“My dear,” she whispered to him, “you won’t have to worry over money. You know I will give you everything, as much as ever you want. I understand perfectly that you have to provide for your mother, and we will arrange all that….”38
Harry laughed. “I don’t suppose you have any idea of the way I live. Well, I shall have to enlighten you. I live not on my wits, but on my wit. I make a career of being popular.’39
Bessie did not understand, so Harry patiently explained to her just how he had been living so well on so little.
He received all his clothes free, his tailor having “an idea, which I naturally encourage, that it is a privilege to dress the man who according to newspapers ‘sets the fashion for American manhood.’” “He had the same arrangement with a shirtmaker, who asked only that he ‘let it be discreetly known where his underwear came from.”40 Black, Starr, and Frost loaned him a constant supply of fashionable gold watches, signet rings, and cigarette cases. His rooms over Sherry’s cost him nothing; the publicity for Sherry’s generated from Mrs. Astor’s visit with him that Sunday evening assured him free lodging whenever he requested. He could entertain lavishly in the restaurant downstairs or at the Waldorf or Delmonico’s, “for the management was perfectly aware that no better advertisement could exist than Harry Lehr’s patronage. Wherever he led, the whole of the smart crowd would be certain to follow.” Harry never sent letters, only telegrams. ‘Oh, do let Harry Lehr send his cables free,” the wife of a cable magnate coaxed her husband. “He is always hard up…so generous…what that boy must spend…and then he’s so amusing!” Wives of railroad tycoons secured free passes for him. A wine merchant paid him six thousand dollars a year to promote his champagne, which soon was filling the cellars of hostesses like Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Fish, and Mrs. Oelrichs.
“Now you see how it is all done,” Harry explained to the amazed Bessie. “But it has this one disadvantage. It can only last while I am a bachelor. People see me from quite a different angle now that they know I am going to marry a rich girl. The day after our engagement was announced everyone started bothering me. The shops won’t give me things free any more. They say that now I can afford to pay for them myself. So you see, darling, I am afraid there is only one solution. You will have to realize that I am giving up a perfectly good livelihood because I love you far more than my career…and you will have to supply me with all that I am losing….”41
Bessie found that “there was something so irresistibly funny in his point of view that I could only laugh and agree.”42 Her lawyers drew up a marriage settlement.
“We had a lovely dinner,’ Bessie wrote in her diary that day before their wedding. “Harry was awfully clever and witty and lovely and handsome and oh! I was so proud of him! There is no other like him in the whole world….”43
The evening after their wedding, at a hotel in Baltimore, Bessie dressed carefully for her first dinner alone with Harry, pinning a diamond brooch on her rose brocade gown, and arranging for the dining room in their suite to be filled with sheaves of red roses and the table set with caviar, quail in aspic, Harry’s favorite champagne, and cigars. Next to Harry’s plate was a special gold and enamel watch she had chosen for him.
As Bessie completed her preparations for dinner, her maid came in, her eyes downcast.
“Madame, I thought I had better tell you…. There must be some mistake. The maître d’hôtel tells me that Mr. Lehr has just given him orders to serve him dinner in his own room. He says that you will dine alone.”
A few minutes later, Harry Lehr entered his wife’s room. All merriment had left his eyes.
“There are some things I must say to you, and it is better that I should say them now at the very beginning so that there can be no misunderstandings between us. You have just heard my orders to the servants, I presume?”
Bessie nodded.
“Well, I intend that they shall be carried out for the rest of our life together. In public I will be to you everything that a most devoted husband should be to his wife. You shall never have to complain of my conduct in this respect. I will give you courtesy, respect and apparently devotion. But you must expect nothing more from me. When we are alone I do not intend to keep up the miserable pretense, the farce of love and sentiment. Our marriage will never be a marriage in anything but in name. I do not love you, I can never love you. I can school myself to be polite to you, but that is all. The less we see of one another except in the presence of others the better.’
Bessie’s mouth was too dry to speak above a whisper.
“But why did you marry me?”
