MARIE DUPLESSIS : AGENOR DE GUICHE MAKES AN APPEARANCE IN THE TEENAGER'S LIFE AND SHE CHANGES HER NAME FROM ALPHONSINE PLESSIS

Grand Horizontals by Virginia Rounding is a primary reference for this month's post.

Excerpt page 20 : "The women of the uppermost ranks, the most desirable demi-mondaines, were also often referred to by the epithets grands or hautes - grandes cocottes, for instance, rather than simple cocottes. The pseudonymous writer "Zed" refers in his Le Demi-monde sous le Second Empire of 1892 to grandes abandonnees (The great abandoned ones) while Frederic Loliee in his Les Femmes du Second Empire of 1907 uses the term grandes horizontales (literally, great horizontals, or women flat on their backs). Collective expressions for the great demi-mondaines included la jaute glanterie (literally high gallantry, chivalry, or intrigue, and colloquially the top rank of kept women) and la Haute Bicherie..."

What I found interesting is that Agenor De Guiche made an appearance in the lives of many courtesans and seems in Virginia Rounding's book to be credited with being the man who turned Alphonsine Plessis into a grandes horizontales. Although De Guiche's family was aristocratic, they had lost their wealth during the French Revolution and so he was not an especially rich young man. When he met Alphonsine he was 21 years old and she was 16. He had finished a couple years of higher education and wanted to bring her up to his intellectual level, though he was not an especially bright student himself. This young man paid for Alphonsine to have lessons in dancing and piano and improved her reading and writing; she became an avid reader who eventually developed an impressive collection of 200 or so books and held literary and intellectual salons. His interest in her seems to have been sincere. The young man spent about 10,000 francs on her in three months but then, in 1840, went to England and took a break from their relationship. By the time he returned, he was not the only man interested in the budding courtesan. 

According to author Virginia Rounding many a mother feared her son would spend his fortune away and acquire venereal diseases by having sex with prostitutes and courtesans.

Excerpt page 36 : She was not unusual, among the grisettes and courtesans of Louis Philippe's reign, in deciding to change her name; it was also a very common practice among the ranks of ordinary prostitutes.  The choice of a new name could serve both to add a touch of glamour and to depersonalize the prostitute, so that she could feel she was merely performing a role, disconnected from her real self.  There was also often a desire to disconnect from her previous life and from her family, either out of shame or from a desire to escape and not be easily traced...

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MARIE DUPLESSIS : GRAND HORIZONTALES : PARISIAN COURTESANS OF THE NAPOLEAN III ERA

Virginia Rounding's book Grande Horizontales begins with the assumption that Courtesans were prostitutes of the highest quality and because of this, the most expensive. So, her book begins with quite an interesting expose on prostitution in 19th century Paris. Here at Mistress Manifesto - BlogSpot, we yearn to define what being a Mistress means, and I acknowledge that the assumption of prostitution is there along with the idea that a Mistress is Kept for sex - only or primarily for sex. After many years of blogging I still find the question to be one that has many answers, but I think mistresses are in relationships that are more interesting than "just sex." That said, a prostitute can become a mistress and visa versa but exactly at what point does a woman become a Courtesan, since some of these women did "rise up" out of prostitution? Maria Duplessis's story has an answer to when.

Grande Horizontales focuses on four Courtesans, and this month I will focus on Marie Duplessis who died at the young age of twenty-three of tuberculosis. One of her lovers, Alexandre Dumas, based his main character in the novel La Dame Aux Camelias, which was published in 1848. Camelias were Marie's favorite flowers. She was married in 1846 to Count Edouard de Perregauz, until her death.

MARIE DUPLESSIS

"The Virtuous Courtesan"

"La Dame aux Camélias"

Alphonsine Plessis

Countess Edouard de Perregaux (She kept her name Marie Duplessis though.)

1824 - 1847

Her father was the illegitimate son of a priest and a prostitute who was abusive to his wife, Alphonsine's mother. The poor woman took off to Paris hoping to support herself and, eventually, her daughters but she died when Alphonsine was only six. Abandoned into the care of relatives, rumor was that the girl was sexually abused from the age of eleven and a half.  Accused of being a seductress, she was sent back to the father who didn't want her. He left her and her sister to become apprentice laundresses. At thirteen and fourteen years old she was a blanchisseuse. This was the fate of many girls in those days.

Excerpt Page 32 : "Such an apprenticeship involved long hours of hard and repetitive physical labour... First piles of dirty linen would be sorted and washed, the actual washing sometimes done in a communal washroom by a washerwoman, a lower level of work than the blanchisseuse.  Much of the work of the blanchisseuse consisted of ironing, which would be done at a large table covered with a heavy blanket, itself covered with calico.  Several irons were heated on the large cast-iron stove, and it would be the job of the apprentice to keep this stove filled - always being careful not to overfill it - with coke... The blanchissuese herself and her older employees would be busy ironing intricate objects such as caps, shirt-fronts, petticoats, and embroidered drawers, while the apprentice would be put to work on the plain items, the stockings and the handkerchiefs..."

What happened next would shock today. Her father then gave her over to a man who was sixty to seventy years old and might have actually sold her to him. When her employer realized the situation, she was fired. To escape this man Alphonsine took a job as a hotel maid. Her father than gave her over to another man. Marie would not talk about it, but there is a strong possibility that her father than took her for himself, committing rape and incest on his own daughter. In 1839 The father and daughter suddenly upped and went to Paris.

As I read these passages I do wonder if Alphonsine's father intended for her to become a prostitute as his mother had been. As author Rounding describes it, French Parisian culture had an understanding of prostitution, and many prostitutes' were legally registered. In Paris the father again left her with relatives and, now only fifteen, she was placed as an apprentice with a dressmaker. She worked long hours - 7 am to 8 pm six days a week. She attached lace and embroidery to decorate dresses there. A dressmaker did not want apprentices who became prostitutes but it was not unusual for them, due to the low, unlivable pay to become grisettes - a woman who took on a paying lover.

Alphonsine, despite her hard work, may have been going hungry. 

Then one day she and two friends accepted the offer of a day away by the owner of a restaurant who probably knew they were hungry.

Excerpt Page 35: "Quite who seduced whom, who exploited whom, is debatable: Alphonsine, with her precocious sexual experience, was an easy prey for a man with a certain amount of sophistication on the look-out for a young and pretty mistress, while she was quick to realize that, if she played her cards right, Nollet was in a position to offer her a way out of a life of drudgery and relative poverty. Events progressed rapidly. Within a month Monsieur Nollet had installed Alphonsine in a small apartment in the rue de l'Arcade and given her three thousand francs for her initial needs."

