Talk:Henry Symes Lehr

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Harry Lehr was a former actor at Baltimore's Paint & Powder club, best known for his female roles. In New York City, he supposedly worked as a champagne salesman and was the roommate of his "best friend" Tom Wannamaker. Lehr earned a reputation as a man of fashion and bragged of his ability to obtain goods and services from merchants for free. He gradually ingratiated himself into the company of Caroline Astor, grande dame of New York and Newport.

Harry Lehr is largely a footnote in social history. Cleveland Amory, the society chronicler pointedly dismisses him as a "champagne salesman" in his epic portrait of the American establishment "Who Killed Society?". Perhaps a better definition of this curious and all but forgotten figure comes in Jerry Patterson's "The First Four Hundred: New York and the Gilded Age" in which the author refers to him as a "malicious and opportunistic homosexual who insinuated himself into New York Society..."

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Time Magazine 1944

Died. Lady Decies, 72, prominent socialite of the prewar Paris-New York set; of coronary thrombosis; in Manhattan. The daughter of Philadelphia Banker Joseph William Drexel, wealthy "Bessie" was a widow at 27, at 29 married Harry Symes Lehr, the Mauve Decade's "court jester" to U.S. Society. Under his tutelage she became the lush favorite of the Four Hundred, told much if not all in a bitter book ("King Lehr" and the Gilded Age) written after his death in 1929. Among the book's revelations: Lehr was a homosexual and had consented to marry only after she offered him $25,000 a year and expenses. When she was 64, she decided she wanted to "attend the coronation," married Lord Decies (and outlived him by four months). Quitting Paris for the U.S. when the Nazis invaded, Lady Decies continued her society shenanigans, to the edification of provincial Americans. Her bejeweled presence kept society reporters scratching for phrases to surpass the brash New York Daily News's report of her wearing a tiara "the size of a nail keg."

• Born - Married - Died, TIME Magazine, 26. Juni 1944

--Franz (Fg68at) de:Talk 13:46, 29 December 2015 (UTC)