A Night at the Opera, or, Portraits of Some Ladies

Sometimes free association leads the Dilettante astray.

Yesterday my friend Janet posted a wonderful found photograph on her blog, JCB, of a snappily dressed woman and a friend out shopping (Click HERE to see that photo).  Although different in subject,  it reminded me of the famous Weegee photo, 'The Critic', published in 1943.  I pulled up a copy of the 'The Critic', and found myself curious to know more.   Everyone knows this photograph---two supremely silly looking Society women being photographed at the 1943 opening night of the Metropolitan Opera, while a homeless woman looks on with contempt.  I wondered, okay, who were these two women in ermine, who looked ready to be extras in the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera?  Although well known to many, much of it was new to me, and here is what I found.

First was the revelation by Weegee's assistant that the picture was actually staged.   Weegee's assistant was sent out to find the woman on the right, who was seriously drunk, at Sammy's Bar in the Bowery, and then was charged with propping her up as the two ladies stopped for their close up.  The rest is photographic history.

 Ready for their closeup:  Mrs. Kavanaugh & Lady Decies in front of the cameras

Second was the identity of the two ladies. They are Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh and her good friend, Lady Decies.  Mrs. George Washington who? Never heard of her.  But Lady Decies sounds familiar...

"Widow of John de la Poer Beresford, 5th Baron Decies,  Lady Decies was the former Mrs. Harry Lehr and Mrs. John Dahlgren, born Elizabeth Wharton Drexel, daughter of the famous Philadelphia banker."  Say what?  You mean, the old dear in the middle is Elizabeth Drexel Lehr?  The one whose ravishing Boldini portrait hanging in the ballroom at the Elms in Newport I so admired just a few weeks earlier?  This cannot be!
 

Giovanni Boldini: Portrait of Mrs. Harry Lehr, 1916

But, it is, bringing this old Mary Petty New Yorker cover of an elderly lady dining in front of her youthful portrait to full life:

Mrs/Lady Drexel/Dahlgren/Lehr/Decies was a famous Society figure of her day, and should not to confused with her sister Lucy, who married Elizabeth's first husband's brother and after her divorce was known as Mrs. Drexel Dahlgren (builder of Champs Soleil in Newport), .  After the death of Mr. Dahlgren, she married Harry Lehr, court jester to Newport Society, the Jerry Zipkin of his day.

 Mr. & Mrs. Harry Lehr

Miss Harry Lehr

On their wedding night, he gallantly informed her that he was not interested in her as a woman (or in any women), but merely in her money.  Yet they remained married and Harry continued to play women's roles in Tableaux vivants, and to exercise his rapier wit for the entertainment of Newport's grand hostesses.  After Lehr's death, she then Lord Decies, the widower of heiress Vivien Gould (who really liked cats, to the extent that she had a building for them called The Cattery on the Decies estate.  Really. Could I make this stuff up?)

Are you still with me?  I'm just warming up.

Mrs. Lady Lehr Decies evened the score with Harry Lehr in 1936 by writing a tell all biography, King Lehr and The Gilded Age.  I actually read it years ago.  Don't ask me why, I just did.  She seems to have been much happier with the titled husband.  And the tiara.  But the question remains:  Did she ever look as lovely as in the Boldini portrait, or was the painter, famous for making his subjects appear wittier, more sophisticated and more glamorous than they really were, just practicing his artistic sorcery?  She looks ravishing in the portrait but the evidence from other portraits is that Lady D. was actually a more ordinary sort:

 1894 by Muller-Ury

1936 by Phillipe de Laszlo

 Weegee's photograph was not the first of the two ladies together.  Here they are at Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt's famous Last Ball at her Fifth Avenue Mansion in 1941.  Here we actually catch a glimpse of the Elizabeth Drexel of the Boldini portrait.

Apparently she was downright scintillating in comparison to her arched eyebrowed companion on the left.  It was more difficult to piece together a biography of Mrs. Kavanaugh.  I mean, who the heck was she?  and why couldn't she find a better hairdresser in New York?

