Queen Bees: Six Brilliant and Extraordinary Society Hostesses Between the Wars – a Spectacle of Celebrity, Talent, and Burning Ambition

by Siân Evans

  Meanwhile, Maud dropped any pretence of enjoying getting muddy and hot on the hunting field; as soon as she was pregnant, she devoted herself to filling her drawing room with interesting people. She produced a single daughter, Nancy, born on 10 March 1896, and was determined not to repeat the experience, saying in later years, ‘Motherhood is a low thing, the lowest’. She ensured that the child was brought up largely by nursemaids and nannies, and taught by governesses. In time Nancy came to feel resentful towards her mother for the neglect she experienced as a child.

  While Sir Bache hunted vermin, Maud collected scalps, using Nevill Holt as her bait. As George Moore wrote, ‘You have come into this life to shine in society, to be a light, to form a salon and to gather clever men around you.’12 Well read and witty, she lured the artistic and the creative, particularly the writers and musicians whom she met on her occasional forays to London. Her favourite house guests included handsome Harry Cust, A. J. Balfour, Herbert Asquith, F. E. Smith, Somerset Maugham, the Duchess of Rutland, Vita Sackville-West, Lord Howard de Walden and Jennie Cornwallis-West, the mother of Winston Churchill. Her old flame George Moore visited regularly after meeting her again in London in 1898.

  A certain amount of latitude in marriage was understood among the country house brigade. Lady Cunard always had a number of admirers and flirtations, and some of these appear to have been genuine and reciprocated. When Lord Alexander Thynne was killed in the Great War, love letters from Lady Cunard were found among his papers. Meanwhile George Moore was a constant and ardent admirer; he spent a large part of the summer of 1904 staying at Nevill Holt, and became close to Nancy Cunard, then aged eight, a friendship that endured till his death. There were some who speculated that Moore was Nancy’s real father, including Nancy herself, but that seems unlikely, considering the timing and location of the Cunards’ marriage. Nevertheless, he continued to send love letters: on 26 January 1905 he wrote from Dublin, ‘dearest Maud, you are all I have, it is through you I know that I am alive […] My heart is overflowing – I must stop writing. When can I see you?’13

  Nevill Holt was a romantic, venerable stone house in an idyllic setting, with a loggia and porch, a terrace, an oriel window, walled gardens, rolling lawns and avenues of beech trees. Maud transformed the rather stark interiors so that they were attractive and appealing to her sophisticated guests, with vast Chinese bowls full of pot-pourri, hot-house plants, the latest books, subtle textiles, Oriental rugs, Russian cigarettes, writing materials and American standards of comfort. Fashionably dressed visitors came and went constantly, entertained in summer by games of tennis and croquet on the lawns, and in winter by endless games of bridge in front of the roaring log fires. Laughter, gossip and intrigues added colour and zest to Lady Cunard’s otherwise rather provincial married life.

  Maud had to get to know the country set who lived nearby; for a spirited and well-travelled young woman with a taste for culture, and a lack of interest in field sports, they could be trying, as the overriding interests of her upper-class neighbours were hunting, shooting and parochial matters. Before long she was planning her escape. The Cunards did not have a London home, but Maud wanted to spend time in the capital, so she cultivated people who would invite her to stay. She deliberately timed these trips so as to avoid Sir Bache and his hunting friends. Whenever he was shooting or fishing in Scotland, she would fill Nevill Holt with her friends, the musical, artistic and literary. One sultry evening, during a heatwave, one of her more theatrical guests threw open his bedroom window and sang the Valkyries’ cry from Wagner’s Lohengrin. A similarly musical wit a few rooms away answered with a fluting phrase from Gotterdämmerung, and within minutes the entire place was alive with operatic yodelling. Lady Cunard described Sir Bache’s reaction to such romantic tomfoolery: ‘When my husband came back he noticed an atmosphere of love. “I don’t understand what is going on in this house, but I don’t like it,” he said.’14

  Maud Burke from San Francisco had transcended her obscure origins through marriage. As an American woman, she was difficult for the class-conscious English society to ‘place’, but she had passed the test of being presented at court as a débutante, and her husband’s title, fortune and household surname provided protective camouflage. If she had stayed in the States and married an American man, she might have found it much more difficult to gain acceptance among her native elite. Some Americans were prepared to travel the world to find a niche in society where they could establish themselves as women of influence, and Laura Corrigan was one of them.

