By now Doris could afford shopping trips to Italy, where she would purchase hundreds of pairs of expensive leather shoes at a time. She never wore any shoes more than two or three times, but probably she disposed of them along with the gowns in which she now traded. Similarly, she never wore her guinea-a-pair silk stockings more than once because (like her kid gloves) they never looked the same once ‘stretched’, and she happily wore several pairs a day. Her hosiery bill alone was more than three times the average weekly wage for a working man, but her cast-off stockings were swooped upon as welcome gifts at the great houses she visited, such as Madresfield, by daughters of aristocratic families whose dress allowance did not run to such luxury items. Her face was as recognisable then, from pictures in society pages, as is that of her great-niece Cara Delevingne in the twenty-first century. Always beautifully dressed, she was warm-hearted, impulsive, clever and witty; conversation stopped when she entered a restaurant. She was in great demand for her ability to make a party go with a swing, knew everyone worth knowing, always surrounded by an admiring crowd, and was blessed with unlimited energy. She cherished what might have been considered a flaw by other women – a gap between her front teeth – claiming with a laugh that it showed she was ‘lucky and sexy’. Arriving at a party she would perform a little talisman sign-of-the-cross routine, touching her forehead, breast and shoulders, while reciting ‘tiara, brooch, clip, clip’ In her beautiful couture dresses, she was, as the French say, a poule de luxe††but just occasionally she let her guard slip enough to admit to a dark underside of her gilded existence. When lunching in Quaglino’s with a friend‡‡ one day, in the midst of a lively conversation Doris suddenly bowed her head and became silent – then she looked up and said vehemently, ‘You may think it’s fun to make love, but if you had to make love to dirty old men as I do, you would think again.’
Mainly, though, Doris enjoyed the life she had made for herself where she could choose from invitations to four great balls in one night, each trying to outdo the others in glamour and luxury. She was even invited to the summer Court balls and there was no great country house from Cliveden to Chatsworth, Belvoir to Blenheim, Hatfield to Holkham to which she was not invited. Driven by her chauffeur along with numerous trunks of glamorous gowns and country clothes, she would be accompanied by Swayne, who carried the jewellery box and was responsible for checking the twenty pieces of luggage, unpacking, pressing and laying out the various changes of clothes and accessories, including immaculately cut tennis shorts. Doris had only to bathe and change, and allow Swayne to dress her hair. Although she played an indifferent game of tennis, lounging around a court in the sun in tennis shorts was a perfect excuse for Doris to show off those wonderful legs.
It was in 1926 that she met Valentine Castlerosse, the vastly overweight, boisterous and eccentric playboy viscount who was heir to the Earl of Kenmare. Castlerosse was the leading society gossip columnist of the day and worked for Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers. ‘There is nothing that enthrals me quite so much as the written word,’ he once remarked, ‘particularly at the bottom of a cheque,’8 and his readers loved the way he lampooned pomposity in society. When he and Doris met Valentine was about to depart on an extended tour of the Mediterranean and Middle East with Beaverbrook, who acted as a sort of godfather and often bankrolled him because the younger man amused him. His chatty columns had the unique appeal of being written by an insider on intimate terms with those he wrote about, and he had become so well known that a few lines’ caricature of a large man with a huge cigar would, in those days, suggest Lord Castlerosse.
Castlerosse was considerably struck by Doris: her slender figure, her exquisite clothes and the way she wore them, her trademark elbow-length white gloves. She was good-natured, quick-witted, with a confident personality, and her overt sex appeal and absolute elegance in everything she did – the way she rose from a chair, shrugged off a fur, or crossed her exquisitely long shapely legs while leaning towards him to listen as though everything he said was a pearl of wisdom beyond price – intrigued him. One special feature of Doris, unlike many of her contemporaries, was that unless she was involved in a face-to-face argument with someone she never made a throwaway comment at anybody else’s expense; she was at heart a kind person and very much a woman of the moment.
