The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  She wanted to alleviate the terrible suffering, but soon met her first obstacle. Maxine realised that she would not be allowed to drive around a war zone in a vehicle dispensing aid, but then the extensive canal network linked to the Yser River came to her notice – almost certainly pointed out by Tony – and she worked out that with the necessary permissions she could use these canals to reach distressed communities over a wide area and bring aid to people who had no one else to help them.

  After some further research she instructed her stockbroker to sell stock to enable her to purchase the 150ft, three-hundred-ton barge Julia, which was lying more or less abandoned at Calais. She arranged for the barge to be gutted and fitted out to her own specification with utmost speed. She redesigned the vessel to have three sections; aft was a basic first-aid clinic as well as comfortable, heated accommodation for herself and a small team. The team would assist her in distributing supplies of food, clothing, blankets and medicines that were to be stored forward, in the largest section of the barge, which was a vast ship’s hold. Amidships was a soup kitchen capable of feeding hundreds of people a day. This work was speeded along with the help of a team of soldiers that she had somehow managed to ‘borrow’ with Tony’s help, for they were able to see each other every week. In mid-December Maxine went back to London to harry her Hartsbourne friends for financial support.

  Lord Northcliffe placed an appeal in his newspapers for funds to enable Maxine to buy supplies for the barge and the appeal was answered generously by the British public, who were horrified at the stories coming out of Belgium. To Maxine’s chagrin a similar appeal in the American newspapers brought almost no reaction, although later on she was given a big consignment of American grain. Winston guaranteed space for her stores and supplies in the navy freighters plying between Dover and Calais; Kathleen Drogheda agreed to work on the barge alongside Maxine whenever she could get away. It was not a large crew – a Belgian skipper who knew the waterways, along with Maxine’s old butler and her maid, who was half-Belgian (both of these members of staff were longing to serve in some capacity and needed no urging). While spending Christmas with her sister Gertrude† in London, Maxine also recruited Gertrude’s elderly chauffeur, and an experienced nurse, a Miss Close, to run the clinic. She hoped to round up a few civilian volunteers to help with the heavy work of distributing aid while she ran around London obtaining passes, carnets, permits and letters of reference from important men, so that she would not be hindered in her work by unnecessary officialdom.

  Duly equipped, Maxine returned to Calais in early January and set up her headquarters at the Grand Hotel there. She gained a letter of approval from the King of Belgium, and with Tony’s help she was given a car and driver by his CO, which helped her to get everything in place. Not everyone was in favour of her scheme: Lord Kitchener and Sir John French were deeply opposed, and were choleric when, on 7 February, she set off, boldly flying an American ensign from the stern. Tony had wangled some leave and travelled with her for the first part of her mission along with a junior officer and three Belgian soldiers who slept in the blanket store.

  When they reached an area which was requesting aid either Maxine or Kathleen would scrounge a wagon if necessary to transport provisions from the barge to starving villagers. They supplied grain and paid local bakers to provide hundreds of loaves a day for free distribution. Maxine somehow obtained a large army truck to run back and forth to Calais in order to keep the Julia stocked. She found an abandoned school and commandeered it for the storage of supplies, paying a local man to act as a caretaker. On one occasion her team relieved a typhoid hospital staffed by nuns that had completely run out of food. The nuns were on their knees praying for divine intervention at the exact moment that Maxine arrived at the convent. Within six weeks the towns of Ypres, Furnes and Poperinge, and some sixty villages in West Flanders, were all aware of Maxine’s barge and army truck full of supplies, and relied on her to keep them alive that bitter winter of 1914-15. No one who sought assistance was ever turned away. When they came across serious injury the Julia's crew used the truck, or any transport they could find and commandeer, to get the victim to the nearest field hospital. Maxine brooked no hindrance: these people were too needy for officialdom.

