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.