by Sally Koslow
One day while I was practicing figure eights, a tall man with silver sideburns glided to my side and introduced himself. Jack Mitford had noticed me at the club. Would I care to waltz? We skated to It’s Time to Say Goodnight and then chatted over tea.
That evening I described Mr. Mitford to John. “Do you realize he belongs to one of the oldest families in England?” he gushed. “Older than the royal family? His brother is Lord Redesdale, the father to a whole flock of beautiful girls.” The next day John presented me with a copy of Burke’s Peerage, which I studied as if I were preparing for an entrance exam to heaven.
The following week, Jack Mitford invited John and me to dinner; I suspect he wanted to see if my husband existed. John not only appeared, he impressed, and Mr. Mitford asked us to join a group that would be skiing in St. Moritz. John’s commissions were rising, and he didn’t want to be away, but he insisted that I accept the invitation. I passed two weeks in Switzerland in a flurry of snowflakes and quips traded in English, French—in which I could get by—and German and Italian, in which I knew barely a word. When Jack’s nephew, Tom Mitford, another Etonian a few years younger than I, complimented my mellifluous speaking voice, I felt as if I’d earned a diploma. Tom was extraordinarily handsome. I had always wanted children, to be the mother that mine was not. I let myself imagine Tom as the father to my sons, who would look like Saxon kings.
John and I began to be welcomed at country house parties. By day we rambled through venerable gardens bordered by yew hedges, played croquet on emerald lawns, or rode horseback. After we’d heeded the dressing gong, we dined in baronial halls.
At every turn I risked exposure. I had no relations or school chums whose names I could drop, no history to recount. Not that my friend Tom or the Honorable Hortense Hoo-Hah would ever have the cheek to ask, “Sheilah, when did you come out?” Protected by a thin shield of decorum and propriety, I allowed a tragic story to circulate. My parents, rest their souls, were dead. John Laurence and Veronica Roslyn Laurence had lived in Chelsea, a fashionable district known for its Bohemian informality and genteel decay. This would explain my lack of formal education. I’d had governesses before a Parisian finishing school and was seventeen when Papa and Mama died in a car accident. Promptly, the orphaned Sheilah married a family friend, the dashing Major Gillam, D.S.O.
The flaw in the fiction wasn’t just that no one could corroborate this tale or my false age, but that I had never been presented at court as a debutante. John solved this problem with characteristic ingenuity. After they married, wives were generally presented a second time. He approached the widow of a colonel with whom he’d fought in Gallipoli. Would she be my sponsor? Mrs. Arthur Saxe, who hadn’t been to court in years, agreed. John forwarded my name to Lord Chamberlain and in short order he summoned us to Buckingham Palace.
At this time in England, unemployment was building and the pound was to go off the gold standard, which caused alarm. For the crowd of which we were now marginal members, however, it was considered ill-bred to discuss anything as disturbing as financial restriction. Mr. and Mrs. John Gillam followed through with a not inexpensive proposition. John rented a cutaway, white tie, and knee breeches, and polished the sword I had admired in his bachelor flat. I ordered a sleeveless ivory silk and gauze dress with a modest train from Norman Hartnell, the queen’s dressmaker.
The evening of my presentation, my head sprouted three tall ostrich feathers. I felt ridiculous in every way, including ridiculously excited, as Mrs. Saxe, John, and I sat like three bowling pins in a hired Daimler that proceeded from our flat. At a glacial pace, our car joined a queue moving forward until we neared the mall where a crowd of workaday Brits lined the street, sizing me up through the windowpane. Was there a Heimie or a Freda among them, as we were admitted through the gate? I felt a pang of profound shame as I looked out the window, embarrassed to be part of such a spectacle, but I was in too deep to turn back now. Powered by unmitigated chutzpah, I’d left my values far behind.
A footman in scarlet livery escorted us toward a grand curved staircase. The hall was crowded and close, since at least a hundred other women were also being presented this evening. I would have liked to pluck a plume from my headdress and fan my face. Not until past eleven did Lord Chamberlain rumble, “Mrs. Arthur Saxe presenting Mrs. John Gillam.” John straightened my train, and in the audition of my life, I followed behind my sponsor, who paraded forward and curtsied. Keeping in mind every lesson through which I’d suffered, I held my chin high and in measured steps, carried on.
