It was a true prophecy in Fanny’s case. They set up house in London where Fanny, through the Jerome sisters and other American friends who had married into the peerage, was quickly adopted into ‘society’; and gave birth first to two daughters,2 then twin sons. After their arrival, her father increased her allowance to $12,000 a year – Fanny, as her father well knew, had been brought up to be a big spender.
Fanny quickly found that Jim was a philanderer and, what was almost worse, a compulsive gambler, meaning that even the social position to which she had aspired was compromised: she was cut by many in English society because Jim did not pay his gambling debts (where a tailor could be kept waiting for years, gambling debts were considered ‘debts of honour’ and had to be settled as quickly as possible). Appeals for more money, from Fanny, from her husband, and even from his mother, poured across the Atlantic. When Jim squandered $100,000 in one year, Franklin grew tired of subsidising these excesses and, in his own words, ‘stopped pouring money down a rat hole’.
Finally, six years after her wedding and with their furniture in the hands of bailiffs, Fanny returned to New York in December 1886 with her tail between her legs. She took her daughter Cynthia with her – Jim refused to let her take the two boys, largely to keep a hold on her and as a bargaining counter for more money. In New York, Franklin agreed to reinstate her in his will, on condition that she divorced her husband and never returned to Europe. She agreed, taking up her American social life again, and initiating proceedings for an English divorce (American divorces were not then recognised in England). Spurred by this, Jim arrived in the spring of 1887 with the two boys, in an effort to extract more money from his father-in-law. With none forthcoming, he dumped the children on the doorstep of the Work mansion in fashionable East 26th Street and left.
The divorce, headlined in newspapers all over America, eventually took place in 1891 in Delaware. Town Topics was heartily on Fanny’s side, The Saunterer expressing himself freely. ‘Mrs Burke-Roche demands release from a husband she neither loves nor respects. The church and the law oppose her, and do all in their power to drive her into a state of desperation when sin would become easy and disgrace a natural consequence. If she is strong-minded, calm, and sensible, she will continue to fight the bitter battle to the end.’
She did, but during it, Jim’s efforts to win money for himself infuriated Franklin. ‘I have supported that man until I had to decline to pay his debts,’ he told one newspaper. ‘He wrote to me himself. He begged me to come to his assistance. He asked me to save him from bankruptcy. I helped him until I got tired. I deemed it wrong to assist him further after his wife and children had come to this country … I have letters from his mother where she begs me to save her son. Here I have telegrams and letters written by Roche both to me and my daughter.’
Eventually Fanny, who also seemed to have little idea of the value of money, left her father’s house after quarrels with him over her extravagance, going to live at Two-Mile Corner Farm, given to her by her father and only a few miles from Newport, where he had a huge house, Elm Court, over which she presided. With public sympathy on her side, she led a lively social life.
This happy state was brought to an end by history repeating itself. Fanny was taught coach-driving (she became the first woman to drive a four-in-hand in Central Park) by a professional whip who went under the name of Count Aurel Batonyi (his real name, it later emerged, was Cohen). She fell in love with him and they married in 1903. Knowing what her father’s reaction would be to another ‘foreign’ marriage, she kept her marriage completely secret from everyone, until a year later, only hours before they embarked for a trip to Europe, she told her father.
For the eighty-seven-year-old Franklin this was the last straw: he cut off her huge allowance – never less than $5,000 a month – and denied her the use of Elm Court, putting it on the market immediately. ‘She is nothing more to me,’ he said wearily. ‘I don’t know where they have gone; they will never come here.’
Where they went was to the farm near Newport. Here she saw some of her friends, although others cut her (‘Passed Faxon in Bellevue Avenue. Did not bow’). Aurel was not accepted at all. Without her income – a bitter blow for one whose clothes and spending habits were part of her identity – and threatened by her father that her children would suffer in the future if she persisted in this marriage, Fanny finally caved in. Aurel was despatched and, after various ups and downs, her father reinstated her again and restored her generous allowance.
