After staying with Isia for slightly more than a year, Blanche moved back in with her parents, who had taken a modest apartment in Boston. The cramped flat off Boylston Street—so small, Blanche later wrote, that “there was barely enough space for the piano and ourselves”1—took some getting used to after the luxury of her sister’s Longwood mansion. Boston, however, like every place else she had ever lived, would prove to be only a way station.
Within months of his arrival, her father—bowing to what Blanche called his “irrepressible impulse to travel”—ordered his family to pack up their belongings yet again. This time they were going to New York City, where, so he assured them, he was absolutely certain to strike it rich with his latest invention. Though Isia offered to take Blanche back in and continue her musical studies, James wouldn’t hear of it. A few weeks later, Blanche and her parents, along with her little sister, Lois, were settled in a small apartment on East Twenty-third Street, near Gramercy Park.
Despite the modesty of their living quarters, Blanche was delighted to find herself in “that great center of metropolitan life.” In her memoirs, she describes, in a tone of breathless excitement, the thrill of those early days in New York City, as she wandered the surging streets, taking in the sights: “the splendid shops, the hotels, the restaurants and theatres.”
Broadway offered a particularly dazzling spectacle with its endless procession of fashionable couples, the men with their “flawless top-coats, high-hats, and silver-headed walking sticks,” walking arm in arm with their female companions, who were likewise arrayed in the “very best hats, shoes and gloves.” Every block was a bazaar, lined with alluring shops—jewelers, florists, furriers, haberdashers, confectioners. “Pompous doormen in immense coats, shiny brass belts and buttons” posed in the doorways, while liveried coachmen in “tan boots, white tights, blue jackets, waited obsequiously for the mistresses of carriages who were shopping inside.”2
At dusk, the electric “fire signs” of the “Great White Way” blazed to life. Hansom cabs drew up beneath the brilliant marquee lights, disgorging laughing, chattering patrons who streamed into the Olympia, the Casino, Daly’s, and a dozen other theaters to watch Miss Julia Marlowe in When Knighthood Was in Flower or Miss Ada Rehan in Sweet Nell of Old Drury or young Ethel Barrymore in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines.
And then there was Fifth Avenue, site of the city’s most extravagant homes: the “magnificent abodes,” as Blanche writes, “that gave the impression of royal palaces—the owners royal not because of birth but because of wealth!” Passing the Vanderbilt mansion on Fifty-second Street—a massive redbrick replica of a Renaissance chateau—Blanche wonders “what it must be like to possess such riches.” She sounds (very aptly, as it would happen) like a character out of a Theodore Dreiser novel: a real-life Sister Carrie, a young girl from the provinces with her nose pressed to the glass, hungering for the glamorous life and glittering possessions just beyond her reach.
Blanche, of course, was hardly unique in her obsession with the social elite. It was an age when the doings of the city’s moneyed aristocracy were followed with feverish interest by the public at large—when newspapers lavished coverage on everything from Chauncey DePew’s departure for Palm Beach, to the gown worn by Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes at the Easter cotillion at Sherry’s, to the unforgivable lapse of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Gould’s English butler, Tibbs, who—having surreptitiously sampled his master’s wine—became tipsy at an “intimate dinner” for two dozen guests in honor of Senator and Mrs. John M. Thurston.3 A particularly extravagant event such as the Bradley Martin ball of 1897—attended by seven hundred elaborately costumed guests and featuring a fifty-piece orchestra, floral decorations composed of six thousand orchids and twice as many roses, and a three-hour champagne dinner served by liveried waiters in knee breeches and powdered wigs—could monopolize the front pages for days.4
Most ordinary people, of course, could only view such excess with a mixture of tongue-clucking outrage and titillated envy. Blanche, however, had only to look at her older sister to see that, while the enchanted realm of the city’s “upperdom” was closed to all but the fashionable few, a life of wealth and privilege was certainly available to a young woman who knew how to land the right husband.
Thanks to the generosity of her brother Frank, who was prospering as a businessman in Boston, Blanche was able to continue her singing lessons. She attended a studio near Union Square, where she joined a “little coterie of embryo artists”—among them Bessie Abott, who would become one of the leading sopranos of the day.5 Later, Blanche studied with Frank Damrosch, a prominent figure in the New York City musical scene, who served as chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera House and founded the Musical Arts Society, an a cappella organization composed of experienced soloists who held concerts at Carnegie Hall.
Blanche displayed such talent that Damrosch invited her to join his group. A few weeks later, she was performing at Carnegie Hall in a gown of pale blue tulle, fashioned by her mother. Her future seemed limitless. “In that great whirling vortex of metropolitan life,” she recalls in her memoirs, “my ambition soared.”6 Before long, she was auditioning for Jean de Reszke, the great Polish tenor, and singing for the world-famous diva Madame Melba, who seconded De Reszke’s opinion that Blanche ought to study in Europe.7
It was a heady time for Blanche. Escorted by her musician friend Victor Harris, she was part of the first-night audience to see De Reszke and Emma Eames perform Verdi’s Otello at the Metropolitan. She sang for the popular composer Robert Coverly at a private gathering and dined with Stanford White, the city’s leading architect, designer of the Washington Square Arch, the New York Herald Building, and the Century Club, among other landmarks.8 The meal—a typical Gilded Age blowout that began with oysters before proceeding to soup, sweetbreads, filet of beef, canvasback duck, celery salad, French peas, and string peas, with pistachio ice cream, fruit, and coffee to close—took place on the rooftop restaurant of Madison Square Garden, another building designed by White, who held forth during dinner with his usual bon vivant flair.
Nine years later, White would be shot to death on that very site by the millionaire madman Harry Thaw, whose showgirl wife, Evelyn Nesbit, had been White’s onetime mistress. The killing of Stanford White in 1906 would become the city’s second wildly sensational murder case of the new century.
The first, of course, was the one that Blanche herself would soon be embroiled in—a scandal that would consume her life and effectively put an end to her dreams of artistic glory.