Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [32]
Crippen made sure his wife had all the money she needed to live well in New York and to pursue her opera lessons. But Cora was growing disenchanted with opera, acknowledging at last what her teachers had recognized long before, that she had neither the voice nor the stage presence to succeed in so lofty a pursuit. She wrote to Crippen that she now planned to try making a career doing “music hall sketches.” In America it was known as Vaudeville; the British called it Variety.
This troubled Crippen. Vaudeville seemed tawdry compared to opera, and even compared to variety, which as Crippen knew was popular in London and becoming increasingly respectable. Even the Prince of Wales was said to enjoy a good night of variety turns. Though some music halls still served as points of commerce for prostitutes and pickpockets, most had become clean and safe. Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Lloyd, and Vesta Tilley did turns, and within a decade so too would Anna Pavlova and the Russian ballet, first introduced to Britain at the Palace.
Crippen wrote to Cora and urged her to reconsider. He recommended that she come right away to London. Here at least she could perform variety without taint.
She agreed to join him, though probably neither love nor Crippen’s plea had much to do with her decision. More likely her career doing musical sketches in New York had also been a failure, and now she wanted to try her hand in London, where she could sing before a sophisticated audience more appreciative of her true talent. Her impending arrival meant that Crippen had to find new lodgings that were large enough and luxurious enough to accommodate a wife with so swollen a sense of self-regard and need. He chose an apartment in Bloomsbury on a pretty street in the shape of a half-circle, one of London’s many “crescents.” This was South Crescent, off Tottenham Court Road, one block from the British Museum and an easy walk to the Munyon’s office on Shaftesbury.
Cora arrived in August, and at once Crippen sensed a difference. “I may say that when she came to England from America her manner towards me was entirely changed, and she had cultivated a most ungovernable temper, and seemed to think I was not good enough for her, and boasted of the men of good position traveling on the boat who had made a fuss of her, and, indeed, some of these visited her at South Crescent, but I do not know their names.”
IN BLOOMSBURY CRIPPEN HAD CHOSEN a neighborhood in which an array of forces then driving deep change in Britain were fully at play. Just east lay Bloomsbury Square and Bloomsbury Road, where within a few years Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, critic Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, and other members of their cadre of writers, poets, and gleaming personalities would become legendary as the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia would marry and take her husband’s name, Woolf. A few blocks to the west, across Tottenham Court Road, was territory soon to be claimed by the visual arts counterpart to Bloomsbury, the Fitzroy Street Group, whose members converged on the Fitzroy Tavern, built in 1897 at the corner of Charlotte and Windmill streets, four blocks due west of the Crippens’ new home. The group’s most prominent and eventually most infamous member was the painter Walter Sickert, who from time to time in the years following his death would be considered a suspect in the Ripper murders. The Crippens shared the sidewalk with the brightest intellects of the day, including G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), and the scholars of University College and the British Museum.
The neighborhood vibrated with sexual energy. Among the Bloomsbury Group, once it achieved full intellectual flower, conversation about sex flowed easily. The trigger, according to Virginia Woolf, was a moment when Lytton Strachey, the critic and biographer, walked into a drawing room where she and her sister Vanessa were seated.
Virginia wrote, “The door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr. Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold.