The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  Clare continued her gossip to amuse Winston: Mary Herbert¶¶¶ had lost three thousand pounds, a huge amount of money, at the Casino and the caisse was asked not to extend her any further credit so she had been obliged to leave early. But as for Maxine, she ‘was very sad after you left ... seeming comatose and uninterested in daily life, but Winnie Portarlington forced her to live on 2 bananas a day and a glass of milk for a week, which did much good’.18 Lady Portarlington### had seen Maxine through depressions in the past. Now she tried to keep her old friend buoyed up with the latest gossip, and the news that, having leased a house in Versailles next door to Lady Mendl’s Villa Trianon, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had also finally signed a two-year lease on Château de la Croë on Cap d’Antibes, to begin in May.

  The narrow winding road that led from Cap d’Antibes to La Croë ended in a cul-de-sac. On the promontory itself there were only three other houses: the Aga Khan’s Villa Jean-Andrée, formerly the Villa Taormina, which he had rebuilt and renamed in 1929 for his third wife; Sir Henry**** and Lady Norman’s Château La Garoupe; and the Château Eilenroc, which was then unoccupied. All were grand, and like La Croë protected from sightseers by huge park-like grounds. La Croë was a typically Mediterranean mansion, white with green shutters and a red-tiled roof. Set in twelve acres of cool woodland and lawns, and facing the sea over some rocks, no other house could be seen from its windows. Apart from yachts which sailed past the Cap between the town of Antibes and Juan-les-Pins, the Duke and Duchess hoped they would be untroubled there by outsiders.

  Wallis immediately threw herself into an orgy of decoration and furnishings. They had planned to be in Paris during the spring months to begin setting up a permanent residence there, but they received orders from the Palace – through the British Embassy – that they must not be in Paris when the King and Queen made their state visit to the French capital;†††† it was strongly recommended to them that they should return to the Riviera.

  Before his marriage, as the Prince of Wales and later as King, the Duke had devoted a great deal of his energy to creating a beloved private home, Fort Belvedere. The romantic small fortress, which dated from 1703, was set in woodland at Virginia Water, near Windsor, and had been given to him by his father. He had spent tens of thousands of pounds of his own money on ‘the Fort’, and one of the few favours the Duke asked of his brother, the new King, was that it remain his own property after the abdication. This favour was, he thought, granted. However, the Fort was soon emptied of the Duke’s personal belongings, which were sent into store at Frogmore House in Windsor Great Park. Many of these furnishings, paintings, silver, porcelain and crystal were now transported to La Croë, where the Duchess was spending huge sums to recreate the conditions to which her husband was accustomed in royal palaces. Wallis had known the Fort intimately for some years while she was the King’s mistress, because it was the place he did most of his private entertaining, so she knew exactly how she wanted the house to look.

  La Croë was built around a huge central hall leading off to wide lofty rooms, all richly furnished, ‘a dream-like place, cool, serene and aloof’, the Duke’s secretary recalled. As you entered the front door,’she wrote,

  you found yourself looking straight across the whole length of the house and through the tall French windows at the back onto the woods and lawns beyond the terrace. On the right of the hall, suspended from the lower gallery, its rich red and gold colours softly floodlit, was the Duke’s banner from the Chapel of Knights of the Garter in St George’s Chapel at Windsor ... antique chairs had red leather seats and black and gold backs ... The broad terrace, facing the sea, ran the whole length of the house ... The great rooms were French in character. The high ceilings and walls were elaborately moulded in white and gold. Tall mirrored doors, standing always open, led from one room to another and looking-glass covered some of the panelling.19

  There were huge mirrors above the great fireplaces and Wallis used mirrors with skill, reflecting objects back and forth, creating effects of light and space. 'Mirrors delighted her, the description continued. ‘As she walked about La Croë she would glance in the glass-covered panels ... and if she stood talking to you her eyes would often wander away to the nearest mirror, so noticeably that some of her friends called her “Wallis through the Looking Glass” ... It had the charming appearance of an English country house in a French setting ... It was all done in a remarkably short time causing Rebecca West to comment admiringly, “There are not many women ... who can pick up the keys to a rented house, raddled by long submission to temporary inmates, and make it look as if a family of good taste had been living there for two or three centuries.’”20 Wallis had the assistance of two ‘interior’ experts, Lady Sybil Colefax and Lady Mendl, but she also had innate good taste.

