Beautiful and flamboyant Lillian Russell (1861-1922) was the toast of the
town almost from the night she made her debut at New York’s Tony Pastor’s
Opera House in burlesques of Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. Only
eighteen at the time, the singer and actress was fresh from Clinton, Iowa,
where she had been born Helen Louise Leonard in 1861. For the next thirty
years Lillian Russell’s beauty and talent for light opera brought her fame
and fortune unsurpassed by any contemporary performer, making her the
first great prima donna of the American stage. The press called her “Airy
Fairy Lillian.” Success her own company, a collection of male admirers
that has never been matched since, several husbands whom she walked out
on, and a number of sumptuous apartments and houses, like her summer home
in then fashionable Far Rockaway, New York, where she entertained lavishly
and often failed to pay the bills. Among several things named for her was
the Lillian Russell dessert, a half cantaloupe filled with a scoop of ice
cream. Miss Russell ate like a longshoreman and never weighed less than
two hundred pounds, which did not prevent Diamond Jim Brady from offering
her a million dollars in cash for her hand in marriage. She even had a
bicycle with a custom-fitted seat molded to her “every peculiarity of pose
and shape.” She will always be the toast of the town to the town of
Lillian Russell, Kansas, which was named for her at the height of her
fame.