by Siân Evans
Like many in society, the Colefaxes returned to Europe at the first opportunity. It was in Italy that Sibyl was able to add to her collection of artists and aristocrats. The journalist Beverley Nichols recalled meeting Sibyl in Venice in 1920, and being amused by her cavalier use of the first name of people she had only just met. ‘Dear Gerald [Lord] Berners – so many talents! Serge [Diaghilev] tells me he is going to commission him to write a ballet.’6 He continues:
I remember her standing at the window of some palazzo or other – (I don’t remember which one but I vaguely recall that our hostess had been the mistress of the Kaiser) – and I was much impressed by the way in which her beady eye swept the Grand Canal, seeking whom she might devour. ‘Surely’, she murmured, leaning over the balcony, ‘surely that is dear Jane [Princess Faustino] in the white gondola below?’ It was not, in fact, dear Jane; it was a drunken woman from Minnesota who was to give us all a lot of trouble; but Sibyl had made her point, she had created the atmosphere.
In 1922, 1923 and 1924 Sibyl spent the summer months with her two sons, Peter and Michael, touring Italy and France. She frequently took them to Florence to stay with Bernard Berenson and Harold Acton, and they attended the Palio, the historic horse race in the square in Siena. Arthur and Sibyl were very close, and when separated by the necessity of his work, as she travelled in Europe, they wrote affectionately to each other – she signing herself ‘Billie’ and calling him ‘My darling Gogo’. By travelling extensively, she was echoing the restless habits of her mother, but in Sibyl’s case it was in order to experience the best that life had to offer, to see as much of beauty and culture as she could manage to absorb. She was driven by an ambition to mix with the creative elite, and to experience avidly whatever she found absorbing and moving, as though to make up for her early years of colourless repression.
While literature and art provided Sibyl Colefax with the stimulus she craved, for Lady Cunard it was music in all its diverse forms, a genuine passion that was inextricably linked to her devotion to the interests of her lover, Sir Thomas Beecham. As Osbert Sitwell wrote:
In the world of opera and ballet, Lady Cunard reigned alone. Her boundless and enthusiastic love of music places all those who enjoy opera in her debt: for it was largely her support, and the way she marshalled her forces, that enabled the wonderful seasons of opera and ballet in these years to materialise […] she had grasped the fact that in the London of that time, in order to ensure the success of such an art-luxury of Grand Opera, it was absolutely necessary to be able to rely on a regular attendance by numskulls, nitwits and morons addicted to the mode even if they did not care in the least for music.7
There was a pent-up demand for dancing, music and entertainment in the aftermath of the war, and Lady Cunard championed the cause of the Ballets Russes. Maud organised a fundraising ball on their behalf on 4 December 1919 at Covent Garden. Diaghilev was constantly seeking funds, and he approached Mrs Greville about becoming a theatrical ‘angel’, investing in his company. She gave him dinner but declined to invest in entertainment. Even Lady Cunard struggled to raise enough money to put on Pulcinella at Covent Garden, because it was an unknown quantity, a new ballet with music by Stravinsky and sets designed by Picasso. However, the less expensive venue of the Coliseum proved suitable, and the production went ahead to great acclaim in the summer of 1919.
With his passion for music and his friendship with Stravinsky and Diaghilev, it is not surprising that gifted but eccentric Lord Gerald Berners became friendly with Lady Cunard. They were both knowledgeable about ballet and opera, and once he had acquired an apartment in Half Moon Street he was able to entertain Maud with cosy post-opera suppers, a short taxi ride from the theatres and concert-halls of the West End. He was a great practical joker, and at open-air summer parties he would pretend he’d just been stung by a wasp, a prospect that petrified Lady Cunard. It was Lord Berners who reflected that Lady Colefax’s parties were like a gathering of lunatics presided over by an efficient, trained hospital nurse, while Lady Cunard’s were like a party of lunatics presided over by a lunatic.
Maud Cunard was much involved in fundraising to support a new venture, raising more than £70,000 for the Sir Thomas Beecham Opera Company Limited. Maud, the Aga Khan and Lord Howard de Walden each invested £5,000, and the company was incorporated on 1 April 1919. But it was an uphill struggle to make the company pay – there was a post-war slump, money was tight, and the repertoire patriotically avoided the works of German composers, which limited its appeal for music lovers.
