The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  Breakfast was served to guests in their rooms, invariably eaten on the balconies in privacy, at whatever time they wished. Afterwards they would drift downstairs, often wearing pyjamas and dressing gowns, but usually dressed in swimsuits – ‘The scantier the better,’ observed one guest as a fellow visitor paraded her beautiful legs about while wearing a few small patches of yellow material many years before bikinis hit the fashion scene.2 Older women wore more decorous costumes and loose silken cover-ups, while Maxine employed an arrangement where with the addition of a matching skirt her swimsuits were turned into sundresses for coffee or drinks by the pool, or for games of backgammon that lasted most of the day.

  By I p.m. non-resident guests began arriving for lunch, and five days out of seven were likely to number up to thirty or forty. One visitor recalled that ‘the whole of the Riviera wandered onto that terrace at some time or other during the season. Often Maxine had rather dim ideas of who these people were, but at least she always knew who brought them.’3 She always knew a good deal about those she invited to stay at the Château de l’Horizon and could reel off their antecedents for a generation or two, but it was not unusual for luncheon visitors to be completely unknown to her. Sometimes they would be ferried in off a yacht; on one occasion the entire ward room of the Training Ship Arethusa came ashore. Sometimes friends with villas further along the coast or up in the hills of Provence would call, bringing their entire house party along. Old friends such as Elsa Maxwell and Elsie de Wolfe were always personae gratae, and could arrive almost without invitation, trailing friends. Most guests, having partaken of Maxine’s lavish hospitality, would have been surprised to know that after a very full luncheon, while they were taking a siesta or maybe out touring the area, at 5 p.m. each day their hostess sat down to an English tea with cucumber sandwiches and little fancy cakes in the library. Maxine’s nieces blamed her weight problem on this secret tradition.

  With a very few exceptions, such as an occasional evening party, dinner was at 9 p.m., for house-guests only, always in evening dress, and always taken beneath the great umbrella pines which Barry Dierks had carefully preserved on the terrace. Citrus plants in pots provided a piquant top-note to the fragrance of the pines. The dark hump of Cap d’Antibes lay silhouetted against the sky at the eastern end of the huge bay delineated by a curve of twinkling lights that eventually blended into the illuminations of the resort of Juan-les-Pins some three miles away. On nights when the moon was full and the tranquil dark sea was bathed in silver light, with only the rhythmic rasp of cicadas and the odd wave slapping onto the rocks as a background, a soft breeze off the sea to stir the balmy air, rustle the pines and caress bare shoulders, diners were often struck dumb by the sheer beauty of it. Having witnessed the effect on her guests of dining by moonlight, Maxine conceived a solution for those evenings when the real moon refused to oblige for her: she designed and installed a large electric ‘false moon’, set in the top of the highest tree, which could be switched on whenever she wished, to provide the full romance of a thyme-scented Mediterranean night.

  *

  Just as at Hartsbourne, Winston and Clementine Churchill were among the earliest visitors to the Château de l’Horizon, first appearing in mid-August 1933, accompanied by their teenage daughter Sarah, for a two-week visit. Winston was much in need of a holiday.

  Maxine was well aware through gossip and the newspapers that he was now regarded as a spent force. Although re-elected to Parliament as MP for Epping in 1924, he had served a surprisingly lacklustre term as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Baldwin administration until the collapse of the Conservative Government in 1929. In the elections the Conservatives were trounced, but though Winston managed to hold on to his own Parliamentary seat, he was already past his middle fifties and by the time of the next election in five years’ time (even assuming his party won it) he would be over sixty – retirement age.

  Winston might sometimes console himself with the fact that his ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, was fifty-two before he began his successful campaigns against French ambition to dominate Europe and thus became a national hero, but not surprisingly, like most other political observers even Winston now suspected that he was facing the end of his career. His own party leaders did not entirely trust him, having never forgotten nor forgiven him for deserting the Tory party in 1904 to join the Liberals and bait them mercilessly on the subjects of Irish Home Rule, Free Trade and India Reform. But most of his enemies looked no further than the Dardanelles fiasco, for which – as most historians now accept – he was unfairly made to shoulder the blame. In the main, though, he was simply too clever for most of them; a troublemaker whether he was on the front or back benches, who was too famous, too eccentric, too attention-seeking. His supreme self-confidence in his own abilities was often a further irritant, and yet he knew only too well that Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were unlikely to select him for further high office if and when they were returned to power.