  She was born Laura Mae Whitrock on 2 January 1879, the daughter of Charles Whitrock and his wife, Emma, née Sitherwood. Accounts of Laura’s early life are sketchy, but the family were humble. Some claimed that her father was an odd-job man, others said a lumberjack, and in later years Laura was known to demonstrate a level of dexterity with an axe unusual in a society hostess. Her home town was Waupaca, Wisconsin, a small town that in its first census of 1880 registered 1,392 inhabitants. The town is located on the banks of a river and both were named after Sam Waupaca, the chief of the indigenous Potawatomi people. Waupaca’s main industry was the Pioneer Foundry, first established in 1871 by John Roche, supplying iron castings to customers in Chicago. It was a rural backwater with harsh winters, and Laura tired of small-town life and moved to Chicago when a young woman. She was ambitious and took a number of jobs, from waitressing at the Hotel Blackstone on Michigan Avenue and working as a telephonist to a freelance role as a society reporter for a Chicago newspaper. She met a Canadian physician, Duncan R. MacMartin, who was the house doctor at the Hotel Blackstone, and they married. But Laura and Duncan were not to stay together; in 1913 they were guests at a party given by James Corrigan. He owned a luxurious summer home on Dry Island, one of the archipelago of 1,864 islands lying along the American–Canadian border where Lake Ontario meets the St Lawrence river. The Thousand Islands, as the area is still known, attracted American and Canadian millionaires, who would buy a small island and have a palatial summer home built on it. The heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune, John Jacob Astor and Helena Rubinstein, were among those who had elaborate homes here.

  The Corrigans were extremely wealthy; James’s father was the steel man Captain James C. Corrigan, known also as Jimmy. He had been born poor in Canada, but through perseverance he had established one of the richest steel companies in America with a financial partner, Judge Stevenson Burke. He married Ida, and they had three daughters and a single son, James Junior, who was born on 7 April 1880 and was adored and cossetted. The Corrigan family lived on prestigious Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, a street described by Mark Twain as: ‘one of the finest streets in America […] none of your poor white trash can live in that street. You have to be redolent of that odor of sanctity which comes with cash. The dwellings are very large, are often pretty pretentious in the matter of architecture, and the grassy and flowery “yards” they stand in are something marvellous.’15

  By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly 260 mansions lined this prestigious street, with their back gardens running down to Lake Erie. Between 1880 and 1930 Euclid Avenue was known as ‘Millionaires’ Row’, as captains of industry such as John D. Rockefeller had houses there.

  However, in 1900, when James Junior was twenty, the Corrigan family suffered an appalling tragedy. While James Senior watched from the shoreline in horror, his wife, Ida, their three daughters and a grand-daughter were drowned when their yacht, The Idler, sank on Lake Erie as the result of sudden storm. The only surviving members of the Corrigan clan were the father and son, who had not joined the expedition. Perhaps as a result of the loss of so many of his family, young James found it impossible to settle to the business, preferring to spend his time with a succession of lady friends and working as a barman. He took so little interest in the company that his father made a business decision that was to have far-reaching implications. James Senior appointed his book-keeper, Price McKinney, as his partner and renamed the firm the Corrigan-
McKinney Steel Company. By the time he met the ambitious Mrs MacMartin, young James was leading the self-indulgent life of a playboy. Laura was to be the making of him.

