Oscar Wilde Page 13

  Like Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and Bram Stoker, who would tour America a year after him, Wilde detested the long train trips between lectures. Crisscrossing the country with cities and plains flashing by outside was, well, boring. “I hate to fly through the country at this rate,” Wilde told reporters. “The only true way, you know, to see a country is to ride on horseback. I long to ride through New Mexico and Colorado and California.” Wilde was not being fatuous; he had traversed on horseback the rugged terrain of the Peloponnese, riding to Olympia with Mahaffy. In his mind, and in his prizewinning poem, Ravenna, Wilde “galloped, racing with the setting sun, / And ere the crimson after-glow was passed, / I stood within Ravenna’s walls at last!”

  Of all the regions of America, he preferred the West, “with its grizzly bears and its untamed cow-boys, its free, open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity!” He visited Leadville, the silver capital of Colorado, situated high in the Rocky Mountains, where he heard every man carried a gun. “I was told that if I went there they would be sure to shoot me or my travelling manager,” he said. “I wrote and told them that nothing that they could do to my travelling manager would intimidate me.”

  Dressed in baggy trousers underneath his favorite overcoat, his long hair tucked into a black miner’s slouch hat, Wilde was lowered by bucket into the Matchless Mine. He opened a new shaft, named “the Oscar,” with a silver drill and had supper with the miners at the bottom. A table was set with small glasses and opened bottles, and everyone sat on stools. “The first course was whiskey, the second whiskey, the third whiskey, all the courses were whiskey, but still they called it supper,” Wilde wrote Nellie Sickert. “The amazement of the miners when they saw that art and appetite could go hand in hand knew no bounds; when I lit a long cigar they cheered till the silver fell in dust from the roof.” Wilde held his own with the two-fisted drinkers and tossed off a shot “without flinching.” He said that “they unanimously pronounced me in their grand simple way ‘a bully boy with no glass eye.’ ” At the casino the drinking continued. Wilde noticed a sign on the piano: “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.” This remark, Wilde said, was the “only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” (The saying “Don’t shoot the piano player” is often attributed to Wilde.)

  During the silver boom, the Matchless had made a fortune for Horace Tabor, and in 1879 he built a three-story, brick-and-stone opera house with a Victorian interior of red plush and gilt that seated 880.* Lillian Russell and Harry Houdini had been there before Wilde walked onstage to read from the wrathful autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance goldsmith who created for Francis I a renowned saltcellar. The miners did not know Cellini from Bellini, but Wilde sagely made the cultural experiment work. He explained how Cellini worked, in particular, how he cast his Perseus. “I was reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me,” he reported. “I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the inquiry, ‘Who shot him?’ ”

  The freedom seekers of the new American West were his kind of people, for they knew how to celebrate life. One evening during his exile, Wilde was drinking at a Paris café when he turned to his companion and said he was thinking of living in America, in the West. It was a place, he said, that “a man is a man to-day, and yesterdays don’t count—that a desperado can make a reputation for piety on his current performances. What a country to live in!”

  Ever since tours began, there have been scenes, arguments, and stormy confrontations. It was inevitable that Wilde finally lost his temper with his business manager Colonel Morse. “It is very annoying to me to find that my Southern tour extends far beyond the three weeks you spoke of,” he wrote Morse. “It is now three weeks since I left New York, and I am informed that I have two weeks more. Five weeks for sixteen lectures—nothing could be worse in every way. It is quite stupid and gross and will do me great harm.” He also had a head of steam up about a newspaper comment Morse placed about a cartoon depicting Wilde as the Wild Man of Borneo. “No mention should have been made of the cartoon at Washington,” he admonished. “I regard all caricature and satire as absolutely beneath notice.… The matter was mine and should have been left for me to decide on.”

