The Mountbattens

by Andrew Lownie

  It was not only in her love life that the chickens had come home to roost. Years of unsustainable profligate spending, coupled with a drop in investment income, meant some tough decisions had to be taken. It was not helped when Britain came off the Gold Standard in September and the pound dropped in value by more than a quarter. ‘Things very gloomy,’ noted Edwina. ‘Doing everything possible.’163 She promptly went out shopping. It was clear that she would have to become a tax exile for the next two years, if she was not to pay 60 per cent of her income in tax.

  One of the largest drains had been Brook House, with running costs of £16,000 over the previous year. This included 27 indoor and two outdoor servants when the Mountbattens were in residence, and even 17 when they were away. They looked with envy at Mary’s house around the corner with its latest gadgets, spot-lit squash court over the garage and cocktail bar in the cellar, and yet was far less expensive to run. There was no real emotional attachment to what sometimes felt like a gloomy museum. Selling it and its contents would produce, after tax, £7,500 a year – plus a saving of £1,000 on staff. A problem was that Sir Ernest’s will had forbidden such a sale, but eventually a way was found and the sale was announced in October 1931.164

  Some items Edwina wished to keep but, rather than pay to store them, she offered them to the Prince of Wales who was furnishing his new home. So her jade, Van Dycks, Romneys and Raeburns found themselves temporarily at Fort Belvedere. He was ‘absolutely thrilled, like a child, and is going round in circles arranging where they are to go.’165 The house itself, however, found no takers and after 18 months of standing empty, it was pulled down. In its place arose an eight-storey block of flats, with the two upper floors an enormous penthouse that Edwina had reserved for herself. Sir Ernest’s wishes had been complied with.

  In November 1931, Edwina set off for Malta with her daughters, Pamela and Patricia. The Mountbattens were to be a family again. Dickie was pleased. ‘Lovely to have the old girl back,’ he wrote in his diary that night.166 He was able to report to his mother of the improved marital relations:

  It’s funny, but until this year I’ve never really discussed my married life with anyone at all. I really just kept things to myself, principally because I was aware of Edwina’s intense dislike of being discussed & felt it would be disloyal to speak about her. Actually being able to talk things over has helped so much and really improved the situation with Edwina so very much. It’s funny but now that I see her as she is (& not on this old-fashioned pedestal I had put her on) I’m really ever so much more fond of her. She is so very, very sweet when one can talk freely with her and see all her difficulties & laugh her out of them. I do feel we’re going to be happy – happier really than we’ve ever been.167

  Edwina made the best of her new life, entertaining her husband’s colleagues but also her friends – Ted Phillips stayed at the beginning of June. As part of the economy drive, their boat Shrimp had been sold to the son of the composer Giacomo Puccini, but the Cunningham-Reids had lent them their yacht Lizard and there were frequent expeditions and picnics around the coast. Dickie had taken up water-skiing and became so proficient he used to water-ski to shipboard parties in full mess dress tie, his shoes and socks around his neck. Soon Edwina began to enjoy herself. She was proud of her husband, whose career flourished, but the idyll couldn’t last.

  On 29 May 1932 in the Sunday newspaper, The People, under the heading ‘Society Shaken by Terrible Scandal’, an anonymous gossip columnist had written:

  I am able to reveal today the sequel to a scandal which has shaken society to the very depths. It concerns one of the leading hostesses in the country – a woman highly connected and immensely rich. Her association with a coloured man became so marked that they were the talk of the West End. Then one day the couple were caught in compromising circumstances. The sequel is that the society woman has been given hints to clear out of England for a couple of years to let the affair blow over, and the hint comes from a quarter which cannot be ignored.168

  It was clear the article referred to Edwina and the quarter that could not be ignored was Buckingham Palace. ‘I hear that that vulgar Socialist Sunday paper “The People” has published what Norman Birkett (the KC Edwina had over the Simpson Divorce business) calls a “particularly outrageous form of libel” about Edwina & the black man,’ Dickie wrote to his mother.169 The Mountbattens were unclear what to do. ‘We both don’t want to add to the publicity by a notorious libel case, but cannot allow her to be thought guilty by taking no action.’170

  After taking legal advice, and under pressure from the Palace, they decided to press ahead with court action against The People and its owners, Odhams Press. The case was heard on 8 July with the well-known barristers Norman Birkett acting for Edwina and Patrick Hastings for Odhams. It was held at the unusually early time of 9.30 a.m., without any advance notice to the press, so there was little reporting, and both Edwina and Dickie were unusually allowed to give evidence. Edwina claimed she had ‘never in the whole course of my life met the man referred to’ and the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, ruled in her favour. Odhams made a full apology and Edwina, claiming to be satisfied, did not press for damages.171 Suspicions remained that a deal had been done.

