Elizabeth Wharton Drexel
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Elizabeth Wharton Drexel (April 22, 1868 - June 13, 1944) was an author and Manhattan socialite.
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[edit] Birth
Elizabeth Drexel was the daughter of Lucy Wharton (1841-?) and Joseph William Drexel. Joseph was the son of Francis Martin Drexel, the immigrant ancestor of the Drexel banking family in the United States.
[edit] First marriage
Elizabeth married John Vinton Dahlgren I (?-1898) on June 29, 1889 and they had a son: John Vinton Dahlgren II (1892-?). She was widowed in 1898. John was the son of John Adolph Dahlgren (1809-1870) Admiral. John Vinton Dahlgren II was her only child.
[edit] Second marriage
Elizabeth married Henry Symes Lehr (1869-1929), aka Harry Lehr in 1901. Harry Lehr was a former actor at Baltimore's Paint & Powder club, best known for his female roles. In New York City, he supposedly worked as a champagne salesman and was the roommate of his "best friend" Tom Wannamaker. Lehr earned a reputation as a man of fashion and bragged of his ability to obtain goods and services from merchants for free. He gradually ingratiated himself into the company of Caroline Astor, grande dame of New York and Newport.
[edit] Henry Symes Lehr
Lehr, a homosexual social climber duped the widow Dahlgren into marriage and refused to sleep with her on their wedding night. She stayed in a loveless, unconsummated marriage for 28 years, not wishing to upset her conservative, staunchly Catholic mother, Lucy Wharton Drexel. Using his wife's fortune and his reputation as "The Funmaker" of New York and Newport society, Lehr attempted to establish himself as successor to Ward McAllister, arbiter elegantiorum of New York's Four Hundred, the collection of Knickerbocker and industrial families he created as a bulwark against the vulgar new wealth of the Gilded Age. Plagued by his own insecurities and haunted by his low-birth, Lehr was never accepted as an equal by the aristocrats whom he clowned for. Grace Graham Wilson, wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt III, who assumed the throne of Mrs. Astor after her death had little regard for Lehr's antics. When his patron Mrs. Astor died, he allied himself with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish of New York and Newport. Together, they bucked the formality and rigidity that characterized social life in Gilded Age New York. The result was insipid practical jokes and tastless entertainments that brought disgrace onto the "Four Hundred" and caused their rebuke in the nation's pulpits and periodicals.
[edit] World War I
In 1915 the Lehrs were in Paris, and Elizabeth worked for the Red Cross. They remained in Paris after World War I, where they bought in 1923 the Hôtel de Canvoie at 52, rue des Saintes Pères in the VIIe arrondissement. Harry Lehr died on January 3, 1929. Harry Lehr is largely a footnote in social history. Cleveland Amory, the society chronicler pointedly dismisses him as a "champagne salesman" in his epic portrait of the American establishment "Who Killed Society?". Perhaps a better definition of this curious and all but forgotten figure comes in Jerry Patterson's "The First Four Hundred: New York and the Gilded Age" in which the author refers to him as a "malicious and opportunistic homosexual who insinuated himself into New York Society..."
[edit] Third marriage
In 1931 Elizabeth was presented at Court to King George V and Queen Mary in London. On May 25, 1936 she married John Graham Hope de la Poer Beresford, 5th Baron Decies. His first wife had been Helen Vivien Gould. He died on January 31, 1944.
[edit] Death
She died in 1944 at the Hotel Shelton. She was buried in the Dahlgreen Chapel at Georgetown University, which she had built as a memorial to her first husband.
[edit] Timeline
- 1889 Marriage to John Vinton Dahlgren on June 29
- 1892 Birth of John Vinton Dahlgren II on June 21
- 1898 Death of John Vinton Dahlgren I
- 1901 Marriage to Henry Symes Lehr
- 1915 Red Cross in Paris
- 1929 Death of Henry Symes Lehr, aka Harry Lehr, on January 3
- 1936 Marriage to John Graham Hope de la Poer Beresford, 5th Baron Decies, on May 25
- 1944 Death of John Graham Hope de la Poer Beresford, 5th Baron Decies, on January 31
- 1944 Death of Elizabeth Wharton Drexel in June
[edit] Publications
- "King Lehr" and the Gilded Age (1935)
- Turn of the World (1937)
[edit] See also
- Great Day in the Morning is a play by Thomas Babe, based on Elizabeth Wharton Drexel's life.
[edit] References
- New York Times, January 4, 1929; Obituary of Henry Symes Lehr, aka Harry Lehr
- Time; August 5, 1935; Review of "King Lehr" and the Gilded Age
- Time; May 18, 1936 announcing the engagement of "Mrs. Henry Symes Lehr" with Lord Decies.
- Time; June 1, 1936 announcing the marriage of "Mrs. Henry Symes Lehr" and Lord Decies.
- Photo of Lord Decies and his wife after the civil wedding on the steps of the Mairie of the 7ième arrondissement of Paris.
- New York Times; February 2, 1944; pg. 21; "Lord Decies dies in England at 77; Soldier, Sportsman, Friend of Taxpayer. Married Gould Heiress Here in 1911."
- New York Times; June 14, 1944; Lady Decies, Widow of Irish Peer, Dies; Former Elizabeth Drexel of Philadelphia Was Once the Wife of Harry Lehr.
