The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  La Candé was owned by Charles Bedaux,¶¶ a wealthy French-American industrialist who was a friend of Herman Rogers. Bedaux and his wife Fern offered to move out of their château while Wallis and the Duke needed it for their wedding. He stipulated one condition: it should be announced that the Duke and Mrs Simpson were there as his guests; Bedaux did not wish it to be assumed he had rented out his house in case it reflected adversely on his financial standing. Wallis decided that it was no bad thing to marry in the French countryside; it was somehow more dignified than the Riviera with its playground-of-the-rich reputation, she thought, and even her enemies in the Royal Family agreed that it was more suitable for the former king to marry in a Renaissance castle than in a seaside villa. Wallis had been very upset by rumours and newspaper stories that she had been delivered of a child at Lou Viei, just one of dozens of nasty tales about her, so she attempted to show herself by taking a walk along the Croisette wearing an ermine coat and white hat. She was mobbed and had to be rescued and returned to Lou Viei which she was by now beginning to regard as a prison. She was also anxious to get away from what she called ‘the smallness of Cannes’.

  By contrast, at La Candé she was totally protected, waited on by a flock of almost thirty liveried servants, as well as her own maid and a top Paris chef. The ancient château had been expensively renovated, with American plumbing, and among its more outstanding features were a swan-shaped bath with gilded plumbing, a pipe organ rumoured to have cost forty thousand dollars, and its own telephone exchange. Eventually Wallis asked Fern Bedaux to return to help her prepare La Candé for the Duke’s arrival prior to the wedding, which had finally been agreed for 3 June 1937.

  Right up to the last minute the Duke hoped that at least one member of his family would attend the wedding, despite the new King having told him explicitly in April that it was not possible because of the risk to the image of the throne. In the event, nobody from the Royal Family attended, and – in place of a wedding present – the Duke received word that Wallis was not to be allowed to use the title HRH. Wallis had only her favourite aunt, Bessie, to represent her own family.

  The couple invited three hundred people to their wedding but only sixteen guests showed up; they included Herman and Katherine Rogers and the owners of La Candé. The Duke’s friend – said to be his only male friend – and aide Edward Dudley ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe was his chief supporter (best man), and Metcalfe’s wife Baba (Alexandra, daughter of Lord Curzon)## was the most senior of the guests. In London the Palace had let it be known that to attend the wedding would mean the end of royal approval, and in some cases the end of plum careers. In May Daisy Fellowes had written to Winston: ‘Will you let me know if you come over for the wedding as we could arrange to go together? I have a daughter who has a house near Candi [sic] – it might facilitate things to spend the night there.’7 However, neither Daisy nor Winston attended. Daisy was not invited, and Winston – the couple’s greatest supporter – declined, saying he was otherwise engaged, but he sent Randolph as his representative.

  The fascinating wedding portraits taken by Cecil Beaton show the Duke and Duchess exhibiting the strain of the past months, and they look many years older than the pictures taken of them on their holidays less than a year earlier. Wallis looks almost ugly with stress, and her square-shouldered, floor-length Mainbocher gown of ‘Duchess of Windsor blue’ did her slim figure absolutely no favours. It made her look gaunt – a disappointment to the millions of women who had breathlessly followed the royal romance.

  That September Winston wrote to Maxine that he was still tied up trying to finish volume four of his epic biography of Marlborough, but admitted that he was ‘thinking much of you all and the pool’.8 Doris was at l’Horizon as usual, though, and she had brought along her new best friend, Margot Flick Hoffman.*** She had met the Hoffmans in China the previous winter, while they were on honeymoon, and Doris and Margot immediately became close friends. When the Hoffmans’ marriage failed after a remarkably short time, Margot joined Doris in Europe and offered to buy her a palazzo in Venice in return for introductions to the right people. Doris had brought along her personable brother Dudley as well, and there was the extremely handsome, golden-haired young Duke of Sutherland,††† who had come directly from a garden party at Holyrood and was able to tell them first-hand about the new Royal Family.

