The Napoleon of Crime (10 page)

With profits declining, Worth decided to improve matters in his traditional way, by stealing a bag of diamonds from a traveling dealer who had carelessly left them on the floor as he stood at a roulette table. It was a spur-of-the-moment larceny—Worth cashed a check for the diamond salesman and distracted him while Little Joe Elliott crept under the table and substituted a duplicate bag for the one containing the diamonds. The theft netted some £30,000 worth of gems, and it was Worth himself “
who insisted on the police being called in and the place searched from top to bottom. But he did not suggest that they look at a near-by barrel of beer, at the bottom of which reposed the precious jewels.” In spite of this elaborate bluff, the diamond dealer demanded that the club manager be arraigned on a charge of robbery. At a preliminary hearing Henry Raymond, playing the part of an enraged foreign businessman whose good name was being dragged in the mud, demanded that he be allowed to cross-examine his accuser and so confused the merchant by bombarding him with angry questions that the poor man was unable to remember clearly whether he had had the bag with him in the first place. Worth was released, but the theft, while lucrative enough, sealed the fate of the American Bar.

“
The robbery startled all Paris, and was the means of attracting suspicion to the house [which] lost prestige and soon went to pieces.” Pinkerton had been recruiting international support in his bid to close the American Bar; most notably, Inspector John Shore of Scotland Yard in London. Shore had been receiving reports for some time of a clutch of criminals operating out of Paris, and he, too, began to demand that the Paris police shut down the establishment once and for all. Through his spies, Worth learned that the English policeman was putting pressure on the French authorities, and his alarm redoubled. It was the first time Shore and Worth had crossed swords.

“
The place was finally raided by the police,” Pinkerton reported, but this time the Sûreté were not going to be beaten by Worth’s alarm system. “
The bar-tender was seized as soon as they entered, and rushing upstairs, they found the gambling in full blast.” Worth and Kitty, by lucky chance, were not in the building at the time, but “
Wells [Bullard] and others [a pair of unfortunate croupiers] were arrested and charged with maintaining a gambling house, but were admitted to bail.” Bullard, the nominal owner of the bar, skipped bail and fled to London, leaving Worth and Kitty to sort out what remained of the business.

Worth later told Pinkerton that he had already decided the bar would “
never again be a success the way he wanted it,” and the building was sold to an “
English betting man or bookmaker named Jack Ballentine,” who kept it going for two more years before the American Bar was finally closed.

Pinkerton later wrote, on Worth’s authority, that “
the ruction which I kicked up was the means of ruining Bullard in Paris, driving him out, breaking up the bar and sending, as he termed it, all of them on the bum.” But rather than resenting Pinkerton’s rude intrusion into his affairs, Worth seems to have admired Pinkerton’s detective efforts. “
Afterwards when we met in London [he said] that he had always fancied me and found that I was a man who kept his own counsel and that he had always felt a kindly feeling towards me,” Pinkerton wrote. They might be on opposite sides of the law, but the thief and the detective had developed a healthy respect for each other’s talents which would eventually blossom into a most unlikely friendship.

So far from being “on the bum,” Worth was still a wealthy man. The breaking up of the American Bar simply closed one chapter in his life. He increasingly craved, for himself and the aspiring Kitty, if not genuine respectability, then at least its outward trappings, and at the age of just thirty-one he could afford them.

There was really only one destination for a man of social and criminal ambition, and that was London, center of the civilized world, where the gentlemanly ideal had been elevated to the status of a religion, abounding with wealth and therefore felonious opportunity.

Victorian Britain was reaching the pinnacle of its greatness, and smugness. “
The history of Britain is emphatically the history of progress,” declared the intensely popular writer T. B. Macaulay at the dawn of the Victorian era. “The greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe.” A similar note of patriotic omnipotence was struck earlier in the century in an essay by the historian Thomas Carlyle: “
We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway, nothing can resist us. We war with rude nature, and by our restless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.” For a crook at war with the natural order, such heady recommendations were irresistible. Huge spoils, and the social elevation they brought with them, were precisely what Worth had in mind.

