The Husband Hunters

by Anne de Courcy

  Just as a wife not only became a husband’s property and took on his name, she took on his status as well, so that if a younger son, short of money as many were, married the daughter of a rich merchant, she immediately rose to his rank. But if his sister married the merchant’s son, she moved down – and out of the close-knit circle of kinship. When Lady Charlotte Bertie married the wealthy Josiah John Guest, a successful ironmaster and Member of Parliament, the fact that he was much lower in status than his aristocratic wife caused her significant social strain for some years.

  So unthinkable was such a fate considered that mothers often forbade their daughters to make such matches, or the daughters themselves rejected them. The arrival of American girls, irresistible to so many, cut down even further the chances of making a really good match – or even any match at all.

  For the American girl who arrived in England unprepared, the clash of cultures was sometimes deafening. If she turned down an eldest son, the shock and surprise was considerable, not least to the peer himself who, having known from babyhood that he was numero uno in the family, had seldom been denied anything. Belle Wilson, who had been proposed to by several, wrote in a letter to her sister: ‘the men get so nasty when they are refused over here’.

  Others around her looked at the American girl as someone to be viewed with suspicion, if not avoided altogether. From the comparative freedom with which she had been brought up, her manner and expectations were quite different. ‘I gathered that an English lady was hedged around with what seemed to me to be boring restrictions,’ recorded Consuelo Vanderbilt, on becoming a duchess.

  ‘It appeared that one should not walk alone in Piccadilly or in Bond Street, nor sit in Hyde Park unless accompanied; that one should not be seen in a hansom cab and that one should always travel in a reserved compartment; that it was better to occupy a box than a stall at the theatre and that a visit to a music hall was out of the question.’

  The American girl might be pretty, well dressed and lively but – where did she come from? Few English could understand that Americans, too, had a class system which, though unadmitted, was every bit as meaningful as their own, that their opposite numbers in New York, Boston or Newport were hedged about with similar restrictions and conformed to shibboleths equally important in their world. (When the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1866, its backers had proposed co-operation with the New York Historical Society, in which lay many treasures that should have been in a museum. Their offer was rejected simply because the patricians who ran the Historical Society considered some of the backers of the museum unacceptable socially.) When Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, the son of the former Grace Wilson, as a small boy saw a woman hanging out clothes and asked his mother, ‘What’s that lady doing?’, Grace smiled and said: ‘That’s not a lady, darling, that’s a woman,’ going on to explain that a lady never turned her hand to menial tasks, and always wore silk stockings and silk gloves. And while in Newport nothing was too grand or too formal, in the English equivalent, Cowes, everyone walked out to dinner as carriages would have been considered ostentatious.

  To most English, all Americans were the same, so that it was a shock to realise that most of these girls were far better educated than the home-grown variety.

  * * *

  From the American girls’ point of view, adjusting was just as difficult. They sparkled in an urban setting, but as much of the British aristocracy’s life was spent in the country the long months living either on their own in the great houses on their husbands’ estates to which marriage brought them, or the weeks-long visits to other such houses, often tried them sorely. ‘From my window I overlooked a pond in which a former butler had drowned himself,’ wrote Consuelo of a winter at Blenheim. ‘As one gloomy day succeeded another I began to feel a deep sympathy for him.’ Even Englishwomen sometimes found life on the estate trying. ‘Solitude at Studley, with de Grey out all day, breeds in me the germs of Melancholia,’ wrote Lady de Grey. Then there was the question of physical comfort.

  Despite these drawbacks, one of the great attractions of upper-class English life to American girls was that in England married women had a much better time than they did at home, something admitted even in America. ‘Naturally, one of the chief reasons why American women have so great a liking for European society is to be found in the fact of the far more important position that married ladies occupy in that society than they do with us,’ commented Lippincott’s Magazine.

