Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World (21 page)

Lucy Sutherland, aged ten
(photo credit 1.89)

Before he died, Douglas Sutherland had made his wife promise that his daughters would be raised and educated in England. The only man in Guelph who could help the young widow fulfill this vow was a dour sixty-three-year-old Scotsman named David Kennedy, who had retired to a nearby farm. In October of 1871, Elinor Sutherland became engaged to Kennedy and a few months later, the two girls and their mother and new stepfather sailed for England. It wasn’t long before both sisters developed an intense dislike for Kennedy, whom Elinor described as a “
crotchety, cranky invalid.” They settled in Jersey, a Channel island just off the coast of Normandy, where the living was cheap and the mild climate suited the poor constitution of their stepfather. Kennedy’s miserliness meant that the girls were indifferently educated by a succession of underpaid governesses and tutors. Luckily, they found much to fire their imaginations in the library of the handsome Georgian house that Kennedy had managed to rent quite inexpensively. It also had some first-class paintings on the walls, a Gainsborough, a Lawrence, and a Lely among them, and Lucy soon began sketching costumes inspired by the clothes she saw in the portraits and in books. Her sister Elinor’s romantic nature was stirred by the stories of kings and queens she devoured in the library.

Social life in Jersey revolved around Government House, the residence of the lieutenant governor, and Lucy and Elinor soon befriended the governor’s daughter. One day when Lucy was eleven, the girls became consumed with excitement when they heard that Lillie Langtry would soon be dining at Government House. Lillie was a local girl, a daughter of the dean of Jersey, who had married and gone to London, where her beauty caught the eye of painters such as John Everett Millais. In the one good black dress she owned, Lillie had also drawn the gaze of the Prince of Wales and soon became his mistress. This granted her entrée to his exclusive Marlborough House set, and before long she was the most celebrated beauty of the age; women imitated her unique style—from her simple coif to her habit of wearing only black or white.

On the night that the “Jersey Lily” was to appear at Government House, Lucy and Elinor hid under a dressing table in the cloakroom, peering through peepholes they had cut in its calico-and-muslin cover. Once Lillie Langtry entered the room, however, the girls’ excitement gave them away and the famous beauty pulled them out from beneath their hideaway. Years later, Elinor could still describe the details of Lillie’s “
white-corded silk dress with a tight bodice and a puffed-up bustle at the back.” The “Jersey Lily,” too, would remember in her memoir “
the two pretty red-headed girls” peeping from under the dressing table.

The next day, the girls spied Mrs. Langtry walking in the town wearing black velvet and furs. Lucy drew a sketch of her that inspired a gown she would make for one of the first balls she attended at Government House. “
It was in black velvet,” she remembered, “which fell in soft folds to the feet, and there was a little tight bodice finished with a deep belt.” While wearing this same black frock at another dance, Lucy met a handsome young army captain who became her first love. Just when it seemed as if marriage to him might be a possibility, however, a lovers’ quarrel erupted. Ignoring her mother’s advice, the ever-volatile Lucy packed her bags and went to stay with relatives in England. “
I decided that there was only one thing to be done,” she later wrote. “I must let him [the army captain] see that I did not care. So to this end I married the next man who asked me, and he happened to be James Stuart Wallace.”

Lillie Langtry
(photo credit 1.5)

After her marriage to Wallace ended in divorce in 1893, Lucy was practically penniless and living in her now-widowed mother’s flat near Berkeley Square. Not long after she had her epiphany about becoming a dressmaker, a friend who moved in society circles came to call and mentioned that she needed a new tea gown for an upcoming country house party. Tea gowns, or “teagies” as they were known, were worn without corsets at teatime—a time of day when gentlemen called on their mistresses—and they were filmy, pretty creations designed with just a hint of the boudoir. Lucy set to work creating a tea gown with soft, accordion-pleated folds inspired by one she remembered seeing in a play. At the country house party it drew a host of admiring comments, and before long every woman who had seen it wanted Lucy to make a tea gown for her. Soon she had to hire an assistant to help her fill the demand.

