The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  One thing he noticed particularly was the absence of British aristocracy. ‘The most striking thing,’ Murphy wrote, ‘was the virtual extinction on this coast of the once-swarming British peer – a phenomenon so startling in scope as to recall the famous disappearance of the passenger pigeon.’4 He heard one middle-aged habituée of Eden Roc asking in irritation, as she looked around the crowded tables, ‘Who are these people? Where do they come from? I do not know a single one.’ The reporter thought this was a bit rich since he had already spotted in the last forty-eight hours Greta Garbo, Doris Duke (once the richest girl in the world, and in Antibes on honeymoon with her third husband), the ice-skater and movie star Sonja Henie, Woolworth’s heiress Barbara Hutton, Maurice Chevalier, Orson Welles and Eva Perón. Still, he understood what the woman meant: those who before the war were the ancien régime – the old rich families who owned the big villas behind Cannes and Antibes, or in Monte Carlo, who took suites in the Hôtel du Cap or the Carlton – were mostly missing. Only a few stalwarts such as Willie Maugham and the Windsors crept back to their villas to represent the old crowd and attempted to revive the villa life they had previously known. The new Riviera set – some felt – truly lived up to the old description of the Riviera, ‘a sunny place for shady people’.

  One former l’Horizon denizen who was not to be seen on the Riviera after the war was Doris Castlerosse. Following her divorce from Valentine, and Margot Flick Hoffman’s – after a remarkably short marriage – from her husband Dick, Doris and Margot had based themselves at Doris’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice for a year, before going to California in 1938.

  During his final trip to the United States before the war began, Randolph Churchill had met Doris in New York. By then she had ‘broken up’ with Margot and was at a loose end. Randolph thought she was not her usual high-spirited self, and some months later he mentioned this to his former adversary, Valentine Castlerosse. Valentine never stopped loving Doris: he couldn’t live with her, nor could he live without her. Since they parted he had kept a scrapbook into which he pasted every press cutting which mentioned her.

  By the time America entered the war at the end of 1941, Doris was at a low ebb, quite possibly suffering from mild depression. Her looks were fading and she was struggling financially; she had begun to pawn her best jewels in order to maintain her lifestyle. Early in 1942 Doris wrote to Valentine suggesting a rapprochement, and she subsequently received a cable from him, which led her to believe he would welcome her return. Berths on transatlantic crossings were severely restricted but with the help of influential friends in New York, one of whom was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s trusted adviser Harry Hopkins, Doris was able to see the President, and it appears she persuaded him that a very senior member of the British government wished her to return to England – possibly she used the magic name of Winston Churchill, who had recently been staying at the White House, or perhaps it was Beaverbrook’s name that was invoked. In any case, Doris was provided with a priority-passage document.

  Valentine met the boat train at Waterloo station. It was Private Lives all over again. Doris was dressed in the glamorous clothes of America that were not available in Britain, and wearing perfume – a product almost unobtainable outside black-market suppliers. In the darkness of the station Valentine was thrilled, and in the initial rapture of their reunion it seemed that they might indeed be able to recapture some of the romance of the early days of their marriage. But it was too much to hope for. By the end of dinner at the Dorchester both knew there was no going back. He was put off by the changes in her appearance; ten years older than when they divorced, she was no longer the old carefree Doris, and it showed. Doris quickly realised she had lost her power over him. When they parted at midnight Valentine put an end to any possibility of a reunion when he told her that he was on the verge of marrying Enid Furness, once rich and now dubbed ‘the penniless peeress’ by the press.

  When Doris crossed the Atlantic she had not been allowed to bring any money or valuables with her, and after Valentine departed she took stock of her situation. She had hoped they might remarry but now, without the possibility of Valentine’s financial support, she needed money to live. There was no question of raising any cash on the palazzo, for not only was it in occupied territory but after their break-up Margot had somehow tied up the deeds.§ The following day Doris sent a telegram to New York enquiring about selling her jewellery, which she had pawned some time before her departure, and suggested an arrangement where she could get the cash for it through a London associate of the jeweller.

