Leaderboard
728x15

Grave story, no.2

Large Rectangle

A few nice names for animals images I found:


Grave story, no.2
names for animals
Image by angus mcdiarmid
"EIGHT DEATHS CAUSED BY LION" --Stevens Point Daily Journal, 11 May 1911

On the left, the grave of the Great Lafayette, in Piershill cemetery, Edinburgh; on the right, the grave of his dog, which, appropriately, sits at the foot of his stone.

We came upon this grave on our way back into town from Portobello at the weekend, and I've been reading up on Lafayette on and off all week. Interesting stuff...

The Great Lafayette was the most successful stage magician of the early 20th century. And he loved his dog.

Here's an extract from an article on him that I came across in an old Oakland Tribune:

"In his personality, Lafayette was dominating and peculiar to a degree. His most remarkable trait was his extraordinary affection for his dog, 'Beauty'. 'Beauty was a cream colored Tennessee hound which appeared in his performance and Lafayette demonstrated his love for the animal in bizarre manner. He had a gold collar studded with diamonds made for 'Beauty'. On one edge of the counterfoil of his cheques was a picture of 'Beauty' sitting on bags bursting with gold, surmounting the words, 'My two best friends'."

He indulged the dog terribly. Beauty shared five-course meals at Lafayette's table and, when it wasn't travelling in Lafayette's Mercedes, which had a silver statue of the dog as its hood ornament, it was transported in a special room in Lafayette's private train coach that was fitted with miniature doggy luxuries.

On 30 April, 1911, Lafayette, Beauty and their company arrived in Edinburgh to begin a two-week engagement at the Empire Palace Theatre in Edinburgh. Shortly after the run began, though, Beauty died (allegedly as a result of over-feeding, but that sounds like mean-spirited gossip to me). The dog was embalmed and laid out on silk cushions, surrounded by lilies, in Lafayette's suite in the Caledonian Hotel.

The sources I can find all repeat the same story, which is that the grieving Lafayette struck a deal with Piershill cemetery, who agreed to bury the dog on the condition that Lafayette was also buried there when he died. That's a strange condition, isn't it? A little searching uncovers a more likely story, as printed in the New York Times that year:

"[H]e went to a cemetery and bought a vault for 0. Being told that a dog could not be buried in consecrated ground, he said he would keep the grave for himself and would have the dog buried with him."

It's a fine difference of emphasis, I know, but that version makes much more sense. At least, up to a point. If the dog wasn't to be buried until Lafayette died, why buy a plot in Edinburgh at all? Given that Lafayette lived in London (in a house at 55 Tavistock Square, the facade of which was adorned with a portrait of Beauty, incidentally), wouldn't he have been better buying a plot there, rather than having both corpses shipped to Edinburgh when he died?

As it happens, the question never arose, because the Great Lafayette died before having a chance to leave the city.

Which is where the lion comes in.

The last act of Lafayette's spectacular stage show was an illusion called the Lion's Bride, which was set in a harem and involved a real lion, which menaced an oriental maiden after appearing to devour the magician.

Just after the scene's climax, which, from the sketchy descriptions of it, appears to have featured the magical transformation of the lion into the resurrected Lafayette, a fire broke out on stage.

Accounts of what happened next are, obviously, muddled and contradictory. Essentially, however, although the audience were able to escape easily, the members of the company had more difficulty, mostly because the exit from the stage was blocked by a huge, panicked lion -- I picture it pacing angrily back and forth at the stage edge with flaming curtains and scenery falling all around, its mane smouldering as cinders land on it, and roaring furiously at the group of exotically dressed people it can see creeping towards it through the choking smoke.

A newspaper report claimed that "Lafayette had a desperate struggle with the beast before he got him out of the way", but that might be hooey. In any case, most of the company somehow managed to get out, including Lafayette. However, once he was out on the street, he remembered that his horse, which had had a role in one of the acts, was still inside. He decided he couldn't leave it, and ran back into the theatre.

He didn't come back out, and the theatre burned for three more hours.

Among the 11 bodies that were eventually discovered, there were found to be two Lafayettes -- that is, two of the charred bodies were dressed in the Pasha costume that Lafayette had been wearing in the last act.

The first to be found -- which had, naturally, been assumed to be the one and only Lafayette and had been sent to a mortuary and cremated before the second was uncovered -- turned out to be a double who stood in for Lafayette as part of the Lion's Bride illusion. The second body was certainly Lafayette's, as it was wearing his diamond rings.

A few days later, on May 14 1911, a funeral cortege processed from the centre of Edinburgh to Piershill cemetery, the route lined with crowds. In the procession was Lafayette's Mercedes, which carried only one passenger: a Dalmatian hound, previously unmentioned in our story, but presumably an animal that had been promoted to number 1 dog in the household following Beauty's death but which now, rather sadly, found itself without a household at all.

Lafayette was Jewish (his real name was Sigmund Neuberger), but Edinburgh's rabbi refused to conduct any ceremony in which a man and a dog would be buried together, so the service was conducted by the local minister. Presbyterians clearly aren't the sticklers for orthodoxy they're sometimes made out to be.

And that's all there is to tell.

The Empire Palace Theatre was quickly refurbished, and it opened for business again three months later. It's still around today.

The Great Lafayette's grave is in the centre of the stonehenge-like circle of stones that you can see in this aerial view of Piershill cemetery.

You can read a pdf of the report of the disaster that ran in the New York Times here. It also has some interesting details about his London house.

Banner