She married a man to escape her island, then left him to die penniless in a madhouse. She bore a daughter in secret and raised the child to call her aunt. She turned her own face into the first great fortune of the age of fame. Most people know her as the Jersey Lily, the clergyman’s daughter so lovely she bewitched a future king.
But the woman behind that legend was something colder than a love story. Emily Charlotte Labouchère was born on October 13, 1853, at the old rectory at St. Saviour on the island of Jersey. Her father, the Very Reverend William Corbett Labouchère, was the rector of St.
Saviour and dean of Jersey, a tall, handsome, learned man who was the voice of God to his congregation. In private, he was something the island whispered about. He had an appetite for women that no collar could restrain, and he fathered children on women of his parish whom he would never name. The scandal built slowly until his own reputation drove him from the island he was supposed to shepherd.
His wife, Emily Davis Labouchère, a recognized beauty in her own youth, left him in 1880. Think about what that house taught a watchful child. A father who preached virtue on a Sunday and practiced the opposite through the week. A mother who kept a composed face over a private wound.
The whole polished surface of respectability, and beneath it, a truth that everyone sensed and no one said aloud. Lily Langtry learned her first lesson young: a beautiful surface can hide almost anything, and a secret kept well is a kind of power. She would build an entire life on both. She was the sixth of seven children and the only girl raised among six brothers, chasing them across fields and shore, climbing where they climbed, riding as hard as they rode.
She called them her “tomboy days” and said she had shared her brother’s outdoor sports in a most boyish fashion. A French governess was brought in to make a lady of her and was quite unable to manage her, so she was handed instead to the tutor who taught her brothers and given an education wider and firmer than most girls of her rank ever received. She learned Latin and Greek and French. She learned to hold her own in an argument.
And she learned from six brothers exactly how men could be led. By her teens, she was the beauty of the parish. There is a story, told and retold, that she fell as a girl for a local young man and that her father took her aside and revealed the boy to be one of his own natural sons, her half-brother. And so the romance was killed.
No one names the boy or fixes the year; it belongs to family lore rather than the record. But whether or not it happened, it fits the shape of the house she grew up in, a place where love and secrecy and shame were folded together so tightly that a girl could not always tell one from the other. Jersey then was an island of some 55,000 souls, a few miles of parish and coast, closer to the coast of France than to the shores of England. The whole of respectable society could fit in a handful of drawing rooms.
For a plain girl, that was safety. For a beautiful, clever, restless one, it was a cage with the sea for bars. She watched the yachts of visiting gentlemen in the harbor at St. Helier, and beyond them the open water, and beyond that, a country she had never seen.
She had almost nothing to trade on: no fortune, no title, no great connection, no dowry that would turn heads in London. What she had was her face, and the growing understanding that her face was worth something, if only she could carry it to a market large enough to pay for it. A young woman of 1870 could not simply leave. She could not travel alone, could not earn, could not choose.
She could only marry, and marry well, and hope the man she chose would take her somewhere worth going. So the girl in the rectory began to watch the harbor and the men who sailed into it. She was waiting for a ship, and in the person of a quiet, moneyed Irishman with a fine white yacht, one was already coming. She did not marry Edward Langtry for love.
She married him for his yacht and the open water beyond the island. Edward Langtry was a widower of good Irish family, born in 1847 in County Antrim, the grandson of a Belfast shipping man who had built a fortune in trade. He owned some 340 acres of land at Parkgate and lived on the income of inherited money, without ever having earned a shilling of his own. He owned the one thing that mattered to a girl staring at the sea: a yacht.
He was quiet, shy, easily led, and he had a schooner called the Red Gauntlet, a graceful vessel of 147 tons that could carry a person clean away from the island. To Lily, the boat was the man’s whole meaning. Years afterward, the plain record put it without mercy: Ned Langtry owned a large sailing yacht, and Lily insisted that he take her away from the Channel Islands. They were married on March 9, 1874, in Jersey.
She was 20; he was 26. The ceremony was performed by her own father, the dean, joining his beautiful daughter to a man she had chosen the way one chooses a carriage. The wedding breakfast was held at the Royal Yacht Hotel in St. Helier, a fitting altar for a marriage built on a boat.
There is a second detail, quieter and crueler, that tells the rest. Within weeks of the wedding, Edward Langtry sold the Red Gauntlet. The yacht that had been the whole point of him was gone, and the money underneath it was already thinner than it looked. For a while she made him take her wandering to Southampton and the south coast of England, always edging nearer to the one city that could hold her.
