No Job for a Lady (36 page)

“No, I’m going to stick around and speak to whatever Mexican policeman shows up. Let them know what happened, so everything dies here. You realize you’ll be contacted by them when you get to Mexico City.”

I had already thought about that, and I knew that I would be exported pronto if I didn’t agree not to use the story in a dispatch home.

“I’m going to miss you, Nellie Bly. I don’t know what I will do when I don’t have you picking on me.”

“Oh, you’ll find someone. A handsome man like you won’t have any trouble finding a woman who wants to order him around.”

“You were right, by the way. I almost had one up to the altar, before she got scared and ran. Or came to her senses. How about you? When will you be ready to settle down and marry?”

“As my brothers would say about themselves, after I sow my oats. But in my case, it doesn’t mean being wild, but carving out a career for myself in this man’s world.”

“Not to worry, Nellie Bly, you’ll succeed.”

And then he does something I’m not expecting: He gives me his book by Edgar Allan Poe.

“I marked a poem for you so that you won’t forget me.”

*   *   *

J
OINING
G
ERTRUDE IN THE CARRIAGE,
my eyes are a bit misty. I will miss Roger and always wonder what might have been.

Gertrude hands me a handkerchief.

“There’s a poem, Nellie dear, one that I love dearly. It’s relates how a young judge stops to ask a farm girl for a drink of water. Both the judge and the girl are smitten with each other, but they go on with their lives, he marrying a socially prominent woman who loves him only for his money and power, and she marrying a simple farmer and living a life of drudgery.

“The poem has one of the most telling and poignant lines in our English language. It goes like this.” She looks up at the sky as she says:

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
10

I make good use of her handkerchief.

*   *   *

W
HEN WE REACH MY HOTEL ENTRANCE,
Gertrude and I part with hugs and promises to keep in touch. She is returning immediately to Oxford.

“I would have had to anyway,” she tells me, “but now that poor Don Antonio died so horribly, I can’t stand to stay a moment longer.”

As for me, my next quest will be off to Puebla, a large city southeast of the capital, and a visit to Cholula, which is near Puebla. Cholula is the largest pyramid in the world and I want to report about it.

I am halfway across the lobby when I hear an exclamation. “Well! It’s about time!”

“Mother!”

“Oh, you remember me? The old woman you abandoned when she fell weak and sick?”

That isn’t exactly true, but I don’t care. I’m just happy to see her.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

A
RCHAEOLOGIST, SPY, WRITER,
explorer, and adventure traveler are just some of the labels pinned on this incredible woman.

Born Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell in 1868, she grew up headstrong, with a willful desire for independence and obtaining knowledge. After graduating from Oxford, she just didn’t go into the world, a “man’s world”; she charged into it. Like Nellie, she gave no quarter in the battle to succeed in a man’s world.

G
ERTRUDE
B
ELL VISITING ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS IN
B
ABYLON, 1909.

(Wikipedia Commons)

She took on challenges and achieved accomplishments that few men had. She went to Egypt and Arabia, learned the languages, and traveled by camel to places no Westerner had set foot upon. She spoke Arabic, Persian, French, German, Italian, and Turkish.

During World War I, she used her knowledge of the deserts to guide British troop movements in battles taking place in the Middle East.

After the war, she and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) were instrumental in the creation of the present-day countries of Iraq and Jordan. She was also the driving force behind the creation of the great archaeological museum in Baghdad.

People described her as a woman with loads of energy—too much; very intellectual, with a lot of drive and determination; arrogant; imperious; ruthlessly ambitious; sharp-tongued; someone who expressed authority in her manners and voice; high-spirited and possessing extraordinary self-confidence and an urge to debate. However, there were three things she did not excel in—spelling, music, and cooking; and it was because these were of no interest to her that she didn’t see the importance of them.

But Gertrude had a love for clothing. She dressed extravagantly, and when meeting her for the first time, people would comment on her “Mayfair manners and Paris frocks.”

Another of her great loves was reading. Her nose was never out of a book, and she said she escaped through them. “They are my magic carpet.”

While in college, she liked going places alone and thought it extremely unfair that boys could go without a chaperone. Not only was this frustrating but it angered her, as well. Given that even a museum visit required an escort, she complained, “I wish I could go to the National, but you see there is no one to take me. If I were a boy, I should go to that incomparable place every week, but being a girl to see lovely things is denied me!”

Unlike Nellie, Gertrude never married. Instead, she had an unconsummated affair with Maj. Charles Doughy-Wylie, a married man, with whom she exchanged love letters.

On July, 12, 1926, she died. She was fifty-seven, the same age that Nellie Bly was when she died.

