wealthy society women, matrons of families known throughout the world for their leadership of fashion, were turned upon me with stares that were frank and curious. And here and there I caught bows of friendly recognition to my escort. I thought, of course, these society women, whom I knew only by sight, were just interested in a close-up view of the famous May Yohe, the new star in the theatrical firmament. I was greatly excited about their interest, and talked and laughed about it with my companion.3
Francis, politely deflecting the true cause of the audience’s stares, told her, “You are so very beautiful Miss Yohe, I can quite well understand anyone’s wanting to get a good look at you.”4
Francis courted May in the ensuing days. He met her mother Lizzie, who was impressed by him. May toured New York City by day with Francis, and in the evening dined with him and his friends. Again, as May tells it, Francis conspired with those friends not to reveal his true identity.
Later that week, May announced to him her plans to return to London with her mother to consider contracts from theatrical managers to appear in new stage productions. Francis, obviously smitten, asked May and Lizzie to be his guests while in London and offered to show them around the city.
As May later construed it, this 1892 trip across the Atlantic played out like a theatrical love story in which she starred as the beloved princess. Francis met May and Lizzie upon their arrival. The “beaming” Francis held May’s hand for a “long time” and insisted she stay at the Savoy, London’s most expensive hotel—and first modern luxury accommodation.
The Savoy was a treat for May. The hotel had opened just a few years before in 1889. Owned by impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, it was built on the Strand in Central London with the profits from his productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas. The Savoy was opulent in every way for the time, with electric lights, elevators (or “ascending rooms” as they were called), speaking tubes between rooms, and even private bathrooms in the more exclusive suites. Arthur Sullivan was on the board of directors, and the hotel was managed by Cesar Ritz, who would later found the Ritz Hotel and define swanky style.
May recounted her first Savoy dinner with Francis:
That night when we were ushered into the dining room we found that one whole end of the big room had been roped off with silver ropes, and that behind it was a table set for three—decorated so lavishly I almost gasped. London knew I had arrived, and before dinner was well under way the word got out that May Yohe was at dinner in the Savoy dining room. Soon there was a regular parade of London Johnnies, sticks, silk hats, evening clothes and Inverness capes, marching along the silver ropes in one endless procession.
I was almost hypnotized by the novelty of it when the parade began. I didn’t know what it meant until Mr. Hope explained that the London Johnnie was an established institution, and that this was its customary reception to a new idol. It meant, he said, that I was already enthroned in the heart of London.5
Francis no doubt orchestrated the display, feeding May’s ego and desire for public attention. The next day they discussed what May claims were “hundreds of offers” from London theater managers and producers to have her appear in their shows. Francis offered to help May and Lizzie sort through the proposals and advance her career.
Then, in conversation with May, Francis’ offer went further. As May recounted, Francis confided, “You know, Miss May, I am hoping awfully that you are going to let me have a lot to do with your affairs—perhaps have the same interest in them that you have.”6
May’s reaction was dramatic. “It took my breath away,” wrote May. “I looked at him quickly. He was just smiling, a strange, whimsical sort of smile, but there was a very earnest light shining in his eyes.”7
May took this as Francis’ signal of a forthcoming marriage proposal. May politely responded in a rare, demure way, “That will be very nice, Mr. Hope.” As May reports, Francis “took my hand, gave it a little squeeze and said in a matter-of-fact way, just as if he were making a casual arrangement for tea or something like that, ‘Then it is all settled. I’m terribly glad.’ ”8
According to May, she learned of Francis’ real identity the next day. Still at the Savoy that afternoon, Francis was meeting with May and Lizzie in their suite, discussing possible managers and theatrical offers, when there was a knock at the door. Lizzie opened the door to find Francis’ valet, who said, “May I ask his lordship whether he will wear his tuxedo or his evening clothes?”
“Ask ‘his lordship’? Lordship who?” responded May’s perplexed mother.
“Lord Fra
ncis, Madame,” responded the valet.
