LILLIE LANGTRY IN CANADA AND THE U.S.A., 1882-1917 ¹

ROBERT LAWRENCE

Lillie Langtry was the most controversial English stage performer to come to North America during the heyday of theatrical touring, c. 1880-1939. She returned frequently, to have her plays and performances almost invariably damned by critics and frequently by mayors. Yet the public was fascinated by Langtry and made her wealthy by crowding into Canadian and American theatres, attracted in part by rumours of her relationship with Edward, Prince of Wales. Langtry's brief visit to Windsor, Ontario, after The Degenerates was banned in Detroit in April 1900, illustrates the kind of controversy that she frequently aroused.

Lillie Langtry fut l'actrice anglaise la plus controversée qui soit venue en Amérique du Nord durant 1'époque des grandes tournées (1880-1939). Elle revint fréquemment, en dépit des dures recensions qu'essuyèrent généralement tant le répertoire offert que les rôles qu'elle choisit d'interpréter. Malgré I'hostilité dont faisaient montre critiques professionnels et maires de municipalités, le public nord-américain, attiré en bonne partie par les bruits qui couraient sur ses rapports avec le Prince de Galles (le futur Edouard VII), continua d'affluer aux spectacles qu'elle offrait, contribuant ainsi à la rendre fort riche. Le court séjour que fit Langtry à Windsor (Ont.) après que la pièce The Degenerates eut été interdite a Détroit en avril 1900, illustre bien le genre de controverse que Mme Langtry était susceptible de soulever.

Early in her professional career Lillie Langtry learned that theatrical touring in North America could be both exciting and profitable; hence she came to this continent thirteen times. She made Canada, between Halifax and Edmonton, at least an incidental part of all her tours except that of 1886-87, utilizing the same play or plays as in the U.S.A. ²The first part of this study will consider the beginnings of her acquaintance with this part of the world and will summarize her first six tours; the heart of the paper will be a report on a small part of her seventh tour, her single performance at the Windsor Opera House, Windsor, Ontario, 5 April 1900. I shall focus on this event because of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding her presentation there of Sydney Grundy's The Degenerates and the many reverberations of that event. To conclude, I shall refer briefly to Langtry's six subsequent North American tours. (She made only one tour outside of Great Britain and North America; in 1906 she performed successfully in South Africa, acting in The Degenerates, As You Like It, The Walls of Jericho and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.)

Recent popular books and television programmes have made interested people more aware than hitherto of the Jersey Lily's romantic affair, 187780, with His Royal Highness, Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. During the late nineteenth century and for a large part of the twentieth, only oblique references to the liaison reached print; however, it was well known to the Marlborough-House and the stately-homes set, and private gossip about Lillie and Bertie titillated many levels of society.

Although Mrs. Langtry, separated from her husband since 1876, had affairs with several other men, the Prince of Wales remained a loyal friend for the rest of his life, stimulating a regular resurgence of gossip about the pair. By 1881, aged twenty-eight, Lillie Langtry possessed very little money, and she had the responsibility for an illegitimate daughter ('my niece'), Jeanne-Marie, fathered by Prince Louis of Battenberg. With the encouragement of the Prince of Wales, Oscar Wilde, and other friends, Langtry determined to earn her living as an actress; she appeared first on a public stage at the Haymarket Theatre, London, 15 December 1881, a charity performance of She Stoops to Conquer. It had kind reviews, and she continued her professional career in Ours, She Stoops, and a few other plays. Very soon she learned from Oscar Wilde, just returned from a successful series of eighty lectures ('The House Beautiful,' 'The English Renaissance,' 'The Decorative Arts') in the U.S.A. and Canada, about the possibilities for profit and adventure there.³

Exhibiting courage and confidence, Lillie Langtry began her long theatrical association with North America at Wallack's Theater, New York City, on 6 November 1882. Her vehicle, which she had already tested in England, was Tom Taylor's old romantic comedy An Unequal Match (first produced in 1858). The New York Dramatic Mirror, in one of her earliest American reviews, made tactfully clear in the opening paragraphs that this was no ordinary opening night:

Her name was on the lips of nine-tenths of the nation's population ... The prevailing sentiment was curiosity . . . to see the woman whose good fortune it has been to secure a profitable notoriety on the strength of a reputation for beauty. Very few people expected to find a person whose comeliness approached near to the

degree which the heir to the British throne and the newspapers have established for her. No one was so absurd as to imagine she would prove a mistress of dramatic art.