  Meanwhile, the Julia had become a floating mini-Hartsbourne. Many former friends or their sons were by now serving on the Western Front; the Dukes of Sutherland and Westminster popped aboard for tea, while Lady Sarah Wilson, who couldn’t miss reporting on a war, was glad to rest in fairly civilised surroundings. Archibald Sinclair, Lord Wodehouse, Lord De La Warr, Lady Dorothie Feilding – all came calling and were sure of a welcome and decent food. Maxine felt that the serious aspect of the Julias work did not mean there could not be plenty of laughter in off-duty times, with games of bridge and other card games to pass the time and relax, drinks and gossip about people they knew.

  Tony reported back to his unit on 15 March and Maxine went on with her work. She was thrilled when he received his promotion to captain in early May, and on 8 May he managed to get to the Julia for the day. Kathleen had returned to England for a spell, so they were able to spend the time alone. In the afternoon they argued about something – Maxine never said what it was and probably it was nothing very serious, but they disagreed – and parted in annoyance with each other some hours earlier than he had planned to leave.

  Two days later she was given the news of Tony’s death. That disagreement would haunt her until her own death twenty-five years later.

  Maxine was never the same again after May 1915. Photographs show that she aged noticeably. Of course, women all over Europe who lost their loved ones suffered the same anguish, and it would be simplistic to write that she was heartbroken; that goes without saying, but she was careful to erase all trace of her bereavement, so there is no surviving evidence of what she felt. Following her own death all of Tony’s letters were burned without being read, on her specific instruction. She never spoke of her feelings for Tony afterwards but she was so withdrawn and silent from that date onwards that her nieces would recall how they hated being taken to Hartsbourne, which never regained the sparkle of the pre-war years.

  Initially Maxine transmuted her grief into an Amazonian determination to avenge the death of the only man she had ever wholly loved. She carried on, silent and grim-faced, running the Julia, feeding the multitudes, until a year later her mission was finally recognised as essential war relief and an official aid agency was created to take over the work. She wrote regular dispatches and letters to American newspapers describing the horrors she saw on a daily basis, and how the Julia was literally keeping thousands of people alive. She hoped for more funding but America was still isolationist, and contributions slow to trickle in.

  During the winter of 1915-16 an old friend called at the Julia several times. It was Winston, accompanied by Archibald Sinclair‡ on one occasion, and on another by Edward Louis Spears.§ All three were serving on the front, and Winston, still psychologically affected by the effects of the disastrous Dardanelles campaign, welcomed the physical occupation of the trenches rather than an HQ post.¶ He was in good spirits when, on a teeming wet day, Maxine took two photographs of Winston and Sinclair in their trench outfits when they visited her: one of only two known photographic images of Winston’s period of service on the Western Front. Winston – who served as a colonel – had supplemented his own uniform to deal with weather contingencies: an extralong trench coat, a riding stock and a blue French helmet instead of his regimental bonnet. Spears wrote of his visit with Winston in his diary in December 1915: ‘tea with Maxine Elliott on her barge. Nice, clever woman. Must have been v. beautiful’.1 Winston and Maxine both returned to London in May 1916, in Winston’s case to report first-hand on trench warfare to Parliament. With the help of Lloyd George, who on becoming Prime Minister in December that year insisted on having Winston in the Cabinet, he began a two-decade climb back to the political heights he had lost. Maxine returned to the theatre to recoup h
er financial position.

  During the time the Julia was operational Maxine effectively fed, clothed and treated an estimated three hundred and fifty thousand people who had no other place to turn for sustenance and medical aid. It is impossible to estimate how many lives Maxine helped to save.# Although she had received many welcome donations in supplies and money, mostly from Britain, by the time she was relieved of this vital aid work in 1916 she had used up a good part of her personal fortune. She had funded the Julia mission by steadily selling shares in a dismal market; at the time, in her desperation to do something for the thousands of unfortunate displaced people, expediency was everything and she had not worried about the cost. But after it was over, when she examined her financial circumstances and discovered how far short she was of her minimum objective of a million dollars in capital, she knew that however much she disliked the idea she had to return to the stage to refill her depleted coffers.

