The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  There is, too, a letter from Winston to Clementine in which he wrote that he was upset that she should harbour what he called ‘such absolutely wild suspicions’ about him.§§ He felt this dishonoured the love he felt for her – and would always feel for her. It was unworthy of her, he wrote, and of him and filled him with an embarrassment he had not known since he was a teenager. She must trust him, for he would never love any other woman.12 That was in the early years of their marriage, but still, a relationship between Winston and Maxine seems highly unlikely. Doris is a different case.

  Apart from the fact that he painted four portraits of Doris while staying at the Château de l’Horizon – as many as he painted of Clementine – there is the evidence of other guests that Winston and Doris got on well. This was inexplicable to Vincent Sheean, who recognised Winston’s genius but described Doris as an ‘unrivalled nitwit’ who was only interested in her appearance. He recorded that one afternoon when Winston was speaking she idly looked up from scratching her shapely thigh with a red-tipped fingernail and asked, in what Sheean described as a piercing nasal voice, why politicians always chose Geneva for their meetings. It seemed to her they could choose a nicer place. Winston looked at her benevolently from under his floppy straw hat and said genially, ‘Because, my dear, Geneva happens to be the seat of the League of Nations. You have heard of it, no doubt?’13

  There is also the fact that after the first holiday at the villa in 1933, when Doris was there, he had not been able to persuade Clementine to accompany him there again. Her daughter said that her mother was not fond of the people that she met on the Riviera who amused Winston. Then, too, Winston must have at least suspected that Doris had had an affair with Randolph, for gossip columns had not only hinted about their friendship in unmistakable terms, but had divulged her favourite name for Randolph – ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy ’.

  All the same, one might be inclined to dismiss this story as mere gossip were it not for one small item buried in the Churchill archives. It is a letter from Doris to Winston in 1936, in which she regrets having heard that he will not be at Maxine’s that September, as she will be there as usual from 1st to 15th. She writes that she has heard he is going to America that month, and as she intends to travel to New York after she leaves Maxine she hopes she might see him there. She ends her letter, intriguingly, ‘I am not at all dangerous any more ... do ring me sometime, Mayfair 3731. My love, Doris.’14

  Set against these anecdotes and suggestions of a possible dalliance between Winston and Doris, it is important to remember that when, in old age, Winston was asked what he considered his greatest achievement, he replied that it had been his ability to persuade Clementine to be his wife. One only has to watch newsreels of the Churchills together in their later years to see that this was a couple who remained in love despite the many tribulations thrown at them.

  However, on balance, given the slight differences in the Churchills’ marriage at the time, and Doris’s casual attitude towards sleeping with men, it is entirely possible that she jumped into bed with him on this one occasion and was not rejected.

  * An all first-class sleeper train which ran between Calais, Paris and Nice, dubbed ‘the train to Paradise’. It made its first trip in 1922; later it added second and third classes and during the Thirties it ran daily.

  † Born 1885 in Philadelphia to an Austrian father and orphaned as a small child, she was raised in Munich by an aunt and so spoke fluent German. Two early marriages ended in divorce before she married Baron Eugene de Rothschild, one of the richest men in the world, in 1925 though she retained her Roman Catholic faith. She was a friend of the Prince of Wales from the days before he met Wallis Simpson, and it was to Schloss Enzesfeld, Kitty’s eleventh-century Austrian castle, that he fled after the abdication in December 1936.

  ‡ The population of UK in 1933 was forty-six million. Now sixty-four million.

  § Elsie de Wolfe was sixty when she accepted a proposal of marriage from Mendl, a handsome and well-connected attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. He apparently liked the kudos of being married to a rich woman who could act as his hostess without any strings; she just wanted a title. On 9 March 1926 the New York Times ran a banner headline, ‘Elsie de Wolfe to Wed Sir Charles Mendl’. The piece was full of innuendo since Elsie had lived openly and happily for over thirty years with the masculine-looking Bessy Marbury. ‘The marriage comes as a great surprise to her friends,’ it read. ‘When in New York she makes her home with Miss Elisabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place.’ Gossips had long referred to them as ‘the bachelors’. The Mendls agreed in advance on a mariage blanc. They each maintained their own apartment in Paris and lived separate lives, though sharing the Villa Trianon whenever they wished. This arrangement was completely accepted in their circles; the couple liked each other and were a wonderful foil at parties, so the unusual partnership worked well. Elsie, who now styled herself Lady Mendl, continued to live with Bessy Marbury until Bessy’s death in 1933, and in her 1935 autobiography After All, Elsie entirely forgot to mention her husband.