The writer then subjected Mrs. Langtry's body to full critical analysis, from hair (fine as silk) to knees and feet (both large and awkward); 'the bust is almost perfect . . . her voice is not strong and is deficient in the lower register.' After several paragraphs, the critic got to the performance:

Of the supporting company it is best to say nothing ... [T]he scenery is admirable

... Mrs. Langtry's costumes were exquisite ... [As an actress] she exhibits her own winsome manners advantageously ... she is neither artistic nor amateurish ... she has expended much thought and study on the character [of Hester Glazebrook], but she lacks power; ... however, her presence on stage is a pleasure ... [S]he is not and perhaps never will be an actress of genuine worth. (11 November 1882, p 2)⁴

1 have quoted at length from this long review (almost two full columns) because the statements in it were repeated, with minor variations, in Canadian and American newspapers and journals for over thirty years. A concise, evocative sentence in the Toronto Globe summed her up admirably: 'she does not act, she is' (10 April 1895, p 9).

Thousands of reviews on this continent stated that Lillie Langtry's theatrical skills did not improve significantly in three decades; yet North American audiences remained fascinated by her, to Langtry's continuing profit. The curiosity alluded to above endured long after her affair with the Prince of Wales had ended, and after any novelty associated with her appearance on stage had worn off.⁵ It may be that the stern, perhaps hypocritical, morality of nineteenth-century America and Canada made the actress's escapades, with Frederick Gebhard and other lovers, more worthy of note in the North American press than in the English. This kind of publicity no doubt drew more-than-normal attention to Langtry's on-stage activities.

Besides the plays already referred to, Lillie Langtry produced in the U.S.A. and Canada such once-notable dramas as A Wife's Peril (adapted by B. C. Stephenson and Clement Scott from V. Sardou's Nos Intimes; it was featured in Langtry's tours of 1886-87, 1887-88, 1888-89, and 1894-95), The Lady of Lyons (by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first staged in England in 1838; Langtry tours of 1887-88 and 1888-89), As in a Looking Glass (by F. C. Phillips; 1887-88 and 1888-89), Gossip (by Clyde Fitch; 1894-95), The Cross-ways (by Lillie Langtry and J. Hartley Manners; 1902-03), and Mrs. Deering's Divorce (by Percy Fendall; 1903-04).

Almost all of her plays had as their central figures women (often divorcées) who had complicated relationships with their husbands or other men. Only rarely did Langtry outreach herself and her modest talents. ⁶ Early in her career she utilized well known and well tested plays; later she developed more confidence and produced new plays, some written expressly for her.

Theatregoers in Canada and the U.S.A. did not crowd into their theatres during three decades solely to study Langtry's skills as an actress, nor can they have been exceptionally anxious merely to see the plays in which she performed. They were either already familiar to regular playgoers or were unmemorable society dramas little different from dozens of others of the period. Indeed, one might expect many prospective ticket purchasers to have been deterred from their intention by the hundreds of damning North American reviews, including uncomplimentary terms like 'inept', 'unhealthy in tone' (As in a Looking Glass), 'colourless' (Lady Clancarty), 'the shallowest, cheapest constructive methods and the trashiest sort of dialogue' (The Degenerates), 'inane climax' (Gossip), 'structure wobbles', 'no literary and no artistic value' (Mrs. Deering's Divorce), and 'lugubrious' (Between the Nightfall and the Light). Despite such negative reviews (and there were, of course, some approving analyses), Langtry and her undistinguished companies played indefatigably and profitably, usually to capacity houses, for many years all over the U.S.A. (in Texas the small town of Vingaroon was renamed Langtry) and in a dozen Canadian towns and cities.

These paragraphs report on and analyze the phenomenon that was Lillie Langtry on this continent. In her native England she acted in the same plays that she offered across the Atlantic, prompting reviews that ranged from cool to respectful, but she was never subject there to the degree of 'Langtrymania' that she met in America and Canada. The domestic drama that she presented during her tour of 1900, Sydney Grundy's The Degenerates, will serve well as an example of the kind of plays she produced and the reactions to them.

