A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy

by Deborah McDonald

  Writers, actors, directors, diplomats had all come to the party. Old friends and new, but none from the old days of Yendel. They were all dead – Meriel had died a few years ago, having published a memoir in which she relived those holidays, quoting Garstino’s poem – ‘. . . oh to be / In Yendel for eternity . . .’ All dead and gone. This was a new world now, with other worlds of memory stretching from that day to this.

  The guests talked loudly, laughed uproariously, and drank oceans. They were welcome; after all, they’d paid for it. They hadn’t actually intended to pay, but nonetheless it was their money that was being drunk.

  Times had become hard for Moura. After Alex Korda’s death in 1956, she no longer had regular work to boost the income from her publishing ventures.

  She had some help from the theatrical impresario Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, the king of London theatreland. He had often done deals with Alexander Korda; actors under contract but not being used by Sir Alex would be lent out to Binkie for his plays. Binkie was renowned for both his financial cunning and for his extreme generosity, and after Korda died he helped subsidise Moura’s income.4

  There were other valuable contacts too, and Moura carried on working in films with other producers and directors, taking whatever odd jobs and tasks she could. In 1959 she was a technical adviser on The Journey (starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner), a drama set in Communist Hungary. In 1961 Peter Ustinov gave her a bit part in his comedy Romanoff and Juliet, as Kiva the cook. Producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean, who had taken a great liking to Moura, employed her as a researcher for Lawrence of Arabia. She was often a go-between – her vast, carefully spun network of friends and acquaintances brought her many tasks. When Lean first had an urge to turn E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India into a film, he asked Moura to approach Forster, who was among her friends, to ask him to sell the film rights. He turned her down, as he did everybody. Forster was ‘simply terrified of the cinema’, Lean believed.5

  Moura’s translation work provided a modest regular income. She had acquired considerable stature as a translator of Gorky and Chekhov, and earned glowing reviews for both. L. P. Hartley called her one of the most felicitous translator’s of Gorky’s work, and she was praised for her beautiful translation of his Fragments.6 Her work wasn’t always good; in need of money, Moura would take any commissions she could get, and her heart sometimes wasn’t in it; some of her translations of lesser works were skimped (occasionally missing out whole sentences and paragraphs if they were too challenging), and her professional reputation suffered. But the work still came in, because publishers couldn’t resist her persuasions.7

  Although Moura had always worked hard, she had never acquired the ability to be careful – or even basically responsible – with money. Without regular support from a figure like Gorky, Wells or Korda, she was perpetually short of cash and perennially unable to use it wisely when she did get it.

  In 1963 the rent on her flat at 68 Ennismore Gardens went up. She simply couldn’t afford it any longer. Moura felt not the slightest embarrassment about this; she had become one of that upper-class breed who turn being destitute into a profession. (Lockhart was another.) She had plenty of rich friends, and never had any compunction about letting others pay for things. Roger Machell, publisher and deputy to Hamish Hamilton, once arrived at Ennismore Gardens for one of Moura’s soirées to find her just getting out of a taxi. She enveloped him in one of her bear hugs and then kept him chatting by the roadside for some minutes, while the cab’s meter went on ticking. Then she turned and went indoors, leaving him alone with the idling taxi and its expectant driver. Machell did what any gentleman would do – he paid the fare himself.8 Many of Moura’s cab fares were handed off with this technique. Despite the shortage of money, Moura always had the charm, the gall and the resourcefulness to live her life without having her wings too severely clipped. She never took buses, and never ventured into the Underground.

