Lillie Langtry, The Jersey Lily

In her time, Lillie Langtry was known as the most beautiful woman in the world. But how did she get her start? Listen in and learn how The Jersey Lily became an international celebrity in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. Much of history
has been written about beautiful women like Nefertiti, who we

(00:21):
talked about recently. They captivate the imagination of the public,
both of course in their own time and now we
still talk about Cleopatra, and sometimes they're famed more for
their effect on powerful men than their own accomplishments. Depends
on the woman. But our subject for today is Lily Langtree,

(00:42):
who was known as the most beautiful woman in the
world in her own time. And Lily has a little
bit of a vaudeville past. And we were talking earlier
about how interesting it was when we put out a
call for favorite vaudevillians how many people suggested it girls,
And I mean they dominated this suggestions definitely in on
Twitter and Facebook and emails we received, and it's just interesting.

(01:06):
It's they're not necessarily the biggest celebrities of the time later,
but they're with fascinate people are still captivated by them exactly.
Whistler called her the loveliest thing that ever was, and
she was also Oscar Wilde's good friend, the Prince of
Wales's mistress, a theater star, a frequent site in the papers,

(01:26):
and the thing that made Sarah laugh earlier, a model
in a soap ad which was possibly the first celebrity
endorsement ever. And she was scandalous and glamorous too, And
that's what makes an it girl an it girl, I think,
George Bernard Shaw wrote of her, I resent Mrs Langtry.
She has no right to be intelligent, daring and independent

(01:47):
as well as lovely. It is a frightening combination of attributes.
And to give you an idea of just how people
worshiped her, We're going to start off with an odd story,
that of Judge roy Bean. So picture the wild West.
We've got sage brush, we have dust, and we have
a saloon in the middle of nowhere at Texas. It's

(02:09):
named the Jersey Lily, and there's a picture of our
lovely Miss Langtry behind the bar. And the bar owner
named Judge roy Bean, who's a pretty interesting guy in
his own right. He's supposedly he find a corpse, which
is uh a bold thing to do, and he has
a bear named Bruno who likes beer and we like

(02:30):
a literation. It's a good compo there. So Judge roy
Bean loved Lily Langtry and you got to remember, she's
this English beauty. He's never met her, but he's obsessed
with her for some reason. He talks about her all
the time. He insists that she's going to come to
their town someday, which is named Langtry and Um. Eventually

(02:52):
she does come. Sadly he's died by then, but the
town givers bear and um, you know, tried to recognize her.
The bear was having none of it. For the record,
she did not end up with the bear. But this
is of course a study in contrasts. We have our
aristocratic lovely from London and our grizzled saloon keeper. And

(03:15):
you have to wonder who was the woman who won
so many hearts. So we're going to begin at the
beginning with her early life. So she was born in
eighteen fifty three and her name was Emily Charlotte. Later
she goes through several other titles, but that's what we're
starting with. She was born in the Channel Islands and
she was the only girl out of six brothers. Her

(03:38):
father was an Anglican clergyman, but maybe not the best.
One could be a little um like Lucrezia Borgia's father
in terms of his profession. Yes, he enjoyed his affairs
very much, and her family was very well educated, but
they weren't very well off, so perhaps she was looking
for a way to get away and enter Edward Langtree

(04:00):
and his fancy yacht. And he was very flashy, which
was something she liked. Remember she's only twenty years old.
She's engaged him within a week. But it was a
bad marriage. Yeah, well partly because he acts like he's
rich and pretends like he's rich, but he's not. Kind
of like who wants to marry a millionaire remember that
original reality show? And he wasn't a millionaire spoiler alert.

(04:24):
But he's also an alcoholic or her her quick husband
and um it said that they may have never consummated
the marriage at all. But regardless of his pretensions and
his alcoholism, he does get her away from Jersey, which
is what she's going for, and they moved to London
together and they move into society, or at least she does.