As May recalled,
Mother turned toward us breathless. I had heard and was stunned. Then my heart gave one big jump. I thought I was dreaming. I looked at our guest. He [Francis] was looking at me with a sort of quizzical expression and smiling humorously … “You’d have to find it out some day, anyway. Will you care any the less for me now that you know if you keep me you will have to some day be the Duchess of Newcastle?”9
May was overcome. Lizzie gasped, “Your Lordship.” They broke out in a flabbergasted, polite laugh.10 Francis, whose full name was Lord Henry Francis Hope Pelham-Clinton-Hope, responded graciously, “No, just Francis to you both,” as he took May’s hand.11
Later, as Lord Francis left their suite, May knew she was in for an interesting time, like some fairy tale princess, when her mother turned to her and said, “Goodness Maysie, you’ve caught a lord!”12
Lord Francis Hope—one of the best men that ever lived.
—May Yohe1
CHAPTER FOUR
Hopeful
POSSESSED OF A KEEN SENSE of aristocratic entitlement, Lord Francis was a tall, handsome, debonair young man of twenty-six when he met May. He was the second son of the deceased sixth duke of Newcastle; his mother was Henrietta Adéle Hope. His elder brother, Henry Pelham Archibald, the seventh duke, was childless and sickly, and thus Francis was regarded as likely to be the next duke. But it was as a descendent of the prominent Hope family that Lord Francis literally made his name.
The Hopes earned their wealth in the 1700s and secured land, art, public office, and aristocratic titles in the 1800s. Originally Scots, they had become a transnational family of merchant bankers headquartered for several generations in Amsterdam and then in England starting in 1762. They provided major loans to national governments, including Russia, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal. The Hopes were important trading partners with the United States during the Revolutionary War. When Napoleon decided to sell his American holdings for 80 million francs in 1803, Hope & Company and Baring of London made the loan to the United States to finance the Louisiana Purchase.
Lord Francis Hope. (photo credit 4.1)
In their mercantile heyday, the Hopes were in the vanguard of a newly evolving European society. They were more disciplined and rational, more engaged in trade, finance, and generating wealth, than they were in enhancing aristocratic privilege. As the American and French Revolutions demonstrated, monarchies were dying institutions; healthy nations would be defined by economic growth and productive social investments, not by the preservation of excessive, consumption-oriented aristocratic lifestyles. Indeed, Lord Francis’ great-great uncle, Boston-born Henry Hope, who was eminently successful and a friend of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, declined the offer by Russia’s ruler Catherine the Great to bestow upon him an aristocratic title. Possessions and power were being passed from the nobility to the newly rich and powerful merchant class, and the Hopes were foremost among them.
Unfortunately for the Hopes, they fell victim to the very system they had initially begun to displace. Enormous wealth and mercantile power, built up by talented, entrepreneurial ancestors, was frittered away by descendants who were more interested in the attainment of high social rank and its correlated conspicuous consumption than in displacing the aristocracy. By the nineteenth century, the Hopes sought to become aristocrats. Two items characterized this quest: the acquisition of a title, or peerage; and the acquisition and display of an extraordinarily conspicuous diamond.
Thomas Hope in Oriental dress, c. 1798. (photo credit 4.2)
Lord Francis’ great-grandfather was Thomas Hope (1769–1831). Thomas and his younger brothers, Henry Philip Hope and Adrian Elias Hope, were beneficiaries rather than producers of mercantile success. When Hope & Company sold out to Baring in 1813 it left millions for the brothers’ pursuits. They were among the richest families in Great Britain.
Thomas Hope was an eminent author, expert in decorative arts and design, and collector of Flemish and Dutch paintings, passions he shared with George, the Prince of Wales and eldest son of King George III. Thomas also shared with the Prince a fascination with things Oriental and was drawn into a number of decorative projects for George’s transformation of his mansion at Brighton into a “pleasure palace.” The writer Lord Byron called Thomas Hope the “house furnisher withal.”2 Thomas adorned his own London townhouse with artistic treasures to be enjoyed by his wife Louisa and his three sons.
While Thomas was a scholar and aesthete, his wife Louisa was ambitious and aspired to an aristocratic title. When the Prince of Wales became King George IV in 1820, Louisa became a “woman of the bedchamber,” or lady-in-waiting, and her son “a lord of the bedchamber,” purely honorary titles with no formal powers or privileges.
