Henry Symes Lehr (March 28, 1869 – January 3, 1929) was an American socialite during the Gilded Age who was dubbed "America's Court Jester".[1]
Early life
Henry Symes Lehr in drag for an amateur theatrical performance
Henry Symes Lehr was born on March 28, 1869. He was the fourth child in a family of seven born to Mary Frances Moore Lehr, and Robert Oliver Lehr, a tobacco and snuff importer who became the German consul in Baltimore and a governor of the Maryland Club.[1] His sister was Alice Lehr Morton and his brother was Dr. Louis Lehr, who was a physician.[2]
Society life
He attempted to establish himself as successor to Ward McAllister, arbiter elegantiarum of New York's Four Hundred, the collection of Knickerbocker and industrial families he created as a bulwark against the new wealth of the Gilded Age.[citation needed][3] He was known for staging elaborate parties alongside Marion "Mamie" Fish, such as the so-called "dog's dinner", in which 100 pets of wealthy friends dined at foot-high tables while dressed in formal attire[4] At a later party, he impersonated the Czar of Russia, and was henceforth dubbed "King Lehr".[5]
Lehr and Bessie were married at St Patrick's Cathedral in New York in 1901.[9][10] After the wedding, they traveled to the Stafford Hotel in Baltimore, where Lehr refused to sleep with her on their wedding night,[11][12] stating:
In public I will be to you everything that a most devoted husband should be to his wife. You shall never complain of my conduct in this respect. I will give you courtesy, respect and apparently devotion. But you must expect nothing more from me. When we are alone I do not intend to keep up the miserable pretense, the farce of love and sentiment. Our marriage will never be a marriage in anything but in name. I do not love you. I can never love you. I can school myself to be polite to you but that is all. The less we see of one another except in the presence of others, the better.[7]
They stayed in a loveless, unconsummated marriage for 28 years, as Lehr benefited from her wealth, she from his social connections and her strong wish to not upset her conservative, staunchly Catholic mother, Lucy (née Wharton) Drexel.[13]
He was diagnosed in 1923, the year he suffered "a general breakdown" while in Paris,[14] and had a brain tumor removed in 1927.[15] He died on January 3, 1929, of a brain malady at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.[1] At the time of his death, Bessie was in France staying at the home of Alva's daughter Consuelo Vanderbilt and her husband Jacques Balsan (after her divorce from Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough).[7] His funeral was held at St. Ignatius Church in Baltimore and he was buried in the family lot in Green Mount Cemetery.[16] Under the terms of his will, he left all of his property in the United States to his sisters and his possessions in Paris to his widow.[17]
Sexuality
Lehr was,[18] in fact, gay and rumored to have had a longstanding relationship with friend and fellow Newport cottager Charles Greenough.[7] Lehr owned, and hung in his bedroom, a nude painting by R. G. Harper Pennington of Robert Gould Shaw II as the character "Little Billee" from the bohemian novel Trilby (1894) by George du Maurier.[19][20]
In popular culture
Lehr appears as a supporting character in Gore Vidal's 1987 novel Empire.[21]
^"Harry Lehr's sister dies. Mrs. Alice Morton Had Lived in France Since Her Marriage". New York Times. August 24, 1927.
^Washington Post; September 26, 1903. Some Thoughts on Harry Lehr. Those very industrious and entertaining gossips who spend so much time exploiting the antics of Mr. Harry Lehr do not appear to have considered the possibility that he may be anything rather than the fool they would have him. This very alert and resourceful young gentleman, it will be well to remember, has prospered most amazingly as the result of his more or less dignified activities in connection with the Newport smart set.
^Vanderbilt II, Arthur T. Fortune's Children. Wm. Morrow and Co., 1989: 243. ISBN0-688-07279-8.
^"Lady Decies, Widow of Irish Peer, Dies; Former Elizabeth Drexel of Philadelphia Was Once the Wife of Harry Lehr". New York Times. June 14, 1944.
^"Record of the Rich". Time. August 5, 1935. Archived from the original on October 19, 2012. Retrieved 2007-07-21. In Paris in 1929 Mrs. Elizabeth Drexel Lehr heard that her husband was dead. To the daughter of Philadelphia Banker Joseph William Drexel, that event meant that the "tragic farce" of a 28-year marriage had ended, that she was now free to tell her story. A bitter, disillusioned book, "King Lehr" is memorable for the lurid light it throws on U. S. Society of the Gilded Age, may confidently be opened as one of the most startling and scandalously intimate records of life among the wealthy yet written by one of them.
^Vanderbilt II, Arthur T. Fortune's Children. Wm. Morrow and Co., 1989: 235–7. ISBN0-688-07279-8
