The Riviera Set Page 2

  In 1890, the choices which offered any degree of independence to a respectable young woman, even a reasonably well-educated one, were limited. She could aspire to become a teacher, governess or seamstress. She could learn to operate a typewriter and perhaps obtain work in an office, though all of these options were low paid and Dettie wondered how much independence she would have working for someone else and living at home. The alternative would be to remarry, but this was a long way down her list of ambitions; she had been burnt by her experience with George. She had lost her puppy fat, had grown tall and stately, with a luscious dark beauty so striking that she really stood out in any crowd, and drew admiring looks wherever she went. Only a decade earlier her walk would have made her crinolines sway, but fashion now decreed more natural skirts, and with her full bust, wide hips and tiny waist (helped by tight lacing), Dettie was what men of her era termed a fine woman. One acquaintance described how her small head was crowned with great braids of coal-black hair while her eyes ‘were a sort of violet, and I have never seen such big ones, or with such a soft and tender look’.2

  In an era when actresses were more famous for their appearance than their acting ability, Dettie lost count of the number of times people told her she ought to go on the stage. She had never acted, but she had certainly entertained her relatives at family parties with recitations and droll performances. The drawback was that she knew her family, and especially her father and her aunts, would be appalled since actresses at that time did not enjoy a reputation for morality. However, ignoring the negative aspects, and despite her father’s words – ‘You’re a damned fool!’ – ringing in her ears, twenty-one-year-old Dettie headed back to New York, where she still had a few friends and knew her way around, now determined to get herself a job on the stage.

  Calling herself Jessica Dermot she enrolled in a drama school at a theatre in Madison Square, and found herself an inexpensive room in a boarding house. Luckily her looks, her pure speaking voice with hardly any accent (her father had always insisted his children speak properly, without any ‘Yankee slang’) and her pretended sophistication caught the eye of the elderly acting coach who ran the school. There was no physical intimacy between them but Dettie was seen everywhere on his arm – he enjoyed showing her off in top restaurants and taught her much from his own fifty years in the theatre: how to project her voice, how to memorise scripts, how to move on the stage so as to command attention. As for losing her self-consciousness in front of an audience, he told all his pupils that the only way was to keep doing it until it became second nature. Dettie learned fast from her elderly mentor and placed her hopes in his plans for his star pupil, but that September he had a heart attack and died suddenly. Not, however, before he had advised her to change her name to something more striking – more in keeping with her spectacular looks.

  They took time over this, experimenting with names that sounded grand and had a ring to them. Eventually Dettie said the grandest name she knew was Maximilius – the name of the father of a rich school friend. They toyed with Maxime, but then hit on the idea of a subtle alteration and Dettie became Maxine; this pleased her because if the ‘x’ was omitted it spelled Maine, which she felt was lucky. She always claimed she had invented this forename, and so was the first to bear it. For a surname she chose her grandmother’s maiden name, Elliott.

  Albert Marshman Palmer was one of the leading impresarios of the day; he owned several theatres, staged numerous productions and had enjoyed a string of successes. Hearing that Palmer was about to cast bit-part roles in a new production of The Middleman, which had enjoyed success in England, Dettie did not wait for auditions but applied directly as Miss Maxine Elliott for a private interview, citing the name of her late mentor. She had no acting experience to offer, and knew that if she was to get a job she would have to promote herself as she was. So she dressed carefully and rehearsed her interview. Her plan worked and Palmer later admitted he chose her because she was stunning, had stage presence and could pass – at a pinch – as an English lady. He offered her a small role and Dettie was on the bottom rung of the ladder, with a salary of twenty-five dollars a week.

  Over the next five years Maxine – as she was now known to everyone other than her family and childhood friends – worked hard and gradually landed bigger and better parts. It was grinding work, travelling huge distances across the United States by train as part of a touring theatre company. There was never enough time to rest properly between the small towns where they would put on a week’s performance and move on, always staying in third-rate boarding houses. Fortunately, Maxine had boundless energy and youth on her side, and eventually she climbed a few more rungs of the ladder and took lead roles in minor productions.

