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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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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 free to email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We also have a Twitter feed at missed in History and a Facebook fan page, so come join us and check out our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. 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