Thunderstruck

ANARCHISTS AND SEMEN

CRIPPEN FOUND QUARTERS IN ST. JOHN’S WOOD, near Regent’s Park. His Munyon’s office was a distance away on Shaftesbury Avenue, which ran a soft serpentine between Bloomsbury and Piccadilly Circus among shops, offices, and restaurants and past side streets inhabited by actors, musicians, French and German émigrés, and other “foreigners,” as well as a few prostitutes. The avenue was home also to three of London’s best-known theaters, the Palace, the Shaftesbury, and the Lyric. The Munyon’s office stood opposite the Palace.

Crippen made sure his wife had all the money she needed to live well in New York and to pursue her opera lessons. But Cora was growing disenchanted with opera, acknowledging at last what her teachers had recognized long before, that she had neither the voice nor the stage presence to succeed in so lofty a pursuit. She wrote to Crippen that she now planned to try making a career doing “music hall sketches.” In America it was known as Vaudeville; the British called it Variety.

This troubled Crippen. Vaudeville seemed tawdry compared to opera, and even compared to variety, which as Crippen knew was popular in London and becoming increasingly respectable. Even the Prince of Wales was said to enjoy a good night of variety turns. Though some music halls still served as points of commerce for prostitutes and pickpockets, most had become clean and safe. Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Lloyd, and Vesta Tilley did turns, and within a decade so too would Anna Pavlova and the Russian ballet, first introduced to Britain at the Palace.

Crippen wrote to Cora and urged her to reconsider. He recommended that she come right away to London. Here at least she could perform variety without taint.

She agreed to join him, though probably neither love nor Crippen’s plea had much to do with her decision. More likely her career doing musical sketches in New York had also been a failure, and now she wanted to try her hand in London, where she could sing before a sophisticated audience more appreciative of her true talent. Her impending arrival meant that Crippen had to find new lodgings that were large enough and luxurious enough to accommodate a wife with so swollen a sense of self-regard and need. He chose an apartment in Bloomsbury on a pretty street in the shape of a half-circle, one of London’s many “crescents.” This was South Crescent, off Tottenham Court Road, one block from the British Museum and an easy walk to the Munyon’s office on Shaftesbury.

Cora arrived in August, and at once Crippen sensed a difference. “I may say that when she came to England from America her manner towards me was entirely changed, and she had cultivated a most ungovernable temper, and seemed to think I was not good enough for her, and boasted of the men of good position traveling on the boat who had made a fuss of her, and, indeed, some of these visited her at South Crescent, but I do not know their names.”

IN BLOOMSBURY CRIPPEN HAD CHOSEN a neighborhood in which an array of forces then driving deep change in Britain were fully at play. Just east lay Bloomsbury Square and Bloomsbury Road, where within a few years Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, critic Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, and other members of their cadre of writers, poets, and gleaming personalities would become legendary as the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia would marry and take her husband’s name, Woolf. A few blocks to the west, across Tottenham Court Road, was territory soon to be claimed by the visual arts counterpart to Bloomsbury, the Fitzroy Street Group, whose members converged on the Fitzroy Tavern, built in 1897 at the corner of Charlotte and Windmill streets, four blocks due west of the Crippens’ new home. The group’s most prominent and eventually most infamous member was the painter Walter Sickert, who from time to time in the years following his death would be considered a suspect in the Ripper murders. The Crippens shared the sidewalk with the brightest intellects of the day, including G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), and the scholars of University College and the British Museum.

The neighborhood vibrated with sexual energy. Among the Bloomsbury Group, once it achieved full intellectual flower, conversation about sex flowed easily. The trigger, according to Virginia Woolf, was a moment when Lytton Strachey, the critic and biographer, walked into a drawing room where she and her sister Vanessa were seated.

Virginia wrote, “The door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr. Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress.

“‘Semen?’ he asked.

“Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.”

The dividing line between Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, as the neighborhood around the Fitzroy Tavern eventually became known, was Tottenham Court Road, which happened also to be a fault line in the world’s political crust and a part of London of no small interest to New Scotland Yard and the French Sûreté. For years the basement at No. 4 Tottenham had housed the Communist Working Men’s Club, where firebrands of all stripe had spoken, raved, and cajoled. Nearby at No. 30 Charlotte was the equally notorious, though more radical, Epicerie Française, a center of the international anarchist movement, kept under periodic watch by French undercover detectives. Here men seethed at the rift between the poor and the rich that was then so glaring in Britain.

Each morning, as Crippen made his way to work at the sumptuous Munyon’s office in Shaftesbury Avenue, he walked down Tottenham Court Road, past the notorious basement and past the Special Branch and Sûreté detectives who kept watch on the street and its surroundings.

None took the least notice of the little doctor, his eyes large behind his glasses, his feet thrown out to his sides as he walked, oblivious to the forces simmering around him.