He continued to look after her children, giving them expensive educations, and when he died in 1911, aged ninety-two, left the twin boys, Maurice and Frank, huge fortunes – on condition they became American citizens and stayed in the US for the rest of their lives.
But the boys, with their romantic Irish heritage and their paternal roots overseas, did not see why they should allow a dead man to dictate to them as he had in life. After thinking things over, they decided to contest this clause of the will. As none of the other beneficiaries minded in the slightest if they travelled to Europe, or were unhappy about the elder twin inheriting his father’s title, their case was successful. Maurice, who did not marry until he was forty-six, by which time he had become a close friend of the Duke of York, was granted a lease for Park House on the Sandringham estate. Here, no doubt, his small granddaughter Diana had her first sight of Prince Charles.
* * *
Some marriages were, of course, extremely happy, notably those where the bride was in her mid-twenties rather than her teens and where love, rather than ambition, had played a part. But adapting to a life so different in climate, attitudes, behaviour and general mores from the one they had known at home was a challenge that had faced all the American girls who married into the peerage.
Some surmounted it by simply winning over their in-laws by their general charm in the face of stiff opposition. One was Leonie Leslie, whose suitor, John Leslie, followed her to America and whose family violently disapproved of the match. ‘Once married I am sure they will all like her,’ wrote Mrs Jerome to her middle daughter, Jennie, in August 1884. ‘She is such a nice clever kind-hearted girl. And will do all she can to make Jack happy & please his family.’
His father’s uncompromising letter quickly followed these sentiments. ‘Dear Sir, I believe my Son has sailed for America with the expressed intention of offering marriage to your daughter,’ wrote Sir John Leslie to Leonard Jerome, in a warning shot across the bows that September. ‘As he is acting entirely in opposition to my desire & without my approval in the course he has taken, I think you ought to know that I am in absolute possession of my estates. I remain faithfully yours.’ On arrival, Jack Leslie quickly won over Mrs Jerome, who was soon reassuringly on his side.
A month later, Jack Leslie and Leonie Jerome were married – and went on to become favourites of both families, so that a year later Randolph was able to write to Jennie: ‘I am truly delighted at Leonie having got over all her troubles,’ adding, ‘the son and heir is a great thing & must remove all remaining bad feelings in the Leslie bosom.’
Maud Burke, who quickly found that she had little in common with her fox-hunting husband, was one who managed to rebuild her life by discovering her talents as a hostess. At the start of her marriage she had tried to adapt to Leicestershire life, occasionally going out hunting with her husband to please him – though delighted when pregnancy gave her the excuse to stop – then on winter days standing listlessly looking out of the window at the mud, rain, snow and frost of the British winter, sometimes restlessly readjusting the furniture in the rooms she was gradually making prettier and more inviting. After approval by the Prince of Wales gave her social cachet she seized her chance and launched herself as a hostess, eventually moving to London and leading a life on her own.
Other girls tackled their transplanting with a kind of camouflage, adopting the customs, however eccentric they might have thought them, that they had seen in grand houses. One who did this, after a shaky sta
rt, was Katharine McVickar, the daughter of a commodore in the US Navy. She had eloped almost on sight with the 5th Baron Grantley in 1879, while being already married to his cousin. The startled and injured Charles Norton brought a divorce action and, as soon as it was absolute, Lord Grantley married Katharine, a mere week before their eldest child was born.
‘Later,’ wrote their son Richard (the 6th Baron), ‘I continually urged my father to permit me to remove the evidence of this race with time from Burke’s Peerage. He took the view, however, that nobody read that work except old-fashioned domestic servants, and said he did not care about their opinion anyway.’
Katharine quickly took to life as a peeress. ‘I can remember being summoned to tea with my mother as a mite of four years,’ wrote Richard Grantley. ‘[It was] a procedure of almost Germanic complexity. My nurse would lead me to the end of the picture gallery, a cosy little apartment 150 feet long. At the end of this interminable walk I was taken over by a footman-in-waiting and handed to the senior footman, two rooms on. Then, one room from my dear mother’s boudoir, I was passed to the butler, and finally announced by the Steward, a sort of super-butler, in the way that still prevails at Embassies.