  ¶ Born in 1887, Margaret ‘Peggy’ Primrose was the daughter of the 5th Earl of Rosebery. It was while attending a ball at her house in 1904 that Winston first met Clementine.

  # Henry Arthur Evans, Conservative MP for Cardiff South at this time.

  ** George Horatio, 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley (1883-1968), was styled Earl of Rocksavage until 1923, when he inherited his father’s title. He was a direct descendant of Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, and was a well-known tennis and polo player who had been a visitor to Hartsbourne.

  †† See page 117.

  ‡‡ The ill-fated Dardanelles campaign some six months earlier.

  §§ I asked Mary (Lady Soames) about this in 2010. She replied that she had questioned her mother about it when she published the letter in Speaking for Themselves (pp. 37-8) and that Lady Churchill could not recall what it had been about. Lady Soames said she could only assume her mother had heard some gossip about her father.

  7

  A New King

  In the spring of 1936 the Château de l’Horizon was in the national news as it had been rented by the new King for a month’s holiday. After lunching there with Maxine, the British Ambassador spent some time arranging all the details with the authorities at Nice. As a result, newspaper reports announced that during the royal visit ‘no car will be allowed to stop on the sun-drenched road which runs behind the villa’, no speedboats could approach the little harbour without coming under the strictest scrutiny, fishermen had been warned that they must avoid the waters near the château, and enterprising long-distance swimmers would be severely discouraged. ‘Invisible eyes will keep a constant watch on the King from sea, land and air during his holiday,’ and ‘an army of gardeners’ had been engaged to put the final touches to the lawns, flower beds, and ‘the little winding pathways under the pine trees, where the King used to walk last year with his favourite Cairn terrier’.1 Gigantic parasols had been placed on the pool terrace for meals to be taken by the swimming pool, and a powerful wireless receiver had been installed at the villa to ensure good reception despite the Alps.

  This was all in great contrast to the informal royal holiday at ‘Rock’s place’ the previous year, when the King had still been Prince of Wales.* Furthermore, although British newspapers were not publicising it, most foreign newspapers were fascinated by the story of the King’s romance with Wallis Simpson.

  In the event the holiday was called off when the King was advised that it was unwise to holiday in such a public place as the Riviera. The French had recently elected a left-wing administration under Léon Blum, and the Foreign Office claimed there were intelligence reports from Paris of a communist plot to assassinate the King. It was therefore announced that the King believed it inconsiderate to give the French extra responsibility in the light of the Spanish problems,† and he was cancelling the holiday. Maxine returned the King’s cheque for one hundred pounds happily, for
she had not really wanted to move out at the best time of the year, and he sent her an eighteenth-century silver snuff box as a thank-you gift. Her niece Diana recalled how Maxine opened the gift, looked at it and gave a humph sound, possibly because she recalled ‘more kingly gifts’ in her past, such as the gold dinner service rumoured to have been given her by Edward VII.

  With the villa empty of guests for the period when the King and his party had intended to stay, Maxine entertained her niece Diana and Vincent Sheean, and his publisher Hamish Hamilton, who was in fact a former nephew-in-law of Maxine’s, for he had once been married to Diana’s sister Jean. Some American celebrities also came and stayed for a few days: among them Douglas Fairbanks, whom Maxine liked and admired; and Johnny Weissmuller, who dived from the top terrace, over the lower dining terrace into the pool.

