Henry Symes Lehr - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Henry Symes Lehr was a socialite and the husband of Elizabeth Wharton Drexel

Elizabeth Wharton Drexel

Elizabeth Wharton Drexel was an American author and Manhattan socialite.- Birth :She was the daughter of Lucy Wharton and Joseph William Drexel...

.

He was the son of Robert Oliver Lehr, a tobacco and snuff importer who became the German consul in Baltimore

Baltimore

Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...

. He was the fourth child in a family of seven. He had a sister Alice Lehr Morton; and a brother Louis Lehr, who was a physician.

He was a social climber who duped his wife into marriage and refused to sleep with her on their wedding night. She stayed in a loveless, unconsummated marriage for 28 years, not wishing to upset her conservative, staunchly Catholic mother, née Lucy Wharton. Using his wife's fortune and his reputation as "The Funmaker" of New York and Newport society, Lehr attempted to establish himself as successor to Ward McAllister

Ward McAllister

Samuel Ward McAllister was the self-appointed arbiter of New York society from the 1860s to the early 1890s.-Life and career:...

, arbiter elegantiorum of New York's Four Hundred, the collection of Knickerbocker and industrial families he created as a bulwark against the new wealth of the Gilded Age. Plagued by his own insecurities and haunted by his low-birth, Lehr was never accepted as an equal by the aristocrats for whom he clowned. Grace Graham Wilson, wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt III

Cornelius Vanderbilt III

Cornelius Vanderbilt III was a distinguished American military officer, inventor, engineer, and yachtsman, and a member of the prominent American Vanderbilt family.-Biography:...

, who assumed the throne of Mrs. Astor after her death, had little regard for Lehr's antics. When his patron Mrs. Astor died, Lehr allied himself with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish

Stuyvesant Fish

Stuyvesant Fish was president of the Illinois Central Railroad.Fish was born in New York City, the son of Hamilton Fish and his wife Julia Ursin Niemcewicz, née Kean. A graduate of Columbia College, he was later an executive of the Illinois Central Railroad, and as its president from 1887 to 1906...

of New York and Newport. Together, they bucked the formality and rigidity that characterized social life in Gilded Age

Gilded Age

In United States history, the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post–Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book The Gilded...

New York. The result was practical jokes and entertainments that brought disgrace onto "The Four Hundred" and caused their rebuke in the nation's pulpits and periodicals.

He was diagnosed in 1923, and had a brain tumor removed in 1927. He died on January 3, 1929 of a brain malady at Johns Hopkins Hospital

Johns Hopkins Hospital

The Johns Hopkins Hospital is the teaching hospital and biomedical research facility of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, located in Baltimore, Maryland . It was founded using money from a bequest by philanthropist Johns Hopkins...

in Baltimore

Baltimore

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