Then illness gave her the opening she needed. She fell sick with a fever, and when she was recovering she pressed her doctor, and through him her husband, that she must go to London to convalesce properly. In 1876 the couple took an apartment in Eaton Place in Belgravia, one of the grandest quarters of the capital. Lily Langtry had reached London at last.
She was 22, unknown, and married to a man already beginning to bore her. They had money enough at first to look like people of consequence. But London was a furnace that ate money, and Edward had no gift for making more. He was, by every account that survives, a decent, dull, shy man, more at ease with a fishing rod than a dinner party.
One who knew them called him a “colorless sportsman. ” Another remembered him as weak and indolent. In her own memoir, written long after she had left him behind, Lily was almost kind, describing “a countryman who felt in London quite like a fish out of water. ” He had married a woman who wanted the very thing that frightened him most: the glare, the crowd, and the noise of society.
Edward’s income came from Irish rents and inherited land, and Irish rents in the 1870s and 1880s were collapsing under agricultural depression and the long land troubles. He had one yacht’s worth of ready money, and he had already sold the yacht. Every month the gap between what they spent and what he earned widened a little more. For now none of that showed.
What showed was a striking young couple new to town, presentable, well-mannered, with an address in Belgravia and no particular fame. Lily Langtry had crossed the sea and spent a marriage to arrive at exactly that ordinary threshold. She had gambled everything to get this far, and this far was nowhere. Then on the evening of April 29, 1877, she was taken to a party at the house of Sir John and Lady Sebright.
She came in a simple black gown with her hair in a soft knot and not a single jewel on her, because she was in mourning for her youngest brother, Reginald, who had died the year before. In a room built to dazzle, she was the one plain thing in it, and that was precisely why no one could look away. Before the evening was over, the artist Frank Miles had begun to sketch her, and his drawings of the unknown young woman in black would soon sell in their thousands as postcards. Within days, the most fashionable men in London were asking who she was.
Within weeks, she had been taken up by a circle of artists and aesthetes who treated her beauty as a public event. And within a single season, this dean’s daughter from a small island with no money and no name had become what her age called a “professional beauty. ”
A professional beauty, a PB as the newspapers wrote it, was something genuinely new in the world: a woman famous purely for how she looked. Cheap photography had just made it possible to reproduce a human face by the thousand, and the great photographers of the day posed these beauties and sold their portraits in every stationer’s window in the country.
People who would never meet Lily Langtry could buy her face for a few pence and prop it on the mantelpiece. She was in the plainest sense the first modern celebrity, famous for being famous. By 1878 she was called the most advertised beauty in Europe. Crowds gathered in Hyde Park simply to watch her ride.
Hostesses fought to have her because a professional beauty in the room was said to be worth a hundred paying guests. Then the painters made her immortal. In the summer of 1878, John Everett Millais, one of the most celebrated artists in Britain and, like her, a child of Jersey, exhibited his portrait of her at the Royal Academy. He called it “A Jersey Lily.
” The crowds who pressed forward to see it were so thick that the picture had to be roped off and a policeman set to guard it. Millais is said to have called her the most beautiful woman in the world. Here the story folds a small perfect irony into itself. The flower she holds in the painting, called a Jersey lily, is not a Jersey lily at all.
None could be found during the sittings, so the painter used a Guernsey lily instead. The most famous image of her, the one that fixed her name forever, was built on the wrong flower. A manufactured picture taken as the truth. It is the shape of her whole life in a single canvas.
She sat for others too: for Edward Poynter and Edward Burne-Jones, for George Frederick Watts, and for the great James McNeill Whistler. The National Portrait Gallery in London holds 65 images of her to this day. But fame of that kind is a strange and dangerous currency. It brought no income of its own, not yet.
It cost a fortune to sustain in gowns and carriages and appearances, and it drew the eyes of powerful men, the most powerful of all being a bored and pleasure-loving prince who was accustomed to having whatever caught his eye. His name was Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Queen Victoria and the heir to the throne, a man the whole country would one day know as King Edward VII. In the spring of 1877, he was 35 years old, married, restless, and bored. He had heard, as everyone had heard, about the beautiful unknown in the black dress.
