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

by Siân Evans

  One important London figure who was a confirmed Francophile was Laura Corrigan. She divided much of her time in the late 1930s between London and Paris, flitting between the two capitals. She had been ‘taken up’ by fellow American Elsa Maxwell, professional party organiser for the rich, who helped her to establish herself in Parisian high society. With her own fortune and Elsa’s contacts Laura was once again employing well-connected characters to hack a path for her to the sunny uplands of high society, throwing magnificent parties at which she liberally distributed exquisite and valuable gifts to her guests. Laura was neither an intellectual nor high-born, but she recognised that curiosity, greed and acquisitiveness are universal character traits. She played upon these human failings to draw people to her, using her great wealth. Elsa Maxwell remembered her fondly: ‘A great London Hostess […] the irrepressible Laura Corrigan, who established a formidable handicap in the American Cinderella Derby by covering the ground from switchboard operator to rich widow in a record six months.’13

  Even allowing for hyperbole (in fact Laura had married Jimmy Corrigan in 1916, and he had died in 1928), Elsa Maxwell genuinely admired Laura. She said her client ‘was not beautiful, she was not educated or particularly clever – [and] her innocent blunders of speech provided almost as much amusement, behind her back, as her parties.’14

  But Elsa was adept at helping wealthy American parvenus get established in Parisian high society for a fee throughout the 1920s and 1930s. She was adept at garnering publicity for her clients and herself, skills that were appreciated by the venues where she organised their parties and receptions, such as the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

  The magnificent Ritz in the Place Vendôme had been the home-from-home of rich Americans for many decades, and from 1938 onwards it was Laura Corrigan’s main residence in France. She maintained the vast Imperial Suite on a permanent basis; unfortunately her grip of the French language was somewhat idiosyncratic, and she blithely called it her ‘ventre-à-terre’, a phrase that literally means ‘belly to the ground’ but which colloquially means ‘flat out’.

  Because of her linguistic tangles and her familiarity with the finest of luxury settings, Laura Corrigan appreciated the Ritz Hotel with its multilingual staff. However, in London she preferred to take a prestigious town house for the season, complete with experienced staff, in order to entertain under her own roof in great style. She needed large, historic houses, ideally belonging to an aristocratic owner, and money was no object. In June 1938 she was based at 11 Kensington Palace Gardens, which she had rented for the season from the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. She gave a spectacular party, and of course details were reported in the newspapers. Lady Diana Cooper was in black, Lady Weymouth wore white and silver and Lady Cunard sported a topknot of roses. The Duke and Duchess of Kent led the dancing, and a cabaret was provided by Chinese jugglers and a xylophone player.

  Throughout 1939 it became increasingly apparent that war was inevitable. Harold Nicolson expressed his frustration at what he saw as the past misguided attempts of Mrs Greville and Lady Astor to influence the foreign ambassadors and political classes for their own self-aggrandisement:

  I do not believe that any intelligent man such as Grandi could have left [Mussolini] under any illusion that the will-power of this country is concentrated in Mrs Ronald Greville. He must know that in the last resort our decision is embodied, not in Mayfair or Cliveden, but in the provinces. The harm which these silly, selfish hostesses do is immense. They convey to foreign envoys the impression that policy is decided in their drawing-rooms. People […] are impressed by the social efficiency of silly women such as Mrs Greville and Lady Astor. Anybody who knows the latter understands that she is a kindly but inordinately foolish woman. Yet these people have a subversive influence. They dine and wine our younger politicians and they create an atmosphere of authority and responsibility and grandeur, whereas the whole thing is a mere flatulence of spirit. That is what always happens with us. The silly people are regarded as representative of British opinion and the informed people are dismissed as ‘intellectuals’. I should be most unhappy if I were Lady Astor. She must realise that her parrot cries have done much damage to what (to do her justice) she must dimly realise is the essence of her adopted class and country.15

  For some individuals, any notion of defeatism was to be stoutly challenged; in the middle of June 1939 Winston Churchill heard from an American journalist, Walter Lippmann, that American Ambassador Joseph Kennedy believed that war was inevitable and that Britain would be defeated. Winston refused to believe that was possible, but that if it happened then it would be up to the Americans to ‘preserve and maintain the great heritage of the English-speaking peoples’.

