Talk:Henry Symes Lehr
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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.
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..."
