Helen Carte
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Helen Carte or Helen Lenoir (May 12, 1852 – May 5, 1913) was the second wife of impresario and hotelier Richard D'Oyly Carte. She is best known for her stewardship of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and Savoy Hotel from the end of the 19th Century and into the early 20th Century.
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[edit] Life and career
Susan Couper Black was born in Wigtown, Scotland, to George Couper Black, procurator fiscal and banker, and his wife, Ellen, née Barham (from Penzance), the second of four siblings. One of her brothers, John McConnell Black, later became a well-known botanist. Her grandfather, Robert Couper, M.D. was a Scottish poet.[1]
She attended the University of London from 1871 to 1874 and was a gifted student, passing the Special Certificates in mathematics and in logic and moral philosophy (the university did not award degrees to women until 1878). She also spoke several languages. She registered at the university as Helen Susan Black. After her studies, she taught mathematics and had a brief acting career, during which she changed her name to Helen Lenoir ("Black", in French).[2]
In 1877, Helen's mother, then a widow, relocated with Helen's sister and two brothers to Australia. Helen, however, remained behind and became secretary to Richard D'Oyly Carte in 1877, just before the production of The Sorcerer. After the death of Carte's first wife in 1885, Helen married Richard on April 12, 1888 in the Savoy Chapel, with Sullivan as Best man.[3] The couple's London home included the first private elevator. James McNeill Whistler, a client of Carte's agency and friend of the Cartes, made an etching of Helen in 1887 or 1888, "Miss Lenoir," and later decorated the Cartes' home. Although some sources refer to Mrs. Carte as "Helen D'Oyly Carte," this name is not correct, because D'Oyly is a given name, not a surname. Therefore, Mrs. Carte's married name was "Helen Carte."
[edit] The woman behind the man
From the time that she was hired as Carte's assistant, Helen was intensely involved in his business affairs and had a grasp of detail and organisational and diplomacy skills that surpassed even Carte's. She became the business manager of the company and was also responsible for the Savoy Hotel. One of Helen's early tasks was to produce the Paignton copyright performance of The Pirates of Penzance. Helen made fifteen visits to America in order to promote Carte's interests. In 1886, Carte offered her a salary of £1,000 and 10% commission on all business at his theatres. Helen, more than anyone else, was able to smooth out the differences between W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, to ensure that the two produced more operas together.
In his 1922 memoir, Henry Lytton described Mrs. Carte:
- "She was a born business woman with an outstanding gift for organisation. No financial statement was too intricate for her, and no contract too abstruse. Once, when I had to put one of her letters to me before my legal adviser... he declared firmly 'this letter must have been written by a solicitor.' He would not admit that any woman could draw up a document so cleverly guarded with qualifications. Mrs. Carte, besides her natural business talent, had fine artistic taste and was a sound judge, too, of the capabilities of those who came to the theatre in search of engagements...."[4]
Throughout the later 1890s, Carte's health was declining, and Helen assumed more and more of the responsibilities for the opera company and other family businesses. In 1894, Carte hired his son Rupert D'Oyly Carte as an assistant. Rupert's older brother, Lucas, a barrister, was not involved in the family businesses and died of tuberculosis in 1907. With no new Gilbert and Sullivan shows written after 1896, the Savoy put on a number of other shows for comparatively short runs, including Sullivan's The Beauty Stone, in 1898. Young Rupert assisted Helen and W. S. Gilbert with the first revival of The Yeomen of the Guard at the Savoy Theatre in May 1897.[5] In 1899, the theatre finally had a new success in Sullivan and Basil Hood's The Rose of Persia, followed by The Emerald Isle for which Edward German completed the score after Sullivan's death.
[edit] After Carte's death
Richard died in 1901 leaving the theatre, opera company and hotel to Helen, who assumed full control of the family businesses. She leased the Savoy Theatre to William Greet in 1901. She oversaw his management of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's revival at the Savoy of Iolanthe, and several new comic operas including The Emerald Isle, Merrie England and A Princess of Kensington (with music by Edward German and libretto by Basil Hood), which ran for four months in early 1903 and then toured. When A Princess closed at the Savoy, Helen leased the theatre to other managements until December 8, 1906.
Rupert took over his late father’s role as Chairman of the Savoy Hotel in 1903, which Helen continued to own. The years between 1901 and 1906 saw a decline in the fortunes of the opera company. The number of D'Oyly Carte repertory companies touring the provinces gradually declined until there was only one left, visiting often small centres of population. After the company visited South Africa in 1905, more than half a year elapsed with no professional productions of G&S in the British Isles. During this period Helen and Rupert likely focused their attention on the hotel side of the family interests, which were very profitable.
In late 1906, Helen (now remarried to barrister Stanley Carr Boulter) re-acquired the performing rights to the Gilbert and Sullivan operas from Gilbert (she already had Sullivan's) and staged a repertory season at the Savoy Theatre, reviving the opera company and leasing the Savoy to herself. Helen persuaded the recently knighted Gilbert, now 71, to stage direct the productions in repertory, and once again Helen had to exercise the greatest tact, as Gilbert sometimes had difficulty accepting that he was no longer an equal partner and was taking no financial risk. The season, and the following one, were tremendous successes, revitalizing the company. After the repertory seasons in 1906-1908, however, the company did not perform in London again until 1919, only touring throughout Britain during that time.
In March 1909, Charles H. Workman assumed management of the theatre. Helen continued to manage the rest of the family businesses with the assistance of Rupert. In 1911, the company hired J. M. Gordon, who had been a member of the company under Gilbert's direction, as stage manager. Helen died in 1913, a week before her 61st birthday, leaving the Savoy Theatre, the opera company and the Savoy Hotel to Rupert, bequests of 5,000 to each of her two brothers and smaller bequests to a number of friends and colleagues. She left the considerable residuary estate to her husband.[6]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Seeley, p. 17
- ^ Seeley, p. 18
- ^ Goodman, Andrew. Gilbert and Sullivan's London (1988; 2000) Faber & Faber ISBN 0571200168
- ^ Lytton, Henry. Secrets of a Savoyard (1922), chapter 4
- ^ New York Post, 7 January 1948. The newspaper report states that this was when he was 22, but at the time of the revival, Rupert D’Oyly Carte was only 20
- ^ The Times, 6 May 1913, p.11, reporting on Probated Will of Helen Boulter
[edit] References
- Baily, Leslie (1966). The Gilbert and Sullivan Book, new ed., London: Spring Books.
- Cellier, François; Cunningham Bridgeman (1914). Gilbert and Sullivan and Their Operas. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
- Fitz-Gerald, S. J. Adair (1924). The Story of the Savoy Opera. London: Stanley Paul & Co..
- Hibbert, Christopher (1976). Gilbert & Sullivan and Their Victorian World. New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc.
- Wilson, Robin; Frederic Lloyd (1984). Gilbert & Sullivan – The Official D'Oyly Carte Picture History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc..
- Seeley, Paul. "Who Was Helen Lenoir?", The Savoyard, September 1982 - Vol XXI No. 2, pp. 16-18.
- Joseph, Tony (1994). D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, 1875-1982: An Unofficial History. London: Bunthorne Books. ISBN 0-950-79921-1