  In those days before television and movies, the theatre was the only available public entertainment. Popular actors had the status of A-list celebrities and those at the top, such as Henry Irving and Sarah Bernhardt, were as iconic to late Victorians as Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe would be in the following century. Maxine was yet to reach the top of this greasy pole, with the celebrity status that meant she had arrived, but she was on her way.

  * Ward was playing shortstop for the New York Giants at this time.

  2

  Miss Maxine Elliott

  In 1893 Maxine landed the female lead in a spectacular new play, The Prodigal Daughter, which included as its final scene the finish of the Grand National. With ten real racehorses and jockeys racing round a huge revolving stage, this production opened to huge success in New York and Maxine’s salary was raised. One of the first things she did was to send for her younger sister to live with her in larger rooms in a better boarding house. She believed that after seventeen-year-old Gertrude had been given some singing lessons she might get work as an extra in productions of which Maxine was the star. Maxine’s name began to appear in gossip columns, and job offers trickled in. One was for a touring production and she made her acceptance conditional: her younger sister must have a part. So Gertrude played the ingénue in a number of productions that followed; in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, for example, Gertrude played Lady Stutfield, a naive character desperate for male attention.

  The two sisters did not work together for long, because Maxine soon received an offer from Augustin Daly, whose company was famous for its lavish musicals, Shakespearean productions which attracted the top names in the classical acting profession, and also dashing dramas.* Although she would not be able to bring Gertrude in with her, Maxine could not turn Daly’s offer down and soon she was playing Silvia in Two Gentlemen of Veron, Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the lead in The Heart of Ruby – a romantic comedy-drama set in Japan, featuring an oriental heroine with a wisp of gauze as a yashmak. She worked indefatigably in those years and earned the respect of her acting colleagues. She was especially pleased that her acting ability in the Shakespeare productions was reviewed favourably because previously it had been her beauty that had been regarded as her chief asset. On the back of these reviews Daly took his company to London in 1895, where Maxine was quoted in the English press, saying that this was her second trip to England – she did not feel it necessary to explain that on her previous visit she had been a schoolgirl in disgrace.

  That summer at Daly’s Theatre, Leicester Square, playing Hermia and Silvia, she took London by storm. Interviewed extensively, Maxine graced the covers of three women’s magazines, and she was showered with invitations by hostesses happy to welcome a beautiful and talented Shakespearean actress at their parties. Her manners were faultless and her pleasant deep voice was apparently almost without an accent. The Daly Company’s leading lady, Ada Rehan, was slated by critics such as George Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm, but Maxine was described as having ‘rare beauty ... a handsome Hermia, playing the part with care and good judgment’. Another stated, ‘Miss Maxine Elliott, who is remarkably handsome, was graceful, courteous and unaffected as Silvia.’1 Fortunately, the company regarded this as good for their rep
utation and Ada Rehan took no umbrage. Meanwhile, Maxine enjoyed what was to be her first London season of many. She was too late that year for the Derby and Chelsea, but there were many other attractions for her to attend between performances, and these included racing at Royal Ascot and Goodwood, boating at Henley, cricket at Lord’s, polo at Windsor Great Park, joining the crowds for Trooping the Colour, and daily carriage rides in Rotten Row. She listened and learned as she met many famous people, and some would become lifelong friends, including Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife Jennie. Elsie de Wolfe, whom Maxine had met briefly in New York, was in London too. Elsie had begun her own outstanding career as an actress and enjoyed some success, but her chief ability was to wear clothes really well and strut about. Within ten years Elsie would quit the stage to become the leading interior decorator of her day, a profession which she claimed to have invented – there were plenty of architects, she said, but no decorators.

