Elizabeth Wharton Drexel de la Poer Beresford, Baroness Decies
- Bobby Kelley
- Sep 18
- 2 min read
(April 22, 1868 - June 13, 1944)
Elizabeth Wharton "Bessie" Drexel de la Poer Beresford was an American heiress, socialite, and author whose life reflected the wealth, glamour, and contradictions of the Gilded Age. She was born on April 22, 1868, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of philanthropist Joseph William Drexel and Lucy Wharton Drexel. Through her lineage she was connected to one of America's leading banking families, her uncle being financier Anthony J. Drexel.
Her first marriage was to
, son of Admiral John A. Dahlgren and grandson of diplomat William Preston. They were introduced through family and social connections in Washington and Philadelphia, where both families were well known. Widowed at the age of thirty-one after John's death in 1899, she was left to raise their son alone.
In 1901 she married Harry Symes Lehr, a well-known figure in New York and Newport society. Lehr, a witty entertainer of the fashionable elite, was introduced to her by Edith Gould. He admitted candidly that he had married her for her fortune, explaining that poverty "terrified" him. For nearly three decades their union, which she later described as "a tragic farce," endured as a hollow partnership. During this time the couple lived largely in Paris, where Bessie devoted herself to charitable work, particularly with the American Red Cross during World War I. She also restored the seventeenth-century Hôtel de Cavoye, which became her treasured Paris residence.
After Lehr's death in 1929, she published her first memoir, King Lehr and the Gilded Age (1935). The book caused a sensation for its candid portrayal of the extravagance, scandals, and hypocrisies of turn-of-the-century high society, and was described as one of the most startling and scandalously intimate records of life among the wealthy. Her second book, Turn of the World (1937), continued her reflections on the glittering social world she had known, mixing nostalgia with frank criticism of its excesses.
In 1936 she married John Graham Hope de la Poer Beresford, the fifth Baron Decies, an Anglo-Irish peer known for his charm and cosmopolitan background. Their engagement was announced from Paris, and their courtship took place after her literary success and years of residence abroad. With him, she found renewed companionship and happiness.
Elizabeth Drexel de la Poer Beresford died on June 13, 1944, at the Hotel Shelton in Manhattan at the age of seventy-six. She was interred in the family crypt at Dahlgren Memorial Chapel in Washington, D.C.
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