  Winston had written that he would not visit in the late summer of 1936, but evidently changed his plans for on 1 September he arrived at the Château de l’Horizon after all. Again it was a painting holiday, but he found time to lunch with his old girlfriend, the former Muriel Wilson. She was now a widow, and staying in a nearby villa. Muriel and Maxine were old friends and so Winston invited her back to lunch at l’Horizon. His fellow house-guests were Loelia, the Duchess of Westminster; a young French film actress whose name Winston forgot when he wrote home, but about whom he remarked that she was very pretty but not very successful’; and the Marquess of Queensberry’s younger brother Lord Cecil Douglas. ‘But many [others] come as usual to bathe and lunch,’ he wrote to Clementine, and he had not been able to avoid being taken out to lunch with Laura Corrigan.‡

  He would rather have been painting for he had found a spot on the River Loup about twenty miles away, which was remote and quiet, and also he hoped to paint the small port at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. He was writing a series of articles for the News of the World, had arranged to go and see some French army manoeuvres on the 9th and 10th and was to visit the much-vaunted Maginot Line on the 14th and 15th so, as usual, time was his enemy.

  Doris Castlerosse was there too, finally in the throes of divorce from Valentine. In a letter containing a tip to him to ‘buy U.S. Steel’ written prior to this holiday, she told Winston that she needed to give Valentine better evidence and so she had ‘let Rootes§ out. It seems ridiculous when I have sworn statements of Valentine’s indiscretions with three different women, but it would have meant a beastly fought case.’2 Eventually Valentine divorced her on the uncontested grounds of adultery with Robert Heber Percy, which caused a few raised eyebrows if not outright titters since Heber Percy – the ‘mad boy’ of the Brideshead set – was the live-in boyfriend of the eccentric Lord Berners.¶ Valentine claimed that the alleged misconduct had taken place ‘in a hotel in Paris and on the liner Strathair last year’, and also mentioned that his wife’s extravagance had caused much unpleasantness during their married life.

  But Valentine’s and Doris’s divorce was not the hottest topic of discussion that September. Having cancelled his holiday at the Château de l’Horizon, the King and Wallis Simpson were cruising in the Adriatic with a party including Duff and Diana Cooper aboard a chartered yacht, the Nahlin. Unlike the UK, where reporting about the King’ s affair was self-censored by loyal press barons such as Lords Rothermere (Daily Mail) and Beaverbrook (Daily Express)# it was open season in the European newspapers and magazines. Each day a new report appeared of the King and his mistress pretending to be ordinary tourists, mobbed by well-wishers waving and chanting ‘Long live love!’ Against Clementines inclinations, Winston had thrown his lot in with the couple and supported them on the grounds that, despite the fact that Wallis was a divorced woman, the King should be free to choose his own wife. Whether he would have done so had he known that the Foreign Office had stopped sending the King any confidential reports because they had evidence of leaks through Wallis to her friend Joachim von Ribbentrop in the German Embassy in London is doubtful.

  In mid-September Winston left to drive north, reporting that the days he spent with Maxine had been very pleasant with beautiful weather and ‘every comfort’. He had painted six pictures at l’Horizon as well as three at Consuelo’s château at Dreux.** In this mood of content he heard the first hints of an unfolding horror, something still virtually unknown about in Britain. While in Toulon he had dined with Madame Marie-Anne Goldsmith Rothschild, who had formerly been married to Clementine’s cousin Jack Mitford. He wrote to tell Clementine that Madame Rothschild was a remarkable woman and she had told him ‘terrible’ tales of the treatment of Jews in Germany.3

  On 10 December, unable to force his ministers to agree to marriage with Wallis, and despite Winston’s unwavering support throughout the crisis, the King abdicated in a storm of national ferment. It was, one American newspaper said, ‘the greatest news story since the Resurrection’. A week earlier, on 3 December, Wallis had fled from England accompanied by the King’s Lord-in-Waiting, Lord Brownlow, to avoid press attention. After a nightmarish journey she arrived in Cannes to stay with Herman and Katherine Rogers†† at their ancient (and reputedly haunted) Villa Lou Viei, on the sunny south-facing hills of Californie. It had been partly renovated by Barry Dierks in 1928, but to his chagrin the owners had insisted on keeping the perfumed flowering creepers which festooned the house, except where the wonderful view of the Mediterranean was affected. Wallis had stayed there previously and enjoyed the hot sunshine and outdoor life. But now it was winter, and cold and wet most days, so she hardly even went into the garden. It was from Lou Viei that she urgently telephoned to the King telling him he should not abdicate, but should put several alternatives to Prime Minister Baldwin, including that of a morganatic marriage which would make her a duchess but not queen. In any event, she urged him, he should not make any decisions until autumn of the following year. But it was at Lou Viei on 11 December, sitting with Herman and Katherine, that she heard on the radio the King’s abdication broadcast. Winston heard it at Chartwell and wept.

