The Fall of the House of Wilde (47 page)

The energies she devoted to learning she also applied to marriage but with less success. Her marriage to Frank Leslie, her third husband, had the merit of lasting five and a half years until he died, in 1880. Transparency was apparently not part of the marriage contract, for she found herself the heiress of a publishing business laden with debt. After nine lawsuits involving the Leslie trademark, she emerged the victor, acclaimed as ‘a veritable Portia'. One case in particular, that of the contestation of the will by the Leslie children, demanded she muster up all the feminine guile and masculine assurance she was accustomed to displaying. Draped in widow's black, she had to listen to testimony after testimony of her ‘improper' premarital liaisons, and newspaper reports maligning her intentions. When not in court clothed in grief, she contrived and schemed until she won victory over the story of her past and her husband's property, leaving her to face the future ‘rich and free'.
³
She quickly set about turning around the business, and by the end of 1885, she had cut down the number of periodicals to two weeklies and four monthlies, and focused her own attention on Frank Leslie's
Popular Monthly
.

In the
Popular Monthly
, she proved herself a worthy heir, thanks in no small measure to her eye for what the public might want. She used her well-known column, ‘The Editor's Opera Glass', to view for the benefit of her provincial public the balls at Delmonico's, Barnum's Jumbo or Vanderbilt's mansion. Accordingly, she expanded what was then a growing appetite for celebrity culture. She depicted an ideal style of living and took her own life as a model. She, for one, had achieved ‘elasticity of limb and fine, firm flesh' by following a strict regime of early rising, cold plunges and a half-hour's daily exercise with dumbbells, swinging clubs and pulleys ‘like an Amazon'.
⁴
She told her readers what she wore – gauze underwear, number-one boots and French silks; what she applied to her face; what she ate for breakfast – beefsteak and toast; and what time she rose – no later than 8.30 a.m. In no time Mrs Leslie became a household name as the avatar of health, beauty and success.

But Mrs Leslie did not confine herself to a life in print. She turned her lavishly decorated apartment at New York's Gerlach Hotel on West 27th Street into an outlet for more publicity. Her Thursdays, with guests quaffing weak claret punch, were one of the social institutions of the city – grandees from Europe's capitals mingled with New York's. By the mid-eighties, with the
Popular Monthly
alone turning an annual profit of $100,000, Mrs Leslie spent her summers in Europe taking the waters and consorting with
le beau monde
of London, Paris and Madrid. In London Mrs Leslie attended Lady Wilde's Saturdays, and was often a guest at Tite Street. She could be seen at the Grosvenor Gallery, at Buffalo Bill's
Wild West Show
, and everywhere her conversation was said to sparkle as brightly as her diamonds. For Jane, this abundantly energetic and self-promoting figure was a superior specimen of New Woman. In an article on ‘American Women' she flattered Mrs Leslie by putting it thus:

The most important and successful journalist in the States is a woman – Mrs Frank Leslie. She owns and edits many journals, and writes with bright vivacity on the social subjects of the day, yet always evinces a high and good purpose; and with her many gifts, her brilliant powers of conversation in all the leading tongues of Europe, her splendid residence and immense income, nobly earned and nobly spent, Mrs Frank Leslie may be considered the leader and head of the intellectual circles of New York.
⁵

With her power and independence, Mrs Leslie spoke to Jane of deliverance from the ‘bondage' of womanhood, about which she had recently written. Her respect for Mrs Leslie was genuine, and shared by many others; some spoke of Mrs Leslie as ‘one of the greatest women of the century'. Mrs Leslie had all the instincts of a brilliant advertiser and a cunning eye for self-promotion. ‘One of the strangest things in the history of American newspapers,' remarked a perceptive, if caustic, observer, ‘is the manner in which those engines of public thought for years have gushed about one Mrs Frank Leslie. They are still at it. The size of her shoe, the asininity of her lovers, the fit of her bonnet, and the colour of her poodle . . .'
⁶

Jane, I suspect, did not think of Mrs Leslie as a prospective daughter-in-law. She was therefore surprised and delighted when Willie set sail again for New York, on 23 September 1891. Willie had only just arrived when, over champagne and Russian cigarettes, Mrs Leslie agreed to marry him. She portrayed her husband-to-be to the
New York Times
as a London journalist of ‘reputation', ‘a fine pianist', and a man who had ‘done some artistic work on canvas in oils'. She built a picture of Willie as a staid, handsome man, well built, with clear blue eyes, dark hair, moustache and whiskers, ready to take up ‘editorial work in connection with the Leslie publications'. Little did she know.

