The Windsors continued to meet Jimmy Donahue socially but as the scales fell from their eyes they became increasingly disillusioned with him and began to find fault. It started with small things: the Duke was irritated by the smell of Jimmy’s breath after eating garlic, and the Duchess would correct Jimmy’s stories. She was, after all, a frequent dining companion of world leaders and some of the most powerful men on the planet, and Donahue sometimes spoke nonsense. Things came to a head at a spa in Baden-Baden in 1954, when they were dining together. Wallis disagreed with something Jimmy said and he retaliated by kicking her ankle under the table, so hard that he drew blood and she cried out in distress. The Duke threw down his napkin and helped his wife to a nearby sofa before coldly turning to Jimmy. ‘We’ve had enough of you, Jimmy,’ he said firmly. ‘Clear off.’ And Jimmy did. They never saw him or Jessie Donahue again.
Twelve years later, aged fifty, Jimmy Donahue was found dead in his apartment, having choked to death on his own vomit after a session of drink and Seconal. The only pictures in his bedroom were a dozen framed photographs of Wallis.
The Donahue incident was the nearest thing to a rift between the Duke and Wallis, and it was soon healed. They sold La Croë to Stavros Niarchos shortly before the Baden-Baden incident, having decided to make Paris their main domicile. Thereafter, their stays on the Riviera would be in rented villas. Soon after their move to Paris, on their eighteenth wedding anniversary, the Duke told Gaston Palewski that he doubted a happier couple existed than he and the Duchess.
* Sister-in-law to the late Kick Kennedy, Debo died in October 2014 while this book was being written.
† Harold Macmillan was married to Dorothy Cavendish, aunt to Debo s husband Andrew, the 10th Duke of Devonshire.
‡ The others were Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal, Madame Martinez de Hoz and her sister Diana Mosley.
§ The owner, Paul-Louis Weiller, millionaire owner of Air France, also owned and financed Le Petit Trianon, the exquisite house in Versailles occupied by the Mendls. In fact, he owned dozens of houses and apartments in Paris and was known for helping displaced and exiled royals and others, who in return made his place in society by attending his parties. He was said to be so boring that if he had not done this no one would have ever accepted his invitations; he is known as ‘poor Louis’ in the published correspondence between Diana Cooper and Evelyn Waugh.
¶ The police saw how the burglary had been effected and suspected a well-known local cat burglar, but they were unable to find sufficient evidence to make the charge stick.
# A barbiturate known as ‘seccies’ or ‘red dolls’ by recreational users. Judy Garland’s autopsy found she had overdosed on Seconal.
** A Kings Story (1951). The Duke was not the ‘onlie begetter’ – he was assisted by a ghost writer, Charles Murphy, who later wrote his own version with additional information he had gleaned during his work.
†† Anne Seagrim, personal secretary to the Duke of Windsor from 1950. Later she was secretary to C. P. Snow and latterly administrator of the Winston Churchill Trust. She admired Wallis as charming, witty ... and very intelligent... There was nothing of the grasping harsh scheming woman one heard so much about.’ See Daily Telegraph obituary, 19 August 2011.
17
Changes
The break-up of Aly Khan’s marriage, along with the disappearance from the Cote d’Azur of Rita Hayworth and – effectively – the Windsors, marked the changing dynamics of Riviera Society in the Fifties. There were other losses too, of personalities guaranteed to liven a dinner table such as Duff and Diana Cooper.
Duff had spent three highly successful years as the first post-war British ambassador to France, when he and Diana were parodied fondly but mercilessly by their friend Nancy Mitford in her novels about society life in Paris. The post had earned Duff a knighthood in 1948, and he spent the next six years writing. His biggest success was his autobiography, Old Men Forget,and in 1952 he was created Viscount Norwich for his political and literary work. His wife, saying that the title sounded too much like porridge’, advertised in the newspapers that she wished still to be known as Lady Diana Cooper.