  Curiously, because it seems out of character, almost the first thing Maxine did on reaching London was to ask Constance Collier to arrange for her to see a psychic to try to get in touch with Tony.2 Their quarrel had been playing on her mind. Although she had a number of sessions, there is no knowing whether she believed she had any success, for she never spoke of it afterwards.

  As part of an incisive self-assessment, she accepted that at forty-eight her looks were fading and that she must trade on past successes. Overweight from her time on the barge eating the wrong foods, she dieted and lost thirty pounds, had a small facelift and dyed her hair, but despite her need for maximum publicity she resolutely refused to allow any mileage to be made of her war work, saying that it was ‘the most sacred thing’ in her life and was not to be capitalised upon. In the event, she had no trouble restarting her career and between 1917 and 1920 appeared in two profitable Broadway shows and made a lengthy tour of the USA. As she no longer had the luxury of her own railcar she was often to be found snoozing in the sleeper car on a mound of mink coats.

  In California she made two silent films for Sam Goldwyn (Fighting Odds and The Eternal Magdalene), during the course of which she met and became friends with Charlie Chaplin. As with most things that Maxine tackled head on, her film career was a success, and by February 1920 she had reached her goal of a million dollars in stocks. She made her last appearance at her own theatre, in a play called Trimmed in Scarlet. It only ran for two weeks and when the final curtain came down Maxine ended her stage career.

  Following the Armistice she had re-opened Hartsbourne between engagements, but she was a different Maxine and Hartsbourne was different, too. So many faces were missing that gatherings were sometimes painful. When there were guests Hartsbourne was still run on lavish lines but the hostess was quieter and often withdrawn.

  There is a story that Maxine had a brief affair with Oswald Mosley at this time. Universally known as Tom, he had served as an eighteen-year-old on the Western Front as an observer in the Flying Corps, and it is likely that he met Tony Wilding there in 1915. An air crash, sustained while he was showing off to his family, left Mosley badly injured and caused what was to become a permanent limp; although he returned to fight in the trenches and fought bravely, he ended the war behind a desk in the Foreign Office, which possibly saved his life since the casualty rate of young pilots was very high. In 1918 he decided to go into politics and his self-confident manner made him an attractive prospect (he had not, at that time, developed the extreme convictions for which he is now known). His motivation was a determination to prevent any further European wars and he was unexpectedly returned as Conservative MP for Harrow, at twenty-two the youngest member to take a seat. He was soon known for his articulate speeches in the House, delivered without the need to refer to notes.

  Maxine was always looking for interesting new talent to introduce into her house parties, and Tom Mosley came with a personal introduction from Elsie de Wolfe, with whom he had stayed in Paris when he attended the Versailles Peace Treaty meetings.

  At the time Mosley was courting Lord Curzon’s daughter Cynthia (‘Cimmie’), and Curzon was still a devoted friend of Maxine’s. It was certainly at Hartsbourne that Mosley met some of the giants on the political scene such as Winston Churchill, F.E. Smith and Lloyd George. It seems somehow unlikely that Maxine indulged in an affair with Mosley, a man almost thirty years her junior, at a time when her family and friends reported her general depression. She had never recovered from Tony’s death, and as she was working in the USA for a great deal of the time prior to Mosley’s marriage to Cimmie Curzon in May 1920 there hardly seems sufficient time for them to have come together. One of Mosley’s sons and several biographers assert (offering no evidence) that there was a brief affair, and although it is a fact that Mosley was known for his womanising before, during and after his marriage, it feels hard to reconcile this gossip with Maxine’s theatrical commitments and her demeanour.

  Despite her unhappiness Maxine still entertained occasionally, and when pressed. For instance, she threw a glittering ball for the two young princes, Edward, Prince of Wales, and Henry, inviting at the request of the Prince of Wales his mistress Freda Dudley Ward.

