What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro
obvious that a bit of gossip flutters through a scene in the television series The Duchess of Duke Street to the effect that Shaw based the character of Eliza Doolittle on Rosa. Perhaps, but the differences were in many ways more striking than the overlap. In the play, the Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle decides that in order to get ahead in life, she has to get rid of her accent and learn to speak like a lady. She goes to Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, who takes her on as an experiment: can he transform this guttersnipe into someone who can pass as a duchess? Eliza is coached in speech, dress, and deportment; and then Higgins introduces her to society—first at an afternoon garden party and later at a dinner party followed by the opera. Eliza conducts herself perfectly everywhere, never revealing a trace of her origins, and not a soul doubts that she belongs among the well-born.
It’s tempting to think of Rosa sitting in the audience on opening night. By her own account she was a close friend of the star, the renowned actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, although “Mrs. Pat” ran off with Lady Randolph’s second husband that same year, which would have tested Rosa’s loyalty since she adored Lady Randolph. At any rate, if Rosa saw the play, she certainly would have deemed herself a greater success than Eliza, whose despairing cry “What is to become of me? What is to become of me?” rings out during the fourth act. After her triumph in society, Eliza realizes that she has been successfully uprooted but now belongs nowhere. She can’t go back to selling flowers in the street, and since she has neither the money nor the family associated with her new class identity, she can’t see a path forward. In the play, Shaw deliberately left her future vague.
Rosa would have found the whole quandary pathetic. She had conducted her own climb up the ladder very differently, and with a different goal in mind. It was as Rosa herself, Cockney born and kitchen raised, that she demanded to be made welcome in the highest ranks of society—defiantly flaunting her Cockney accent all the way. Back when she was a young servant in the household of the Comte de Paris, she had developed a passion she would nurture for the rest of her life—not for a man, but for an entire class, starting with the comte’s family. “I was overwhelmed with admiration for them,” she told Lawton. He was “marvellous,” his wife “the most interesting woman in the world,” their marriage “the most perfect match in the world.” She had no such language of superlatives for her first employers, an undistinguished family at 3 Myrtle Villas in Leyton, but everything that went on at Sheen House entranced her. All the family members used to visit her in the kitchen, she said. “If you had a round back, when the Comtesse passed through, she would give you a whack and tell you to stand up straight. She told me to keep my back straight just as she told her daughters—with a whip!” To have been disciplined exactly as if she were a noblewoman’s daughter was still making her proud some forty years later.
Lady Randolph Churchill was a similar paragon in Rosa’s eyes, despite an obvious penchant for awkward marriages. (Randolph reportedly died of syphilis; George Cornwallis-West left her for Mrs. Pat; and Montagu Porch, whom she married at sixty-four, was three years younger than Winston.) “She was one of the most perfect women … that I have ever met,” Rosa declared. Another figure in her personal pantheon was Thomas Lister, Lord Ribblesdale, who lived at the Cavendish for years and became a genuine friend. Ribblesdale was lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and also master of the buckhounds, a post that chiefly required him to display the grandeur of British high birth as he led the royal procession at the opening of Ascot. By all accounts he did this superbly. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Ribblesdale, showing him swathed in the magnificent cape, breeches, and boots of a nobleman ready for a day’s hunting, hangs in the National Gallery. Rosa was devoted to him and treasured her copy of the painting. (In fact, she said it was she who urged him to present the original to the museum.) “Lord Ribblesdale was the most wonderful man in the world,” she told Lawton. “His voice and manner and everything about him was just charming. He was a very, very great gentleman—a great specimen of an English gentleman.”
By contrast, she wanted nothing to do with what she called “boughten” nobility. “I don’t like the people who buy their titles,” she told Lawton. “I don’t like the man who makes sugar or the man who gives a few thousands to a hospital having a title, I only like titles which are inherited.” Back in olden times, she went on, “people used to lie under the table drinking and drive a four-in-hand and go swash-buckling around, but they did those things like gentlemen and aristocrats and on certain occasions only—not every day in the week like the nouveau riche hooligans do now … Now it is all vulgar, because the people who do it are vulgar … They are aping their betters.”
The arrivistes were doing badly what Rosa was determined to do perfectly. Coming of age when she did, in the midst of a long, frantic spree of social mobility generated by the Industrial Revolution, she could see that new money was disrupting many of the verities that had long ruled Britain. People whose parents had never dreamed of such advancement were gaining access to education, opportunity, and wealth; and the most conservative among the old-money classes had to close ranks sternly if they wanted to avoid associating with the wrong sort. Then as now, there was no simple way to define social class in Britain—birth, education, accent, manners, taste, and income all contributed, and only the first of these was immutable. Who belonged? Who didn’t? More nerve-racking still, who might belong next week or next year, given a little luck or the right fiancée? Rosa knew, just as Henry Higgins did, that anybody could slip into the upper ranks by acting the part properly. But she also believed that the true greatness of aristocracy was beyond imitation, a state of grace bestowed only upon the well-bred, and that all others would fall short sooner or later. One of the stories she loved telling about herself was tantamount to her own version of Pygmalion: she described the time she arrived at a country estate to arrange a dinner and decided to go in the front door instead of the back. “I was smartly dressed and very good looking in those days, so the lady of the house was almost kissing my lips when I said—‘Oh, it is only Mrs. Lewis, the cook. I know my way to the kitchen.’ Oh, you should have seen their faces! … Lady Paget or Lady Randolph Churchill would have seen the joke, but these people couldn’t, they not being exactly tip-top. It’s only a thoroughbred that does the right thing instinctively.”
Rosa believed with all her heart that she had won a special place among the thoroughbreds. “Although I was a servant as you might say, and went out and cooked for them, they didn’t regard it so,” she explained, distancing herself from the word “servant” even as she was forced to use it. “They found other things in me than my capacity to cook. They seemed to enjoy being with me, and I have always associated with them on equal terms.” Her rich clients visited her in the kitchen, she often said, and she in turn dropped into their drawing rooms—their dining rooms, too—whenever she felt like it. “And I was always welcome,” she stressed. “I trotted in to see everybody at these dinners.” Sometimes she borrowed a gown from a Bond Street dressmaker, along with gloves and a fan—“dressed myself up like a Duchess and gone to the dinner. Then between the courses I would slip down into the kitchen if anything was going wrong, and sometimes bring up a dish in my own hands—and why not?”
One of the photographs she gave Mary Lawton for the book showed the head cook at the Cavendish, “Mrs. Charlotte,” dressed in a simple but beautifully styled evening gown, with her hair piled high in fashionable waves and puffs. She was posed in an upholstered chair, one hand positioned palm-up on her lap, the other holding a book, her gaze off to the side, her expression slightly nervous and frozen into place. “My cook photographed in evening dress looks as good as anybody—as good as a Duchess,” Rosa declared. The occasion for the picture was the annual ball that Rosa staged for her staff and dozens of other cooks, maids, butlers, and doormen from London establishments. She borrowed