Henry Thomas Hope. (photo credit 4.7)
After a decade of dispute, the brothers finally settled. Henry Thomas Hope received the blue diamond and seven other important gems, Adrian inherited property, and Alexander came into possession of the huge Hope pearl and some 700 other gems and precious stones. Their mother, Louisa, who had remarried in 1832, retained much of her money.
When Louisa died in 1851, Henry Thomas married his longtime French mistress Anne Adéle Bichat who had, some ten years before, given birth to an illegitimate daughter, Henrietta. They moved into the London home he built at 116 Piccadilly.
LORD FRANCIS HOPE’S FAMILY
Henry Thomas wanted to show off his blue diamond. His opportunity came with London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 in an innovative, newly constructed structure, the Crystal Palace. The Great Exhibition was a benchmark for the Victorian era, displaying all sorts of machinery, weapons, models, scientific equipment, craftwork, and treasures to six million British and foreign visitors. It defined the genre of nineteenth century world expositions. Among the featured items was the Koh-i-Nur diamond, recently acquired by the British East India Company and presented to Queen Victoria. Next to it was a diamond of “177 grains tinged with blue and known as Mr. Hope’s.” This was the first naming of the “Hope diamond,” and on July 12, at the exposition, Hope had the honor of placing the gem into the hand of Queen Victoria for inspection.
Henry Thomas Hope was a conservative politician and a patron of the arts. His inheritance provided him with wealth, and the Hope diamond became its symbol. Owning such a diamond, as well as a fine London house, the inherited art collection, and a castle in Ireland, provided the trappings of aristocracy—without the title. A position in Parliament was respected, but, having married his former mistress, a French woman with no standing, late in life and having fathered a child out of wedlock, the status-conscious Henry Thomas felt somewhat deficient in Victorian society. The legitimization he sought could still only be achieved through genuine aristocratic status—just what his mother Louisa sought.
To achieve that aim, in 1861 Henry Thomas Hope helped engineer the marriage of his daughter Henrietta to Henry Pelham Alexander, the earl of Lincoln and son of the duke of Newcastle. Though the Pelham family had been a distinguished one, counting among its immediate ancestors Prime Ministers of England, it was, like the Hope family, having problems. Henry Thomas had to bribe the prospective groom—“Linky,” as he was known to friends—into the marriage. Though only twenty-seven years old, Linky had accumulated a mountain of debt—some £230,000 (about $24 million today) from horse racing alone. Linky was a deceitful, spendthrift drunkard; Queen Victoria called him “worthless.” He even extorted extra money out of Henry Thomas just before the wedding.
Linky’s immediate family was also beset by disorder. His parents were divorced, his estranged father a dour character, his mother half-mad, his sister an opium addict, and his brother a transvestite. Given Linky’s behavior, the Hope fortune could very well be squandered and the diamond, so ardently contested, lost.
When Henry Thomas Hope died in 1862 his widow, Anne Adéle Hope, inherited the estate at Deepdene, a collection of fine paintings, the castle at Blayney in Ireland, the London house on Piccadilly, and the Hope diamond.
When she finalized her will in 1876, she had two concerns—the Hope fortune and the family name. Normally, Adéle would have left the Hope family wealth to her daughter, Henrietta. But Henrietta’s husband Linky, now the sixth duke of Newcastle, was living at the edge of bankruptcy. Adéle knew how hard her husband had fought for the family treasures and how little regard he had for Linky, despite the aristocratic title he conveyed to the family.
Adéle thus decided to skip a generation and leave the Hope treasures to Henrietta’s children—her grandchildren—hoping they would be more capable than Linky of maintaining the family’s legacy. She also decided to make them heirs not outright, but “tenants for life.” This was a particular legal status. It meant that the Hope estates and heirlooms could not be easily sold off. They would be available for the use of the heir during his or her lifetime, but then had to be passed on, either to the descendants, or back to a sibling and his or her descendants. This, she thought, would assure continuity of the Hope treasures.
