Название: What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories
Автор: Laura Shapiro
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780008281083
isbn:
The plan was to let her husband run the hotel while she kept on with catering. But Lewis proved inept as a hotel keeper: the hotel deteriorated, guests stopped frequenting it, and the bills went unpaid until he had run up a debt of £5,000. At that point she threw him out of the hotel and out of her life. She called it a divorce, but she may have simply banished him without the trappings of a legal procedure. She told Lawton that once she was rid of him, she took charge of the hotel and was able to restore its former high standard while keeping up the catering business and paying Lewis’s debts in full—all this in sixteen months, by virtue of hard work and scrimping. Rosa was very fond of this story. “So I put my shoulder to the wheel and did everything—only kept a few servants, went to market myself, bought quail at fourpence, and sold them at three shillings, bought my game and vegetables in the open market, loaded them on the wheelbarrow, and pushed the barrow home myself, back to the hotel … I paid that £5,000 on tea and toast, never had anything else to eat, never had a new dress, never even took a bus if I could avoid it. No, I never had a new frock or a stitch of clothing until I had paid every farthing of the £5,000.”
With the Cavendish as her anchor, Rosa had no need any longer for even a symbolic husband: the hotel became her home, her social life, and the center of her business empire. She gave the place the intimacy of a private club, filling it with the pedigreed furniture she found at auction whenever the contents of a great English estate went up for sale. The hotel had no public restaurant at first: the guests dined at graciously arranged tables in their suites, and she took charge of many private parties at the behest of socialites, politicians, and theater people. In the kitchens, a staff of women whom she selected with care and trained herself were cooking for the hotel and also for her catering business, which was busier than ever once Edward was on the throne. As a favored chef of the king, she was hired to prepare formal dinners at the Foreign Office and the Admiralty; and when the kaiser visited England in 1907, spending three weeks at Highcliffe Castle in Dorset, Edward asked Rosa to take charge of all the cooking for his stay. (“One King leads to another, what? … He would eat ham, partridges, very fond of game, and salad, but must always have fruit with everything.”) The Daily Telegraph published an admiring feature on one of the governmental dinners she staged at Downing Street—“Woman Cook’s Triumph”—and her reputation took another leap. “I was at the top of the tree,” she told Lawton, and she stayed at the top until World War I shook the branches.
George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion opened in London in 1914, the last year of Rosa’s reign. The play, which later became the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, has an obvious overlap with Rosa’s story—so obvious that a bit of gossip flutters through a scene in the television series The Duchess of Duke Street to the effect that Shaw based the character of Eliza Doolittle on Rosa. Perhaps, but the differences were in many ways more striking than the overlap. In the play, the Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle decides that in order to get ahead in life, she has to get rid of her accent and learn to speak like a lady. She goes to Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, who takes her on as an experiment: can he transform this guttersnipe into someone who can pass as a duchess? Eliza is coached in speech, dress, and deportment; and then Higgins introduces her to society—first at an afternoon garden party and later at a dinner party followed by the opera. Eliza conducts herself perfectly everywhere, never revealing a trace of her origins, and not a soul doubts that she belongs among the well-born.
It’s tempting to think of Rosa sitting in the audience on opening night. By her own account she was a close friend of the star, the renowned actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, although “Mrs. Pat” ran off with Lady Randolph’s second husband that same year, which would have tested Rosa’s loyalty since she adored Lady Randolph. At any rate, if Rosa saw the play, she certainly would have deemed herself a greater success than Eliza, whose despairing cry “What is to become of me? What is to become of me?” rings out during the fourth act. After her triumph in society, Eliza realizes that she has been successfully uprooted but now belongs nowhere. She can’t go back to selling flowers in the street, and since she has neither the money nor the family associated with her new class identity, she can’t see a path forward. In the play, Shaw deliberately left her future vague.
Rosa would have found the whole quandary pathetic. She had conducted her own climb up the ladder very differently, and with a different goal in mind. It was as Rosa herself, Cockney born and kitchen raised, that she demanded to be made welcome in the highest ranks of society—defiantly flaunting her Cockney accent all the way. Back when she was a young servant in the household of the Comte de Paris, she had developed a passion she would nurture for the rest of her life—not for a man, but for an entire class, starting with the comte’s family. “I was overwhelmed with admiration for them,” she told Lawton. He was “marvellous,” his wife “the most interesting woman in the world,” their marriage “the most perfect match in the world.” She had no such language of superlatives for her first employers, an undistinguished family at 3 Myrtle Villas in Leyton, but everything that went on at Sheen House entranced her. All the family members used to visit her in the kitchen, she said. “If you had a round back, when the Comtesse passed through, she would give you a whack and tell you to stand up straight. She told me to keep my back straight just as she told her daughters—with a whip!” To have been disciplined exactly as if she were a noblewoman’s daughter was still making her proud some forty years later.
Lady Randolph Churchill was a similar paragon in Rosa’s eyes, despite an obvious penchant for awkward marriages. (Randolph reportedly died of syphilis; George Cornwallis-West left her for Mrs. Pat; and Montagu Porch, whom she married at sixty-four, was three years younger than Winston.) “She was one of the most perfect women … that I have ever met,” Rosa declared. Another figure in her personal pantheon was Thomas Lister, Lord Ribblesdale, who lived at the Cavendish for years and became a genuine friend. Ribblesdale was lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and also master of the buckhounds, a post that chiefly required him to display the grandeur of British high birth as he led the royal procession at the opening of Ascot. By all accounts he did this superbly. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Ribblesdale, showing him swathed in the magnificent cape, breeches, and boots of a nobleman ready for a day’s hunting, hangs in the National Gallery. Rosa was devoted to him and treasured her copy of the painting. (In fact, she said it was she who urged him to present the original to the museum.) “Lord Ribblesdale was the most wonderful man in the world,” she told Lawton. “His voice and manner and everything about him was just charming. He was a very, very great gentleman—a great specimen of an English gentleman.”
By contrast, she wanted nothing to do with what she called “boughten” nobility. “I don’t like the people who buy their titles,” she told Lawton. “I don’t like the man who makes sugar or the man who gives a few thousands to a hospital having a title, I only like titles which are inherited.” Back in olden times, she went on, “people used to lie under the table drinking and drive a four-in-hand and go swash-buckling around, but they did those things like gentlemen and aristocrats and on certain occasions only—not every day in the week like the nouveau riche hooligans do now … Now it is all vulgar, because the people who do it are vulgar … They are aping their СКАЧАТЬ