They met on May 24, 1877, at a supper given by the Arctic explorer Sir Allen Young. It was no accident of the seating plan. The prince had arranged to be placed next to her, and his wife, Princess Alexandra, was away in Athens visiting her brother, the king of the Greeks. Lily was 23.
From that supper, by the common account, an affair began that would run from late 1877 to the summer of 1880. What made this different from the prince’s many other liaisons was that he did not hide it. He carried her openly through the great houses and the racecourses of England. He was seen with her at Ascot in 1878 when she was at the very height of her fame and beauty.
Most astonishing of all, Princess Alexandra herself accepted the situation and received Lily at Marlborough House. A dean’s daughter from Jersey with no fortune and a bankrupt husband was dining in the house of the future king, welcomed by his wife. The fame it created is hard to overstate. Her photographs were selling by the thousand.
Women copied the way she wore her hair, twisting it low at the back of the neck in what the papers christened the “Langtry knot. ” They copied her clothes, her bearing, the very tilt of her head. Shopkeepers put her name to soaps and scents and hats to make them sell. A whole small industry grew up around a single face.
Nothing quite like it had happened before because the machinery that made it possible, the cheap photograph and the illustrated paper, had only just been invented. Lily Langtry was the first person to be famous in the way the modern world understands the word. The finest modern biographer of Edward VII, the historian Jane Ridley, searched for the hard evidence and could find no love letters from these years and no proof of the exact nature of the relationship. She also showed that Lily was a tireless inventor of her own myth, who published a flattering and false account of being presented to Queen Victoria.
So the honest picture is this. That the prince favored her, carried her through society, and made her the most talked about woman in England is beyond doubt. The grand romance of a beauty and a smitten prince is in large part a story Lily told about herself, and told brilliantly. It hardly mattered whether the passion was as deep as the legend claimed.
She was the first of the prince’s great public mistresses, setting the pattern the others would follow. Remarkably, the bond outlasted the passion. Long after the affair had cooled, the prince remained her friend, helping her when she fell, attending her performances, keeping a place for her at the edge of his world until his death as king in 1910. While all London toasted his wife, Edward Langtry sat in the corner of his own life, drinking and disappearing.
At the parties where she shone, he was an afterthought, the dull husband in the corner, a countryman among wits. He had never wanted this world. He had wanted a quiet life of fishing and shooting and inherited ease. Instead he found himself married to the most public woman in England, watching her walk on the arm of the heir to the throne.
He had no trade of his own, no profession, no talent for making money, only the habit of spending it. And he had married a woman whose hunger for the world was bottomless. In London, the two weaknesses met and multiplied. She wanted everything the city could show, and he could deny her nothing and command her nothing.
He did the thing that weak and wounded men have always done. He retreated into melancholy and into drink. The shy, colorless sportsman grew quieter and heavier and sadder, and the marriage curdled into something cold. She was seeing other men, and he knew it, and he drank, and the two of them circled each other in a house that had run out of money and out of love at the same time.
Then in 1879, the private humiliation became a public one. A scandal sheet called Town Talk, edited by a man named Adolphus Rosenberg, printed a sensational story. It claimed that Edward Langtry was petitioning for divorce and that he had named the Prince of Wales along with two other noblemen as the men who had wronged him. It was false.
There was no such petition. But it dragged the prince’s name and Lily’s reputation into open court, and it forced Edward into the witness box to answer for a marriage that had already failed in every way but the legal one. He testified that he had always lived on terms of affection with his wife. It was a sad, loyal, threadbare thing to say.
Rosenberg was convicted of libel and sentenced to 18 months in prison. The trial revealed how fragile the whole edifice was. Lily’s entire standing rested on a reputation that any cheap printer with a press could threaten, and on a royal favor that a single scandal could cool. Behind the reputation, the money was running out in earnest.
The gowns were unpaid for. The house was unpaid for. The tradesmen were beginning to lose patience. For a time, the royal connection held the creditors at bay.
But that protection was worth exactly as much as the friendship behind it, and the friendship was cooling. Lily had grown careless. She had taken lovers where she pleased. The truth of her private life in these years was anything but tidy.
By the middle of 1879, even as the royal affair still burned, she had begun a liaison with the Earl of Shrewsbury. By January 1880, the two were said to be planning to run away together. There was also Prince Louis of Battenberg, a handsome young naval officer of a minor German royal house, later to become the first Marquess of Milford Haven. From about March of 1880, he and Lily were lovers.