Piano Charley was already across the Channel, operating under the cover of wine salesman and steadily drinking a large proportion of his supposed wares. Worth, Kitty, and the rest of the gang packed up what was left from the American Bar—the chandeliers, brass fittings, and oil paintings—and merrily headed back across the Channel to the great English metropolis.

The upper floors of what was once Worth’s gambling den are now the bedrooms of the Grand Hôtel Intercontinental, one of the most expensive hotels in Paris. Still more appropriately, given the next phase of Worth’s life, the door to number 2, rue Scribe now leads into “Old England,” a chain of stores where one can still buy all the appurtenances, from monogrammed riding boots to top hats, of a pukka English gent.

SEVEN

The Duchess

B
y coincidence, or fate, in 1875 Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was also about to make a triumphant public reappearance in the English capital after long years in hiding.

Georgiana Spencer (pronounced George-ayna) was just seventeen in 1774 when she married William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire. The duke, one of the richest and oddest men in England, was also, by popular assent, one of the luckiest, for the eldest daughter of John, first Earl of Spencer, was considered the most beautiful and accomplished woman in the nation. Poets praised her to the heavens, the Prince of Wales fawned on her, and painters vied with one another to depict her charms. Her detractors were equally emphatic, portraying her as an aristocratic slattern whose hats were too tall and whose morals were too low. Everyone had an opinion on Georgiana.

Thomas Gainsborough began his celebrated painting of the duchess around the year 1787, and it was no easy commission, even for the great portraitist. There was something about the pucker of her lips, the hint of a smirk, playful and suggestive, that defied reproduction. Or perhaps it was simply the captivating presence of the sitter herself, “
then in the bloom of youth,” that baffled the master. Gainsborough’s frustration mounted as he drew and redrew Georgiana’s mouth, trying to catch that fleeting, flirting expression, “but her dazzling beauty, and the sense which he entertained of the charm of her looks, and her conversation, took away that readiness of hand and happiness of touch which belonged to him in ordinary moments.” Finally he lost his temper. “
Drawing his wet pencil across a mouth which all who saw it considered exquisitely lovely, he said, ‘Her Grace is too hard for me!’ ”

Gainsborough painted Georgiana, as far as we know, three times: as a child in 1763, a delightful painting “
giving promise even then of her remarkable charms,” which now hangs in the collection of Earl Spencer at Althorp, England; and a second time in 1783, for a full-length portrait which is now in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In the latter painting the duchess is draped around a column in a classically demure posture, but appears a trifle seedy and “
greenish,” in Walpole’s words, possibly after some hard nights on the town. By the time he came to paint her a third time, both artist and sitter had become yet more celebrated and Gainsborough was plainly determined to capture Georgiana’s very allure. Hence his frustration with the duchess’s elusive mouth.

He persevered, and the resulting portrait was a masterpiece, seeming to distill Georgiana’s delectable expression. Her left eyebrow is arched and winning, a tantalizing half-smile plays across her lips, and beneath the huge cocked hat her glance is slyly mischievous. In one hand she grasps a blooming rose and in the other, pinched suggestively between thumb and forefinger, a ripe pink rosebud. Georgiana had not proved too hard for him after all, and the finished product was devastating, frankly sexual yet strangely coy.

She had been painted many times before and would be painted again, by the greatest artists in the land, including Reynolds, Romney, and Rowlandson. As one critic noted in 1901: “
More portraits exist of Georgiana than of any other English lady of the eighteenth century.” Yet, for grandeur and impudence, personality and piquancy, none matched Gainsborough’s painting of the duchess in full bloom.

There is no evidence that the portrait ever hung in the ducal home of the Devonshires at Chatsworth, but at around the time that Georgiana became pregnant by her lover, the future Prime Minister Charles Grey, the lovely Gainsborough painting abruptly and inexplicably vanished. Perhaps the duke, although himself a serial adulterer, found the portrait of his wife with her coquettish smile and arched brow too powerful a reminder of her affair, and banished it from his presence.