  Rent was a different matter. After looking around for new accommodation, she found a cheaper flat on the second floor of a genteel Edwardian block at 211 Cromwell Road, and in May 1963 she left the home she had first moved into in 1939. The move was such an event, it was reported in the Observer’s Pendennis column: ‘The sound of steel on wood echoed through the empty, bare-floored room . . . Moura Ignatievna, in a blue-spotted dressing-gown, was sorting papers from an old ottoman that had not been opened, she said, for at least 20 years.’ Moura’s move, said Pendennis, meant the disappearance of ‘another of London’s landmarks’. The names of those who had been entertained here over the years were listed like an epitaph: Wells, Maugham, Koestler, Hemingway, André Gide, William Walton, Harold Nicolson, Graham Greene, Robert Graves, Bertrand Russell . . . All had come ‘not for the exquisiteness of her surroundings but for the stimulation of her company and the warm bear-hug of her Russian personality’.9 A few men of her age group fancied more than that. Bertrand Russell, who’d met her first in the Kronverksky apartment in 1920, had said after H. G.’s death, ‘She’s welcome to a place in my bed.’10

  She was photographed for the Observer in the new flat, weary but cheerful among her half-unpacked possessions.

  Her closest friends were worried about her. Moura had just turned seventy-one. She had always been known to be short of money, but the enforced move shook them. Her situation must be serious. Peter Ustinov led the way; putting in a generous £1,000 himself, he invited all Moura’s friends to contribute. They all gave, some of them quite large amounts, and the total raised came to around £6,000.11 Ustinov organised a gathering at which the cheque was ceremoniously handed over.

  Moura was grateful; she was touched and overcome with love for all her good friends. So overcome, she immediately threw a series of enormous parties. On three consecutive nights, all her closest friends, as well as her less close friends, her casual acquaintances and all their hangers-on crowded into her new flat and celebrated with her. By the time they were through, she had blown the whole lot, and was as broke as ever.12

  When Moura started shoplifting, her friends grew even more concerned. In December 1964 she was caught stealing from Harrods. She took an umbrella, a spectacle case and other items (which she concealed inside the brolly) worth a total of £9. 7s. She asked the magistrates to take into consideration a previous theft of ‘a toilet bag and other goods’ from a shop in Sloane Square. The police estimated her income at a well-to-do £2,000 a year; accordingly she was given a hefty fine of £25, plus 9 guineas costs.13

  The items she stole were intended as gifts for her friends, Moura claimed, and she hadn’t the cash to pay for them. This noble intent was undermined somewhat when on another occasion she said plaintively to Bob Boothby that the umbrella ‘contained only junk’. Boothby asked her why she would choose to steal junk. She wasn’t amused. To Hamish Hamilton she confided that it was all about the challenge – ‘pitting my wits against theirs’.14 Once upon a time there had been the Cheka, then MI5, the KGB and the combined wits of Europe’s intelligence services; now all that was left was the Metropolitan Police and the staff of Knightsbridge’s department stores. Eventually she was threatened with prison, and promised to give up the habit; from then on her friends received fewer gifts.

  It was an addiction. When Hamish’s wife Yvonne noticed that one of her objets d’art had gone missing, she mentioned it to her butler, who said, ‘I should speak to the Baroness Budberg, madam, if I were you.’15

  Moura’s old enemy Rebecca West, who had earlier tried to blacken her with MI5, eccentrically thought her innocent of the shoplifting charge, on the grounds that she didn’t think Moura was really that short of money. ‘I thought she was very tiresome in her perpetual protestations of poverty,’ she wrote, ‘but this is a vice which affects many people who are suffering from other forms of insecurity and cannot face them.’ Rebecca didn’t specify what form of insecurity she thought Moura suffered from.16 Perhaps she was right to think that there was a deeper unrest in Moura’s unconscious mind;
if so, she was more accurate than Moura’s friends, who thought her merely eccentric.

  Everyone who knew Moura liked to think that he or she possessed the key to her mysterious personality, but only a select few – including Lockhart and H. G. – knew her well enough to judge her, and even they struggled to understand. Many seemed to agree with the palmist that her life was more interesting than she was. During the 1950s it had begun to occur to people in Moura’s publishing circles that her life would make an excellent memoir.

  Long ago, during the transitional period between Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, Moura had made a start on a book of her own, which appears to have been a memoir. At the beginning of the 1930s, while Lockhart was working on Memoirs of a British Agent, Moura was writing something she referred to variously as ‘À côté de la mêlée’ and ‘Au milieu de la mêlée’.17 It never came to anything – either due to distractions or the inability to put down on paper any version of her life that she would be able to live comfortably with. There were too many secrets, too many contradictory tales told to different people. The ‘Mêlée’, if it was ever written, never saw the light of day.