  Thanks to their repressive upbringing, it was only after marriage that English girls blossomed, and thanks to the greater social mix – politicians, ambassadors, leading writers, the financiers befriended by the Prince of Wales – it was at their dining tables that the most fascinating conversations could be heard. In England, to be a beautiful young married woman with the talent and money to entertain was to be courted, admired and the centre of a circle.

  In America, by contrast, most of the rich were too interested in and too busy at making money to involve themselves in politics. In New York, they spent most of their time in their offices or in the grand mahogany-walled bar of Hoffman House, with its famous cocktails and equally famous nude paintings; in Newport, husbands would depart on Sundays to return to their offices, leaving their rich, pampered womenfolk behind – politics, for most of them, happened in Washington. In England, most of the men in society did not do jobs but ran their estates, where they spent most of the year; when in London, many of them ran the country. In all this their wives, albeit only in a supporting role, were very much at their sides.

  At home, the belle, so brilliant and popular while single, retired to the ranks of matrons once married, and although there was constant entertaining, but with writers and artists frowned on, husbands constantly involved in business, and few politicians – most were in Washington – conversation usually ran along narrow, predictable lines. The Four Hundred ‘would have fled as a body from a painter, a musician, or a clever Frenchman,’ said Mrs Winthrop Chanler, from a prominent New York family but with widened horizons from her upbringing in Rome.

  ‘The English married ladies are like our American girls,’ said Chauncey Depew, adding loyally that ‘they never get the spring and dash, quickness of repartee and chaff that our girls have,’ although he conceded that ‘they are the brightest and most venomous politicians in English society. Their houses are frequently political centres from which emanate influences that govern the nation.’

  So the girls from the US came – and they kept on coming. Between 1875 and 1905 over forty American girls married into the peerage, bringing with them the dollars that saved many a stately home from ruin. There were many attempts to calculate the total amount of American dollars spent in dowry payments; one estimate said that American brides had brought in $50 million to Britain, but the probability is that it was nearer a billion dollars – money that went straight into the pockets of the men they married.

  Such was the concern about the economic drain on America of title-heiress marriages that when another Vanderbilt bride, Gertrude, married the son of an American railroad tycoon in 1896, the New York Journal reported jubilantly: ‘it will be an American wedding. There will be no noblemen in this – no purchased titles. The millions all belong in America and they will all remain here.’

  But not until the Singer sewing machine heiress, Marguerite Decazes de Glucksberg, married a young French duke in 1910 did the press spell out unambiguously what they saw as the sordid reality. For these nuptials, the New York Tribune’s headline was: ‘She pays all the bills – he thinks himself cheap at the price.’

  CHAPTER 16

  Tennie Claflin: The Odd One Out

  Tennessee Claflin’s obituary in the New York Times said that she and her sister Victoria were ‘the most widely known women in the country fifty years ago’, adding that they then ‘both went to England and married men with large fortunes’. It was quite true, but it is likely that she would have preferred The Times’s description of her as ‘A pioneer of w
oman’s suffrage’.

  As the happily married Lady Cook, her life was full of pleasure and ease. She was perhaps happiest in the beautiful grounds of her baronet husband Sir Francis’s estate of Monserrate, near Lisbon; one of the articles that had appeared about her, and pleased her greatly, had referred to the ‘blonde, spirituelle Lady Cook’, moving gracefully among the ‘rare and gorgeous plants’ of her garden. As well as this majestic hilltop castle in Portugal, she was châtelaine of Doughty House in Richmond, on the Thames, with its superb art collection.

  * * *

  For the former Tennie Claflin, this life of wealth and sophistication was a world away from the ramshackle, disreputable existence she had led as a child and young woman in America’s Midwest. For of all the American husband-hunters who married into the British peerage during the late nineteenth century, Tennessee Claflin’s was the most unlikely story. Although, like most of them, she was good-looking, unlike the others she was not rich, she did not have a mother to chaperone, support or dragoon her, she lacked formal education and had no superb clothes from Worth. Instead, she had lived by her wits – managing en route to become one of the world’s first female stockbrokers – and in her native US was trailed by an aura of scandal and sexual licence. Ironically, it was the latter which gave her her first real step up the ladder.