Maud gained the patronage of prestigious guests by inviting them to gala performances and opening nights when Sir Thomas was conducting. She chose to overlook his frequent absences, and the rumours of his numerous affairs with singers and performers. In 1920 she was forty-eight, but she boasted of her younger lover, ‘Sir Thomas is quite a Don Juan’. Beecham was still married to Utica, who would not agree to a divorce, but he was also frank about the true nature of his relationship with Lady Cunard, on one occasion allegedly remarking to his musicians, ‘Gentlemen, you will be pleased to know that the future of the orchestra is assured, thanks to the virility of your conductor.’ Meanwhile, faithful George Moore still adored Maud and occasionally dined with her; on 7 December 1920 he wrote to her:
You brought into the world a hard heart as well as much beauty, grace and charm, and it is small wonder I fell in love with you, and shall always love you. Your party last night was animated with your personality and everybody was inspired with an unwonted happiness […] all were smiling and agreeable, magnetised by you, for you charm even the morose.8
Family matters were still a cause of concern to Maud Cunard, in particular the state of mind of her only child. Nancy Cunard’s lover Peter had been killed less than a month before the end of the Great War, but her husband, Sydney Fairbairn, had survived, being awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry for his actions in the last week of the war. Nancy became increasingly bitter about her marriage. She contracted Spanish flu in January 1919, then pneumonia, and had to recuperate at her mother’s new house at 44 Grosvenor Square. Sydney was finally demobbed from serving in France and returned to London only to be told by Nancy that she could no longer bear being married. Duff Cooper, Nancy’s friend, commiserated with him over two bottles of champagne; Sydney confided that he still loved her and believed her to be faithful to him, and Duff Cooper chose not to disillusion him. Nancy convalesced in the south of France, and in January 1920 she moved permanently to Paris and threw herself into writing. Striking-looking, reed-thin and elegantly dressed, with pale, glittering eyes and an unusually husky voice, she quickly attracted attention, and became the toast of the French avant-garde. Brancusi sculpted her, Man Ray photographed her and Oskar Kokoschka painted her. She was a literary and artistic muse in London too; Aldous Huxley’s character Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point is based on her, and in Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, Iris March is unmistakable as Nancy. The portraitist Augustus John and the Vorticist Wyndham Lewis were also captivated by her.
Nancy fell seriously ill in Paris in the winter of 1920–21 and underwent a hysterectomy, followed by peritonitis. Her mother and father were constant visitors while her life was in peril. While she recovered in Paris, her first solo book of poetry, Outlaws, was published in London, to good reviews. Lady Cunard notified the press and both the Nation and the Observer featured Nancy’s poems. In March 1922 mother and daughter holidayed together in Monte Carlo, but the relationship between them was always uneasy. When in London, Nancy tended to stay in rooms above her favourite restaurant, the Eiffel Tower, but would join her mother for lunch or dinner at Maud’s new house, 5 Carlton House Terrace. Maud was also determined to resolve Nancy’s unhappy marriage, and in November 1922 she persuaded Duff Cooper to lunch with Nancy’s husband, Sydney, to induce him to agree to a divorce. Meanwhile Maud was conquering London society; in later years Nancy remembered meeting T. S. Eliot at a ball given by her mother in 1922, and dancing wit
h the Prince of Wales. She observed how ably her mother orchestrated these formal occasions.
Maud Cunard used considerable personal charm to infiltrate the circles she most admired, adroitly slipping through the increasingly permeable class boundaries. As the traditional aristocratic hostesses retreated to their country estates in the early 1920s, their places were quickly filled by new arrivals, who deployed intelligence and bottomless bank balances. Mrs Laura Mae Corrigan arrived in London on 1 April 1922. She had been rebuffed by Euclid Avenue, the Millionaires’ Row in her second husband’s home town of Cleveland, because the inhabitants resented the former waitress and divorcée who had acquired such a wealthy rough diamond, James Corrigan. The couple had lived in a New York hotel, which they thought would garner them opportunities to mingle with the wealthy, but despite having hired an ‘aristocratic lady’ to provide them with introductions, the grand Fifth Avenue families, the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, simply ignored those so far below their own social circle. Magnificent wealth was not enough to gain access to the ‘Four Hundred’, New York’s elite. One of Laura’s targets even had a stock of RSVP cards specially printed by Tiffany & Co., declining Mrs Corrigan’s kind invitation (with a gap so that the appropriate date could be added by hand), to despatch as his standard response to any overture from her.