Poverty, hard physical labor, and sexual abuse would give Alphonsine motivation to improve her life, quite obviously. Her relatives in Paris, realizing also what she had done, outcasted her. She was alone in the world. Nollet was her first known patron and she soon overspent for his means and took other lovers as well. It was as if she gave in to her fate, or realized there was only one way to survive.

Alphonsine Plessis would fashion herself Marie Duplessis and rise out of poverty and obscurity by becoming an honored Courtesan. To do that she needed the patronage of a man and one known to other Courtesans came into her life. The next seven years or so of her short life would be dramatic and, perhaps because she had to know she was dying, gravely ill, she earnestly sought entertainments.

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Notes: The image on the book is not that of Maria Duplessis.

Here at Mistress Manifesto I've featured a great many Courtesans and Paris seems to have been the epicenter of Courtesan culture. You can click on the tag below to bring up posts such as Paris, or Courtesan.

CAROLE TREGOFF : MISTRESS OF SOCIETY SURGEON BERNARD FINCH and CO-CONSPIRATOR IN THE MURDER OF HIS WIFE BARBARA FINCH

The book is old and the last copy available at a major city library. I'll be using "A Murder in West Covina," as well as numerous news stories to reveal this story of love gone wrong. The murder made headlines for three years back in the day and attracted Hollywood actors claiming they were doing research for future roles.

Of course we know that not all "love triangles," which is how the murder was typified in the press at the time, end in murder or scandal. (Some people choose to be in a triad.) Because it's clear that wife Barbara Jean Finch was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her husband the doctor, before he murdered her, it's difficult for me to think of this as a "love triangle."

As a side, I first learned about this murder when I was reading around the journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was featured here in April 2023, titled "Pulitzer-Prize Nominated Reporter Dorothy Kilgallen* and Pop Singer Johnnie Ray : A Flaunted Unconventional Romance In The 1950's Before She Died." Kilgallen, married with children, a popular panelist on a television game show named What's My Line, first made her name as a rare woman journalist back in the 1950's and 1960's and she was very good at that too. (Her own death was suspicious and in recent years there has been an attempt to reopen the case.) In 1960 Kilgallen covered this trial.

CAROLE ANN TREGOFF

(1937 - ?) 

After being freed from prison, in May 1969, Carole lived under an assumed name.

I was unable to find an obituary for her. 

Image from Newspapers.com

clipped by jamesdhug

Our Mistress of the Month for July 2025 here at Mistress Manifesto, is Carole Tregoff, who modeled briefly and became the Mistress of a "society surgeon" Doctor Raymond Bernard "Bernie" Finch, who murdered his wife, Barbara Jean Finch.  Finch was arrested and charged with First Degree murder. Carole was arrested and charged the same. How innocent was she?

The murder occurred on July 18, 1959 when Carole was 22 old. Barbara had been shot dead, once in the back. Carol hid in the bushes and later drove all the way to Vegas alone, perhaps in a state of shock. (Bernard was 41 and his wife, Barbara, was 36.)

Bernard and Barbara had been married six years and both had been married before. Barbara had brought one child into the marriage she'd had with her first husband, Lyle Daugherty, and had another child with the doctor. A young woman from Sweden served as the children's nanny and was important to the testimony in the case.

In an interesting twist, in 1951 there had been accusations of a "wife swap." Bernard's high school sweetheart, Frances Simpson and he had married. Next door lived Lyle Daughterly and his wife - Barbara Jean.  It was Doctor Bernard Finch who delivered Barbara, who he would eventually marry, by caesarian, of the daughter who he'd become step-father to. Eventually Frances married Lyle. The two had said they only got involved after divorces but there was publicity that turned it into a sordid "wife swapping" ordeal. 

Carole Tregoff had also been married before and was known in Vegas as Mrs. James Pappa. Oddly, in some news articles she is identified as the doctor's "assistant." The day after the murder, detectives found the red haired, light skinned beauty, living in Vegas and working at The Sands hotel and casino as a waitress. Yes really! So Vegas was home for her, not West Covina; this is not an easy commute by driving. Asked where the doctor was, she said he was at her apartment. Soon after, he was arrested. Carole lied to protect Bernard - and herself. She claimed that he had been with her in Vegas for a long weekend and gave a rather detailed account of their doings.

Carole was asked if Bernard supported her financially (i.e. if she was his Mistress) to which she answered that he had given her money but never supported her. She said that she and Bernard had intended to divorce their spouses and remarry to each other. The two had been living together in Vegas, then called "shacking up." 

In subsequent testimony, Carole's stories didn't match. She claimed that she had moved to Vegas to avoid being called into the divorce action between Bernard and Barbara that May.

It turned out she hired a hitman to murder Barbara. He took the money.  He didn't do the deed.

Soon the trial would make headlines.

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* Re Dorothy Kilgallen : in 1960 she went to cover the trial of society surgeon Bernard Finch, accused of shooting his wife Barbara once in the back while his co-conspirator and mistress, Carole Tregoff cowered in a clump of bougainvillea. " The crime was s slapdash do-it- yourself job done after a hoodlum named Cody took payment for the hit from the lovers, lost his nerve, blew the money in Vegas and then lied to Finch about having done the murder.

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April 2023

PULITZER-PRIZE NOMINATED REPORTER DOROTHY KILGALLEN and  POP SINGER JOHNNIE RAY : A FLAUNTED UNCONVENTIONAL ROMANCE IN THE 1950's BEFORE SHE DIED

February 2017

EVELYN NESBIT : TEENAGE MISTRESS OF ARCHITECT STANFORD WHITE  and  WIFE OF HARRY K. THAW - MURDER SCANDAL

SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON ALLOWS HIS WIFE LADY EMMA HAMILTON AN AFFAIR WITH HORATIO NELSON, DUKE OF BRONTE : ANOTHER PREGNANCY AND SCANDAL

1798 - 1800ish

For now Emma, as Sir William Hamilton's wife, was a society woman, a celebrated hostess, and had the friendship of Queens, even if her position as a Lady was not equal. She was a fashion influencer at the time too and a celebrity. When Horatio Nelson, "The Hero of the Nile" needed to recover his health after battle, Emma had him stay with her and her husband in Naples and gave him a lavish fortieth birthday party where eight hundred Neopolitan dignitaries and other important, including English, guests attended and another thousand came for the dancing. 

