THRIVE ON CAMERA and in life!
By Barbara Barna Abel & Shannon McMahon Lichte
Completed in honor of Shannon McMahon Lichte (1961–2024), beloved friend, creative partner, and co-author.
They weren't supposed to achieve fame, money, power, or independence. Nor were they supposed to share a legendary romantic partnership that spanned decades over two continents.
New York, 1886. The rules were clear. They broke them anyway. In a world built for men, two larger-than-life women of impeccable style and taste set out to build something else entirely. They never let the fact that women couldn't vote, hold a bank account, or own property stand in their way.
Elsie de Wolfe is twenty-seven— passing for twenty-one —and running out of time. She’s a not particularly gifted amateur actress whose future depends on one thing: a strategic marriage. What she lacks in beauty and pedigree, she makes up for with wit, unerring chic, and a spine of steel.
Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury has no intention of marrying at all. Bold, brilliant, and impossible to contain within the narrow confines of New York Society, she is determined to make her own way—creatively, financially, intellectually, and socially.
Against the glittering backdrop of Gilded Age New York and Belle Epoque Paris, they buck convention, bet on themselves, make history – and have a ball doing it.
When Elsie and Bessie first meet at a reception honoring Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawaii, an unmistakable frisson of electricity passes between them. Soon, friendship turns to love, and together they become legends, inventing the fields of interior decorator and modern theatrical agent.
Sharp, stylish, and deliciously subversive, Becoming Legends: Elsie-Bessie is a love story. Like all great human sagas, theirs is rich with feeling, longing, awakening, triumph, heartbreak, jealousy, frenemies, fortunes made and lost, a tabloid murder, and even a throuple.
Becoming Legends: Elsie-Bessie began as a shared dream between me and my dear friend and creative partner, Shannon McMahon Lichte, two high school friends who got together for socially-distanced cocktails one summer evening early in the pandemic and hatched a plot to tell the story of Elsie and Bessie.
We met every week via zoom and delighted in the process of writing and discovery.
Shannon passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2024 before the project was finished. I promised to keep going and share Elsie-Bessie with the world.
This book is dedicated to Shannon, who like Elsie and Bessie, possessed an unparalleled capacity for friendship. And accessories. Love you. Mean it.
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