Harry Lehr laughed, and “there was such bitterness in the sound that I shrank back involuntarily.’
Harry looked past her, pacing the room. “Dear lady, do you really know so little of the world that you have never heard of people being married for their money, or did you imagine that your charms placed you above such a fate? Since you force me to do so I must tell you the unflattering truth that your money is your only asset in my eyes. I married you because the only person on earth I love is my mother. I wanted above everything to keep her in comfort. Your father’s fortune will enable me to do so. But there is a limit to sacrifice. I cannot condemn myself to the misery of playing the role of adoring lover for the rest of my life.’
Bessie was speechless.
“After all,” Harry continued, “have you so much to complain of? At least I am being honest with you. How many men in New York, how many among our own friends, if it comes to that, have entered their wives’ rooms on their wedding night with exactly my state of mind? But they prefer hypocrisy to the truth. If I am never your lover when we are alone, at least I will not neglect and humiliate you in public. What is more, I believe you will actually gain by marrying me. You will have a wonderful position in society. As my wife, all doors will be open to you. Perhaps you will remember that luncheon to which I invited you to meet my four best friends?”
Bessie nodded.
“That was because I wanted to be sure that they would approve of my choice. Much as I wanted to marry you, nothing would induce me to forfeit my position in society to do so. But when I heard their decision to take you up I knew you were going to be invited to all the most important houses in New York, and therefore there could be nothing to fear.”
Harry turned to look at Bessie.
“I suppose I am what novelists would call an adventurer. I am not ashamed of it. I would do more than I have done for the sake of my mother. If you will try and accustom yourself to the position, and realize from the start that there is no romance, and never can be any between us, I believe that we shall get along quite well together. But for God’s sake leave me alone. Do not come near me except when we are in public, or you will force me to repeat to you the brutal truth that you are actually repulsive to me.’44
Harry walked out of the room, leaving Bessie sitting by the fire, “staring into the ruins of my life. Then I undressed and crept into the great bed that was to have been our marriage bed, and lay sobbing in the dark till the pillow was drenched with my tears.’ The next day she wrote in her diary: “My happiness is gone. Mamma must never know.’45
Bessie determined that it was “a thousand times better [to] wear the mask of casual indifference, let him think I cared as little as he!”46 The two set out to perfect their charade as they plunged into the social whirl.
2.
Even after his marriage, Mrs. Astor continued to fawn over Harry Lehr. “Kind motherly Mrs. Astor,” Bessie noted, “would smile her approval: ‘So nice to see young people so much in love. I am so glad to see dear Harry with such a charming wife.’” “47 And Alva Vanderbilt was very fond of him. Both ladies asked Harry to help them select their clothes, for which he had a special knack. “I went to Wetzel’s,” Harry wrote in his secret diary one day when he bought a new suit, “and had my clothes fitted on. I did the very best I could to hide how it bored me. Oh, if only I could wear ladies’ clothes,” he drooled in his diary, “all silks
and dainty petticoats and laces, how I should love to choose them. I love shopping even for my wife.”48
“How could anyone take me seriously, dear lady?” he would ask Mrs. Astor or Alva Vanderbilt. “I’m only your fun-maker, your jester.”49 Never were there two more kindred spirits than Harry Lehr and his best friend and fellow jester, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish.
Mrs. Fish had married well. Her husband, the president of the Illinois Central Railroad, was a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. Yet she was an unlikely candidate to be one of high society’s leaders. She could barely read or write. By the standards of the Gilded Age, her husband’s fortune of just “a few million,’50 as she described it, was little more than what Ward McAllister would call “respectable poverty.” She was heavyset, of stern visage, with piercing black eyes and high-arched eyebrows; some were unkind enough to say that like her friend Harry Lehr, she sometimes pretended she was a woman. But from this corseted grande dame of aristocratic bearing came a constant stream of chatter, punctuated by her hoarse macawlike laugh and bursts of caustic comments, which in their directness and unexpectedness were the delight of a bored society.