  Wilde always had a love-hate relationship with the press. He admitted to Nellie Sickert that “even the papers though venal and vile, and merely the mouthpieces of the slanderer, often repeat and write sensibly about me.… I feel I am doing real good work here, and of course the artists have received me with enthusiasm everywhere.” One was Joaquin Miller, a self-invented character with many a dubious tale, including the story that he lost a finger in a fight with wolves while a driver for Wells Fargo. Following publication of Songs of the Sierras in 1871, Miller styled himself as a civilized Buffalo Bill, sporting a sombrero, pointed gray mustache, and long curls. Storming London, he arrived at the Savage Club with great Indian whoops ready to sell poems to the duchesses.

  When students at the University of Rochester mimicked the Harvard demonstration, Miller complained about the mockery, urging Wilde not to “lose heart or come to dislike America. For whatever is said or done the real heart of this strong young world demands, and will have, fair play for all.” Quick to exploit a publicity opportunity, Morse advised Wilde to reply with a letter to the New York World. Pompous and grandiose, perhaps because it was written for publication, the letter shows how Wilde prattled on when inflated with his own importance: “Who are these scribes who, passing with purposeless alacrity from the police news to the Parthenon, and from crime to criticism, sway with such serene incapacity the office which they so late swept?” he asked. “ ‘Narcissuses of imbecility’ … let them peer at us through their telescopes and report what they like of us. But, my dear Joaquin, should we put them under the microscope there would be really nothing to be seen.”

  Even so, Wilde created some memorable, albeit stereotypical, American characters and dialogue. “Perhaps after all, America never has been discovered,” Lord Henry says. “I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” Hester Worsley in A Woman of No Importance is an example of the wealthy young American who comes to England to marry a title. “American women are wonderfully clever in concealing their parents,” Lord Illingworth says, only to be told that Hester’s father made his fortune in American dry goods. “What are American dry goods?” asks Lady Hunstanton. “American novels,” replies Lord Illingworth.

  In “The Canterville Ghost,” a California family leases a country house equipped with an apparition. “I come from a modern country, where we have everything that money can buy,” says Hiram B. Otis, the American politician, who is writing a history of the Democratic party. “I recken [sic] that if there were such a thing as a ghost in Europe, we’d have it at home in a very short time in one of our public museums, or on the road as a show.” His wife, Wilde observes, never adopted ill health as a form of European refinement and was quite English—“an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

  Wilde had shown America that an Irishman could talk like an Englishman and be well-educated and well-dressed. He had earned his celebrity, but being an aesthetic curiosity had wearied him. The new Oscar would be a dandy, not a direct descendant of Brummell or Disraeli but more of an aristocrat of the dinner table, like Baudelaire. It was inevitable that Wilde would link Aestheticism with Decadence.

  *The 1893 silver crash closed most of the mines. By 1899 Tabor was bankrupt and dying, but he still believed that silver would rebound. He whispered to his wife, Baby Doe, “Hang on to the Matchless,” a deathbed request she honored. For thirty-five years she lived alone, penniless and confused, writing her dreams and hallucinations on scraps of paper. She was discovered in her one-room cabin in 1955, frozen to death. The Ballad of Baby Doe immortalizes her life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  New Scenarios

  E
xperience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

  —LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN

  After the rigors of descending mine shafts and the frustrations of defining Aestheticism, Wilde needed the diversions only a city like New York offered and decided not to return to London when the lecture tour ended in mid-October. Only his mother wanted him home. When she wrote, “I thought you had sailed away to Japan,” he appeased her with some of his American earnings. Lady Wilde expected a celebratory welcome for her famous son: “You are still the talk of London—the cabmen ask me if I am anything to Oscar Wilde—the milkman has bought your picture!” Although his mother predicted that he would be “mobbed” on his return and forced to seek shelter in cabs, Wilde was not that convinced about his reception: he feared that the English press would recall only the myopic tabloid satires rather than his innovative ideas about decorative art.

  New York welcomed the exhausted lecturer while he examined his options. He stayed for two and a half months, restlessly moving from hotel to hotel until he found rooms at 61 Irving Place, at the corner of Seventeenth Street in what was then the theatre district, and finally at 48 West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village. Hostesses fought over occasions to entertain him. One awed young woman recalled how Wilde “burst like a resplendent meteor” into her charmed circle; he sat next to her at a luncheon and opened the conversation by saying: “The great crises of our lives are never events but always passions.” The two stared at each other silently, then simultaneously broke into laughter. On a more serious note, Wilde predicted, not for the first time, that he would leave an indelible mark upon his generation.