In sumptuous robes, on thrones that looked stolen from a storybook, sat King George and Queen Mary and behind them, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Gloucester, Prince George, Princess Mary, a dowager marchioness whose name I couldn’t recall, and all the others, each looking more bored than the next. I curtsied almost to the floor, made a bow, and stood up again while I tried not to trip over my gown. Pragger-Wagger, I was certain, allowed his gaze to linger on my face for several seconds longer than was necessary.
My magic moment complete, John gracefully tossed my train over my arm and I backed out of the room, as required by protocol. Now a full-fledged member of Society, I joined the horde that had earned the same distinction, forming two human corridors through which the royal entourage passed. The men bowed and the women curtsied before we were ushered downstairs for tiny cakes and sandwiches served on gold-rimmed plates that I assumed were priceless. John lifted a glass of Champagne and toasted our hollow, hallowed achievement. “To my dearest Sheilah, long may you reign.”
What was the difference now between the likes of Judith Hurt and me? Everything and nothing. Before, I was an ordinary fake. Now I had taken deception to new heights, from which my fall, should I be unmasked, would be even more humiliating. Ketzeleh, what have you become? I could hear my father say, shaking his head in disgust. My daughter, the fraud.
With my false honor, I felt more alone and confused than ever. The next day, I pawned my gown and with the money, made an anonymous donation to the Jews’ Orphan Asylum, in honor of Louis and Rivkah Shiel.
Chapter 15
1930
I became a regular at Tom’s lunch circle at Quaglino’s, a watering hole for young aristocrats who liked to drink and bloviate in equally indefatigable measures. There I met another vaunted member of the Eton tribe and Tom’s cousin, Randolph Churchill. He was regarded as an up-and-coming journalist, but that afternoon I noticed only that he was long and lanky, like John, although decades younger and equally handsome.
His voice roared above the others in Conservative bombast. Rarely did he have a kind word about any politician other than his father, Winston, who was currently out of office. Randolph dismissed most of our country’s leaders as cretins, though he saved his highest contempt for Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of Britain’s first Labour government, “a bastion of Bolsheviks and Jews” that he considered a threat to the capitalist system. He mocked MacDonald, who was neither a Bolshevik nor a Jew, for being illegitimate: it was public knowledge that the man had been born to an unmarried housemaid.
Though I often felt out of my element during these discussions and simply chuckled or tossed my curls in the background, in MacDonald’s case I longed to speak up. I revered this man, who had succeeded through hard work, not connections. But I realized, as I listened to Randy jaw on, that even if you were prime minister—or, let’s say, a married lady presented at court in a train and ostrich feathers—what you achieved in life mattered little if you lacked gentle birth. At any point, you could be exposed, reviled, and turned from somebody into nobody.
Randolph’s smugness infuriated me, but what bedeviled me more was that while I found him barely likable, he was the first man I desperately wanted to bed. My midnight trysts had ended, but they whet my appetite for more than my marriage offered. Whenever Randy was near me, and even if I was simply thinking about him—which was all the time—I felt a craving. I also sensed, in the way a woman always does, that he felt the sam
e way. Was this attraction magnified by knowing that had Randy been aware of my origins, he’d be appalled? Or had he done me one better, sniffed out my past and in the grand British tradition of upper-class gentlemen soliciting the company of trollops, planned to trap me in his own web? These questions were secondary to the bigger issue: when would we sleep together?
I had not stopped loving Johnny, my anchor and my dearest friend, to whom I owed a high level of loyalty. Johnny was also earning an adequate living for the first time since we’d wed, and encouraged me to spend my mornings trying to write a novel and my afternoons socializing, which, now that I had friends, I was happy to do. But my husband and I had wordlessly abandoned attempts at conjugal relations, and with it, dreams of a child. My flings had meant nothing more than to confirm that I adored sex, its caresses as much as its other physical dividends, though I also realized that I liked being needed by someone who cherished me.
