by Siân Evans
I think I should leave the country, and take a tiny apartment in Paris […] I hope my maid would come with me. Indeed, I am sure that she would. And though, naturally, I should not be able to entertain, I could have a few people to tea, once a week. And perhaps […] though one cannot be sure […] perhaps some of the people whom I have entertained in the past would invite me back.1
Her visions of romantic penury were fortunately interrupted by the arrival of yet another ambassador. Mrs Greville’s fortunes were affected by the worldwide slump, though the devaluation of the pound made British exports, such as McEwan’s Pale Ale, more affordable on international markets. As a major shareholder in the brewery set up by her millionaire father, who had schooled her in commerce, she was a formidable businesswoman. Kenneth Clark recalled how he glimpsed the brewery directors arriving at Polesden for a board meeting. Mrs Greville was ill in bed, but he watched as each of them was summoned in turn, and later emerged visibly shaken.
Nevertheless Mrs Greville economised in a way that only the truly rich would; she owned very valuable emeralds, which had once belonged to Empress Josephine, and magnificent ropes of pearls, but had to pay considerable insurance premiums whenever they were worn. So she had replicas made and often wore those instead, especially when she was travelling. Only an expert could have told them apart, and her insurance premiums were much reduced as a result. However some of her contemporaries faced far tougher financial decisions and less palatable alternatives.
Sibyl Colefax needed to supplement the family’s income in order to continue entertaining. Arthur’s increasing deafness now limited the fees he could command from his work at the Bar, and they had a shortfall of around £2,000 per year, the equivalent of approximately £70,000 today. Sibyl was a reluctant businesswoman, but she had a great flair for interior design, largely self-taught, and excellent taste. She also knew people who were prepared to pay for bespoke interiors, and she had good contacts with antiques and fine art dealers. In addition, she was acquainted with women who were successful interior designers, including the American Elsie de Wolfe, otherwise known as Lady Mendl.
The decorating company of Sibyl Colefax Ltd was established in 1933, with premises at 29 Bruton Street, in Mayfair. There was demand in ‘smartistic’ London for interior designers. Syrie Maugham, the former wife of the writer Somerset Maugham, had established a distinctive style, setting up her firm in 1922 in Baker Street. In reaction to the cluttered, dark Victorian interiors of her youth she created rooms in various shades of white, cream, oyster or pearl. She also used mirrors extensively, to reflect the soft light of 1920s London. Vast white flower arrangements added texture, and even her books were rebound in vellum. Against the white walls would stand ‘pickled’ furniture, elegant antique pieces that had been stripped and bleached. Her house at 213 King’s Road in Chelsea was ‘as pretty as a narcissus in snow, as pretty as the silver feathers on a pane of winter’s glass’2. Syrie Maugham and Sibyl Colefax were near neighbours and knew one another socially. The two women’s distinctive styles were very different, and they did not regard each other as business rivals.
Sibyl’s decorating style was rather more conventional and historical in inspiration; she favoured a soft colour palette of light greens and greys with judicious touches of gold and rose. She liked antique lacquer and Oriental ceramics, both of which typified the English ‘country house’ style, especially when combined with floral chintzes, which she used to brighten drawing rooms. She provided pleasant, comfortable and functional interiors decorated with timeless good taste. Some preferred the angularity of Modernism, but Sibyl’s accessible style worked well in grander country or town houses, where existing furniture could be reupholstered and better lit, supplemented with carefully chosen antiques and art works, to make pleasing, comfortable interiors.
Her first business partner was Peggy Ward, who later became the Countess of Munster. Sibyl used her social connections to advance her career, and her own house in Argyll Street acted as a showroom for her talents. Sibyl’s determination and enterprise provided the motivating force behind the company. Her workload was immense, with twelve-hour days starting at 7 a.m., so that she could continue to entertain in the evenings. To save time she often changed her clothes in the back of her chauffeur-driven Rolls while travelling between appointments. Her weekends in country houses were arranged so that she could check on progress on the firm’s various projects en route. Prestigious commissions rolled in, but at first Sibyl tended to under-estimate the hidden costs, so her profits in the early years were not huge. Her response was to work even harder, and her ambition was to be commissioned by the Prince of Wales to decorate his home, Fort Belvedere, an early-nineteenth-century country house in the Gothic Revival style, situated in Windsor Great Park, which he occupied from 1929 to 1936.