Adéle had labored long and hard for the legitimacy of her daughter and acceptance into the Hope family. With no son there was no one to carry the Hope name forward. Henrietta had five children: Beatrice, Archibald, Francis, Emily, and Florence. Archibald, the eldest male, would succeed his father as duke of Newcastle. So Adéle chose Francis, then only ten years old, as her primary heir, with the stipulation that he change his name to Hope upon reaching legal adulthood.
In 1879, Linky died. Henrietta remarried the next year, taking Thomas Theobald Hohler, a singer, as her husband. Given these circumstances, Adéle was dissuaded from changing her will. In 1884, Adéle died. To inherit, Francis had to wait three years, until he was twenty-one. On April 7, 1887, he became Lord Henry Francis Hope Pelham-Clinton-Hope (“Lord Francis”), and inherited the Hope home, castle, estate, art collection, and famous blue diamond.
The Hope diamond had been gathering fame as one of the largest and rarest of diamonds. Speculation about its origins had increased since the 1851 London exposition. The prominent Victorian gemologist, Edwin Streeter wrote about the ill-luck that had pursued diamond dealers like Tavernier, who first brought the blue diamond back from India. His scholarly account was heavily influenced by a fictional detective story, The Moonstone, penned in 1868 by Wilkie Collins, a friend of Charles Dickens. That story featured a yellow diamond—“the Moonstone”—which originally formed the eye of a Hindu idol in an Indian temple. It was purloined from the treasury of an Indian ruler by a thieving English soldier who then incurred the curse of the god. Smuggled to the English countryside, the Moonstone was at the center of theft, kidnapping, and murder. The god’s curse followed the English possessors of the diamond until the Moonstone was rightfully returned to India and set into the eye of the idol from which it originally came. Collins based his story on tales of the Orloff diamond and an incident described in Tavernier’s travelogue. The Moonstone was, in part, a moral commentary on colonialism, as symbolized by the British acquisition of the fabulous Koh-i-Nur diamond for Queen Victoria—literally, the “jewel in the crown.”
Henrietta Adéle Hope, duchess of Newcastle under Lyne. (photo credit 4.8)
Understandably, with more large named diamonds from India coming into public view, and Orientalist stories of “cursed diamonds” becoming something of a fashion, newspapers and other popular accounts often conflated the diamonds and their stories. A New York World article in 1888 reported that
The Hope Diamond [is] the property of an English gentleman of that name, who brought it from India. Its history is surrounded with wild traditions of the East, and more than once it has been stained with blood, lost and recovered, bought and sold, stolen and yielded as ransom. It has gleamed in the gem encrusted turbans of the great Maharajas, hung on the breasts of odalisques, and is said once to have formed the single eye of a great idol.6
Concocted stories like this had no historical basis whatsoever, yet contributed to the renown of the diamond, and, not insignificantly, to its worth.
Now, in London, as unlikely as it seemed given his wealth, privilege, and entitlement, Lord Francis was courting May Yohe, a talented girl of humble origins from America. Lord Francis could not possibly have imagined where his infatuation with May would take him.
For her part, May was on the threshold of unimaginable fame and fortune. She was to embark on an amazing personal and professional journey, traversing distances far greater than her voyage across the Atlantic.
Pit and gallery joined the wildest
demonstration ever given in a London
theater, when men threw pocketbooks
and women their jewels at my feet!
—May Yohe1
CHAPTER FIVE
&n
bsp; My Honey
MAY’S STAGE CAREER TOOK OFF IN LONDON. As one astute commentator noted about her, “with the witchery of her voice, her beauté du diable and her chic little figure, she comes triply armed to conquer.”2 Her success benefited from Lord Francis’ help, but was sealed when May entertained and charmed English audiences with a superb performance on January 19, 1893, for the opening at the Lyric Theatre of a comic opera, The Magic Opal.
The Lyric, newly opened in 1888, was a handsome 1,300-seat theater in London’s West End. Comic opera was flourishing as entertainment. Also known as “light opera,” it replaced a form of bawdier burlesque, translated French operettas, and more improvisational comedic theater. It was perfected by the partnership of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, whose polished, well-staged story-telling resonated with Victorian audiences entertained by the clever, if transparent farces, parodies, and commentaries of H. M. S. Pinafore (1878), Pirates of Penzance (1879), and The Mikado (1885).