“Can I get you something for your throat, my dear?” Stuyvesant Fish asked his wife, who was in the midst of a coughing fit.
“Yes,” she sputtered, “you can get me that diamond and pearl necklace I saw today at Tiffany’s!”51
Mrs. Fish was as much a part of the frivolous society that migrated between Fifth Avenue in New York City and Bellevue Avenue in Newport as anyone. Yet she liked nothing better than to poke fun at the superficialities and pretensions of her world.
She delighted in the stinginess of some of the wealthiest society matrons. Once she dropped in unannounced at lunchtime at the home of one society leader. “We had a slab of nondescript cold meat,” she later complained to her social secretary, “and fried potatoes and tea. Of course all this would be served with great style by a butler and two footmen in bright liveries. It’s a shame. I should have told her I was coming so the poor woman could have had a square meal.”
Later in the afternoon, the lady took Mrs. Fish into her drawing room and summoned her servants to bring in the tea. The tall doors of the room opened and in came the butler followed by two footmen, one carrying over his arm an antique lace tablecloth, which he carefully positioned on the tea table, the other bearing a heavy silver tray, which he placed on the tablecloth, with the butler overseeing the entire operation to make sure everything was perfect. “And what do you think we were served?” Mrs. Fish asked her secretary. “Weak tea and soda crackers!”52
“I’m so tired of being hypocritically polite,” Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish once grumbled to a friend. She in fact made no effort whatsoever to be polite, and it became something of a badge of honor to be insulted by her. Her guests loved it and kept coming back for more.
“Howdy-do, howdy-do,’53 she would brusquely greet her guests, quickly herding them on to her husband as they came through the front door of Crossways, their colonial mansion built on the hill above Bailey’s Beach in Newport, or of their six-story Venetian palace at 25 East Seventy-eighth Street in New York. (“It would be an uncomfortable place for anyone without breeding,” she noted.54)
“Make yourself perfectly at home,” she told her guests. “And, believe me, there is no one who wishes you there more heartily than I do.”
“Oh, how do you do!” she greeted a gentleman. “I had quite forgotten I asked you.”
“Well, here you all are,” she announced to her guests: “older faces and younger clothes.”55
One of her innovations was to streamline to precisely fifty minutes the customary marathon three-hour dinner orgies that Mrs. Astor had made de rigueur, to reduce, as she said, the “eight to ten courses of boresome, messy dishes to, oh, perhaps three courses—but something you really wanted to eat.”56 Each footman assigned to every two guests was under strict orders to keep the courses moving, and guests remembered having to hold their plates down with one hand while eating with the other. One guest recalled lifting his hand to take a fish bone out of his mouth and, before he could put it on his plate, seeing his plate disappear.
She encouraged her guests to call each other by their first names during the dinners, rather than the “Mr.” and “Mrs.” that were then the custom, and so she became Mamie.
“And what have you been doing with yourself to-day, Fred Martin?” Mamie asked one of her guests at dinner.
“Oh,” Mr. Martin replied, ‘I’ve been addressing the inmates of the asylum for the blind; I spoke for over an hour, and at the conclusion I asked my audience which they would prefer to be—deaf or blind.”
“Well, and the verdict?” Mrs. Fish asked.
“They were unanimous in deciding in favour of blindness.”
“What! After hearing you talk for an hour!”57
One newcomer to society made the mistake of being so gauche as to ask Mrs. Fish about the size of her New York City mansion.
“I can’t tell you how big it is,” Mamie replied, “because it swells at night.”
Another tried to compliment her on her Newport mansion.
‘Tours is the largest small house I’ve ever seen,” the guest said to Mrs. Fish.
“And yours is the smallest large house I’ve ever seen,” Mamie replied.58
There was a great deal of gossip one summer about Mrs. Alice Drexel, who had a handsome male secretary to oversee the operation of her mansion. A friend of hers leaned over to Mrs. Fish.
“Mamie, have you seen Cousin Alice? I’ve looked everywhere in the house.”