Meanwhile, she maintained a frenetic pace in her socialising. She had immense stamina, but also a desire to be everywhere and meet everyone of interest. A typical day from her diary was parodied by the novelist Mary Borden in her story ‘To Meet Jesus Christ’:
To go from a Pirandello play to a ball in Park Lane, a musical At Home at an Embassy in Portland Place, a reception at the India Office, and a supper in Soho, and to mark down a new quarry in each place, and roll home exhausted at four in the morning with half-a-dozen new intimate friends, who include the great Italian dramatist, a Crowned Head, the French writer of the day, and some woman who had snubbed her for years, was something of an achievement, but this was her average nightly bag.3
However, not everyone wished to be drawn into her social circle; Vita Sackville-West insisted her two sons share a bedroom at Sissinghurst, so that one of them would always be occupying that room even if the other was away, and refused to install a separate guest bedroom, so that she need never have Sibyl to stay for a weekend. Sibyl’s relentless desire to know everyone also grated on some; a tale spread around London of a contest between a young man and a Chelsea hostess in pursuit of an electric lion. The young man won the race because the woman kept turning round to explain to the spectators that she had known the lion as a cub.
She was adept at collecting what she called ‘my young people’. Kenneth Clark’s meteoric curatorial career started with the success of the Italian Old Master exhibition, which opened at the Royal Academy in January 1930 and had been organised with Sibyl’s assistance. It was such a popular success that fashionable Londoners would go to any lengths to obtain tickets, Clark recalled. He and his wife, Jane, were taken up by Sibyl, and her invitations with their angular, almost illegible handwriting arrived in droves. She was impressively organised, spending three hours every Saturday and Sunday morning starting at 5 a.m., writing hundreds of invitations and posting them in huge bundles. She also seized every possible opportunity to garner new people for her collection; the actor Alfred Lunt accompanied her to the theatre and was so annoyed by her restless scrutiny of the audience that he threatened to leave.
Lunch or dinner at Sibyl’s was not always an unmitigated pleasure. Unlike the spouses of most of the hostesses, Sir Arthur Colefax was a regular feature at the dining table. Flanked by the more patient guests, he would hold forth on the issues of the day. Sibyl’s glittering social circle were very hard on poor Arthur, but there was a striking unanimity in their descriptions. Virginia Woolf claimed she had unwillingly become the second leading authority in Britain on the Dye-Stuffs Bill, Sir Arthur being the greatest. Maurice Bowra, a keen cricket enthusiast, compiled an imaginary First Eleven of Bores, making Arthur captain. Beverley Nichols wrote:
if it had not been for Sibyl her guests would have scattered at the very sight of him. He knew a great deal about the laws of England and also about the laws of France, and at one time he had some sort of advisory post connected with the construction of the Channel Tunnel. Once, walking home with Max Beerbohm after lunch, I asked what Sir Arthur had been talking to him about for so long. Max heaved a deep sigh. ‘Surely you need not ask? He was boring the Channel Tunnel.’4
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br /> Sibyl’s literary regulars included T. S. Eliot, the Kiplings, Rebecca West, Harold Nicolson, H. G. Wells and André Maurois. She also had a penchant for theatrical types, especially John Gielgud, Tilly Losch and Alexander Korda. Musicians such as Noel Coward and Artur Rubinstein came as guests, but were often persuaded to ‘sing for their suppers’. One of her greatest coups was the actor Charlie Chaplin; Sibyl had met him in Hollywood, and when he visited Britain, she enticed him to Argyll House. Harold Nicolson wrote:
Lunch with Sibyl Colefax. A good party. Lady Castlerosse, Diana Cooper, Charlie Chaplin, H. G. Wells, Tom [Oswald] Mosley. We discuss fame. We all agree that we should like to be famous but that we should not like to be recognised. Charlie Chaplin told us how he never realised at first that he was a famous man. He worked on quietly at Los Angeles, staying at the Athletics Club. Then suddenly he went on a holiday to New York. He then saw ‘Charlie Chaplins’ everywhere – in chocolate, in soap, on hoardings, ‘and elderly bankers imitated me to amuse their children.’ Yet he himself did not know a soul in New York. He walked through the streets where he was famous and yet unknown. He at once went to the photographer and had himself photographed as he really is.5
The financial crisis of the early 1930s alarmed Emerald Cunard. She discreetly disposed of some of her diamond and emerald jewellery, but had good-quality paste replicas made first, so that no one would notice. Her financial worries were eventually alleviated by a substantial inheritance from her old admirer George Moore, who died on 21 January 1933. The bulk of his estate, worth £80,000 (approximately £2.9 million today), went to Lady Cunard, whom he had loved for thirty-nine years. He had never married but had spent his life adoring her from afar. She was an infrequent visitor to his house in his last years, usually turning up unannounced, clutching an orchid in a pot as a gift. He relished her company: ‘Dearest and best of women. Life would be a dreary thing without you. Come to see me soon’, he wrote. In one of his last letters to her, on 14 October 1932, he referred to his own book Heloise and Abelard, and told her that in the text he was Gaucelm D’Arembert (G for George) and she was Lady Malberge (M for Maud). Chapter XXII contains the following passage, narrated by Gaucelm:
‘It has fallen out that Malberge has wept naked in my arms, telling me that I must help her to obtain some man who has caught her fancy, reminding me of our long love, her tears flowing on her cheeks. Thou wilt help me, she has said, for I must have both of you […] sometimes I mingle with the crowd and catch sight of her, and sometimes a whim brings her here to me, and I look upon my life as it has come to me through Malberge as a perfect gift. My death, which cannot be far away now, only affects me in this much, that I shall not see Malberge any more; and not seeing her, I am indifferent to all things after death as I am during life, indifferent to all things but Malberge.’ And on these words Gaucelm D’Arembert turned away, thinking that he had said enough.6
Moore also left Emerald his letters to her, many of which she destroyed, but those she retained were later inherited by Sacheverell Sitwell. Emerald’s missives to Moore have not survived, so it is difficult to know to what extent she ever reciprocated his grand passion. However, Nancy Cunard was very fond of ‘GM’, even asking him once if he might be her biological father. Emerald’s cavalier treatment of ‘the Hermit of Ebury Street’, as he was disparagingly called by Sir Thomas Beecham, was another factor in Emerald and Nancy’s deteriorating relationship.
Kenneth Clark first met Emerald in 1930, when she arrived late for a concert. The audience had been kept waiting by the conductor, Beecham, and as Emerald chattered away blithely to the embarrassed Clark, who was showing her to her seat, Sir Thomas turned round and snapped, ‘You’re late. Sit down.’ Her perennial unpunctuality was famous; audiences at academic lectures would often see the shadow of a headpiece of osprey feathers bobbing along the lower edge of the illuminated screen and recognise the unmistakably beaky silhouette of Lady Cunard.
By now Emerald had refined her lunch and dinner parties to a fine art. Peter Quennell, a great gossip and prolific biographer, remarked that she liked to mix her guests ‘like cocktails’, surrounding herself with an assortment of the prominenti from diverse fields. She delighted in intelligent eccentrics such as Lord Berners, writers such as Somerset Maugham or Michael Arlen and suave statesmen such as Duff Cooper and Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. Visiting heiresses such as Barbara Hutton were welcome, as was prickly Virginia Woolf. Emerald was adept at discovering those who had the potential to amuse, inform or delight her other guests. She especially enjoyed teasing the more serious VIPs who turned up at her table. As Kenneth Clark recorded, one evening her victim was a ponderous American millionaire called Myron Taylor.