  That evening as she walked along a hotel corridor she came face to face with an old acquaintance, an earl with whom she had once had a dalliance, who cut her dead but muttered aloud as they passed that she was a traitorous bitch. She was very upset about this incident, but worse was to come.

  Her telegram to New York had been intercepted by the Censor’s Office, and the next day Doris received a visit from two detectives, who pointed out to her that what she had done – effectively attempting to bring money into the country by subterfuge – was illegal, and under wartime legislation she could be arrested and jailed. She was very open with them about what she intended and what she had done, never dreaming that she had broken any laws, but after they left she panicked and telephoned friends, asking for a loan of five hundred pounds. Cash was in short supply in spring 1942, one of the darkest times of the war, but after she broke down sobbing one friend, a bookmaker, offered to lend her two hundred pounds and send it the following morning by messenger.

  When the messenger arrived at the Dorchester Doris did not answer her telephone or her door. Eventually the door was opened with a master key and Doris was found in bed, unconscious. There was an empty pill bottle on the side table. She was rushed to hospital and lived for a few days, with Valentine remaining at her bedside for most of the time. When she died he was distraught, blaming himself because he had refused to marry her. He went to stay with his biggest supporter; Beaverbrook thought that Doris was more likely to have been distressed by the visit of the detectives than by Valentine’s rebuff, but felt unable to tell his friend about this because of wartime security laws. Valentine blamed himself for the rest of his life for Doris’s suicide, after an inquest ruled she had died by her own hand from barbituric acid poisoning.

  The loss of former habitués did not unduly concern the flood of new visitors to the Riviera who, having come through the dark war years into the sunshine of peace, seemed determined to live by the motto ‘If you have money, why not enjoy it?’ They had come to eat lotus. Movie stars and would-be starlets flocked to the South of France, and many such as Tyrone Power found their way onto the terrace at Château de l’Horizon. The constant partying at the villa became too much for Norman Winston. He packed up and left Rosita to her guests. Thereafter, he was to be found each day lunching alone at Eden Roc. ‘It is not that I find it difficult to eat with 20 or 30 strangers,’ he complained. ‘And it is of no importance, probably, that I don’t know who they are, or my wife hasn’t the faintest idea who they are or how they got invited. The trouble is that they all know each other so damn well.’5

  Perhaps it was no surprise to find that Rosita had consulted a team of Riviera old-stagers regarding her guest lists: Elsa Maxwell, Sir Charles Mendl and ‘Scrap’ Schiaparelli were among her advisers, and they were some of those most frequently to be found, once again, at the Château de l’Horizon. But the greatest coup of the summer season was all Rosita’s own work. When the US aircraft carrier Leyte dropped anchor in Golfe Juan, she smartly despatched a motor boat out to the ship, bearing invitations for the admiral and senior officers to a series of lunches and dinners to introduce them to local society. For the ten days of their stay every day was a gala and in the evenings the tropical white naval uniforms lent an air of distinction to the cosmopolitan gatherings on the pool terrace overlooking the moonlit sea. Rosita’s reward was not only her increasing popularity, but access to an unlimited store of scarce A
merican cigarettes, smooth white bread baked aboard the ship and American ice cream.

  In turn, her American visitors were thrilled to be introduced to Prince Pierre of Monaco, who wore his jacket like a hussar’s cape across his shoulders. He was not the Prince of Monaco, of course – he was formerly Count Pierre de Polignac – but had attained his title when he married Princess Charlotte, only daughter of the Prince of Monaco, in 1920. It was a very romantic union but after a dozen years the marriage ended unhappily and his father-in-law told Pierre in undiplomatic language that if he ever set foot in his principality again he would call out the Monégasque army to deal with him.