  Although not short on invitations in New York, Maxine was far removed in status from the American aristocratic families such as the Astors and Vanderbilts. But she found to her surprise that in England her profession, added to her looks, far from being a hindrance, was instead a passport to the exclusive gatherings of the upper classes. Indeed, there was great excitement that summer when, in the Birthday Honours, Queen Victoria bestowed a knighthood on Henry Irving. It was the first time anyone in the theatre had been so honoured and did much to make the acting profession socially acceptable. At a party at the Lyceum to honour Sir Henry, Maxine met the great man, as well as theatrical luminaries Ellen Terry, Max Beerbohm and a leading actor who would figure largely in her future, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, known as Forbie, with whom Elsie de Wolfe was discussing a new play.

  When she returned to New York that autumn, to open there and later to tour for six weeks as Olivia in Twelfth Night, Maxine’s friends noted that her accent was now more English than American. Despite her success in her chosen career, her time in England had changed her horizons. The old days of cheap boarding houses, trying to grab a space in a crowded dressing room to apply make-up, and sitting up all night on trains were already long behind her: she was a leading lady, and she had been content with this achievement until she glimpsed in England a milieu that greatly appealed to her. How to make herself part of that way of life taxed her mind considerably in the year that followed, and while it was a dream presently out of her grasp, it remained a lodestar to her and coloured her plans.

  A year later Maxine and the leading man, Frank Worthing, left the Daly Company when they were bypassed for leading roles. They decided to strike out together, and take their talent to the west coast. Maxine had an additional agenda. Gertrude, towards whom Maxine felt fiercely maternal, was back living with the Dermots in Oakland and had written to say she longed to return to Maxine and the stage. Furthermore, it was easier to get a divorce in California than New York and Maxine hoped that a suit filed on the west coast by a Mrs Jessica McDermott would go unnoticed in New York and not create adverse publicity. Initially, Maxine’s plan worked well. She starred in several productions in San Francisco that summer of 1896, and at a party she met Nat Goodwin, one of the most famous comedians of the day.

  Nat was thirty-nine years old and a fellow New Englander (born in Boston). Like Maxine he was at the tail-end of divorce proceedings and was open to change. Although he was only 5' 7", had thin red hair, pallid skin and pale eyes, he countered these physical deficiencies by a super-confident air and his unique style of dressing. He wore beautifully tailored clothes, pale kid gloves, a top hat and hand-made shoes, and carried a gold-topped cane. Nor was he afraid of jewellery; signet rings and flashing diamond studs in his shirt front completed his fashionable ensembles. When Nat Goodwin was in the room he was always the centre of attention. A comic genius, he had a huge number of adoring fans in the USA who slavishly followed his rackety personal life in gossip columns and magazines without his misdemeanours affecting his career; rather, his transgressions seemed to make him all the more interesting and lovable. He made things happen wherever he went, a clown, certainly, but one with style and presence. On stage he could bring an audience to tears of laughter by an elegant wrist movement, a slight turn of the head or eyebrows raised at precisely the right moment. His public never realised that Nat’s delivery – his ‘just being himself’ and throwing in off-the-cuff lines – was the result of many hours a day, rehearsing, studying lines, changing scripts to capitalise on audience reaction during the previous performance, an insistence that all the other actors must, like himself, know their parts and stage placements inside out, and be capable of split-second timing.

  In his autobiography Nat recorded his first impressions of Maxine, who was twenty-eight at the time they met. He noted that, although stunning, she was not dressed by a couturier, and she was ‘with’ Frank Worthing, who was evidently in love with her, but she was not in love with Frank. She was, Nat wrote,

  one of the most beautiful women whom I had ever seen, her raven black hair and eyes in delightful contrast to the red hues that formed an aureole, as it were, above her head. There she sat, totally unconscious of the appetites she was destroying, absorbing the delicate little compliments paid her by that prince of good fellows, John Drew. How I chafed at the etiquette which prohibited my being at her side!2