  That night the Mountbattens celebrated with a party at the Café de Paris and, as a mark of solidarity, the King and Queen entertained them to lunch at Buckingham Palace the next day and the Prince of Wales threw a party on the eve of their departure for Malta. There were, however, no winners. The Palace and Dickie were unhappy about all the publicity and it only strengthened Edwina’s republicanism, furious that she had been forced to submit to this public indignation. Henceforth, she swopped the Daily Herald for the Daily Worker.

  The black man was supposedly Paul Robeson, whose Othello had recently taken the West End by storm, and whom Edwina was to claim both in court and in her diary, ‘I have never met.’172 The People supposedly spent £25,000 trying to find evidence that the two had met at least once, but with no success. Dickie’s official biographer Philip Ziegler argues:

  Even if one accepts that she lied in her private diary and that she was prepared to perjure herself, it seems inconceivable that none of the many fellow-guests who must have witnessed Robeson’s presence was ready to testify to that effect in court.173

  According to Edwina’s official biographer, Janet Morgan, ‘Every guest who came to Brook House or Adsdean, every entertainer of significance who performed at her house, was mentioned in her daily diary; there, for her own records, was a note of every outing with every lover. Robeson’s name did not appear.’174 She further pointed out that even Robeson’s wife did not believe the story. ‘It is most incredible that people should be linking Paul’s name with that of a famous titled English woman, since she is just about the one person in England we don’t know.’175

  However, there is no reason that Edwina would commit everything to her diary and even Morgan admits that Edwina doctored her writing in case Dickie read it.176 Equally, there is no reason Robeson’s wife knew everything about his private life. The writer Marie Seton, who knew all parties concerned, said Robeson had told her that he did ‘go to bed once’ with Edwina, that she had been the seducer and he had accepted she had never met him, but it ‘jarred inside him’.177 The black singer Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson told a friend, Bill Pilkington, that Edwina and Robeson had had a brief affair.178 Edwina’s sister Mary later told the Mountbatten biographer Richard Hough, ‘Edwina admitted that she had lied in court.’

  Long after, Edwina made the same admission whilst having dinner with Catherine Courtenay and her husband in Kandy, Ceylon. Mountbatten talked openly of ‘the whitewash in the court case with Robeson. Edwina just stayed silent, until she said, “It’s over now. What else could I have done?”’179 According to Hough, the figure most deeply affected was Paul Robeson. ‘For Edwina to stand up in court and declare that she had never met him when their relationship had been so close, and when he had been invited to her hou
se frequently and been seen there by dozens of her friends, deeply wounded him and he never got over it.’180

  If the ‘coloured’ man wasn’t Robeson, could it have been someone else? She certainly knew the other best-known black entertainer of the period, the singer and pianist Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson. He had played in private concerts at the homes of many of her friends, including Marjorie Brecknock, and she had presented him with a gold cigarette case engraved with her name and supposedly a loving message. ‘Whenever she gave a party, Hutch played for her,’ explained Edwina’s daughter Pamela. ‘It was the habit of society women to give the entertainers presents rather than pay them.’181

  Hutch had been born in Grenada in 1900, but left as a teenager to study medicine in New York. A musical prodigy, he quickly switched to music and started performing in the clubs of Harlem, where he was taken up by the Vanderbilts. Through them, Edwina had most probably first seen him perform in Harlem and Palm Beach, and in 1924 she had recommended him as a piano teacher to the children of King Alfonso and Queen Ena of Spain. The affair between Queen Ena and Hutch was an open secret.182 The writer Lesley Blanch later remembered, ‘Lunch alone with Lady Mountbatten at Buck House, her infatuation for the pianist Hutch was a hushed-up scandal.’183

  According to Hutch’s biographer Charlotte Breese, ‘Edwina and Hutch may have become lovers in Harlem in l925, then he went off to Spain and they met up again in Paris.’184 Hutch often performed at Zelli’s in Paris, where Edwina was a regular visitor. She brought him over in the autumn of 1926 to play at a reception in Carlton House Terrace, given with a socialite friend, Lady Gibbons, and he played in London venues that the Mountbattens and their circle frequented, such as the Café de Paris and Chez Victor.