  When it was completed the Duchess held sumptuous receptions at La Croë, with the help of thirty-three uniformed employees – peculiarly, they were all blond-haired – all trained to treat the Duke as if he were still King.21 Those who visited recall how the Duke adopted full Highland dress at dinner: kilt, jabot, sporran, and a sgian duhh tucked into his stocking. His kilt, or as a member of his French staff called it, ‘his little skirt’, was in Balmoral tartan. One guest – Debo, the Duchess of Devonshire – wondered how he could stand it in the climate. Pipers after dinner were a regular feature, and she recalled that it was a goosebump-provoking experience to be sitting over drinks on the terrace on a balmy night, looking over the sea, to hear the faint skirl of pipes as the pipers marched up from the woods towards the house – all the same, she thought, ‘it was all probably more suited to the misty glens of Scotland than Antibes in high summer’.22

  By the swimming pool there were wicker chairs with black cushions and a large white and red tent which flew the Prince of Wales standard and acted as a changing room. This pennant mirrored the Garter standard which hung in the entrance hall. The Duke told Harold Nicolson, who was a guest in August 1938, that when he became King there was no Prince of Wales, so the standard was taken down. He therefore saw no reason why he shouldn’t use it at La Croë. ‘I saw why,’ wrote Nicolson. ‘But he didn’t. It is his insensitiveness to such things which brought on all the trouble.’23

  *

  One regular Château de l’Horizon guest was missing from the Riviera that autumn: Doris Castlerosse. Margot Flick Hoffman had kept her promise to buy Doris a Venetian palazzo in return for introductions and presented her with the delightful single-storey Palazzo Venier dei Leoni which had formerly belonged to the Marchesa Casati and would in turn become Peggy Guggenheim’s European home. Margot and Doris spent a year there, during which time Doris’s brother‡‡‡‡ and his bride visited them, only to find the palazzo deserted when they arrived, but with all the doors open. They discovered a bedroom with the bed made up and retired. At 4 a.m. they were woken by a full orchestra playing music in their room – Doris had been at a party and had suddenly recalled they were due to arrive, so she gathered up the orchestra and brought them home to welcome the newlyweds.

  Looking back from the twenty-first century we can see that the enticing frivolity and sheer glamour of life on the Riviera in those sunlit, apparently carefree days of the late Thirties – when Elsa Maxwell, Mrs Laura Corrigan, Lady Mendl, Daisy Fellowes and others (including Maxine) vied for the informal title ‘Hostess with the Mostest’§§§§ and beauties drifted around in silk pyjama suits – seems even more alluring when viewed against the shadow of the approaching war. But the recipients of the lavish entertainment, who danced and sunbathed and swam and gambled in the sun, were unable to see this. It was all, to quote one of the most enthusiastic participants, Cole Porter, ‘delightful... delicious ... de-lovely’.

  Another song that owes its inspiration to the Riviera is Noël Coward’s ‘I Went to a Marvellous Party’, which describes five parties he attended in 1938. The first was a beach party given by Elsa Maxwell, and another a come-as-you-are-party’ to which he and the actress Beatrice Lillie wen
t casually dressed, only to find that everyone else was wearing full evening fig. When he performed the song Noël always spoke ‘Elsie’s’ line with an American accent: it is safe to assume he meant Elsie de Wolfe.

  We talked about growing old gracefully

  And Elsie who’s seventy-four

  Said, A, it’s a question of being sincere,

  And B, if you’re supple you’ve nothing to fear.’

  Then she swung upside down from a glass chandelier,

  I couldn’t have liked it more.