The fictional American Mrs Whitehand in E. F. Benson’s Freaks of Mayfair bears an uncanny resemblance to social mountaineers like Laura Corrigan. Having failed to achieve acceptance on the east coast, Benson’s millionairess heroine decides to conquer London society after ‘Nittie Vandercrump, the acknowledged queen of Newport, cut her dead for the seventeenth time, and with her famous scream asked her friend, Nancy Costersnatch, who all these strange faces belonged to’9.
Arriving in London, Mrs Corrigan recognised that one needed a leg-up to get on the social ladder, and she contacted a fellow American, the thrice-married Lady Cora Strafford. Cora’s first husband had been Mr Samuel J. Colgate, the toothpaste millionaire, who was thirty-nine years her senior, and Cora had no qualms about fortunes derived from trade. She invited Laura to an intimate little dinner party, where the newcomer learned from a fellow guest, the Duke of Portland, brother of Lady Ottoline Morrell, that the famous Mrs Alice Keppel might be willing to rent out her vast Georgian mansion at 16 Grosvenor Street in Mayfair.
A meeting was arranged, and within a month of her arrival Laura had leased Mrs Keppel’s town house, complete with its exquisite ceramics, red lacquer furniture, grey walls, magnificent paintings and glittering chandeliers. George and Alice Keppel had maintained the original layout of the building as apartments, so that each had their own suite of rooms; Laura initially objected to this arrangement, pointing out that ‘Mr Corrigan and I live intimate’, but Edward VII’s former mistress suavely pointed out a discreet private staircase linking the two suites. Despite her misgivings about the exquisite Persian rugs (‘Why, they’re not even new!’) and the Chippendale chairs (which Laura felt were slightly marred by the ‘petits pois’ covers), the outgoing and incoming society hostesses reached an agreement that suited them both. For £500 a week Laura would lease the house and contents, keeping on Mr and Mrs Rolfe, Alice’s exceptional butler and cook, and the twenty household staff. In a master-stroke, she also bought a copy of Alice’s address book, so that she had the names and addresses of everyone worth knowing in London. The Keppels decamped, and Laura moved in.
Mrs Corrigan’s entrée to London society was facilitated by Mr Rolfe, who lured into the house the friends of his previous mistress, to meet her mysterious successor. She was a curiosity, and phenomenally wealthy; the antennae of high-class ladies who devoted themselves to good works twitched at the prospect of the sums that might be diverted to benefit their Dumb Chums or Distressed Gentlefolk. As an American, of course, she was classless – but was she quite acceptable in polite society? To ensure that she was, Mr Rolfe recommended the services of Charlie Stirling. He was the nephew of Lord Rossmore and well-connected in aristocratic circles; he was young, witty and popular. Significantly, he was already social secretary to Edith, Lady Londonderry, one of London’s most influential hostesses.
Charlie Stirling launched Laura Corrigan on the London scene. First he arranged for her to dine at Londonderry House, as Lord and Lady Londonderry’s son Robin, who had been visiting the States, had already met hospitable James Corrigan. Edith took to Laura at once; she appreciated the liberal donation to one of her favourite charities, as suggested by Charlie, and the two women became and remained unlikely friends. In return, the Londonderrys were among the guests at Laura’s first dinner party in her new home, which was reported in The Times. Their attendance was an endorsement from the aristocratic and political elite. A few weeks later, The Times stated that Princess Marie-Louise, a cousin of George V, was the guest of honour at another dinner party chez Corrigan. The hostess’s outfit was described as a gown of white crêpe embroidered with opalescent pearls; she was evidently a woman of substance. Court circles also noted that she had been a guest of the Duchess of Rutland, and through the wife of the American Ambassador, Mrs George Harvey, Laura Corrigan was presented at court. Thanks to the connections of Mr Rolfe, Charlie Stirling, the goodwill of a few establishment ladies and her own determination, Laura was launched on London society.
