A Bird in a Gilded Cage

ELIZABETH DREXEL LEHR’S biography of her late husband, King Lehr and the Gilded Age (Lippincott, $3.00), contributes to the social history of twentieth-century America all the wealth of detail (more accurately, all the detail of wealth) that contemporary memoirs are so often content to allude to shyly in passing.

Born a Drexel, Elizabeth Dahlgren was a young widow with a large fortune when she met Harry Lehr. ‘The most amusing man in New York’ convened a jury to meet her, and an hour after Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, Mrs. Oelrichs, and Mrs. Belmont had announced their decision to make her the fashion, he proposed and was accepted.

With engaging frankness he explained his way of life to his betrothed. ‘I make a career of being popular.’ Tired millionaires could relax while Harry Lehr’s vitality supported their wives’ parties, and he was careful not to jeopardize the favor of either hosts or hostesses by unwise partiality. So long as he remained an entertaining bachelor, wives of railway and telegraph magnates showered franks and passes, uncomplainingly bought the champagne he sold. Wetzel, Kaskel, Black Starr, supplied his far from simple wants on the understanding that their names should be discreetly mentioned; Sherry welcomed his parties as incomparable advertisements. ‘So you see, darling, I am giving up a perfectly good livelihood because I love you more than my career.’

Touched by his candor, the bride made a substantial settlement. After the wedding Lehr offered one further explanation; women were not attractive to him, his wife least of all. Divorce meant scandal; Mrs. Lehr stood by her expensive bargain. To the end he signed hotel registers as ‘Henry Symes Lehr, valet, wife, maid, and dog,’ and Mrs. Lehr derived what consolation she could from the fact that his friends kept their promise to make her the fashion.

It was an exacting life. Parties were endless, serious, and expensive. Most serious was Mrs. Astor’s, because her ballroom held exactly four hundred people, and not to be included was death. Most expensive was the $200,000 Hyde ball, with Réjane imported to recite Racine, Sherry’s redecorated in Louis XVI brocade, and the supper room carpeted with rose leaves. Lehr the arbiter considered that distinction was achieved with less. Pickaninnies springing from a watermelon to distribute enamel watches as cotillon favors, Tosti’s ‘Goodbye’ sung by Melba while showers of autumn leaves fell from balconies — even a monkey in evening dress, properly sponsored, was sufficient to assure a successful entertainment.

Mrs. Lehr found it ‘a spacious, leisurely age, unsophisticated in its pleasures for all its resources.’ But though she assures us that Mrs. Fish enjoyed driving a horsecar, and Mr. Van Alen liked to cook spaghetti, we cannot escape the impression that the society Harry Lehr ruled was at least comfortably conscious of its resources. Against that opulent background of daumonts do visite, trains edged with solid-silver roses, Boldini portraits, and pink marble bathtubs, the resplendence of the principal figure scarcely holds its own, but the reader has no cause to repine.

Those who buy the book merely for the sake of the pages from Harry Lehr’s locked diary should be warned that they will get exactly what they deserve.

MARIAN VAILLANT