For her seventh North American tour (15 January - 22 May 1900), Lillie Langtry chose a play that proved to be more controversial than any of her earlier vehicles. London, England, had received The Degenerates calmly, 31 August - 16 December 1899; the Times thought it weak in construction, hackneyed in story, and not very well acted (London Times, I September 1899, p 4). By contrast, the Era of London found much to commend, observing the sharp social satire of the drama, the clever dialogue, and the way in which the sympathies of the audience went out to an erring woman whose actions finally redeem her (2 September 1899, p 13). Throughout the fifteen-week run of The Degenerates in London, theatre attendance was generally down, because of the emotional upset created by the Boer War, which had begun-disastrously for England-on 12 October 1899.

The complex plot of The Degenerates concerns a charming English divorcée who owns race horses and has been touched by scandal; the climax comes when Mrs. Trevelyan is found-fully clothed-in a gentleman's apartment at midnight; however, nothing terrible happens on stage. Any movements in the direction of immorality are minimized by the timely appearance of Mrs. Trevelyan's innocent sixteen-year-old daughter. After some well-orchestrated repentance and lengthy explanations, The Degenerates ends more or less happily for all the English aristocrats on the stage.

Mrs. Langtry transferred this play to New York on 15 January 1900, with only a few members of the London company. In the U.S.A. and Canada she was supported by Frederick Kerr and two Grossmiths (Lawrence and George Jr.), amongst others. The reviewer for the New York Times found The Degenerates thin in content, derivative, and unconvincing, with Mrs. Langtry and her associates deficient in acting skill; moreover, that reporter found the actress to be 'astonishingly, alarmingly décolletée,' a matter not mentioned in the London Times. Perhaps the most important comment by the New York critic was that the play could not be taken seriously (14 January 1900, p 16). Mrs. Langtry carefully explained to reporters in the U.S.A. that the word 'degenerate' was a less opprobrious term in Great Britain than in America. In her native land it conveyed only a deterioration of standards or Values, as opposed to the American imputation of viciousness or depravity.

After The Degenerates concluded its scheduled four weeks in New York, with very good houses, Mrs. Langtry took it on tour as far west as St. Louis, Missouri, playing to very mixed reviews, and experiencing cancellations in

Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Newspaper comments suggest that the doubtful morality of the British aristocracy as illustrated in The Degenerates worried American critics and theatregoers, with fears of possible contamination of innocent countrymen.

Advance seat sales in Detroit, where the storm of censorship really broke around the Langtry company early in April 1900, were excellent, thanks perhaps to several news items and editorial comments in the Detroit Free Press and the Journal during March 1900; however, William Maybury, the Mayor of Detroit, was evidently seriously concerned about the deleterious impact of this degenerate play on his constituents. On Wednesday 4 April Maybury and three companions travelled to Toledo, Ohio, to see The Degenerates. Early the next morning the mayor thundered to reporters in his office:

Three ... witnesses of this production unite with me in pronouncing the play indecent, not only in suggestion but language. The dialogue in places is such as would offend the sensibilities of any decent person and is calculated to hold up to ridicule those things which respectable society holds dear and sacred ... The play has not a single redeeming feature. (Detroit Journal, 5 April 1900, p 1)

These strongly held views compelled him promptly to forbid any performance in Detroit of this indecent drama, scheduled for the Opera House 5-7 April. Maybury's feelings about The Degenerates were reinforced by statements of representatives of the Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Congregational churches in the city: they collectively regarded it as conducive to corrupting the morals of people who went to see it.

The Windsor Opera House was owned by Mayor Davis, who welcomed without hesitation the Langtry company and its notorious play, stating that what was good enough for London, England, was probably all right for Windsor. The Reverend Canon Hincks, however, speaking to the city magistrate on behalf of a deputation of 'prominent church people,' did not agree: 'If it is too vile for that seductive city over the river, what a demoralizing effect this play will have on Windsor people, young and old' (Detroit Journal, 6 April 1900, p 1). Later, Magistrate Bartlett and Chief-of-Police Wills of Windsor stated that they had found nothing indecent in The Degenerates.

The fee for rental of the principal auditorium in Windsor was only $30; however, with a small house on Thursday 5 April, Mrs. Langtry barely covered costs, without reference to the actors' salaries. Few residents of Detroit went to see the one-night stand of the play, and the population of Windsor did not respond very enthusiastically to the controversy across the Detroit River. A curious crowd gathered in the cold night outside the Opera House, but few of them went in, at $1.50 and $2 a ticket. Detroit took some interest, however, in the proceedings through a reporter from the Detroit Journal. First he described the opera house (which closed in December 1901) as 'dingy,' with wooden chairs and two box stoves. George Grossmith and the other male actors dressed and made up in an 'outhouse' (Toronto Saturday Night, 21 January 1911, p 6).

