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

by Siân Evans

  Emerald Cunard’s world was now focused entirely on the cultivated conversation of intelligent and well-connected people in the theatre and, above all, in opera. With Sir Thomas Beecham she managed to finance seasons of opera at Covent Garden in the days before state subsidies; Beecham used his family’s fortune, while Emerald was adept at tickling large donations from the wealthy, who she would then include in her glittering first nights at the opera. Such encounters were not always smooth. On one occasion Sir Thomas, who was conducting the overture to Fidelio, yelled ‘Shut up!’ at the well-heeled occupants chattering in Lady Cunard’s box.

  Her own knowledge of music was considerable, and she would on occasion launch into surprisingly accurate renditions of arias by Verdi, Puccini or even Wagner. By making opera attendance fashionable among a certain moneyed section of society, Emerald Cunard enabled some of the best orchestras and singers to come to London to perform, thus giving music-lovers of all classes unprecedented opportunities to hear the best classical music in the world.

  In November 1927 Sir Thomas Beecham founded the Imperial League of Opera, an organisation to mobilise opera lovers throughout Britain to support their favourite art form. Membership cost 10 shillings per annum, and the League was aided by a generous donation from Laura Corrigan, who also took a large and prestigious box for the season at Covent Garden. The League was intended to promote the performance of live opera, not only at Covent Garden, but also in six regional cities in Britain. Sir Thomas now concentrated on building up new British audiences for opera and was disillusioned with performing only for the wealthy. The initiative was taken further by the formation of the Covent Garden Opera Syndicate Limited, which reached an agreement with the BBC in 1930 to broadcast the operas on the wireless.

  Throughout her life there were whispers that Emerald had lovers, and certainly she was an experienced flirt and manipulator of men; she had persuaded George Moore that they should, in his phrase, ‘stint their desires to blessed adultery’ so that she could make an advantageous marriage, but he remained devoted to her for nearly four decades, despite her passion for Thomas Beecham. This was a constant thorn in his flesh; in 1927 he wrote to her, ‘It is impossible for me to allow my name to appear along with those who favour Sir Thomas Beecham’s operatic scheme. You will know why.’ Moore’s letters exemplify the full gamut of human emotions, from missives seething with panting desire to brief notes of sulky, terse sentences, which reveal his hatred of his usurper in Emerald’s affections.

  Meanwhile, Emerald continued to entertain in her unique style. She was famous for introducing people to one another with riveting and sometimes ill-chosen descriptions. On introducing a young author, she trilled, ‘This is Michael Arlen – the only Armenian who has not been massacred!’ On another occasion an exiled aristocratic Russian was described as ‘Grand Duke Dmitri, the murderer of Rasputin’. He walked out in protest.

  Her lunch parties were justifiably famous, and few refused an invitation to her lapis lazuli-topped circular table. Lunches tended to be relatively intimate in scale, rarely numbering more than ten diners, because Emerald preferred conversation to be general. Her speciality was the ‘throwaway shocker’, a statement or question that was uttered to startle the company into a response, and which she probably rehearsed in advance. Typical remarks included ‘Christ had a very unpleasant face, and John the Baptist’s was little better’, or ‘Christmas is only for servants’. She defied the convention of having equal numbers of men and women at her table, because ‘I invite my friends for conversation, not for mating’. She was described by an unnamed contemporary as having ‘a whim of steel’.

