When Harry Met Bessie

Coming August 26th!

Readers might ask why I used Arleigh, a Bellevue Avenue cottage that’s long gone (burned down in the 1930s) and which few people have ever heard of, for my thirteenth Gilded Newport Mystery. It's a valid question. I certainly started the series off with the most famous of the mansions: The Breakers, Marble House, Beechwood . . .

There’s one very good answer: Harry and Elizabeth Lehr, the couple who leased the house in the early years of the 20^th century.

Harry Lehr was born in Maryland in 1869 to relatively modest family. His father was a snuff and tobacco importer who also served as the German consul in Baltimore, so they were respectable enough, but not wealthy by any means. Harry would have no inheritance to speak of. To support himself, he went to work as a wine salesman, but quickly found himself yearning for grander things. Much grander. Harry was no fool. He realized that while men ran the business world, women ran society, so he managed to endear himself to society’s great ladies, using his considerable charisma to charm them. And while all evidence points to Harry having been gay, in order to secure himself a place in society he needed a wife—a wealthy one.

Harry and Bessie Lehr

Enter Elizabeth (Bessie) Drexel Dahlgren, a young widow born in 1868, who had been raised a Catholic and had led a sheltered, genteel life. She was beautiful, cultured, naïve, and, as an heiress to a Philadelphia banking fortune, exceedingly rich. Rich enough to make Harry a very happy man.

They met at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1900, introduced by Mrs. George Gould. It didn’t take Harry long to suspect he’d found his quarry in the guileless Bessie, but it was the unanimous approval of Society’s powerful Triumvirate, Alva Belmont, Tessie Oelrichs, and Mamie Fish, that prompted him to propose. He treated Bessie like a queen, played the role of adoring fiancé to a T, right up until the wedding night, when he bluntly told his eager bride he’d married her only for her money; that she repulsed him; that while he would keep up the appearance of a happily married couple in public, in private they would lead essentially separate lives.

Portrait by Giovanni Boldini

If that kind of toxic relationship isn’t fodder for a domestic murder mystery, I don’t know what is. Their story hooked me—the tragedy of Bessie being locked in such a loveless marriage—but I had already been hooked by the portrait of Bessie Lehr by Giovanni Boldini, which hangs in the ballroom of The Elms. When I first saw it, I wondered about that beautiful, glamorous woman—who was she, what had her life been like? Had she been happy? Had she, like so many other women of her class, lived a life elegance and privilege, balanced by a dedication to philanthropy?

The answers would shock me and engage my sympathies. Bessie did find some solace in philanthropy work (she especially supported Catholic charities), and through her writing. She was the author of King Lehr, where she honestly describes her life with Harry, and Turn of the World, about the lives of the rich during the last two decades of the Gilded Age, which she wrote as Lady Decies during her third marriage (also not a happy one). But her daily life with Harry was punctuated by his constant criticisms and nagging appeals for money.

Along the way, Bessie met and fell in love with another man and planned to divorce Harry once her devoutly Catholic mother died, but when the time came, Harry tauntingly informed her that the man she loved had also died. With no hope for a happy future, Bessie remained in the marriage until Harry himself died of a brain malady in 1929.

Were they alone in enduring a loveless marriage? Certainly not. Murder at Arleigh begins with the wedding of Reginald Vanderbilt to young heiress Cathleen Neilson, a marriage plagued by Reggie's alcoholism and chronic gambling. They would eventually divorce. Even Reggie's sister Gertrude, who married Harry Payne Whitney for love, would before too long realize their differences were too great and Harry's affairs too numerous to count. There are many other examples, but few that are quite as cruel and calculating as the story of Harry and Bessie.