Eventually, one midafternoon Randy pulled out his gold pocket watch as if we’d had scheduled an assignation, extended his arm, and said, “Mrs. Gillam, shall we?” We did, in a discreet hotel where I believe there may now be a plaque that reads In Suite 901, in 1930, Sheilah Graham reinvented the orgasm. Compared to my previous lovers, Randolph Churchill was indeed elite.
“Who are you?” he asked after the first of three lush couplings that afternoon and early evening.
“Today, yours,” I said, pressing my finger to his lips. “But please, no talk.” In bed I found I could silence him far more effectively than at Quag’s.
Our affair was short-lived. The last time we were together I was among a group that included Charlie Chaplin. My amazement at meeting a movie star was quashed by the actor’s breathtaking subservience to Randolph, who took fawning as his due.
“Mr. Churchill, how I wish I were you, who has had every advantage,” Mr. Chaplin said with a flicker of irony that blew by Randy like a feather. “I’ve had to fight for everything I’ve earned.” He spoke of a father exiled to a workhouse and a mum committed to a lunatic asylum, while as a lad he performed onstage rather than get an education. “How lucky you are to have been born with wealth, position, and your family name. I wish we could trade places.”
In response to this raw humility I expected Randy to at least invite Charlie Chaplin to call him by his first name and to defer with, “If only I could trade places with you, Mr. Chaplin. You are all the more a genius because you have overcome such obstacles—and you deserve my greatest respect.” Randolph merely said, “I take your point.”
Charlie Chaplin went on with what I found to be a discerning analysis of Prime Minister MacDonald’s term of office. Randy broke in with, “Charlie, my friend, balderdash. You know nothing. Tell us what you do know. About the American movie colony.”
Chaplin spoke of Hollywood, its fresh air and purple bougainvillea, tennis, and marabou, and power-hungry lions that ruled studios like rival jungle kings. But what especially captured my attention was his talk of dashing men and exquisite women who once were waitresses and store clerks and virtually overnight had become stars, beloved from coast to coast. Americans, he claimed, don’t give a quid about your birth. If you dare to climb upward, they applaud. If your family name doesn’t suit, you change it. Talent and tenacity count more than wealth and position.
The next time Randolph suggested lunch, I decided I was busy. I truly was, trying to write a novel, Gentleman Crook. Given that I was no stranger to fiction—I, the living example of fabrication—thought that becoming an author would be duck soup. Wrong. I found plotting to be harder than geometry, never my star subject at the Asylum, and every one of my characters’ voices sounded stilted in the same way. After writing two thousand words—many of which were “astonishing,” “thrilling,” “brilliant,” “very,” and “awfully”—I decided that I lacked the requisite concentration and imagination to complete a work of fiction. I solved my hero’s problems by throwing him off a bridge, put my manuscript aside, and tried my hand again at writing for newspapers.
I began with a short essay, “I Married a Man 25 Years Older, by a Young Wife,” and sent it the Daily Pictorial, one of dozens of Fleet Street tabloids. They bought it immediately, for the not-unrespectable price of eight guineas. This money came strictly from my brain—no dancing, singing, or high social rank needed—and required no complex storytelling. Journalism, I decided, was my calling after all.
Chapter 16
1932
Would you be willing to accompany me to Germany as a chaperone for my little sister Unity?” Tom Mitford asked one day. “I need a stern Frau Someone to keep our hellcat in line, and I refuse to travel with my aunt.”
“Why ever not?” I asked.
“She has ankles like loaves of bread. I couldn’t possibly look at them for a whole fortnight.”
Our short journey was set. We would be headed to Munich. Sending your daughter to Bavaria had become fashionable among the upper crust, many of whom had German relations. Let their girls have a taste of freedom before marriage. Tom’s father scoffed at formal education for women—husbands from within their firmament were all his daughters required. This visit was to be Unity’s consolation prize before her debut. She was seventeen.
“I can’t promise the trip will be easy, but it shan’t be dull,” Tom said. His words were prophetic, though not necessarily on Unity’s account.
