Before Wallis

by Rachel Trethewey

  The Morgans already had a son, Harry, and daughter, Consuelo, but their twin daughters Thelma and Gloria became the focus of Laura’s attention. The two girls were identical; even their parents and later their lovers found it hard to tell them apart. As they grew older, the only difference which distinguished them was that Thelma had a scar from roller-skating.3 The twins were so close that they almost seemed to be telepathic and throughout their turbulent lives they stood together against the world. Due to their father’s career, the family lived a nomadic life moving from Switzerland to Holland then to Barcelona. No single country felt like home, which led to the children lacking a firm sense of identity. They spoke English but with a French/Spanish accent and a slight stammer.4 Their education was haphazard; they had a disconnected knowledge of some things but remained ignorant about many others.5

  It was a rootless upbringing that made the girls insecure. Their mother was the centre of their world, but she was a volatile character who smothered her daughters with love one moment but then flew into terrible tempers the next. Laura instilled into her girls that they should never trust anyone. She advised them never to make intimate friends, as there was no such thing as real friendship because people always wanted something. She also warned them never to give anyone anything without a return.6 She believed that women had to use their feminine wiles to manipulate men to get what they wanted.7 However, it appears that she did not always take her own advice as she was difficult to live with and it seems that her husband had affairs. When Mr Morgan was appointed consul general at Hamburg in 1913, his wife refused to accompany him. Instead, she stayed with the children in Barcelona.8

  At the start of the First World War, the family left Spain. Their mother finally joined their father in Hamburg while Thelma and Gloria were sent to a French boarding school in England. It was the twins’ first experience of being away from their mother and they missed her and were homesick. As they spoke very little English, they felt like ‘misfits’ at the school. They found it hard to make friends and as usual had to rely on each other. They disliked everything about England from the cold weather to the boiled food.9 After the twins had spent their summer holiday in Germany with their parents, Laura decided to move them to a school in Switzerland. However, they had only been there a short time when their parents decided to go to America. Gloria and Thelma had never been to the United States and they were determined to go too. Although at first their parents thought it would be too dangerous to risk taking their daughters across the Atlantic in wartime, the girls outmanoeuvred them. Working as a team, they falsified a telegram, pretending it was from their father, to get accommodation on the ship. Faced with a fait accompli, their parents relented and took them to America.10

  From the moment they arrived in New York, in September 1916, the striking ‘Morgan Twins’ attracted publicity. Both girls were very happy to talk to the press. Newspapers ran the story of how they got themselves to America. While their parents continued to travel due to Mr Morgan’s career, the twins were sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York. Over the next three years they only saw their mother four times as she joined their father in his postings to Cuba and then Brussels. With their real mother absent, they formed a close bond with the head of the convent, Reverend Mother Dammen, who became a trusted confidante. After the girls left school, when they were just 17, they moved into an apartment together in a brownstone house in the centre of New York. Characteristically, Thelma and Gloria’s first action on moving in was to fill the flat with flowers and name it ‘Chez Nous’.11 For two teenage girls to live alone together at such an early age was very unusual. Their parents were living in Brussels, so their landlady agreed to keep a motherly eye on them.12

  It was an exciting time to be in New York and the twins perfectly suited this era. In 1920 prohibition of alcohol had been introduced but within weeks 2,000 speakeasies sprang up in New York, flouting the law. The affluent were able to continue to drink alcohol with no problem because, although it was against the law to manufacture, transport, sell or possess alcohol, it was not illegal to purchase or consume it.13 As well as speakeasies, nightclubs flourished. El Fey, Club Richman, the Embassy and the Regent’s Club were the trendsetters. They were noisy, crowded and glamorous, featuring live entertainment including comedians, dance troupes and jazz bands. Jazz music reflected the atmosphere of rebellion that pervaded the period. The modern Manhattan nightclubs were a product of the new prosperity as well as Prohibition. There was a building boom in the city and the new money of traders and speculators was competing with the traditional wealth of established families like the Vanderbilts, Whitneys and Astors. There was a democratic feeling in the nightclubs where Broadway stars, dukes and society women danced side by side with ex-convicts, film extras and bootleggers. The clubs were cosmopolitan as people from all walks of life were drawn together by the intoxicating beat of the music and the liberating experience of defying the rules.14