In the autumn of 1841, three years before Adam Worth came into the world, the London art dealer John Bentley was making one of his annual forays through England’s Home Counties in search of rare paintings. An astute art connoisseur, Bentley owned a thriving dealership in the metropolis and was much in demand as a valuer of Old Masters. Over the course of his career, for pleasure and profit, he had made it a rule to spend a few weeks every year wandering through the small villages and towns of England, making inquiries as to whether any of the local residents had works of art or other antiques they wished to value or sell. Many a bargain was to be found in this way, and the practice enabled Bentley to shed, for a while, the cares and strains of metropolitan life in a bucolic and nomadic quest for art.

In this particular year, Bentley’s enjoyment of his annual outing had been sharply diminished by a stinking cold which had settled both on his chest, making him cough and sneeze, and on his mind, making him grumpy. On the morning of September 17, Bentley’s ill humor and streaming nose were suddenly forgotten when his researches brought him to the small sitting room of one Anne Maginnis, an elderly English schoolmistress long retired. For there, above Mrs. Maginnis’s fireplace, grimy but unmistakable, was the portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, by Thomas Gainsborough. How the widow Maginnis, who had little money and even less interest in fine art, managed to get her hands on Gainsborough’s famous missing portrait has never been adequately explained. According to one account, the old lady “
spoke of it as the portrait of a relative of hers, and that it was bought, not as the picture of the beautiful Duchess, but merely as ‘a Gainsborough.’ ” Bentley never inquired too closely into how she had obtained the great picture, partly out of tact, but largely because he had immediately identified the missing duchess, knew a sucker when he saw one, and wanted to buy it cheap.

No one can be sure what had happened to the painting in the intervening years. One biographer quotes the Reverend Henry Bate as referring to two Gainsborough portraits of the duchess, “
one of which Lady Spencer has, the other, we think, is in Mr Boothby’s possession.” One possibility is Charles Boothby-Skrymshire, also known as Prince Boothby, a man of fashion so named on account of his egregious social climbing and his tendency to “
abandon friends as soon as he met people of higher social position or rank.” He was believed to be a close friend of the Devonshires and may have obtained the picture when the duke decided he no longer wanted it. Prince Boothby committed suicide on July 27, 1800, whereupon his “
effects were dispersed.” Another candidate for the elusive “Mr Boothby” is Sir Brooke Boothby of Ashbourne Hall, just twenty miles from Chatsworth, a scholar, poet, friend of Rousseau and Charles James Fox, satirist and art collector who owned at least one other portrait of the duchess as well as a crayon drawing and was acquainted with his ducal neighbors. Sir Brooke may have sold the Gainsborough in 1792 when he suddenly ran out of money. Whichever Boothby had briefly owned the
Duchess
, the portrait had vanished until it cropped up again in Mrs. Maginnis’s tiny cottage under Bentley’s knowing and excited gaze. The elderly woman plainly had no idea what the painting was, or what it was worth, for in a singular act of vandalism some years earlier she had cut off the Duchess’s legs just above the knee, shortening the painting to three-quarters of its original size and consigning Georgiana’s feet to the fire. Henry James would criticize the “
very wooden legs” in Gainsborough’s portraits, but that was hardly a reason for burning them and Mrs. Maginnis’s brainless surgery left the portrait out of balance: Georgiana seems almost overpowered by her vast hat. But even in these sadly reduced circumstances, Bentley recognized Gainsborough’s
Duchess
, admired her still-saucy smile, and scented a bargain.

Many years later Bentley’s grandson, one Sigismund Goelze, explained what had happened, recalling his grandfather’s discovery in a letter to
The Times:
“
It was then hanging in her sitting-room, over the chimney piece, and, knowing that originally the picture was painted full-length, he asked her how it was that it only showed to the knees. The old lady told him that she had cut it down to fit the position it then occupied, and added that she had burnt the piece which she had cut off.”

Although Bentley could not be certain that this was indeed the
Duchess
, his expert’s hunch told him to take a gamble. The widow Maginnis, while no expert in matters artistic, knew the value of money and was, moreover, an experienced haggler. After some lively negotiations lasting several hours, the old lady agreed to let the art dealer take the painting away on the basis that he knew a man who might pay as much as £70 for it. Bentley was careful not to mention whom the picture portrayed, for even thirty-five years after her death Georgiana’s name could only increase the expectations of an impoverished English schoolmistress.