I persevered, and here's what I found:

Mrs. Kavanaugh began in Richmond, Virginia, where she was born Maria Magdalena Muller.  She married William Haberle, a brewery heir from Syracuse New York.  They lived in a drab typical upper middle class Queen Anne house on Prospect Avenue in Syracuse.  Mr. Haberle died young, leaving her with two daughters.  By 1912, she was in London with her daughter Leonora (whose marriage to a ne'er do well was a failure, and who seems actually never to have left home), and is married that year to Colonel Kavanaugh, a cotton manufacturer from Waterford New York, who became colonel while serving in Governor Levi Morton's staff.  

Nothing exceeds like excess:  Mrs. Kavanaugh, and five pounds of jewelry in her elaborate drawing room at 10 East 62nd Street.  Not for her the graceful Louis XV of the Fricks

Soon after, we find them living in a grand beaux arts town house at 10 East 62nd Street and beginning to appear in the Society columns.  Not for Mrs. Kavanaugh any published good works.  If she sneaked out to work in soup kitchens, it was a well kept secret.  Apparently, Society and jewelry were her main occupations.  If her portrait was painted, it isn't in the public domain, but she was photographed often, from the Beaux Arts Ball to El Morocco.  Whereas Lady Decies is well documented by photos and portraits from her early years, her buddy Mrs. Kavanaugh seems to have sprung into the world, fully bejeweled and befurred (if Sarah Palin can make up words, so can I) after her 1912 move to New York.

 In 1943, Mrs. Kavanaugh bought, for cash, the house next door, number 8, apparently to protect her property.  The value of the combined properties that year was $211,000.  Just as a point of reference, number 10 is currently valued at $22,500,000, and the far less grand number 8 at $2,160,000.

Numbers 8 (center) and 10 (left) East 62nd Street

In 1944, Lady Decies died, and LIFE again photographed Mrs. Kavanaugh at opening night at the Met.  As Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the star audience attraction in most seasons, couldn't attend, Mrs. Kavanaugh was the center of attention. Interviewed later about her jewelry display that evening, she explained that she would have worn more, but didn't feel it was right in wartime.  Interestingly, Mrs. Kavanaugh and Leonora sat in the front row, and not in the Golden Horseshoe, the first tier balcony where most of the fashionable set were. And their drinks (Mrs. Kavanaugh had beer, a nod to the origins of her fortune, perhaps) were had at Sherry's on the mezzanine, not in the more exclusive Opera Club.  Just sayin'.

At El Morocco after the opera.  Daughter has certainly inherited her mother's style.

And back to El Morocco in 1950.  Get Mrs. Kavanaugh's hat, an apparent riff on Bullwinkle

After the Weegee photo appeared A story circulated that her grandson, William Warner, son of Leonora, was in a foxhole in Europe when copies of the photograph were dropped by the enemy, bearing the caption "GIs, is this what you're fighting for".   Warner's friend John Pierrepont set the record straight, which was that after the photo appeared, Warner had an unusual amount of mail that week, filled with clippings the friends had sent of the photo.  

Wait a second.  William Warner?  It couldn't be.  But, yes, it is.  Mrs. Kavanaugh's grandson is the same William Warner, who wrote the wonderful Pulitzer Prize-winning Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay.  I read this book too.  Much better than King Lehr and the Gilded Age.  Much. In the introduction to his fourth book he writes of 10 E. 62nd St. that he was born "in a house without great books, without a father, and, for some periods of the year, without a mother."

And now you know as much as I do about 'The Critic', if you didn't already.  It took me an hour to suss out this information, and another hour and a half to write it down, a half hour to choose the pictures, and it took you less than ten minutes to read it.  Lucky you. I'll never get those three hours back

Speaking of A Night at the Opera, here is Margaret Dumont with the Marx brothers on a disastrous opening night in the 1935 movie.   Looks familiar, doesn't it?   The silly socialite, living only for jewels and being seen at the right places was a standard cliche of old comedies, and one glance at Decies and Kavanaugh makes it easy to understand why.