Yet hopes ran high on October 4. Miriam had refurbished the Gerlach with a joint bedroom and dressing room for Willie and booked a wedding supper at Delmonico’s. After the ceremony, the party sat down to a six-course dinner of capon, beef tenderloin, and upland plover, accompanied by four wines, Möet and Chandon champagne, and a cardinal punch. Willie tied one on and collapsed drunk on the marriage bed that night.
The binge lasted a week and brought unwelcome surprises. Bad enough that he couldn’t deliver and left his false teeth on the bureau, but he was a mean drunk. Two nights after the wedding, he stumbled into the room, smashed bottles, and threatened Miriam, yelling “Damn your soul!” and “To hell with you!” The housekeeper said she was afraid she’d wake up and find Mrs. Leslie dead. Once Miriam had a close call. On a carriage ride, they approached a precipice and Willie shouted: “I have a blankety blank good notion to drive down that embankment and break your neck.” Miriam wasn’t easily cowed; she consigned Willie to a separate “sleeping room” and put up a brave front.
As the weeks went on, this became increasingly hard to do. The marriage, which she thought would generate positive publicity, had the reverse effect. The press descended like jackals, jeering at her age (she was “old enough to be his mother”) and her last-gasp fourth “attempt at matrimony.” She forged on, paid his double-digit liquor bills at the Lotos Club, and buried herself in business while he slept until one thirty each afternoon.
The breaking point came the first of the year. In January 1892, she assembled a hundred friends to accompany them by train to the first annual convention of the International League of Press Clubs in San Francisco. Willie began to feel alarmed for his future and sent Miriam a mea culpa sonnet beforehand, which she printed in the Monthly:
Into love’s water have I cast my stone,
Where gently mirrored lay your face so fair;
But now the rippling circles, under grown,
Have blurred the clear gray eyes and golden hair.
“Love! Can no love for all my faults atone?”
Should the waves quiet, will you still be there?
Unmoved, Miriam put him in a separate coach car and changed her name back to Frank Leslie. She informed reporters that she would become Mrs. Wilde as soon as her husband made “for himself a name equal to my own.” He was in no hurry. Mrs. Leslie, he drawled, “has made industry a study while I have reciprocated by making indolence mine.”