Fanny and Stella (42 page)

‘Two gentlemen who sat next to us’, the reviewer for the
New York Clipper
breathlessly confided, ‘discussed in audible tones the merits of Ernest Byne, believing him to be a woman. After enjoying their conversation, we took the liberty of informing them of the sex of the supposed lady, and handed them a programme to substantiate it, whereupon they were completely
astonished
and
confused
.’

Colonel T. Allston Brown, one of New York’s most flamboyant – and shrewdest – agents and managers, took Stella on and mounted a vigorous press campaign to announce his newest signing: ‘ERNEST BYNE, pronounced by the entire press of New York, Boston and London to be the most WONDERFUL impersonator of female character ever before the public, and whose debut in New York has met with such unparalleled SUCCESS.’ A selection of ‘OPINIONS OF THE PRESS’ followed, including an entirely fictitious quote from ‘
The Times
of London
’ which declared that ‘anything more marvellous and clever than Ernest Byne’s impersonations cannot be conceived, the difficulty being in believing that he is not acting real life’.

In New York, Stella was a star, perhaps not of the first magnitude, but celebrated enough to have her likeness taken by the society photographer Napoleon Sarony, the brother of Oliver Sarony, the Scarborough photographer who had taken no fewer than thirty-four studies of herself and Lord Arthur after they had performed
A Morning Call
to great acclaim in that genteel spa.

In 1876, the
New York Clipper
was moved to hymn Ernest Byne in doggerel:

Your airs and graces make us all

Believe you must be feminine:

Your arts, though you’re no
Harlequin
,

Do well deserve a
column
,
Byne
.

As well as the joy of seeing Fanny and Harry again, it was quite possible – probable even – that in New York Stella was reunited with Lord Arthur Clinton, apparently back from the dead.

Ever since Lord Arthur’s sudden and convenient death from scarlet fever just days before the police closed in on him, there had been sightings of him here, there and everywhere. He was shooting in Scotland or racing at Ascot. He had been spotted in town, at the theatre, in fashionable restaurants, strolling in Hyde Park. Or he was living abroad, under an assumed name, in Paris, in Sydney, in New York. Especially New York. According to
Reynolds’s Newspaper
in October 1872, the dissolute peer was alive and well and living there: ‘Lord Arthur Clinton who was mixed up in the Boulton and Park business, and was reported dead, has been recognised several times at some of the New York Theatres and clearly identified.’

Three years later, in September 1875, the
Northern Echo
in Darlington reported that Lord Arthur Clinton was amongst the mourners at the funeral of his sister, Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, and the following year the
Morning Post
said that he was present in Dublin ‘at the Installation of the Duke of Connaught as Great Prior of the Irish Masons’.

In 1879, the grandly named Australian newspaper the
Clarence and Richmond Examiner and New South Wales Advertiser
proclaimed that ‘My Lord Arthur Clinton’ was not dead at all. He had, in fact, ‘only temporarily died to oblige his family’, the paper revealed, and now, after an absence of some years, he ‘has just appeared in the arena of London society alive and hearty’ having spent the past eight years in hiding in Australia.

S 
tella and Gerard returned to England in early 1877 and resumed touring as ‘The Wonderful Bynes’. With ‘Elegant Parisian Clothes and Costly Appointments’, the Wonderful Bynes offered a varied programme of ‘Songs, Eccentricities, Duets, Operettas &c’. All in all, it was ‘a most marvellous entertainment’, the theatrical bible the
Era
declared. ‘The Bynes are the talk of Grimsby’.

But the past could still catch up with Stella. In April 1879, ‘AN INDIGNANT NONCONFORMIST’ in Cardiff wrote to the
Western Mail
to complain about some ‘disgustingly suggestive’ posters placarded across the town announcing the forthcoming engagement at the Stuart Hall of ‘The Wonderful Bynes Company’ featuring ‘Mr Ernest Byne, the Unequalled Impersonator of Lady Characters’: ‘Will either Mr. John or Mr. Richard Cory, who are part-owners of the Stuart-hall, kindly inform the public who this “unequalled impersonator of lady characters” is, and also whether “the Wonderful Bynes Company” include Boulton and Park, or either of that notorious pair?’

In 1881, the Wonderful Bynes were in London. According to the census taken that year, Ernest Byne, ‘actor’, was living in lodgings at 21 Euston Street in Somers Town. Stella was thirty-two but she defied the advancing years by the simple expedient of knocking five years off her true age and proclaiming herself to be twenty-seven. She was still a fine figure of a woman and if she could get away with it, why should she not?

Spring’s fairest blossoms.

Summer’s bright day . . .

Autumn’s rich cluster,

Fading away!

J 
ust five days before Stella passed herself off as a still-blooming twenty-seven-year-old, Mrs Fanny Winifred Graham (
née
Park) breathed her last in Newark, New Jersey, where she had been looked after for some years past by Mr Oliver Hagen, a watchmaker, and his wife, Catherine. No cause of death was listed on her death certificate, a tactful omission which usually meant that syphilis and its fearsome complications were responsible.

The syphilitic sore on Fanny’s bottom, the sore that would not go away, the sore that had forced her to seek grudging treatment from the forbidding figure of Dr Richard Barwell at the Charing Cross Hospital, had finally caught up with her. Dr Barwell had managed to heal the sore, but he could not eradicate the syphilis from her body. As the years passed, the syphilitic poison slowly but surely gnawed away at Fanny’s body and Fanny’s mind until, at the last, half-mad and half-blind, racked with pain and paralysed, Fanny died aged thirty-four.

Dear garrulous, gossiping, glorious Fanny. Fanny: stout of heart, stern of feature and sweet of nature. Fanny: with her campish ways, her braying laugh and her low cunning. Fanny: not beautiful, certainly; frequently foolish; uncommonly lewd; invariably lustful. Fanny: always kind, utterly charming and generous to a fault, especially with her favours.