  Having missed his usual holiday at l’Horizon, Winston asked Maxine if he could visit her instead during January, a period when she normally had the villa closed up while she went to a spa or to St Moritz. Maxine immediately changed her plans and invited him and Clementine, but he explained that ‘Clemmie ... has made all her plans’ and was taking Mary skiing. He would stay in Paris for some important discussions and arrive in Cannes on 5 January, he wrote. However, he then had to go and see the Duke of Windsor for luncheon, because the Windsors were leaving the Riviera the following day. He had not seen them since the ‘dark day’ of the abdication, he wrote, and ‘as you know I am a devoted servant’.9

  A few weeks earlier the Windsors had arrived at Cannes to spend their first Christmas together at Lou Viei, which had been loaned to them while Herman and Katherine Rogers went to America for a few months. Following their wedding the Duke and Duchess had been living at the discreet though luxurious Hôtel Meurice in Paris while they searched for a permanent home. They found Lou Viei ‘a welcome change’, the Duke wrote to Wallis’s aunt Bessie on 28 December. They had spent a quiet and peaceful Christmas and had only once been out to dinner as it was so much nicer on their own at the château. ‘I expect you will find us ensconced in some French château when you next visit us here,’ he ended.10

  As usual, Winston lapped up being spoilt by Maxine for a few weeks at the start of 1938. Although not guaranteed in January, the sun shone and it was mild, so that apart from lunch with the Windsors on the day of his arrival he hardly stirred from the villa for the first week, working every morning in bed at his proofs. He had had to cut almost a hundred pages of text which, he complained to Clementine, was like cutting off his own fingers and toes, but Maxine had arranged an extra comfort for him with the services of a masseur. It was too cold for swimming and he could not paint as the winter afternoon light was no good (as Clementine had warned him) – it was dark by 6 p.m. at that time of year – and so he had fallen into the habit of playing Mah Jong all afternoon with Maxine, who was an expert, but, he wrote to Clementine, he had only lost two pounds after many hours of amusement. The only other house-guests that week were Maxine’s niece Diana and her husband Vincent. The big event of his holiday had been a dinner with the Windsors a few evenings earlier.

  On learning while lunching with the Duke and Duchess that they had put off their departure from the Riviera for a week, Winston asked Maxine to invite them ‘and no other outside guests’ to dine one evening at l’Horizon. Although she was not opposed to the couple Maxine had made it clear she disapproved of the abdication, sniffing (and no doubt recalling King Edward VII’s arrangements with Mrs Keppel) that ‘we did things better in my day’, but she could never refuse ‘dear Winston’ anything. Lloyd George was also staying locally, at the Hôtel du Cap d’Antibes, and at the very last minute Winston asked that Lloyd George be invited to the dinner, since many years earlier it had been Lloyd George who had officiated at the Duke’s investiture as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle. It being winter and too chilly on the terrace, they dined in the pretty dining room.

  Over luncheon that day the matter was raised by those attending the dinner of how they were to address and treat the Duchess. Much ink had been spilled at Whitehall and Buckingham Palace over the matter of Wallis’s title, and she had been famously deprived of the prefix HRH. It was without precedent for a married woman not to take her husband’s title on marriage, and seems a remarkably petty act by the Palace to withhold it in the case of Wallis, especially when the Duke made clear his deep hurt over the matter. There were those in society who did call the Duchess Her Royal Highness, and thos
e who used ‘Her Grace’; those who curtsied to her and those who refused to do so. In the case of the dinner party at the Château de l’Horizon it was agreed that since it was a purely private dinner no harm would derive from their addressing Wallis as Your Royal Highness and then ma’am, and Diana and Maxine (Margaret Lloyd George did not attend) would curtsey to her when she arrived.

  There was a certain amount of nervousness before the dinner as it was the first time the former King had set foot in l’Horizon, although while staying at ‘Rock’s place’ he had several times strayed along the narrow footpath when out walking his dog, and once got as far as the terrace before he vanished, to the consternation of bathers in Maxine’s pool. When Winston came downstairs to meet Maxine prior to the Windsors’ arrival he found her in front of a looking glass. He joined her in a last-minute preen and as always had a bon mot for the occasion: ‘You have a strange party tonight, my dear. It consists entirely of the ci-devant; ex-Kings, ex-Prime Ministers and ex-politicians. It is like Voltaire.’11