The Magic Opal was crafted by the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz based upon a text by the English librettist Arthur Law and produced at the direction of Horace Sedger, the manager of the Lyric Theatre. The year before, Sedger had worked with W. S. Gilbert to produce The Mountebanks at the Lyric.
Lyric Theatre, London, 1889. (photo credit 5.1)
The Magic Opal is set in Greece, though its music is decidedly Iberian and Andalusian. A love story, it provided fodder for May’s later myth-making. In the convoluted plot, a brigand chief, Trabucos, is in love with Lolika, the daughter of Aristippus, a wealthy merchant. Lolika, though, is in love with Alzaga, son of the town’s pompous mayor, Carambollas. The rebel and the mayor’s son compete for Lolika’s affection. She disdains the rebel Trabucos, who has Alzaga kidnapped and sent away to the mountains. Trabucos then plots to gain Lolika’s affection by stealing back a magic opal ring previously stolen from him. The opal ring, in the mayor’s private collection, has the power to make the wearer fall in love with a person of the opposite sex when they touch—though no one save Trabucos knows of that power. As townspeople gather for the wedding, the mayor gives the magic ring to his daughter as a present. Trabucos’ sister Martina (played by May), is disguised as a peddler in the crowd. She steals the ring from Lolika’s hand, substituting a counterfeit. The mayor touches Martina, falls hopelessly in love with her, and proposes marriage to this seeming vagabond, to the shock of the crowd. The two-act play continues as characters inadvertently fall in and out of love with each other as the ring is worn by different women.
Newspaper illustration of a scene from The Magic Opal at the Lyric Theatre, 1893. (photo credit 5.2)
May sang a duet with Trabucos, played by Wallace Brownlow, and also performed a solo, in which she lamented the hardships of the peddler’s itinerant life. Overall, the play was well received, so much so that Sedger, within weeks, put together a second company that performed it in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Brighton, Leeds, Liverpool, and Newcastle.
Reviews of May’s performance were particularly noteworthy. One critic noted May’s excellent contralto song sung “with a remarkably powerful though, at present, somewhat rough voice.” Another found that “the four notes of her voice—deep and gruff as that of a basso—fairly astonished critics and audience alike. But it was novel, and Miss Yohe is graceful and pretty and so she and her voice were at once accepted as awfully fetching.”3
Newspaper illustrations of The Magic Opal, 1893. (photo credit 5.3)
The impression May made on the audience and even those on the theater staff was memorable. “The Call Boy,” an anonymous commentator on the London theatrical scene recalled:
The lady is the olive-complexioned, hazel-eyed, neat-figured, uncommon-voiced beauty who, in the character of a gipsy, stole away my heart on the first night of The Magic Opal at the Lyric on Thursday, January 19th, 1893; at which time, at which house, and in which piece, Miss May Yohé made her bow to an admiring British Public.4
The great playwright, critic, and future Nobel prize-winning author George Bernard Shaw also reviewed the play. His praise of May’s performance was all the more impressive given his trenchant critique of the opera itself and the other leads.
The only success of the first night was made by a Miss May Yohe, who, though she spoke the American language, actually had not ordered her florist to deliver half his stock to her across the footlights. She is personally attractive; her face, figure, and movements are lively and expressive and her voice is extraordinarily telling: it sounds like deep contralto; but the low notes beneath the stave, which are powerful in a normally trained contralto, are weak; and she has practically no high notes. But the middle of her voice, which she uses apparently by forcing her chest register, is penetrating and effective.5
Shaw pegged Yohe’s distinctive, trademark voice. Another called it a “steam calliope contralto.”6 When one inquirer asked who trained her “extraordinary voice,” May responded, “Its owner.” A follow-up question asked, “Do you know Miss Yohe that yours is the sort of voice that goes right to the heart?” “Is it?” she said, “Well perhaps that is because it comes straight from it, or at least, from the chest, which is somewhere in the same neighbourhood.”7
Throughout her career, Yohe was said to have a limited vocal range with a small number of notes. Indeed, the notes in her repertoire became a metaphor for various accomplishments and setbacks on and off stage. When she added a romantic conquest, commentators would write that she added a note; when beset with a financial downturn, critics would say she lost one.