  Relegated to the periphery of politics, and faced with the urgent necessity to earn enough to support his family, Winston had turned his attention to writing; his major relaxation was painting. Being out of administrative power did not, however, mean he ceased to think and function as an MP; that was his raison d’être. Unlike most of his colleagues in Parliament he had front-line battle experience in three wars, and he now found he was a party of one, observing what was happening in Italy and Germany – especially Germany – and applying his substantial grasp of world history to assess and predict a likely outcome. During his first visit to the Château de l’Horizon in August 1933 Winston wrote a long article for the Daily Mail in which he wondered how it was possible to watch the events unfolding in Germany without feeling increasing anxiety over what the result might be. He had received credible information that Germany was quietly rearming in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles, and he warned that Germany’s neighbours in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Denmark were seriously alarmed about this.

  The early Thirties were a dark period for Winston in almost all areas of his life, not only his career. Unlike Maxine, he had lost a good deal of his wealth in the financial crash of 1929. The money had not been inherited but earned by him as a young man and invested after taking advice from well-placed friends. It could not be replaced easily or quickly. Furthermore, he had ‘plunged’ in the Twenties, purchasing a virtually ruined country house, which now he could really not afford. He was constantly in danger of losing his beloved Chartwell, and as a result Clementine tolerated rather than enjoyed the house. Less than a year after the crash, his best friend, the brilliant F.E. Smith,¶ died suddenly, at the age of fifty-eight. Winston had wept openly and told Clementine that F.E.’s death had left him feeling ‘so lonely’. And then, some months later, while in New York trying to earn money on a speaking tour he was hit by an automobile while crossing Fifth Avenue, which left him badly injured. The accident, and his recovery from it, was followed by a serious illness – paratyphoid – and subsequently a paratyphoid ulcer which haemorrhaged and nearly killed him.

  Winston’s children were much loved by him but were also a frequent source of worry. Randolph, twenty-one, tanned, fair, and as handsome as a matinee idol, looked as though any parent would be proud of him. But he had grown into an arrogant young man who, having discovered that he shared a birthday with Pitt the Younger, was convinced that he would emulate Pitt and be Prime Minister by the time he was twenty-five. He certainly had the pedigree, and everyone of importance in Great Britain in the first half of the twentieth century had probably at one time or another sat at the dining table at Chartwell while Randolph was growing up. To him, his future was a matter of predestination and he merely had to step into the role assigned for him, but he failed to take into account an Englishman’s natural distaste of bumptiousness. He was heartily disliked, and although it is fair to say that Randolph inherited some of his father’s ability (he thought he had it all, and more), he lacked his father’s humanity
and, even more damaging, he lacked common sense. He alienated the very people from whom he needed support to begin his career in politics. When he was turned down as a candidate by the Tories he was so determined to get into Parliament, which he regarded as his birthright, that – against his father’s wishes and advice – he stood as an independent candidate and on three occasions split the Conservative vote, which enabled Labour to reap the benefit in two constituencies which should have been easily won by the Conservatives.

  Some of the resulting odium felt for his son was transferred to Winston, and for a while each time he rose to his feet in Parliament he was shouted down by men who might otherwise have been his backers. Winston did not support Randolph’s ambition to enter politics – at least not then – and he actually made a public statement to that effect. In those years, whenever Randolph visited his parents Chartwell rang with loud argument until eventually he was banned. The estrangement from Randolph went on for several years and besides harming him politically it hurt Churchill emotionally.

  Diana, the eldest of the Churchill daughters, had married the son of Winston’s old South African friend Abe Bailey, but the marriage failed after eighteen months, and she had since suffered from depression. Sarah, meanwhile, had decided she wanted to go on the stage as a dancer. Esmond Romilly was another source of concern. The rebellious son of Clementine’s beloved sister, Nellie, who lived with them a good deal of the time, had run away from his boarding school after espousing communism, a doctrine loathed by Churchill and much feared by the upper classes.

