Madcap May

by Richard Kurin

  Another provided a stronger, broader, more troubling indictment:

  The star of May Yohe does not seem to be glittering so effulgently as of yore. Last season, she was the most discussed woman in London; her photographs were in the shop windows along Regent Street and the Strand; a life-size transparency of her swung from the wall of the Lyric Theatre.

  But now the novelty of the fact that she is Lady Hope is no more, and those strange few tones which emanate from her throat and remind one of the bullfrog when he is doing his best, do not suggest at present to London Theatre-goers the victorious song of the siren.

  Possibly in a short time, when the old Duchess of Newcastle is dead and Miss Yohe has succeeded to that title, she will once more magnetize them. But at present, the burlesque, Dandy Dick Whittington, in which she is appearing at the Avenue is not attracting as many people as the management could wish.13

  Income from the theater was not enough to right Lord Francis’ debt. In bankruptcy, his trustees came up with a plan to sell a portion of his lands at the Deepdene estate in Surrey. This wonderful property with a beautiful mansion was being rented by Victoria Cross awardee Lord William Beresford and his twice-widowed American wife, Lillian Hammersley, née Price, the former duchess of Marlborough. They agreed to the sale by the assurance company holding Lord Francis’ debt. Thomas Hope’s lovely estate would now be sold off in lots.

  The trustees also wanted to sell the Hope diamond, even though it was a family heirloom. According to the newspapers, they hoped to get about £24,000 or approximately $13 million in today’s dollars for what one story described as a “rather ugly blue stone about the size of a hen’s egg”—not quite how May described the blazing gem she said she’d worn at Rothschild’s princely dinner.14

  As the newspapers had it, Lord Francis had now “tumbled into the deep abyss.” 15 When Miss Yohe married him she pictured herself living in his many fine houses, surrounded by luxurious pleasures which would be her due as the wife of a noble lord. Now, Lord Francis’ creditors had put a stranglehold upon him. “May’s victory,” declared one article, “has been an empty one.”16

  The assurance company sought to liquidate Lord Francis’ assets to pay off his debts. By December 1895, while the diamond was still unsold and resting in the Parr’s Bank vault, the bankruptcy was discharged. Now the couple had a fresh start. May took it upon herself to earn income to support the couple, a fact bandied about in the press. “Work for Lady Hope” blared the headline:

  May Yohe has seen all of this grandeur slip rapidly out of her hands, and now she is preparing to go back to her old work of wearing boys’ clothes and singing topical songs in the concert halls of London. She is credited with being the best boy impersonator in London to-day and aside from her title, can command a good salary through real merit.17

  Music sheet cover depicting May Yohe in Dandy Dick Whittington. (photo credit 7.3)

  The Hopes’ Deepdene estate, Dorking, Surrey, England, c. 1891. (photo credit 7.4)

  By the spring of the next year, May revived the previously successful Mam’zelle Nitouche at the Court Theatre in order to bring in income badly needed by the couple. She initially took on the lead role. It turned out to be a critical disaster. Wrote Hibbert of the production, “The comic opera has degenerated into a rough-and-tumble absurdity, with musical interludes of a music-hall type, in which Miss May Yohe … abandoned herself to a series of gambols which highly amused the audience, but stood in no definable relation to musical or histrionic art.”18

  Alan Dale, an American reviewer, was even more critical,

  I went impelled by curiosity. I left amazed that critical London could possibly tolerate such a singularly second-class entertainment.