Revolutions were occurring in Europe - not just the French - and shifting power was a threat to all the royals and aristocrats. Sir William was philosophical and invited Nelson to live with them, a great show of friendship meant to end the rumors. In fact, Sir William could not deny that his wife and Nelson were growing close and that he and his wife had taken to separate apartments and had become friends. 

When the French invaded Naples, once again Nelson prevailed and was credited with saving the city and restoring peace, for which Queen Maria Carolina was especially thankful to Sir William, Horatio Nelson, and Lady Emma Hamilton.  Nelson was created Duke of Bronte as his reward and Sir William, increasingly I'll, sought to end his Diplomatic service and return to England. Insiders knew that age was catching up with Sir William and his health was not good, as he suffered from digestive issues.

Her husband had been an English diplomat for thirty-seven years and wanted a sabbatical but was quickly replaced. The Queen, Lady and Sir William Hamilton, Nelson, and their entourage, left Naples as more conflicts endangered them and Napoleon and his army's approached, threatening to take over their territories and rule over them. They went from Germany to Hungary, where they were feted by Prince Esterhazy and Emma entertained by singing along with the music of the composer, Haydn, to Czechoslovakia. The travel was escape as well as vacation.

Considered to be two of the sexiest people alive, gossips believed that Emma and Horatio were having an affair. By early 1800, they most certainly were. Thirteen years into her life in Naples, Emma became pregnant and then there was no denying it. She had risked loosing everything she had gained by being with him and had unprotected sex with a man she was not married to. Emma began to show pregnant and had to know that by the laws of the 18th century, the child would belong to her husband legally. Nelson was a married man too.

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EMMA WAS NOT SHY ABOUT LETTING SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON KNOW SHE WANTED TO MARRY HIM and AT LAST SHE BECAME LADY EMMA HAMILTON

Emma did not shyly wait around for a proposal like an 18th century woman was supposed to do. She told Sir William Hamilton that she loved him and wanted to marry him. Famous now as a beauty, a model, a dancer - and an intellect - faithful and loyal to him, she pledged to continue to make him happy.

While Sir William denied to all to his friends - who asked for the truth - that he had married her, there were those who believed he already had. By 1790 it was the gossip in fashionable London that the Ambassador to Naples and his mistress were about to arrive. It was a bit of the kind of scandal people loved. Those of his rank imagined that he was not her sexual partner, perhaps because he was, in fact, a senior. So it went with the English.

However, those of his friends who lived in Naples and had seen them as a couple thought otherwise. They encouraged him to marry Emma. Even the Queen Maria Carolina of Naples and the Two Sicilies encouraged marriage.

Emma traveled England with Sir William and his entourage. Her mother was part of the entourage but the daughter she had been forced to send away by Charles Greville, now nine years old, went unvisited by Emma. (Instead her mother, Mary, called Mrs. Cadogan, went.)

His family had a reason to discourage a marriage besides Emma's background and that was that they wanted his estate intact to inherit it. He claimed her to have made him extremely happy. He suggested that they would be "engaged for life" but proudly seeing how popular she was, he began to reconsider. Ultimately, and by my way of thinking, much to his credit, the man began to follow his heart.

Excerpt page 158 : Sir William confessed to his friends that he had decided to "make an honest Woman of her." He promised that he would never set her above visiting female aristocrats by allowing her to present them to Maria Carolina. Declaring himself entirely confident about the future, he cheerfully knocked two years off Emma's age. He wrote to his friend, Georgiana, Countess Spencer, mother of the Duchess of Devonshire:

A man of 60 intending to marry a beautiful young Woman of 24 ad whose character on her first onset of life will not bear a severe scrutiny, seems to be a very imprudent step, and so it certainly would be 99 times in a 100, but I flatter myself I am not deceived in Emma's [resent character --- We have lived together five years and a half, and not a day has passed without her having testified her true repentance for the past.

On August 28, Sir William attended court at Windsor and gained the king's consent to the marriage. Two days before her marriage, she sat for artist George Romney for the last time.  The artist had created dozens of paintings of Emma, but for the first time he wrote Lady Hamilton rather than Mrs. Emma Hart in his record of models who sat for him.

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AMY LYON AKA "MRS. EMMA HART" AS THE MISTRESS OF HONORABLE CHARLES GREVILLE BECOMES THE MISTESS OF SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON

And then she met the one... 

But it did not start out as expected.

Amy Lyon had accepted to be called Mrs. Emma Hart while the Mistress of Charles Greville, who wanted to remake her into a meeker and more conservative woman - the "virtuous housewife" which meant repressing her true self and acting.  He had banished the daughter she bore with another man as a sixteen year old, rented her a house on the outskirts of London and installed her mother to keep her company.  Emma aimed to please him and keep his patronage and told him he made her happy and that she loved him; maybe she did. 

Greville had status in English society as a second son in the historical Warwick family but he had not attracted a wife who would bring her inheritance into the marriage. Perhaps for a time he thought that being known to have a Mistress might give him a desirable reputation among men. But his search for a wife did not end with having Emma and nor did it prevent him from having an affair with Elizabeth, Lady Craven. He was out of love for Emma and sought to find a way to send her on her way without drama.

The newly widowed Sir William Hamilton was a relative that Greville wished to court for money.  He fifty-five years old - much older than Emma - and as the fourth and youngest son of Lord Archibald Hamilton, worked as a diplomat assigned top Naples. He came to visit and they delighted each other but Lord Hamilton knew that Greville would soon get rid of Emma. Emma was ignorant of Greville's plans and continued to tell the man that she missed him and belonged to him and could only go so far in entertaining Hamilton.

Excerpt page 103 : Emma's new friend had grown up in the royal court with the future King George III.  His mother, Lady Jane Hamilton, had been the Mistress of Frederick, Prince of Wales, from about 1736 until 1745.  Frederick appointed her his wife's lady of the bedchamber.  Then, dizzy with lust, he also made her the queen's Mistress of the robes - not even the poor queen;s clothes were free from her rival's claws.  Lady Jane possessed the absolute sway over Frederick and his family thought her son's earl;y life.  Sir William called King George his foster brother, boasting that "my Mother reared us and the same nurse suckled us.  With this he hinted what many suspected: he was the Prince of Wales's son....

Greville negotiated for Sir William Hamilton to take on Emma.  He was calculating.  He claimed that having a Mistress was preventing him a good marriage, that he admired her and was attracted to her but that she was in love with Sir William. He said she had become obedient and of "good humor" and that considering all the advantages she might bring into a relationship, she was not one to demand a man spend on her. By pushing his lover Emma on Hamilton, he reasoned he was not abandoning her and she accepted the opportunity to travel and visit with Hamilton without knowing.  It took him two years to move Emma and her mother on, beginning with six weeks of tourist travel.

1786

Avoiding the problems in France that would result a couple years later in the French Revolution, they traveled to Geneva first and then Naples where the mother and daughter were to live at Palazzo Sessa, Hamilton's estate. Emma turned twenty-one.  Also there was Mrs. Anne Damer, a sculptress who Sir William Hamilton was thinking of marrying and twice Emma's age.  Hamilton quickly decided in favor of Emma, and he began to treat her like a princess but began to treat her mother like a servant.

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PREGNANT EMMA LYON - THE FUTURE LADY HAMILTON - WAS THROWN TO THE STREET and THE HONORABLE CHARLES GREVILLE RESCUED HER - TEMPORARILY

 

She was afraid... Maybe she had not used contraception or he had not wanted her to or she was unlucky. Or maybe she had hoped to make Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh give her a more formal arrangement or maybe even marry, her for it was not unheard of that a powerful or rich man would take a woman such as herself to be a wife. Harry did pay Madam Kelly to release her from any contract and set her up in one of many of the houses he owned in London. But she kept her pregnancy a secret for three months. Now that she was officially kept, she would only be able to go out on the town with a female chaperone or Sir Harry himself... But he was not much interested in visiting with her and was a no show while she waited.  Secretly, he was going broke... Emma became desperate and clingy when she did see Sir Harry and he was furious when she told him the truth. She was sixteen years old and Harry put her out, abandoning her. She had to go back to being an "independent companion." As her pregnancy advanced she increasingly appealed to Charles Greville to take her as his Mistress and be her savior.

Still hoping the father of her child, unmarried as he was, would change his mind and at least support her through the pregnancy, Emma took to being the tragic heroine of her own drama. Greville took to being the one who owed nothing and had all the power. He wanted her only on his own terms which meant that she be loyal and faithful only to him and sever contact with any old lovers and give up the life of an escort and prostitute. When she finally went to Greville, a servant took her to a "laying in house" where she was secreted to have the baby. 

Childbirth killed one woman in ten in those days but Emma made it through the birth to a daughter she also named Emma...

Excerpt page 80 : After birth, well-off women relaxed in their rooms, cosseted by the servants, showing off the new arrival to visitors while languidly sipping gruel tea, a special hot spiced wine mixture called caudal.  Emma, however, had to return to Greville.  Her daughter was boarded with a wet nurse, probably near the laying-in house. Greville aimed to ensure she would have few opportunities to journey into town and visit her child.  he sent little Emma off to her great-grandmother in Hawarden as soon as possible. Emma knew what was expected of her; she had to pretend that her pregnancy never happened.  Within a week or so she was traveling in a coach to a new home in Paddington, West London. There, she began to reinvent herself. Amy Lyon, the flamboyant would-be actress and extroverted girl about town, became Mrs. Emma Hart, just arrived from Chester, Charles Greville's quiet and terribly shy new Mistress.

In a village on the rural outskirts of London, Greville rented Emma a small house where she was to be retired and become exclusively his.  Her mother Mary, only in her late 30's herself, was already there to live with her. Not only was Emma to go by Mrs. Hart, but her mother was to assume the name of Mrs. Cadogan. Greville had not the money or standing of Sir Harry but he was still a second son of Lord Brooke, who was made Earl of Warwick in 1759, and he still had the reputation of a man who spent money on women. He had been unable to attract a wife, especially not a wife who would bring money into the marriage from her family. He aimed to reform or inhibit or control Emma.

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EMMA HAMILTON (AMY LYON) : HER MISTRESS MOM PROVIDED A BETTER LIFE FOR THE BOTH OF THEM : EMMA GREATLY EXCEEDED ALL EXPECTATIONS FOR SOMEONE BORN TO BE A DOMESTIC SERVANT

England's Mistress is a beautifully written book by Kate Williams that was a delight to read, beginning with the descriptions of life in 18th century England for the poorest of the poor. I began to see the sights and smell the smells.

As I read the story of Emma Hamilton, I was reminded that she had much in common with other women - Courtesans and Mistresses - who rose up from humble or even devastating beginnings through beauty and intellect, to a more adventurous and unconventional life. I'm also reminded that it was and is possible to be shunned from acceptable society but never the less eventually prevail to be esteemed by it and also, finally, that a hard past doesn't excluded someone from love and marriage.

As I read the books about women's lives in previous centuries, I'm also glad that we women have more choices. Overall, we have been able to be more independent, to become educated, to volunteer, to hold jobs and have careers, to own our own money and property, to choose to be unmarried or not ... 

EMMA HAMILTON 

Amy Lyon 

Mrs. Emma Hart

Lady Emma Hamilton

1765 - 1815

Born into extreme poverty in the coal mining village not far from Liverpool, Amy Lyon had one great advantage - her mother Mary. Though her husband, Amy's father, died when Amy was an infant, somehow Mary provided for her daughter without remarriage. There was some mysterious scandal associated with Amy's father's death - alcohol poisoning or suicide perhaps, maybe mining accident or murder. Or perhaps the scandal was that Mary had become a  Mistress. After all, her mother was widowed at only twenty- two and Amy was fatherless - by those days standards, an orphan. 

Neither mother or daughter lived up to the expectations of suspicious and hateful neighbors. Were they witches? Mary moved the two of them in with relatives who weren't happy about it and navigated a class structure that intended to keep people in the position of their birth. The story was that Mary was Mistress to Sir John Glynne or Lord Halifax but that would be some stretch. It was probably one of Glynne's estate employees who kept Mary, someone who provided her with little extras.

Excerpts pages 18 - 19 : Mary was surely lover to a man with money for a sustained period of time, perhaps throughout Emma's childhood. It is unlikely that Emma survived on potatoes and old cheese that made up the diet of her neighbors. Like all country people, Hawarden villagers were stunted and sunken- eyed through malnutrition. They suffered from rickets, and their hair, teeth, and skin betrayed their lack of protein. Emma grew tall, strong, and beautiful, with a thick mane of hair and strong white teeth. She had sparking eyes, clear skin, voluptuous good health, and bounding energy. In the 1760's and 1770's, England was racked with famines, a smallpox epidemic, and sweeping influenza, but Emma appears to have suffered no severe childhood illnesses. Thomas Pettigrew, one of Lord Nelson's early biographers (Lord Nelson being important to Emma's story...) who knew Emma's London employer, Dr. Budd, noted that when she worked as a servant she had no "means to cultivate her intellectual faculties," so she must have learned to read, write, and do simple addition as a child. Somehow, Mary found money that protected Emma from the worst of village hardship and helped her grow into a beauty.