  This more egalitarian atmosphere made Gloria and Thelma’s entrée into New York society easy. Although they were on a limited budget, the girls lived a sophisticated life. They were soon seen at nightclubs, debutante parties and tea dances. Cocktails were a novelty for the twins, but cigarettes were not, as they had been smoking since they were 13 years old.15 Cocktails were the height of fashion because it was a way to disguise the unpalatable ingredients in bootleg liquour. F. Scott Fitzgerald popularised Orange Blossoms, a mixture of gin, orange juice and sugar syrup, while another favourite was the Pink Lady, a combination of applejack, grenadine, gin and egg white served in an elegant long-stemmed glass.16 The twins’ penchant for cigarettes was not unusual. Like drinking cocktails, it was a way of showing they were thoroughly modern girls. In the early 1900s women could be arrested for smoking in public. Two decades later promoters of Lucky Strike cigarettes linked smoking with female emancipation, and attractive young women were photographed lighting up what they described as ‘Torches of Liberty’ at New York Suffragist parades. Perhaps more importantly for the twins, smoking was also promoted as a way to keep fashionably svelte.17

  Thelma and Gloria were both skilful needlewomen and as there was little spare money available they made themselves chic clothes. When they were invited to a fancy dress ball they wore identical medieval pageboy costumes they had designed themselves.18 Together Thelma and Gloria made a striking impact. The 1920s was the ‘Age of Personalities’ where the most popular newspapers relied on sex, sensationalism and pictures of pretty New York girls to attract their readers.19 The gossip columnist Maury Paul, who was known as ‘Cholly Knickerbocker’, became a good friend of the twins and he helped to turn them into celebrities, calling them ‘the Magical Morgans’.20 The photographer Cecil Beaton wrote of them in The Book of Beauty:

  The Morgan sisters […] are alike as two magnolias and with their marble complexions, raven tresses and flowing dresses, with their slight lisps and foreign accents, they diffuse […] an Ouida atmosphere of hothouse elegance and lacy femininity. They are of infinite delicacy and refinement, and with slender necks and wrists, and long coiled, silky hair, they are gracefully statuesque. Their noses are like begonias, with full-blown nostrils, their lips richly carved, and they should have been painted by Sargent, with arrogant heads and affected hands, in white satin with a bowl of white peonies near by.21

  With their exotic good looks, the girls received a great deal of male attention. However, Thelma claimed in her memoir that they had ‘a strong sense of propriety’ which made affairs unthinkable. They were naïve and romantic and what they were looking for was romance, love, marriage and children.22 While she was still a teenager, Thelma met James Vail Converse Junior at a dinner party. After falling in love, they eloped to Maryland to get married. James came from a wealthy family but had lost most of his fortune on an oil deal. When Thelma and James moved to Palm Beach the twins were separated for the first time. Away from Gloria, Thelma experienced an overwhelming sense of loneliness.23 Her marriage was short-lived as J
ames was an abusive alcoholic. After a few months Thelma knew she had made a mistake but she only made up her mind to leave him after she suffered a miscarriage following a fall. While she was seriously ill in hospital it was Gloria, not James, who stayed by her bedside.24