  At the home of a Dublin friend, Professor John Doremus, Wilde met Elisabeth Marbury, who at twenty-six had been evading marriage since she came out in society according to the protocol of an Edith Wharton novel. She was old New York, and despite a Quaker-Presbyterian background, her parents considered the theatre educational. Every Friday evening the family attended performances at one of New York’s fifteen theatres, where they chose among the classics and drama (she saw John Gilbert in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal in 1870), musicals and burlesques, French opéra bouffe and variety shows.

  Already a grandmotherly looking figure with a masculine bearing, Marbury was destined to be the preeminent American theatrical agent of the nineties. Initially Wilde delighted her. “Like many others I fell under the thrall of his gifts as a conversationalist and could listen with delight to the brilliancy of his talk,” she recalled. As Wilde’s agent, she later took a more critical view when he flaunted his homosexuality even as she lived in a lesbian relationship. Wilde never understood how his behavior spread fear throughout homosexual circles in England and America.

  At this time Wilde acted as his own agent. With characteristic savoir faire, he brought actresses the script of an unproven playwright in a country where he was known more as an objet d’art than as a talented writer. He learned through trial and error the difficulties of negotiating a contract. That Vera needed revisions, as Boucicault had suggested, never motivated him to make changes before seeking a lead. He had verbalized the scenes long ago and could not rewrite without the inspired urgency of conversation.

  Upon Lillie Langtry’s arrival in New York with her touring company, Wilde put aside the frustrations of selling his play. On the morning of October 23, he arose at the unheard-of hour of three, dressed in a black velvet jacket, and put on his beloved overcoat. He took a hansom to the pier for the 4:30 A.M. launch that chugged out to the SS Arizona, the same ship on which he had had his disappointing encounter with the Atlantic. He boarded carrying an abundance of white lilies and presented them one by one, to the actress’s amusement.

  The New York Times reported his tie “was gaudy and his shirtfront very open, displaying a large expanse of manly chest”—surely a fabrication, for Wilde would never publicly expose his body. A Canadian reporter asked him if he had “discovered” Mrs. Langtry. “I would rather have discovered Mrs. Langtry than have discovered America,” he replied. In many ways he had discovered her back at Salisbury Street, when he introduced her to poetry, advised her to wear yellow, and encouraged her dramatic ambitions. She was never a talented actress, but she had presence, remembered her lines, and filled seats by wearing fabulous jewels so that the ladies in the audience could debate which ones were gifts of the Prince of Wales.

  Wilde’s adoration did not go unnoticed. “As for the love-smitten Oscar Wilde, he is head over heels in love,” reported one journalist. The proclaimed couple fell into their familiar roles as fashion consultants. Wilde told the Lily not to wear long boots for her part of Rosalind in As You Like It; she fussed with his unmanageable hair and tugged on his tie. Wilde insisted on posing her for Sarony, who had paid five thousand dollars for the privilege; she laughed and talked through the sitting and rejected the first set of proofs. “You have made me pretty; I am beautiful,” she told Sarony, who responded with one of his impish shrugs. Americans were paying five dollars for her portrait, and the French wanted five hundred copies.

  Wilde explained that Americans were not uncivilized, only decivilized. He assumed himself to be the favored protector for dinners at Delmonico’s and other celebrations. But he was upstaged by a playboy called Freddy Gebhardt, who used Langtry’s greed for expensive gifts to his advantage. They were often a threesome at dinner. On the morning of her debut as Hester Grazebrook in An Unequal Match, Wilde introduced her to a remarkable man called Steele MacKaye, whose innovations—the movable stage and the tip-up seat—were precursors of modern theatrecraft.