After Sir John Glynne's death, perhaps because the estate employees had to move on, Mary and Emma traveled to London. Emma was twelve years old, the age poor girls then became domestic servants, and she obtained employment with Dr. Honorotus Leigh Thomas. She was likely an unpaid child laborer and may have done hard physical labor such as hauling coal, pumping water, and splitting firewood as she was at the very bottom of servility.

Excerpts: page 21 and 22 : ... Within a few months, the hands of most young maids were scarred with burns, and the most common cause of death for eighteenth century girls was burns or scalds.... Families such as the Thomases burned over a ton of coal every six weeks, and the walls, floors, ceilings, and furniture needed regular scrubbing to remove the black dust. It could take a whole day to clean a room properly... Worst of all, like all girls in her position, Emma had to feign servility and respectful admiration for her employers ...

Perhaps the worst plight of servant girls was what we call sexual harassment and rape today.

 

Excerpt page 22 : Masters saw their young servants as easy prey. Since most, like Emma, spent much of their day cleaning isolated rooms alone, they were easy to trap and grope.  At night there was even more opportunity, for they slept in unlocked rooms or on the floor.  The master usually beat the servants (women were not legally permitted to punish them) and often backed up his physical violence with harassment - thinking it a good way to keep the girls in check...  The typical eighteenth century man simply seduced his servants and fired them when he was bored of them.

Emma found herself unemployed after a few months with the Thomases and perhaps it was only that she could not keep up with the work. At the time servant girls were supposedly ones to fall in love with their masters (despite such treatment*) and to live on fantasies of becoming married. In Emma's case, escape to London, 180 miles south, was her dream and the coach ride was probably only possible because her mother gave her the fair. This ride in itself would have been rough, extremely uncomfortable, and shared with others. Hundreds came to London with hopes of a better life every day. There was an anti-immigrant sentiment and many were soon locked up into jails through innocent though there were criminals among them. Girls were procured for brothels by "motherly" types. Luckily Emma was hired by a middle class couple, the Budd's, who might have, like many of their status, hoped a country girl would be more easily manageable and accept lower or no pay. Servants for aristocrats were hired only through personal recommendations.

London was teeming with people who were desperate. It was filthy, and often on fire. London also had the royal, the rich; exclusive shopping and luxury living. So the new townhouse owned by the Budds and implied better status of servitude must have been a relief. But Emma was not to remain there for long and would bounce around from employers and brothels.

Stick with me as the story of this Mistress of the Month, who became beloved in England's late 18th century, as I unfold her story!

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* My opinion as this statement by the author leads me to think the girls were masochists. 

If interested in Mistresses of British or English aristocrats or royals, click on tabs such as London, or Royal Mistresses!

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October 2023

MARIA LACZYNSKA - WALEWSKA : MARRIED POLISH MISTRESS OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE  FROM 1806 TO 1810  (They had a son.)

February 2016

ISADORA DUNCAN

Mother of Modern Dance and Mistress of Paris Singer; She Did Positive Affirmations to Attract a Wealthy Patron

HOW DID "MRS. SMITH KEEP A RELATIONSHIP WITH MICKEY FOR SIXTY-FIVE YEARS?

Mrs. Smith spoke to the authors of The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney.

..."I became sexually involved with Mickey between his divorce of B.J. and his marriage to Mart.  Mickey is a very caring and passionate lover.  While we never considered a relationship beyond clandestine meetings and coorespondence, it also was a friendship like no other.  We were able to tell each other our deepest secrets and confidences, which we have done for over sixty years.  We never had a scheduled time or meeting setup; it just happened...well, when it happened.  Whenever we could sneak away. While the sexual aspect eventually was not the focus, we remained almost soul mates.  I heard about the travails with his flavor of the years, and I was able to unload my problems. We both listened and commented.  It was actually better than being in psychoanalysis.  ...  We sometimes talked on the phone, and many times we corresponded  We never sent any letters to our homes; we were very careful... (page 478)

The two led their own lives but Mrs. Smith was in attendance at parties where Mickey, the life of the party, clearly went into another room to have sex with someone (other than her) or left with a woman.

Mrs. Smith also had strong opinions of his various wives.  She thought Martha was a drinker who humiliated him.  Elaine took money from him to help pay off her first husband's gambling debts but seem to be into him for the money.  Barbara, whom Mickey had children with, was murdered and Mrs. Smith reported this terribly traumatized  Mickey.  Soon after he married Barbara's best friend, Marge, who became mother to the four children he'd had with Barbara.  Carolyn, Mrs. Smith reported, was temporarily of interest to Mickey, at a time when he wanted to give up Hollywood and hide out.  Jan was possessive but willing to settle down with Mickey.

So we know that in some way Mrs. Smith and her husband were film-business or Hollywood connected, because there was some socialization with Mickey.  Also, they were close enough that the couple loaned money to Mickey that he never repaid....

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NATHANIEL BRANDON'S AFFAIR OF HIS OWN - EVENTUALLY HE ENLISTS HIS WIFE TO KEEP THIS SECRET FROM RAND

Nathaniel Brandon and Patrecia Gullison agreed to keep their affair a secret and he thought that their affair would end and not mean much.

Excerpt page 345: ...She turned down modeling jobs to be available to him.  He learned "to lie expertly," he wrote, "As I became a master at inventing reasons to be away from the office."  .... In early 1964, he reluctantly gave his wife (Barbara Branden) permission to conduct her own affair with an NBI colleague she had grown fond of. He didn't reveal his affair with Patrecia until three years later, when he needed her help in keeping his secret from Rand.

Missy here:  Despite almost flaunting it, Barbara took a while to catch on that her husband was having an affair with Patrecia.  But in the summer of 1965, she asked Nathaniel for a separation. From 1964-1966, Rand was still counseling the couple in order to help heal their relationship. To me this is all so convoluted. Ayn Rand may have had a philosophy - a theory - that could be applied to therapy but she was not at all qualified just based on her personal involvement with these people.  When the separation was announced, she may have hoped this would be when Branden turned to her, but it was not to be.

Excerpt page 347: Brandon stood on a precipice.  Should he tell the truth, risking Rand's anger and his own disinheritance, or take up his duties as Rand's lover?  He chose a third way, finding other but real incidental ailments to complain of: exhaustion from overwork, trauma from the end of his marriage, fragile self-esteem because of Rand's history of rebuking him, depression, "a sense of (emotional) deadness that made it exceedingly difficult to think of resuming a romance with her," and, somewhat astonishingly at this point, anguish over his second-fiddle status in the triangle with Frank, which had caused him pain in the past, he said, and almost surely would again.....

