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| Mrs Brown-Potter (1857-1936) |
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In Press and Literature |
(North Adams Transcript, 11th July, 1899)
MRS JAMES BROWN POTTER
AMERICA has captured England, this sounds startling, but it is true. The capture has not been a martial but an artistic feat, and one of the American women of beauty and note who have been generaling that campaign of utter capitulation is Mrs. Brown Potter, who has just made all London pass under the yoke. Royalty has been dining her and nobility feting her, and during this present season there is not a more popular foreigner in the English capital.
Cora Urquhart Potter has attained the top of that artistic ladder up which the last ten years she has been so studiously climbing, and has finally been declared the most beautiful, the most gifted and the best dressed woman on the stage in the in the world.
A little over ten years ago she was the wife of James Brown Potter, and an acknowledged beauty in the exclusive set of New York's Four Hundred. She was the mother of a lovely little girl, little Fifi Potter, now a young woman and a debutante in the society that knows her mother no more. Mrs. James Brown Potter, as she was then known, had a taste for amateur theatricals; she acted well and often appeared in plays at private entertainments of the fashionables. Some one told the spoiled beauty that she had genius and would make a great actress. She believed this; there is nothing so easy as to believe well of oneself. The life of Mrs. Brown Potter began to look humdrum; she wanted wider admiration, greater triumphs than a fashionable coterie could afford her. With her beauty, social position and talent she thought she had only to appear to have the world at her feet.
Mr. Potter, with a rare chivalry, publicly made no protest, although it is said his wife's determination broke his heart, while his wife, much advertised, appeared before the public. Beauty is less rare than genius, and in some things the world is just. It resents the one claiming the rewards of the other. Consequently people went to see Mrs. James Brown Potter's beauty and laughed at her acting.
Kyrle Bellew played leading parts with her and the combination of the two professional beauties made people smile. The two then began a tour of the world. Mr. Bellew, who is an experienced actor, undertook to coach the one time society woman. He succeeded, for from year to year her acting improved. The two came back to New York when they thought they had achieved success enough to win applause from their former critics. They presented "Romeo and Juliet," in which Mrs. Potter of course played the leading part, and played it badly, while Mr. Bellew gave a very good Romeo.
She also played "Charlotte Corday," but New York was cold to her art, and she is said to have gone away chagrined and indignant. After further touring of the world with Mr. Bellew she turned up in London, secured an engagement to play in Sir. Beerbohm Tree's presentation of "The Three Musketeers." She played the part of Milady and dressed it marvelously well. London went wild over her gowns and the Prince of Wales praised her beauty. Her fame was made. In "Carnac Sahib," a later production of Mr. Tree's, she added to her laurels, although it is not quite clear which London admired most, Mrs. Potter's gowns or her acting. As it has always been her ambition to force those who once criticised her to acknowledge her talent, it is not unlikely that she may again be seen shortly in New York theaters.
It is doubtful, however, if her success will bring society to witness her triumph, for its sympathy is with the lovely daughter whom Mrs. Potter deserted for a public career and who since the time she has been old enough to understand her mother's choice is said never to have voluntarily mentioned her name.
(The Syracuse Herald - 17th April, 1917)
Fifi Stillman's Mother, Still Beautiful, Lives Hermit's Life in England
More Weird and Wonderful Than Ever, Verdict of Her Friends.
NEVER WEARS HAT
Disdains Modern Fashions and Says She Has Won Peace.
By MARGARET MARQUAND
London, April 16.— I am sure it will not surprise you to hear that in London every detail of the Stillman divorce case is being eagerly read and discussed. The sums paid by British Newspapers in cable tolls for long recounts of it must bulk to a vast aggregate. Mrs. Brown Potter was for so long a time a vivid personality in this country that the mention of her name in connection with her daughter's domestic affairs has revived interest in her.
Mrs. Brown Potter, more weird and wonderful than ever, now lives an almost hermit existence (I suppose a "hermit" can be a woman) in Guernsey where she has a beautiful old farmhouse with vegetable gardens and great rose beds which she tends herself. Her hair is cut short and is snow-white. She never wears a hat and she disdains all modern fashions. Her feet are sandalled and her "dresses" are simply shawls or scarves swathed around her slim figure. She has pound "peace," so she says, and I wonder if an echo of her daughter's troubled times has penetrated to her Channel Island home.