The auditorium had a capacity of 900; the reporter estimated an audience on Thursday evening of 250 people. Only twenty-nine were women; of these only eleven courteously removed their hats. The visiting Detroit theatre critic was not alarmed by the play; it was no better nor worse than dozens of other modern plays; he or she found little to commend in the men depicted on stage: 'The male companions of Mrs. Trevelyan are a duke. . . . a knight, . . . and a viscount who was beastly drunk all the time, a millionaire half dead with inherited diseases [not specified], a south African adventurer, and a vulgar type of avaricious Jew.' The lighting was poor, there was no scenery, and the lines were 'stupid.' People went to see Mrs. Langtry: 'Without her, her gowns, her reputation, and other accoutrements, the play would die of inanity in a very short time' (Detroit Journal, 6 April 1900, p 7).

Another Detroit daily newspaper, The Free Press, was clearly sympathetic to Mayor Maybury; it made few allusions to the prohibition of The Degenerates in Detroit, and made no reference to the single performance in Windsor. By contrast, the Windsor Evening Record for Friday 6 April had two columns on the subject (pp 1 and 4). Under the heading 'Nothing Indecent' this writer gave no indication of having seen the drama the preceding evening, but did interview several people on Friday morning: Chief-of-Police Wills had enjoyed the play; Magistrate Bartlett stated that he had not attended a play for forty years and did not see this one; John Plimmer, the janitor of the Opera House, watched the play when he was not busy with the stove, and saw ,nothing objectionable.'

A second column was headed 'No Rush. A Small Audience Greeted The Degenerates Last Night.' The reviewer felt that a $2 admission fee kept many people away and those who attended came to no moral harm; the critic referred to actor Frederick Kerr's opening remarks about the persecution of the troupe. 'His London accent drew the sympathy of the audience probably because Windsor is very British and loyal to the Empire.' To that reviewer, Mrs. Langtry 'entered into the spirit of the play with great zest.' The plot was slight and imitative of Lady Windemere's Fan, with at least one Wildean pigram in the dialogue: 'Gentlemen are always right, even when they are wrong.' The reviewer referred to the lack of scenery, to the impressive gowns by Worth of Paris, and included a cast list.

Just previous to and during Lillie Langtry's tour with The Degenerates, another English actress, Olga Nethersole, had acquired much notoriety in the U.S.A. with her production of Sapho (by Clyde Fitch). She had introduced the lay in Chicago on 30 October 1899, and performed it, with very enthusiastic eviews, in at least eleven other American cities, until she and her company were put on trial in New York in March 1900 for having presented an immoral play. During March and April the case had national newspaper coverage, and the trial was imminent at the time of Lillie Langtry's difficulties in Detroit and brief visit to Windsor on 5 April. On 10 April the Nethersole case came before the Supreme Court in New York and lasted for two days; at the end, the jury deliberated for ten minutes before declaring Nethersole and her company not guilty of 'offending public decency' (New York Dramatic Mirror, 14 April 1900, p 13).

An important relevant point is that Olga Nethersole had presented Sapho at the Detroit Opera House 1-6 January 1900, without criticism from Mayor William Maybury, although he was, as described above, highly indignant about the proposed performances of The Degenerates and singled out Mrs. Langtry for discriminatory treatment. Sapho and a dozen other plays of apparently doubtful moral character had been performed in Detroit without protest. Mayor Maybury (1849-1909) was no country hay-seed or small-town hick. He was a native of Detroit, B.A. and M.A., University of Michigan, a lawyer, a prominent Mason, and had been a member of Congress for four years. The theatre and gossip columns of the Windsor Evening Record provided an explanation for Maybury's actions (6 and 7 April, both p 2). That analysis must take the reader back a few months.

In July 1899, only a few weeks before opening The Degenerates in London, England, Lillie Langtry had married her second husband, the impecunious Hugo de Bathe, who, twenty-eight, was eighteen years younger than she. (In 1907 Hugo inherited a baronetcy from his late father, becoming Sir Hugo, making his wife Lady de Bathe; some Canadian newspapers then referred to the Jersey Lily as the Water Lily.) On 16 December, the day that The Degenerates closed at the Garrick, Hugo sailed for South Africa, to join the British forces trying unsuccessfully to defeat the Boers. By March 1900, he was seriously ill, and Lillie Langtry was reported to be deeply concerned about him.

