Entertaining Women by Chris Enss

Author:Chris Enss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TWODOT®

Irksome was too mild a word for Lillian’s third marriage. In 1894 she wed a singer, John Haley Augustin Chatterton, who styled himself Signor Giovanni Perugini. Her actress friend, Marie Dressler, portrayed the tenor as a conceited buffoon who stooped to embarrassing Lillian onstage. After several months of discord, Lillian kicked him out. Disillusioned, she threw herself into her career, taking a hand in management of her company. Although her appearance in The Goddess of Truth and other productions under the direction of Henry E. Abby were not well received, she made a comeback in An American Beauty and thus acquired her nickname.

In 1899 Lillian joined Weber and Fields Music Hall, where she earned more than twelve hundred dollars a week. Until 1904, when Joe Weber and Lew Fields dissolved their partnership, she enjoyed a fizzy success in comic opera. Lady Teazle, a musical version of The School for Scandal, showcased her talents as an actress. Minor surgery on her throat had not helped her deteriorating voice, so she began playing exclusively comic roles. She covered thousands of miles in her private railroad car to indifferent success and finally returned to vaudeville and a popular reprise of some of her most famous songs.

Still beautiful, fiercely intelligent, and as opinionated as her mother ever had been, Lillian began writing a syndicated newspaper column, lectured on health and beauty and love, supported the vote for women, and put out a line of cosmetics called Lillian Russell’s Own Preparation.

In 1912 she married Alexander Pollock Moore, owner of the Pittsburgh Leader. Moore was everything her musician husbands had not been, and his power in conservative politics matched her interests well. She recruited for the Marine Corps and supported War Bond drives during the First World War and afterward raised money for the American Legion.

She made a movie version of Wildfire in 1914, starring with John Barrymore, but the movie was not particularly successful. Her public appearances, however, especially when she closed with her song “Come Down My Evenin’ Star,” still roused huge enthusiasm. Her profile, which was as well-known as her name, was featured on cigar bands and matchbox covers, theater posters, and magazine covers. The Illustrated American declared: “There are those of course, who have preferences in other directions when it comes to female beauty. They may prefer theirs darker, or slighter, or more willowy, or shorter or taller. But any such predilection is a personal matter, after all everyone acknowledges Miss Russell a beauty and a rare one at that.”

Lillian always knew her beauty was an asset, but after her work for equal rights for women, for political causes, and on behalf of American servicemen, she decided to enter the political arena herself, and, in 1915, she declared her candidacy for mayor of New York. The woman whose first tour of the West had ended in economic failure had learned a lot about the world of commerce, and her candidacy was founded on the principles of sound business practice. “The reason I

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