  ‘At Chez Victor, he used to sing directly to Edwina Mountbatten who, on one occasion, took off her chiffon scarf and put it round his neck and kissed him while he was playing,’ remembered Joan Vyvyan, a young socialite. ‘He sang “The Man I Love” to her. He was madly attractive and intelligent. How we envied her!’185

  The ‘compromising circumstances’ that had occasioned the gossip article were supposedly: ‘Hutch and Edwina being inextricably united through vaginismus, a rare and temporary medical phenomenon; and having to be taken in flagrante delicto by ambulance from the Mountbattens’ home at Brook House to hospital.’186

  ‘I was at a grand party. Edwina interrupted Hutch playing the piano,’ the BBC producer, Bobby Jay, recalled. ‘She kissed his neck, and led him by the hand behind the closed doors of the dining room. There was a shriek and, a few minutes later, she returned, straightening her clothes. Hutch seemed elated, and, before he returned to the piano, told me that, with one thrust, he had flashed her the length of the dining-room table.’187

  The bandleader, Alfred Van Straten, noted in his diary a night in the early 1930s, when Dickie came in to Quaglino’s very drunk and sat with him. ‘“I am lonely and drunk and sad,” he complained. “That n*gger Hutch has a prick like a tree trunk, and he’s fucking my wife right now.”’ In the hearing of one socialite, Joan Vyvyan, Mountbatten exploded, ‘If I ever catch that man Hutch, I’ll kill him.’ In both cases, the violence of his language has the ring of truth and speaks of pent-up pain and jealousy.188

  Edwina had much in common with Hutch. Both promiscuous and uninhibited about sex, they were charming, funny and did not mind if they shocked people. Each gave the other an entrée to worlds that intrigued them, but that they could not enter alone. Hutch had far more to gain socially from Edwina’s company and contacts, but through him, she could relax in a milieu that amused her, away from the responsibilities and restrictions of her marriage. The affair with Hutch was to continue off-and-on for the next 30 years. His other lovers would include many of those in the Mountbattens’ social circle, including Merle Oberon and Princess Marina of Kent, Cole Porter, Noël Coward and Ivor Novello.189

  * * *

  It was in 1932 that Dickie was to have his own first affair, with a woman who would become his principal mistress until his death over 40 years later. Yola Letellier was in her twenties and the third wife of Henri Letellier, one of France’s most successful newspaper owners and a man 40 years her senior. The owner of Le Journal, then the world’s third largest-selling newspaper, and co-developer of both Deauville and Cannes, Letellier was one of France’s most powerful men, reputed to own 1,260 suits, 11 motor cars, a champagne marque, a racing stable, Mexican oil fields, and ‘real estate scattered throughout Europe and South America’.190

  Mystery continues to surround Yola. Born Yvonne Henriquet, probably in 1904 – she gave dates ranging from 1900 to 1907 – she also used the names Henriques and Henriquez, whilst the dates of her marriage to Letellier vary between January 1926 and 1928. With her heart-shaped face, freckles and long legs, she was chic, animated, attractive, intelligent, undemanding and affectionate. Her aunt had been a friend of Colette and supposedly Yola was the inspiration for Colette’s 1944 novella Gigi, filmed five years later, about a young girl who falls in love with a much older man.

