Hesketh Pearson

by The Marrying Americans

  Sometimes she received unexpected compliments. Having undergone the ordeal of presentation at a Drawing-Room, whereat the Prince and Princess of Wales represented Queen Victoria, her mother-in-law Lady Blandford, the practical joker, said that no one would take her for an American. “What would you think if I said you were not at all like an Englishwoman?” asked Consuelo. “Oh, that’s quite different!” “Different to you, but not to me.”

  Occasionally she was reproved for behavior unbecoming to a duchess. At a dinner in honor of the Prince and Princess of Wales she wore a diamond crescent instead of the usual tiara. The Prince stared at it and said: “The Princess has taken the trouble to wear a tiara. Why have you not done so?”

  She found all these functions intolerably boring, and the racing at Newmarket equally so. She had to accompany her husband to Leicestershire for the hunting, which gave her no pleasure, and she made the fatal error of letting her mind wander away from horses and hounds and foxes into the realm of good deeds. Hearing, during one hunting season, that there was much unemployment and hardship at Woodstock, she sent money to provide work. The obliged recipients wrote a letter of thanks to her husband, then exclusively occupied with the solemn matter of fox chasing. He was amazed to hear that the roads on his estate had been repaired, displeased to receive expressions of gratitude for what he had not done, and quickly informed his wife that she was not entitled to act in that manner without his approval.

  However, he was good enough to approve the births of her two sons. She was unconscious for a week after the birth of her first, but recovered quickly on regaining consciousness. Following the arrival of the second, she reflected that she had done her duty to the dukedom and could now please herself. But life’s realities were kept at bay in the splendor of Blenheim, and she became more and more bored by the necessity of walking “on an endlessly spread red carpet.” Moreover, the conversation of the nobility made little appeal to her, and when she met a number of Austrian aristocrats in Vienna she thought it “a pity that they could express their thoughts in so many different languages when they had so few thoughts to express.”

  Queen Victoria died in January 1901, and when Consuelo spent some weeks in Paris that spring in the agreeable company of her father she was depressed by having to wear black clothes. All she dared do was to wear white gloves, thereby earning a lecture at Longchamps from the Duchess of Devonshire, who had been a leader of the fast set a generation before but was now a raddled old woman in a brown wig, her wrinkles filled with paint, her mouth a red slash. How, she asked, could Consuelo show so little respect to the memory of a great Queen as to exhibit white gloves? As the shocked lady was an incorrigible gossip, Consuelo’s impropriety no doubt received much publicity; in spite of which she was chosen to act as canopy-bearer to the new Queen at the coronation of Edward VII, her fellow bearers being the Duchesses of Portland, Montrose and Sutherland. When Alexandra was anointed by the old Archbishop of Canterbury they held the canopy over her. The oil was placed on her forehead by his shaky hand and a little trickled down her nose. She did not move a muscle but her eyes expressed anguish.

  After eleven years of nervous stress, either waiting for the Duke, who was invariably late for lunch, or being with him, which was worse, Consuelo pined for relaxation and they agreed to separate, the arrangement giving them equal custody of the children. In those days divorce was difficult and still scandalous, and since neither of them wished to marry again a legal separation met the case. It was estimated that about ten million of the Vanderbilt dollars had been spent on Blenheim and their London house, and as she had produced his heirs the Duke had no cause to complain. She went to live at Sunderland House, built for her as a present from her father, and here she gave musical parties. She also became absorbed in social work, starting a home for women whose husbands were in prison and a recreation center for working girls. She sat on a National Committee which inquired into the decline of the birth rate, and obtained a donation of a hundred thousand guineas for the removal of Bedford College, of which she was Hon. Treasurer, from Baker Street to Regent’s Park. Her mother, who had become Mrs. Oliver Belmont since her divorce, led the Women’s Suffrage movement in the United States, and when the 1914 war broke out Consuelo worked for the American Women’s War Relief Fund, collecting a lot of money by writing and lecturing. To enable women to be represented by their own sex on municipal councils, she founded a Women’s Municipal Party, and when a vacancy occurred on the London County Council she sat for North Southwark. At the election of 1919 she stood as a Progressive for that borough and topped the poll.

  When the 1914-18 war came to an end, the moral standards were loosened and she obtained a divorce from the Duke. In July 1921 she married Jacques Balsan at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, where divorced persons were treated with indulgence. He had been an airman in the war, and a balloonist before that, several times staying at Blenheim. His nature appealed wholly to hers, and they were very happy together. The Duke had now become a Roman Catholic, and as he wished to marry another American, Gladys Deacon, he asked Consuelo to get their own marriage annulled. Since Jacques Balsan was a Roman Catholic and she wished to appease his family, she granted the Duke’s request. Her only way of doing so was to swear that she had been married to him against her will. She was now on friendly terms with her mother, who consented to make the declaration, testifying before an English tribunal of Catholic priests: “When I issued an order nobody discussed it. I therefore did not beg, but ordered her to marry the Duke.” The annulment being granted, Consuelo married Jacques in a Catholic church, and was affectionately received by his family at Châteauroux. They then settled down in Paris, and soon she was busy helping to raise money for the construction of a hospital for the middle classes, receiving the Legion of Honor in 1931. Three years later her son succeeded his father as tenth Duke of Marlborough.

