Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age

Abstract

When Frank Leslie, founder of the Leslie Publishing House and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the first of its kind to provide up close and personal graphic images in its features, died in 1880, he left his wife, Miriam (“Mrs. Frank Leslie”), with astounding debts and lawsuits. Betsy Prioleau’s Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age tells the story of publishing magnate Miriam Leslie, who, against all odds after her husband’s death, resurrected the once profit-laden publishing house to miraculous results. Within a year and a half, Miriam won the court battles, repaid her debt, and increased the circulation of Leslie publications exponentially. Edith Wharton fans who appreciate Wharton’s shrewd business tactics and publishing acumen will enjoy this lively biography about Miriam “Frank” Leslie who, among many of her daring acts, legally changed her name to her deceased husband’s and became a major tour de force in journalism and business. However, unlike Wharton, who rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected at the time of young women seeking husbands, Mrs. Frank Leslie became its top connoisseur and consummate marketer. Although Wharton certainly participated in salon culture and the social societies of New York’s upper elite, she also became its staunchest critic, considering fashion trends superficial and oppressive. Miriam, on the other hand, earned her fame and wealth by reporting on fashion and cultured society in all its domestic bliss. In fact, Miriam’s personal history would make her an ideal character for a Wharton novel. Married four times and a three-time divorcée, Mrs. Frank Leslie appears more colorfully than the most stubborn and complex heroines that fill the pages of Wharton’s fiction. And Prioleau is just the person to tell this fascinating tale, adding to her impressive scholarship on female powerhouses and seductresses, such as The Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells (Duke UP, 1983) and Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love (Penguin, 2004).The eloquent and yet lively prose found in this biography shows that Prioleau is right at home with this female publishing icon. Pulling words and phrases found in newspaper clippings, correspondence, court proceedings, biographies, chronicles, journals, and diaries, Prioleau’s portrait is presented with an air of authenticity in this moving biography of one of the first female tycoons of the Gilded Age. With vividly painted characters and subplots that rival even Wharton’s most scandalous fiction, Prioleau’s biography tells a real story about a real businesswoman who pulls up a seat at the men’s table and bluffs her way to the top with an intellect and fortitude that rivals any other. Even if Prioleau is a bit forgiving in attributing Miriam’s racist and classist views to a complex web of social and cultural influences, the author, nevertheless, presents a woman who unapologetically speaks her mind but writes what people want to hear.Diamonds and Deadlines is organized primarily chronologically, with an introduction, prologue, ten chapters (each devoted to a specific period in Miriam’s life), and an epilogue that ties up loose ends, such as what happened to the nearly $2 million “this unsung hero of feminism” (Prioleau 1) left to women’s suffrage. This cleverly written biography unveils the nuances and mysterious life of one of the world’s most powerful female moguls of the Gilded Age and delivers in prose what gossip only hinted at in the dailies.In the prologue, Prioleau presents “The Empress of Journalism” at the height of her success in 1898, having run “the nation’s largest publishing house for fifteen years, beaten cutthroat competition on male turf, and rescued the Frank Leslie company from financial ruin, turning it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise” (5). Returning from a three-year hiatus, Miriam continues her Gerlach parlor evenings in New York, a potent vignette that sets the stage for the remaining chapters that un-layer this complex and esteemed woman whom the reader first glimpses in the prologue. Chapter 1 does not open with her childhood as might be expected, but rather with her 1883 visit, after a forty-year absence, to her childhood home in New Orleans. Traveling with an entourage of three who were there to record the trip, Miriam, always the consummate brander, creates a new identity for herself with a Huguenot royal pedigree and well-educated upbringing that is completely at odds with the “real” Miriam that Prioleau paints for us just a short chapter later.With each subsequent chapter, we learn a bit more about this elusive literary giant born Miriam Florence Follin in the creole section of New Orleans on June 6, 1836. She was the daughter of Charles