Nor is much known about the ceremony other than what was reported by the
Sunday Magazine
, whose editor Mrs Leslie requested to attend. It took place on 5 October 1891, at the Church of the Strangers on Mercer Street, followed by supper at Delmonico's. We are told of Mrs Leslie's gown of pearl grey satin, made by the top designer in Paris, Charles Frederick Worth, and of her bonnet of grey velvet with pearl ostrich tips. But even for a woman who liked to give the public something to talk about, she can't have welcomed the tattle her wedding excited. One paper remarked that the groom had taken a ‘wife old enough to be his mother'. Her attempt to conceal her age, entering forty-three rather than fifty-five in the church records (to Willie's thirty-nine), came to naught in an image-sensitive age. If this wiped the smile off Mrs Leslie's face, then a further report, entitled ‘The Wild Wildes', can't have done much to boost Willie's ego. Having described the marriage as ‘eccentric', the reporter remarked that ‘Oscar Wilde's brother' had become ‘Mrs Frank Leslie's husband'.
⁷
This unnerving epithet did not augur well for Willie. The honeymoon visit to Niagara, the pilgrimage site of all American newly-weds, and of which Oscar once quipped, ‘one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life', marked an inauspicious start.

Intoxicated on his wedding night, Willie continued the binge throughout the honeymoon. On their return, Mrs Florence M. Wilde signalled her disapproval by receiving official permission on 30 October to change her name once again to Mrs Frank Leslie. This assertion of independence raised eyebrows and, it was said by one reporter, the New York State Legislature was good enough to allow her to marry as often as she chose without going to the expense of having new visiting cards printed. Returning to New York, Mrs Leslie rearranged the apartment back to its prenuptial condition, as she found sharing a bedroom with a sot intolerable.

Willie, racked with remorse, wrote his wife a sonnet in which he wore his heart on his sleeve:

Ad Amicam Meam

If through excess of love for you, my sweet,

My passion did my temperate reason blind,

If fretful fancy made my lips unkind,

And words rang harsh, and thoughts were all unmet

To make the conquest of yourself complete,

Forgive me, sweetheart! Trust me, you will find

My love one day deep in your life entwined,

And tendrilled round your innermost heart-beat.

Into Love's water have I cast a stone,

Where gently mirrored lay your face so fair;

But now the rippling circles, wider grown,

Have blurred the clear grey eyes and golden hair.

Love! Can no love for all my faults atone?

Should the waves quiet, will you still be there?
⁸

Here in this autobiographical poem we get a picture of Willie's mind – self-enveloped and tortured. Soft at heart, he was yet inclined to an abusive violence from which Mrs Leslie could not feel safe. The man she had found so chivalrous in the first flush of romance was susceptible to bouts of instability he himself could neither fathom nor control. Offered every material advantage, career prospects and wealth, this poet manqué suffered from an out-of-jointness that in modern parlance might go by the name of depression.

Life itself seemed to have become burdensome to Willie, who did not rise until one or two o'clock in the afternoon. He would then drive in the victoria to the Frank Leslie offices and collect his wife for a ride in the park. The remainder of the day was taken up with drinking. Spurred by no desire, he failed even to write. He chose instead to observe Americans, whom he damned for chasing illusions, and declared the country in need of a leisure class. For sure, as the embodiment of capitalism, America did not suit Willie. His disillusionment with the country, along with his persistent
ennui
, alarmed Jane, who wrote to Oscar in December 1891: ‘[Willie] doesn't seem to care for America. The men only talk business & the women he doesn't like – & the newspapers he says are simply diabolic – all personalities, like the cutting I enclose – I want Willie to start a Literary Journal. He is living in idleness & that is quite absurd. Idleness and pampered luxury.'
⁹

Thus did Willie kill time at the Lotos or the Century Club, where he made a name for himself, as reported in the
New York Times
, as ‘the very laziest man that ever went around in shoe leather'.
¹⁰
At the clubs he ran up liquor bills amounting to between $50 and $70 a week, and found momentary relief from philistine expectations in broad farce, improvising ‘Oscar Wilde the Aesthete'. This act at least won him applause. As farceur or indolent, Willie seemed bent on defining himself in opposition to American sensibilities.

