Tennessee Celeste Claflin - Marriage

Marriage

Early on “Tennessee… had impetuously married a named John Bortels … but the marriage was short-lived.” When Bortels asked how she made money after disappearing for a time, it “led to a bitter quarrel, after which she agreed to give him her share of the proceeds… on the condition that he go away and divorce her.” In her late thirties she was married a second time. “Her choice was a man strikingly like Cornelius Vanderbilt—perhaps Tennie had learned a lesson by missing the chance to become the thirty-five-year-old widow of the richest man in America.”

On October 15, 1885, in England, Tennie married the vastly wealthy widower Sir Francis Cook, Viscount of Montserrat, Portugal, after telling him that the spirit of his dead wife told her she approved. “For endowing London’s Alexandra House and a concert hall for impoverished student artists,” Queen Victoria created a Cook Baronetcy. As the wife of an English baronet, Claflin would thereafter have been correctly styled “Lady Cook, Viscountess of Montserrat,” whom the British found witty and amusing. “Tennessee was still an ivory-skinned beauty with red hair and a delicate cleft chin.” When Sir Francis died sixteen years later amid rumors that she had murdered him, Tennie inherited $250,000.