  In 1951 Blanche Knopf, wife and business partner of the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf, wrote Moura a flattering letter, asking her to consider writing an autobiography, and offering to raise an advance from European and American publishers and sell serialisation rights to an American magazine.18 Moura agreed, and presumably the advance was paid. She and Blanche met in the Ritz bar in Paris to discuss the book, and at the end of the year Blanche wrote again, asking how the synopsis was progressing. A whole year went by before she received a letter back from Moura. She had had to abandon the project because it interfered with her other work. ‘Never mind,’ she wrote, ‘I’ll do it once upon a time and you will have it!’19 She didn’t. Years went by and there was still no synopsis and no book, and the advance had long ago been burned up in taxi fares and parties. In 1956 Hamish Hamilton told Blanche that Moura was ready to begin her autobiography at last. There was jubilation for a short while, but again not a word was written, and the project came to nothing.

  In the 1960s the idea was floated once more. Moura had been invited by Kenneth Tynan to contribute an interview on Gorky for his ITV arts programme Tempo. She asked the programme’s researcher, Joan Rodker, if she would act as an amanuensis to help her write an autobiography. Joan was in some ways a fellow spirit – a left-wing activist with a penchant for holding court, described as the closest thing London had to a Communist salon. She spent many mornings sitting on Moura’s bed, listening to her talk about her life and about Gorky. But again no book grew out of those sessions.20

  During Moura’s lifetime and afterwards, Hamilton made several attempts to get either a memoir or a biography off the ground, but there was too much resistance from the family and too little information. Robin Bruce Lockhart – the boy whose birth so broke her heart in 1921 – was approached many times by authors wanting his help with their projected biographies of Moura Budberg. He knew about her espionage work from his father, but for most periods of her life there was too little information to work with. Moura had seen to that.21

  Moura liked being mysterious; she liked keeping people guessing. And she must have realised that those things which she most wanted to keep secret were precisely the things that her friends and acquaintances most wanted to read about. She was so interesting because she was such a mystery.

  Although no memoir was ever written, Moura’s other work continued. Her efforts as a translator and writer had expanded from books to the theatre and cinema. In 1962 she created a new translation of Gorky’s seminal play The Lower Depths for a staging by the playwright Derek Marlowe. The production starred Fulton Mackay and featured the young Prunella Scales.22 As well as Gorky she translated Chekhov, and in 1967 she was commissioned by Laurence Olivier to translate Three Sisters for a National Theatre production starring Joan Plowright, Anthony Hopkins and Derek Jacobi; it was well received, and Moura’s translation was compared favourably with other recent versions.23

  That same year Moura wrote the screenplay for Sidney Lumet’s film The Sea Gull, based on her own translation of Chekhov’s play. It starred Vanessa Redgrave, James Mason and Simone Signoret. During the filming, Signoret – another magnetically attractive woman whose appearance had deteriorated with age – developed an intense dislike for Moura: ‘The old hag claims to be a baroness but we all suspect her of being an old Russian phony.’24 It was a comment that perhaps said more about the middle-aged French actress than about the elderly Russian screenwriter.

  In 1972 Moura made her last contribution to film, when she was employed as a ‘Russian adviser’ on the BBC adaptation of War and Peace, starring Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezukhov. Her work had brought her full circle, back to the beginning. Everything connected up, through her bond with Gorky, for whom Leo Tolstoy had been both mentor and admirer; and through the worlds of imperial St Petersburg and rural Russia in the days before the Revolution swept it all away. Moura had been born into that other world, which had changed little between the days of Bonaparte and Alexander I to those of Rasputin and Nicholas II.

  All gone now, beyond reach. Soon it would be time to follow it into the darkness.

  Moura had been back to Russia. It was all different now, but a few of the old people were still there.