The era belonged to smart young women who wore shingled hairstyles under close-fitting cloche hats and knee-length tubular silky dresses with dropped waists over bust bodices which flattened the breasts – an androgynous look was the ideal and indeed women like Doris who could get away with it sometimes wore no underclothes at all, apart from a silk slip as a liner. High-heeled strappy shoes and silk stockings were de rigueur. These women scorned chaperones, drank cocktails and smoked cigarettes in holders.
While Valentine was about to depart for the east, Doris was leaving for America and he arranged for them to meet again after playfully warning her that skirts were even shorter in New York, and drinks longer (despite Prohibition). That Sunday his society column, ‘The Londoner’s Log’,§§ which provided its avid readers with a diet of amusing personal philosophy and entertaining gossip about the mainly impenetrable, glittering and glamorous world whose population eddied between London, Cannes, Deauville, Monte Carlo and various stately homes, led with a photograph of Doris. In short, Valentine Castlerosse fell headlong under Doris’s spell.
When they returned to London in the spring of 1928 from their respective trips, Valentine was a frequent visitor to 6 Deanery Street and their affair blazed across the backdrop of London society like a comet. One night at the Embassy Club the Prince of Wales, who was at another table, looked up and saw them together, the vast bulk of Castlerosse’s three hundred pounds making Doris appear even daintier than she was. The Prince’s companion recalled how the Prince whistled in admiration and sent a note over to Valentine which read ‘Congratulations, my Lord.’ In May, Valentine and Doris were married, to the consternation of Valentine’s friends, who forecast his annihilation by Doris – chiefly because although he spent like a rich man he was not one. Beaverbrook vainly attempted to prevent the marriage and Valentine’s mother refused ever to acknowledge Doris or receive her, clinging to the belief that since Doris was Protestant and because the ceremony was performed in Hammersmith Register Office it was not a real marriage in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, Doris had finally obtained her title, albeit a courtesy one. Now Viscountess Castlerosse, her writing paper bore the appropriate coronet over the interlinked initials DC. In time, barring accidents, she could hardly avoid becoming Countess of Kenmare.
Doris was undoubtedly romantically attracted to Valentine Castlerosse but neither of these larger-than-life characters was cut out for a conventional marriage. All the evidence suggests that while Valentine loved Doris obsessively (albeit not exclusively) to the end of his life, she often drove him to the edge of madness. Their marriage was a disaster; their extravagance eye-watering. Valentine once told a friend that Doris’s idea of economising on a short visit to Paris was to restrict her purchase of new couture gowns to just a dozen. Her jewellery collection was legendary (though to be fair many of the pieces had been gifts showered upon her by admirers), and she often referred to herself as ‘Miss Goldsmiths and Silversmiths’. Unexpectedly invited to swim in a new pool when at a house party, she thought nothing of despatching her chauffeur on a four-hundred-mile round-trip in her Rolls-Royce to fetch her swimsuit from London.
Valentine was as bad; he drank only the best champagnes – in magnums, never bottles – smoked the largest, most expensive Havana cigars, employed the best tailors to make his colourful bespoke suits and distinctive beaver-collared cashmere overcoats (mink-lined in the winter months), ordered dozens of pairs of handmade shoes at a time in the belief that he got a discount for quantity, and gambled away small fortunes in the firm conviction that his luck was about to change. His annual salary from Beaverbrook of three thousand pounds,¶¶ which together with his allowance of about half that s
um would have been perfectly adequate for most men in his situation, hardly paid his drinks bill. His idea of economising was to charge everything, and never spend any cash. Not surprisingly, he was always in debt, but when his creditors became a nuisance he sent his excess bills to Beaverbrook as expenses and ‘the Beaver’, after a little bluster at seeing delivery notes for multiple sets of expensive golf clubs, bouquets of red roses and dozens of cases of champagne, invariably paid them. On one occasion when Valentine had a sudden attack of guilt after opening his post which contained only overdue bills he asked Doris to cut down on her expenditure, but she retorted scornfully, ‘All right, don’t give me any money then ... I’ll pay for everything myself in future.’