  Consuelo and Jacques built a house on the Riviera and took a château at St. Georges-Motel, where her philanthropic work continued. Like so many others, they had to bolt when the Germans entered France in 1940. With difficulty they escaped to Spain, and thence to Portugal, where they got a plane across the Atlantic. And so her story ends.

  CHAPTER 5—Wives of a Viceroy

  Mary Leiter and Lord Curzon

  Grace Duggan and Lord Curzon

  Other things being equal, which they never are, it is curious to reflect that if Mrs. Vanderbilt had aimed a little lower and married Consuelo to a lesser title but more imposing figure, the story of an eminent English statesman, George Nathaniel Curzon, would have been vastly different. Like Marlborough, Curzon married for money, but the union, unlike Marlborough’s, became a marriage of hearts. Being an intelligent man, Curzon would have been influenced by Consuelo, who might have fallen in love with him but would never have allowed her critical sense to remain dormant on that account. Curzon was both fortunate and unfortunate in his first wife, fortunate in that she adored him and was beautiful, unfortunate because her love numbed her brain and contributed to his high opinion of himself.

  George Nathaniel Curzon (his stately manner prevents one from thinking of him merely as George) was the eldest of many children. He was born in January 1859 and brought up at the family seat, Kedleston Hall, in Derbyshire. His father, Lord Scarsdale, was a cold, parsimonious, Puritanical clergyman of the Church of England; his mother displayed no affection; and his childhood was bleak, being overshadowed by the diabolical harshness of the family governess, whose mental and physical torture reduced her pupils to tears and engendered a habit of sobbing which never left the eldest boy. Her savagery was repeated when he went to a private school, where he was flogged by a sadistic master on the smallest provocation. But in spite of the fact that his niggardly father kept him on short rations at Eton, the release from tyranny was so great that he was happy there and did well. Naturally a boy who had suffered so much ill-treatment became insufferable when no longer frightened by ferocity, and at any school but Eton his rebellious behavior would have
resulted in chastisement, but he was able to describe his period there as “glorious.”

  During one of his holidays at Kedleston he fell from his horse, his back being badly hurt; but after resting for a while the pain disappeared and he ceased to worry about it. Soon after the death of his mother, and just before going to Oxford, he developed curvature of the spine, which perhaps resulted in mental as well as bodily stiffness. Late in life he took Lord Riddell into his confidence: “My reputation is due in some measure to the fact that for many years I have been braced up with a girdle to protect my weak back. This gives me a rigid appearance which furnishes point to the reputation for pomposity.” It also gave rigidity to his ambition, and like many men with some physical defect he pursued his course with undeviating purpose.

  At Balliol College, Oxford, he made a reputation for scholarship and earned distinction as debater and orator in the Union, of which he became President. It is true that he only obtained second-class honors in Greats, but everyone knew that this was due to his keenness at the Union, his political ambition. In 1886 he became a Conservative Member of Parliament for Southport, and was made Under-Secretary for India in 1891-92, but all the time he could spare from his duties was spent in travel. From 1882 to 1894 he wandered extensively in Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Tunis, India, China, Persia, Japan, Siam, Afghanistan and America. When at home he engaged in the social round, augmenting his sparse allowance by journalism, and often joined the annual meetings of the Crab-bet Club at the Sussex home of Wilfred Scawen Blunt, where the rising politicians of the day met to compose and recite poetry and to converse over Lucullan repasts. At one of these meetings an anonymous poem was delivered, a phrase in which stuck to Curzon for the rest of his life. It had first appeared in The Masque of Balliol, composed by members of that College in the late eighteen-seventies, and was headed Charma Virumque Cano:

  Charms and a man I sing, to wit: a most superior person,

  Myself, who bears the fitting name of George Nathaniel Curzon.

  From which ‘tis clear that even when in swaddling bands I lay low,

  There floated round my head a sort of apostolic halo.

  This soon received the honor of misquotation, and now appears in works of reference as:

  My name is George Nathaniel Curzon:

  I am a most superior person.

  Wits and peers took part in those meetings at Crabbet Park, such as Lord Houghton (later Lord Crewe), George Wyndham, G. Leveson-Gower, Lord Elcho (later Lord Wemyss), Curzon himself and a dozen other notabilities. But “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges,” and the one man among them whom they all probably dismissed as a nobody, Oscar Wilde, is the only one remembered today. The nobodies of today are often the immortals of tomorrow, and the great names of an age are unknown in the next generation. Curzon is now a mere name in a history book: Wilde is quoted and discussed everywhere.