*
Winston Churchill, back in power since 1951, had weathered several strokes since the first at Max Beaverbrook’s Villa La Capponcina in 1949. The worst of these – again kept secret from the British public – occurred in London in June 1953, shortly after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. In September that year Winston again stayed at Cap d’Ail where, apart from a few trips to Monte Carlo, he did very little other than work on an important speech. Once again the Riviera climate worked its magic and he slowly regained his health.
Beaverbrook allowed Winston to treat the villa as his own and invite whomever he wished. These were mainly old friends such Daisy Fellowes, widowed now, for her husband – Winston’s fun-loving and extraordinarily complaisant cousin Reggie – had died in 1953 after years in a wheelchair following a stroke, nursed admirably by Daisy. The couple had suffered a deep trauma in the post-war years. Daisy’s daughter from her first marriage, the Princess Jacqueline Marguerite de Broglie, had worked for the French Resistance, and in 1941 married an engineer called Alfred Kraus following a hasty wartime romance. Kraus was subsequently found to have been an important Abwehr agent, and in 1945 was accused of betraying members of Jacqueline’s cell in order to protect her. He was interned before eventual repatriation, but Jacqueline was apprehended by a mob and had her head shaved as punishment. Daisy’s self-confessed feelings of shame over this did not change her habits: she continued to throw impressive parties in Paris and entertain on the Riviera at Les Zoraides where the luncheon menu seldom varied – Churchill’s secretary noted that even in August it was Vodka, more vodka, caviar and grouse’.1
Winston was understandably most comfortable with old friends around him, but he found few survivors now from the old Maxine days. His friend Consuelo Balsan – née Vanderbilt, and the former wife of Winston’s cousin and best friend of his youth, Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough – now owned a hilltop mansion in Provence and adored Winston’s occasional visits. And Willie Somerset Maugham was still around for luncheons with stimulating conversation. It all helped his recovery, and on his return to England in November 1953, Winston delivered an uplifting speech to the Conservative Annual Conference at Margate. He even injected some off-the-cuff humour, and showed no sign of reduced faculties. Throughout the summer there had been considerable press speculation about his health and capability to continue in office, but his dazzling rabbit out of the hat performance at Margate put an end to it; Winston was nearly eighty, but he was able to demonstrate that he was still a force to be reckoned with, and he also knew that in a matter of weeks he would be back in the warmth of his beloved Côte d’Azur.
New personalities had appeared on the Riviera to replace absent friends. The Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis became a prominent face; he based himself in Monte Carlo and entertained grandly on his yacht. His wife Athina (Tina) was the daughter of the ship owner Stavros G. Livanos, a Greek traditionalist who disliked Onassis and his business methods, and they had two children, Alexander and Christina (for whom he named his yacht).
The Christina O was the most luxurious yacht on the Riviera. A converted Canadian wartime frigate with a top cruising speed of eighteen knots, she carried a twin-engine amphibious plane as well as several pleasure boats for guests to use. Air-conditioned throughout, she boasted gold taps shaped like dolphins, her own hospital and laundry, telephones in every stateroom, and a swimming pool tiled with a fresco copied from the Palace of Knossos in Crete that could be emptied and the base hydraulically lifted to provide a dance floor. The beautifully appointed salon boasted an El Greco* as well as one of Winston’s landscapes, and there were valuable works of art dotted throughout the ship. Few people ever refused an invitation to cruise on the Christina, including Winston Churchill and Aly Khan.