The rich tone and foghorn quality of her voice, coupled with her delicate stature, placed her in a wonderfully ambiguous, alluring position. The contralto is the deepest female singing voice in the classical theater. Parts could be sung by females or by male castrati, male singers in Italian opera who were castrated before their larynxes matured. Contraltos may play female parts, but more often female villains or “trouser roles”—adolescent or feminine males. As cognoscenti say, contraltos play “witches, bitches, or britches.” May’s voice was intriguing because it seemed to cross and conflate gender lines, creating a dramatic tension between her and the audience. If her voice came from her heart, was it male or female? How was its sexuality heard by her listeners? And what did it then say about their sexuality?
Newspaper caricature of May Yohe in The Magic Opal, 1893. (photo credit 5.4)
T. H. L., a theater critic, contemplated the question and captured the sensual effect of May’s performance upon the audience:
That voice of hers has often puzzled me. Why does it fix you in your seat, rivet your whole attention, and somehow stir your heartstrings as they have rarely been touched before? The jeunesse dorée in the stalls actually sprang to life under its quickening vibration, while the gallery boys went mad over it.8
Though accolades for May’s performance were considerable, praise was not universal. An artist for one of London’s illustrated weeklies made fun of May, depicting her as an awkward amateur and reflecting what seemed to be some anti-American sentiment.
Despite the good reviews and requests from other theaters for the touring show, The Magic Opal had a disappointing run of only forty-four shows before closing at the Lyric on February 27, 1893. Theater finances, rather than quality, proved its undoing. The production expenses for the show were inordinately large, and high ticket prices kept audiences below the size needed to break even. This was a problem not uncommon for theaters of the time; indeed newspapers often published commentary about how music hall entertainment was drawing off audiences and revenue from the theater. The Sunday Chronicle parodied Horace Sedger’s problem:
Dear O-pal, costly O-pal,
Dear O-pal, costly O-pal.
Making for Sedger,
A hole in the ledger;
Give us one better than dear Opal.9
Sedger responded by asking Albéniz to revise the play, which he did by April. Characters and some numbers were eliminated; the plot was simplified. Interestingly enoug
h, the title was changed to The Magic Ring. This was a concession to a popular belief that opals were cursed—something that may have dissuaded audiences from attending the show, or at least accepting its story line. That belief had originated as a superstition invented by Hungarian and Slovak mine owners in an effort to keep Australian opals off of the European market in the early nineteenth century. Sir Walter Scott based his 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein on that superstition, and it became part of popular culture thereafter.
May appeared neither in the touring company nor in the re-titled production. Instead, she starred as the lead in Mam’zelle Nitouche, which opened at the competing Trafalgar Square Theatre on May 6, 1893, and ran through the summer. Called a “vaudeville opérette,” this is really an operetta within an operetta. First produced in Paris a decade earlier, it was written by Henri Meilhac and Albert Milaud.
The story is set in nineteenth-century France, where a mischievous and playful young convent girl, Denise de Flavigny, discovers that Célestin, the organist and music teacher, secretly composes operettas for his lover Corinne. Denise gets Célestin to take her to a performance in town. A quarrel between the two lovers forces Denise to take the stage under the name of Mam’zelle Nitouche. Denise proves adept, starring in the performance, and then falls in love with a young soldier named Fernand.
May Yohe as Denise in Mam’zelle Nitouche, 1893. (photo credit 5.5)
The role of Denise was a joyful (if somewhat narcissistic) one for May. It recalled her playful innocence at the Dresden girls’ school and affirmed her confidence in her own talent. Her performance again charmed London theater aficionados. “She possesses many of the qualifications required for a successful impersonation of Nitouche,” wrote the Times’ theater critic.
Madcap May Page 6