  Beset by problems in both his professional and personal life, powerless and unable to make any headway politically, Maxine’s generous invitations to Winston to come and stay for as long as he wished at the Château de l’Horizon were welcome in what were grim times. He knew he would be in the lap of luxury there, spoilt by her, and that he would be surrounded by agreeable company because Maxine would make certain of it.

  Winston was described by his secretary at the time as a dynamo, but Maxine found that the middle-aged Winston who visited the Château de l’Horizon in 1933 was more subdued and softer than the self-confident and successful young man she had first known when he was First Lord of the Admiralty, before the war. As a consequence she was very protective of him, behaving like a fond aunt, and without overt fussing ensured that everything at the villa revolved around him. Although he was going through a bad time, she still considered him superior to everyone else who visited the villa and she happily changed the timetable (normally absolutely fixed for Maxine’s convenience) to suit Winston’s peculiar hours. This set the pattern for all of Winston’s future visits. Other guests, both house-guests and those invited for meals or card parties, were limited to those she knew would entertain and amuse him. He must be given everything of the very best. He must never be bored. Only rarely did Maxine invite the Antibes crowd when Winston stayed, but among the few who bridged the gap were Elsa Maxwell, who could be relied upon to enliven any party, and the ageing Aga Khan with his old-world courtesy bringing a waft of foreign royalty. Winston loved to hear a piano played well after dinner for it reminded him of his mother’s playing, and though it is not what she was known for, Elsa Maxwell could play classical music.

  Winston enjoyed serious conversation with those who were politically informed, but he also enjoyed the company of pretty women who knew how to enliven a dinner party with clever repartee. When he saw a beautiful woman, his face lit up with pleasure and admiration.4 Maxine evidently noticed this, and among the most frequent guests when Winston was visiting were the ‘Three Ds’: Daisy Fellowes, Doris Castlerosse and Diana Cooper – the first two of whom might best be described as courtesans. They were old acquaintances (friends would be too strong a word); both were titled, and despite scandalous histories they managed to remain socially acceptable, although not to Clementine Churchill.

  Of the two, Clementine most disliked Doris (Lady Castlerosse, née Doris Delevingne), and perhaps not without justification, for some years later a persistent rumour about Winston and Doris circulated in society. This is running ahead of the story, but in 1933 they clearly spent a fair amount of time together for although Winston worked each morning on the three-volume book he was writing about his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, a telegram he sent to Lloyd George records that he had also spent a good deal of his time painting. He specifically mentions several landscapes: ‘Yachts in Cannes Harbour’, and one of the church of Notre Dame de la Vie. But he also produced – unusually for Winston – a portrait. It was of Doris Castlerosse and painted in the style of Lavery’s portrait of Doris that had been exhibited in the Summer Exhibition, which had startled her husband Valentine into the comment ‘It may be art, but it’s not Doris.’ Randolph had also pronounced that it was ‘not at all like her’. Word of this portrait leaked out and it was reported in the Daily Express that ‘Mr Winston Churchill is challenging the achievement of Sir John Lavery ... one of the few noteworthy features of this year’s Academy.’5

  Doris had grown up in Beckenham, a typical respectable middle-class suburb. She was the daughter of a tradesman but had the good fortune to look as though she must have ‘good breeding’. There was only one way in which she could enjoy the things she wanted from life, which went well beyond the middle-class aspirations of her parents, and that was to marry well. Her looks were her passport. Along with thoroughbred streamlining she possessed what were often described as the best legs in the world; as famous as, but arguably even shapelier than, those of Marlene Dietrich or Betty Grable. Doris was fortunate that post-war styles meant she was able to make the most of these first-class assets. Had she been obliged to hide her legs beneath the ankle-length fashions of previous decades, history might have been different. With her fair looks, a little pointed face, cool, appraising blue eyes and porcelain skin, her small hands tipped with shiny red-lacquered nails, she was, as her favourite couturier of the time, Victor Steibel, called her, ‘an enchantress with a jester’s cap of pure gold hair’.6

