Lavender Legend

Oscar Wilde arrived in the United States on January 3, 1882, wearing the extravagantly flamboyant clothing that would soon make him famous—lavender trousers, frilly white shirt, blue scarf, green coat trimmed with seal fur, and a turban-like hat that perched atop his shoulder-length brown hair.

Newspaper reporters covering the Irish writer’s arrival thought he dressed funny and took careful notes on his attire. They also thought he talked funny. “His manner of talking is somewhat affected,” a reporter noted, “his great peculiarity being a rhythmic chant in which every fourth syllable is accentuated.” The New York Times reported that Wilde laughed funny, too: “His laugh was a succession of broad ‘haw, haw, haws.’”

Wilde was surprised by American newspaper writers’ descriptions of him but delighted to be the subject of their attention. He was a man who believed all publicity to be good publicity—or, as he famously put it later, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

In the next 51 weeks, Wilde became the subject of countless American conversations—never mind hundreds of articles, editorials, cartoons, and songs—as he zigzagged the country, traveling 15,000 miles, delivering nearly 150 lectures, and conducting more than 100 interviews with reporters, some of whom mocked him as a “sissy,” “an ass-thete,” and a “long-haired what’s it.” On his wild, zany circuit, Wilde ate gargantuan meals, drank copious quantities of whiskey and wine, visited a silver mine and an opium den, got fleeced, and hobnobbed with Walt Whitman and Jefferson Davis.

“How do you like our country?” a reporter asked the traveler two months into his journey.

“I am lost in wonder and amazement,” Wilde replied. “It’s