After Rita Hayworth’s departure, Aly regularly featured in newspapers escorting
a chain of beautiful women including Joan Fontaine. At a ball thrown by Jacques Fath he danced with Pam Churchill for the entire evening. Rita had started formal divorce proceedings and she went on record in the newspapers announcing that while she loved Aly he didn’t understand family life and thought only of gambling, horse racing and big-game hunting. ‘He is a playboy,’ she stated, ‘while I work all the year round in Hollywood.’2 When she got home after work, Rita continued, she didn’t want to have to share it with eighty of Aly’s friends ‘of all kinds, coming and going’. She neglected to explain her chief complaint, that they were mostly women friends, or that during the Cannes Festival that year his visitors had regularly included Gina Lollobrigida, Yvonne de Carlo and the Greek actress Irene Papas. Irene Papas once said that her affair with Aly had set her career as a serious actress back by ten years.3
Aly did not sleep with every woman who visited the villa, of course, but he never turned down an opportunity either. And it must be said that the women he invited to stay were often long-legged and spectacularly lovely. He was coupled that year with the Folies Bergère star Mistinguett, and Zsa Zsa Gabor who was in Paris that year (1954) to make the movie Moulin Rouge. There was considerable press interest in his relationship with Lise Bourdin, a gorgeous French actress and singer. The ingénue Lise assumed that staying at the Château de l’Horizon and sleeping with Aly meant she was engaged to him. Indeed she announced this in a press statement, but she was speedily disillusioned.
Debo, the young Duchess of Devonshire, spent a few weeks each year at the Château de l’Horizon in Aly’s time, usually accompanied by one of her female friends as a chaperone because the Duke was working as part of Princess Margaret’s train. Half a century later Debo would recall that Aly was frequently absent during these visits, but that his house-guests were free to wallow in the luxury he provided, supervised by his ‘sweet’ Italian uncle, a secretary and an excellent chef. Debo wrote home to her mother about her trips in a series of letters, several of which have been compressed here:4
Aly has got a lovely new boat, we spent the day in it yesterday and went to St Tropez ... This house is ... so quiet after Cannes which is stuffed full of [tourists] with huge cars. Here we have the sea under our windows and the pool as well; one can bathe in the night – it’s all so lovely and warm ... it’s a sort of dotty dream world here, with everything almost too easy ... I do love the change of food and company, but I couldn’t stay up so late for very long. One needn’t get up in the mornings though, so it comes to the same thing in the end ... one might as well throw away one’s watch – the disregard of time is something chronic ... Everyone is incredibly late; we sat down to lunch today at a quarter to 3 and dinner is out at a restaurant at about 10 p.m. – we go to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning but as the restaurants and night clubs are all out of doors it isn’t half so tiring as when one’s eyes are filled with smoke ...
The Château de l’Horizon was invariably filled with an eclectic mixture of visitors and callers which amused Debo: ‘A lot of frogs have come this morning to make a bit of a film,’ she wrote one day. ‘I can watch it from my balcony, all taking hours, with the star sitting looking cross in a hairnet.’
During a March 1954 visit she wrote that there was ‘a very odd collection of people ... a Frog general, [an] Irish Stud manager, and some of the Marquis de Cueva’s ballet dancers, all very nice, but all complete opposites and yet they all seem to get on all right, even though the ballet ones can’t speak English.’
Debo was often provided with one of Aly’s sports cars to enable her to shop in Cannes, visit local gardens to get ideas for Chatsworth or to tour the area. When Aly was in residence he took her to the ballet, or sometimes to the Casino in Monte Carlo which didn’t appeal to her, or to Yakymour to see his father:
We’ve twice been to the Aga’s. Goodness he is sweet. The Begum is a giantess, quite friendly, with a ghastly common secretary-companion ... I want to laugh every time she speaks ... Oh ... the Aga!The utter sweetness, I worship him; I will become a Believer ... He tells gossip of 50-60 years ago, and says [about Debo’s long-dead grandfather and uncles] things like ‘he was in the 4th, or was it the 10th?’ and expects one to know, although the person has always been dead for at least 40 years. Aly and the Begum can’t stick each other, one can see.
The old Aga was very unhappy with Aly over his frequent appearances in the newspapers with ‘unsuitable’ women; he felt very strongly that this was not the right image for a man widely regarded as heir presumptive to the title of Imam of the Ismailis.