  When she heard afterwards that the King – now to be known as the Duke of Windsor – was planning to go to Zurich and stay at a favourite hotel there while they waited out the requisite time for her divorce to become final, Wallis was horrified, realising how he would be besieged by the press if he stayed in such a public place. She consulted Elsie de Wolfe and the result was the Duke went instead to stay with Kitty de Rothschild at her Schloss Enzesfeld near Vienna. Winston wrote to the Duke as soon as he heard, to say he was pleased that he had found such an agreeable temporary ‘shelter’ for he knew Kitty well from having once been ‘a guest with her at Maxine’s’.4 The Duke agreed, and initially found his hostess kind and hospitable, but as the weeks went on he upset her by running up international phone bills of over eight hundred pounds, calling Wallis several times a day, as well as contacts in England, and treating Kitty’s staff as though they were his own servants. ‘We are not the rich Rothschilds,’ she complained to a friend.‡‡ Her husband Eugene de Rothschild left for Paris in mid-January 1937 to transfer all their liquid assets out of Austria after stories began to circulate about confiscation of Jewish property by the Nazis. Kitty stayed on till the end of January out of consideration for her guest, but when she felt obliged to leave the Schloss and join her husband, the Duke did not even rise for breakfast to say goodbye to her.

  Wallis was more considerate of her hosts, for she knew they had sacrificed their normal life to shelter her. ‘Nobody asks them [out] because of me,’ she wrote to the Duke, but in a subsequent letter she described her disgust on wandering about Lou Viei and finding that the kitchen, run by an elderly Provençal couple, was dirty and smelly. Their cooking was not up to her standards either, and it was instantly clear to her that they could not be married from Villa Lou Viei. The couple had hoped that the wedding would be held soon after the coronation in London, but it was all very much in the hands of the King’s Proctor who was investigating a charge of collusion, and so the couple was unable to set a specific date with any degree of certainty.<
br />
  Wallis made enquiries and through Daisy Fellowes located a secluded house on the tip of Cap d’Antibes which was empty and available to rent. It was a large seaside villa called Château de la Croë, built only ten years earlier for Sir William Pomeroy Burton, president of Associated Newspapers Limited, but on Victorian lines. Since then, Sir William had bought another place on Cap Martin, which he preferred, so he wanted to sell or lease La Croë. Daisy was ‘longing’ to see the Duke again, Wallis wrote from Villa Lou Viei, but although recognising that Daisy had been a stalwart friend in their crisis she advised the Duke against becoming too friendly with her, ‘not from jealous reasons but you know what the press is and [what] the gossip would say – as we know her reputation is not too steady’.5 Wallis has been accused of being uncaring of the Duke in contrast with his obsession with her, but her letters show she was jealous of any attentions he paid other women, and at one point she even ludicrously accused the Duke of having an affair with his hostess Kitty.

  After a shopping trip to buy a number of new gowns and a fur jacket, Wallis paid a short visit to Willie Maugham’s villa La Mauresque, where she was joined by Sybil Colefax§§ and they discussed decor. Along with Syrie Maugham, who had pioneered the ‘all-white room’, and Elsie de Wolfe, Sybil Colefax was the dernier cri in interior decoration. All four of them then went to visit Daisy at Les Zoraides in search of ideas for La Croë.

  In the event, the idea to lease La Croë for the wedding was temporarily shelved when the new King advised the Duke that a wedding in a villa on the French Riviera might appear too frivolous.6 Wallis had anyway realised that it would be impossible to recruit the necessary staff in the time available to them, as well as adequately furnish and make the château ready. Instead, she accepted an invitation to stay at and be married from a palatial château a few miles south-west of Tours in central France.