‘Now, Mr Taylor, what do you think about incest?’ ‘Well, er, ah, there seems to be no doubt at all that biologically the results are deleterious. In some of our small prairie towns statistics show …’ ‘But, Mr Taylor, what about Siegmund and Sieglinde?’ and Emerald began to sing in her small sweet voice, with impeccable diction, the end of Act 1 of The Valkyrie. Mr Taylor, only slightly shaken, continued inexorably, ‘… and it is proved conclusively that in some Near Eastern countries …’ ‘Kenneth, what do you think about incest?’ ‘I’m in favour of it, Emerald.’ ‘Oh, Kenneth, what a wicked thing to say! Think of the Greeks! … But all the same it was just a silly old taboo, like Pythagoras saying that it was wicked to eat beans.’ Emerald delighted, ‘Mr Taylor, do you think it wicked to eat beans?’ Emerald’s rooms were always very warm, and by this time the wretched Myron Taylor was sweating profusely. All he could do was to cover his large senatorial face with a table napkin.7
Conversation at her table was general, stimulating and occasionally scurrilous though rarely vulgar, and the reputations of others were mercilessly shredded. Emerald remarked that one should be kind to the poor; only Mrs Corrigan was kind to the rich, with her tombolas and Cartier knick-knacks. Emerald called her rivals Mrs Greville and Lady Colefax ‘The Dioscouri of Gloom’, and alleged that Mrs Ronnie instructed her chef to inflate the quails to be served at dinner with a bicycle pump. When Somerset Maugham, widely known to be homosexual, was preparing to leave one of her parties early, he made the excuse ‘I have to keep my youth’. ‘Why didn’t you bring him with you?’ she retorted.
On one occasion her needling was publicly rebuked. The elderly playwright George Bernard Shaw and his wife, Charlotte, were the guests of Lady Lavery, and Lady Cunard brought up the sensitive subject of a new publication, a collection of love letters written many years previously between Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell, before he had met and married Charlotte. Shaw had expressly forbidden ‘Mrs P’ from publishing them, but she had ignored his wishes. Now he was highly embarrassed, and Lady Cunard pressed home her advantage. ‘You must read them’, she insisted to Mrs Shaw. ‘As love letters they are unsurpassed. Promise me you’ll read them.’ Charlotte Shaw replied, ‘I shall certainly read them, and when I have read them I will tell you what I think of them, and what I think of you.’ Even Emerald was silenced.
She was once discomfited at her own dining table. The conversation had turned to the resemblance between people and certain animals. Emerald made the tactical error of asking a question to which she could not predict the answer: ‘What am I like?’ she trilled. The guests sat in silence, each thinking inevitably of some species of bird. Archie Clark Kerr, a professional diplomat who appeared to have nodded off, suddenly pronounced ‘A fruit-eating bat’, and immediately closed his eyes again. Of all flying creatures, the unprepossessing nocturnal mammals with leathery wings, pointed faces and sharp teeth were probably the least flattering he could have suggested. Emerald changed the subject adroitly.
Emerald was obsessed by her appearance, and she reacted badly to having her photographic portrait reproduced in Cecil Beaton’s Book of Beauty in November 1930. Somewhat theatrically, she thrust her copy of the book into the fire during lunch, to the amazement of her guests, and held it down with a poker, exclaiming, ‘He calls me
a hostess, that shows he’s a low fellow!’ However, she may have been secretly flattered to be featured in the book, and she had consented to having her photograph taken – unlike Virginia Woolf, who was furious to discover that Beaton had included two sketches of her he had made from photographs taken by others, without permission. Sibyl Colefax wrote nervously to Beaton, ‘I do wish you hadn’t put in Virginia – she will never forgive it – & she’s so worth having for a friend.’ Mischievous Lord Berners acquired a copy of the book and amused himself by making subtle changes to the portraits of female celebrities, blacking out the occasional tooth in an otherwise flawless smile or hatching in pimples or a discreet moustache above luscious lips. However, he never defaced the portrait of Emerald; he was too fond of her.
Even the Astors were shaken by the Great Depression, although they weathered the storm better than many, as their principal portfolio by 1929 was $100 million worth of real estate on the island of Manhattan in New York City, where property prices and rents stayed buoyant. However they had a great many charitable commitments they wanted to honour, such as supporting the Margaret McMillan nursery schools. With reluctance they economised by ‘letting go’ a number of household and estate staff, and mothballing some of their cars. They also decided to close up large parts of Cliveden until the financial situation improved substantially.
Despite its promising start, Nancy Astor’s political career hit some obstacles in the late 1920s and early ’30s. She narrowly held her seat against a strong Labour candidate in the election of 1928 with a majority of only 500. In February 1931 Nancy spoke in the House in support of a private members’ bill on the total prohibition of alcohol. This was always a controversial stance, but Nancy caused national uproar by claiming that the reason why England’s cricket team had narrowly lost the Ashes to the Australians the previous summer was that the Antipodeans were teetotal. It was hard to think of a greater insult to both English and Australian cricket enthusiasts, and Nancy was castigated by the press.