When at last he confessed the affair to his parents, the machinery of royalty moved with cold speed to remove him from the scene. On October 17, 1880, Prince Louis was sent to sea, departing on a voyage around the world aboard the warship Inconstant that would keep him away for two years. There was also Arthur Clarence Jones, a young man from Jersey, a childhood friend tangled into her family, himself the illegitimate son of a nobleman. He was the ordinary thread among the glittering ones, the man from home.
Letters that survived long after her death and came to light only in the 1970s show her writing to Jones with a warmth and an intimacy she gave to no one else on paper. When the biographer Laura Beatty studied those letters, they changed the whole picture of this hidden chapter of her life. Think of the tightrope she was walking in those months. A royal lover whose favor paid her debts and gave her the world, an earl she was said to be ready to run away with, a young prince whose family would soon hurry him to the far side of the earth, and threaded quietly through all of it, the man from home to whom she told the truths she told no one else.
What undid her in the end was not a jealous lover, nor a rival, nor a scandal sheet. It was biology. In the summer of 1880, Lily Langtry discovered she was pregnant, and she could not be certain, or could not say, which man had fathered the child. The two names that history has argued over ever since are Prince Louis of Battenberg and Arthur Jones.
The official answer, the one the royal descendants would later accept, named the prince. The answer most modern historians now think more likely, on the strength of those private letters to Jones, names the childhood friend from Jersey. The truth was buried so deep, so deliberately, that it has never been settled. What is certain is that Lily herself understood at once what the pregnancy meant.
It meant ruin. Everything she had was built on a public image, and an illegitimate child by an uncertain father would smash that image to pieces. Her private letters from this time carry a desperation that cuts through all her later self-mythologizing. She wrote to Arthur Jones begging him to go to a chemist and buy her something, anything that might end the pregnancy.
It did not work, or she did not use it. She began without a flicker of hesitation to arrange the disappearance of everyone who might see the truth. In December of 1880, Edward was sent to the United States on what looked like an errand of business, to value some property that had belonged to the late actress Adelaide Neilson. It was a pretext, thin and convenient, and it worked.
Once he was across the Atlantic, a series of delaying letters kept him there, held at a safe distance while the months of the pregnancy passed. He was kept away until April of 1881. With Edward removed, Lily herself vanished from London. She was spirited quietly across the channel to France, to the anonymity of Paris, where a famous face could be hidden among strangers who did not know it.
The retreat was funded in part by the Prince of Wales, a man with every reason to want the whole affair kept far from public view. And there in France in the early spring of 1881, most probably on March 8, Lily Langtry gave birth to a daughter. There was no birth certificate. The birth was deliberately left unregistered.
They named her Jeanne Marie. Now came the decision that defines Lily Langtry more sharply than any love affair. She could not raise the child openly, so she chose a lie, and she chose a large one. The baby was handed to Lily’s own mother, the child’s grandmother, back on Jersey, to be brought up on the island where Lily herself had been born.
Jeanne Marie was raised to believe that Lily was not her mother at all, but her aunt. She was told that her father was Edward Langtry, the absent husband, a man she would never meet. The lie was kind in its way, a soft childhood built on a hard untruth. But a lie of that size does not stay buried forever.
It waits. Sit with the coldness of that arrangement. This was not a moment of panic, a secret kept in the heat of a single crisis. It was a plan sustained for years, maintained through visit after visit, a mother looking at her own daughter and letting the child call her aunt.
Every birthday, every visit home, every letter was a small act of the same long deception. Lily had weighed the truth of her child against the survival of her fame, and the fame had won. The year was 1880, and it fell on her from every direction at once. The Shrewsbury scandal had made her name a byword for recklessness.
The whispers of a secret pregnancy were spreading through the very drawing rooms that had lionized her, and the Prince of Wales allowed his favor to cool as the trouble gathered around her. When royal warmth withdrew, the protection it had given withdrew with it, and the people she owed money to stopped waiting to be paid. In October of 1880, Lily Langtry was forced to sell her possessions to raise the money to settle her debts. The gowns, the furniture, the small treasures of a fashionable life, all of it went, sold off to keep her husband from being dragged into the bankruptcy court.
Two years before, she had been the most photographed woman in Britain. Now her belongings were being valued and carried away by strangers. And she was carrying through the worst of it the heaviest secret of all. The collapse of her fortune and her standing did not come in some quiet season when she had nothing else to bear.
