The Heir Apparent (39 page)

Bertie, meanwhile, had developed an abscess on his bad leg. The surgeon Sir James Paget was obliged to cut it twice. For the second operation Bertie was given laughing gas and ether, which, Alix told the Queen, “made him fight with the doctors and being so strong he fell off the sofa and I saw him and the doctors rolling together on the floor!! This brought him to and he had no idea where he was. They had then to begin it all over again—and
strapped
him down poor boy! And then Paget cut it about
4 inches
long and deep.” The pain afterward was torture.
⁸

For ten days after his operation, Bertie dined alone with Alix. He entered this methodically in his diary.
⁹
He had never been alone with her for so long, and though he was convalescent, it was also perhaps a sort of penance. Bertie was not well enough to escort Alix when she left for Greece on 4 April 1877. “Will write so sorry to leave dearest Bertie although he is very nearly well but both he and doctors insist upon it,” Alix wired the Queen.
¹⁰
The next day she telegraphed from Paris after a rough crossing (“very ill”): “miss my poor Bertie dreadfully.”
¹¹

In
The Times
classified section throughout May 1877 there appeared the following advertisement:

On 9 May, Bertie dined with Sir Coutts Lindsay at his newly opened Grosvenor Gallery on New Bond Street, where he saw James McNeill Whistler’s painting of fireworks,
Nocturne in Black and Gold
, which Ruskin rubbished as “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”
¹²
No doubt Bertie agreed. Certainly he bought no Whistlers for the royal collection. Unlike Albert, who had been an eager collector and patron, Bertie showed little interest in art. He has been accused of an “inborn philistinism”; not a single important contemporary British or French picture was acquired by him for the royal collection.
¹³

Two days after the Grosvenor Gallery dinner, accompanied by his artistic sister Princess Louise, Bertie again visited a gallery: He went to King Street to view John Everett Millais’s
Effie Deans
.
¹⁴
Whistler contended that art should stand alone, regardless of its subject matter, but
Effie Deans
was a virtuoso exercise in narrative art. Effie was the tragic heroine of Sir Walter Scott’s novel
Old Mortality
, and Millais’s painting shamelessly milked the pathos, showing the beautiful country girl parting from her seducer, holding her maiden “snood,” the hair ribbon worn by Scots virgins, to which she had forfeited the right. Millais’s model was an unknown woman named Lillie Langtry.

Millais had met Lillie at an at home held by Lady Sebright, a hostess who collected artists and writers. Mrs. Edward Langtry’s entry that evening had caused a sensation. Among the “rush of cavaliers” who jostled to take her in to supper, it was Millais who won.
¹⁵
Frank Miles, another fashionable artist, sketched her there and then, and the image was reproduced as a penny postcard that was sold on street corners. Frank Miles specialized in drawing society beauties for magazines, and Lillie came to his studio on Salisbury Street for her sittings. While she
posed, Prince Leopold often called, and he bought Miles’s drawing of her sleepy features on a background of lilies and hung it above his bed at Buckingham Palace. One day when he was ill his mother the Queen came to visit him in bed, and (according to Lillie) the picture shocked her so much that she took it down at once, standing on a chair to reach.
¹⁶

Bertie, who was no slouch where professional beauties were concerned, let it be known that he wanted to meet Mrs. Langtry, too. The intermediary was Sir Allen Young. “Alleno” was a wealthy bachelor, a yachting acquaintance of Bertie’s who had earned fame as a polar adventurer; he spoke rarely and in monosyllables, and, as Mrs. Langtry tactfully put it, his gray eyes had the “curious, far-away look which one associates with a great explorer.”
¹⁷

A dinner was fixed for 24 May 1877. Bertie’s diary that day was, even by his standards, unusually packed. He returned from Portsmouth where the previous day he had inspected Lord Charles Beresford’s battleship
Thunderer
, arriving back in London at 1:30; lunched with his sister-in-law Marie, Affie’s wife, the Duchess of Edinburgh; chaired a committee meeting at the Marlborough Club, and then took leave of Marie at Charing Cross at 8:15.
¹⁸