CORA CRIPPEN NOW LAUNCHED her bid for fame in the variety halls of Britain. She had one significant advantage: British audiences loved acts from America. She resolved to make her debut in a brief musical of her own creation, in which of course she would play the leading role. She asked Crippen to pay the production costs, and he gladly assented, for the work seemed to improve Cora’s outlook and her behavior toward him, though she remained prone to dramatic swings of mood, as if she believed volatility were as necessary to a diva as a good voice and an expensive dress, the purchase of which Crippen also cheerfully funded.

Cora drafted a libretto for her show but recognized that it needed work. She arranged a meeting with a woman named Adeline Harrison, a music hall actress and part-time journalist who also worked as an adviser helping other performers craft new acts and improve scripts. Crippen may have had something to do with recruiting Harrison, for the two women met at Munyon’s suite of offices on Shaftesbury.

Harrison recalled her first glimpse of Cora. “Presently the green draperies parted and there entered a woman who suggested to me a brilliant, chattering bird of gorgeous plumage. She seemed to overflow the room with her personality. Her bright, dark eyes were twinkling with the joy of life. Her vivacious rounded face was radiant with smiles. She showed her teeth and there was a gleam of gold.”

A photograph from about this time captured Cora in a pose for the stage. It shows her seated and singing from a songbook, beside a basket heaped with flowers of some lush species, possibly orchids or calla lilies, or both. She is on the far side of plump, with thick fingers and almost no neck. Her dress and the many layers underneath make her appear still larger, more weapon than woman. The dress is printed with daggerlike petals. Its billowing shoulders amplify the breadth of her bodice but also highlight the impossible narrowness of her abdomen, corseted perhaps in the famous “Patti” from the Y.C. Corset company, named for Adelina Patti, one of the world’s most beloved sopranos. Cora wears an expression that conveys both confidence and self-satisfaction. Not quite haughty, but vain and smug. Mighty.

Harrison read Cora’s script. There wasn’t much of it—“a few feeble lines of dialogue,” Harrison wrote.

Cora told Harrison she wanted to make the act longer and asked how that might be achieved. Cora wanted it to be more of a freestanding operetta than a simple variety turn.

“I suggested that a little plot might improve matters,” Harrison said.

The resulting show was called The Unknown Quantity and debuted at the Old Marylebone Music Hall, not quite the tier of theater Cora had hoped for. The Marylebone had developed something of a reputation for favoring melodramas that featured coffins, corpses, and blood, but it nonetheless was a known and credible venue that would give her an opportunity to show off her talents. That was all she wanted. Once London got a look at her, her future would be made.

A program from this period identified Cora as Macà Motzki—her maiden name divided in two—and as a principal in “Vio & Motzki’s American Bright Lights Company, From the Principal American Theatres.” Her foil was to be an Italian tenor named Sandro Vio, identified in the program as “General Manager and Sole Director.” Crippen too was on the program, as “Acting Manager.” The plot involved romance and extortion and required Cora at one point to hurl a fistful of banknotes at Vio. She insisted the cash be real, though the resulting first-night scramble by the audience caused the management to command that fake money be used in future performances. The show lasted one week. Cora demonstrated a lack of talent so complete that at least one critic mocked her as “the Brooklyn Matzos Ball.”

The failure humiliated Cora and caused her to give up variety, at least for the time being.

THE CRIPPENS MOVED FROM South Crescent to Guildford Street, a block or so from where Dickens once lived, but soon afterward, around November 1899, Professor Munyon called Crippen back to America to run the company’s Philadelphia headquarters for a few months. He left Cora in London.

Something happened during that stay, though exactly what isn’t clear. When Crippen returned to London in June 1900, he was no longer employed by Munyon’s. He took over management, instead, of another patent medicine company, the Sovereign Remedy Co., on nearby Newman Street. At about this time, he and Cora moved back to Bloomsbury, this time to Store Street, where a century earlier Mary Wollstonecraft had lived. The Crippens’ new apartment was only half a block away from their old home on South Crescent and a brief walk to Crippen’s new office.

Crippen learned to his displeasure that while he was in America Cora had begun singing again, at “smoking concerts for payment.” She told him, moreover, that she intended to try once more to establish herself as a variety performer and had adopted a new stage name, Belle Elmore. And she had become even more ill tempered. “She was always finding fault with me,” he complained, “and every night she took some opportunity of quarrelling with me, so that we went to bed in rather a temper with each other. A little later on, after I found that this continued and she apparently did not wish to be familiar with me, I asked her what the matter was.”

And Cora—now Belle—told him. She revealed that during her husband’s absence she had met a man named Bruce Miller and, Crippen said, “that this man visited her, had taken her about, and was very fond of her, and also she was fond of him.”