Tom had warned me that every one of his sisters had been cheerfully spoiled in the countryside, six fillies running wild. At the dock where we set sail for the Channel, I spotted Unity immediately, and there was nothing little about her. She was as tall as Tom, the incarnation of the Norse goddess Valkyrie, which was her second name, suggested by their grandfather, a friend of Richard Wagner. Unity was no less lovely than the older Mitford sisters, whose photos I’d seen in the society pages, all fine-featured with long limbs and beguiling smiles. She wore a green tweed traveling suit swathed in a fox fur I could have happily pilfered.
After how-do-you-dos we settled in on deck, where Unity—despite her fierce appearance—complained of seasickness. She retired to her room, and I never saw her again until we debarked and she sprang to life. No sooner had our threesome settled into a first-class train compartment than a German man presented himself in military garb so crisply pressed it looked as if he’d only just unwrapped it.
“May I make your acquaintance, please?” His English was heavily accented. “I could not help but notice all of you at the Gare de l’Est.”
I took SS-Rottenfuher Otto von Pfeffel, as he introduced himself with soldierly precision, to be some sort of cadet, older than Unity but younger than Tom. His boots were high and burnished, and his light brown hair barbered to such an extreme that scalp the color of pale pink sherbet peeked through. He proffered cigarettes for each of us from a gold case decorated with an eagle. It’s possible that he’d had a professional manicure.
“Where is this captivating group headed, if I may ask?” SS-Rottenfuher von Pfeffel tipped his hat. Tom explained that our destination was Munich. “Ach, but I am also traveling there. I would be most pleased to show you the sights.”
I took you to mean Unity. Throughout our time together, I would blink and yet another dashing, uniformed devil with preposterously blue eyes would appear, flexing his charm. Every one of these men wore a swastika pin on his lapel.
Unity, Tom, and I spent a pleasant few hours with the cadet, and proceeded to the dining car where we chatted over lunch, for which he insisted on paying. Unity convulsed in laughter at any number of von Pfeffel’s remarks, but I couldn’t fault her. She reminded me of myself at the same age, a girl in a woman’s body, as infatuated as I might have been with von Pfeffel a decade earlier.
“Which military school do you think he attends?” I asked Tom after Unity and her admirer walked ahead of us back to our seats.
Tom chuckled. “He’s no student.”
“In the army then?”
“Sheilah, he belongs to Adolf Hitler’s National So
cialist German Workers’ Party.”
“I see,” I answered, although I didn’t. I skipped over the serious pages of newspapers. I knew Adolf Hitler was the German politician with a doughy face and an abomination of a mustache who had failed to overthrow the Weimar Republic. This represented my comprehensive knowledge of Herr Hitler. I returned to my seat, and reopened my guidebook to Munich. The semmelknödel was highly recommended.
I had anticipated a trip of merry abandon, with evenings at the opera alternating with pints at the city’s ancient rathskellers. During the day, I expected to fill my lungs with bracing alpine air as we hiked the mountains shouldering the city and explored crumbling fairy-tale castles. I did not expect Germany itself to be crumbling.
Our hotel was not the city’s most luxurious—the Mitfords’ financial resources, like that of many blue bloods, were on a decline—but it was scrupulously clean, a German attribute as highly prized by my visiting countrymen as its bratwurst. We began to walk the nearby area. Munich had a mellow beauty, with a web of cobblestone streets and ancient red-roofed buildings. Tom stopped at a newsstand, stared at a headline, and shook his head in disbelief.
“Could you translate, please?” I asked.
“Unemployment Soars to 40 percent.”
“Like at home,” I said.
“That’s twice that of England. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this country’s in the shitter.”
As we strolled I looked more closely and saw despair. A one-legged war veteran was reduced to begging. A carton of eggs cost as much as a string of pearls in one of many pawnshops, and I noticed swastikas everywhere, from discreet symbols adorning coats to twisted black crosses on bloody red pennants that flapped high and mighty above our heads. We turned a corner near the Königsplatz, where an especially grand flag roiled in front of a stout yellow stone building. Through its door people came and went, their right arms raised in one-armed salutes to one another. “Nazi Party headquarters,” Tom announced, with respect. I wondered if he’d planned our sightseeing so we’d arrive at this destination.