  * * *

  Tennie, as she was always known, was born on 26 October 1845, in Homer, Ohio. Originally, the family had been respectable and hard-working: on her father’s side, her great-grandfather was a son of the Duke of Hamilton and their grandfather was the first senator from Massachusetts; another forebear was George Washington’s great friend, the American legislator Colonel Alexander Hamilton; on her mother’s side, she was descended from the old German families of the Hummels and the Moyers.

  Her father, Reuben Buckman Claflin, always known as Buck, was however a confidence trickster, a one-eyed snake-oil salesman moving on from one small Ohio town to another when debts or false claims caught up with him; her mother Roxanna was illiterate, homely, small and fiery-tempered. Tennie was the youngest of the couple’s eight surviving children (two died in childhood), all bar one exceptionally good-looking. Together the brood were noisy, self-assertive and given to disruptive behaviour – for which they were frequently beaten by their father with braided whips he kept supple for this purpose in a barrel of rainwater. They were lightly educated in a log-cabin school.

  The Claflin tribe’s wanderings continued until they reached a small town called Mount Gilead, by which time the remarkable handsomeness of two of the older girls had brought them respectable marriages. Victoria, the third daughter, had always believed herself to be psychic and in touch with angels and various notable figures of the past. And soon reports came that five-year-old Tennie, the youngest, sent some time before to stay with relatives in Pennsylvania, was showing signs of psychic gifts, this time of second sight, frightening playmates by ‘reading their minds’ and telling a farmer where he could find a lost calf. She even – accurately – predicted a fire in a seminary.

  It was a time when fads, new philosophies and outré theories said to be science-based such as phrenology (reading character through the various bumps on the head) were taking hold in America. Most of these appealed mainly to the credulous, but one that interested and attracted the educated and serious-minded was spiritualism, believed in by many public figures both in England and the US.

  This was tailor-made for Buck Claflin, who set Victoria up as a clairvoyant, with Tennie, already proven (in her own mind at least) to have occult powers, as a ‘magnetic healer’. It was the start of the sisters’ long closeness, largely with Victoria as pioneer and Tennie as able lieutenant.

  One day Victoria, now a lovely girl with huge blue eyes, silky curling brown hair and a delicate profile, fell ill and the doctor who attended her, Dr Canning Woodhull, became smitten with her. He was a man from a good family but, unknown to the Claflins, such a wastrel that his family had cast him off. Victoria’s parents, for whom life was a hand-to-mouth affair, thought the match too good to turn down and, two months after her fifteenth birthday, they were married.

  As Woodhull’s family could have foretold, he was constantly drunken and unfaithful – he ended up an alcoholic and a morphine addict. But at the beginning Victoria, prepared to give her marriage a chance, moved to San Francisco, then booming as a mining town, with her husband and their son, hoping to make a fresh start.

  Soon Tennie, aged fourteen, was being billed not only as a healer but as a clairvoyant in her father’s snake-oil ‘show’, where she sat in her booth for thirteen hours at a stretch. What aided her success at this was her utter conviction in her own powers, so that this became a life that continued in Canada, where her father advertised her as someone who could cure cancer. When this claim was, unsurprisingly, found to be fraudulent, the Claflin family left hurriedly, next settling in Cincinnati. Here Victoria and her two children had joined them there, leaving her feckless husband behind.

  By twenty Tennie was a pretty girl who exuded friendly warmth, vitality and an earthy sensuousness, qualities that made her a magnet for men. By this time, the number of people interested in spiritualism had grown enormously, swelled by those who had lost loved ones in the Civil War. Buck was determined to cash in on this by means of his daughters. They moved to Chicago, again advertising themselves as mediums; here Tennie married a young man named John Bartels. But marriage did not put a stop to her free-and-easy way with men, and again the aura of illicit sex and the men that hung around the house caused complaints by the neighbours.