  His father, Colonel James MacKaye, had spied for President Lincoln and founded the American Telegraph Company, but the son—impractical and extravagant—epitomized the American dreamer. At sixteen he left school to study painting in Paris, then switched to acting, spending unlimited family funds in a quest for fulfillment. He trained with François Delsarte, an actor who claimed he had discovered “the natural and infallible laws of human expression.” Delsarte urged students to watch children at play and to study the human body in hospitals, morgues, asylums, and art galleries. Despite travel and education, MacKaye never achieved maturity, perhaps because he had the wealth to be reckless.

  Lanky and darkly sinister at forty, with long, black, curly hair, he was a magnetic individualist whose personality-driven ideas overwhelmed Wilde. The latest was a movable stage: one stage on top of the other, installed inside an elevator shaft, which shifted up or down to different levels by pulleys and counterweights. MacKaye explained to his visitors how a set was changed while another scene was in progress at stage level. Holding a pocket watch, he demonstrated that it took only forty seconds to switch sets.* Anything mechanical was mysterious to Wilde, but he could visualize how such a mechanism could benefit a dramatist, and he showed his interest by asking questions.

  Langtry wandered over to a window overlooking the Park Theatre, where her play was to open that evening—and gasped. It was on fire, a common enough occurrence in the gaslight era. Since Wallack’s Theatre was unoccupied, the play opened there a week later. Wilde attended with MacKaye and afterward, at the invitation of W. H. Hurlbert, editor of the New York World, went to the paper’s composing room, where he wrote his review seated amidst the ink-smudged typesetters. Avoiding any opinion of the overall production (which he disliked), Wilde praised Langtry’s beauty (it had launched a new movement in English art) and her costumes (they surpassed the scenery). He even mentioned the safety curtain at the Madison Square Theatre, another of MacKaye’s devices.

  MacKaye wanted to build the first million-dollar theatre and asked Wilde for The Duchess of Padua and Vera to open his extravaganza at Broadway and Thirty-third Street. Investors were harder to sign up. Wilde ingenuously assured his partner that the influential people he had met in America would open their checkbooks. Only youthful enthusiasm, gilded charm, and foolish optimism kept the fantasy in motion. “Do not yet despair,” Wilde told MacKaye when things were bleak on all sides, “you a
nd I together should conquer the world.”

  MacKaye chased the money and Wilde pursued the actresses. The script for Vera was making the rounds, but there were only working notes for The Duchess of Padua. The inspirational rush that had produced sonnets to Bernhardt and Terry was missing. Wilde went to plays to evaluate actresses and decided that the right one could inspire a scenario for The Duchess. Mary Anderson, seen in a recent Romeo and Juliet that Wilde did not enjoy, was intrigued with the proposal. Confidence soaring, he promised his play would put her “with the great actresses of the earth.” They started to work as a prelude to negotiating a contract.

  Wilde wanted an advance of five thousand dollars to write the play and a royalty on each performance. Anderson’s stepfather and business manager, Hamilton Griffin, whom Wilde called “the Griffin,” was appalled at the terms. After prolonged discussion, they agreed that MacKaye would direct a production in late January 1883. Wilde would receive one thousand dollars on signing and an additional four thousand if Anderson accepted the play. “The world is at our feet,” Wilde told MacKaye, and they celebrated. But two weeks later Anderson and the Griffin postponed production for a year to ensure a longer run. The script was due March 1. Without the urgency of a shorter deadline, Wilde disappeared into the New York social scene.

  MacKaye urged him not to forget about Vera. Marie Prescott, another popular actress, read the play and liked the title role but wanted revisions. Wilde’s reply to such requests was usually a good-natured “but who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?” Then he did the necessary alterations. After negotiating with Anderson, Wilde adopted a more uncompromising attitude and asked for permanent control of acting rights, one thousand dollars down, production in the fall of 1883, and a fifty-dollar royalty on each performance. An agreement was drafted. Now the world really was at their feet! Off they went to celebrate at Delmonico’s. Wilde generously lent MacKaye two hundred dollars of his advance, which he tried to retrieve with unlikely success the next year. By the time Vera opened, however, MacKaye had embarked on a series of failed enterprises; he attempted to write a nine-volume work on Delsarte, sold real estate in Sioux City, South Dakota, and prospected for gold in North Carolina. The two dreamers never saw each other again.