“No,” Mrs. Fish replied with an icy stare. “Have you looked under the secretary?”59
Not even Alva Vanderbilt knew how to deal with her viper’s tongue. Alva let it be known that she found Mamie’s Newport mansion “ugly,”60 but she was not prepared for Mamie’s retaliation.
“I have just heard what you said about me at Tessie Oelrich’s last night,” a livid Alva stormed at Mamie Fish. “You can’t deny it, because she told me herself. You told them I looked like a frog.”
Mamie coolly looked Alva over, and then politely corrected her: “A toad, my dear; a toad. “61
Mamie Fish invariably served champagne at her dinners. “You have to liven these people up. Wine just makes them sleepy.”62 She wanted her guests to be awake for the entertainment she had planned. On her invitations she had scrawled, “There will be something besides the dinner, come.” That “something besides the dinner” could be the cast of a current musical, visiting royalty, an opera singer, vaudeville actors, Indian or Japanese dancers—any celebrity, it was said, who could “hold a fork.”63 The high point of many evenings was when her friend Harry Lehr appeared after dinner, dressed to the nines as a Newport dowager, and strutted before the guests.
One of her guests began to explain to Mrs. Fish why he would have to leave the party early.
“I promised my sister that I would call for her….”
“Don’t apologize,” she squawked like a blue jay. “No guest ever left too soon for me.’64
Growing bored with one of her own parties, Mamie ordered the orchestra to continue playing “Home Sweet Home” until all the guests had taken the hint and gotten up to leave. One guest begged her for one more dance, just one more two-step.
“There are just two steps more for you,” she told her, “one upstairs to get your coat and the other out to your carriage.’65
Still playing “Home Sweet Home,” the musicians stood up and herded the lingerers out the front door.
One furious socialite sat on the front steps of Crossways, pouting, as she waited for her carriage to arrive. Mrs. Fish’s secretary saw her.
“My goodness, what are you doing out here?”
“I’m waiting for my carriage. Mrs. Fish has ordered us out.”
The secretary hurried to Mrs. Fish to inform her that the lady’s carriage had not yet arrived and that she was sitting on the front steps.
“Let he
r stay there,” Mrs. Fish ordered. “She’ll cool off better out there than here.”66
Harry Lehr and Mamie Fish understood each other perfectly.
Shortly after the Lehrs’ marriage, the guests at one of Mrs. Fish’s parties were trying to guess each other’s favorite flowers.
Harry Lehr jumped in. “I know Mamie’s: the climbing rose.”
“And I yours, pet,” she replied. “The mari-gold.”
Once at a party, Stuyvesant Fish and his wife got up to leave.
“Sit down, Fishes,” Harry Lehr called from down the table. “You’re not rich enough to leave first.”67
Like two mischievous schoolchildren egging each other on, Harry Lehr and Mamie Fish delighted in plotting outlandish pranks. They arranged for a baby elephant to walk through the dining room after one dinner. Another evening, boys dressed as cats distributed favors to the startled ladies: squiggling white mice. There was a dinner party for dolls given by the pair, where all conversation was in baby talk. The two pranksters caught Mrs. Campbell’s dachshund, covered it with flour from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail, and set the dog loose on Newport’s fashionable Casino terrace when it was filled with society matrons in their black lace dresses.68
One evening when Bessie Lehr came in from driving, Harry met her in the hall.
“Joseph Leiter has just rung up,” he said. “He wanted to know whether he might bring a friend to our dinner party tomorrow night. I told him I was sure you would not mind as it is not to be a big, formal affair.’
“Who is the friend?” Bessie asked.
“Prince del Drago, who is staying on the yacht with him. Joe says he is a charming fellow, and comes from Corsica. I asked him whether he was any relation of the del Dragos whom we met in Rome, and he said that certainly he was. They all belong to the same family, only the Prince’s is a distant branch. Joe thinks we shall like him immensely, but he warned me that he is a little inclined to be wild. He doesn’t want us to give him too much to drink, because he is not used to it. Anything goes to his head, and then apparently he is apt to behave rather badly.”
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