‘He would throw open the door of the boudoir and trumpet: “Mr Norton.”
‘Tea with Mother was not very jolly. My sisters would be sitting bolt upright and nearly as terrified as I was, in spite of being older and wiser. I was always made to address them as “Miss Joan”, “Miss Eleanor”, “Miss Winifred” and “Miss Katharine”. Our portion was one thin sandwich … I scored, because I was always given a bonus of a single lump of sugar, but only if I sucked it silently and did not crunch “vulgarly”, as Mother used to say.’
Cornelia Craven, a bride at sixteen, managed her successful marriage through total immersion in her husband’s way of life – aided by the fact that she had largely grown up in Scotland and that for much of the time her parents were nearby. As she grew older she became grander: once, when an elderly cousin whom she was entertaining to luncheon told her that he was over on business, she responded: ‘How unfortunate you had to go into trade.’ Living at Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire, where she was loved and respected, she took a close personal interest in the villagers’ lives – to the extent that if a villager failed to appear in church on Sunday morning she would call round in her carriage and pair to find out why. If an employee was ill she provided medical attention, she distributed hampers at Christmas and (after she was widowed) financed a Christmas party and conjuror for the children in the village hall.
But it took Mary Curzon to sum up the more general view in a letter to her father. ‘Just tell the dear girls once a month so they won’t forget it never never never to marry away from home unless they find a George as it is always a sorrow to be an alien – and 50 years in a new country never alters your nationality and I shall never be an Englishwoman in feeling or character and oh! the unhappiness I see around me here in England amongst American women.’
EPILOGUE
By the end of 1902 the all-powerful Mrs Astor had fallen and there was a new queen of society, Grace Vanderbilt. Grace ruled, as ever, by insisting on the self-perpetuating mores of the society she had always known, relishing the routines of its seasons and days, the maintenance of the small but telling differentials between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
But slowly, society itself was changing. Even in New York, the barriers were coming down – or rather, were being trampled underfoot by people who were hardly aware of them. No longer was it necessary to marry your daughter off to a title in order to ensure yourself a back-door entry into society, as had earlier been the case; the passage of years had cleansed many earlier fortunes of their ‘nouveau’ connotation and the younger generation found itself an outcast no more. Besides, there were plenty of ways other than balls, the ritual of calling and the effort of changing your clothes several times a day to make your mark or occupy your days.
Ideas of freedom, of education and above all of female franchise were sweeping through the consciousness of both nations. Alva Vanderbilt, whose whole life had once been dedicated to rising to the top of the social pile, was now drawn into the suffrage movement, founding the Political Equality League in 1909 to get votes for suffrage-supporting senators. She campaigned, she wrote articles for newspapers, she donated large sums to the cause, she focused all her formidable energies and independence of spirit on this new goal. Anything further from her life as a Newport and New York socialite cannot be imagined (although she carried on dyeing her hair a Titian red until the end. ‘I don’t want to die with grey hair’, she told a friend.’ ‘It’s so depressing.’)
Organisations like the National Consumers’ League were campaigning against sweatshops, there was general condemnation of excess, and those at the top were concerning themselves more and more with less frivolous matters.
It was the same in England where, as Consuelo Marlborough commented, ‘A purely social life has no appeal.’ It was not a remark that one would have heard twenty years earlier.
Lady Warwick, King Edward VII’s former favourite, joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1904, giving it large sums of money and supporting its campaign for free meals for schoolchildren, while the suffrage movement steadily increased its supporters. Liberal politicians were promising welfare reforms (carried out a few years later); various grandes dames – Americans among them – were founding village schools or orphanages.
