Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill Read Free Book Online Page A

American girl, being presented at court, a rite of passage for the cream of English society, ranked just short of marriage to a peer as a measure of transatlantic social success. In American society columns it became a sort of Homeric epithet, always mentioned after the subject’s name (“Miss So-and-so, who was presented at court. . . .”).
    So it was a momentous occasion when, on June 6, Sara and Hoytie put on their specially ordered elaborate white evening dresses, fastened the requisite three white ostrich plumes in their swept-up hair, took up their ornate bouquets, and maneuvered their long court trains into the carriage that bore them to Buckingham Palace. There—once the prince and princess of Wales had arrived with their mounted escort of Life Guards from Marlborough House—they made their deep court curtsies, one by one, to the royal couple, and then mingled with the decidedly imperial throng crowding the reception rooms, which included the Princess Victoria; the maharajahs of Bikaner, Alwar, and Pudukota; the duke and duchess of Connaught (brother and sister-in-law of the king); and Lord Grey, the foreign secretary. It was a long way from the Cincinnati Country Club, where the only maharajahs were likely to be in costume; and it signaled the beginning of a new phase in the Wiborgs’ life.
    For Frank Wiborg—having made a fortune in the neighborhood of $2,000,000, with considerable investments in real estate and commerce which would continue to throw off substantial income—was moving toward retirement as an active partner of the Ault and Wiborg Company. The year after Sara and Hoytie made their curtsies to the king and queen, President Taft appointed Frank to a dollar-a-year post as an assistant secretary of commerce and labor, and the family moved temporarily to Washington, where they rented a house at 1626 Rhode Island Avenue. Frank even thought of running for Congress from his Ohio district if Nicholas Longworth declined to renew his bid for reelection in 1910. As it turned out, he got only lukewarm support from the Ohio Republican organization, and his candidacy came to nothing; but he was now a figure of national, even international, standing, and his wife, and particularly his daughters, had become stars whose comings and goings made copy for gossip columnists and their readers.
    In New York or in London, where Olga in her turn was presented at court in 1909, Adeline marched onward as inexorably as her uncle the general, trailing her glorious daughters behind her from ball to tea party to charity benefit. Lovely in strikingly individual ways—from “Miss Sara’s chic” to “Miss Hoytie’s dark beauty” to “Miss Olga’s delicate fairness,” as one commentator put it—they were even more striking as a trio. All three girls had had years of music lessons; now they were expected to perform at society soirees, as every accomplished young lady did, at the drop of an ivory fan. Sara sang contralto, Hoytie tenor, and Olga soprano, and they would do everything from American folk songs to Wagner in three-part harmony, often accompanying themselves on the guitar or the piano. A favorite show stopper was their rendition of the Rhine Maidens’ theme from Das Rheingold, which the girls sang bare-shouldered behind a semitransparent curtain, waving their arms about suggestively. Their act was so polished that one perplexed London hostess, thinking them to be professional performers, mistakenly offered them money to play at one of her parties, a gaffe which merited a story in the New York Tribune.
    What Frank Wiborg made of all this is puzzling. He was proud, certainly, of the figure cut by his womenfolk: he retained a clipping service to keep track of their appearances in newspapers and fashionable magazines, and he kept the cuttings stuffed into the pockets of his diaries. But he seems to have felt that their celebrity—for it was that—was the purely natural consequence of their position as his wife