***

But, he was happy with Patrecia, perhaps more happy that he had ever been.  Ayn, perhaps as predicted, tried to find a way to analyze the relationship he had with Patrecia into oblivion. 

Excerpt page 349:  Gradually, his evasions, inconsistencies, and "drift" became intolerable to the woman for whom logic was tantamount to truth.  They began to have explosive arguments.

... The news of the Branden's impending divorce sent shock waves through the concentric circles of Rand's New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C., Toronto, and Chicago organizations...

***

They denied others were involved in the decisions the couples made to divorce. It took three years into the affair, until 1966, that Nathaniel and Patrecia admitted to Barbara that they were going to start having sex! To me, this is a testimonial to the fear of Ayn Rand that Nathaniel must have felt. He seems to have been greatly confused about his feelings.

Perhaps Ayn had also had enough. When there are so many shades of grey, one sometimes starts to see thinks in black or white. Ultimately, but with tremendous anger, she did break with Nathaniel. It was an excommunication.

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AYN RAND : OUT OF DEPRESSION - WISHING TO RENEW HER AFFAIR WITH BRANDEN BUT HE'S FALLEN IN LOVE WITH A YOUNGER WOMAN

Although Ayn Rand got back to work - and business - and she - and Nathaniel Branden had lectured and created a following of Objectivists, in the early sixties she continued a long-held pattern of accepting others as friends and then discarding them. Her demands and expectations could be too much yet some of them were hurt. She wanted what - and who - she wanted. Though through her depression she and Nathaniel had gone without sex, now, at fifty-eight to his thirty-three, she wanted sex again.  They were collaborators on many a business venture and that included monthly newsletters, promotions, tours, publications and speaking engagements. He was considered to be her intellectual heir. He had worked hard.  But Nathaniel was no longer the twenty-four year old who had met his literary and philosophical heroine. By 1963 the Brandens, still married after all, moved into the same building as Ayn Rand and Frank O'Connor. But Branden did not want to go back to having an affair with Ayn but initially he agreed they would. Some of her followers would turn against him.

Excerpt pages 340-341: Those who took his side pointed out that he had dedicated himself to her and her ideas from is freshman year in college, was intensely protective of her self-image, and was naturally frightened of her volcanic temper and allegiance to a black-and-white moral universe.  In any case, he later admitted that he didn't love her, not in the romantic sense she meant, and hadn't since before the publication of Atlas Shrugged. (Fall of 1957)  If he appeared to forget her original horror of being "an old woman pursuing a younger man" and was maneuvering to get what she wanted, he was procrastinating. He also told her something that was true: that she was the most important person in the world to him.  He said he needed time to work out the problems in his ten year marriage to Barbara before resuming a romantic relationship with her.  During that early conversation she replied, sighing, "I don't feel fully ready yet, either.  I was just testing your attitude for the future." She offered to counsel the unhappy couple.  He accepted.  For the moment, he was off the hook.

He knew, if she didn't. that it was far too late to begin again.  During the years of her depression, he had behaved toward her as a good son behaves to an ailing mother, except that they occasionally slept together. Yet he had also distanced himself from her. ...

Excerpt page 344: What she didn't now was that, beginning in late 1963, Branden was juggling a new romantic triangle, or rather a parallelogram. As just about the time she decided that she was fully ready to resume sleeping with him, he fell in love with a younger woman - a willowy twenty-three year old fashion model and aspiring actress named Patrecia Gullison.

***

Missy here.  Yes Patrecia Gullison was married.  Branden had attended her wedding a year or so earlier. She was youthful but also had attended one of his lectures and was also a bit of a devotee.

Excerpt page 344: Unlike Rand and Barbara, she didn't ask hum to check his premises or overcome his flaws. Unconditional female admiration was a thrilling new experience for him, and he was starving for an extraphilosophical experience of sex.  She was "what Nathan had never had in his life," said Barbara in 2005, "someone who wasn't trying to save his soul."

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TWENTY FOUR YEAR OLD NATHANIEL BRANDEN IS SEDUCED BY FORTY-NINE YEAR OLD AYN RAND

 

Missy here.  I wish I could think of Ayn Rand's husband, Frank O'Connor, as her creative muse, but it seems he fulfilled another role in her life, one of unending support - the unselfish one. Nathaniel Branden, though intelligent, educated, and heading for a career as a psychologist, seems to have fallen under Ayn's spell.

Excerpt page 256:  Nonetheless, he felt an unfamiliar sense of elation, power, even mastery.  The woman with the magnificent eyes and the penetrating mind was looking to him for romance; and when he looked back at her, "the image (of myself) I saw reflected (in her eyes) was that of a god," he later wrote.  "I am in love with you, " he said aloud.  It was a fiction that would last fourteen years.

It wasn't a conscious fiction, not at first.  That they had fallen in love struck them both as philosophically inevitable and romantically and morally correct.

That first afternoon, they told each other that whatever they did they would not hurt each other or their spouses.  Rand suggested that the affair would be "nonsexual" in the ultimate sense," meaning that their lovemaking would stop short of intercourse.  Brandon agreed, disappointed but also relieved, he recalled.  As crusaders for integrity and honesty, they also prepared to present the fact to Frank and Barbara. They decided to ask permission to meet by themselves twice a week....

***

And actually, they all four met.  Ayn and Nathaniel claimed that this did not mean they did not also continue to love their spouses. So, as I see it, they altered their relationships and were now in Open Marriage.  A couple months later they revamped the agreement to include full sexuality.  Barbara also felt that her frustrating sex life with her husband was part of the reason.  But Barbara was not well, suffering nightmares and panic. Nathaniel, who was enrolled in a master's degree program at NYU began to play therapist with his wife - and others - using Rand's theories.  Evolved a whole language of ideas about a person's psychological state.  By my way of thinking, what this all amounted to is psychological abuse of Barbara. If she could not find this change in her relationship with her husband acceptable then she was blamed.  Objectivists could not also be Emotionalists, like Barbara.

By the fall of 1958 Ayn herself was depressed despite increasing wealth and being in demand as a speaker and lecturer. She was also having to face literary criticism and took to secluding herself. She remained depressed until early 1961. She smoke and drank coffee. She had also begun using stimulants by prescription and may have used the drugs to lift her mood, loose weight, or get wired.  Frank O'Connor didn't desert his wife, but he also withdrew.

