Tragic Mansions by Rita Lydig
Lydig, Mrs. Philip (Rita). Tragic Mansions. First Edition. 1927. Book is in very good minus condition—minor fading to the spine, an archival tape repair to the hinge, and minor wear to the covers. A remanent of the dust jacket—a portrait of Rita Lydig—is pasted to the front endpaper. Introduction by Harvey O’Higgins.
Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers was not the first book to use barely disguised members of fashionable society. Society beauty Rita Lydig got there first with Tragic Mansions, in which she uses examples from her Gilded Age social set. Her premise is that rich Americans are too sincere, too hardworking to successfully imitate the detachment and amorality of their European counterparts. When they try, it leads only to heartache and despair. The book’s protagonist is clearly Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan (called Virginia Cort in the book). Lydig writes disparagingly of Consuelo’s socially rapacious mother, Alva, and of her duplicitous best friend, Gladys Deacon (whom Lydig calls Cecilia). It was via heart-to-heart conversations with Cecilia (Gladys) that Lydig learned the inside story, and though Hugo Vickers covered some of the material in his biography of Gladys Deacon, there is additional insight here.
“I soon discovered that while the foreign aristocrat was contemptuous of money-making, he had no contempt for money after it was made. Far from it. There was almost nothing he would not do for money—nothing … except work for it.”
--Mrs. Philip Lydig