Bon vivant Oscar Wilde was well-known for his way with a bon mot:
“I can resist everything except temptation.”
“Don’t be led astray down the path of virtue.”
“Only shallow people do not judge by appearance.”
But these clever utterances were anything but spontaneous. Not only did Wilde pre-plan much of the supposedly casual party repartee he was infamous for, but he devised his quotes according to a formula.
“To ensure he kept getting [invited to parties], he perfected a verbal trick: replacing a word in a sentence with its unexpected opposite.”
“Wilde in America” documents Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour of America. Just 27 and still years from writing respected works such as “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Wilde hatched a plan to make himself famous, despite no accomplishments to date.
In doing so, says author David M. Friedman, he was the first to become famous for fame’s own sake. If you want someone to blame for Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Honey Boo Boo, Oscar is your man.
Wilde learned the importance of making oneself known from his mother, Lady Jane Wilde, who claimed (without proof) to be descended from Dante and taught her son that in conversation, “Epigrams are always better than argument,” and “Paradox is the very essence of social wit.”
“It was from Lady Wilde that Oscar learned that identity is a kind of fiction, and that being oneself is a form of playacting,” Friedman writes. “It was from her that Oscar learned that the most important act of creativity is the creation of one’s own image.”
At Oxford University, Wilde found a mentor in John Ruskin, a professor of fine art who gave lectures on “the power and meaning of beauty” and inspired the burgeoning aesthetic movement — which placed aesthetic virtues above the pragmatic — by declaring beauty as “evidence of God’s presence on Earth.”
Inspired by Ruskin, Wilde found his identity.
“He would become the self-anointed leader of Oxford’s student aesthetes, preaching to his classmates the Divine Gospel of Beauty and the superiority of decorative handmade goods to ugly manufactured ones.”
Having learned from his mother “the importance of scenery, costume and appearance in creating a persona,” his first public display of extravagance came in 1877 at the exclusive opening of the Grosvenor Gallery. For his London debut, the 22-year-old Wilde, knowing that those in attendance would include the Prince of Wales, made his mark with “an unforgettable act of peacockery.”
Wilde “strut about the Grosvenor in an evening jacket specially tailored, shaped, decorated and tinted so that, when viewed from the rear, it transformed its wearer into a walking, talking musical instrument: a cello. In a room lined with works of art, Wilde stole the show by wearing one.”
While the press began to take notice and a fan base developed among “the blue-blooded women . . . of London society,” he also had detractors, one of whom would unwittingly help make him a legend.
Librettist W.S. Gilbert, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame, found Wilde pretentious and awful, and wrote a mocking libretto about two rival aesthetes. While the two leads were each composites, when the opera, “Patience,” premiered in 1881, the public quickly decided that the flamboyant character Bunthorne had been modeled on Wilde. Not a flattering portrayal if true, but Wilde seized on it, attending the opera’s opening night and attracting as much attention as the production itself.
Desiring to launch “Patience” in America but fearing that the British-born aesthetic movement might not translate here, the promoter decided to send Wilde to the United States to deliver a series of lectures — then a popular form of entertainment — on subjects related to aestheticism, such as the nature of beauty, while wearing the same sort of outfits as Bunthorne.
Wilde saw a chance to build on his fame, and sailed off to America.
The promoters had sent letters of introduction to prominent members of high society and the press, fudging the truth to intimate that Wilde was a founder of the aesthetic movement and was far more notable in England than he really was.
When he arrived, Wilde was ambushed by reporters before he even left the ship and was inundated with invites to parties, most of them in his honor.
At the first of these, he was feted by the mayor of New York, a New York Supreme Court justice, the pastors of Grace and Trinity churches and dozens of thrilled society matrons.
He did not disappoint, making a grand entrance in “a black velvet Prince Albert coat and billowing white shirt with a large collar, accessorized by a robin’s-egg-blue scarf.”
The next night, he attended the production of “Patience” along with an admiring entourage, including a reporter from the New York Tribune. When Bunthorne hit the stage, the audience was watching not the actor, but Wilde, who quipped to one of his guests — ensuring that the Tribune reporter was in earshot — “This is the compliment that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre.”
It’s worth noting that at this point, Wilde was barely out of college, and had still never delivered a lecture in his life nor really accomplished anything save for winning a college poetry prize and releasing a little-read book of poems.