I remember meeting Mr. and Mrs. James Stillman about nine or ten years ago when they made their first visit to Mrs. Potter, who had not seen her daughter since she had left her home when "Fifi" was scarcely more than a baby. "Things had happened" and young Mrs. Stillman, whose husband was then only a prospective millionaire, insisted upon seeing her mother in her English home. So she and "Jimmie" and the two children (they must be 12 and 13 or 14 now) went to stop with Mrs. Potter at "Ye Old Bridge House," Staines.
Looked Marvelously Lovely
Staines is a pretty old-world riverbank place that has escaped the horror of the "tripper" invasion, which is the fate of so many of the Thames-side towns, and "Ye Old Bridge House" is an exquisite to Jacobean mansion that Mrs. Potter made perfect with that flawless taste for furnishing and arrangement that is one of her chief characteristics.
I will never forpet my first meeting with Fifi Potter. I had been asked to dinner and as I had to come down from town by train I arrived early and found Mrs. Potter and her mother, Mrs. Urquhart, sitting in the inglenook on either side of the great brick open fire-place in the hall, which was really the favorite "living-room" of the house.
Mrs. Potter was looking marvellously lovely in the flickering fire-light. Her dress of soft reddish-brown velvet caught the tones of her red hair and took an answering gleam from barbaric ropes of amber and gold beads that hung round her thin throat.
Mrs, Urquhart in dull black with a little lara cap shading her forehead, looked like a frail statuette carved in ivory and ebony.
And the low-raftered roof and the strange atmosphere, of pace and antiquity gave a brooding sense of unreality to the whole picture.
James, Jr., Turns Rebel
Suddenly a shriek seemed to cut through the air, and down the old oak stairs stamped a small red-faced sturdy figure howling horribly, with a fat nurse in full pursuit. It was Mrs. Potter's grandson — James Stillman, jr. - and he didn't want to go to bed.
Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Urquhart sat in their corners motionless, voiceless, while the battle raged and finally the small rebel was defeated. Then Mrs. Potter turned to me and with an expression of tragic despair remarked, "I suppose he is very healthy!" And silence settled once more over the two fragile figures of mother and daughter.
A few minutes of this and again a diversion. The outer door opened with a bang and entered James Stillman, father of the defeated child. He had been out for a tramp. Big, burly, and decidedly muddy, he also made an incongruous mark in the picture. "Cold, hungry, tired and thirsty," was his greeting, and he tramped up the broad oaken steps and disappeared.
Again came the quiet voice from the fire-side: "Yes. very healthy."
And again silence that was presently broken by a sort of ripple of sound and young Mrs. Stillman stepped into the aura cast by six candles that had now been lighted and added their softness to the firelight glow.
She was very wonderful to look at, was this daughter of Cora Urquhart Potter. Taller and more heavily built than her famous mother, she possessed the inheritance of an insistent personality that, though fascinating, was also rather forbidding.
Always An Aristocrat
She was dressed in a complete Chinese mandarin's outfit. A gorgeous coat of blue embroidered in gold and yellow and rose-color, she wore, with Chinese shoes, jade necklaces and bracelets, and round her head was bound a rose-colored silk scarf with gold embroidered ends that trailed on the ground as she walked. An amazing figure to make up the trio — grandmother, mother, daughter, and upstairs that "Healthy" product of a fourth generation.
I have thought of that trip frequently during tho last weeks while the Stillmans have been washing their dirty linen in public. Many are the tales told about Cora Urquhart Potter, whose beauty held sway through long years in London, New York and Paris; she probably did many things that were foolish, "but," as I once heard a very famous man of title remark, "damme, Cora Potter was always an aristocrat."
And it is a fact Mrs. Potter's life story will one day supply a romance that is history. She has preserved a strange atmosphere of aloofness, a curious separation from the vulgarity of life that only breeding can supply. One can only wonder if her only daughter Fifi has carried on the "panache" of her lovely, famous mother.