  Winston reported to Clementine that ‘the poor Duke’ was bright and charming although now that he was no longer King ‘he had had to fight for his place in the conversation like other people’.12 However, Sheean’s memory of the event was in sharp contrast. ‘From the beginning,’ he wrote, ‘the Duke of Windsor dominated the conversation. He sat at the head of the table, like a King, with Maxine at his right, Mr Lloyd George at her right; the Duchess sat between Lloyd George and me; Winston and Diana completed the circle.’13 At some point the conversation turned to Welsh coal mines and the Duke compared them with the more favourable conditions that existed for miners in Hitler’s Germany. He and the Duchess had toured the German mines, he stated, and been impressed by the facilities including compulsory installation of hot showers at the pithead. This led to a discussion on the manner in which the poor, and specifically mining families, lived in England and Wales – a matter on which the Duke held himself to be something of an expert.

  Sheean, an intellectual socialist, sat back in amazement as he listened to the other three men debating the matter. ‘The seriousness in the question could not be doubted,’ he wrote, ‘and yet it was confounded with an incurable frivolity owing to their astronomical remoteness from the conditions of life of which they spoke.’ The Duke undoubtedly wished to see the people who worked in the mines clean, healthy and contented – just as he might wish his horses or dogs to be, Sheean thought. As for the Duchess,

  so slim, so elegant, so suggestive of innumerable fashionable shops, dressmakers, manicurists and hairdressers, [she] seemed at the uttermost remove from the pithead of a mine ... in the exquisite little room, gleaming with glass and silver over the flowers and champagne, all so enclosed and private and secure ... what did they have to talk about but the dirt on a miner’s neck?14

  Winston, though, considered the dinner a great success, and Maxine told him she had not enjoyed a dinner more since the great days at Hartsbourne. He thought the Windsors looked somewhat pathetic but also very happy, and Wallis had made a very good impression on him, so that he believed their marriage, so dearly bought, would be a most happy one.

  Maxine was as popular as ever and had not lost her knack of attracting top politicians as well as celebrities. During the time that Winston was at l’Horizon in early 1938 she entertained Anthony Eden as well as Lloyd George and his daughter Megan several times. Winston, too, accepted invitations to other villas, such as that of Lord Rothermere, who had a place at Cap Martin close to Daisy Fellowes. Maxine only dined out occasionally and almost always with friends; she was treated with huge respect having come to be accepted as the grande dame of the Riviera. At a dinner at a neighbour’s villa, also attended by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Diana Sheean recorded how, at the end of the evening, ‘the entire roomful of guests rose to their feet, including the Duke of Windsor and Mr Churchill, when [Maxine] came to the door to indicate that it was time she took her house-party home. She was dressed all in white, all diamonds flashing, hair white. That was when I fully recognised the stories of her beauty.’15

  Before he departed Winston gave a dinner at the Casino for some Dutch friends of Maxine’s, at which he was captivated by a parrot: ‘The most lovely parrot I ever saw ... He is a millionaire and keeps a sailor to look after him,’ he wrote.16 The parrot knew a number of French swear words and party pieces, and kept whispering in his keeper’s ear and then roaring with laughter. He could also miaow like a cat and imitate the sound of drums of a military band, and generally showed off to loud applause. In fact, Winston reported, he brought the house down.

  After twelve pleasant days at the Château de l’Horizon, Maxine reluctantly waved Winston off in her chauffeur-driven car to Cap Martin to spend a week or so at Les Zoraides with Daisy and his cousin Reggie. He liked to paint there – there was a different quality of light from that at Cannes and Antibes, and Daisy’s garden had some beautiful settings. During Winston’s visits Daisy thoughtfully declined to have her swimming pool covered each morning with fresh pink rose petals. Maxine had been so genuinely upset at his departure that Winston promised to return soon and said he would try to bring Clementine next time. This could be as early as the end of the month, and he wrote to his wife asking if she would consent to join him in France. Knowing her feelings about the company one met at Maxine’s, he assured her that this time they would be quite alone. The golf course at Mougins, near where he liked to paint, was within an easy drive, and he was sure they could find a good golfing partner for her, he cajoled, or there was tennis.