  While in California getting a divorce, Thelma decided she would like an acting career. Hollywood was a modern Babylon, where new wealth, luxury and ambition burgeoned.25 Thelma was one among many eager starlets who hoped to find fame on the silver screen. Film was one of the first industries in which women were able to compete on roughly equal terms with men, writing, producing and directing as well as acting.26 However, fame proved elusive for Thelma. While she lived in Hollywood she played small parts in a few movies. In one film, she appeared as a Spanish señorita who just had to wink.27 Although her acting career never really took off, her social life did, and she was soon mixing with ‘Hollywood royalty’. She went swimming at Pickfair, the home of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Through the new medium of film the couple had experienced an unprecedented degree of fame. Mary Pickford was the first great film celebrity. Known as ‘little Mary’ and ‘America’s Sweetheart’, she was the first actress to earn more than a million dollars a year.28 When she married her fellow actor Douglas Fairbanks in 1920, she was probably the best-known woman in the world. The Fairbanks’ Hollywood home was known as ‘the Buckingham Palace’ or ‘the second White House’ of the film world. On their rambling estate in the Los Angeles Hills they gathered together an eclectic range of guests, including Albert Einstein, Lord Louis Mountbatten and the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mary admitted that Douglas was always bringing ‘funny people’ home to dinner and celebrities might find themselves sitting next to a tramp, a wrestler and two homeless cats.29

  At Pickfair Mary created a cultured, civilised atmosphere. There was vintage wine, caviar in iced boats and sumptuous dinners created by French chefs. However, the atmosphere was relatively staid, with very little alcohol on offer.30 On rare occasions dinner was followed by dancing, but only the waltz or two-step were allowed as the hostess did not approve of jazz music. More frequently guests played a round of bridge or they watched the latest film in the Fairbanks’ screening room drinking a cup of Ovaltine. Evenings ended early as Mary and Douglas liked to be in bed by 10.30 p.m.31

  The Fairbanks were great friends with the British-born actor Charlie Chaplin. The trio had set up United Artists together in 1919, which allowed artists for the first time to produce and distribute their own work and to be properly credited for their role in creating it.32 Chaplin and the Fairbanks lived close to each other in Beverly Hills. Thelma went out with Chaplin; they saw a great deal of each other and there were even rumours in the newspapers that they were to be married, but in fact they were just good friends.33 Chaplin was known to be a womaniser; he had countless flings with women who were keen to be seduced by one of the most famous men in the world.34 To avoid more gossip, Thelma stopped seeing Chaplin so often and within months he was married to Lita Grey.35 Attracted to older men, Thelma began a relationship with the actor Richard Bennett, who was in his 50s. However, she soon discovered that acting was not her gift and that she did not want to marry Bennett. Looking for fresh adventures, she left the movie world to travel to Europe to see her parents and sister Consuelo.

  Unlike Rosemary and Freda, Thelma lacked a strong sense of identity. She was a social chameleon who adapted to suit her surroundings. Once she was in Europe, it did not take her long to reinvent herself again. At a dinner in Paris she met Marmaduke Furness, the owner of Furness and Withy shipbuilders. Viscount Furness was one of Britain’s wealthiest men. His father Christopher was a self-made man who had started life as a docker in Hartlepool but became a multimillionaire, member of parliament and the first Baron Furness of Grantley.36 His son Marmaduke was considered one of the most brilliant businessmen in the City. Rumour had it that the sale of the Furness–Withy line for £9 million was concluded by him on the back of a menu.37 However, he was far from urbane speaking, with a slight Yorkshire accent, and he swore frequently.

  Dapper, with sandy, brilliantined hair, ‘Duke’, as he was known to his friends, was more than twenty years older than Thelma. He had been married before and gossip surrounded the death of his first wife, Daisy Hogg. In December 1920 she had a serious operation. After making a good recovery, she travelled with her husband on board his yacht the Sapphire to visit his mother in Cannes, but during the voyage she had ‘a sudden relapse and passed away peacefully’.38 Her death was never fully explained. Although there was a fully equipped hospital and a doctor on board she could not be saved. Despite the availability of refrigeration on the ship, she was hastily buried at sea.39 From his first marriage, Lord Furness had two grown-up children, Averill and Christopher (known as Dick), who were only a few years younger than Thelma.