  Miss Yohe’s voice has sunk into a husky whisper and the three notes she used to disport herself are now lamentably pallid and feeble … I confess I was totally unable to discover any excuse for Lady Hope’s popularity.19

  The review by George Bernard Shaw, a one-time fan of May’s, was even more devastating:

  Miss May Yohe might, I think, have given us something fresher at the Court Theatre than a revival of Mam’zelle Nitouche. I take it that Miss Yohe is not now living by her profession …

  Miss May Yohe is too clever—too much the expert professional—to be dismissed as a stage-struck fashionable amateur; but, on the other hand, there is nothing either in “Mam’zelle Nitouche” nor in the style of its performance to explain why any lady should step out of the aristocratic sphere to produce it …

  Miss Yohe’s own extraordinary artificial contralto had so little tone on the first night that it was largely mistaken for an attack of hoarseness; and her sentimental song, with its aborted cadence which sought to make a merit and a feature of its own weakness, was only encored, not quite intentionally, out of politeness. Her sustaining power seems gone: she breathes after every little phrase, and so cannot handle a melody in her old broad, rich manner; but doubtless the remedy for this is a mere matter of getting into condition.

  As a comic actress she has improved since the days of “Little Christopher Columbus”; and the personal charm and gay grace of movement, with the suggestion of suppressed wildness beneath them, are all there still, with more than their original bloom on them. But with every possible abuse of the indulgence of which Miss Yohe can always count on more than her fair share, it is impossible to say that she removes the impression that the day for opera-bouffe has gone by.20

  May must have found Shaw’s critique especially biting. But she also respected what he had to say. By late 1896, she withdrew from the stage production as actress and singer—but she continued as manager and producer of the Court Theatre. She then, as she was wont to do, proved George Bernard Shaw wrong. Under May’s management, the theater was “remarkably successful from a financial point of view” and she was soundly praised for her accomplishment.21

  Given her series of starring roles, managerial responsibilities, and continual battles in the press, it was time for May to take a break. Another American woman, Lady Beresford, currently in favor with Queen Victoria, was in the limelight. Conan Doyle was working on a theatrical comedy. Gilbert and Sullivan were fighting with each other. Socialists were stirring up passions in London and on the continent. And Lord Francis was incurring more staggering debts. And though May was committed to star in a short-running production of The Belle of Cairo by year’s end, she said she was through with the theater.

  May then did the thoroughly unexpected over the next two years. She started to do charity work with the poor. There was precedent: she had performed in benefit concerts in the United States, and in 1895 she’d sung in a charitable matinee for St. Mary’s Hospital, held under royal patronage. But her interest became more serious and time-consuming. First May took up the cause of peasants living in the area of Castle Blayney, Lord Francis’ mansion in Ireland, originally purchased by Henry Thomas Hope. A few months later, she started working with her mother-in-law, the dowager duchess Henrietta Adéle Hope, ministering to the poor in London’s Whitechapel. These were no idle pursuits, for both locales were rough and tumble places in the midst of dramatic social change.

  Castle Blayney (more like a manor house in size) was built on Hope land in County Monaghan, south of Ulster. Land and governance reforms were in the forefront of Irish politics in 1897–98, with local people gaining more say in their affairs.

  We don’t know why May got involved, but she may have taken her cue from author, philanthropist, and woman’s rights activist May Augusta Ward. Yohe shared a name with this fiction writer of considerable repute and a profession with one of her characters. One of her books was about a theatrical figure. Another was about Marcella Maxwell, an independent-minded “new woman,” who, while married to a wealthy husband, yearns to help the poor. Ward was also close to the very charitable Rothschild family, who supported many social reform causes among Jewish and Irish settlers in London’s Whitechapel district.

  May Yohe in The Belle of Cai
ro, 1896. (photo credit 7.5)

  May Yohe as a boyish soldier in The Belle of Cairo, 1895. (photo credit 7.6)

  Castle Blayney, the Hope estate in Ireland. (photo credit 7.7)

  May also could have been influenced by Consuelo Vanderbilt. An American from a prominent, wealthy family, Vanderbilt had recently married the duke of Marlborough and was intent on helping the tenants on her husband’s ducal estate. Yohe and Vanderbilt were often linked as the two most prominent Americans associated with the British aristocracy, and May could have sought to follow Vanderbilt’s lead.

