Elizabeth Drexel Lehr - King Lehr and the Gilded Age

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Text originally published in 1935 under the same title.

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Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

KING LEHR AND THE GILDED AGE

by

ELIZABETH DREXEL LEHR

WITH EXTRACTS FROM THE LOCKED DIARY OF HARRY LEHR

WITH 32 ILLUSTRATIONS

Contents

TO MY MOTHER

LUCY WHARTON DREXEL

FOR WHOSE SAKE

I ENDURED

MANY THINGS

HARRY LEHR DIED IN BALTIMORE ON JANUARY 3 RD , 1929, and the news of his death flashed over two continents. I was in Paris, whither I had rushed back from a visit to Colonel and Mrs. Jacques Balsan at their Riviera villa. My maid greeted me with a sheaf of newspapers. One glance at her face told me the truth.

I sat down slowly on my bed...no need to hurry now...and began to read them. The headlines flared up at me...Harry Lehr, Americas Former Social Leader, Dies...The Beau Brummell of Twenty Years Ago...Once the Four Hundreds Playboy...Death Takes Societys Jester.... Long columns were filled with the exploits of the man whose claim to fame had been that he had found out the way to make a jaded world laugh; his freak parties were recounted at length, his bons mots quoted, his social triumphs commented upon, his many eccentricities remembered.

Reading them I looked back into the past, visualizing those twenty-eight years of our life together, years that had brought him success and laughter and approbation, years when he had been acclaimed as the King Lehr whose wit had enlivened the drawing-rooms of New York and Newport. For me those same years had held sorrow and disillusion. I had known loneliness in the midst of crowds, had learnt to endure agonies of humiliation in secret.

And now it was all over. The tragic farce of our marriage had ended.

For days I shut myself up in my home in the Rue des Saints Pres, while reporters clamoured at my door in vain.

My lawyer called to see me. He hesitated in explaining his business. Harry Lehr had left a will, bequeathing $200,000, all the money he possessed in the world, to his brothers and sisters. It was just what I had anticipated. I had never thought to inherit money from him, or wanted to. But there was a strange codicil attached:

I bequeath to my wife, Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, my houses, lands, silver plate, tapestries, pictures, carriages, yachts, motor cars, in all parts of the world, excepting in the United States of America and in France, absolutely and for ever.

I took the document and stared at it incredulously. Houses, lands, yachts? Harry had never owned any at any time during our married life! How could he leave me what did not exist? Surely such a codicil must have been made during his illness when he was not responsible for his actions? No. It was dated some years before. Then my lawyer enlightened me.

I am afraid you will have trouble, unless you take instant precautions, Mrs. Lehr. Your husband has made you residuary legatee, which means that you would be liable for all taxes, all claims which may be made on his estate, and for the payment of any debts incurred by him. You will have to renounce this bequest legally even though it only exists on paper.

So I had to make a solemn, formal declaration that I refused to accept my imposing fictitious inheritance, that I would never lay claim to it.

The few friends of Harry Lehr who heard of the wording of the codicil laughed at what they called his final and best joke. So like him to get the last ounce of fun out of life, to waste the time of pompous lawyers drawing up codicils to bequeath imaginary possessions. But their laughter was tinged with affectionate regret for the man who had been able to jest while death knocked at the door. Not one of them guessed the real meaning of the codicil. That remained for me. It had always been thus in my life with Harry Lehr; always the jest for the world and the bitterness for me.

So now after many years let me write the truth of our story, in order that those who knew us both may perhaps understand for the first time. Many wounds have been healed for me, and at last I can look back on the past seeing it in its true perspective. I want to be fair to Harry Lehr, to write of him as he really was; not only as The Funmaker as he liked to call himself, Americas Court Jester; nor yet as the man who embittered the best years of my life. As Stevenson wrote: There is so much bad in the best of us, and so much good in the worst of us...

MOST FITTING TO BEGIN OUR STORY WITH THE SIMPLE statement that I was born Elizabeth Drexel, for it is almost superfluous to add that had I not been thus born I should never have been married to Harry Lehr. My grandfather Francis Martin Drexel founded the Drexel family in America. From the little Tyrolese town of Dornbirn on the shores of Lake Constance he arrived in Philadelphia in 1817, a young artist with a stock of paints and brushes as his principal capital, and remained to become first one of the most fashionable portrait painters in America, and secondly the founder of a banking house.

My father, named Joseph William, was his youngest son. I was scarcely out of my childhood when he died. A big, bearded man with fine dark eyes, sensitive, beautifully shaped hands, and a low musical voice rather at variance with his habitual sternness and the iron discipline that ruled our household. He was perpetually tired. Every hour of his day was given over to work, even at home he was constantly harassed by messages from his secretaries. When he came back from the office at night he was more exhausted than a field labourer; I have often known him to fall suddenly asleep even at the dinner table in the middle of a conversation that was obviously interesting him, although when he made an effort he could be a delightful companion and talk well on nearly every subject.

My mother was younger than my father, small and golden-haired, with a little heart-shaped face that was nearly always smiling and big china-blue eyes that reminded me of those of my beloved Paris doll. Before her marriage she had been Miss Lucy Wharton and she was immensely proud of her descent from the Duke of Wharton.

The winters we spent in New York in a big house at 103 Madison Avenue, only a few blocks from J. Pierpont Morgans house, and since they were so closely allied in business the two families saw a great deal of one another.