Lillian Russell The Iowa Girl Who Took the World By Storm

Lillian Russell was born Helen Louise Leonard in Clinton, Iowa, in the early 1860s . Her father ran a newspaper, her mother scared the local men by speaking her mind, and the baby came out howling like she already had headlines to make.

 She grew up in Chicago, where sin had a better rhythm. Helen sang too loudly, laughed too big, and drove her mother half mad. She got kicked out of a church choir for “indecorous behavior,” which is Victorian code for being interesting. Someone told her nice girls didn’t go onstage. Helen said, “Then I guess I’m not nice.”

 

She was eighteen when she ran away to New York — the filthy, electric carnival of the Gilded Age. Tony Pastor looked her over, saw the cheekbones, the mouth, the trouble. He said, “Helen Leonard sounds like someone who does laundry. You’ll be Lillian Russell.” It was a name made for scandal and silk sheets.

 

By 1881 she was onstage in The Pirates of Penzance, and America lost its collective mind. The New York World called her “the prettiest girl in America.” Another paper called her “a soprano who makes an entrance like a cavalry charge.” A Boston critic said she was “more bosom than brilliance.” She framed that one, saying, “At least he noticed.”

She glowed under the gaslight, wrapped in satin, drowning in feathers. The gowns were so heavy a weaker woman would’ve sunk into the stage. “If a girl is pretty,” she said, “she will be tempted.” Lillian was very pretty, and temptation was her profession.

 Husbands came and went. She burned through them like cigars. Harry Braham was a shy orchestra conductor who probably thought marriage would calm her down. It didn’t. Edward Solomon, a British composer, forgot to mention his other wife back home. “I married him for love,” she told a reporter, “and divorced him for sport.” After that, she didn’t bother with romance unless it paid dividends.

 

Diamond Jim Brady adored her like a worshipper at a jeweled shrine. He bought her emeralds the size of eyes. They thundered through New York in carriages that clinked like treasure chests. When a reporter asked if she loved him, she said, “I love the light when he opens a jewelry box.” Even Brady laughed. They were both predators; they just preferred different prey.

 

Lillian didn’t perform so much as detonate. Her voice was rich, ripe, slightly dirty — like good liquor poured over sin. Critics said she sang “as though applause arrived by freight train.” 

 

Harper’s Weekly said she was “a comet in human form.” The Chicago Tribune suggested she was “too loud, too blonde, too pleased with herself.” She read that one aloud backstage, then toasted herself with champagne.

 

She was the first woman to understand that fame was a costume, and she wore it better than anyone. People swore she bathed in champagne and powdered her face with crushed pearls. She didn’t. She just enjoyed hearing them say it. “If they’re going to make up stories,” she said, “they might as well be good ones.”

 

By her forties, the voice started to crack, the applause slowed, and the champagne got warm. She evolved and became a columnist, scolding the same society that once threw roses at her feet. She told women to exercise, told men to shut up, told everyone to dress better. “Freedom,” she told one crowd, “does not mean looking like a broom.” The crowd roared, half in laughter, half in fear.

 

She backed suffrage, flirted with politics, and somehow ended up advising President Harding — imagine that, America’s golden courtesan turned patriot. In 1922 she went to Europe on government business, supposedly to study immigration, really to shop. She came back with trunks of clothes and a limp. A fall on the voyage home turned to pneumonia. She died in Pittsburgh at sixty-one, still beautiful enough to make men cry. Diamond Jim fainted at her funeral.

 

They called her “the most beautiful woman in America.” Mark Twain called her “the ideal American woman.” Oscar Wilde said her voice had “the color of gold and the shape of sin.” The moralists called her indecent. The critics called her vulgar. They were all right.

 

America in the 1880s liked its women silent, obedient, invisible. Lillian Russell smoked cigars, rode bicycles in bloomers, and smiled like she knew your secrets. She treated men like accessories. She didn’t explain herself — ever. “A woman should never explain anything,” she said. “It ruins the illusion.”

 

That was Lillian Russell — Clinton’s dirtiest miracle. The girl who crawled out of Iowa cornfields and turned America into her mirror. She was everything the country wanted to be: loud, gilded, ambitious, corrupt, and alive.

 

Asked once if she regretted anything, she smiled — that smile that had emptied pockets and hearts alike — and said, “Only that I couldn’t take my own encore.”