  2

  The Edwardian Summer and the Successful Hostess

  Edward VII, known popularly as ‘Tum-tum’ (though never to his face), was welcomed to the throne in 1902 by the majority of his British subjects, who recognised in him many of their own hedonistic impulses. His reclusive mother, Queen Victoria, the perpetually grieving widow, died in 1901, still blaming her eldest son for the death of her husband, Prince Albert. Edward had a well-deserved reputation as a bon viveur. He positively enjoyed good living, luxury, the new-fangled thrills of motoring, fast racehorses and even faster women. He had an eye for beauty, but he also enjoyed the companionship of women, their conversation and their friendship. His last and best-known mistress was Alice Keppel, known as ‘La Favorita’. When his coronation was being planned, Edward insisted that Alice must be among his special friends in a screened-off section of the public gallery, above the ranks of peers and peeresses in Westminster Abbey. Inevitably, some wag designated the seating as ‘the King’s Loose Box’. The other ladies to be favoured in this way included Alice’s great friend Mrs Margaret Greville, the world-famous actress Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs Arthur Paget, a beautiful American-born heiress and society hostess. Another guest, Theresa, Lady Londonderry, Edith’s formidable mother-in-law, caused a sensation in the Peeresses’ cloakroom by demanding a pair of forceps from behind the closed door. The famous Londonderry Tiara had ended up in the water closet while she was using the facilities, and specialist tools were needed to retrieve it.

  Edward VII benefited from the collusion of sympathetic hostesses, who could provide him and his mistresses with comfortable country house settings in which he could indulge his passions. Discretion was all, of course, and it was with his trusted inner circle of friends, the Marlborough House set, that he spent much of his leisure. Among his favourites were Ronnie and Maggie Greville, who entertained in luxury in their house, 11 Charles Street in Mayfair. As Mrs Greville’s god-daughter recalled, ‘Throughout most of Kingy’s reign I can see her, small but forceful, making her way to the front of any company she was in’1. The Grevilles occasionally rented a place in Surrey to entertain house parties, but they needed a country estate of their own for weekends, so that they could compete with their landowning contemporaries. In 1906 Mr McEwan bought the Surrey estate of Polesden Lacey for £80,000 and gave it to his ‘stepdaughter’ and her husband. It was just 22 miles from London, a very desirable property, at the centre of which was a handsome 1824 villa by Thomas Cubitt. The house had been redesigned and extended for the previous owner, and now Mrs Greville resolved to turn it into a house fit for a king.

  Mrs Ronnie had been an early enthusiast for the new hotels that opened in London at the turn of the century. For the first time respectable ladies could dine in public with men in well-lit, comfortable restaurants within hotels, rather than in the rather louche ‘private dining rooms’ such establishments had previously provided. Inspired by the example of the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly, near her Mayfair home, she engaged the same architects, Mewès and Davis, who had worked logistical and stylistic miracles on the hotel’s congested and challenging site. They transformed Polesden Lacey, creating the epitome of modern luxury within a traditional country house. Their client required ample central heating, en suite bathrooms and endless hot water. She wanted a telephone switchboard, with extensions in each of the principal bedrooms and main rooms. The kitchens were state-of-the-art, to ensure that the quality of food and drink was sublime. By employing the very best staff, she ensured that the house was run like the very best hotel. The architects worked in a variety of historical styles, and the resulting interiors were sumptuous, with gilded boiseries acquired from an Italian palazzo, plaster ceilings copied from the best Tudor examples and museum-quality Chinese ceramics and Italian maiolica. The paintings were of the best quality, and no expense was spared to provide the arriviste Mrs Greville with the sort of authentic setting that the daughter of a long-established aristocratic family might consider her natural habitat.

  Margaret intended that Polesden Lacey should be fit to entertain the King. But before the metamorphosis was complete, tragedy struck. In March 1908 her charming forty-four-year-old husband was diagnosed with throat cancer, and had to have an operation to remove his larynx. Ronnie survived the surgery but succumbed to pneumonia and was dead within a week. Margaret had genuinely loved him, and his loss was devastating. After a period of mourning she started to socialise again, often accompanied by Mr McEwan, who was a widower, Margaret’s mother having died in 1906. Her great triumph was to have Edward VII to stay at Polesden Lacey in 1909, with her dear friend Alice Keppel, who was Edward’s mistress. The King complimented Mrs Greville on her ‘genius for hospitality’.

  For any ambitious would-be hostess, it was vital to have an impressive home in the country, for weekend entertaining, as well as a place in London. When he handed over the keys to Cliveden in 1906, William Waldorf Astor had breezily assured his son and new daughter-in-law that he would never return. Consequently, Nancy transformed the formal High Victorian interiors from the ‘splendid gloom’ of her father-in-law’s era into a more welcoming house, with comfortable chintz-covered furniture and curtains, modern books and flowers in every room. The suits of armour were sent down to Hever Castle in Kent, where Waldorf’s father was busy creating another idealised historic house. However, in 1907 the Astors’ first son was born and named William Waldorf after his grandfather, who announced he would visit Cliveden after all in order to see the latest addition to the clan. The couple were apprehensive, but he accepted their modifications, saying, ‘The first joy of possession is to change everything around and remould it nearer to the heart’s desire.’

