Thunderstruck

THE LADIES’ GUILD COMMENCES

BELLE’S AVOWED FONDNESS FOR BRUCE Miller had an important consequence. She told Crippen she no longer cared for him, and she threatened to leave him for Miller. Though they still slept in the same bed, they spent their nights without touch or warmth. They struck a bargain. Outwardly no one was to know of the strain in their marriage. “It was always agreed that we should treat each other as if there had never been any trouble,” Crippen said.

He gave her money just as always, “with a free hand whatever she seemed to want at any time; if she asked me for money she always had it.” She bought furs and jewelry and countless dresses. On one occasion he gave her £35—about $3,800 today—to buy an ermine cape. In public she always called him “dear.”

In September 1903 Crippen went so far as to open a joint “current” account at Charing Cross Bank in the Strand. The account required his signature and Belle’s but did not require both to be present when a check was presented for cashing. About three years later the Crippens opened a savings account at the same bank, with an initial deposit of £250—$26,000—under both their names.

Crippen paid for Belle’s evenings out with friends and sometimes even came along, acting always the part of an affectionate and indulgent husband. He paid too for Belle’s evenings with Miller.

Later Miller would contend that on some of his visits to the Crippens’ flat he had the feeling that Crippen was at home, elsewhere among the rooms.

One evening Miller arrived at the Store Street apartment to find the table set for three. Belle held up dinner “until quite late,” Miller recalled. Belle said, “I am getting uneasy; I expect another party to dinner.”

The third party never arrived, and Belle told Miller, “I am often disappointed that way.”

She never said who the third party was, but Miller “surmised that it was to be Dr. Crippen.”

CRIPPEN SAID, “I NEVER INTERFERED with her movements in any way. She went in and out just as she liked and did what she liked; it was of no interest to me.”

He was not being entirely frank, however. “Of course, I hoped that she would give up this idea of hers at some time”—and by this he meant her idea of one day leaving with Bruce Miller.

Her other grand idea, of becoming a variety star, had been rekindled and now burned as brightly as ever. This time, however, she gave up trying to make her career in London and resolved instead to build a reputation at music halls in outlying towns and villages, known as “twice-nightlies” for the two variety programs performed each evening. “She got an engagement at the Town Hall, Teddington, to sing, and then from time to time she got engagements at music halls,” Crippen said. She performed as a comedienne at a theater in Oxford, where she lasted about a week. She did turns at Camberwell, Balham, and Northampton.

Eventually she made it to the Palace, but not in London. In Swansea. Posters for a show there identified her as Miss B. Elmore and placed her performance between two musical groups, the Southern Belles and the Eclipse Trio.

“She would probably go away for about two weeks and return for about six weeks, but used to earn very little,” Crippen said.

She began dying her hair a golden blond, at a time when dying hair was considered an act of suspect morality. “There was hardly any dyed hair,” wrote W. Macqueen-Pope in his Goodbye Piccadilly. “It was considered ‘fast’ and the sign of prostitution.” He recounted how a novelist, Marie Corelli, in one of her books described the owner of a fine country hotel as having dyed hair. The owner sued and won—even though she had indeed colored her hair. The court awarded only one farthing in damages. “She might have got more,” Macqueen-Pope wrote, “but the dyed hair was most apparent.”

Maintaining Belle’s color took a lot of work. “When her hair was down in the morning one could see the original colour on the part nearest the roots,” Belle’s friend Adeline Harrison observed. Belle applied the bleaching chemicals to her hair every four or five days, and sometimes Crippen helped. “She was very anxious that nobody should ever know that she had any dark hair at all,” he said. “She was a woman who was very particular about her hair. Only the tiniest portions of the hairs at the roots after they began to grow could be seen to be dark.”

At one point Belle’s travels brought her to a well-respected provincial theater in Dudley, the Empire, a theater with a sliding roof, where she wound up on a bill that included a much-loved comedian named George Formby. Another performer, Clarkson Rose, went to see Formby’s act that night and happened also to catch Belle’s performance. “She wasn’t a top-rank artist, but, in her way, not bad—a blowsy, florid type of serio,” meaning a seriocomic, a performer who mixed comedy and drama.

With so many turns a night, before boisterous audiences, it was never difficult to judge which performers the crowd favored. Belle was not one of them. Her singing was neither good enough nor sad enough to charm the crowd, and her comedy elicited only a halfhearted response from those accustomed to the likes of Formby and Dan Leno, one of the most popular comics of the day. She failed even in the halls of London’s impoverished East End, considered one of the lowest tiers in the business. Robert Machray in his 1902 guide to the evening delights of the city, The Night Side of London, wrote, “To fail at even an East End hall must be a terrible business for an artiste. It means, if it means anything, the streets, starvation, death.”

But not for Belle. She had Crippen, and she had his money. She did have one talent, however. She was gregarious and had a knack for making friends quickly. She gave up performing but lodged herself snugly among the theatrical crowd. Using Crippen’s money, she continued her participation in the late-night revelries of actors and writers and their lovers and spouses. For appearances she sometimes brought Crippen along. Both kept to their bargain about keeping up the illusion of a happy marriage. They smiled at each other and told charming stories about their life together. Behind his thick glasses Crippen’s magnified eyes seemed to glisten with genuine warmth and delight.

But not always. A photographer captured Crippen at a formal banquet. In the photograph he is wearing evening attire: black dinner jacket and pants, white bow tie, and a gleaming white shirtfront. He wears a flower in his lapel. He is surrounded by women in white, as if he is about to disappear in a cloud of taffeta, silk, and lace. Belle and two other women are seated on risers behind him. Two pretty young women sit on his right and left, so close to him that their dresses drape over his legs and thighs, meaning also that their bodies and his must be in contact, albeit with layers of cloth in between. The scene is faintly erotic. One woman’s arm rests on his. The camera captures all five women in diverse expressions, odd for this era when one was never to move and above all not to smile. One woman stares into the middle distance, bored or sad or both. Another is smiling and glancing away. Belle, seated behind and above Crippen, has the pained expression of someone trying to get a room full of children to sit still. Only Crippen stares at the camera. His eyes, centered and magnified in the thick lenses of his glasses, are utterly without expression, as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy, momentarily inert.

BELLE INSINUATED HERSELF into a group of talented variety players and their spouses, among them Marie Lloyd, Lil Hawthorne of the Hawthorne Sisters, Paul Martinetti, a well-known “pantomimist,” Eugene Stratton, a blackface singer, and others. At one gathering the women resolved to form a charity to provide for performers down on their luck and founded the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, a more subdued, women’s counterpart to the Grand Order of Water Rats, founded in 1889, which Seymour Hicks, a performer and memoirist, called “the most distinguished brotherhood of world-famous music-hall artists.” The Water Rats’ chairman was called the King Rat. The leader of the ladies’ guild was merely its president: Its first was Marie Lloyd, its most famous member. Belle became treasurer.

The post gave Belle the kind of recognition she never got on stage. Her peers liked her and her unquenchable good spirits. Meetings were held every Wednesday afternoon, and Belle attended every one. Close friendships blossomed—close enough, certainly, that her friends knew about and had seen, even touched, the scar on her abdomen. Belle was proud of it. That long dark line gave her an element of mystery. When her friend and fellow guild member Clara Martinetti saw it, she was appalled. She had never seen a scar that size before. “Oh Belle does it hurt you?” she exclaimed.

“Oh no,” Belle said, “it doesn’t hurt me,” and as she said it, she grabbed that portion of her abdomen and twisted.