She was assiduous during this period in both England and the U.S.A. in raising money for various charities working in South Africa on behalf of the British troops there. For example, in February 1900, at a matinee concert in New York City, attended by much publicity and many socialites, Lillie Langtry helped to raise over $8,000 to purchase equipment for the hospital ship the 'Maine.' ⁷ As well, she personally contributed $3,000 to the widowsand-orphans fund of the British army.

The Windsor Evening Record revealed what no Detroit newspapers mentioned -that Mayor William Maybury was, like many Americans with ancestral memories of the War of Independence, highly sympathetic towards the Boer cause in South Africa. He was reported to have contributed to the Boer relief fund. Maybury's attitudes account for his extraordinary antipathy towards this particular English actress who had publicly supported the British cause in South Africa, and they explain his motivations for banning performances of The Degenerates in his city.

Lillie Langtry's tour was by no means over on 6 April. She was scheduled to perform this play for a week in Newark, N.J.; however, a civic election was in the offing, and the cautious licensing committee, nudged by Mayor Seymour, wanted to see the first night of the play before giving authorization for performances during the remainder of the week! Mrs. Langtry refused to accede to this odd arrangement and cancelled the visit to Newark, giving the cast a week's holiday, during Holy Week.

Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington, and Boston followed without incident. Mrs. Langtry cut her scheduled fortnight in Boston to one week and paid unexpected visits during the week of 14-19 May to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. She no doubt remembered warm receptions in Canada during her five earlier visits to Ontario and Quebec.

The reviewer for the Toronto Globe was doubtful about the structure of the play and the lack of a moral lesson in it, but found Lillie Langtry a skilled and graceful actress and praised the company, particularly George Grossmith Jr. The unsigned review also commented on the bright dialogue and the literary finish of The Degenerates. The 'warm audience' at the Grand Opera House gave her three curtain calls (15 May 1900, p 12).

By contrast, the critic for the Toronto Saturday Night found almost nothing good to say about-one supposes-the same performance of the same play. To that sly reviewer, the drama was very slight and unmemorable, with acting of 'respectable mediocrity'; it was a performance close to 'unspeakable boredom.' As for the ethics of the play, The Degenerates is not clever enough to be truly immoral [No one] could be affected by its shallow cynicism and mediocre frivolity. Not immoral, but vulgar and stupid. It was Mrs. Langtry they went to see ... in all the effulgence of her Parisian gowns and mysteriously preserved physique ... She played her part with a certain ease and charm, as if she knew exactly how a woman like Mrs. Trevelyan would conduct herself ... The public had seen the bride of Hugo de Bathe and had witnessed one of the most talked of plays and that was all the majority had gone for. (19 May 1900, p 6)

Lillie Langtry certainly had a very partisan audience in Ottawa on 16 May. She performed The Degenerates there to a packed house, for the benefit of survivors of a terrible fire that had ravaged Hull and damaged parts of Ottawa on 26 April; four people died and 15,000 were left homeless. The performance raised $11,600. The reviewer for the Ottawa Journal had little to say about the drama on stage, but concentrated on audience enthusiasm for the star. (17 May 1900, p 3)

Other than a one-night stand in Worcester, Mass., on 22 May, just before she sailed for England, Langtry's last major presentation of The Degenerates in North America was at Montreal. With the happy prospect of a return to England, she could ignore a cool Montreal review and take pleasure in a packed theatre on Thursday, 17 May, with apparently good houses on the 18th and 19th. The critic for the Montreal Star found The Degenerates dreary and disappointing. It included 'a few risque situations, a few speeches that bordered on vulgarity, and an occasionally bright line that was apparently an afterthought or an accident' (18 May 1900, p 8).