Aly had by now become deeply involved with another beautiful screen goddess. This time it was Gene Tierney, whom he had met while on a bloodstock buying and selling trip in Argentina, where she was making the movie of the Gaucho. Gene had a string of successes behind her and was best known for her portrayal of the character Laura in the film of the same name. She was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in Leave Her to Heaven and had starred in a series of other well-known and still-loved movies such as Heaven can Wait, The Ghost and Mrs Muir and Ће Mating Season. Her high cheekbones were somehow emphasised by the shadows created by black-and-white movies and gave her an ethereal, aristocratic look. She and Aly fell for each other at their first meeting and, as always, Aly quickly monopolised her.
The Aga and the Begum looked upon this latest of Aly’s exploits with deepening disproval. At Aly’s flamboyant New Year’s Eve party held in Cannes the Aga was horrified to find that a pile of cotton wool balls were provided on each table for guests to soak in champagne and throw at each other. Aly had never been allowed to get as close to his father as young Sadruddin, and when he stood and laughingly pelted the elderly nobleman with soaked ‘snowballs’ he was evidently unable to see his father’s distress. At midnight Aly publicly demonstrated his affection for Gene Tierney with a passionate kiss in the middle of the dance floor, and the Aga was heard to complain to the Begum that he – who had been the friend of Queen Victoria, who had dined with every crowned head and world leader in the twentieth century – was now subjected to this vulgarity by his son.
The Aga Khan had had his own affaires du cœur – quite a few of them, in fact – but all his ladies were dealt with according to a strict set of belle-époque rules and rewarded appropriately when the affair ended; some were regarded as old friends. Even after he married the Begum, he enjoyed the odd dalliance, but discretion was his watchword. Few if any of these romances ever reached the newspapers.
There was an immense charm and an old-world courtly manner about the Aga, which Debo witnessed and was captivated by. He was a kind and gentle man with a wonderful magnetism. His attitude towards the opposite sex was that of a man who adored women, and he invariably treated them as though they were special, fragile, beloved creatures.
Perhaps this characteristic is best illustrated by the story of Heather Manchester,† who met the Aga in the early Fifties, when he was in his seventies. She was twenty and only recently married when her husband was sent to a Swiss clinic for the treatment of acute bronchitis. She had gone to stay at the Hotel Royal in San Remo, a venerable old Riviera hotel, much patronised in its heyday by European royalty. It was just across the Italian border and located where Heather could easily visit her husband if needed. She was nominally chaperoned by her aunt and uncle who, however, preferred the much livelier social scene at Nice’s Hôtel Negresco some twenty miles away, so Heather was left alone at the Royal, which in the off-season was almost empty and very quiet.
Wishing to let her mother know she had arrived safely, she dressed quickly in the clothes she had worn while travelling the previous day and went down to the reading room to write a postcard. ‘Consequently,’ she said, ‘I looked like a ragbag.’ There was only one other occupant of the reading room and she recognised him instantly as the Aga Khan, famous to her as the owner of numerous Derby winners. With the confidence of youth she pretended not to know who he was, or to withdraw, and a relationship developed between them. After that, they
met in the reading room every morning for about a month, and spent from breakfast until lunchtime chatting and laughing, he teasing her gently.
He was multi-lingually fluent, and for a man who had had four wives, and was reputed to have several mistresses, he seemed remarkably unsure of himself with a woman ... Initially I think he was shyer than I was. He always referred to me as ‘La petite madame’ but within a few days we had drawn closer to each other than I have ever felt to anyone in my life. When I left him I was always fizzing. I have never felt anything like it before or since.5
Curiously, she had already met Aly, while on honeymoon in Paris. Heather and her bridegroom had gone out to dine on a stormy winter night at an exclusive new restaurant and found only one other couple dining – it was Aly and Rita, and Aly, his leg in plaster after his skiing accident, suggested they might like to join them. ‘I remember how this couple literally glowed with love for each other,’ she told me, ‘and I was impressed by the size of Rita’s ring, which had a stone the size of a postage stamp.’ They never met again, but one morning in San Remo Heather saw a story about Rita splashed across the headlines and she found the Aga grumpy and agitated. She wrote:
The Riviera Set Page 27