Most fashionable women in 1890s London bought their clothes in Paris, from couturiers like Worth or Doucet, or perhaps took a design from a magazine to their favorite “little dressmaker” to be copied. Lucile could have remained yet another of London’s many “little dressmakers” had she not come up with the idea of creating original designs that were not copies of Paris originals. When society women discovered they could have dresses made that would never be seen on anyone else, Lucy’s order books quickly filled up. The finishing touches in Lucile’s frocks were much admired as well—tiny buttons, frills of lace and ribbon, and delicate silk flowers that became a kind of Lucile signature. By 1893 Lucy had hired four assistants and opened a shop in Old Burlington Street. At Royal Ascot the following June, the society columns noted that frocks by Lucile were much in evidence.

But even more comment would by caused by Lucile’s creation of a room at Old Burlington Street where undergarments—hitherto known as “unmentionables”—were displayed. And instead of the plain white cambric underwear that proper women were supposed to wear, Lucy’s taffeta-hung Rose Room offered pastel knickers and pale pink lingerie. “
In those days virtue was too often expressed by dowdiness,” she recalled. “I loosed upon a startled London, a London of flannel underclothes, woolen stockings, and voluminous petticoats, a cascade of chiffons, of draperies as lovely as those of ancient Greece.” According to her memoir, “
Half the women flocked to see them though they had not the courage to buy them at first. Those cunning little lace motifs … those saucy velvet bows … might surely be the weapons of the woman who was ‘not quite nice.’ ” To the aristocratic set surrounding the Prince of Wales, being “nice” was an utterly déclassé notion, and when Lucile’s cobweblike creations were adopted by women such as the Countess of Warwick, one of the prince’s favorites, others in society soon followed.

“Daisy” Warwick was a friend of Lucy’s sister, Elinor, who in 1892 had married Clayton Glyn, a bluff Essex squire with an estate not far from the Warwicks’ imposing Easton Lodge. Elinor had devoted most of her twenties to finding a wealthy mate from a “good” English family. With no dowry to bring to a marriage, she had had to rely on the allure of her striking looks—bright red hair, green eyes, and perfect pale skin—all complemented by eye-catching clothes made by her sister. After her marriage, however, Elinor was unhappily surprised to learn that Clayton’s means were more modest than they seemed. Yet this didn’t deter her from dressing in style as she and her husband mixed with
“the
crème de la crème
of English aristocracy” at Easton Lodge house parties.

As a divorceé, Lucy was not invited to country house gatherings and preferred, in any case, the company of “café society” as London’s haute Bohemia was then called. Yet in this milieu, Lucy did not lack for admirers. One was the artist Philip Burne-Jones, son of the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones; another was the distinguished throat surgeon Sir Morell Mackenzie, who hosted Thursday evening gatherings of notables from the artistic world. At one of Mackenzie’s salons, Lucy met Oscar Wilde, whom she thought was “
the oddest creature I had ever seen,” wearing black velvet knee breeches and a sunflower in his buttonhole.

Another theatrical figure, the actress Ellen Terry, would make a far greater impression. Lucy became one of the actress’s female acolytes, and Terry consoled and encouraged her in the aftermath of her divorce. She also introduced Lucy to friends in the theatrical world which led to her being asked to design costumes for plays. At the time, clothes worn on the stage tended to be made of stiff brocades and velvets, but by using lighter fabrics and creating clothes that could have been worn offstage as well as on, Lucy brought a new realism to theatrical design. Cecil Beaton would recall her costumes as “
masterpieces of intricate workmanship” and claim that her influence was enormous. Many years after seeing a “Snow Princess” dress Lucile created for the actress Lily Elsie to wear in
The Merry Widow
, Beaton would use it as the inspiration for the white ball gown he designed for Audrey Hepburn in the film of
My Fair Lady
.

Lucy introduced some of the effects she learned in the theater into the world of fashion retailing. When Lucile Ltd. moved to a town house on fashionable Hanover Square in 1897, she decorated the rooms with gray silk wall coverings and installed gilt chairs and couches where customers could sip tea while choosing clothes. And instead of wax dummies displaying her frocks, Lucile had living mannequins, girls she carefully groomed into her own lovely creations with names like “Hebe,” “Dolores,” and “Gamela.” Although some of the Paris couture houses already had “mannequin parades” where models would walk about the showrooms, it is Lucile who can be credited with creating the first real fashion shows.