  The family moved on, earning as they did so by fortune-telling and conducting séances. Tennie’s youthful marriage broke up and her husband disappeared from her life for good. Then Victoria had a spirit vision telling her to go to New York, to 17 Great Jones Street. ‘There you will find a house ready and waiting for you,’ declared the spirit, after which a vision of the house and of its interior appeared. Victoria rushed to New York and there found the house exactly as she had seen it in every detail. It was on 3rd Street, between the Bowery and Broadway, a perfectly respectable district, and in 1868 the family moved there.

  In New York, their fortunes changed dramatically, thanks to the impression they made on the richest man in America – Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt, or the Commodore, as he was always called, was rough and unpolished in his ways, hard-bitten and ruthless – a real ‘robber baron’, as some of the more unscrupulous new millionaires were known. At seventy-six, he was tall, spare, hawk-nosed, looked and acted younger than his age and cared little what people thought of him: he had always gone his own way and was determined always to do so.

  Despite his forbidding exterior, he was lonely: his wife of fifty-five years had died a few months earlier. This had lent an edge to his known interest in spiritualism, hitherto largely an effort to contact his dead mother. In short, for a man attempting to make money out of two pretty daughters said to have clairvoyant powers, he was a perfect target for Buck Claflin.

  The Commodore lived not far from the Claflins, at 10 Washington Place, just off Washington Square. As he was a man happy to grant interviews – though dealing with those who came to him briskly – it would not have been difficult for Buck to bring Tennie to meet him, present her as a ‘magnetic healer’ and at some point also introduce Victoria.

  From the start the Commodore found Tennie’s gaiety, uninhibited freedom of expression and open, flirtatious manner more appealing than Victoria’s more refined beauty. Tennie was used to down-to-earth language, she would pull his side-whiskers, tease him and perch on his knee. The healing sessions grew more intimate as the touch of her ‘magnetic’ hands inspired carnal thoughts. The good-natured Tennie took this in her stride, and soon the servants grew used to finding a flushed, tousled Tennie in the Commodore’s bed in the morning, and the Commodore himself grew ever fonder of the girl he called his ‘Little Sparrow’.

  His personal physician and intimate friend, Jar
ed Linsly, who had noted the Commodore’s gradually declining mental powers, thought Tennie’s presence ‘invigorating’ for the old man, adding in his diary: ‘He is often childish and therefore lucky to have so attractive and willing a plaything as Miss Tennessee to divert him, while others, more capable, go about his material affairs.’ His son Billy, although anxious that his father should not get too embroiled with the Claflins, realised that if he passed information to them, they would in turn feed it back to his father – who would then act on it.

  While Billy was happy that his father was enjoying himself with Tennie, he certainly did not want him to marry her. Accordingly, he and his siblings tried to fix him up with a highly suitable widow, nearer his own age. But the Commodore was having none of it, and after the widow left, Tennie’s visits continued.

  Yet when the Commodore proposed to Tennie, to the mystification of those around him, she turned him down. From her point of view, she had her life ahead of her – thanks to the Commodore’s stock-market tips the sisters were better off now than they had ever been – and he was old enough to be her grandfather. But the friendship remained, as did his help with investments, so that the girls continued to prosper.

  By this time, investors had noticed that all the stocks the Claflins bought went up. Whether they thought that, as Victoria claimed, she was advised from beyond the grave or whether they simply assumed that she benefited from the Commodore’s suggestions, investors began to follow her in large numbers.

  At this point the Commodore was persuaded into marriage by his children, increasingly worried by Tennie’s visits and presumed influence over their father. His bride was not the forty-nine-year-old widow Mrs Crawford but her thirty-one-year-old daughter Frank, and the marriage took place in Canada, safely away from Tennie. However, it was a marriage in name only, as Frank and the Commodore did not share a bed, and Tennie’s visits continued.