  Lady Cunard’s guests often remarked on her bird-like appearance. She had a slightly beaky nose, a receding chin and fluffy blonde hair. Lord Drogheda described her as a ‘canary of prey’. Cecil Beaton thought she looked like ‘an amusing-looking little parakeet in her pastel-coloured plumage’. Oswald Mosley called her ‘a bright little bird of paradise’. The avian impression was heightened by her habit of flitting from subject to subject. Beverley Nichols said, ‘her natural milieu was a gilded cage. At her best she was one of the most brilliant conversationalists I have ever known – and again the bird-like simile is apposite, for her talk was a series of delicious trills and roulades, with sudden quite irrelevant cadenzas.’12 This impression was enhanced by her face in profile; she had a receding chin, about which she was extremely self-conscious, and avoided being photographed from the side. Lady Cunard tried massage and some form of electrical therapy to correct her profile, but she was afraid to try plastic surgery. She used a beauty cream marketed by Helena Rubinstein that apparently imparted a temporary scorching sensation when applied to the face, which was thought to be beneficial. Emerald sported extremely heavy make-up in an era when this was uncommon for women unless they were appearing on stage or in films. The art historian Kenneth Clark, who came to know her in the early 1930s, noticed that from a distance one could only see paint and wrinkles; as one got closer, she actually appeared far younger. Mrs Greville, more of a soap-and-water aficionado, heartily disapproved. ‘You must not think that I dislike poor dear Emerald’, she would purr to her friends; ‘I am always telling Queen Mary that she isn’t half as bad as she’s painted.’ Emerald was extremely fashionable and soignée; she had an exquisite figure and legs, according to the writer and publisher John Lehmann, and always dressed in the height of fashion, adorned with ropes of pearls, diamonds and the famous emerald rings on her small, claw-like hands.

  She was charming to her guests but was always late arriving at her own luncheons, which meant they had to make small talk until she appeared among them. Over the dining table she also demanded that they demonstrate their ‘party pieces’. Cecil Beaton was critical of her clothes; they were in the vanguard of fashion, but she was too impatient to put up with lengthy fittings so that, in his opinion, the finished garment was often a failure.

  She could pounce on a guest with a startling question, such as ‘Mr Churchill has just been telling me the most dreadful things about Signor Mussolini. What do you think of Signor Mussolini?’ A fellow American, Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, former Duchess of Marlborough, astutely summed up Emerald’s modus operandi: ‘She appeared to dispense a tremendous energy, but her enthusiasm cloaked an ingrained pessimism. As I grew to know her I realised that it was her need for friendship that caused her to indulge in absurd superlatives. I used to wonder why she did not herself realise that it was the wrong approach, especially in England.’13

  Laura Corrigan was also primarily driven by a need for friendship, and by the mid-1920s she was well established in London society. Her dinner-dances regularly attracted between 120 and 150 guests, many of whom already knew each other, and she put a great deal of effort into entertaining with an eye to novelty by throwing ‘surprise’ parties, engaging cabaret artistes and providing a distinctly ‘night-club’ atmosphere. Cecil Beaton thought that she relied on ‘calculated spontaneity’ to charm at her parties, but she was generous; when she hired a cabaret act to entertain her guests, she would willingly pay a week’s fees for a single night’s appearance.

  The food and drink were excellent, and with the avuncular assistance of Mr Rolfe, the butler, the guests were provided with tombola prizes that strangely matched their status. The theme of the 1924 party for 104 guests was the Jardin des Perroquets Verts, and the house was transformed like a set for an exotic, brilliantly coloured ballet. For one evening, the drawing room curtains were covered with powdered glass, which glittered enticingly, while on a further occasion she had a temporary ballroom constructed in the garden, peopled with actors disguised as trees, be-smocked yokels and rustic gardeners. But part of Laura’s charm, so far as her guests were concerned, was her happy knack for malapropisms, which were pounced on with glee and repeated all over town. Shown a Gothic cathedral, she made a polite enquiry about the ‘flying buttocks’; admiring a Modernist sitting room, she enthused about the ‘confused lighting’.

 
The French language seems to have been one of her Achilles heels; during the Great War she had financed a hospital for soldiers in France, and when she attended the official opening she greeted each inmate with the unfortunate phrase ‘Dieu te blesse’, which means ‘God wounds you’, rather than ‘God bless you’, as she had intended. In London in the 1920s, when offered a ballet act based on L’Après-midi d’un Faune for one of her parties, Laura turned it down immediately, saying, ‘What do I want with a ballet about a telephone?’ British history was similarly a minefield to Laura; an English king was ‘Richard Gare de Lyon’. While visiting the Duke of Marlborough at his country house, she asked where his illustrious ancestor had won the Battle of Blenheim. He pointed at the statue of the first Duke on its column at the centre of the park and said ‘There’. She believed him. She was also asked if she knew the Dardanelles; no, she said, but she had a letter of introduction to them, and she had heard they were very nice. In another case of mistaken identity, when introduced to the Aga Khan, she ventured that she had met his brother Otto Kahn the German-born banker, philanthropist and patron of the arts, in Hollywood. She was also uncertain how to respond when lunching at Lady Cunard’s with George Moore, who declared, ‘I always think, Mrs Corrigan, that of all sexual perversions, chastity is the most incomprehensible.’ ‘Wal,’ she drawled diplomatically, ‘I guess I shall have to think over that, Mr Moore.’

