What do professional beauties actually do?

Thursday, 19 November 2009 05:00

November 19, 1883. What do professional beauties do? asks the Toronto Telegram. The only one it notices doing anything is Lillie Langtry (1853-1925). She was an actress. She was also the mistress of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.

There is curiosity to know what professional beauties are and what they do. The papers are always printing articles about this and that professional beauty, and telling how beautiful and how captivating they are, but they never say what they do.

In London, artists of various kinds are paid large sums of money to sing and play at the houses of the wealthy and the fashionable. But for what purpose the professional beauties are engaged, or that they are engaged at all, does not seem clear. Perhaps they sit to be looked at, like their grandfathers cut in alabaster; or possibly they pose in different attitudes, like the aesthetes in "Patience." Do they caress anybody—the host, for instance? And do the guests test the reality of their charms by pinching them or sticking pins in them, as the rustics and small boys do with the fat woman in the circus?

So far as can be learned, the professional beauties in England are the wives of men of character and standing. How then is it that they permit their wives to be on exhibition, and their photographs to be sold by the thousand? As a matter of fact, these professional beauties receive a percentage on the pictures sold.

Mrs. Langtry was the reigning professional beauty in London until her husband's affairs came to grief through the anti-rent agitation, and his own poor brains became muddled with beer. Then came "hard times" for the poor beauty. Her exquisite bijou house in Park Lane was sold, and there was no way out of the difficulty, or to get bread for herself and her children, but by turning her good goods, lady-like manners and culture to account on the stage. For this she deserves the approbation of all good people…

But all this has little to do with the question with which we set out, namely, what are professional beauties and what do they do besides sitting for their photographs. Do they take their meals like other people, and what becomes of them when their reign is over.