  Aged nineteen, having obtained a job modelling for a London fashion house, Doris went to London to seek her fortune and was introduced to the twenty-one-year-old up-and-coming actress Gertrude Lawrence, whose background, ambitions and flexible morals were not too dissimilar from those of Doris. The two women got on well, and when Gertrude announced that she intended to become the most famous actress in London Doris responded, ‘And I am going to marry a lord.’ Both achieved their goals. Doris’s personal axiom undoubtedly helped her: ‘There is no such thing as an impotent man,’ she opined, ‘only an incompetent woman.’

  Following a failed early marriage, Gertrude was in a relationship with a cavalry officer, Captain Philip Astley. Part of their arrangement was a Mayfair flat to which he contributed most of the upkeep, and it was a long-running affair, though both had other lovers at the same time. Gertrude was hopelessly extravagant despite Astley’s generous allowance and when she met Doris she was looking for someone to share some of the additional costs of her flat. Doris moved in and for a short time the two women shared one evening gown – the only one they had between them until Doris discovered that one of the perks of her job was the discreet acquisition at bargain prices of garments that she had modelled for potential clients and were consequently regarded as secondhand. Not only were she and Gertrude happy beneficiaries of this policy, but Doris also found an eager clientele, initially among Gertrude’s actress friends and soon thereafter from society women on a budget.

  By today’s ideal, neither Gertrude nor Doris were conventionally beautiful, but they had perfect figures, were good-looking in an unusual and arresting way, and each had an ability to make men believe they were beautiful. Nod Coward first met Gertrude when they were both about fourteen and knew her all her professional life. He described her as ‘not pretty but striking’, but he also said that when she was about to go on stage in Private Lives she somehow lit up from within and in those moments, when he looked at her she took his breath away. Astley bought h
er the right clothes, taught her how to behave, took her to the right places and introduced her to the right people; the consummate actress absorbed all the tips her handsome escort offered.# Doris presumably benefited from this educational process too, and she evidently learned quickly for no matter where she moved in society she seemed to slot in seamlessly. There was another characteristic the two women shared: both were sexual foragers and sleeping with men who could further their ambitions was an accepted element of their strategy.** An Englishwoman’s castle is her bed,’ Doris declared. One friend wrote that she ‘delicately exploited ... sex’ and never hesitated to attack the standards of the age ‘which forced women to accept the social, sexual and economic dominance of men’. She felt that the male should pay some tribute for being allowed to maintain the fiction of his superiority.’7

  By 1923 Gertrude was already beginning to stretch towards her goal of stardom, playing the lead in a musical revue written for her by Noël Coward. As for Doris, in line with her ambition to marry a lord one of her first lovers was Tom Mitford, brother to the famous Mitford sisters and heir to Lord Redesdale. This was moving in the right direction, but it was soon clear that although there was a title, young Mitford had no money. The next important man in her life was Stephen ‘Laddie’ Sanford, an American professional polo player who had no title but was rich. So Doris fell madly in love with him.

  Laddie set Doris up in her own smart little Park Lane apartment and ‘looked after her’. Doris always claimed that he had been the love of her life, but within a year Laddie had begun an affair with a Park Lane neighbour, Lady Edwina Mountbatten. Doris was distraught, but then she sensibly remembered her goal and made the best of the split with a good settlement. Before long she was the mistress of a Canadian financier who bought her a Mayfair house, 6 Deanery Street off Park Lane – and this time she made sure her name was on the deeds. By the time she was twenty-five, Doris had made the most of well-placed investments and gifts from a series of rich lovers and she had indeed acquired not only the glittering lifestyle she wanted, along with a host of society contacts, but she also had an income from her own clothing business, which she expanded by opening a hairdressing salon on the Champs-Élysées. Her house in Deanery Street was staffed by a housekeeper, a lady’s maid called Swayne and a chauffeur to drive Doris’s Rolls-Royce. A hairdresser called every evening to style her hair. The title, however, still eluded her.