  For whatever reason, May helped open up Hope’s land for use by impoverished Irish peasants. While her effort met with some amusement in the London press, May apparently stayed with it for several months. Her work in Whitechapel was more intense. A teeming, squalid, urban slum, it was a dangerous place. Poverty bred crime, disease, and vice; police thought that there were more than a thousand prostitutes in the district. A decade earlier, Whitechapel was the scene of Jack the Ripper’s infamous serial murders. George Bernard Shaw’s socialist Fabian Society met in the slum in an explicit symbolic statement of the social ills and contradictions that beset Victorian England.

  May worked with her mother-in-law, who maintained a humble residence at St. Anthony’s House in the midst of the slum. Henrietta lived there most of the time. The dowager duchess, a rather striking, well-outfitted woman in her own right, sponsored charities, gave talks, and awarded prizes for good works. She was a Catholic English duchess who had joined the Tertiary Order of Franciscans, and thus taken a vow of poverty. She happily served the community to improve their lot “within their own class,” and often said the rich got more out of serving the poor than the other way around.22 She was a favorite of Queen Victoria.

  May Yohe, c. 1898. (photo credit 7.8)

  May helped her mother-in-law raise money to rebuild the Whitechapel School by giving benefit performances, including one at the Aldegate public baths hall—a far cry from the Strand. According to press accounts, May was said “to be greatly beloved by those for whom she works.”23 Moreover, May gained the good graces and won the heart of her mother-in-law who had so opposed the marriage of her son to this American showgirl.

  Forsaking the theater, working on her husband’s Irish estate and with her mother-in-law in Whitechapel, even putting on weight, May, now about thirty-two, seems to have gone through a domestic phase. Rumors, perhaps started by her, suggested that she might be pregnant. If the rumors were true, she and Francis would have an heir, likely to become a succeeding duke of Newcastle, given that Archibald, the current duke, was childless. May’s good works and attention to her new family evidently reached the palace, for a report suggested that Queen Victoria would be inclined to receive her at court should Francis succeed as duke and May become his duchess.

  Despite the initial chilly reception from British society, May developed a cadre of distinguished friends, a mixture of theater people and aristocrats who gathered for Sunday afternoons or took trips to the nearby countryside. She tended to be the life of the party, outspoken, vivacious, and charming in a spirited way. As one of the group recalled, “May Yohe was one of the most amusing women one could meet, and she could keep a dinner table in roars of laughter for hours.”24

  While May was doing charitable work and rehabilitating her image, Francis was squandering more and more money he didn’t have. In July 1898, Francis was given permission by the court to sell off a valuable collection of eighty-three Dutch and Flemish paintings including Rembrandts, Rubens, and others to settle his debts. He appeared to be paying off his relatives to avoid their opposition. In 1899, again with a mountain of debt, he asked the Chancery Court for permission to sell the Hope diamond. He had a buyer lined up; L. M. Lowenstein & Co. had agreed to purchase it for about £18,000.

  Hope’s lawyers argued that he needed the proceeds to meet the demand of his creditors. Francis’ brother, the duke, and his sister, Lady Beatrice Lister-Kaye, argued that the gem was a family heirloom and had come into Francis’ possession only for his lifetime use, not for sale. It was unique and famous and bore the family name. It was willed to Francis with the explicit intention that it would be passed down in the family. There was no necessity to sell the heirloom save the extravagant spending of Lord Francis. His failure to control his appetite should not be enough to negate the intention of Lord Francis’ grandmother in making him the heir to the diamond and her fortune. Should other relatives, like Lady Beatrice, one day inherit the diamond, they would surely do justice to its name and reputation, the Newcastle lawyers confidently predicted.

  Francis’ lawyers argued that the diamond was too big to wear and thus useless as an ornament. It should be sold, they said, rather than just sit in a safe for decades. It was a “mere curio” rather than a genuine heirloom, and besides, it hadn’t been in the family all that long. It wasn’t even that rare—other blue diamonds had recently been discovered.