  On 3 June 1939 Philip Sassoon died from complications following influenza, aged only fifty. Bob Boothby, who had been a close friend between 1925 and 1935, said, ‘War was not his element. His death, like everything else about him, was well timed.’16 Sassoon had been increasingly depressed by the news his international contacts provided about the Germans’ plans for subjugation of Europe, and some believed his death was self-willed.

  Throughout the summer of 1939, the last season before the war, there was a flurry of social occasions and grand balls. A particularly glittering occasion was held at on 6 July at Holland House, the West London home of the sixth Earl of Ilchester, for the début of Sonia Cubitt’s daughter Rosalind. (She was to become the mother of Camilla Parker Bowles, now HRH the Duchess of Cornwall.) The guests of honour were the King and Queen, and Noel Coward and the ubiquitous Queen Ena of Spain were also present. Naturally, Mrs Greville was determined to attend; the successful launch of her god-child’s daughter to the cream of society, including her dear friends the monarchs, was unmissable. Still weak from a bout of pneumonia, the seventy-six-year-old was carried up the stairs in a wheelchair by two of her footmen. Around her neck was the astonishing five-strand diamond necklace that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. It was not a night for half-measures.

  In July 1939 Mrs Laura Corrigan took Dudley House in Park Lane for two months for a rumoured £5,000. Among other events, she gave a large dinner party at which the American Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and his wife were the principal guests. The party was the eve of the Kennedys’ débutante daughter Eunice being presented at Buckingham Palace. Her young brothers Bobby and Teddy watched her leave from the balcony of their house in Grosvenor Square.

  Nicolson had condemned the ‘silly hostesses’ earlier in the year, but their attitudes were certainly not unusual for their era. It was only gradually becoming apparent to the general public the true nature of life – and death – under totalitarian regimes, especially the Third Reich. On 30 August 1939 Nicolson had a lunch with Sibyl Colefax, Lady Cunard and Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had been First Secretary in Berlin between 1933 and 1938. Kirkpatrick chillingly described conditions in Germany, and the ‘sense of evil arrogance’ that emanated from the Führer.

  At the beginning of August 1939 ‘Chips’ Channon drove down to Polesden to see Mrs Greville. He described the house and grounds as magnificent, silent and spacious, well maintained by his hostess’s long-established wealth. He found his hostess notably older, thinner and greyer than he remembered, but nevertheless they settled down for such a fulsome gossip that he nearly ran out of time to dress for dinner. Even ‘Chips’ was taken aback by Mrs Ronnie’s vindictive opinion of her old friend Grace Vanderbilt. ‘There is no one on earth quite so skilfully malicious as old Maggie […] she was vituperative about almost everyone, for about 40 minutes.’17 In the middle of August 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of war, Mrs Greville was planning a recuperative holiday in Le Touquet and Deauville. As the gravity of the situation became clear, she cancelled her plans to go to France, and stayed at Polesden with friends to await developments.

  With war looming, Waldorf Astor decided to remove all the Astors’ valuables from their London home to Cliveden for safety. He asked Rose to collect from the bank the Sancy diamond too,
forgetting that he had already been to the bank and absent-mindedly put the gem in his pocket. Rose was not pleased, but Waldorf was preoccupied. In August 1939 he reduced the number of staff at Cliveden, and once again he was planning to help open the Canadian Red Cross hospital on site.

  As another war with Germany seemed imminent, ‘Chips’ Channon likened the mood in the House of Commons to getting married for the second time: ‘it is impossible to work up the same excitement. Certainly tonight London is quiet and almost indifferent to what may happen. There is a frightening calm.’18 In New York, on 1 September 1939, W. H. Auden recorded his creeping sense of doom as the last hours of peace of ‘a low, dishonest decade’ ebbed away.

