Excess all areas – the sparkling tale of the ‘Empress of Journalism’
★★★★ ★
Miriam Leslie – or Mrs Frank Leslie as she was internationally known – was looking her best. Her hour-glass figure appeared to advantage in a Worth dress of lace and mousseline de soie, its low-cut bodice showing off her ample cleavage while, hidden from view, a rose-sprigged corset cinched her waist to the requisite 21 inches. On her feet were satin slippers. Brilliant diamonds glittered from her ears, wrists, fingers and bodice; around her neck hung a chain of 3,000 diamonds.
The year was 1898, a time when the semiotics of clothes were allimportant, and a language that could be read by anybody who was anybody in New York society. For this was still the Gilded Age, when conspicuous consumption was the New York mantra. And Miriam Leslie was not known as “the Empress of Journalism” for nothing.
Reaching this pinnacle of wealth and power had not been easy. Miriam’s early life in New Orleans had been hard, in a family that lurched from one financial crisis to another. An early marriage, largely through trickery, had seemed to offer hope but was speedily annulled by the duped husband.
In 1856, Miriam was at her lowest ebb. It was a stifling summer, New York was ravaged by yellow fever – hearses rumbled down the streets day and night, and the stench was unbearable – crime was rising, unemployment was rife and Miriam and her mother were stuck in a tiny, stinking tenement room. How she emerged from that garret to become the successful ruler of a publishing empire and a woman widely travelled, cosmopolitan and a survivor of scandals that would have sunk anyone of less steely determination, is the subject of Betsy Prioleau’s extremely well-researched biography (there are almost 70 pages of source notes). Prioleau is especially strong on context, bringing Gilded Age New York to vivid life. This is also the story of a woman who took on men at their own game – and beat most of them.
A voluptuous brunette with melting dark eyes, a square jaw, tumbling dark curls, tiny hands and feet, Miriam was seldom without a man at her side. Her second marriage was to the wealthy author Ephraim G Squier, but it was not long before she attracted the eye of the man who would change her life. This was Frank Leslie, short, dark, bearded and already a household name – a highly successful publisher and pioneer in print technology. Soon Frank had abandoned his wife and moved in with the Squiers, a ménage à trois that lasted several years until Squiers, suffering from terminal syphilis, was moved into a home.
Escorted by the free-spending Frank, Miriam travelled the world, dressed always in the height of fashion. Frank also put her in charge of one of his magazines, an ailing publication that she quickly turned into a success, largely by ignoring the horrors of the Civil War then raging, and giving women what she believed they wanted: fashion and frivolity. Circulation rose to 80,000 and Miriam’s confidence rose with it. By 1875, she was Mrs Frank Leslie, surviving headlines about his abandonment of his first wife and her own love affairs. Then Frank, who had overexpanded – in the Gilded Age, spending money was the only way to go – went bankrupt, clawed his way back, only to be diagnosed with throat cancer out of the blue. Within a week, he was dead. Despite other dalliances, Miriam had loved him deeply. But she was not so stricken that she would allow his sons to overturn the will he had made in her favour. She won a bitter court case – and had her name legally changed to Frank Leslie – to secure her hold on the company.
Her journalistic instinct was sure. When President Garfield was shot, at 9.30am on July 2 1881, within an hour Miriam had sent two artists to Washington to record the scene, her engravers (needed by all newspapers then for illustrations) worked through the night – and her paper was the only one to provide a pictorial record of the assassination attempt on the following Monday. When Garfield finally died, her reporters were not only at his bedside but in the cell of the murderer as well. Under her aegis, circulation soared from 33,000 to 200,000.
There were lovers, there was a futile last husband whom she dumped, she wrote books, she gave hugely popular lecture tours, she lost and made another fortune, which she left to the suffrage cause. This is an extraordinary life, well told.