  The handsome, slender and charming Pierre was not the only former prince to attend Rosita’s parties – the Duke of Windsor was seen one evening, although he was perhaps not treated with quite the same deference as in Maxine’s day. Nor was Pierre the only scion of the de Polignac family haunting the Riviera. Princess Ghislaine, wife of Prince Edmond de Polignac, was a frequent guest and became a close friend of Rosita.

  In the previous year Ghislaine, a long-legged, vivacious, blonde Parisienne, had met Duff Cooper, by now British ambassador to France, who was already involved with several mistresses.¶ This was clearly no obstacle to a new liaison, and Ghislaine was also involved elsewhere – with the Russian ambassador to France, in fact. After their first tryst Cooper had written about Ghislaine in his diary: ‘She is a girl after my own heart, good company, a formidable appetite for pleasure and no nonsense about love. She is 26 – has had four children, feels that she has done her duty, and is now determined to enjoy herself.’ One can sense him leering as he ends lasciviously, ‘I have no doubt she will succeed in doing so. I shall do my best to help her.’6

  Rosita took an instant liking to Ghislaine, who ‘knew everyone’, and invited her to travel home with the Winstons for Christmas and New Year and stay at their New York home. Rosita even paid for Ghislaine’s first-class cabin on the transatlantic crossing and bought her a wardrobe of Dior clothes styled in the New Look, which earned much notice in society columns. Unfortunately, Mr Winston also took a liking to Ghislaine, and on New Year’s Eve, when Rosita returned home from the beauty shop where she had been preparing for a party, she found her husband and Ghislaine flagrante delicto. The party went ahead as planned and Rosita regaled fellow guests with how she had pulled Ghislaine out of bed, kicked her out the door and told her to go back to France. Not surprisingly, the story got into the gossip columns with rumours that the Winstons were divorcing. Some days later Rosita found a note on her pillow which read ‘Are we, or are we not, living together?’ There was no divorce, but Rosita was quickly showered – according to Cecil Beaton – with ‘a great block of stocks, a platinum mink cape and some emeralds’.7

  At this point Maxine’s nieces decided that they would never be able to regard the Château de l’Horizon as home – it had been Maxine’s place and they felt it would be too uncomfortable for them to give orders in their formidable aunt’s house. So when the Winstons’ lease was up (the Ghislaine episode having ended their plans to buy) the villa was put up for auction. Before the auction could be held, however, it was bought in a private treaty sale by an agent operating through the Bank of England on behalf of anonymous bidder.

  The price paid was sixty-five thousand pounds,# and the buyer was Prince Aly Khan.8

  * A joke at the expense of the much-publicised Marshall Plan, which would allocate over twelve billion dollars to rebuild and modernise Western Europe.

  † $1000 tO $1500 (now $I3,345–$20,020).

  ‡ The Bon Auberge and Château Madrid.

  § The property eventually reverted to Doris’s estate and was sold by her heirs to Peggy Guggenheim in 1948.

  ¶ Among them the socialite Gloria Rubio Alatorre and Louise ‘Loulou’ Lévêque de Vilmorin, Countess Pälffy. Diana Cooper knew about her husband’s serial affairs, and once when asked by her son if she minded she replied that she did, but that they were just the flowers while she was the tree.

  # Now £2.3 million, but houses of a similar size in that location fetch £10 million and more.

  12

  Prince Aly Khan

  Château de l’Horizon was sold more or less as Maxine left it, discounting the wartime depredations. Before the sale Aly Khan, accompanied by his long-time chauffeur and bodyguard Emrys Williams, had gone looking for ‘a cottage near the sea’ and had looked over a number of suitable properties in what was then a buyer’s market. They were shown over Château de l’Horizon by Maxine’s former chauffeur, the blond-haired Jules, who on behalf of Maxine’s nieces had looked after the villa during the war whenever possible, and ever since. ‘He told us some amusing stories about the fabulous parties which had taken place at the château in the pre-war times [and] pointed out a rock,’ Emrys Williams recalled, ‘where he had ... seen Winston Churchill at work ... painting. It obviously gave him pleasure to talk about the past.’1