  Dickie had first met her playing polo in Deauville in 1928, and then again in April 1932 whilst staying with friends in Cannes.191 Dickie was thrilled to discover that another woman found him attractive. ‘Told her news,’ Dickie wrote in his diary. ‘Amazing heart to heart.’192 Edwina was furious. She was allowed lovers but not her husband, and immediately left for Paris to confront her. ‘Your girl is sweet,’ she wrote to Dickie, ‘and I like her and we got on beautifully and are now gummed and I am lunching with her at her house on Tuesday!!!’193

  CHAPTER 9

  Playing to Win

  Restless and bored, Edwina now decided to go travelling. In August 1932, she and Jean holidayed on the island of Brioni, in the Northern Adriatic, before joining up with Nada at Wolfsgarten and going on to the Middle East, taking in Istanbul (where they stayed with the British Ambassador), Jerusalem, Damascus, Akaba, Baghdad and Tehran, travelling only with basic camping equipment and a change of clothes, and using local guides. When his ship docked in Haifa, Dickie joined them at Baalbeck.

  In Transjordania, Edwina chartered a light aeroplane for crossing the desert, in Damascus she bought a car and drove the 600 miles to Baghdad, and at the buried city of Persepolis she spent a week with the archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld. At the end of November, the two women dined with King Faisal in Baghdad before returning home for Christmas. In the course of three months, they had covered 6,000 miles by plane and 4,000 by car. ‘Divine having the old girl back,’ Dickie wrote in his diary.194

  Within three months, feeling depressed, Edwina was off again – this time to stay with Yola outside Paris. Diagnosed with malaria and jaundice, Edwina dieted and tried to gain her strength. In April, the two women left for Cannes to meet Dickie’s ship, but Edwina remained weak and it was Dickie, not Edwina, who now danced the night away. Her spirits were only raised when a six-foot, blond, blue-eyed Hungarian count, Anthony Szapary, whom she had met a few months earlier in Budapest through Yola, arrived from Tuscany and took her to see the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo. Szapary, a few years younger than Edwina, an accomplished tennis player and well-known ladies’ man, became Edwina’s new lover. She now resolved to go to the Clinic Loew in Vienna for her troubles. It had the added benefit of being close to Hungary for weekend visits to Szapary.195

  Edwina and Yola stayed in Vienna for two months as every possible treatment was tried to restore Edwina’s health. ‘My gall bladder, liver etc, don’t work at all as they should, neither does my stomach or intestine.’196 The experts pronounced she was suffering from a sort of Mediterranean parasite and only further rest in Vienna would cure her. She continued to enjoy her time with Szapary, but other rumours circulated. During the summer of 1933, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford divorced. Rumours began to fly with Fairbanks ‘openly betraying his irritation as he was questioned about his friendship with a woman of title . . . He has been a frequent escort of Lady Edwina Mountbatten . . .’197

  * * *<
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  At the beginning of September 1933, Dickie began his four-month naval interpreter’s course in Paris, renting the flat of Jean’s sister-in-law Kay Norton in the Place du Palais-Royal. It was meant to provide a relaxation from naval duties, but Dickie, as always, took it very seriously, with all reading, writing (including his diary) and speaking to be in French. The result when he took his interpreter’s examination in January was predictable. He had come top.198

  Edwina, who was bilingual, was due to spend the autumn with him, but after three days announced she and Yola were returning to Budapest to continue her treatment. Dickie stayed on, alone, lonely and miserable. ‘I do hope you’re not jealous,’ she wrote after telling him that she and Yola were sharing a room.199 He was jealous and told her not to interfere. ‘If you get into that sort of mood,’ she warned him, ‘think first before writing as it’s asking for trouble.’200 When Dickie’s French teacher, Madame Callede, announced she would be taking an autumn holiday near Biarritz, Dickie followed her to combine his lessons and see the Prince of Wales, who was also staying there. It was in Biarritz that Dickie and Edwina were reunited and where at a polo match Edwina was to meet the great love of her life.

  Harold Phillips was eight years younger than her, the younger brother of Ted Phillips, a six-foot-five, square-jawed Guards officer with a private income. A fluent Spanish speaker – his mother’s family, the Bryces, came from South America – he was also an excellent rider and held a pilot’s licence. Where Dickie did everything with fanatical purpose, Bunny – so-called because of his long legs and back – was effortlessly competent. Where Dickie was exhausting, Bunny was easy-going. It was just what Edwina needed and he now took on the role in Edwina’s life that Yola had played in Dickie’s – a reassuring presence for all the family.