It came at the exact moment she was managing the most dangerous concealment of her life. Few people in history have kept their composure under a weight like that. Lily kept hers. Society did what society does.
The same hostesses who had fought to have her at their tables now found reasons not to invite her. The rise had taken two years. The fall took a matter of months. One thread of luck, or of old affection, remained.
The Prince of Wales did not abandon her entirely when she fell. He used his influence on her behalf, and in time he would help open the one door still ajar to a beautiful, ruined, famous woman with no money and a great deal of nerve. He introduced her to the people of the theater. It was the door of the stage.
For a woman of her background, that door might as well have led off the edge of the respectable world. Ladies did not go on the stage. Actresses, however celebrated, sat outside polite society by definition. To walk through that door was to give up openly and forever the pretense of being a lady of leisure.
Lily Langtry looked at that surrender and saw an opportunity. She had been looked at for money already in a sense, her face sold by the thousand in shop windows while other men took the profit. Now she was ruined, and the one thing she still owned outright was the thing that had made her famous in the first place. If the whole country would pay to see her face, then the whole country could pay her directly.
She had help in the leap, and it came from the most brilliant and outrageous man in London. Oscar Wilde, then a young apostle of the aesthetic movement, had made Lily a kind of high priestess of beauty. Wilde was said to carry a single lily through the streets in her honor. It was Wilde and the aesthetes who urged her toward the stage.
She began carefully. Her first appearance on November 19, 1881, was an amateur one, a charity performance of a slight two-hander called A Fair Encounter at the town hall in Twickenham. Then came the true leap. In December of 1881, she made her professional debut in the West End of London, playing Kate Hardcastle in the comedy She Stoops to Conquer.
And to watch this ruined society beauty tread the boards for money came the Prince and Princess of Wales themselves, sitting in the audience. Britannica would later call her the first society woman to go on the stage. She had turned her disgrace into a first. The critics were not kind, and they never really would be.
The plain truth is that Lily Langtry was a competent actress and not a great one. When she died, the Manchester Guardian judged that she was never a real actress. The Times wrote that she had never succeeded in touching the emotions, the common cord of humanity. Her best work by general agreement was as Rosalind in As You Like It.
And years later as Cleopatra in 1891, she drew warmer notices, with one paper reportedly calling her the finest Cleopatra of its time. But the reviews were never the point. The public did not buy a ticket to see acting. They bought a ticket to see her.
Her name on a playbill filled seats regardless of what the critics wrote. And seats filled meant money, real money earned by her own effort and paid to her own hand. She had spent her whole life so far depending on men: a father for a home, a husband for an escape, a prince for a place in the world. Now, for the first time, she was earning.
The woman whose furniture had been auctioned in 1880 was within a year or two a woman with an income of her own, and the beginnings of a fortune she controlled herself. She had found in the one talent the world could not take from her a way to make herself free and rich on her own terms. The theater gave her something the drawing room never had: a measure of real control. On the stage, she was not waiting to be chosen by a prince or rescued by a husband.
She was the draw, the name on the bill, the reason the seats were full. The beauty who had been sold in shop windows had become the proprietor of her own fame. In the autumn of 1882, Lily Langtry boarded a ship for New York. She arrived in October of 1882, and the country received her like visiting royalty.
The press swarmed the docks. Oscar Wilde, who happened to be touring America himself on a lecture tour, was there to greet her. Then, in an omen no playwright would dare invent, the theater where she was to make her American debut burned to the ground the night before she was due to open, delaying her first appearance by a week. It did not matter.
The delay only sharpened the country’s appetite. The money was staggering. Her impresario, Henry Abbey, is said to have given her a larger share of the receipts than any other actress of the day. One American opening night reportedly took $6,800, said to be $1,000 more than the record night of the great Sarah Bernhardt herself.
By one account, she carried home $100,000 from a single tour and poured it straight into property on Fifth Avenue and into a private railway carriage of her own. She traveled like an empress. Her private railway carriage, said to be named the “Lalee,” was painted cobalt blue and decorated with golden lilies, fitted inside with silk and brocade, and a bath with silver taps. Beside her for much of this time was a wealthy young New Yorker named Frederick Gebhard, known as Freddy, a clubman and horse lover from a rich family with whom she kept company for the better part of a decade, from about 1882 until the early 1890s.