The Hopes developed a relationship with the King’s right-hand man, Sir Arthur Wellesley, the first duke of Wellington, the hero who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Louisa instigated a scheme to offer the duke a huge £10,000 bribe (about $1 million today) if he would help them obtain a baronetcy, thus making them aristocrats. Wellington was outraged but did not want to expose the famed and crown-friendly Thomas Hope.
By 1828, Wellington had become a close family friend. While Louisa still harbored aristocratic ambitions, her connections to Wellington and the King did not get her nearer to a peerage.
These connections, however, did get the family closer to a marvelous, exceptional diamond. Thomas’ brother, Henry Philip Hope, lived modestly, never married, and built up one of Europe’s most fabulous collections of precious gems, including hundreds of diamonds. The collection was valued at the time at about £150,000, or the equivalent of about $15 million today.
In 1830, George IV died. Wellington was the executor of his estate. George had bankrupted the crown with years of extravagant purchases and his successor and brother, King William IV, was eager to sell off George’s property to relieve royal debts and avoid provoking public outrage over his brother’s extravagance. One of George’s prized possessions was a large forty-four-carat rare blue diamond.
Henry Philip Hope. (photo credit 4.3)
The blue diamond had a long, if somewhat purposefully obscured history. It was originally a 112-carat rough cut gemstone acquired in India in 1653 by French diamond merchant Jean Baptist Tavernier. In 1668, Tavernier sold it at Versailles to Louis XIV, who had it recut into an exquisite sixty-seven-carat heart-shaped gemstone, the second most valuable in the French crown jewels. It was placed in an ensemble of other gems, a decoration signifying membership in the knighthood of the Golden Fleece, and worn in that form by Louis XV and Louis XVI as well. The stunning and valuable blue diamond was then stolen from the royal treasury in Paris in September 1792 amidst the tumult of the French Revolution and “disappeared.” Napoleon tried to find it in his effort to restore the great crown jewels and France’s national pride.
Sketch of the Hope diamond. (photo credit 4.4)
The blue diamond resurfaced in its forty-four-carat cut-down form in 1812, and came into George’s possession by 1823. It was then called the “George IV Diamond,” and the King had it set into his own version of the Golden Fleece, a knightly decoration, presumably to insult Napoleon.
When George died, Wellington sought a discrete buyer for the diamond, and knowing the Hopes and Henry Philip’s collection, consummated the sale—reportedly for the bargain price of £18,000, though no records have been found to confirm that.
The blue diamond was first formally recorded in Henry Philip Hope’s catalogue Collection of Pearls and Precious Stones in 1839, and was modestly designated as “No 1.” The catalogue noted that the diamond is mounted on a “medallion, with a border en arabesque of small rose diamonds, surrounded by 20 brilliants of equal size, shape, and cutting, and of the finest water, and averaging four grains each.”3
Thomas Hope died in 1831 leaving £180,000, an incredible art collection, the London home on Duchess Street, and a mansion and estate at
Deepdene in Surrey to his wife and three sons. When his brothers died childless—Adrian Elias in 1834, and Henry Philip in 1839—Thomas’ sons inherited another £1 million, more property, more art, and the gem collection.
King George IV of England, c. 1820. (photo credit 4.5)
Thus the three surviving Hope children, Henry Thomas, Adrian, and Alexander Hope were fabulously wealthy. Henry Philip had written a letter to his three nephews, to be delivered posthumously, advising them “to cherish and cultivate a fraternal regard and affectionate feelings for each other, and not to dishonour or disparage the memory of your parents and uncles by unworthy differences among yourselves.”4
Sketch of the Hope diamond set in a medallion, c. 1839. (photo credit 4.6)
What ensued was exactly the opposite, with years of fraternal argument, vitriol, and lawsuits especially over control of the immensely valuable gem collection for which no clear bequest existed. Given that two of the brothers, Henry Thomas and Alexander, were members of Parliament and that the Hopes were involved in high society, the dispute was well known, even to Queen Victoria, who had assumed the throne in 1837. Benjamin Disraeli, a member of Parliament and later Prime Minister, knew the Hopes personally. He commented,
The three brothers Hope, though the wealth of the whole family had become concentrated in them, were always at war. There were some famous jewels, which had belonged to their uncle Philip Hope, which were a fruitful subject of litigation. There was a blue diamond that all the brothers wanted. They hated each other.5
Madcap May Page 5