and Susan Danforth Follin (though likely the illegitimate daughter of a slave woman her father owned). By 1850 her parents had moved to New York City, where her dalliance with David Charles Peacock, a twenty-seven-year-old jewelry clerk ten years her senior, forced him to marry her or face criminal charges. Miriam, ever the opportunist, as Prioleau reports, used this to her advantage, taking on the role of married woman without the attendant oppression. From 1856 to 1857 she toured East Coast playhouses with the free-spirited actress Lola Montez, both of whom played to sell-out crowds. This adventure in theater introduced Miriam to her second husband, the famous archaeologist Ephraim George (E. G.) Squier. As Prioleau reports, after their marriage, Miriam and E.G. developed a friendship with the publishing magnate Frank Leslie, whose particular praise of Miriam’s beauty and intellect led to a scandalous affair, divorce number 2, and marriage number 3. Prioleau’s biography, with delightful and tantalizing prose, reveals the rollercoaster ride that became Miriam’s world as she worked tirelessly with her third husband to run and manage a complicated and sometimes unpredictable publishing empire. Each chapter and stage of Miriam’s life depicts her creative and editorial breakthroughs amid the backdrop of Lincoln’s inauguration and assassination, race wars and public lynchings, worker riots, debates on women’s rights, increasing class divisions and wealth inequalities, the stock market crash, and the Comstock laws, all the while recreating and refashioning the Leslie publications to garner new readers.Some of the most genuine insights of Diamonds and Deadlines are the author’s detailed vignettes of those in Miriam’s inner circle who contributed to the development of her character and persona, including several paramours such as the Marquis de Leuville, the author Joaquin Miller, a Russian prince, a Munich sculptor, and her last husband, Willie Wilde—the eldest brother of Oscar Wilde whom she divorced just two years later, referring to it as a major blunder in her life. Indeed, Prioleau’s biography moves beyond the traditional recognition of a woman’s climb to fame with grit and hard work, to unveil Miriam’s obsession with material possessions and class, even preferring the company of fellow industry moguls over domestic responsibilities. Prioleau’s account further reveals Miriam’s quick thinking on President Garfield’s assassination to dispatch artists to the scene of the tragedy, allowing a pictorial spread of the event the next day and earning her more recognition that solidified her place among the robber barons of the female sort. But the absence of important female literary and cultural figures in Prioleau’s biography invites questions regarding Miriam’s relationship with other powerful female tycoons like her, whose paths likely crossed. For example, this reader is curious about possible run-ins Miriam may have had with the likes of Hetty Green, considered in the early twentieth century to be the richest woman in the world, an heiress turned Wall Street bulldog often compared to other titans such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. One wonders what it would be like to be a fly on the wall during an exchange between Miriam and the latter, dubbed “The Witch of Wall Street.”Diamonds and Deadlines’ wide appeal lies in its unapologetic heroine’s capitalistic desires, which stand at odds with her feminist agenda that, on the surface, promoted domestic bliss and a fashionable life through marriage and family. The epilogue provides the follow-up to the millions Miriam left to women’s suffrage, which (as Prioleau deftly points out) were reduced to less than half after the lawsuits contesting her will and legal fees took their portion. Although Wharton does not make an appearance in Prioleau’s biography of Mrs. Frank Leslie, she is nevertheless present. Fans will find this biography refreshing in light of Wharton’s own flouting of traditional gender roles and penchant for design. Diamonds and Deadlines delivers on its promise to unfold the life of Mrs. Frank Leslie “just as it happened, in all its color, drama, and incredible futuristic storyline” (4). Like the heroines that grace the fiction of Wharton’s elite New York, Miriam seeks out marriage not for love, but to boost her career. Where social propriety dictates that women can provide for themselves only indirectly, which deprives them of independent lives, Miriam, unlike the scripted tragic heroines of Wharton’s fiction, is able to reconcile her moral ideals and still survive in the cutthroat world of publishing. Perhaps Lily Bart, Ellen Olenska, and even Undine Spragg could learn something from the newly branded “Frank Leslie,” whose uninvited chair at the big boy table speaks multitudes: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.