The Scarlet Sisters (38 page)

Before the sisters left for England they had decided to use draconian measures to sanitize their image. They would simply kill off their past. Victoria had said she wanted to eclipse her tarnished reputation to spare her daughter. Victoria still smarted from the rebuke of a private school that had barred Zula during Woodhull’s free love era. Left behind in New York was a visceral reminder, an evil Victoria, cast in wax and viewed by carnival gawkers in Bunnell’s New American Museum in the Bowery. Along with figures of Tweed, Beecher, and Gould, Woodhull writhed in an eternal Dante’s
Inferno
wax tableau.

Yet it was no better across the Atlantic. “God only knows what we have suffered since we have been in England,” cried Tennie in a letter to her father. “The lies slanders & filth are worse here than ever in America. It is a wonder that we were allowed to live.” Tennie blamed Andrews: “The atmosphere was poisoned, & all on account of that rotten stinking moral leper Stephen Pearl Andrews pollcat [
sic
] free love doctrines which so blasted our entire family.… V never wanted that part of the Beecher article, which is so filthy, published in the paper. All she wanted were the facts.” Completely reversing herself on free love, Tennie was blaming Andrews for Woodhull’s ardent defense of “amative” relations in the article, because some of it was written by Andrews. The “filthy practices” now referred to free love liaisons, not hypocrisy.

As astonishing as it seems, both sisters felt they could not just bend the truth but smash it to pieces. Despite her many proud public avowals of free love—broadcast from stage to stage and in newspapers across
America—Victoria now flatly denied she had ever advocated the doctrine, and Tennie had shelved her harangue about women who marry for money being no better than prostitutes. They remained true to a softer chastising of the sexual double standard, which exonerated wandering males while reviling female partners. They painted themselves as traditional women’s rights advocates and touted their interest in the eugenics craze, stressing that only physically and mentally healthy couples should bear children.

The sisters recast their advocacy as centering on the “teaching and elevation” of their sex. They wanted to join the British suffragists, but Susan B. Anthony blistered that move, cautioning their major leader, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, that “Both sisters are regarded as lewd and indecent. I would advise against any contact.”

That the sisters could so thoroughly deny all that they had honored for years left their followers shattered and their adversaries hooting. In a revealing speech, Tennie expressed her deep despair about how tough their proselytizing radical road had been. “You may credit us with insanity, if you will; but I pray you, along with it, to also give us credit for honesty of purpose.” The press said “that we are simply notoriety seekers… Do people usually invoke upon themselves continuous persecution, merely to obtain notoriety? Do they consciously invoke the terrible power of the press to crush them, to brand them before the world by every vile and detestable epithet? Do they seek the hoots and jeers of the common multitudes, and the sneers, and upturned noses of the select few wherever they go? Do they purposely render themselves friendless, and homeless and distressed in all possible ways merely to become simply notorious? Nay, my friends!… It requires stern conviction of duty, undying devotion to principles, and an unswerving faith… We sometimes almost fainted by the way side; It was almost a greater sorrow than we could endure… if the public knew what it has cost us in sleepless nights, ill heartaches and laceration of the soul to be able to perform our duties.” Now, facing poverty, having discarded that brutally hard road, with its few rewards and constant ridicule, seemed the right move. Still, such disavowal of what the
sisters had labeled their “undying devotion” to free love principles earned them lasting contempt from disillusioned followers.

The sisters had compelling private reasons for becoming chaste chameleons in their desperate dash for respectability. Soon after they arrived in England, they met men of great social distinction and wealth. Giving up their flaunted independence, they now sought a life unlike any they had ever known. If free love was the victim, so be it. After the pummeling they had received from the American public and press—and the lack of support from free lovers, Spiritualists, and suffragists when they were in prison—the sisters felt they had no allegiance to anything but their own happiness. Woodhull would forever refer to her “persecution” in America. But it would be long, desperate years before she and Tennie would get these desirable Englishmen to the altar.