She had been born wealthy, but after her father passed away, there were family money problems. In Baghdad, ill from pleurisy, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. No one knows if it was accidental or intentional, because the night she took the pills, she asked her maid to wake her up at a certain time the next morning.

*   *   *

P
OOR
N
ELLIE
! S
HE THOUGHT
Lily was a beautiful swan and that she was an ugly duckling. And as the world judged beauty, a woman who captured the hearts of audiences on the stage and the beds of princes offstage outranked a wannabe foreign correspondent who traveled across a continent (and eventually around the world) carrying a single carpetbag.

L
ILY
L
ANGTRY, 1885
(National Archives)

Lily was born Emilie Charlotte Le Breton in 1853, on Jersey, a British island in the English Channel.

She had a number of prominent lovers, including the future king of the United Kingdom, Edward VII. In 1877, when he was the Prince of Wales, he arranged it so that he could sit next to Langtry at a dinner party given by Sir Allen Young May. Her husband was conveniently placed at the other end of the table.

Their affair lasted from late 1877 to June 1880. Some say it was because of Lily’s spending habits. Edward once complained to her, “I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship,” whereupon she tartly replied, “And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.”

Being brought up with six brothers, just like Nellie, Lily had no problem speaking her mind to anyone. Because she was a challenge for her French governess, Lily was put with her brothers’ tutor and became better educated than most women of her time.

At twenty, she married Edward Langtry, an Irish landowner and widower. They knew each other because his wife had been the sister of the wife of one of Lily’s brothers. It was not the happiest of marriages, and Lily went on to have numerous affairs.

Like Gertrude Bell, Lily loved fine clothes, but she preferred to wear a simple black dress. She didn’t need anything else—her beauty outshined anything she wore.

She soon became close friends with Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt, and it was because of their encouragement that she embarked upon a stage career. Her debut was in London at the Haymarket Theatre, in a play called
She Stoops to Conquer.

It is no coincidence that Nellie knew about Lily. Lily toured the United States many times, first in 1882, and even though the critics didn’t give her the best of reviews, the audiences loved her. The roles she appeared in included Pauline in
The Lady of Lyons
and Rosalind in
As You Like It.

It wasn’t until 1882 that Lily became involved with Frederic Gebhard, who was a well-known New York City millionaire. He introduced her to the sport of Thoroughbred horse racing, which Lily embraced so wholeheartedly that together they took a stableful of American horses to race in England. Their relationship lasted nine years.

When Nellie mentioned to Lily that a town in Texas was named after her, Nellie was not correct. The town of Langtry was named for a railroad supervisor. However, Judge Roy Bean, a notorious hanging judge of the Old West, lived there and was in love with Lily from afar. He even built an opera house in hopes that one day she would perform in it.

Of the three women in the book, Lily, Gertrude, and Nellie, Lily lived the longest. She died in 1929, at the age of seventy-five. However, before her death she basically was a lonely woman. She had married a man much younger than she and he lived in another house. They would see each other occasionally, but her closest companion was her maid.

*   *   *

H
ISTORY HAS GIVEN
L
ILY
L
ANGTRY
many more pages than her lover Frederic Gebhard, but in his day he was a wealthy, well-known playboy and owner of some of the best racehorses in the country. He also had a deep interest in Mexico and in encouraging U.S. trade with that country.

His obituary in
The New York Times,
September 9, 1910, summarizes a life of luxury and leisure, his every whim satisfied … until it caught up with him:

FREDERIC GEBHARD DIES IN GARDEN CITY

One of Best Known Men in New York 15

Years Ago—Suffered Breakdown Last Spring.

HIS INCOME ONCE $80,000

Racing and Yachting enthusiast and Member

of Many Clubs—Former Friend of Mrs. Langtry.

Frederic Gebhard, fifty years old, one of the best known men in New York some fifteen years ago, the uncle of Mrs. Reginald C. Vanderbilt and the brother of Mrs. Frederick Neilson, died yesterday morning at 8 o’clock in the Garden City Hotel, in Garden City, L.I. Early in the year Mr. Gebhard suffered a breakdown that developed into a dangerous case of pleurisy. In April, with two doctors and two nurses attending him at the Stratford House, 11 East Thirty-second street, where he had been living for some time, his friends did not expect him to live ten days.

He recovered strength, however, and two months ago was moved to Garden City, on the advice of his doctors. His sister hurried to his bedside three days ago from Sandy Point Farm, near Newport, and Mrs. Vanderbilt started for Garden City Wednesday night. His second wife, who was Marie L. Gamble, had been in constant attendance at his bedside since early in the Spring.