Shortly after she had moved to larger quarters on Hanover Square in the spring of 1904, Lucy sent out engraved invitations to her first staged fashion “parade,” “
keeping the illusion that I was inviting my friends to some afternoon party.” She realized that “on this parade of mine I would stand or fall and as the day grew near I was terribly anxious.” On April 28, however, a good number of Lucile’s friends and faithful clients turned up at Hanover Street to find the premises decorated with three thousand handmade silk roses. In the carpeted showroom, Ellen Terry ushered attendees to their seats before a stage that was “all hung with misty olive chiffon curtains … which created the effect I wanted.” Heads turned when Lillie Langtry took her seat alongside aristocratic luminaries like Princess Alice of Albany and the Duchess of Westminster. Also in attendance was one of Lucy’s friends, the always “vivid and amusing” Margot Asquith, whose husband, Herbert Asquith, would later become Britain’s prime minister.

As the lights dimmed, a string orchestra began playing, and then the first of the models appeared. “
I shall never forget the long-drawn breath of admiration which rippled round the room as the curtains parted,” Lucy later wrote, “and the first of my glorious girls stepped upon the stage, pausing to show herself a moment before floating along the room to a burst of applause.” The next day the newspapers raved about Lucile’s “
gallery of exquisite creations,” and Lucy herself wrote, “There was never such a triumph for me as that afternoon. Orders flowed in by the dozen, so that saleswomen could hardly cope with them.” Within months she was putting on as many as three shows a day, and in the spring of the following year, she began hosting parades of outdoor wear in the garden at Hanover Square, sometimes with models accompanied by pedigreed dogs on jeweled leashes, each “matched” to the model’s dress. One newspaper dubbed Lucile’s unique style as “Lady Duff and Her Stuff” since by then Madame Lucile had become equally well known as Lady Cosmo Duff Gordon—though it had very nearly turned out otherwise.

By the time Cosmo’s mother died in early 1900, he had almost missed his chance with Lucy. That spring she had gone to Monte Carlo with her mother for a holiday during which a titled (and married) Irish landowner began being very attentive to her. When Lucy and her mother moved on to Venice, the Irish baron followed, and rumors soon reached London that he was planning to divorce his wife in favor of Lucy. On catching wind of this, a furious Cosmo sent a telegram to her hotel saying, “
If you are going to marry anyone it is going to be me.” He then rushed to Venice, had a noisy confrontation with his rival in the hotel lobby, and persuaded Lucy to marry him instead.

On May 24, 1900, they were married at the British Consulate in Venice, and on the honeymoon that followed Lucy would write that they were both very much in love. It would not be long, however, before she would be complaining that Cosmo was “
most extraordinarily dull to be with.” She found visits to his Scottish estate at Maryculter in Aberdeenshire to be “deadly,
deadly
dull,” since he was a keen sportsman and she was not. At house parties, Cosmo’s idea of good fun was to have some of the guests don fencing masks while he shot at them with wax bullets. Cosmo himself had lost an eye in a shooting accident but this did not lessen his expertise as a fencer, and he would lead the British fencing team to a silver medal in the 1906 Olympics. He was also tall (six-three) and quite presentably handsome behind his handlebar mustache, and his title unquestionably raised Lucy’s status.

Her husband’s baronetcy notwithstanding, as a divorcée, Lucy could not take part in the society ritual of being presented at court. Her sister, Elinor, however,
was
presented at Buckingham Palace in May of 1896, a fact that Lucy would always bitterly resent, though she designed a lovely white satin court dress for her sister to wear along with the requisite white ostrich plumes. By then Elinor was four years into her marriage to Clayton Glyn and had a daughter, Margot, who was almost three. But the romance with Glyn had evaporated; in the style of many men of his class, he had begun being unfaithful after only two years of married life.