Missy

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THE FOUNTAINHEAD NOVEL BECOMES A FILM and NATHANIEL BRANDEN COMES INTO THE LIFE OF AYN RAND and HUSBAND FRANK O'CONNOR

Page 211 Excerpt:  (Regarding The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand's novel, which she had worked long and hard on, not being hoped for literary hit or the well received film, which premiered in Hollywood in June 1949 and was seen in Warner Brother's theaters after that.)

But the larger explanation for the disparity lies within Rand's character. She would not admit that she had written a flawed script.  From adulthood, if not before, she positively refused to consider that she bore significant responsibility for any of the conflicts, failures, or disappointments of her life.  "In all the years I knew her, I never heard her say anything remotely to the effect that she had acted badly, mistakenly, or unfairly," recalled a former friend. As her fame increased and she became conscious of her own iconic stature with readers and audiences, she tended increasingly to fuse her life with the lives of her characters, whose mistakes, if any, arose from ignorance of other's bad intentions and not from a lack of objectivity, diplomacy, or wisdom. She remembered obstacles and disappointments less as ordinary, if infuriating, setbacks than as episodes in a tug of war --- like Roark's *a character who appears to be her idealized man), like Equality 7-2521's - with evil. People and events appeared as black or white. She minimized to the vanishing point the help she had received, failed to mention thinkers who had influenced her, and presented herself as a wholly self-created soul. ..."

Page 219 Excerpt: Of all the readers and viewers of The Fountainhead, however, only one had personal meaning for her, she later said. This was a nineteen year old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal.  A few years after meeting her, he would legally change his name to Nathaniel Branden.

***

Book Review/Report:

Nathaniel Brandon had read the novel for the first time at age fourteen... In the fall of 1949, when the Canadian, who was also of Russian-Jewish heritage, was in his first semester at UCLA, he wrote Ayn Rand and began a correspondence with her. Husband Frank suggested she call the young man and she did, inviting him to visit her at the couple's ranch. She was forty-five and a woman of power and he was a college freshman. They talked for nine and a half hours - all night long - about her philosophy and how to make sense of the world. He was invited to come by again. Ayn considered him to be a genius.

Romantically, Nathaniel Brandon was involved with Barbara Weidman, who was also Canadian and of Jewish heritage, also read and loved The Fountainhead, and also was a student at UCLA. He brought her along to meet and talk with Ayn on the next visit. She too was intellectually stimulated by the conversation and Ayn as an example of an intellectual woman. Meanwhile Frank occupied himself with farming enough to have a somewhat successful business of it.  Ayn and Frank had welcomed so many visits from Nathaniel and Barbara that they began to regard them as, and call them "the children."

I wonder, especially because of reports that Frank never initiated sex with Ayn, if Ayn had ever wanted children.

***

Excerpt page 230:  Most intriguing to them was her marriage.  O'Connor, who could have posed for an Esquire ad and who exuded warmth, gentility, and wisdom, was unresponsive to philosophical discussion and even to most books, yet Rand, who usually placed the highest premium on analytical intelligence and self-assertion, called him her "top value."  Seated, she would glance around to be sure he was nearby; she continuously touched him and held his hand.  "Frank is my rock," she told Barbara.  To Nathaniel, she said, "He believed in me when no one else did." and "We have the same sense of life." He was silent because he was "Too disgusted with people to share what he is with the world," she told them...."

In the fall of 1950, Rand began touching Nathaniel, too. She sometimes held his hand as they strolled the grounds and talked about their ideas and her work.  Barbara saw nothing odd in the older woman's affections for Nathaniel.....

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AYN : MRS. FRANK O'CONNOR and FRANK O'CONNOR : MR. AYN RAND : FAME AND FINANCIAL SUCCESS LEAD TO A DIFFERENT LIFESTYLE

Missy here!

In 1926, Ayn Rand first sighted Frank O'Connor, born in Ohio in 1897, and then twenty-nine, when he was a background actor. He had two brothers settled in Hollywood before he came. He eventually moved into some speaking roles.  They were married in 1929, about the time that her Visa was to expire.

Excerpt pages 66-67: There is no doubt that Ayn Rand did stalk Frank O'Connor.... She ambled over to his side, stuck out her foot, and tripped him. He apologized for stepping on her toes, and they exchanged names... Later that day, she waited for him on the weekly parole line, and they spoke to each other again. And then he disappeared for nine long months...

Rand was heartbroken, and obsessed....

She saw him again in the Hollywood branch of the public library, in May 1927...  Ayn and Frank began to see each other in the evenings and on weekends... Perhaps for the first time in her life, Rand was transparently, completely happy....  O'Connor probably gave her her first kiss; he was her first and, for a long time, only lover...

***

After some financial success due to her screenplay and authorship, in particular her novel The Fountainhead, which kept selling briskly, and after living in a cramped apartment, the couple moved to a house in the San Fernando Valley - Chatsworth - thirteen acres of farmland. The house had been designed for director Josef von Sternberg and his mistress Marlene Dietrich in 1935, a then modern steel and glass design!  Frank became a gentleman farmer while they could afford a cook, maid, and handyman. However, despite this new lifestyle, despite having her own office on the studio lot at Paramount where she wrote screenplays, Ayn considered New York City to be her spiritual home, They traveled there on business trips. She was famous now and her confidence was at an all time high. She began to attract young men as friends, was socializing and entertaining politically conservative friends.

In 1951 she told friends they were moving to New York. Soon they were driving cross-country to the city, where a rental apartment had been arranged for them. Maybe Frank believed it was temporary when he left his beloved farm in the care of others - perhaps five years, or seven, but they would never live in California again. Nathaniel Branden and his wife, Barbara, lived in New York.

Excerpt  page 237:  No one who knew O'Connor believed that he willingly left the San Fernando Valley ranch.  "That property was his business and his world," said Hill. "Ayn knew it.  There was no way she didn't know how badly she was hurting Frank."

***

Frank began working at a florist and took up painting...  By 1957 Ayn and Nathaniel were neighbors, spending time with each other two to three times a week, holding hands and hugging good-bye, though they were both married.  They were telling others they were "soulmates."  It took a while, since these actions were often in front of their spouses, but Nathaniel's wife Barbara finally realized that Ayn was in love with her husband and said so.

Excerpt page 255: ...Now at the height of her mental and emotional power (he was twenty-four and she was forty-nine), she had been rehearsing just such a moment of triangulated passion for at least half her life.  Branden, as flattered and incautious as he may have been, was out of his depth.  For all his flirtatiousness, he had never really contemplated an actual affair with his literary and intellectual idol, he later said...