* * *
American newspapers, increasingly influential as their readership grew, were reflecting the changed attitude of the times, almost unanimously condemning what they saw as profligate spending. The tone of awed respect with which the huge dinners and wilder excesses of the Gilded Age were recorded had given way to acidulous comment on what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen called ‘conspicuous consumption’.1 A particular cause of resentment was that so many good American dollars had left the land of the free to prop up failing British estates.
As early as 1895 the Los Angeles Herald had pointed out that ‘A laboriously compiled list of all the marriages of American women to titled men for the past thirty-five years shows that at least $200 million have gone away from these shores in the period. Eighty per cent of this is represented in the marriages of the past six years.’
Thoughtfully, the paper listed the names of those who had, as they put it, exchanged cash for coronets, together with the size of the dowry that each had brought with her.
The flower of young American womanhood absorbed this expression of the zeitgeist. No longer did they, or their mammas, stalk the coverts of Mayfair for lurking eligibles. Perhaps, too, the girls were warned off by the fate that befell so many of them – again, zestfully chronicled by their own newspapers.
What is striking, though, is the effect, out of all proportion to their numbers, of the American invasion, not only – though mainly – on the upper classes, but on Britain in general.
The repair and restoration of many superb houses, now open to the public, is down to them. Most notable, perhaps, was the effect Consuelo’s millions had on Blenheim Palace: the refurbishment began even on the new bride’s honeymoon – tapestries, paintings and furniture were bought in Europe to fill the gaps left by the various sales, the Marlborough gems were replaced and immediately on the couple’s return the Duke began a comprehensive restoration and redecoration programme, with gilt boiseries (in imitation of Versailles), the moving of various rooms to upper floors and the employment of a famous French landscape artist to create a water garden and fountains. Indeed, even after their divorce the allowance the Duke had secured from the Vanderbilts enabled him to continue not only with the improvements to Blenheim but its very maintenance.
In keeping with this grandeur more servants were engaged, with a staff of fifty outside, including electricians for the newly installed electric wiring, a cricket professional for the estate cricket team, lodge-keepers in black coats with silver buttons and cockaded top hats and twelve gamekeepers in green
velvet coats and black billycock hats.
The money brought by Adèle Beach Grant when she married the 7th Earl of Essex supported the estate in the early years of the twentieth century and allowed the Earl to continue to host lavish parties. Their seat, Cassiobury House, enjoyed a high-society profile at this time; in 1902 the Earl and Countess received both King Edward VII and the young Winston Churchill there.
The series of renovations at Coombe Abbey, the ancestral home of the Earl of Craven, begun the year of his marriage to Cornelia, suggests that without this influx of American money Coombe Abbey would have been lost. Her parents, the Bradley-Martins, described as ‘angels of generosity’ by their English friends, greatly improved the castle at Bal Macaan and built a hall for the local people on the estate (they in turn were so appreciative of what Bradley Martin did for them that they subscribed to the erection of an obelisk memorial to him on his death).
Mary Leiter used her father’s money to help her husband, George Curzon, become the Viceroy of India; it also secured Tattersall Castle in Lincolnshire, Bodiam Castle in Sussex and Montacute House in Somerset for the National Trust. Jennie Churchill’s older sister Clara, married to Moreton Frewen, turned the surroundings of their house, Brede Place, into a magical garden. The beautiful May Goelet, happily married to the serious-minded 8th Duke of Roxburghe, brought wonderful tapestries as well as a superb collection of French furniture to Floors in addition to her enormous $20 million dowry; William Waldorf Astor adorned Cliveden with superb paintings and sculptures from Italy.
Culturally, the American effect was great, although more subtle. The Americans’ style and smartness made Englishwomen make more of an effort; their vitality and openness to the new let fresh air into what had become formalised lives. They were responsible for a number of ‘firsts’: Maud Burke put English opera on the map and Nancy Astor became England’s first female Member of Parliament. And their descendants, from the amazing 20th Earl of Suffolk (son of Daisy Leiter and the 19th Earl), hero of numerous incredible wartime exploits, to Winston Churchill, perhaps our greatest Prime Minister, made an indelible mark on our history.
The Husband Hunters Page 30