Tennie had a slight encumbrance. The man she chose—one of the richest and most esteemed in England—was married. It is unclear how they met or how they shared their life before they wed. For once in her life, Tennie was the soul of discretion. There was no boasting to the press or, apparently, to her crazy, blackmailing family about her relationship with Francis Cook, considered in 1869 one of the three richest men in England. Tennie and Cook met sometime between 1877 and 1880. When Tennie turned thirty-five in October 1880, Cook was sixty-three. Because of the age difference, many dismissed the union as Tennie’s fortune-hunting move, of exchanging one rich, old man (Vanderbilt) for another, but this is a shallow assessment. Letters between the couple reveal a closeness with one another, despite his family’s being less than charmed at Tennie’s arrival.

Cook was no Vanderbilt self-made semiliterate. His father had started a company that became England’s major importer of fine silks and linens, and Cook had continued to build it into the highly successful Cook, Son & Co. He was well traveled, a lover of music, and an extraordinary art collector. His works included Roman and Etruscan sculptures and paintings by masters such as Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and El Greco.
He owned a castle near Lisbon called Monserrate with enormous acreage that encompassed even a small village. From the windows of Monserrate, one could see the vast rolling lawn and the “most noble and beautiful landscape garden in the world,” as the London
Times
claimed at the time Tennie was in residence there.

Cook was vigorously prepossessing—“tall, long bearded, strikingly handsome”—and exhibited an intriguing combination of “old worldliness” and a “briskness of manner and absence of ceremony.” Despite his colossal wealth, he liked to twit upper-class snobs by carrying brown paper parcels through the streets and walking to and from the railroad station. In a discussion, he could appear reticent, but he would then end it firmly, quietly, and politely: “That subject will not bear further discussion.” It was certain that neither Francis nor Tennie had ever met anyone like the other, and both were entranced. Cook became a friend to both sisters and tried to help Victoria in her frustrated courtship with John Biddulph Martin, a prominent member of a banking family, whom Victoria wanted desperately to marry.

One December evening in 1877, John Martin was driven to hear Victoria Woodhull’s lecture in St. James’s Hall. He was still mourning the one sibling he cherished, a sister named Penelope, who had died in 1873 after giving birth. Her strong feminist views echoed in his thoughts as he went to hear the woman who had impressed him from afar. Victoria was thirty-nine and Martin thirty-six, a banker in the prestigious family firm on Lombard Street in London. Moneyed and Oxford-educated, Martin had been a star athlete and had kept his trim, handsome good looks.

Woodhull’s six-month lecture tour had begun in towns such as Liverpool and Manchester and was ending in St. James’s Hall for several performances. She was met with mixed success. Two thousand attended her well-publicized opening night, but the audience dwindled precipitously afterward. Londoners felt, as one critic said, that the American substituted “sentiment for fact and anecdote for scientific reasoning.” Many papers ignored the lecture, and the London
Telegraph
criticized Woodhull’s
indulging in “somewhat flatulent rhetoric.” But a minister who heard Woodhull praised “the boldness of that woman’s intuition and the incisiveness of her fervent eloquence.” Equally fascinated was Martin, who said to himself that if Woodhull wanted him, “I would certainly make her my wife.”

Now on her march to respectability, Woodhull emphatically disavowed free love in her speech. Laws and social attitudes had not changed; nonetheless, marriage no longer enslaved women and was now, she said, a “sacred institution.” Her earlier adamant praise of the Oneida, New York, colony where monogamy was harshly discouraged was now a part of her “consistently misrepresented” views. She had always praised true love “monogamic [
sic
]” unions, she swore, carefully picking out lesser lines in past speeches that were overshadowed by her anti-marriage riff back then. Painful howls erupted from disgusted past followers. After reading one of Woodhull’s strenuous denials of “free lovism,” a former
Weekly
reader spoke for many: her words had probably “never been exceeded” in their “barefaced mendacity.” A
Brooklyn Eagle
tongue-in-cheek editorial mocked the transition: “We had all been ‘misled.’ ” Woodhull now “stands revealed as pure and lustrous as an electric light in an alabaster vase.”