Back behind the closed doors of the Gerlach apartment, Willie, as reported by the servants, often howled abuse at his wife. The apartment became a place for Willie's pacing or for his lying on the sofa, always with a brandy or a whiskey bottle at hand. When quarrels flared up, as they often did, Willie became violent, and on one occasion flung a whiskey bottle at his wife's satin sofa. Brief moments of tranquillity, such as when he played the piano and she lounged on the sofa, were invariably blown away like a cannonball when Willie commanded his wife to fetch him more brandy. If she refused his demand, he vented his rage with verbal abuse – ‘Damn your soul; to Hell with you.'
¹¹
One can only assume Willie had lost his freedom and had become a hostage to alcohol, an addiction that left him hopelessly out of control.

A constant theme, from the moment of their marriage, was Willie's paralysis – sexual, mental and physical, according to a biography,
Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs Frank Leslie
, written in 1953 by Madeleine B. Stern. ‘What a confessional it would be,' Mrs Leslie was later to write, ‘if men and women were to tell with frank unreserve their precise reasons for marrying!' Mrs Leslie, Stern wrote, ‘knew her reasons well enough'. For Mrs Leslie, Willie at thirty-nine had the virtue of youth and, she assumed, potency. She had hitherto married men much older than herself and had given them satisfaction. She now looked to Willie to satisfy her, as her appetite for sex had grown over the years, according to her biographer, who put it thus: ‘[Willie] could, she was sure, fulfil the need that with [Mrs Leslie] had grown with what it had fed on, until at fifty-five it was sharper than ever.'
¹²
When night fell, tension rose, and each night ended ingloriously for Willie, leaving Mrs Leslie wakeful, frustrated and, according to Stern, mentally depressed. This spell of impotence made Willie more abusive. In the first poetic outpouring he had tried to assure Mrs Leslie it signified love and respect rather than its opposite. But soon he lost the urge to reassure her of her allure.

Mrs Leslie found refuge from her troubles in work. The big event of the year was an excursion in January 1892 to the first annual convention of the International League of Press Clubs. She and Willie joined a party of over a hundred people, who set out from Grand Central station to cross America. ‘The Empress of Journalism', as she was dubbed, had a drawing room on the train to herself. Needing physical distance from Willie, she pointedly excluded him from her quarters. Everywhere the party were feted and cameras snapped at them, opening newspaper plants, being welcomed at state capitals, taking burro rides, being escorted through vineyards, orange groves and citrus fairs. Mrs Leslie spoke everywhere, from car steps to public halls, dispersing quotable
bon mots
across America. The more Mrs Leslie gloried in the amplitude of her success, the more she insisted on her own identity. When presented at Auburn with a bouquet of violets to ‘Mrs Wilde', she promptly informed the girl, ‘My dear, perhaps you do not know that the Legislature passed a special law permitting me to use always the name of Frank Leslie.' When an interviewer addressed her with, ‘Mrs Wilde, I believe,' she told him somewhat irately, ‘I have agreed to be called by my husband's name when by dint of industry and perseverance he makes a name in the world of American journalism as I have.' Adding, ‘Eh, Willie?' After three months of marriage, the couple were bitterly at odds. At San Diego Bay, she sailed with a friend and wept as she spoke of Willie's impotence. The failed romance was taking its toll on her – one reporter said she had come to look ‘something like sixty'.
¹³

Still, she revelled in playing the lion at the Press Congress. Always meticulously arrayed, often in a combination gown of black silk and velvet, with pearl necklace and glittering diamonds, the appearance of this household name on the platform brought a spontaneous burst of applause. At the culminating event in San Francisco, she took as her topic ‘Reminiscences of a Woman's Work in Journalism', and repeated her rags-to-riches story. ‘Homeless, bankrupt in heart and purse, with nine lawsuits to fight and $300,000 business debts to pay, who shall deny that this was a sufficiently severe entrance examination to the “College of Journalism”, which is none other than the great school of life.' This beautiful and accomplished woman pronounced that women could now do whatever women felt competent to do, and told her audience that the more womanly women were, the greater were their chances of success in the world. The ‘good steed Progress' was bearing women to the front so that they could ‘gallop the course' with men ‘neck and neck'. She held her audience rapt as she recast her life to epitomise the American dream.