On Jan. 8, several parties were thrown for him by society’s grandes dames, one at the home of a former US ambassador to France. Another soiree he attended honored Louisa May Alcott, the best-selling female writer in the US at the time on the strength of “Little Women.” Wilde stole her thunder, arriving fashionably late and, as reported in the Tribune, “immediately [drawing] off part of the crowd which had formed around Miss Alcott.”
Of course there were detractors. Poet Emma Lazarus wrote to a friend that he was “beneath contempt” and that “for the very reason that he is not a fool, and knows what he is about, I think he is the more to be despised and shunned by all sensible people for making such a consummate ass of himself.”
Love him or hate him, people were talking about Oscar Wilde, just as he had intended.
His first lecture, written close to the last minute and given at a 1,250-seat auditorium near Union Square, was an incredible success. Not only did the tickets sell out, but scalpers resold them at a 100 percent markup, hawking the $1 tickets for $2 apiece.
When he walked on stage, “the audience gasped . . . staring, many with mouths open, at a 6-foot-3 man wearing a snug black velvet coat with lavender satin piping and a frill of white lace at the wrists, black satin breeches . . . and patent-leather pumps with lustrous silver buckles.”
America expected Wilde to be the real-life Bunthorne — a colorful buffoon. But his speech made it clear that he was not. While extravagant in dress and manner, he delivered a speech of intelligence and refinement, delving into the origins of aesthetics and the impact on it of great thinkers such as Goethe, Plato, Homer, Michelangelo and more.
With this lecture and the many to follow, Wilde established himself as both a fashion icon and a deep intellectual. Both the World and the New York Herald praised him, and Wilde mailed the better reviews to contacts in London to spread the word of his triumph.
At the time, Americans had recently fallen in love with collecting photographs of celebrities, as such photos had just started to be sold in stores. So Wilde arranged an appointment with Napoleon Sarony, the Annie Leibovitz of his time.
If you’ve ever seen a picture of Wilde, chances are you’ve seen a photo from that shoot, as the Sarony photos, highlighting Wilde’s outrageous outfits, brought him closer to legend.
The photos became “big sellers for much of the next 12 months.” People displayed them in their homes, and newspaper cartoonists nationwide increasingly used Wilde as fodder, basing their drawings on those photos. By year’s end, Wilde was “one of the most recognized figures in the United States.”
The images became so popular that advertisers used them to sell products “ranging from cigars to kitchen stoves,” despite their having no connection to Wilde. In one bizarre example, a card for “Mme Marie Fontaine’s Bosom Beautifier For Beautifying & Enlarging The Bust” featured a young woman watering sunflowers, with a picture of Wilde inserted just below her, sans context. The popularity of the photos with advertisers, Friedman states, made Wilde “the first modern marketed celebrity in our culture.”
Wilde would travel the entire country that year, lecturing and receiving rock star treatment up and down the East Coast, in California, and throughout the Old West and Deep South.
He sat for hundreds of newspaper interviews, and enjoyed private meetings with the likes of Walt Whitman, Confederate President Jefferson Davis (who took an immediate dislike to him) and former President Ulysses S. Grant. President Chester A. Arthur even sent regrets for having to miss one of Wilde’s soirees.
By the end of the trip, Wilde, initially based on little but his own determination and wit, was a household name, becoming “the most written-about Briton in the United States,” even more so than Her Royal Highness Queen Victoria.
Unlike the reality stars of today, however, Wilde would accomplish something — writing a classic novel and a classic play. He started out famous for being famous, but earned greater fame for his accomplishments.
Sadly, however, his self-promotion would be his downfall.
The gay writer was imprisoned for two years of hard labor, from 1895 to 1897, for “gross indecency,” after having an affair with the son of the Marquess of Queensberry.
Wilde might have avoided this fate, but after the marquess made his displeasure public, Wilde sued him, despite the knowledge that he risked prison. It was a fall in prison that ruptured his eardrum and eventually led to his death, of cerebral meningitis, in 1900, at the age of 46.
“The man who had so presciently devised a winning — and lasting — formula for how to become a modern celebrity had failed to see a crucial pitfall of the new culture of self-promotion: the danger of believing the hype, especially your own,” Friedman writes. “Wilde thought he was too famous to fail — which is precisely why he did.”