Because South Africa has been a recurrent motif in this account, it is worth mentioning that on Friday, 18 May, word reached Montreal (and the rest of the breathless Empire) that the town of Mafeking in the Transvaal had been relieved. A Boer army of about 7,000 men had besieged Colonel Robert Baden-Powell ⁸ and a troop of approximately 800 British soldiers for over seven months. Suspense had surrounded the fate of Mafeking for weeks, and great rejoicing hailed this symbolic victory over the Boers. On the night of 18 May there was dancing in the streets of Montreal, and the crowd at Her Majesty's Theatre applauded Mrs. Langtry when she came on stage as Mrs. Trevelyan, carrying a Union Jack! Canadian newspapers of the time indicate that there was much less pro-Boer sympathy in Canada than in the U.S.A.

Considering the fuss over The Degenerates throughout Langtry's four-month tour of North America, the many attacks on the play, and the sneering or condescending reviews, what happened after her return to England seems extraordinary. During the last months of 1900 and the early months of 1901, Lillie Langtry embarked on an expensive venture, the refurbishing and management of the Imperial Theatre in London. In order to bring in some money, with an existing production, she revived The Degenerates, playing it with great success for twenty weeks between 3 September 1900 and 9 March 1901 (with time out to look after the Imperial) in nineteen different theatres, eleven of them in the environs of London. Weekly reports in The Era speak of crowded houses and of audiences sympathetic to Mrs. Trevelyan and her reformation. Places like Manchester, Birmingham, Brighton, Liverpool, Dublin, Brixton, Ealing, and Camden all regarded Lillie Langtry and The Degenerates with interest and respect; these approving reviews are very different in tone from reactions in America, where audiences, reviewers, and mayors, all with stern moral principles, were seriously upset by both the artist and the play. Lillie Langtry had sufficient confidence in the drawing power of The Degenerates to revive it yet again in London. She offered it, to mixed reviews, at her own theatre, the Imperial, for thirteen nights 17 April - 3 May 1902.

Langtry later claimed to have lost money on the North American tour of The Degenerates; nonetheless she soon returned to present The Cross-ways (by J. Hartley Manners, with suggestions by Lillie Langtry; 1902-03)⁹ and, a year later, the sensational Mrs. Deering's Divorce (by Percy Fendall). In Act III of the latter play, Mrs. Langtry, playing the part of Mrs. Deering, a divorcée, tries on a new gown in a male dressmaker's shop in Bond Street; she removes on stage the dress that she wore into the shop and stands in her chemise, as a man enters. (The play was performed in Detroit without incident 7-12 December 1903, and Langtry felt no need to return to Windsor).

Lillie Langtry's last four North American tours differed in character from the preceding nine: she toured in one-act plays that were a part of evenings and matinees at vaudeville houses, often in the Orpheum circuit. These small dramas were very popular and enormously profitable (There are many references in reviews to packed houses)¹⁰ and were economical to present, requiring only one or two supporting actors and little in the way of properties and scenery. The three one-act plays that she presented during these tours were Between the Nightfall and the Light (a tragedy, by Graham Hill; 190607), The Test (an adaptation of Sardou's A Wife's Peril; 1912-13), and Ashes (by Percy Fendall; 1915-16 and 1916-17).

In wartime, Atlantic crossings were dangerous and touring in North America exhausting; Langtry now had plenty of money-after her death in 1929 her estate was valued at $235,000 (Montreal Star, 16 January 1932, p 20)and soon after the end of the Great War she retired from the stage to enjoy life in Monaco and England for a decade.

Lillie Langtry must have been very grateful for the controversies that The Degenerates and her other plays stirred up in the U.S.A. and Canada. Had she remained in England throughout her long career she would have had a forgotten thirty-seven years on stage, first arousing a short-lived curiosity amongst British theatregoers in the 1880s, subsequently to be regarded as one of many actresses of the second rank.

She was fortunate to come to America at the climax of a strong moral-reform movement, when civic, temperance, and religious watchdogs scrutinized literature, theatre, and public behaviour generally, to eliminate or subdue any tendencies towards immorality. Marie Lloyd, a contemporary of Lillie Langtry, also met with the disapprobation of North America moralists during her five tours, between 1889 and 1914, both for her scandalous private life (In 1914 she was living openly with Bernard Dillon outside of marriage, in 'moral turpitude') and her suggestive music-hall songs ('A Little Bit of What You Fancy Does You Good,' 'Oh! Mr. Porter,' 'Wink the Other Eye'). The controversies that Lillie Langtry stirred up in Detroit and other North American cities contributed to her substantial fortune, and although theatre reviewers on this continent were more often negative than positive, the public obviously paid no more than lip-service to the forces of morality, while crowding the theatres and vaudeville houses to see the notorious Jersey Lily.