  Next morning he called on Maxine and Gertrude in their rooms, and offered Maxine a contract to star in his new production in Australia, adding that he was sailing the following day and required an answer on the spot. Maxine was already under contract to a rival producer at seventy-five dollars a week and coolly explained she could not get out of it in under two weeks in order to allow her understudy to rehearse adequately. However, she said, if he would increase his offer to $150 a week, and find parts for Gertrude at half that, they would follow him out on the next sailing. Nat not only accepted her terms but offered them both three-year contracts and a guaranteed tour of the USA on their return from Australia. He was slightly annoyed that he would have to open in Melbourne with Blanche Walsh, his existing leading lady; however they decided that in the interlude before sailing Maxine would be able to make the most of the agreement in terms of publicity stories about the forthcoming tour and she could use the voyage via Honolulu to learn her lines. On being told this news Frank Worthing fainted.

  Shortly after the sisters arrived in Melbourne Blanche Walsh saw how the land lay and flounced off back to America, leaving the field clear for Maxine to shine. At the same time the gossip columns became aware of Nat’s impending divorce. He claimed that his wife was frequently so drunk she could not fulfil her matrimonial obligations. Mrs Goodwin was not too drunk, however, to employ a top divorce lawyer, who soon discovered that Maxine’s divorce had quietly passed through the courts, and she threatened in a newspaper interview to counter-sue Nat, naming Maxine as co-respondent (along with several other beauties whom Nat had courted during the previous two years). At this, the discomfited Blanche Walsh came forward, saying she was also happy to give evidence for she recalled that Nat and Maxine’s adjoining hotel suites in Australia had connecting doors.

  Nat’s autobiography, written two decades later, reveals the injured self-justification he suffered when this news broke in the press. Maxine had wept uncontrollably, believing her career to be over, and it was so unfair, he wrote, because they were totally innocent. It was Gertrude’s suggestion that they counter the adverse publicity by issuing an announcement that, since her arrival in Australia, Maxine’s divorce had been granted, and that subsequently she and Nat had become engaged to be married. In the event, the publicity surrounding their respective divorces, Nat’s philandering and their betrothal provided the couple with acres of media coverage and, rather than harming their reputations, increased their popularity. When they returned to the United States their productions played to packed houses and were advertised as standing room only for weeks in advance.

  They married in February 1898, and among some diamonds and a perce
ntage in the theatre company profits, Nat’s wedding gifts to Maxine included a handsomely decorated private railcar so that in future they could go on tour in absolute comfort. It was the equivalent of owning a private jet today.

  Neither pretended it was a love match. They liked each other, and they rubbed along comfortably enough, and there were compensations. Nat was proud of Maxine’s talent and beauty, and she was quick to realise that Nat could give her a better life than she could provide for herself, and she was now able to bank all her earnings. True he drank rather too much – but unlike her first husband Nat was a happy drunk. Also, Maxine had a tendency to depression, and Nat could always cheer her up when she started to worry.

  Within a few months of their marriage Nat and Maxine, along with Gertrude, were on their way to England to enjoy the delights of another English summer season. While Maxine was busy buying a new wardrobe Nat went out and bought them a house – in a day. Maxine had said they should have a country house within easy reach of London, but Nat said he bought it chiefly because he was amused by the seller’s name – Lord Penzance, which he thought sounded like a character from an Oscar Wilde play. To be fair, it was a country house, although it was only thirty years old and came complete with a large staff and market garden. Set in extensive grounds with an oak wood, meadows and winding stream as well as formal gardens, Jackwood was perched on the summit of Shooters Hill† and enjoyed extensive views over Eltham and beyond to Kent. A mock-Tudor mansion built in 1874, it was everything an American might expect from an English country house, from its large bedchambers with dressing rooms, servants’ quarters, library, drawing room, dining room, morning room, study, lofty great hall and magnificent grand staircase to its stabling and lodge at the bottom of the long wooded drive. At Jackwood Nat dressed in tweeds and startled the local gentry with his fast riding and driving high-perch carriages more suitable for cutting a dash in Park Avenue than English country lanes.