He gave her a house on West 23rd Street in Manhattan and jewels to match, and together they went into the world of horse racing that would become one of the great passions of her life. It was that passion that produced the most terrible night of her American years. In the small hours of August 13, 1888, a train carrying Lily and Gebhard and their string of racehorses was running on the Erie Railroad toward Chicago when the car holding the animals came off the rails near Shohola in Pennsylvania. It rolled down a steep embankment and burst into flames.
Seventeen of the horses were aboard. One person and 15 of the horses died in the fire. Among them, Gebhard’s champion, a horse called Ayrshire. A single horse named St.
Saviour, for the parish of her birth, survived the wreck. America took her to itself in a way England never quite had. Out in the far west of Texas, a rough frontier justice named Roy Bean, who styled himself the “law west of the Pecos,” fell so completely under the spell of her photograph that he named his saloon the Jersey Lily in her honor, and the little settlement that grew up around it took the name Langtry, too. She did come at last, though only after his death, to visit the desert town that carried her name and the bar that had been raised to a face its owner had never seen in the flesh.
She built beyond the stage, too. In 1888, she bought a great tract of land in the Guenoc Valley of Lake County, California, a ranch of some 4,000 acres and more, and set out to make what she called the finest claret in the country. She hired a winemaker from Bordeaux, planted her vines, and in a flourish that only she would think of, put her own portrait on the labels of the bottles. She sold it in 1906, but the estate still makes wine today, and still trades on the name of the Jersey Lily more than a century after she rode away from it.
And through all of it, she was inventing something the world had never quite seen before: the business of being famous. In 1882, she lent her face to Pears’ soap, becoming, by common account, the first celebrity in history to be paid to endorse a commercial product. Her testimonial, printed across the country, declared that since using Pears’ soap for the hands and complexion, she had discarded all others. The company is said to have paid her £132 to sign.
There is a legend, colorful and unverifiable, that she was paid pound for pound, the fee weighed out against her own body. The plain fact beneath the legend is remarkable enough. Lily Langtry had worked out how to turn a face into a fortune. She had money now, more than she had ever imagined.
She had a continent at her feet. She had everything, in fact, except the settling of one old debt she had left behind her in England. A debt with a name, and the name was Edward Langtry. The two images belong to the same handful of days in the autumn of 1897, and set side by side they tell the whole truth of Lily Langtry more honestly than any romance ever could.
She had reached by then the summit of a second empire, this one built on horses. Because the Jockey Club would not allow a woman to register racehorses in her own name, she simply raced under a man’s, calling herself “Mr. Jersey,” her horses running in silks of turquoise and thorn. The finest of her horses was a champion called Merman, bought for 1,600 guineas, a stayer of real class who carried her colors to victory in some of the greatest races in the calendar.
In 1897, Merman won the Cesarewitch, one of the toughest handicaps of the season, run on October 13, starting at odds of 100 to 7. On that race, Lily is reported to have gambled hugely, punting by one account to win £40,000. Merman would go on to win the Goodwood Cup in 1899 and in 1900 the Ascot Gold Cup itself, ridden by the famous American jockey Tod Sloan. So complete was her mark on the turf that it outlasted her by a century.
There is a race run at Goodwood to this day that carries her name, the Lily Langtry, named for the woman who was never once allowed to enter a horse under her own name. She had beaten the Jockey Club at its own game, hidden behind a man’s name until her horses were good enough that the sport could not pretend she did not exist. That same year, 1897, she finally cut the last legal thread binding her to the husband she had long since discarded. English law made divorce all but impossible for a woman, so Lily had done what almost no English woman of her time could contemplate.
She had become a naturalized citizen of the United States, using the ranch she now owned in California as her ground. On May 13, 1897, in a county courtroom at Lakeport in California, she was granted a divorce from Edward Langtry. She was free. She was rich, celebrated, a champion owner, a star of two continents.
And Edward Langtry in that same year was dying by inches at the other end of the world she had climbed out of. He had been given a small allowance to keep him quiet and out of her life, paid on her behalf, quarter by quarter, by the prince’s own solicitor, the great fixer George Lewis, £25 at a time. In the autumn of 1897, he was crossing by steamer from Belfast toward Liverpool when he fell and struck his head. On October 3, he was found dazed and wandering on the platform at Crewe railway station, carrying in his pockets the sum of elevenpence halfpenny in coppers, the whole of the fortune left to the man who had once owned land and a yacht and a good Irish name.
