owners of the time, the social elite embraced racing as its favorite entertainment and made the race meetings at Epsom, Ascot, Newmarket, and Goodwood important events in the social calendar. With plenty of leisure time on their hands and with what was left of their family fortunes in their pockets, aristocratic owners indulged extravagently in buying, breeding, and training horses-and, not least, in gambling. It was a time when, after the reforms of the 1870’s and 1880’s, racing had become respectable.
But there were some particularly ugly aspects of racing in this period, and we have used them as the background for this book. The Brits have always been sensitive about American invasions of one sort or another (remember the World War II joke about GIs that included the phrases “over-sexed” and “over here”?). We have been factual about the British attitude toward such well-heeled American gamblers as John Drake and Bet-a- Million Gates, hard-riding jockeys like Todhunter Sloan and the Reiff brothers, and trainers like Enoch Wishard; and about their fear of the horse doping that Wishard had brought from American tracks to the richer courses of England. For five racing seasons, the stewards of the Jockey Club wrung their hands helplessly, debating what to do. Finally, in 1903, they declared doping an illegal practice. Even then, the main impetus seems not to have been a concern for the health of the horses or for good sportsmanship, but for the cost to the gambling establishment (and hence to the economy): conservatively estimated, British bookmakers had lost over two million pounds to the enterprising Americans, something like seventy million pounds in today’s currency, close to one hundred twenty-five million dollars.
In the same year that the British Jockey Club outlawed doping, its French counterpart forbade the practice as well, but doping had already caught on among French trainers. Within a half-dozen years, it had spread across Europe, and a variety of substances were being used: caffeine, strychnine, and morphine, as well as cocaine. Finally, in 1910, the Austrian racing authorities hired a Russian chemist named Bukowski to develop a test for the presence of drugs in horse saliva. In 1912, a horse named Bourbon Rose was disqualified in France because it tested positive for dope. The owners sued and lost, and testing became an accepted practice.
If you’ve ever tried to learn the nuances of a complicated sport like football or tennis from a source who either had an imperfect knowledge of the game or was so perfectly versed in it that he assumed that everyone knew as much as he did, you can grasp the problems we faced when we began to do the research for this book. We had a great deal to learn, not only about horseracing and training, but about the underworld of doping and cheating-most of which is only obliquely addressed in the primary sources of the period. As a consequence, we’ve relied more heavily than usual on secondary sources, chief among them George Plumptre’s splendidly anecdotal book on Edwardian racing, Professor Thomas Tobin’s scholarly work on the doping of racehorses, and (for the characters of Henry Radwick and Alfred Day), on Henry Blyth’s study of the Henry Hastings scandal, The Pocket Venus. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to us to write about this obscure and difficult subject if it hadn’t been such a significant factor in the life and times of Lillie Langtry. It was an interest in her that snared us into the complex milieu of nineteenth-century racing.
Susan Albert writes:
I can think of only two women of our time who might be compared to Lillie Langtry: Madonna, the Material Girl; and Marilyn Monroe- Hollywood superstar, voluptuous sex queen, and lover of a president. In her time, Langtry commanded the same kind of public adulation and public censure that Madonna and Monroe have commanded, and for many of the same reasons. She was more widely known on both sides of the Atlantic than any other woman of her day (with the possible exceptions of Queen Victoria and Princess Alexandra), certainly more widely photographed, and probably more widely written about.
And yet, despite the words and pictures that convey Langtry’s image to our time, despite the “autobiography” that conceals far more than it reveals, the real Lillie Langtry remains a fascinating enigma. She was a brief sensation on the London social scene in the late 1870’s; she gave birth to a daughter whose paternity can only be guessed at (good guesses are Prince Louis of Battenberg and the Prince of Wales); she spent two decades as a mediocre actress whose figure, face, costumes, and jewelry excited far more attention and approval than did her acting or the plays she produced; and she relied for much of her financial support upon the generosity of a string of wealthy lovers. She married Hugo de Bathe in a private ceremony in July of 1899 (the only congratulations came from the Prince of Wales, who telegraphed to Mr. Jersey his compliments not on her marriage but on Merman’s winning of both the Goodwood Plate and the Goodwood Cup) but she had to wait eight long years for old Lord de Bathe to die so that his son could inherit his baronetcy. Long before Mrs. Langtry became Lady de Bathe, however, Hugo had found other entertainments; although they remained married through Langtry’s lifetime, the two lived together for less than a year. She outlasted the glamour of the theater and the glitter of the Edwardian period; nearly twenty years after King Edward VII died in 1910, she was living alone and embittered in a villa in Monte Carlo. “If the world could see the turmoil going on in my heart,” she said to a friend, “it would be startled beyond words. I have lost my daughter, the only thing that is dear to me. My life is sad indeed.” She died of pneumonia in 1929, at the age of seventy-six, and was buried on the Isle of Jersey.
But while these facts of Lillie’s life are known, the mysteries we have portrayed in this book remain unsolved. What did happen to the jewels-worth more than two million dollars in today’s currency-that were taken from the Union Bank in 1895? How did Edward Langtry die? What
We don’t know the answers to these questions. Nobody does. But a study of Langtry’s life certainly suggests that she was the kind of woman who might have converted her jewels to ready cash and had the paste copies stolen to cover up the substitution. To gain her freedom, she might also have connived at Ned Langtry’s death; he was an alcoholic and relatively easy to dispose of-and the circumstances of his death in Chester Lunatic Asylum, where he was taken after being involved in some sort of accident at Chester Station, were certainly mysterious enough. And while we can’t know for certain that Jeanne actually renounced her mother, we do know that Lady de Bathe was not given an invitation to Jeanne’s wedding (in 1902, to the Honorable Ian Malcolm) and had to plead with a policeman to admit her. We also know that Jeanne promised the Malcolm family, before her marriage to Ian, that she would sever all relations with her mother.
Like Marilyn Monroe, like Madonna, Lillie Langtry was as notorious as she was famous and as scorned as she was praised. But whatever else she was, she remains an intriguing subject for fiction.
REFERENCES
Here are a few books that we found helpful in creating
The Annual Register 1899. London: Longsman, Green and Co., 1900.
Blyth, Henry. The Pocket Venus: A Victorian Scandal, New York: Walker and Company, 1966.
The British Journal Photographic Almanac & Photographer’s Daily Companion. London: Henry Greenwood, 1899.
Brough, James. The Prince and the Lily: The Story of Lillie Langtry-The Greatest International Beauty of Her
Day. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1975.
Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