  War in Europe was unavoidable unless Germany drew back from the brink. Hostilities broke out between Germany and Poland, and on 1 September 1939 there was a special session of Parliament to discuss the crisis. It was a day of high emotion. Neville Chamberlain put the blame squarely on Hitler’s shoulders; he listed the recent course of negotiations, and when he revealed that sixteen points that Hitler claimed had been rejected by the Poles had never been presented to them by the Germans, Nancy Astor was heard to exclaim, ‘Well, I never did!’ Even on the brink of war she was astonished to discover that the Nazis had lied. Chamberlain soberly read out the ultimatum he had sent to the German government, stating that unless they abandoned their aggression against Poland, Britain would fulfil its promise to go to war.

  At 11.15 on the morning of Sunday 3 September, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, veteran of the Munich Agreement, broadcast live on the radio to a hushed and expectant nation. He announced that the British government had waited for a response to the ultimatum, but that no reply had come from Berlin as the deadline had expired, ‘and consequently, this country is at war with Germany.’

  10

  ‘Bravery under fire’: 1939–1945

  Within minutes of Chamberlain’s broadcast, air-raid sirens sounded throughout London. Although Margot Asquith had blithely informed Emerald Cunard that gas masks were unnecessary and air raids were not dangerous, the sinister wail was to become all too familiar to Britain’s inhabitants, who now learned to live with the threat of bombs, the need to ‘take cover’ at a moment’s notice, the exigencies of rationing and life in the blackout. Urban children were evacuated to the countryside; Mrs Greville’s country house, Polesden Lacey, took in thirty schoolchildren from the East End on the very first day of the war, accommodating them in flats over the garages.

  The King and Queen elected to stay in London for the duration of hostilities, but as the war became more intense they often slept at Windsor Castle. Queen Mary took up residence with the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort at Badminton, accompanied by a retinue of no fewer than sixty-three servants.

  Many expats headed back to Britain; on 12 September the Windsors, ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe and three Cairn terriers were picked up from Cherbourg by the British destroyer HMS Kelly, commanded by the Duke’s cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, and deposited on the quayside in blacked-out Portsmouth. They stayed for two weeks; the Duke offered his services in support of his King and country and hoped to remain in Britain permanently. However, the royal family were implacably opposed to the idea, especially Queen Elizabeth. Another solution was required, and it was agreed that the Duke would act as liaison officer with the British Military Mission near Paris. He was wearing khaki uniform and his many medals when he and Wallis lunched at Lady Colefax’s home on 27 September 1939.

  In anticipation of the bombing campaign, which did not materialise for months, many wealthy Londoners closed up their town houses and moved into the big hotels. It had become increasingly difficult to staff and heat private homes, as fuel was rationed and servants were recruited for war service. Hotels were convenient and convivial alternatives, as all meals in restaurants were initially limited to three courses and had to cost 5 shillings a head or less. A hotel restaurant was no more expensive than a more modest establishment. As the American war correspondent Ed Murrow remarked, ‘at least you would be bombed with the right sort of people.’

  Many notable members of London society were on the move in the early days of the war. Lady Londonderry closed up most of her family’s palatial house at the bottom of Park Lane and ate at the Dorchester Hotel. The best hotels were packed with celebrities, socialites and statesmen. London was full of servicemen and women, who filled the theatres, night clubs and dance floors. Some householders continued to entertain to the best of their abilities. Sibyl Colefax moved from Lord North Street early-eighteenth-century terraced house in Queen Anne’s Gate, which Lady Diana Cooper described as ‘frail as a pack of cards, and Queen Anne cards at that’1. At first, during air raids, the servants would be sent down to the basement while ‘Coalbox’, as she was fondly known, and her guests would serve themselves the meal. Once the Blitz began in earnest in September 1940, Sibyl’s guests refused to shelter in the kitchen, knowing they would be no safer there. ‘Chips’ Channon defied the bombs and held lavish dinner parties at his house in Belgrave Square until it was badly damaged by a bomb in November 1940.

  The Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane had opened in 1932, and it became the focus of many Londoners’ wartime social lives. It was believed that its reinforced concrete construction made it safe in air raids. When the Blitz began in September 1940, residents and visitors sought refuge nightly in the hotel’s subterranean Turkish baths, where beds had been installed in cubicles for the VIP residents. However, ‘the Dorm’, as it was known, had been excavated laterally beyond the building’s foundations, so a mere twelve inches of tarmac and gravel lay between the drive outside the hotel’s entrance and the ceiling of the supposedly secure shelter. One stray bomb landing outside the main entrance could have wiped out what Mrs Corrigan called ‘la cream de la cream’ of London society.