  Cliveden was a very grand and largely self-contained estate. White Place, its home farm, supplied fresh produce to the house and its occupants. At its height there were fifty outdoor staff, including gardeners, stable hands and coachmen, estate workers and groundsmen. The indoor staff numbered around twenty and included housemaids and kitchen staff, a valet and three footmen, a ladies’ maid, a French chef, a head housekeeper and the butler. The outdoor staff lived with their families in estate cottages, while the domestic staff lived inside the west wing of the house. Former servants helped when required for large social events such as banquets and balls. As befitted their rank and wealth, the Astors’ household was run to exacting and formal standards. Until the advent of the Great War, the butler and footmen powdered their hair and wore formal livery, including knee-breeches, while serving dinner.

  Cliveden was set on a steep wooded hill looking to the Thames on one side and across terraces and gardens on the others. The ground floor contained a vast front hall, a drawing room overlooking the river, a panelled library, a Louis XV dining room, Lord Astor’s study and Lady Astor’s boudoir. There were forty-six guest bedrooms, and the Astors liked to entertain great groups of visitors for the weekend. Nancy would impulsively invite additional guests to join them at the last minute, which often caused chaos in the extensive kitchens. In order to fit everyone around her dining table, she dictated that each diner should only be allowed eighteen inches of the table’s perimeter to accommodate their place settings and persons. Burly Winston Churchill complained that, while he could get his knees under the Astors’ table, he could not then move to sample any of the thirty courses served at dinner. The Cliveden butler discreetly sought the advice of the High Priest of his fraternity, the Head Steward at Buckingham Palace. ‘Two foot 6 inches per guest’, came the Delphic reply. Thereafter Cliveden guests were allocated enough elbow room to wield their cutlery in comfort.

  Nancy’s manner as a hostess was refreshingly natural and informal by the standards of Edwardian England. She rarely appeared in front of her guests before lunchtime, leaving them to make their own amusements in the morning, but was frank and funny when she did appe
ar, and would galvanise any group with her immense energy and charm. She was a startlingly effective mimic and a skilful raconteur, with a great sense of fun; midway through a meal she would suddenly pop a pair of celluloid stage dentures into her mouth and imitate Margot Asquith.

  The guest list of those who visited Cliveden in the Edwardian era reads like a combination of Who’s Who and Burke’s Peerage. Literary guests abounded, such as J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and Rudyard Kipling. Foreign royalty were as welcome as their British relations; the unassuming and popular Crown Prince Gustav of Sweden was such a favourite that he was lent the Astor family holiday home at Sandwich in Kent for his honeymoon when he married Lady Louise Mountbatten. King Edward VII had a particular penchant for pert American beauties; on one occasion Nancy Astor side-stepped his request to play bridge with the knowing reply ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell a King from a Knave’, exactly the sort of suggestive remark he appreciated.

  ‘Edward the Caresser’, as he was known, admired American women for their brio and worldly wit, and he liked pretty Lady Cunard too, who joined his social circle in Marienbad. The King was ‘taking the cure’ at the German spa town, supposedly purging the overloaded royal digestive system through saunas, baths, massages and epicurean meals. Maud dined with the King and his entourage, but she made the error of attempting to amuse the table by discussing a racy novel by Elinor Glyn, The Visits of Elizabeth, in which a naive young girl is puzzled by the nocturnal creaking of corridors in a country house. A fellow guest at the table was an unmarried woman, and such frank talk in front of an ‘innocent’ was a singular breach of etiquette. The King cut her off by turning away and pointedly changing the subject; he was a veteran corridor-creeper himself, but he observed the proprieties in public. Maud was reprimanded afterwards by an equerry, and hid in her hotel for a few days after this gaffe. It was the first time she made herself persona non grata with the royal family, but it would not be the last.