![]() ![]() Marguerite selected a bridal wardrobe and gown fit for a princess: her trousseau of forty outfits included elaborate silk sleepwear, morning peignoirs and jackets, and afternoon lingerie dresses of linen and lace embellished with ruffles and bows reception gowns and loose tea gowns, dinner dresses, décolleté evening dresses, and lavishly decorated ball gowns twenty-four hats nineteen pairs of shoes and gloves, belts, shawls, and enough handbags to accessorize each outfit. When Elizabeth Baker realized she might not even have the chance to produce a wedding, she conceded and spared no expense. The couple announced to her father that they were going to wed and offered a choice they would either be married with her parents’ permission, or they would elope. Her mother’s theatrics reached the breaking point. When she threatened suicide, Marguerite barricaded herself in her room. When her mother stormed around the house, Marguerite hid in the closet. When she tried to entice her daughter with a Scottish marquis, Marguerite laughed it off and helped the man get drunk. But her mother put up barriers at every step along the way. He was the love of her life, she realized, and she was his love, his “Mardie.” They looked forward to their future together. When they returned to Maryland, Marguerite found her charming fiancé as warm and caring as ever. Instead, for the second time she made her daughter vanish by dragging her off to Europe. Bernard Baker was concerned, Tom was “a nobody.” Like the popular Houdini performing his magic tricks, she would have liked to make Tom disappear. But he was a struggling stockbroker, not a landed nobleman, as her mother would have preferred. True, he had a circle of rich friends and good connections. Tom may have come from a prominent family, but he was five years older than her and his bank account was slim. She “ranted, raved and stormed and had hysterics,” said Marguerite. Her father noted calmly that she was still young and might change her mind. In the early spring they told her parents they wanted to marry. It was a surprise to Marguerite that the better she knew him, the more she found him “gallant and chivalrous,” “loveable and charming.” It wasn’t long before she fell madly in love with him. The cooler she acted, the more heated his interest until, finally, he succumbed and fell in love with her. “He was piqued by my indifference,” she said. He sent her flowers and she thanked him politely he took her for drives and she smiled sweetly he asked her to dances and she accepted, then sometimes broke the dates and showed up with someone else. She lured him in, and then treated him with detachment. But rumbles of war brought the carousel to a halt. They had their love and that seemed enough. While the others threw themselves at his feet, she “snubbed him, abused him, ignored him.” Her wicked methods just might work. She made up her mind to use the same tactics on Tom that he used on all the girls. She was determined to snag a fiancé before the winter was over, and Tom was her target. It was known that he had already broken off one engagement, but then again, so had Marguerite. An abundance of rich, pretty girls would do most anything to win him over. She claimed she had no serious interest in Tom, but his apathy was a conundrum and she took his disinterest as a dare. Twenty-year-old Marguerite Baker, a ripe, bright-eyed beauty and one of the “birds” at the debutante cotillion, stood out from the others in her blue tulle gown sparkling with silver. He was a regular, “a member,” of the bachelor balls, who stood attired in his tailcoat, aloof from anyone on his trail. Tall and strongly built, he rode well, danced like a dream, and was adored by all the debs. Scion of an elite Baltimore family and twenty-five years old when she first laid eyes on him, Tom Harrison was considered the handsomest bachelor in Baltimore. It made her feel “like a song-bird released from a cage.” Marguerite broke away from her mother’s social ambitions by marrying Thomas Bullitt Harrison. Both were alone in Berlin: Stan, because she was seeking a divorce from her husband, a German doctor Marguerite because she was widowed and working.Įach of them was rebellious and unafraid: As a young woman on holiday in Florence, Stan Harding broke away from her controlling parents and fled to a group of English expats. ![]() They were both fluent in French and German and interested in the arts, and both worked as journalists. Well bred, well educated, and well traveled, both were reddish-haired beauties with mischievous gray-blue eyes, engaging smiles, and keen intellects. Stan Harding Krayl, as she was known in Germany, and Mrs. ![]()
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