  The hotel attracted a mixed clientele, from Cabinet ministers to brigadiers, dowagers to diplomats, officers to actors. Some residents negotiated what was known as the ‘duchess’ rate, a reduced tariff because their presence added lustre to the hotel’s reputation. Dorchester regulars included the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and his wife, and Oliver Stanley, Minister for War from 1940 onwards, who was married to Lady Maureen, daughter of Lord and Lady Londonderry. It also attracted a rather more louche clientele. Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie wrote: ‘In the Dorchester, the sweepings of the Riviera have been washed up – pot-bellied, sallow, sleek-haired nervous gentlemen with loose mouths and wobbly chins, wearing suede shoes and checked suits, and thin bony women with fox capes and long silk legs and small artificial curls clustering around their bony sheep-like heads.’2

  Mrs Greville closed up her exquisite eighteenth-century town home in Charles Street and decamped to the reinforced concrete Modernism of the Dorchester in July 1940. She used a discreet side entrance to avoid being seen crossing the crowded lobby in her wheelchair. The hotel was the nexus of government, the armed services and international intrigue, and while many rich septuagenarians with indifferent health might seek safety in the provinces, Mrs Greville chose a ringside seat in order to watch the Luftwaffe’s concerted attempts to destroy London. From a vast upper-storey suite, with her faithful servants, and ablaze with magnificent jewellery, Maggie was determined to go out with a bang.

  Between bombing raids she entertained her favourites by inviting them to exquisite meals in her suite, using fresh produce sent up from Polesden’s Home Farm, such as milk, butter, newly laid eggs and cream, which were otherwise extremely difficult to obtain legitimately in rationed Britain. Resolute and defiant to the end, she refused to descend to the underground air-raid shelters during air raids; as bombs fell on London and anti-aircraft batteries in Hyde Park blasted into the sky, Mrs Greville would telephone VIPs sheltering in ‘the Dorm’, daring them to join her upstairs, and dismissing them as cowards if they felt discretion was the better part of valour.

  Meanwhile, old friends and rivals also converged on London. The rapid advance of armies acr
oss Europe caught Mrs Keppel out once again (the first occasion had been in August 1914). Following their hurried retreat from Italy in July 1940, the Keppels sailed from St Jean de Luz in a Royal Navy troop ship crammed with British nationals and military personnel. In the confusion Violet Trefusis handed her jewellery to a man she assumed to be a porter, and never saw him (or it) again. The journey back to Britain was fraught and uncomfortable, and, as in 1914, Mrs Keppel decamped to the Ritz to recuperate. Mrs Greville rapidly tired of hearing tales about the Keppels’ ordeal, and told Lady Londonderry: ‘To hear Alice talk about her escape from France, one would think she had swum the Channel, with her maid between her teeth.’

  Mrs Greville was aware of her tarnished image, due to her early enthusiasm for the Third Reich. Duff Cooper, the MP whose election she had tried to sabotage, had embarked on a lecture tour of the States at the beginning of the war, to persuade neutral America to support Britain. She complained about his ‘dereliction of duty’ in being overseas. Duff Cooper responded robustly, pointing out that she was probably harbouring resentment against those who, like him, had long warned of the dangers of the Nazis.

  To redeem her reputation, she placed a feature in the Evening Standard (2 February 1940) claiming that, while the Nazis had attempted to cultivate important Englishwomen for propaganda purposes, she had regularly travelled to Germany primarily in order to take ‘the cure’ at Baden-Baden. She added that she was currently recovering from an (unspecified) illness, and her only dinner engagement that winter had been with Lord and Lady Halifax. (He was the Foreign Secretary, and therefore an unimpeachable reference.) Mrs Greville also donated nearly £6,000 to buy a Spitfire for the RAF. Any wealthy individual could, in principle, commission a plane, but only a true egotist with a great deal of ground to make up would have their own name painted on its fuselage. The P8643 Margaret Helen saw active service from April 1941 till December 1944; in fact, it outlived its sponsor.