In her short span, Fanny had perfectly realised her true self. She had fashioned herself from the most unlikely and the most unpromising of clays. She had formed herself and shaped herself with nothing but the ingenuity of her own hands. She had stitched and sewn, knitted and glued, pinned, tied, taped and laced herself to miraculously contrive the strange and gaudy creature that was Mrs Fanny Winifred Graham (
née
Park).

Not for Fanny the uncertainties and the insouciances of youth or beauty. There was no delicate, blushing springtime, no clustering blossom – other than artificial – on the bough. Fanny had been delivered of herself in her prime. She was a woman of a certain age, a woman of the world. Clever, knowing, witty and wise, it was no wonder she played principally dowagers and duchesses. She
was
one.

Defiant, determined, brave and fearless, Fanny did not flinch and she did not flee. ‘How
dare
you address a Lady in that manner, Sir?’ Fanny had challenged Detective Officer Chamberlain with superb aplomb and frigid hauteur on the night of the arrest. Her courage never failed her, even in her darkest hours.

So Mrs Fanny Winfred Graham (
née
Park) lived and died. ‘
N’importe
,’ she would often say. ‘What’s the odds as long as you’re happy?’ It could have been her epitaph.

Fanny was laid to rest in Rochester, New York, alongside her beloved brother, Harry, who had died five years earlier in October 1876. A year’s imprisonment with hard labour in the House of Correction in Coldbath Fields was generally considered to be a sentence of death by another name. Appalling food, lack of sanitation and back-breaking work – designed to subjugate the strongest will – reduced even the most robust of men to physical wrecks. Harry died a broken man, but it was no small consolation that he died a free man.

At the time of her death, Fanny was neither rich nor poor, but comfortably placed and living off the income from her capital. Her estate was to be divided between the widow of her older brother Alexander and the devoted Catherine Hagen, who had nursed Fanny through her last, long illness. There was one other bequest: ‘I give, devise and bequeath the sum of £500 and also my Topaz ring now worn by me unto my friend Henry B. Warner, now of the City of San Francisco, California.’

Who was Henry B. Warner? Was he that handsome American beau that Fanny had hoped to meet, that ardent swain she had been searching for all the days of her life and thought she would never find? Was he the great love of her life? Had Henry B. Warner perhaps given Fanny the topaz ring as a love token? The ring was clearly important. It was the ring ‘now worn by me’, as Fanny had so scrupulously written in her last will and testament. Two years later, in the St James Hotel in St Louis, the legacy was given over to Henry B. Warner who signed a receipt for it in a shaky hand, as though he were labouring under great emotion.   

Song of the wild-bird,

Heart-stirring lay. . .

E’en as we listen,

Fading away! 

T 
he year after Fanny’s death, Stella and Gerard became Ernest and Eden Blair, and for the next twenty-two years would tour as The Brothers Blair, with a staple of two short drawing-room comediettas,
My New Housekeeper
and the ‘Society absurdity’
Complications
. It was a tried and tested formula. To Gerard’s handsome male lead Stella would appear in various comic female incarnations: an argumentative Irish washerwoman, a giddy young widow and a haughty and acidulated peeress of the realm. ‘The performer who undertakes the female characters is very good, without being vulgar in the slightest degree,’ the
Era
noted in 1891.

Touring the length and breadth of the country was arduous. Bookings were steady rather than spectacular, and reviews were lukewarm rather than lavish. ‘The Brothers Blair are artistes of a high order,’ the
Belfast News-Letter
wrote in 1896, ‘and their drawing-room sketch caused much amusement.’ They found themselves performing mostly in provincial music halls, often in small, out-of-the-way places like Douglas on the Isle of Man and Margate in Kent. Occasionally they got a booking in London, which was useful for Gerard as by this time he was married with a wife and son living in Camberwell.

It was not quite hand-to-mouth, but it was an erratic, irregular existence, punctuated by worrying periods with no work. The bright promise of Stella’s youth, the bright promise of her beauty and her talent, had slowly tarnished with the passing years. The brilliant future that she had envisioned for herself had faded, faded away.

Stella rarely complained now. The dark moods and thunderous faces of her younger self were gone, replaced by a quiet joy and a deep sense of gratitude. She was grateful for the life she had; grateful that she was not rotting in some dark and dank prison cell; grateful to be working in the theatre; grateful to be alive. And if, for a moment, she was ever ungrateful or disappointed or dissatisfied with her lot, if she was ever sharp or impatient or petulant, she had only to turn her thoughts to poor dear Fanny so cruelly taken from them in her prime.

Of course there were still followers and beaux and gentleman callers (though to be strictly accurate, only a very few of her gentleman callers were gentlemen, or anything much approaching gentlemen).

Still they came, though she was no longer young and no longer beautiful. But she was, after all, Miss Stella Boulton-Byne-Blair and she could no more stop followers from following, beaux from coming and gentleman callers from calling than she could stop the rain from falling or the wind from blowing.

Still they came, like the endless waves breaking upon the shore: young men and old, fat men and thin, tall men and short. Shy working men in stiff collars and Sunday-best suits, who spoke in strange accents and came to ask her to walk out with them. Callow youths who blushed and stammered and poured their love out in a scalding torrent of words, and cocky, cheeky youths who flirted with her violently.

Soldiers and sailors, vagabonds and ruffians. Men of middling rank and men of no rank at all. Poor men aplenty and rich men (though in truth, these days rich men were at something of a premium). Still they came, to fete Stella, to admire her, to desire her, to court her, to fall in love with her, and sometimes, sweetly and seriously, to propose marriage to her.