In the summer of 1935, a rather thickly bound book covered in a tan, brownish and red dust jacket

with little other decoration appeared on bookstore shelves. It was called King Lair and the Gilded Age.

And it was, as reviewers at the time noted,

a bitter, disillusioned book,

memorable for the lorded light it throws on U.S. Society of the Gilded Age,

one of the most startling and intimate records of life

among the wealthy, yet written by one of them. At the time of publication, the Guilded Age had

receded into nearly two generations of the past, but the woman who wrote its pages still clearly

wanted to have her say.

The author was Elizabeth Drexel Lair, or Mrs. Harry Lair, as she was still known at that point.

Elizabeth, known to her friends and society as Bessie, was 67 years old and had been widowed twice.

She knew all the social players of the Gilded Age, including the towering Mrs. Astor. She had been painted by Baldini, and she had been

presented at court in Europe. She, in so many ways, was the perfect ingenue of the Gilded Age

when she was young, attractive, and heiress to the great

Drexel banking fortune, and she circulated in New York and Newport societies as well as in the

usual spots in Europe, including the Riviera. But Bessie's story had a darker side, as we shall

see. Although, we will perhaps never know exactly why she

wrote what we would call today a tell-all memoir of that gilded age at that particular point

in her life, it may well have been to once and for all shine some light into the corners

and dispel once and for all some of the darkness.

While the great works of Edith Wharton and Henry James told the story of the Gilded Age largely through fiction,

Elizabeth Drexel Lear told it in the way that she saw it,

...