England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [31]
Emma perhaps preferred to model outside of the Academy. She certainly seems to have posed for Romney. His paintings of the time show models who have resemblances to Emma. One early biographer claimed Emma worked from the same Covent Garden tavern as a Miss Arabel, who had modeled for George Romney and introduced him to Emma. Both gossip columnists and Emma's friend, the artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, claimed Romney met her in her youth. A letter Emma wrote to him in 1791, begging him not to divulge details about her early life, indicates that she knew him before she became Greville's mistress. "You was the first dear friend I open'd my heart to…. you have seen and discoursed with me in my poorer days, you have known me in my poverty…. I own through distress my virtue was vanquished."9 Poverty, distress, and vanquished virtue are extreme words to describe her restrained life as Greville's "fair tea maker." Emma surely refers to the period in the 1770s when her "virtue" was actually threatened. Age only fourteen, it seems, Emma was a favorite model for both Reynolds and Romney. As a caricature of her drawn in 1798-99 later implied, she may also have met Henry Fuseli, friend of Reynolds, whose Nightmare shows a dark-haired model who looks like Emma lying in a faint across a bed.
Emma's work as a model provided vital experience for her next position. In early 1779, Emma left Covent Garden and her brief flirtation with tavern nightlife for good. London's most celebrated quack doctor, James Graham, had been searching the taverns of Covent Garden, and he had picked Emma to star in his absurd, exotic Temple of Health.
CHAPTER 10
Celestial Goddess
In 1778, James Graham, entrepreneur, sex therapist, and showman, burst onto London society. He hired a townhouse in the fashionable area of the Adelphi, off the Strand by the Thames in central London, called it a "Temple of Health," and gave nightly lectures about sexual matters and the power of electricity, as harnessed by him, to cure all ills. Graham was a supreme showman and his lectures were extravaganzas featuring explosions, smoke, fireworks, music, and, to London's utter delight, a phalanx of glamour girls posing in flimsy white dresses. In an adjoining room was the Electrical Throne, which dispensed electric shocks to clients. Next door lay his prized Celestial Bed, which, he claimed, guaranteed "perfect Babies even to the Barren." Dubbed the "Emperor of the Quacks," the handsome thirty-five-year-old with a genius for self-promotion became London's first celebrity guru, and the girls on the stage were his stars.
Emma never discussed her early life, so she never wrote that she modeled in the Temple, but she seems to have told her friends that she did so, and she later sponsored stories in the newspapers that referred to her as a Goddess of Health. Dubious as the Temple was, to be an assistant to Graham was a much less scandalous occupation than being a tavern girl, and it was a job Emma felt she could acknowledge. Her early life as Graham's model was often central to newspaper reports about her—even thirty years later—and Emma never denied it, although she refuted other assertions. Somehow she managed to make the leap from lowly tavern girl to mistress to the aristocracy, and it is most likely she attained this promotion through dancing at the Temple.
It seems that Emma began work in early January. Graham combed Covent Garden looking for girls with confidence, natural grace, beauty, and the appearance of good health. He also advertised in the newspapers for a young woman who was "personally agreeable, blooming, healthy and sweet-tempered… She is to live in the Physician's family, to be daily dressed in white silk robes with a rich rose coloured girdle. If she can sing, play on the harpsichord or speak French, greater wages will be given. Enquire Dr Graham, Adelphi