(04:45):
She was very beautiful, She was very pale, which is
why she was called Lily voluptuous and also a social climber.
But luckily for her, this was a time when you
could become a professional beauty. Yeah, if you were beutiful
enough and you had this aristocratic pedigree and you were married,
that was very important qualifier. You could become of this

(05:10):
it girl by getting your portrait taken or your portrait painted,
and uh, the public would snap up postcards and commemorative
things that were made from the images, and you'd become famous.
It's kind of reminds me of Madam X. I just
read a book that our former host Candy and recommended,

(05:30):
a really good book called Strapless about John Singer, sergeant
in the Painting of Madame Patreux, which we know her
as Madam X. But same sort of deal, just becoming
a society professional society beauty. Don't give it away yet,
I haven't read the whole thing. Once our girl made
the right connections she was in, she could make it

(05:52):
to the stratosphere of high society. She wanted to, and
John Everett Malay and Whistler both wanted to paint her portrait,
and Malay paint did her with a lily, and there
we have it. Our Jersey lily. She also makes friends
with Oscar Wilde, who pretends that he's in love with
her in part to um avoid being arrested for being gay.

(06:13):
We want to do a podcast on him later and
they'll let us know what you think about that. If
you're interested in Oscar Wilde. Yeah, we're considering doing a
whole series on writers, so again, let us know what
you think. But although they had a fake romance, wild
and lang Tree did not have a fake friendship. But
our favorite detail about the story was that he would
walk around the streets holding a lily in her honor

(06:36):
and once slept on her doorstep, And we want to
mention she stood by him through all his troubles, which
not many people did. She was also friends with Gladstone,
who read Shakespeare Toure and uh yeah, just pretty much
idolized by everyone who was someone in town. So now,
of course it's time for a prince, because how much

(06:58):
higher in London society d could you get the Prince
of Wales? To be exact the future King Edward the Seventh,
who had seen her portrait as had all of London,
and asked to be introduced Sir Allen, Young and explorer
obliged in eighteen seventy seven and things took off from there.
So the Prince of Wales was married. Of course, he

(07:19):
was happily married to Princess Alexandra, who was also really
popular with the public. But they had a good relationship
except when it came to sex, and he was known
to be a pretty serious womanizer, so it's not too
surprising that he reaches out to this popular woman about town. Uh,

(07:40):
he's really enchanted by her. She doesn't seem quite so
enchanted by him, though, since the only thing that she
wrote about him was that he smelled like cigars, probably
because he smoked about twelve a day, and that's not
even counting all of these cigarettes he enjoyed. I guess
that would be pretty memorable. But she was the first
mistress that he had ever made public, which made her different,

(08:03):
and the world was just insatiably curious about her. She's
a total celebrity now and she starts to move in
even higher circles than she had been. She goes to
balls at Buckingham Palace and meets the most important people
and even is presented at court, which is pretty hard
to believe. Well, and now that the London public is

(08:24):
so obsessed with her. Those portraits of her are selling
like hotcakes, lying off the ships. And she had a
head for business and had told them she wanted a
commission on all those pictures. Signed the contract, so she's
at least come into a bit of money. But Lily
has another relationship that is a slightly more discreet than
this one, um, but a little more glamorous too, and

(08:47):
that's with Prince Louis of Battenberg, and he's interestingly the
Prince's nephew. The Prince introduced them. Actually it's a little
gross keeping it in the comer um. And unlike his uncle,
this prince is young and very attractive, and to add
to his appeal, he could have ruled Bulgaria, but he

(09:07):
chose not to. He's very glamorous. Her situation with Prince
Louis was a bit more precarious than the one with
the Prince of Wales because she got pregnant and he
was in the navy, so they just sort of sent
him away too far off lands. Um tried to give
her some money to perhaps take care of the situation,
and it was passed off as the Prince of Wales's

(09:30):
baby not the other ones, and people just kind of
kept silent about that one. And she had a girl,
Jean Marie, who was handed off to her brother's family,
and she referred to her mother as her aunt for
the rest of her life and they were never particularly close.
In a side note on Prince Louis, he ends up
having to resign his very very high post in the

(09:52):
Navy when people get caught up in World War One
fever and accused him of being a German spy. So
he has a glamorous career for the wrong sort of
reasons in his future. Our other guy in Lily's life
is really interesting. His name is Arthur Henry Jones, and
we have no idea who he is. And it's interesting

(10:14):
because you don't really know how she felt about either
of her princes. She seemed rather ambivalent towards the Prince
of Wales and much well, and didn't say much about
Prince Louis. But this guy she wrote something like sixty
five letters to that were found, you know, stashed away
and some little spot and they're very passionate letters of love.

