Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals by Beatty Laura

Author:Beatty, Laura [Beatty, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781448130559
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XX

The Storm Breaks

THE FREAKES’ TABLEAUX vivants had tipped the balance of Lillie’s outlook on life in the summer of 1880. Of course there was still the possibility that Louis Battenberg might fling his position to the winds and marry her, but Lillie was realistic enough to know that it was an outside chance. Her attitudes were changing now as fast as her hopes died. For a while, she had been asking her friends in Bohemia what she should do, and they had offered various suggestions. Wilde, of course, wanted her to act. Miles had thought of market gardening, which Wilde had dismissed, partly because he was possessive and it was Miles’s idea not his own, and partly because he found ‘muddy boots’ unaesthetic. Whistler had been impressed by the caricatures she made of her friends and thought she should paint. So, it seems, did Poynter, who had also been surprised by her evident talent. After his first visit to Norfolk Street he had been struck enough to write to Wharncliffe, observing,

I had never been1 in her house before: her drawing-room is very quaint, like a magician’s cave; her paintings on glass surprised me. I had no idea she could do so well.

Millais, altogether more practical than his fellows, had used his influence to persuade Heinrich Felberman, editor of Life magazine, to find her a job as a columnist. Felberman was tempted. As he recalled in his memoirs, Lillie’s various portraits on his pages had already done wonders for his circulation. In particular the picture of Effie Deans had been what he termed a ‘phenomenal hit’. ‘Before that’, he remembered,

she had narrowly escaped becoming my society editress. Sir John Millais, my neighbour in Kensington, who took the deepest interest in Mrs Langtry’s future welfare, just at the time when her financial crash came, approached me through the Rev. Compton Reade … to give the famous beauty employment on my social staff. He believed that she had a talent which could be developed and would be of great use to me in the world in which she moved. The price asked was 800 guineas a year, which, although I was of a speculative disposition, I considered too high. I offered half and eventually increased it by another hundred … After a good deal of persuasion I was prevailed to go as high as six hundred pounds, but the very same day I received a telegram saying that Mrs Langtry had decided to go on the stage.

She did not, in fact, finally decide on the stage as a career until late 1881, but she did, in the June or July of the year before, take lessons in diction as a means to that end, engaging a Mr Cauvet as a tutor. This she kept under wraps. It was more elegant to appear to have bowed to popular demand than to have elbowed her own way into the limelight. Later she said of this last season – and though the sentiment is true

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