  In her memoir, Thelma described the first evening she met Lord Furness. After dinner Duke took her dancing in the Paris nightclubs. They ended the evening at Casanova, a fashionable Russian club where champagne and caviar were served while violins and balalaikas played and a Cossack choir sang. As dawn broke over Montmatre, they bought flowers in the flower market near the Madeleine. Duke was returning to London the next morning but after breakfast a huge box of roses arrived at the Ritz for Thelma from him. He sent a card that said he hoped the flowers would keep fresh until they met again. True to his word, he was back to see his new girlfriend two days later.40

  During their courtship, Duke came to Paris most weekends. As Lord Furness was a racehorse owner, the couple often went racing at Longchamp in the afternoon and then spent the evening at nightclubs. Thelma was attracted by Duke’s power; she felt that there was ‘nothing he could not do’. When they went to restaurants they were always given the best tables. His vast fortune meant he could indulge her every whim. Thelma could not recall when he proposed; instead she explained that they both just took it for granted that they would marry.41 However, one night at the Embassy Club in London, Duke asked her when her ‘bloody divorce’ would be finalised. Thelma explained that her first husband still hoped for a reconciliation, but this did not stand in Lord Furness’s way as he had made up his mind to marry her. He arranged for detectives to follow James Converse Junior and within the month Converse had agreed to a divorce.42 When Thelma’s old lover, Richard Bennett, heard she had divorced he announced that when she returned to America he intended to marry her. Thelma denied the report and her mother went a step further by holding a press conference to announce her daughter’s engagement to Lord Furness.43

  Thelma married Duke in June 1926 at St George’s Register Office, Hanover Square, London. She wore a Patou wedding dress, in bois-de-rose crepe de Chine with a matching long coat trimmed with lynx and a matching turban.44 After the ceremony a reception was held for a few close friends at Duke’s Arlington Street house. It was an austere setting for a celebration; the house was more like a museum than a home with statues lining the hallway and glass cases filled with Lord Furness’s collection of rare glass and silver placed around the reception rooms.45 Full of memories of Duke’s life with his first wife, Daisy, the house never felt like home to Thelma.

  Before she married him, Thelma knew that Duke was a difficult man. When he was in a bad temper he would shout and swear at anyone who got in his way. However, in the first months of their marriage she saw little of this side of her new husband’s personality. She later wrote that she had never been happier in her life. She believed that Duke was a perfect husband; he was clever, worldly-wise and amusing company.46 As one of the richest men in the country, Lord Furness provided Thelma with the lifestyle she craved. They travelled in his yacht, plane or private train carriages. His customised Rolls-Royce had solid silver handles, the Furness crest on the door and room for two chauffeurs.47 In August, the Furnesses went to stay at Duke’s Scottish estate, Glen Affric, near Inverness, for stalking and fishing. There were also visits to Ireland to see Lord Furness’s stud in Gilltown, where he bred raceho
rses. Thelma found herself thrown into a world of endless parties, sociable weekends and days at the races. For most of the year, the newly married couple divided their time between Duke’s London house and Burrough Court, near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.

  At Burrough Court the Furnesses entertained in style. It was a large hunting lodge that could sleep up to thirty guests. The house was built around two courtyards, and its exterior was covered in ivy creeper. On Friday nights, when friends arrived for the weekend, cars would fill the courtyard. Once guests had driven down the mile-long avenue leading up to the house they would be greeted at the front door to the house by a butler and two footmen, who had been notified of their arrival by staff in the gatehouse. Their hosts would meet them inside before they were ushered up to their bedrooms to change. It was a comfortable place to stay; each bedroom had its own bath and central heating. At Burrough Court guests always dressed for dinner and the women would waft down the stairs in their long evening dresses to meet the gentlemen gathered in the great hall for cocktails. After drinks they would have dinner in the dining room. Reflecting Duke’s passion for horses, the room was lined with paintings by George Stubbs. It looked out over a formal garden with box hedges cut into the shape of peacocks and pyramids. At dinner, footmen in the Furness livery of plum knee breeches with yellow stockings would stand behind each chair, before a butler and two footmen would bring in each course.48