The couple fought constantly, each occasionally managing to inflict actual physical damage. Their house in Culross Street shuddered nightly as they fought and made up, and on one occasion Doris visited a friend of her husband’s displaying an arm full of bruises. She asked the friend to warn Castlerosse that if it happened again she would involve the police. When the friend delivered the message Castlerosse rolled up his trouser leg and showed him a bandaged leg. ‘ did that,’ he complained. ‘With her teeth too.’9 Their public rows in restaurants – oblivious of other diners – became celebrated. An enraged Valentine would inflate his Billy Bunter figure, turn puce and produce a torrent of invective, but he was no match for his wife who knew all the chinks in his armour and could always produce a volley of witty jibes about the things that most concerned him; his obesity, his virility, his massive debts. Having delivered her poisonous darts she would depart with a triumphant laugh. However, Doris’s devastating ripostes were often self-defence against Valentine’s fearsome temper, and there is plenty of evidence from her closest friends to whom she ran for shelter to indicate that Doris smarted quite as much from these encounters as her husband.
Noël Coward based his character Amanda, the insouciant and sophisticated leading character of Private Lives, on Doris. To those in the know, certain of Amanda’s lines made famous by Gertrude Lawrence – the first actress to play the part – seemed especially poignant. ‘I think very few people are completely normal, really, deep down in their private lives,’ she mused, and ‘I believe in being kind to everyone ... and being as gay as possible’. Another line is, ‘Heaven preserve me from “nice” women.’10 The 1930 play was a huge success, playing to packed houses for years. It is still one of the Coward plays most frequently reprised. When after the first night a friend told him it was enjoyable but that certain parts of it – all the quarrels and rolling around on the floor – seemed quite unreal, the playwright snorted, ‘You obviously don’t know the Castlerosses.’
By the summer of 1933, when Doris was invited to stay at the Château de l’Horizon, Valentine had petitioned for divorce on the grounds of Doris’s adultery, citing Sir Alfred Beit.## He had a list of men to choose from, including Randolph Churchill, who on one occasion telephoned Valentine from Doris’s bed to taunt him. When Valentine bluntly asked him ‘Are you living with my wife?’ Randolph retorted that he was, since Valentine didn’t have the courtesy to do so. A few nights later they met at a club to which they both belonged and Valentine angrily confronted his young and handsome rival, saying that for two pins he would hit him. ‘I shouldn’t do that, Castlerosse,’ said Randolph evenly. ‘I’m not your wife.’
Gossip that year said that Doris was Cecil Beaton’s first heterosexual experience. Their intimate escapade occurred at a house party when Beaton wished to make his lover Peter Watson jealous by ‘turning heterosexual’, and was – probably unwittingly – overheard by fellow guests as Beaton’s squeals of ‘Oh goody, goody!’ rang through the house. When the story reached Valentine’s ears he merely remarked, ‘I never knew Doris was a lesbian!’ But despite his own infidelities, he was heartbreakingly jealous of Doris’s lovers. He hired a detective agency to follow her for evidence and one evening at the Ritz in Paris he received a telephone call from the agency to tell him that his wife was staying at the hotel and a man had been seen entering her room. ‘You blithering idiot!’ he yelled. ‘It’s me. I am here with my wife.’ His mother persuaded him to withdraw his divorce petition because of the disgrace it would cause the family name, and the couple agreed to a formal deed of separation with no financial clauses. Calling herself Lady Castlerosse, Doris was now free to roam through society like a vixen in a hen house.
The personality of Daisy, the second of the Three Ds, was no less distinctive, albeit she was less likeable than Doris. She had first met Winston in Paris in 1919 when he was there for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and immediately set out to seduce him. He was forty-four and staying at the Ritz when he was introduced to the twenty-nine-year-old Princess Daisy,*** widow of Prince de Broglie, who had just become engaged to Winston’s first cousin, the banker Reggie Fellowes (a former lover of Consuelo Marlborough).††† Daisy invited Winston to come to her room after dinner in order to see her ‘little child’. It was perhaps because of his own small daughter Sarah, who was four at the time, that Winston went along as requested, only to find that the ‘little child’ was Daisy, lying stark naked on a tiger skin. Winston declined the obvious invitation with amusement and left, but he told his wife about it: years later Clementine told a friend that she had ‘quite forgiven Daisy’ because her seduction attempt had been unsuccessful.