  Laura Corrigan’s gaffes made society snigger, and she was a further figure of ridicule because of her appearance. She was small, slim, fashionably and expensively dressed, but the fact that she had been bald since the age of around forty was the worst-kept secret in London. Laura suffered from alopecia, which caused most of her hair to fall out, but she had an assortment of auburn wigs made for her to cover all social eventualities. There was an artfully tousled one to be worn in bed, an informal daytime one and an immaculate coiffure for evening – there was even a rubber bathing cap, around the edges of which peeped curls. On one famous occasion she dived off a yacht into the sea, and the bathing cap accidentally came off, floating on the water, to the collective gasps of onlookers. Without surfacing, Laura managed to grab the cap from below, reattach it under water and surface triumphantly with her coiffure only a little askew. The Sunday Express referred to her as ‘The Big-Wig of London’, and the compact travelling trunk in which her hairpieces were transported was known quite openly by her friends as ‘Laura’s Wig-Wam’, but only Emerald Cunard was cruel enough to mention Laura’s baldness to her face. The two women were talking at the dinner table about what they planned to wear to a forthcoming gala night at the opera, and Lady Cunard announced that she would be wearing ‘just a small emerald bandeau, and my own hair’.

  Laura Corrigan may have been the butt of jokes and disparaging remarks – Duff Cooper described her simply as ‘atrocious’ – but she could also be astute and ruthless, as she proved in 1925. James Corrigan’s inheritance had been in the hands of the firm’s former book-keeper, Price McKinney, since his father’s death in 1908. Price owned 30 per cent of the company stock outright and he also managed James’s share of 40 per cent. Laura and James wanted to oust McKinney, and to do that they needed an overall majority. Laura contacted the family of the third original partner in the firm, Stevenson Burke, and secretly persuaded them to sell her some of their stakeholding for $5 million. James had difficulty raising that sum, so Laura pawned her jewellery and arranged bank loans. In 1925 James Corrigan brought off a spectacular boardroom coup, dramatically ousting Price McKinney at a stakeholders meeting by announcing that he now owned 53.5 per cent of the company, and therefore was taking control of the company as President. Within a year Price McKinney had shot himself in the bathroom of his mansion on Euclid Avenue; after this, Cleveland polite society turned completely against the Corrigans. They closed up their mansion, Nagirroc, and Laura returned to her social life in London, with occasional forays to Paris, Venice and New York, where she preferred to live in a hotel.

  1926 was the apotheosis of both the Corrigans; even though they were 3,000 miles apart, they were now worth about $60 million as a result of having regained control of James’s inheritance. Always a fan of horse-racing, James had established the Wickliffe Stables with Price McKinney in happier days. When McKinney was ousted, James took over the entire venture, including the highly lucrative and successful Kingston stud, and pursued his love of racing.

  Meanwhile, Laura Corrigan pulled off another social triumph. On 21 July 1926 she threw a lavish party, hiring an unoccupied house in Grosvenor Street, but instead of engaging professional performers, she persuaded her aristocratic guests to provide their own acts. It was Amateur Night in Mayfair. Lady Louis Mountbatten, Lady Brecknock, Mrs Richard Norton and Lord Ashley warbled their way uncertainly through a ‘plantation number’. Lord Weymouth and Daphne Vivian, Lady Lettice Lygon and Lord Brecknock cycled round the ballroom on a pair of tandems, simultaneously singing ‘Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do’. Others played the ukulele, while gifted Dorothé Plunket, the illegitimate daughter of Lord Londonderry, executed an exhibition dance. Lady Maud Warrender, daughter of the Earl of Shaftesbury, was only deterred from a plate-smashing act by a timely intervention from the butler, Mr Rolfe, who was anxious to protect the parquet floor. But the hit of the evening was the hostess, who in the manner of a circus ringmaster insisted that her guests try out the latest dance craze, the Charleston, while the band played. Laura watched, then slipped on a top hat and red shoes to dance in the centre of the syncopated throng; she had been practising the dance secretly for weeks with professional tuition. Laura Corrigan always wanted to be the high-stepping star of her very own Busby Berkeley musical, and by the time her party ended at 4 a.m. she had achieved her dream.