  Most members of the Riviera set read the same daily news as Winston, but they assumed Germany was no significant immediate threat to their lifestyle, while Winston, though fully enjoying the dinners, lunches, parties, casinos and performing parrots, could plainly see the growing danger. On his journey to Maxine’s he had stopped in Paris to dine with the former Prime Minister of France, Pierre Flandin.¶¶¶¶ It was not a pleasant evening, he reported to Clementine: Flandin had been most depressing and pessimistic, and he (Winston) had come away seriously concerned about what he had heard. It appeared that the French right-wing administration assumed Germany would become undisputed ruler of Europe in the near future, and it all stemmed, Winston wrote, from the fact that Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and John Simon ‘would neither make friends with Germany nor prevent her re-arming’.24 He thought that a thousand years in the future historians would look askance at the fact that the victorious allies of the First World War had so meekly delivered themselves up to a vengeful enemy whom they had once overcome.

  * He succeeded to the throne on 20 January 1936 as Edward VIII.

  † The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936.

  ‡ Wife of a billionaire American steel magnate who bought her way into English society in the Twenties by renting the Keppels’ London house at a huge rent, and giving away costly ‘prizes’ such as gold cigarette cases at her fabled parties. She was uneducated and notorious for her malapropisms, but she was a kind person and never nasty to anyone.

  § William Rootes (later ist Baron Rootes), founder of the Coventry Rootes manufacturing group which produced Hillman, Humber, Singer, Sunbeam and Talbot cars.

  ¶ Lord Berners was renowned for his waspish humour and exotic way of life: guests were summoned to dinner by a music box; the doves in his dovecote were dyed many and various colours so that in flight they looked like a handful of confetti. Nancy Mitford parodied him as her fictional Lord Merlin. In 1942 Heber Percy married a woman he had impregnated and all three lived at Berners’s Faringdon House. It was an unusual ménage, but Berners was kind to Heber Percy’s wife and treated her as a daughter-in-law until the divorce in 1947. Berners left his estate to Heber Percy.

  # Before the diluting influence of television, daily newspapers were hugely powerful. The Express was the first paper to reach a circulation of two million.

  ** Château de St Georges Motel.

  †† Katherine had known Wallis since 1918, when they were young navy wives in San Diego. Widowed, she married millionaire Herman Rogers who worked for the State Department and while on transfer in China she met Wallis again. Herman retired to the South of France aged thirty-five to write ‘the great American novel’ (he never did).

  ‡‡ In fact they were very rich, although all of their properties in Austria were subsequently confiscated by the Nazis.

  §§ Sybil, Lady Colefax, was a socialite and in the Thirties became an acclaimed interior decorator with her business partner John Fowler. The firm remains a favourite for redecorating English country houses.

  ¶¶ Charles Bedaux invented a time and motion study called the Bedaux system. His promotion of it to international big businesses earned him a substantial fortune (he was the fifth richest man in America at one point), but also the hatred of trade unions. During the Second World War he collaborated with the Germans and made a fortune. In 1944 he was arrested in Algeria by the US Army while constructing a pipeline for the Germans. He was charged with treason and committed suicide while awaiting trial.

  ## Sister of Cimmie Mosley.

  *** Margot Flick, a noted polo player and pilot, had married Richard Sanford Hoffman, a writer, in February 1936.

  ††† ‘Geordie’, the 5th Duke of Sutherland, son of Maxine’s beloved friend Millicent from the Hartsbourne days.

  ‡‡‡ And would do so again in 1942-3 in a famous wartime ‘bulldog pose.

  §§§ Richard Sheridan; he died aged twenty of peritonitis, in 1936 in Algeria. Clare’s daughter Elizabeth died in 1914, also of peritonitis.

  ¶¶¶ Mary Herbert, Baroness von Hügel (1849-1935), wife of the theologian and Austrian ambassador Friedrich von Hügel; daughter of the ist Baron Herbert of Lea.

  ### Winnifreda Yuill, the Countess of Portarlington. A lady-in-waiting to Princess Marina, the wife of George, Duke of Kent (youngest son of King George V).