  To return to our history book, Curzon had an early love affair which came to nothing, but in the summer of 1890 he met an American girl in a London ballroom and it seemed that something would come of it. Her name was Mary Victoria Leiter, and she was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Levi Leiter of Chicago and Washington. Her father, having started as a humble clerk in a general store, had run a dry-goods shop in Chicago with another ambitious youth named Marshall Field. Though he had none of Field’s flair for business, Levi was a terrific worker, and the store was so successful that he was able to retire in 1881, when he dabbled in real estate. Money flowed in, his fortune being so large that he could pay off a loss of nearly ten million dollars incurred by his son (who had tried to corner the wheat market but had found himself cornered) and scarcely notice it. He was in a position to endow his daughter handsomely and still devote his leisure years to making a collection of early American books; yet he did not make as much as his one-time partner, Marshall Field, a self-effacing man who left over 120 million dollars, partly owing to his practice of paying employees a bare subsistence wage.

  Mary Leiter was an exceptionally beautiful girl, and as she would possess a remarkably large fortune there were many suitors for her hand. But just as Curzon had made up his mind to marry someone who would be worthy of the position he intended to win, worthy not only in money and appearance but also in understanding, so Mary Leiter had every intention of giving herself and her fortune to a man who would make the most of both in a high post of public responsibility. Curzon found that they had many tastes in common, and they met frequently during the season, at the close of which he gave her an amulet. She took a pearl from her chain and had it set as a tiepin for him, “as emblematic of the tear I shed on leaving London.”

  They started a regular correspondence, and early in ‘91 he heard of the destruction by fire of Mrs. Leiter’s house in Washington. At the time he was at St. Moritz writing a book on Persia, and the news made him wonder why people ever lost their heads in a crisis, as apparently some of the house’s inmates had done, and as he was to do at a crucial moment in his career. The Leiters were again in London during that summer, and Curzon and Mary talked endlessly about his book on Persia. He then started a second journey round the world, during which he kept her posted with political news and constantly expressed a desire to penetrate the countries to the northwest of India, while her letters displayed an intense interest in his political future and described the various American states her family were visiting.

  On his way home from this second world tour he spent a day in Paris and went to dine with Mary at the Hôtel Vendôme on March 3, 1893. He afterwards declared that he had no premonition of what the evening would bring forth, and according to his official biographer, “it was just that the hearts of these two people were no longer capable of containing the song which their souls were singing.”{10} He told her that, though from the first he had felt they were destined for one another, he had not dared to mention it for three years because of a resolution to carry out his Asiatic journeys and his feeling that a married man would not be justified in undertaking them. In fact the soul-song was fated to continue for some time, since he now intended to visit the Pamirs and Afghanistan, and would not marry until he had done so. She consented to his terms though she knew that until their engagement was made public she would be badgered by other suitors, and she agreed to keep it secret from her parents for a year.

  She was disquieted on the eve of his Afghan journey, imagining all sorts of dangers with which he would be beset, and she wrote urging caution. The books she read about India heightened her alarm, and when she heard that the Amir of Afghanistan was ill she implored him not to go to Kabul. The danger would be terrible, and “it will be quite inhuman of you to go and run such a risk.” She saw Löhengrin at Bayreuth and wondered whether the heroine or herself were the more to be pitied, the heroine because her lover’s allegiance was torn between her and his knightly traditions, or herself whose lover had “adventurous propensities.” His Afghan visit over, she wrote to say that the period of waiting had been good for her (“My feminine philosophy believes in test and patience greatly improving and developing a woman”) and she thought that they would be “eternally happy.” When she heard that he was safely through the trip to Pamir she could not speak for happiness: “I believe I never had a moment of such transcendently blessed thankfulness in all my life.”

  On his return home he collapsed from the strain, while she comforted herself with the assurance that after their marriage a quiet week in England “would be Paradise Regained.” On March 2, 1895, their engagement was announced, and he cabled her that it had caused “universal delight.” They had kept their secret closely, and even his most intimate friends were amazed that the lofty George Nathaniel Curzon had condescended to marry a girl whose father had been something vaguely felt to be discreditable in Chicago and whose mother was commonly supposed to resemble Mrs. Malaprop. The ambassadorial world turned up for their wedding at Washington on April 22nd, nearly five years after Curzon had felt that he and his wife were destined for one another. Some
of his relations had crossed the Atlantic for the occasion, and everyone admired his bride with her ivory skin and large violet eyes and classical features. Soon they were in England, and in time his wife’s fortune enabled them to take No. 1 Carlton House Terrace, London, and The Priory, Reigate, where they could entertain without stint. Incidentally, another Leiter was able to make life easier for another Englishman when Mary’s sister Marguerite married the impoverished Earl of Suffolk.