The dinner party of ten assembled at Alleno’s Stratton Street home was kept waiting. “I am afraid I am a little late,” boomed a “deep and cheery voice,” and Mrs. Langtry noticed an expectant hush. According to her own account, which is frankly unbelievable unless she was strangely dense, she was quite unaware that the Prince of Wales was expected. Alleno presented her to Bertie, whose chest was apparently adorned with glittering orders and a blue Garter ribbon, and she became panic-stricken and longed to escape. At dinner she “found herself” seated next to him and was struck silent.
¹⁹
Her ordeal was brief. At 11:30 the prince departed for Lady Dudley’s dance.

In her memoirs,
The Days I Knew
, written in 1925, Lillie created a myth about herself. Brought up in Jersey, the only daughter of William Le Breton, the philandering Dean of Jersey, she ran wild as a girl with her
six brothers, and married impulsively a seemingly wealthy Irish widower named Ned Langtry. After recovering from a dangerous illness, said to be typhoid, she came to live in London with Ned, who took lodgings on Eaton Place. In the spring of 1877 she was in mourning for her younger brother, and she appeared at Lady Sebright’s feeling shy and countrified, wearing a plain black dress and no jewels because she had none, with her hair twisted in a simple knot on the nape of her neck. “Fancy my surprise when I immediately became the centre of attention,” wrote Lillie.
²⁰
The next morning her table was heaped with invitations, and she and her reluctant husband found themselves attending two or three parties a night. Everywhere she went she wore the little black dress, which was the only evening gown she possessed.

Lillie’s narrative of herself as an innocent country girl to whom success just happened is disingenuous. Her assault on London society, though far more spectacular than she could ever have dreamed, was carefully planned. She admitted as much in an interview she gave to
The New York Herald
in 1882. Wearing a loose red robe and drying her waist-length hair before the fire, she told the reporter that the Le Breton family had a “prescriptive right” to the deanery of Jersey, which they had held for generations. “My pedigree being good and my position in Jersey society being assured, it was not surprising that I should be well-received.” She was introduced to London society, she claimed, by Lord Ranelagh, whose daughter had married her brother Clement. She was no adventuress.

Langtry denied that she had ever set herself up as a beauty. “I never thought I was one, and I don’t think I am now. I am never in the least surprised when I hear people say they are very much disappointed about my beauty.”
²¹
Her modesty is engaging. Photographs show rather heavy features, a wide nose and a square jaw, but to the London of 1877 she was the epitome of classical beauty. Her admirers raved over her Greek profile; she was a portrait on a Greek coin, the lost Venus of Praxiteles, Venus Annodomini, the modern Helen. Millais, Frank Miles, Edward Poynter, and George Frederic Watts vied to idealize her low forehead, her chiseled mouth, and the feature they admired most of all, her column-like neck, the “augustly pillared throat” with its three
“plis de Venus”
or creases of skin at the angle of the jaw.
²²

A portrait of Lillie by James Sant, which belonged to Bertie and seems to have been commissioned by him, shows her Grecian profile.
²³
Her hair is simply knotted on her neck, her throat is bare, her skin innocent of makeup, and she wears a loose muslin blouse. Sant’s image breathes health and country freshness; Lillie epitomized the new fashion for ample beauty, which was the antithesis of slim Alix with her false fringe, her tightly laced wasp waist, and her scarred throat concealed by pearl chokers and lace collars.