  It came about after Stalin had gone to his grave and Nikita Krushchev had begun to relax some of the dictator’s more repressive instruments of power. Moura’s first visit was in 1959 – after a gap of twenty-three years. She was accompanied by George Weidenfeld, who was hoping to make contact with Soviet authors and publishers.25 While he stayed at a hotel in Moscow, Moura was welcomed back into the Gorky household. It was still there, the place she had last visited in 1936, when he lay dying. The house was filled now with his family and presided over by the elderly Yekaterina Peshkova, Gorky’s legal widow. It remained a crowded little commune. Korney Chukovsky was still around; his remaining hair was white, and the bushy moustache had gone, but he still had the same warm smile as on that cold December day when he first took Moura to meet Gorky and watched in amusement as the great man displayed his intellect like a peacock for the spellbinding young woman.

  The house had become the Soviet state’s official Gorky museum, and the downstairs rooms were open to the public at certain times of the day while the family retired to the upper quarters. In the evenings, as in days past, they entertained lavishly. The table was overflowing with food and wine. Guests arrived from eight in the evening until after the theatres closed and they played the piano, danced, sang and discussed world affairs. ‘It was all very Russian and very elitist,’ the bewildered Weidenfeld recalled.

  Yekaterina welcomed Moura, but she was still wary of her, even after all these years. When Moura asked to visit again in 1962, Yekaterina confided to Chukovsky her anxieties about the Gorky papers, which were still in Moura’s possession. She had heard that the papers unaccounted for included many dangerous items, including jottings by Gorky in which he put down his true thoughts about Stalin. Yekaterina had heard also (wrongly, in fact) that Moura had sold some of these writings to the British press. And the business of Gorky’s vanished will still bothered her; she didn’t know that Moura had forged the signature, but she knew that there had been something not right about that episode.26 But the visit went ahead, and Moura, Yekaterina and Timosha went on a Volga river trip together.

  On one occasion Moura was accompanied to Russia by Peter Ustinov, who was on a journey into his parents’ past. In Moscow, he watched in amazement as she gestured to a policeman and demanded that he hail her a taxi. He declined to be treated as a servant: ‘I am a militiaman,’ he said, ‘and I control traffic.’

  ‘Don’t give me that nonsense,’ Moura replied. ‘Find me a taxi. I’m an old comrade, and where are your manners?’

  The policeman ‘was reduced to tears’, Ustinov recalled, ‘and he found her a cab’.27

  Nobody ever kn
ew whether she saw anything of her old friend Guy Burgess in Moscow. But another of her friends, Graham Greene, did meet Burgess there, and recalled their peculiar conversation. ‘I don’t know why he particularly wished to see me,’ Greene wrote, ‘as I didn’t like him . . . However, curiosity won and I asked him for a drink.’ Burgess sent Greene’s government escort away, saying that he wished to talk to him alone, ‘but the only thing that he asked of me was to thank Harold Nicolson for a letter and on my return to give Baroness Budberg a bottle of gin!’28

  Maxim Gorky’s life was history now, his former home a museum, and in 1968 there was a ceremony to celebrate his centenary. Moura was there, his most beloved and only surviving lover and confidante (Yekaterina had died in 1965, while Maria Andreyeva had been in her grave since 1953).

  In England the same strange process had happened to H. G. Wells, but with rather less pomp; in 1966 a blue plaque was put up at 13 Hanover Terrace, and the house opened to the public for the day. A huge crowd turned up. The new owner, slightly alarmed, spotted an elderly lady looking around on her own, and decided to ‘have a courteous word’. The old lady was Moura, revisiting the past. ‘This place I know,’ she said. ‘Mr Wells once pinched my bottom.’29

  He had pinched rather more than that. However unsettled their relationship had seemed, there had been a bond. H. G.’s son Anthony West remembered the impact Moura had on him, and upon his father.

  I . . . cannot forget my first breath-taking sight of her as she sat talking to my father in the garden at Easton Glebe one day in 1931. Her fatalism enabled her to radiate an immensely reassuring serenity, and her good humour made her a comfortable rather than a disturbing presence: I always looked forward eagerly to my next meeting with her, and remember my last with pleasure. I believed unquestioningly in her bona fides, and had never a doubt but that without her warmth, affection, and calm stoicism behind him, my father would have been a gloomier and more pessimistic man in the years that lay between his seventieth birthday and his death. Whenever I saw them together I felt sure that they were truly happy.30