But Victoria did not care. She would do anything to gain the peace, security, and respectability she saw in Martin. One family descendant feels that Martin was determined in his desire to marry her. “They seduced each other.” He felt Woodhull’s drive to be seen as respectable stemmed less from some fortune-hunting goal and more because of her real love for Martin. John was “very much a part of the establishment,” writing esteemed papers, lecturing, and being an active partner in a centuries-old banking house. “She wanted to fit in with that; didn’t want to let him down. If he had been an artist, it wouldn’t have mattered. She wanted so much to help him and not embarrass him.”

Both sisters also repeatedly insisted that they had at last found men who believed in their strong views on women’s freedom, and thus were following their adherence to marrying for love, not money. With husbands
so rich, few in the cynical press believed them, but both husbands did support their views, Sir Francis by publishing Tennie’s writing, and Martin by becoming a partner in Woodhull’s magazine,
The Humanitarian
.

Martin’s brave impulse regarding marrying Victoria was stalled, however, by his family’s horror at the thought. Woodhull collapsed into pitiable desperation when he pulled back. Several months after her speech, Martin had visited Woodhull at the Claflins’ Warwick Road home, but shyly made no more moves for a full year, as he was dealing with a romance that ended in failure. He cryptically wrote in his diary that “I should certainly have asked E H” [the initials of an unnamed love] to be my wife” had not the “old obstacle intervened.” Impotency seemed to be the “old obstacle.” He began to spend nights with Victoria, marked with red dots in his diary. Thanks to Victoria’s “forbearance in this regard,” his “old enemy” vanished.

By February 1880, he had rented a house on Warwick Road for the two of them to escape from the Claflin bedlam next door. The smell of money had wafted overseas, and more of the America clan arrived in 1878: Buck, sister Meg Miles, and Meg’s two daughters.

Despite his initial hesitation, Martin remained forever besotted with Victoria. “She was more alive than anyone I ever met,” he told a friend. “When you were with her everything became so thrilling, so worthwhile. You looked at the world through her eyes and you saw miracles all around you… She believed that people were interesting and wonderful and they became it. She wanted people to be happy and she made them happy.” Yet Martin was stuck. All his life, the litany of upper-class breeding was drummed into him: the centuries of banking esteem, the eleven family members in Parliament, the impeccable name.

In the spring of 1880, Victoria anxiously pushed Martin about marriage. He was “very upset” at a ruined outing when “the great question came up,” and she pursued the subject of honorable intentions. Martin fled to Spain but could not forget Victoria. In August they reconciled but broke up again over her demands that Martin take her to Overbury, the Martin country estate, to meet the family. By November, Martin was still
trying to get up the courage to tell his parents about the relationship. The whole family was pressuring him to break things off with Victoria. On December 1, 1880, he wrote, “Dear Momma. I am very sorry that any of you should feel anxiety on my account when I feel none.” He would not write Victoria’s name but said, “ ‘She’ was very unhappy this morning & said that she was sure” that “none of you like her except for my sake, & that she would not come between me & my people but I hope we shall get over that. I hope I shall find you all friends on Friday. I shall not meet her in the meantime, as I have to go & make speeches tonight.”

It sounds as if he was terrified of the prospect, leaving Victoria to enter the lion’s den without him, accompanied by his older married sister, Julia Henty, whom he knew sharply disapproved. On December 2, Victoria went to Overbury. His older brother, Richard, grilled Woodhull and decided he liked her. Yet digging into this upstart American’s past, Richard and his brother-in-law discovered Joseph Treat’s pamphlet and confronted John with an “appalling story of V’s antecedents.”

John obeyed his mother and broke off relations with Victoria during intense, sobbing, hysterical meetings. Woodhull resorted to a bit of legal pressure, prevailing on Francis Cook to meet with Martin. Breach of promise was vaguely alluded to. The high-strung Woodhull was so devastated at the thought of losing Martin that she teetered on the edge, once again, of a breakdown. She paced, pleaded, and pursued.

As 1880 ended in “chaos,” as Martin noted, a frantic Woodhull rushed to create a suitable makeover. She changed her name to Woodhall, with an
a
, in order to claim an English heritage. In a country where one’s pedigree is judged in centuries, Woodhull invented an esteemed lineage: The sisters were “descended on their father’s side from the Kings of Scotland and England” and also from German royalty on their mother’s side. Somehow they were thus related to Alexander Hamilton.