He was taken to the Cheshire County Lunatic Asylum at Upton near Chester. And there, in the middle of that same October, most probably on the 15th, only days after Merman thundered home in the Cesarewitch and only months after the divorce set her free, Edward Langtry died of a hemorrhage of the brain, the injury from his fall. He was buried in Overleigh Cemetery at Chester. Lily did not come.
She sent a wreath and she sent money. Here is the sentence to hold on to because it is the coldest and truest thing she ever said. Writing later in a private letter of condolence to another widow, Lily remarked that she too had lost a husband, but that alas it had been no great loss. She had married him to escape an island, used him to reach a city, sent him across an ocean to hide a child, paid him to stay out of her life, divorced him from another continent, and buried him without attending.
And in the end, she summed the whole of him up as “no great loss. ”
She spent people the way she spent money: freely, cleverly, and without ever quite counting what she had thrown away. Edward was the first great expense. He would not be the last.
The man was Hugo Gerald de Bathe, the son of a baronet, born in 1871, some 18 years younger than the bride. They were married on July 27, 1899, at St. Saviour’s Church on Jersey, the very parish where she had been born and christened almost half a century before. It was a small and secretive affair.
The only guest present apart from the officials was Jeanne Marie, the daughter the world still believed to be her niece, standing witness at a wedding built like the first one on convenience rather than love. The symbolism of the day was almost too neat. While Lily stood in the little Jersey church marrying a man young enough to be her son, her champion Merman was carrying her colors to victory in the Goodwood Cup. The horse triumphed.
The marriage barely began. Within months of the wedding, Hugo went off to fight in the war in South Africa, volunteering for the front while his new wife returned to her theaters and her horses, and the couple settled almost at once into a life of comfortable distance. Why did she marry him at all? The answer is the same answer that runs through her whole life.
He offered her something she had wanted since she was a girl in the rectory: a title. His father was a baronet, and one day Hugo would inherit that rank, and his wife would rise with him. In 1907, when the old man died, Hugo became the fifth baronet, and Lily at last became Lady de Bathe. The penniless daughter of a country clergyman, the ruined mistress whose furniture had been auctioned to pay her debts, the working actress who had scandalized her class by taking money on a public stage, was now a titled English lady.
She had wanted from the beginning only never to be ordinary. And here was the proof stamped in the pages of the peerage. Lady de Bathe. And yet the victory was strangely hollow, as her victories so often were.
The marriage that gave her the title was barely a marriage at all. In her later years, Lily lived in Monaco, while Sir Hugo lived apart from her in the south of France at Nice, the two of them meeting only at social gatherings or in brief and occasional private encounters. It was less a union than an arrangement. One by one the props of the grand life were sold away.
The estates that came with the de Bathe name, lands in Sussex and beyond, were sold off in 1919, the same year she gave up Regal Lodge and her horses and her whole life on the turf. In 1925, an old woman now, she published her memoir and called it The Days I Knew, a last performance rendered in print, in which she arranged the story of her life exactly as she wished it remembered, softening here, inventing there, tending the legend to the very end. It is a charming book and an unreliable one. She had gathered everything a life could gather: fame beyond any woman of her time, fortune earned with her own name, a champion racehorse, a vineyard across the ocean, houses in three countries, and now a title carved into the aristocracy she had fought her whole life to enter.
But the people were gone. The husband she had used was 20 years dead in a pauper’s grave. The second husband was a stranger who lived in another town. The prince who had made her was dead too, gone in 1910 as King Edward VII.
And the one person left in the world who was truly hers by blood, the daughter she had hidden and lied to for 20 years, was about to look at her with the coldest eyes she had ever seen. Jeanne Marie had grown up on Jersey believing a careful and total lie. Around the turn of the century, as she reached the age of about 20, the truth was finally told to her. By one account, it was Margot Asquith, sharp-tongued and careless of other people’s secrets, who let it slip.
However it came, it came like a blow that could never be taken back. In an afternoon, everything Jeanne Marie believed about herself came apart. Her aunt was her mother. Her mother had lied to her for her entire life.
Her father was not the dead Irishman she had been told of, but one of two men she had never known, their very identity a thing her mother would not settle. Lily’s reported response to her daughter’s shock has survived, and it is as revealing as anything she ever said. Confronted with the wreckage of the lie, she is said to have asked the girl which she would prefer to have as a father, a penniless, drunken Irishman or a royal prince and the most handsome of all naval officers. It landed as further proof that her mother saw even the truth of her child as a matter of presentation, a story to be arranged for best effect.