Doris Castlerosse slept with men because she needed them to provide the good things in life and she used what she regarded as her God-given assets as tools to achieve her aim. But Daisy, who was an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune and a princess by her first marriage, was as rich as Croesus; her lovers numbered in the hundreds and she appeared to regard the serial purloining of other women’s husbands as normal behaviour. It is hard to come up with a reason for her obsessive sexual need other than straight-forward nymphomania. She was Duff Cooper’s mistress for a while, and in letters between Duff and his beautiful wife Diana they referred to her as ‘Daisy “Wanton” Fellowes’ because Daisy smoked opium or sniffed cocaine before sex to render extinct any inhibitions that might have hindered the full extent of the experience. She kept a stash of cocaine handy for any visitors who felt similarly inclined, and once dispensed a large dose as a headache cure to a Diaghilev ballerina.
Daisy was yet another of those women with striking looks that seemed to typify the art deco period; in fact, she was almost ugly despite a nose job which she underwent without anaesthetic in order to be able to direct the proceedings. Stick thin through rigorous dieting, she lived on minute helpings of grouse, iced carrot juice and lashings of vodka in order to maintain the angular shape so beloved of Cecil Beaton’s camera lens. She thought nothing of spending thousands of pounds – the price of a good family house in London – on a single gown to be worn once. Indeed, she is still remembered as one of the most daring trend-setters of the twentieth century, and arguably the most important client of the surrealist couturier Elsa Schiaparelli and the jewellers Cartier and Belperron.‡‡‡
At the Ritz, fellow diners rose to their feet and some even climbed onto chairs to get a glimpse of her monkey-fur coat with gold embroidery. She mostly espoused a chic, streamlined look – what Beaton called ‘studied simplicity’ – which made other women seem overdressed. She was never afraid to be stylishly outrageous; the colour Schiaparelli pink, so hot it was called shocking pink, was invented for her and she wore a surrealist hat shaped like a red high-heeled shoe with a haughty aplomb that stifled any ridicule. She entertained lavishly from her villa, Les Zoraides, at Cap Martin near Menton, and from two massive yachts, the more famous of these being the Sister Anne. Unlike Doris Castlerosse, who at heart was a kind person, conversation about mutual acquaintances with Daisy was likely to be maliciously droll, and at least one friend reported that she was always afraid to leave the room for fear of what might be said about her in her absence. Despite this, Daisy’s witty conversation was much appreciated, and there is no doubt that she knew everyone worth know
ing.
Diana Cooper, the third D, was a regular visitor to the Château de l’Horizon during the Thirties. Born Lady Diana Manners, the daughter of the Duchess of Rutland by her lover the dashing Harry Cust (but the Duke magnanimously accepted the child for the sake of good form), she had married Duff Cooper, one of the few young men of her acquaintance to survive the trenches of the First World War, in 1919. Although they were leaders of a group of young intellectuals, they were also very much part of the ‘bright young people’ set in the early Twenties, until Duff was elected to Parliament in 1924. Diana was a society celebrity – her classic beauty photographed wherever she went, her fashions copied, her sayings quoted, even her personality borrowed by Evelyn Waugh for his novels. Her parents were initially against the marriage because for a while it had seemed possible that Diana might marry the Prince of Wales, but despite Duff’s serial philandering it was a happy union, and by 1933 they had a three-year-old son, John Julius.
Diana apparently tolerated Duff’s on-off affair with Daisy, was even reasonably friendly with her, and was amused by Daisy’s ‘secret’ for getting a cocktail party off to a good start: ‘Just pour some of this into the punch, darling’ – ‘this’ was Benzedrine. Somehow Diana moved with the fast crowd without herself ever becoming sullied by it; maybe her exceptional beauty acted as a shield.
The Riviera Set Page 10