  Mr and Mrs Corrigan seemed happy enough living on either side of the Atlantic, each pursuing their own pleasures. But their triumph was short-lived; on 23 January 1928, while Laura was entertaining in London, James Corrigan suffered a heart attack and dropped dead outside the Cleveland Athletic Club. He was forty-seven years old. Laura took a year’s sabbatical from London society to make a cultural trip around Europe and then returned, as industrious as ever. She also adopted a philosophical attitude when Jimmy’s transatlantic leisure activities came to light. As Stanley Walker wrote: ‘When her husband died she presented identical souvenirs from his personal belongings to a dozen women of society with the explanation that Jim had wanted them to have something to remember him by.’14

  Laura now needed to make some serious financial decisions. Under the terms of Jimmy’s will she had the power to sell her shares, but the votes that went with them were vested in the new President, John H. Watson. So she sold her entire holding to William Mather, and Corrigan-McKinney was swallowed up by the Republic Steel Corporation. Laura now had an income of $800,000 a year for life, enough for any hostess to entertain freely.

  By 1929 she was back in London and resuming her old life, but no longer the doyenne of 16 Grosvenor Street. The Keppels had now bought a glorious house and estate on a hillside overlooking Florence, the Villa dell’Ombrellino, and so had sold their Mayfair home and shipped their treasures to Italy. Laura rented a succession of grand London houses from their owners as the mood took her, from Crewe House in Curzon Street to the Dowager Duchess of Rutland’s home in Arlington Street. She would book a vast first-floor suite at the Ritz Hotel whenever she was in Paris, where she was a keen customer of Cartier’s, and she held open house at the Palazzo Mocenigo when she summered in Venice. She did not confine her holidays to Europe; one year she chartered a yacht, filled it with her friends and cruised the Caribbean. At every port where they put in, each passenger was given $200 dollars as ‘pocket money’ to spend ashore.

  Laura Mae Corrigan now had aristocratic friends of her own in British society; she became a welcome and popular country house guest. When staying in castles and mansions, she took a particular delight in using the headed notepaper provided for guests to send brief missives to those snooty ma
trons who had spurned her back in Cleveland and New York. ‘Wish you were here!’ she would hand-write below the restrained heading of ‘Blenheim’ or ‘Mount Stewart’, adding a careful signature and printing her name, just to rub it in. ‘She was once rebuffed at Newport. Later she was accepted by the British royal family, and now she takes great pleasure in snubbing Newport. She has made good’15 was the approving verdict. Those Americans who had ignored her in the past and now visited London were not invited to any of her events.

  But some fellow hostesses in London could be sniffy about her too; living just around the corner in Grosvenor Square was another American who had ‘married up’. Initially Lady Cunard disapproved deeply of Mrs Corrigan’s obscure origins, her jolly vulgarity and her popularity among the well-heeled philistines, though Laura bought her way into her social circle by making generous contributions to Sir Thomas Beecham’s operatic projects. It was Mrs Corrigan who pioneered the novelty party, an idea she had garnered from her burly American friend Elsa Maxwell in Paris. Elsa’s parties involved the complex staging of country house murders and treasure hunts for such diverse objects as a swan, a pompom from a sailor’s hat and an autographed portrait of royalty. Elsa and Laura shared a passion for fancy dress, and before long photos of aristocratic party-goers dressed as Mozart, Cleopatra or Nelson were gracing the gossip columns of Tatler and the Daily Sketch. The Daily Mirror reported that modern hostesses were competing:

  to provide boxing matches or private cinema entertainments or music-hall shows if they wish to keep their guests from yawning. The Hon. Mrs Greville, for instance, had quite a variety of entertainment at her dinner party. There was a conjuror and a ventriloquist, who carried on a conversation with his painted fist, and an Hawaiian orchestra which provided languorous tunes.16