Jeanne Marie did not forgive her. From that day, the daughter treated the mother, in the plain words of the record, like a stranger, and the arrangement lasted the rest of Lily’s life. Here was a woman who had been received by the future king of England and welcomed by his wife at Marlborough House, a woman the crowned heads of Europe knew by sight, whose photograph sat in the royal collection itself, and her own daughter would not receive her. It was said that after King Edward died, the royal family were willing to receive Jeanne Marie, but that her own mother she would not receive at all.
Lily could open any door in the world, except the one that mattered. Jeanne Marie made her own life, and made it far from her mother’s shadow. On June 30, 1902, at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, she married a Scottish member of Parliament named Sir Ian Malcolm and became a respectable political wife, the very picture of the settled propriety her mother had never wanted and never had.
She had four children of her own. And here the buried secret sends up one last strange shoot into the modern world. If the father Lily named was the true one, then Jeanne Marie was the daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg, which tied the hidden child of the Jersey Lily directly into the innermost circle of the royal family, half-sister to the man the world would know as Louis Mountbatten. And two generations on, one of Lily’s own granddaughters, Mary Malcolm, would become one of the first two women ever to announce on BBC television.
Lily could conquer anything that beauty, nerve, or money could conquer. She had conquered society, the stage, two countries, and the turf. But the one thing she wanted at the very end, the love and the presence of her own child, could not be seized or charmed or bought. It could only be earned slowly over years by honesty, and honesty was the single currency she had never learned how to spend.
Her last years were spent in Monaco at a house she called the Villa Lys, the villa of the lily, the flower that had followed her since the day Millais painted the wrong one into her portrait. She gambled at the tables of Monte Carlo, where a good deal of the fortune she had built with her own face slipped quietly away into the long nights. Her closest companion at the end was not a husband or a lover or a child, but a woman named Mathilde Marie Peat, an employee, the person who was simply there. On February 12, 1929, at the age of 75, Lily Langtry died of pneumonia as the sun came up over the Mediterranean.
She had asked to go home. Her wish was to be buried on Jersey in the family tomb at St. Saviour’s Church beside the parents whose rectory had shaped her. Winter storms delayed the crossing so that her body waited before it could be brought over the water.
At last she was carried home by steamer over the sea to the island she had spent her whole youth trying to leave, and laid to rest on February 23, 1929, in the churchyard of the parish where she had been born. There was, even at the very end, one last crowd. The people of Jersey had not forgotten their most famous daughter, and they turned out in the February cold to watch her come home, lining the way as her coffin was carried up from the harbor to the little church at St. Saviour.
The island that had once been too small to hold her had waited 50 years to have her back. And now it took her in for good. Oscar Wilde, at the height of her fame, had declared that he would rather have discovered Mrs. Langtry than have discovered America.
It was a glittering compliment, the kind the age loved to lay at her feet. But turn it over and it reads differently, because everything discovered by Lily Langtry was in the end used and spent. The husband who took her off the island died penniless and mad. The lovers were managed and discarded.
The daughter was hidden, lied to, and lost forever. The face that all the world discovered was sold to the whole world, and it left the woman behind it at the very last with a paid companion for company and a fortune gambled away in the Monte Carlo dark. And yet, what she built did not die with her. She had invented something the world had never seen and has never since been without.
She was the first modern celebrity, the first person to turn a face into a fortune, the first to be paid to sell a name, the direct ancestor of every manufactured, marketed, sold image that has followed her down the century since. The wine ranch she planted in California still bears her name and pours its bottles today. Her portrait holding the wrong lily still hangs in the museum on Jersey. To this day, a seaside villa in the south of England sells itself as the love nest a king built for his mistress, the very stones supposedly raised for Lily Langtry.
In truth, the house was built by a stranger she never knew, a woman of exactly her own initials and joined to Lily’s name only by a legend invented long after both of them were dead. Even now, the manufactured story outsells the truth. In the end, the story returns to where it began. To a girl in a plain black dress with no jewels, watching the yachts leave the harbor on a small island, certain of only one thing, that she would not stay ordinary.
She got everything she reached for. She became the most famous face in the world, and she was buried in the black of the grave on the island she had fled, with almost no one who loved her left to stand beside it. The surface had held to the very end.
There had simply never been very much underneath it to hold.