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AYN RAND ; LONG MARRIED SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST - KNOWN FOR HER OBJECTIVIST PHILOSOPHY - FRANK O'CONNOR HER HUSBAND - NATHANIEL BRANDON HER MUCH YOUNGER MARRIED PSYCHOLOGIST LOVER

AYN RAND

Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum

1905 (Russia) -  1982 (New York)

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."  - Ayn Rand  (page1)

Ayn Rand was born into a Russian Jewish family, but didn't make much of the religion of her birth, instead promoting a philosophy of how best to live life, with the emphasis on an individual's self-interest. As a child, her family was prosperous enough to vacation travel to London and Paris and she also found herself in a decent grade school that ignored the tiny quota for Jewish students and took more like her. She also graduated Petrograd State University, where she was a member of student writing clubs, in the fall of 1924. The nineteen year old graduate then enrolled in a new school, State Technicum for Screen Arts, meant to train actors and cinematographers. In 1925 she got a passport and applied for a Student Visa to America, with her impoverished family and her mother making personal financial sacrifices to support her ambitions.

Fleeing a hostile existence in which Jews were targeted, Ayn was the one in her family to make it America. She went to Berlin, then Paris, and arrived on a steamship to New York harbor in February 1926. She went first to Chicago and relatives of her mother's and she promised to return to Russia but did not. In 1931 she became a citizen and endeavored to get her family out of Russia but was thwarted. As the years passed, and the Holocaust of World War II occurred, she was unsure if any of her family left behind in Russia had survived in Europe, thus pointing to a disconnect from them. Rand hated Russia and the Marxists and her experiences there would forever influence her thinking. She would become the anti-Communist heroine of Capitalism but not a Christian one. She - and the man who would become her husband, were atheists. Giving herself a new, made-up, name was perhaps her first act of recreating her self, a self that believed in individualism.

However, Ayn was also one of those who wanted "Communists" eradicated from Hollywood in the 1940's, still a controversial move.

She'd begun writing as a child - ten years old - sixteen; a first novel: Perhaps she knew writing to be her strength. She left Chicago for Hollywood and an encounter with Cecile B.DeMille, also of Russian-Jewish heritage, got her a job as a screenwriter circa 1927 which paid her rent at a YMCA owned residence for women unchaperoned. Mythologies have sprung up about their "chance encounter." It's said Ayn likely managed to run into DeMille just as she was said to have stalked the man she wanted to marry. By 1928, none of her scripts moving towards development into movies, she was cut to part time employment. Then when DeMille moved on to form Goldwyn-Mayer, she was left without a job.

Hollywood also was where she met the man she chose as a husband, actor Frank O'Connor, who is described repeatedly, and in so many words, as an accommodating gentleman. (His brother is described as both gay and essential to the relationship and I kept wondering if he also was gay. Especially when I read that it was said that he had never initiated sex with Ayn, but she did with him.) Initially, he was doing better than she. He went from background acting to small speaking roles.  

'He was earning enough to buy his young wife her first portable American typewriter, a radio, and a beautiful made-to-order walnut desk.  He presented her with a brand new copy of Webster's Daily Use Dictionary; inscribed with a love poem he wrote, based on the letters of the alphabet. Together they purchased their first car; A used Nash, bought on time, which Rand would never learn to drive.  He decorated their new apartment, giving his wife another glimpse of his artistic talent. They were happy.' (page 75)

In a rare "role reversal" of sorts for the time, after O'Connor's small parts in films did not suffice, Ayn became the bread-winner, the one whose career was to be followed. In essence her husband became a Kept Man, but married, known only for his relationship with her.

They bought land to ranch and he became a gentleman farmer out in the San Fernando Valley, but when Ayn tired of Hollywood, they moved to New York, with promises to return some day. They never did.  Another couple took care of the property and the farm for many years. There were times during their marriage in which he took small jobs to help out financially, but it was up to him to arrange the flowers and spend time painting. A decision was made and the couple left Los Angeles for the Big Apply in the fall of 1934.  We The Living, a novel by Ayn Rand, was published in 1936.

It was in that city that the couple went from a shared room to owning a decent apartment to live in for years, and where Ayn sweated over writing her novels, as fame and fortune were hers. It was also during these years that a complicated and sophisticated of relationship intrigue went on, perhaps essential to Ayn's emotional and psychological stability.

She was about fifty-two years old and had been at it for thirty years before she became world famous and she had worked very hard at her writing. Rand was devoted to it, considered a genius, and she became extremely concerned that she top the success of her prior two novels as she worked on her third.

When it came to support for her career, Ayn did not only depend on her husband or her friends. Rather a much younger man and his fiancée had come into her life - their lives, starting with their long visit out in California, almost as devotees to her philosophy. The youthful Nathaniel Brandon was engaged and eventually married the same woman, Barbara. Perhaps sex wasn't ever going to work out for this couple, but eventually Ayn and he had an affair beginning in the mid 1950's, reportedly fifteen years long, one that her husband and his wife also accommodated and sex was only part of their relationship. 

Years went by, the young man matured, became a psychologist, met a younger woman who did not come with complications, and sought to divorce his wife. The hesitation - and the conniving - was about how he might sustain all the important roles he played in Ayn's life, other than the romantic or sexual. This new development happened about the time that Ayn had recovered from a years-long serious depression, after her second novel, The Fountainhead, which she'd spent years working on, was met with criticism. (Her novels today are considered classics, still sell very well, and her philosophy still has influence, especially on economic policies.) Ayn was in charge again. She had called off sex with Nathaniel Brandon and now wanted to start it back up but clearly, at least to him, she was no longer attractive to the younger man.

How Ayn and her husband Frank and Brandon and his wife Barbara slowly came to agree to what would be considered today to be an Open Relationship, was of special interest to me and, I think, would also be to the readers of Mistress Manifesto. It could be argued that husband Frank O'Connor had become a Kept Man as a husband but notions of who should dominate a relationship and be the bread-winner back in the day are now considered old fashioned. I would also say that when it came to self-determination and satisfying one's needs Ayn dominated the marriage and was superior in meeting her needs, while not abandoning her husband.  The moral qualms, if there were any, seem to have been those of Brandon.

However, when the truth finally came out, she was extremely angry and indignant. She banished the younger man from her life.

Continue with me this month as we explore these complicated relationships.

Missy

P.S.  Although Rand was an advocate of hard work and earning one's own way in the world, of self-responsibility and a sort of moral righteousness, although she wore a dollar sign pin, she was never wealthy by today's standards and her sense of morality was not that of the typical American citizen.

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The book by Anne C. Heller is the primary reference for this month's posts.