  Although the property had been swept of landmines before Rosita Winston had rented it, nothing had been done to tidy the formerly pristine grounds. The rocky garden areas stretching along the coast on either side of the villa, which once had neat little winding paths beneath the umbrella pines, leading to secluded areas to sit on a rock and watch the sea in solitude, had become a haven for feral cats: dozens were living among the overgrown shrubs, weeds, detritus and litter left by a company of Polish soldiers who occupied l’Horizon for a few months after the Sixth Army moved out. The swimming pool had been cleaned, but was unused for a massive crack had appeared in it. The white marble in the hall had, inexplicably, been covered with brown paint by the Germans, and in many of the bedrooms the walls were flaking or peeling, and covered in mildew after rainwater had seeped through the damaged roof.

  As Aly Khan toured the property and the problems revealed themselves Emrys Williams assumed that it would be rejected because of its poor condition, but strangely Prince Aly seemed unconcerned. Instead, he ‘grew more and more excited’, Hughes recalled, as his employer went from room to room. ‘It’s wonderful. Wonderful!’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise how beautiful it was. I’m going to buy it ... Just think how marvellous my pictures will look in this house. The Matisse – the Murillos – the Dufy, and the Picassos. It’s the perfect home for them ... I’ve made up my mind. I must have this place.’ Emrys Williams, who could see only the amount of work needed, wrote that he could hardly believe his ears.2 He was right to be wary – it would ultimately cost the Prince more than the purchase price to refurbish the villa.

  As soon as the sale was finalised Aly and Williams began by removing most of Maxine’s furniture. Helped by Jules and a few of Aly’s friends who were shanghaied into a work party, the men scrubbed the hall with caustic soda to remove the brown paint from the marble. When they had cleaned everything to Aly’s satisfaction a team of thirty Italians was hired to redecorate, and to repair all the walls and the roof. Step by step the villa began to come back to life. A set of everyday’ crockery was made to Aly’s own design at the Vallauris Ramie pottery (famous for Picasso’s input). From the gardens at Maisons-Laffitte,* where his wife Princess Joan was living with their two sons,† a statue of Hercules was brought to Cannes and sited on a mount to the left of the drive so that it could be viewed to advantage against the clear Mediterranean sky. Furniture was acquired from all over Europe in a mad spending spree. With almost limitless funds – or at least limitless credit – Aly was intent on creating a perfect bachelor residence.

  The Louis Quinze table which graced the dining room in Maxine’s day was replaced with a 15ft slab of flawless polished Carrara marble set on gilded supports. The old English School paintings were auctioned and replaced with Aly’s treasured collection of Impressionists. Most visitors who saw l’Horizon at this point described it as ‘fabulous’ and ‘luxurious’, but at least one regular guest thought that despite all the comfort it was rather ‘a funny house, very big and like a hotel in that there is nothing lying about – no sign of a
n owner’s mark on it’.3

  *

  Aly had seen little of his father during the war because the Aga Khan had moved to Switzerland in 1940 with his third wife, the Princess Andrée, and their son Sadruddin. It was a luxurious haven for them, of course; the Aga already owned a huge chalet in Gstaad and the couple spent winters at St Moritz, where he took half of one of the floors of the prestigious Palace Hotel. There was an apartment for himself, with quarters for his valet and male secretary, and another suite of rooms, known as the family apartment, for Andrée and six-year-old Sadruddin. Various additional rooms accommodated their entourage. The Aga never entered the family apartment, which was the equivalent of harem quarters: Andrée always came to him when they met. Sadruddin – known as Sadri – saw his father every morning for English conversation and to play games such as backgammon and chess. It is impossible not to notice how different Sadruddin’s childhood was from that of Aly, with Sadruddin given so much attention by his father. In the summer, the Aga spent his afternoons playing golf and enjoying whatever social life he could find. It was not what he wanted – he enjoyed politics and hobnobbing with world leaders – but it was the best arrangement he could manage given the times.