Mrs Corrigan courted a fun-loving bunch of younger aristocrats and socialites, having no interest in cultivating intellectuals, the artistic or the serious. She preferred display and luxury, and her husband, James, who would visit London for stints of ten days or so, was happy to provide ample funds to obtain it. One of her earliest social successes was a fluke: the handsome and highly eligible Duke of Kent, younger brother of the Prince of Wales, was rumoured to be the guest of honour at one of her parties. The Duke heard the gossip, and was amused enough to present himself on the appropriate night. Laura’s reputation as a hostess of note was instantly established, and she was so excited that she stood on her head, having first secured her skirts around her knees to protect her modesty. The headstand habit, accompanied always by a drum-roll from the band, was immortalised in Noel Coward’s comic song ‘I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party’. One could not imagine Mrs Greville performing such a trick.
Laura Corrigan responded to the slightly febrile mood of the 1920s by providing sumptuous venues with ample entertainment for her curious guests. As well as targeting aristocrats, she consciously cultivated the Bright Young People, those who were too young to have served in the forces during the Great War, but who were reacting against its legacy with a defiant superficiality, with parties and dances, madcap bets and gambles. The decorative guests of Mrs Corrigan were rather like the party-goers in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. They knew little of the personality who had invited them, or the origins of the industrial fortune that enabled such prodigality, but they enjoyed her lavish hospitality. As Barbara Cartland wrote:
Acrobats, jugglers, knockabout comedians, and on one occasion, performing seals appeared in Mayfair drawing rooms in a search for the sensational. Few British hostesses, however, could compete with the standard set by wealthy Mrs James Corrigan [… who] settled down to startling London with her sensational parties. Amazing, costly settings, gold tombola prizes, and the best theatrical turns procurable made her at least the most-talked of hostess of the period. Such parties always seemed to me to be filled with people who were afraid they were missing something or someone in the next room.10
At any one of Laura’s dinner-dances there might be fancy dress competitions, games of chance, including lotteries and tombolas (pronounced as two disparate words by the hostess as ‘Tom Bowlers’, as though enunciating a person’s name.) The prizes were highly desirable and expensive little gewgaws from Cartier. Each lucky party-goer would win a pair of braces with gold buckles, or a pretty little diamond hairclip. Mr Rolfe was careful to ensure that everyone went home with something, in the manner of participants at a child’s birthday party. These were valuable prizes, and while none o
f her guests was exactly impoverished, it is human nature to be both acquisitive and competitive. Conspicuous consumption was the theme, and Laura planned her parties with precision and an eye to an overall budget of around £6,000 per occasion, the equivalent of more than £100,000 today. By 1923, her second season, she was able to give a wildly successful party for 140 people, including a number of overseas guests who were in London to attend the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York. As her friend Elsa Maxwell wrote: ‘Europe in the 1920s was awash with rich Americans who used money as a springboard for high dives into society, and no one made a bigger, cruder splash than Laura.’11
So rapid was her ascent up the social scale that in 1923 Laura and James Corrigan were invited into the Royal Enclosure to watch the Epsom Derby, in the august presence of Queen Mary. Through her own ingenuity and determination Laura had achieved in Britain what had been denied to her in her own country; acceptance at face value. She was keen to ensure that those who had snubbed her in Cleveland or New York were left in no doubt about her social successes.
Mrs Corrigan often gave interviews to the press, and her bons mots and frequent malapropisms were widely reported in print. It was through the gossip columns of newspapers that the new London hostesses were able to advertise their social triumphs in the 1920s. There was an avid appetite among the readership for humorous stories, amusing features or tales of misdeeds among the aristocracy. The Bright Young Things were always good copy, with their themed fancy dress parties and treasure hunts. After the war many newspapers employed well-connected correspondents to write their social news, and gossip became more alive and better informed. Some hostesses even invited gossip columnists to their parties for the purposes of advertisement, though they had to be prepared for the occasional bad review, in the manner of theatrical impresarios, if an evening did not go as planned. Other hostesses continued to use the papers as a means of recording their social triumphs, supplying all the details of an event through their social secretary; The Times would dutifully run two whole columns of the names of guests the morning after a Londonderry House political reception. Some hostesses were astute enough to cultivate the press so as to ‘plant’ unattributable stories that served their own purposes. One of those was Mrs Margaret Greville, in her determination to advance the courtship of Prince Bertie.