  There was no one else at Les Zoraides as Daisy was recovering from a facial injury sustained when the train on which she was travelling threw her from her seat, and apart from a few lunches out Winston worked at his editing until lunch and in the afternoons and evenings joined his hosts – he did not tell Clementine when he wrote to her that he spent several evenings at the Casino with Reggie, for he knew how it would worry her. However, to his enormous pleasure, Clementine agreed to his suggestion that she join him for the last week of January, so she was able to attend the celebratory luncheon party at the Hôtel du Cap which Winston organised for the Lloyd Georges’ golden wedding anniversary. Also present were Daisy and Reggie, and Maxine. Lord Derby had sent his apologies and a gigantic basket of orchids; the King and Queen had sent a telegram, as had the Windsors, who had by now departed for Paris. The wives of fishermen from Nice came bearing flowers, an old Riviera custom for golden wedding days, organised by Daisy on this occasion. The ‘bride and groom’ ceremonially cut a three-foot-high wedding cake (Lloyd George earned local approval by distributing most of this to the children of the town of Antibes).

  Despite his promise the Churchills were not entirely alone at l’Horizon as there was one fellow visitor: the sculptor Clare Sheridan, Winston’s bohemian first cousin. She was highly intelligent and outspoken, and despite the fact that she was a strident communist sympathiser, and Winston was the leading spokesman in England against the Bolsheviks, he enjoyed their lively debates. Perhaps he also recalled that when they were both young at the beginning of the century she had written to him to say she wished to become a writer in order to be independent of her father. Winston (it should not be forgotten that he was born and raised in the Victorian era) told her that a better occupation for women was to ‘please and inspire the male sex’.

  She had since sculpted Winston,‡‡‡ and among her other sitters were such prominent men and women as Guglielmo Marconi, Lord Asquith, Gladys Cooper, H.G. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Lord Birkenhead (Winston’s best friend, F.E. Smith) and Marie of Romania. Clare had been widowed in 1915, just days after the birth of her son,§§§ and set to work as a war widow to support her children. After the war she became a tireless traveller on her motorcycle and wrote books about these travels in Russia, Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Turkey, and her adventurous and unusual life, during which she spent several months living with American Indian tribes. She had a much-publicised love affair with Charli
e Chaplin and the two notoriously camped out together in California with her small son, Dickie, until they were discovered by Chaplin’s fans. When asked by the press if it was usual in England for married women to take lovers, she replied frivolously that it was. ‘As many as they can get,’ she added, which caused outrage. Winston’s great friend the financier Bernard Baruch took her aside and explained that she couldn’t behave so flippantly in America and keep her reputation intact. Dickie was sent to England with a nanny to stay with the Churchills, and Clare went to Mexico.

  During the summer of 1920 a Russian trade delegation on a visit to London invited Clare to travel to Russia to make busts of their senior revolutionaries. Subsequently she sculpted Lenin (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1924), Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and Kamenev. It seems she took Winston’s early advice somewhat literally, for reputedly she slept with all of these sitters and was cited by Kamenev’s wife in their divorce. Among her best friends she numbered the Mountbattens and Lady Diana Cooper, Princess Margaret of Sweden and Vivien Leigh, none of whom apparently took her left-wing credentials too seriously. Certainly she was happy to enjoy Maxine’s capitalist luxury.

  When the Churchills returned home Winston felt a renewed vigour and wrote to Maxine telling her it was the first ‘really good rest’ he had enjoyed for a long time. ‘I do not know when I have had such a pleasant month.’17 He had noted, however, that Maxine was not her usual bouncy self, she had gained a great deal of weight now and had lost much of her old sparkle. He only hoped, he wrote, she had not tired herself out by entertaining them. Clare wrote to say that after their departure l’Horizon had filled up with its usual quota of guests, who were – she wrote – an odd mixture, and as well as good friends of Maxine from the old days included an Italian duchess who was very anti-British. Maxine could not bring herself to be rude to a guest, but took a little revenge by playing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ constantly on the gramophone. Eventually the duchess asked, ‘What is the name of this pretty tune?’ and Clare took huge pleasure in telling her. However, she reported fairly, the duchess was agreeable and funny as long as they kept off politics.