  In the summer of 1921 there was a new tragedy. While staying with friends, wearing brand new very high-heel shoes bought on a recent trip to Italy, Winston’s mother Jennie** tripped on a wooden staircase and broke her ankle as she fell. Gangrene set in, and she died of a haemorrhage following amputation surgery. Maxine was deeply upset by this, and six weeks later, when Winston and Clementine’s three-year-old daughter Marigold also died suddenly from complications following a childhood infection, she found it difficult to know what to say to offer him comfort when they met at a mutual friend’s house party in the north, where Winston was staying in order to give an important speech.

  Gradually, it was borne in on Maxine that she had lost interest in Hartsbourne. Despite the somewhat frenetic gaiety of post-war society, without Tony nothing was the same and she recognised that those golden pre-war years could never be regained: there were too many absent friends. Her eldest niece, Blossom, visited Maxine regularly at Hartsbourne in the early Twenties and testified that her formerly vivacious aunt seemed to have tired of organising her famous Saturday-to-Monday parties. Mostly, when Blossom stayed there she found Maxine with only her closest female friends as guests: Lady Portarlington, Kathleen Drogheda (who was in the throes of a bitter divorce), Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland,†† Muriel Wilson (who had once refused Winston’s proposal of marriage), Olive Winn‡‡ and Elsie de Wolfe. If any of them suggested driving into London for the evening Maxine would invariably look up from a card game and say disparagingly, ‘Oh we don’t want to go to the theatre tonight, do we?’ Blossom recalled only one incident when a glimpse of the old Maxine appeared. By request she threw a party for ‘the young’, including Lady Diana Cooper, and Lord Rosebery’s son; musicians were hired and the carpets were taken up for some modern, energetic dancing of the new flapper dances such as the Black Bottom. Maxine appeared to take part in everything with tremendous enthusiasm, but when it was all over, and the guests had departed, she sighed deeply and remarked to her breathless young niece that it had all been ‘such a bore’.

  In 1922 Maxine bought a substantial mansion in Abbey Road, Maida Vale, which had some tennis courts behind it, and the following year she sold Hartsbourne. For some time, with the advice of Elsie de Wolfe, she threw herself into renovating the new London property, convinced that she could persuade Forbie and Gertrude, with their daughters, to come and live with her. But Forbie wasn’t having it, and Maxine was hurt by what she saw as a rejection of her affections by her only family. Increasingly lonely in what was a very large house, she joined a bridge club where she played against experts and became so obsessed that she would play until 5 a.m. and refused invitations to other entertainments. On the few occasions she accepted and joined a house party she was always to be found in a foursome playing bridge. ‘Heaviness’ was what her nieces recall of those years. ‘Heaviness
of body, movement and spirit,’ wrote one. ‘I remember sighs of Aunt Dettie’s, deeper and heavier than any have ever heard.’3 Maxine had always been inclined to depression, and her bereavement and lifestyle led her into a cycle of misery in which she gained weight again and aged considerably. It took her two years to work through this episode, and when it was over she realised that she had lost touch with her old Hartsbourne friends and was missing good conversation.

  It was at this point that the irrepressible Elsa Maxwell, whom Maxine had known since before the war, came back into her life. Elsa had been a guest at a number of Maxine’s soirees and was always happy to entertain her fellow guests with her own brand of piano music and singing. Not only did she compose songs which were taken up and used by Cole Porter and other famous names, but she could play any type of music – classical, jazz, popular ballads – with great confidence and élan – and accompanied singers, who included Noël Coward, Cole Porter and – later on – Maria Callas. She was an asset as a guest and no one ever had anything but praise as Elsa’s pudgy fingers galloped over the keyboard, yet she had never received any formal teaching (which caused her to harbour a deep resentment against her mother, who had refused her request for piano lessons). Elsa wrote in her memoir of staying at Hartsbourne where it seemed to her that there was ‘a Princess or an Earl on every landing’.4 Untidy in her appearance and overweight though Elsa was, she hardly sat still and was filled with an exuberance which seemed not to irritate but spread joy. She wrote that she quickly realised the futility of attempting to compete on equal terms with the hordes of naturally slim ‘stick insects’ in society, so she decided in her twenties not to let it worry her. People accepted her for what she was, or not. And if they didn’t the loss was theirs.