Notes

A shorter version of this study was presented at the ACTH/AHTC Conference in Windsor, Ont., 29 May 1988

1 Lillie Langtry's theatrical visits to North America in summary: 1) 6 Nov 1882 - 9 June 1883 (Canada 15-17 Mar, 6-7 Apr, 5-9 June 1883); 2) 27 Oct 1883 - 28 June 1884 (Canada 29 Oct - 24 Nov 1883); 3) 4 Oct 1886 - 18 July 1887 (she did not appear in Canada); 4) 19 Sept 1887 - 26 May 1888 (Canada 1-12 Nov 1887); 5) 15 Oct 1888 - 25 May 1889 (Canada 29 Nov - 3 Dec 1888); 6) 28 Nov 1894 - 20 Apr 1895 (Canada 9-11 Apr 1895); 7) 15 Jan - 22 May 1900 (Canada 5 Apr, 14-19 May 1900); 8) 29 Dec 1902 - 3 May 1903 (Canada 29-31 Jan 1903); 9) 7 Sept 1903 - 19 Mar 1904 (Canada 5-14 Oct 1903); 10) 1 Oct 1906 - 23 Feb 1907 (Canada 4-9 Feb 1907); 11) 30 Sept 1912 - c. 15 Feb 1913 (Canada 9-25 Dec 1912); 12) 1 Nov 1915 -29 Apr 1916 (Canada 3-15 Jan 1916); 13) 4 Sept 1916 - 10[?] Mar 1917 (Canada 20-25 Nov 1916)
Return to article

2 Kevin O'Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada (Toronto, 1982)
Return to article

3 The review of the same play in The New York Times is not significantly different in content and tone from that in the Dramatic Mirror. The Times critic found the old drama very dull and Mrs. Langtry not an acceptable actress ... affected and artificial ... self-conscious ... with a sweet, thin voice ... her gestures are strained and awkward ... The popularity of Mrs. Langtry will pass away quickly.' There is much more of this; the concluding paragraph describes a ticket speculator selling $2 orchestra tickets for $19. (7 Nov 1882, p 5)

Lillie Langtry's early appearances in public in New York City created traffic jams; Wallack's Theater auctioned tickets for the opening night (thoughtfully holding back 250 seats for the press), a scheme that brought in $7,000. The profit from Langtry's first North American tour was $100,000.

After she played in repertoire (An Unequal Match, As You Like It, and The Honeymoon) in New York City for five weeks in 1882, Langtry toured in the USA; she appeared for the first time in Canada at the Grand Opera House in Hamilton, Ont. on 15 Mar 1883. That afternoon many young men and women crowded around her special railway car, anxious for just a glimpse of the famous lady and perhaps her American companion Frederick Gebhard, but she did not appear and would not be interviewed. The local theatre critic found her performance as Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer very uneven, ranging from excellence to below mediocrity. The writer concluded, 'She is not likely to retain a prominent place on the stage; when public curiosity has been satisfied, she will sink out of sight' (Hamilton Spectator, 16 Mar 1882, p 4)
Return to article

4 Lillie Langtry's association with the Prince of Wales was, however, long remembered, at least in Edmonton: 'There is no more talked-about person on the stage today than Lillie Langtry, not necessarily because the late Edward VII took a great interest in her stage career, but the fact that she possesses such an interesting personality' (Journal, 7 Dec 1912, p 22)
Return to article

5 Her production of Macbeth, New York 1889, was very shortlived
Return to article

6 Pierre Sichel, The Jersey Lily (Englewood Cliffs N.J.), p 364
Return to article

7 Colonel Robert Baden-Powell later founded the Boy Scout movement
Return to article

8 '. . . a great deal of disappointment ... As a British city the people of Toronto were anxious to see the play which had called for the personal praise of the King of England, and the wonder is what the King saw in the piece' (New York Dramatic Mirror, 14 Feb 1903, p 4)
Return to article

9 '. . . the biggest salary [unspecified] in the world for a week in vaudeville' (Toronto World, 2 Feb 1907, p 12)
Return to article

10 For generous assistance I thank Sister Geraldine Anthony, Mount Saint Vincent University; G. Mark Walsh, Municipal Archivist, Windsor Public Library; and Ainslie Wilson, research assistant, University of Victoria
Return to article