To the Last Man

THE THREE LIVES OF HARRIET HUBBARD AYER (284 pp.)--Margaret Hubbard Ayer & Isabella Taves -- Lippincott ($3.95).

MRS. GLADSTONE (251 pp.)--Georgina Battiscombe--Houghfon Mifflin ($5).

Before these two books, the male reader's heart is likely to shrink within him like a salted snail. They tell the stories of two overpowering women, different largely in the type of power they used. Harriet Hubbard Ayer carried culture between her dazzling teeth like a cutlass; Catherine Glynne Gladstone wielded a feather duster of a featherbrain. Both weapons were equally effective.

The P.M.'s Lady. "What a comfort to know there is One above who is able to tell us!" a lady once said in Catherine Gladstone's drawing room after discussing a theological point. "Yes," answered Catherine, "I think William will be down in a few minutes."

William Ewart Gladstone, his more ardent admirers were to become convinced, had been sent to earth to trounce the foul Tory fiend Benjamin Disraeli, to be four times Liberal Prime Minister of Britain and, finally, to translate God's blunt, muttered injunctions into eloquent sentences of interminable length. History records William's success in all these spheres, but it bypasses his extraordinary wife. Catherine was such an attractive woman that even Queen Victoria, who came to loathe Gladstone, almost forgave her for being his wife. Every morning, when they were at their favorite country house, the Gladstones walked uphill one mile to church, William throwing sticks for the dog, Catherine reading the morning mail and dropping most of it on the road. William was exact and businesslike. Catherine was inexact and totally haphazard. Visitors were often startled to find her wandering about on the way to her bath draped in nothing but a large towel. She conducted her charitable works with disarming inefficiency and brilliant success. One convalescent home received from her the gifts of a packet of seeds, a canary, a piano; another, a cow ("animals are first-rate to interest people").

Like most of the distinguished Glynne family Catherine was devoted to "Glynnese," a private language whose proper use was once demonstrated in a speech supposedly to be delivered by Gladstone in Parliament: "Sir, the Noble Lord opposite is such a phantod* and the Honourable Gentleman next to him such a daundering/- and wizzy** old totterton,/-/-" etc.

Catherine's Glynnese was often far less daundering than her normal English. Her description of William's reaction to the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria is a case in point: "A pamphlet nearly written he has been boiling over at the horrors and at the conduct of the Government very proud that England's voice is speaking its great heart throbbing and in this pumped-out moment with no backing it speaks."

Catherine, who survived her husband by two years, bore him eight children. In many ways he was a child to her too, and she was protective about him. One dinner guest who differed with William on the subject of opium felt a note smuggled into his hand: "Do not contradict the Prime Minister." But when "England's voice," speaking through Gladstone, went on too long and Catherine felt that the pumped-out moment had arrived, she could be firm about cutting him off. Once she hurled a phrase at him that is the measure of the woman: "Oh, William dear, if you weren't such a great man you would be a terrible bore!"

The Great Career Girl. Mrs Ayer was no less a Victorian than Mrs. Gladstone and (like all the best Victorians) no less unorthodox, but she was more spectacular about it. She spent 150,000 of husband Bert Ayer's iron and steel dollars on her Chicago household expenses each year. She read highbrow magazines and struggled to get Bert to like her French dishes (the French novels were beyond him). Alas, he threw her magazines in the fire and, instead of eating, drank. Harriet, "bird of gorgeous plumage strayed into a hen yard," might have had a long, drawn-out struggle to civilize this unworthy man, but she left the fellow some time before he went broke. Instead of being that Victorian emblem, The Woman Alone Against the World. Harriet Hubbard Ayer became one of the first great modern career women.

She had helpers. One was a socially topflight admirer, dashing Civil War Major General E. Burd Grubb, a West Pointer with an inherited business. He sent her violets daily from his hothouses but never (he had a strict moral code) asked her aboard his transatlantic yacht. The second was a smooth operator known as "P'ison Jim" Seymour. His diabolical advice to Harriet: "Let the men fool around with mines and railroads. See what you can take out of their wives."

Harriet saw. In Paris she staked out a claim to her private gold mine--a cosmetic cream that she claimed was invented for Madame Recamier. a premature career girl of the Napoleonic era. In due course, Harriet returned to the U.S. with her saucer of cream. It was a business triumph but a personal disaster. Along the way she had committed her daughter Margaret to the care of a frenetic novelist and proprietor of a finishing school named Blanche Willis Howard, who became The False Friend Who Poisoned Her Daughter's Mind Against Her Mother. She herself fell under the care of the sinister Wuerttemberg court physician. Dr. Julius von Teuffel, who fed her a hypnotic drug called sulfonal. At this point the proliferating plot begins to evoke Bertha, The Sewing Machine Girl.

On Top of the World. Von Teuffel, suggest the violently pro-Harriet biographers, acted at the instigation of P'ison Jim Seymour, who had helped finance Harriet's thriving cosmetic business and wanted to keep his hands on it.* There was a mad cannonade of charges and countercharges: that she was a loose woman, that she took dope, that she was addicted to alcohol and even drank hair dye to get it. Did Seymour hire a model to leave Harriet's offices--"clad only in blue tights"? Did he suborn witnesses to swear it was Harriet? These questions are not resolved. What is clear is the fact that Harriet was put into an insane asylum. New York in the '90s was no place or time to go mad in. Harriet Hubbard Ayer had a terrible time of it for 14 months.

She returned to lecture about her experiences. Still a smasher in a low-cut evening gown, she would go offstage and return in her tattered asylum gown and bring the house down in tears of indignation. Eventually Harriet was reunited with her daughter Margaret, who, after a brief stint on the Ziegfeld stage, led a useful life as an editor and teacher, and now, in her 70s, is co-author of this book.

Arthur Brisbane, journalism's Basic English eminence, then on the New York World, put Harriet to work as a columnist. It was a good pick. She had written brilliant copy for her own cream, and she did even better campaigning against the wasp waist and for shorter skirts, and announcing that yes, it was very wrong to eat peas off a knife. Perhaps gallant General Grubb might have conceded that, regardless of who won the Civil War, American women won the peace. Harriet Hubbard Ayer fought to the last man and had the final victory of picking up poor old Bert Ayer's unpaid tabs before he died. And. some say, holding his hand at the end.

* Imbecile /- Sloppy ** Sallow /-/- Prematurely aged * The firm eventually went into receivership. Today's Harriet Hubbard Ayer, Inc. (now a subsidiary of Nestle-Le Mur Co.), though named for her, is a different business, founded in 1907.

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