This was the season of the Professional Beauties. “Do come, the P.B.s will be here,” hostesses would scribble on their invitation cards.
²⁴
PBs were paraded as trophies at parties; like horseflesh their merits were compared and discussed. Artists in search of bestselling soft-porn pinups competed to paint them; their photographs were sold as postcards by the thousands; women stood on benches to spy them over the crowds in the park, and their dresses were instantly copied. Lillie’s chief rivals that season were Mrs. “Patsy” Cornwallis-West and Mrs. Luke Wheeler. Mrs. Wheeler she damned with faint praise (“Her beauty was of line and expression rather than colour, and, while disappointing to some people when first seen, its charm grew on acquaintance”); Patsy Cornwallis-West, an old flame of Bertie’s and a far tougher proposition, she befriended. The two women lived on the same London street, Eaton Place, and they competed for Bertie’s attentions.
²⁵

According to Anita Leslie, whose grandfather was one of Lillie’s lovers, her seduction technique was to fix her admirer with her huge blue eyes and “appear to swoon, the idea being that the charm of his person had rendered her senseless. A lady in this state has to be held, supported on the sofa and perhaps her clothes loosened.” However, “she did not have to faint to get the Prince of Wales, of course. He was never bashful.”
²⁶

Alix was not completely recovered, and Dr. Gull ordered her to “limit fatigue and keep early hours.”
²⁷
This gave Lillie the opportunity to blossom as ruling favorite. According to her own account, she rode
with the prince on Rotten Row each evening—in spite of the fact that she had barely ridden sidesaddle before, and when one admirer put her on his horse she fell off in a dead faint.
²⁸
The prince’s daily parade at seven p.m. on his horse with its red brow band was one of the rituals of the season, eagerly scrutinized by royal watchers. Accompanying HRH would have been a public affirmation of Lillie’s status. Bertie apparently made no attempt to conceal his new mistress or keep the affair secret—but we have only Lillie’s mythmaking and her own account to go on.

Alix, meanwhile, now recovered, involved herself with Eddy. The thirteen-year-old prince had become ill with typhoid, caused, so Alix believed, by drinking bad water at Sandringham. She nursed him devotedly, but she found the “constant fear” engendered by the dreaded typhoid almost unendurable.
²⁹
“I am with him all day long, and only take a short drive in the evening, and he continues as good a patient as possible—but what a long and dreary time it has been,” she told Victoria.
³⁰
A flare-up of Eddy’s illness kept Alix a willing prisoner at Marlborough House, while Bertie escaped to Cowes, where he spent most of August on board the
Osborne
with the younger children, avoiding the typhoid in London.
³¹

Under the prince’s patronage, Cowes Week had ballooned from a family yachting party, where the royals could walk about freely without ceremony, into a crowded regatta with a perpetual garden party on the lawn of the Royal Yacht Club. Bertie raced his yacht the
Hildegarde
in a half gale and won his first Queen’s Cup; ladies rushed onto the platform to see the finish in defiance of the rules of the Royal Yacht Squadron, and Bertie received a stirring ovation that “will be one of the brightest dreams of his life.”
³²

Lillie Langtry was there, too, staying with her husband as guests of Sir Allen Young on his yacht
Helen
. Alix’s absence did not go unnoticed. Soon stories of an estrangement were circulating in London.
³³

It is often claimed that Alix felt no jealousy for Lillie Langtry, but her behavior hardly suggests a happy princess. That autumn at Abergeldie, her woman of the bedchamber Charlotte Knollys fell ill, apparently yet another victim of typhoid. The “inevitable” Charlotte was
unpopular with the household but devoted to her mistress, and Alix dropped everything to nurse her, refusing to leave her while she remained ill. Her care for “my poor dear Charlotte” earned the approval of Victoria (“her unselfishness is indeed beautiful”), but Alix found comfort in martyrdom; nursing had perhaps become an emotional necessity to her.
³⁴
Alone at Abergeldie, without Bertie, she drew close to “Beloved Mama” as she called the Queen (behind her back, she referred to her as “Mutter”),
^*
telling her that “you quite spoil me with all the
kind words
but you may rest assured that I appreciate them all
very very
deeply—but I am sure you know how happy it makes me to think that we should have understood each other so very well.”
³⁵