(10:37):
This is someone she apparently did care about very much.
But the trail ends there, but it doesn't take long
for Lily's it girls status to start to wane. The
Prince moves on her, The Crown Prince moves on to
other loves, and she's got to look for a job.
It's time to make some money. And it doesn't help

(10:58):
that her husband, Edward has gone off to the US,
and again he's an alcoholic. He's gone bankrupt. At this point,
he's not sending her any money. She has to figure
out what to do, so she's looking for suggestions. According
to one article I read, someone suggested she become a
vegetable farmer, and then Oscar Wilde suggested actress, which makes sense.

(11:18):
Seems like a better fit for Lily than vegetable farming.
Way and the Prince, they're no longer together, but he's
very happy to use his connections to help her out.
He's moved on to Sarah Burnehart, but that in itself
is a pretty good connection to the stage, I'd say, exactly.
And it was a big deal for a society girl
to get on the stage. It's simply wasn't done. But

(11:40):
she did, and her debut as a one at the
Haymarket Theater in London, and the critics said she was
absolutely terrible, but people loved her. She sold out the
house pretty much every night, probably just coming to see
who this personality of Lily lime Tree was. And at
this point she's also tapped to be the face of Pairs,
so probably figuring if she can sell just postcards with

(12:03):
her picture, maybe she can sell soap too. And she
also tours the US and appears in vaudeville, which is
brings us around her introduction again, and while she's there,
she finally divorces lang Tree, who seems like a total
darnly and sadly, his later life is terrible. He dies
in an asylum after being picked up as a bomb

(12:24):
basically drunk in a gutter and was declared insane. But
people often try to paint her as this woman who
left a guy you know who lost his money to
go become famous and pursue her dreams on the stage.
But clearly that's not really how that all worked out
so well. Critics might not quite have a point with
how she treated her husband. They do have a point

(12:46):
with the money angle. Lily really likes money, and she's
she's willing to do some things to get it. Maybe
let some scruples go by. While she's in the US,
she met a very rich man named pretty geb Hard,
who bought her a place in Manhattan and generally just
kept her in style. She didn't want to marry him,
but she she did like the perks that came with

(13:08):
being in a relationship with him. And she makes a
pretty good amount of money on stage and vaudeville and
her soap advertisements too, And when she makes enough money
she stops performing. She retires, and she goes on to
do a bunch of fun stuff like write novels and
get into horse racing and do kind of a lot

(13:29):
of gambling. In Monte Carlo, she goes a bit overboard
with that. She managed a theater for a while and
also got her wish for marrying up. She married a baronet,
Hugo de Bath, whose family almost disowned him over the
whole thing, and they lived apart and didn't seem faithful
to each other. But you know, she had the pedigree
she wanted now. And she dies in Monte Carlo in

(13:51):
nine and a New York Tribune article noted that an
era had ended. Um So that bout wraps up our podcast.
We have a few more literary references about her, though
Irene Adler from the Sherlock Holmes books may have been
based on her. Lady Windermere's Fan was definitely written for her,

(14:12):
and again you can hear about her in a WHO song,
and Oscar Wilde wrote a poem about her in the
eighteen eighties called Roses and Rue, which I think is
really kind of completely ridiculous. There's a line about, you know,
matching flower with shower, but he did have a little
couplet I liked. I remember I never could catch you,
for no one could match you, and no one at

(14:33):
the time could match Lily Langtree. And that brings us
to our listener. Mail William wanted to give us a
note on a recent podcast on Feudal Japan, and he said,
you mentioned in passing about how the samurai helmet kind
of looks like Darth Vader's helmet. This is no coincidence.

(14:54):
George Lucas based parts of his Star Wars story maybe
the Jedi on Samurai concepts such as the code of honor,
the Master Apprentice aspect, and of course light sabers. But
Darth Vader's helmet was indeed designed to be reminiscent of
the Samurai helmet. So thank you, William, and I can't
wait to tell my little brothers about that. They'll like it,
and if you'd like to give us some suggestions, feel

(15:16):
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(15:38):
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