  Francis’ lawyers pointed to the precedent of the court having allowed Lord Francis to sell off his Dutch and Flemish paintings for the benefit of the estate just the year before. They reminded the court that the permission of the other Pelhams and Hopes—the “remaindermen” as they were technically called—was not needed as the sale would benefit the tenancy in life by bringing cash into the inheritance. The Newcastle lawyers countered that, given Lord Francis’ spending habits, he would quickly spend any cash the sale brought in.

  Judge Byrne noted that the prior sale of Hope’s paintings was justified because the paintings needed substantial funds for their constant upkeep, and would, if not sold, be endangered by Francis’ bankrupt situation. The Hope diamond, on the other hand, was safe in a bank and required little or no care. The judge sided with Lord Francis’ relatives and denied permission for the sale. Lord Francis appealed the decision to Lord Justice Romer and the Master of the Rolls, and lost again a few months later.

  May, never shy about overstatement, mused that she might set the Hope diamond in a tiara.

  By the fall of 1899, the pressure on the marriage was building. Francis was overspending, and his brother and sister were outraged at his excesses. Despite May’s good works, they probably put some of the blame on her. For her part, May increasingly found Lord Francis to be distant and unromantic; she would sometimes refer to him as “it.”25 The love in their marriage was clearly on the wane. May wrote:

  I was happy, however, with my husband, despite certain shortcomings, of which, I suppose, every good man must have his share. Lord Francis liked to read a great deal—he used to read a book when I thought he ought to be reading me. He liked to hunt, too—and I often felt that he might have spent some of the time hunting ways to enamor me that he spent hunting ways of trapping animals or catching fish.26

  In September 1899, the London papers reported that the couple had separated. But by November, they were off on a so-called world tour; May called it a second honeymoon. For May, it was an attempt to revive the marriage. For Francis, it may have been a means of avoiding his creditors and his contentious family. They raised some money during their absence by renting Castle Blayney to the duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s son.

  The trip started aboard the Hope yacht at Cowes. Captain James Holford of the House Guard was among Lord Francis’ guests for the send-off party. In the evening, he sidled up to May. He was clearly enamored, telling her, “you are the most beautiful little woman I have ever seen, Lady May. If your husband wouldn’t object, I should like to send you a little souvenir to remember the evening by.”27

  With permission from the oblivious Francis, Holford later sent May a lovely diamond necklace with a large brilliant pendant and a note saying, “Wear it and think of us who love you for the splendid little woman that you are.”28

  The couple then traveled to South Africa, Ceylon, and Australia, where they took a house in Sydney’s fashionable Pott’s Point for about six months. They attended the theater there and in Melbourne, and May offered to sing in
various benefits and patriotic matinees. Given their aristocratic standing, which was fairly uncommon in Australia, they were lauded and feted.

  May Yohe, 1899. (photo credit 7.9)

  In August 1900, they reached the United States. Whether for want of money or fondness for the stage, May sought to return to the theater. She and Francis negotiated an agreement to appear in New York’s Savoy Theatre later in the fall, and then at the Columbia Theatre in Boston, for a thirty-week run of an English musical comedy. Newspapers reported her salary at more than $1,000 per week and maybe as high as $1,750. This was astronomical for the times. Broadway’s finest star, Lillian Russell, typically made about $1,250, and perhaps only the internationally acclaimed Sarah Bernhardt made more.

  May and Francis then sailed from New York to England, and further apart. For Francis, it was a voyage back to respectability and for May the wildest ride of her life.

  That instant I became the property, body, soul and mind, of Putnam Bradlee Strong!

  —May Yohe’s recollection1

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  New York’s Finest Lover

  HE WAS A STRIKING FIGURE in his dapper uniform, very military and romantic.”2 So wrote May about Captain Putnam Bradlee Strong, who was a fellow passenger of the Hopes on the Atlantic crossing to Southampton. Strong was the son of William L. Strong, the former Mayor of New York and mentor of Teddy Roosevelt.