  **** Sir Henry Norman, Bt (1858-1939) was a retired journalist and Liberal politician.

  †††† Winston and Clementine were part of the royal entourage for this state visit. Although Winston’s image at home was tarnished he was well-regarded in France.

  ‡‡‡‡ Edward ‘Dudley’ Delevigne. His second wife was Angela Greenwood, daughter of the Tory MP Hamar Greenwood (created Viscount Greenwood, 1937).

  §§§§ Maxine would not have agreed that she vied for this she thought it was hers by right.

  ¶¶¶¶ Pierre Étienne Flandin, French conservative politician and Prime Minister of France November 1934–May 1935.

  8

  Final Fling

  Politically, relationships in Europe grew steadily worse during 1938. Within weeks of Winston’s return from Cannes in early February Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, resigned his office in protest against Neville Chamberlain’s wish to try to renegotiate with Mussolini. Soon afterwards, in mid-March, following his triumphal state visit to Italy which served to demonstrate the strength of the German-Italian Axis, Hitler marched into Vienna and annexed Austria in the Anschluss.

  In June Germany imposed anti-Jewish laws requiring Austrian Jews to register all property, at home and abroad, within a few weeks. The following month, in order to emphasise Anglo-French unity, and as a belated response to Hitler’s visit to Rome, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth made a second state visit to Paris. Then in August, while negotiations continued in Prague between Czechoslovakia and Sudeten Germans, Germany called up three-quarters of a million troops for an unprecedented series of military manoeuvres. In response, the British government announced the mobilisation of the Royal Navy by September, and warned that the British would not back down over Czechoslovakian interests as they had done over Poland.

  That summer some of Maxine’s family came to stay, among them her niece Blossom with her husband, the British aircraft designer and manufacturer F.G. Miles. The talk on the terrace turned to investment, and Fred Miles suggested to Maxine that as Rolls-Royce was seriously expanding into aircraft engine production they would probably make a good investment. Maxine shook her head shrewdly. When the war came, she said, any assets in England would be frozen. She intended to keep her assets in America, although she made it clear she was not to be persuaded to leave the Château de l’Horizon.

  In August 1938 the Windsors, who had already decided to purchase Château de la Croë, dined at La Mauresque with Somerset Maugham and his daughter Liza Paravicini. Although things looked decidedly grim in Europe, Maugham wrote in his memoir Strictly Personal, at this time that he still believed, as most people did, that the British and French had great armies and if the time came for them to fight they would acquit themselves ‘valiantly’. So on the Riviera life went on as before. Harold Nicolson was staying at La Mauresque when the Windsors visited. ‘I am glad I came here,’ he wrote in a letter to Vita Sackville-West. ‘It really is the perfect holiday. I mean, the heat is intense, the garden lovely, the chair long and cool, the lime-juice at hand, a bathing-pool there if one wishes to splash, scenery, books, gramophones, pretty people –
and above all, the sense that it is not going on too long.’ 1

  He described how in the soft warm evening he had sat alone by the swimming pool among the banks of red and white oleander in the pink dusk and watched the sun set over Cap d’ Antibes until the lighthouses began to wink across the purple water. Then he had to go and bathe and change to greet the Windsors, having been warned by Maugham that the Duke became cross if the Duchess was not treated with respect, and there was the usual discussion about how to address her.

  In they came . . . she has done her hair in a different way ... it gives her a placid less strained look . .. He entered with his swinging naval gait, plucking at his bow tie. He had on a tussore dinner-jacket. He was in very high spirits. Cocktails were brought and we stood around the fireplace. There was a pause. ‘I am sorry we were a little late,’ said the Duke, ‘but Her Royal Highness couldn’t drag herself away.’ He had said it. The three words fell into the circle like three stones into a pool. Her (gasp) Royal (shudder) Highness (and not one eye dared to meet another) . . . They called each other ‘Darling’ a great deal. I called him ‘Your Royal Highness’ . . . and ‘Sir’ the whole time. I called her ‘Duchess’. One cannot get away from his glamour and his charm and his sadness, though.2