I recalled that lovely glowing Rita, and I knew the Aga disliked this sort of thing for we had spoken of it. Rita was arguably the most famous woman of her time – a bit like Princess Diana became later. During the war we had Vera Lynn and Churchill; the Americans had Rita Hayworth and Roosevelt. Artillery shells used to come off the production line and were adorned with messages such as ‘with love from Rita Hayworth’. She was a household name and her marriage to Aly Khan had been on every cinema newsreel and in every newspaper ... I knew the Aga thought such publicity was demeaning. I listened for a minute and then told him reasonably: ‘She doesn’t have to do anything to make these headlines; she just has to be,’ and he calmed down at that, because he had himself experience of excessive press intrusion and when I asked him once if he minded people always looking at him, he thought about it a little and told me ‘You get used to it. And you know that when people stare at you it is not mere curiosity; they get pleasure from seeing you.’ My point about Rita had been made and he appreciated it.
They spoke every day for hours; he told her of his love for his family and his pleasure when he watched Aly ride in races (‘He has no fear ... is as brave as a lion’), his admiration for Aly’s eye for a horse and his concern at the way Aly drove (‘He drives like a maniac ... he will kill himself one day.’). He also spoke of his youngest son Sadruddin, who was a contemporary of Aly’s son Karim, and how close those two boys were – they were ‘more like brothers’.
There was never any impropriety, and as far as Heather was concerned age and physical intimacy were irrelevant: ‘We existed for each other in the moment, and we were both absolutely fully aware of what we had together. It seemed perfect just as it was.’
After more than a month she received the phone call from Switzerland telling her that her husband was to be allowed to leave hospital, and although she had always known this moment would come, and part of her welcomed the news, the suddenness of it shocked her. She raced through the foyer, late for her meeting, and cannoned into the Aga, who had come to look for her. It was their only physical contact. He held her in his arms saying with a smile, ‘Ah petite madame – at last I have you.’ But as he looked into her face and saw her distress he must have guessed the reason, and released her gently. Heather, drowning in the moment of intimacy, glanced up at the hotel reception staff as she and the Aga walked to the reading room; they were open-mouthed at the incident. ‘I didn’t care: I was too unhappy. Meeting this wonderful man and falling in love with him had been like coming into the sunlight.’ She knew he took as much pleasure in their relationship as she did.
On the following day – her last at the hotel – while she was lunching with her aunt and uncle the Aga walked purposefully to their table and bowed deeply to her. ‘ bien,’ he said quietly. The dining room was agog for the Aga never dined publicly; her aunt was suspiciously puzzled but Heather had nothing to reproach herself for and did not feel obliged to explain. She saw the Aga only once more as she left.
He looked at me with such overwhelming tenderness in his eyes, he could see that despite the tears in mine, my face was full of love for him. The concierge came for me, and we bade each other a formal goodbye. That was the last time I ever saw him. I read about it in the papers when he died in Geneva about seven years later. But he is with me still.
As well as his racing successes, the Aga was famous for having been weighed in gold and diamonds for his jubilee celebrations. What could he do for his seventieth anniversary in 1954 to top this? It was called his Platinum Jubilee Observance, and there was no precedent for such a ceremony, which would be held in Karachi. He asked Aly to accompany him and the Begum, and Aly – as well as many Ismailis – believed that in his post-ceremonial address the Aga would formally name Aly as his successor. It was all Aly had ever dreamed of; he regarded it as his birthright to be leader of their people. And it would be fair to say that most of them openly venerated him as the natural heir.
The gorgeously spectacular ceremony in Karachi was duly held and afterwards the Aga gave the address for which Aly was waiting. But nothing was said about who was to be his successor, a position which was in the Aga’s own gift. Aly was deeply humiliated and distressed, but only allowed Emrys Williams to see his tears of frustration. He continued the considerable amount of work he carried out on behalf of the Ismailis because he felt it was his duty, but also he still hoped that his father would one day name him as his successor.
Aly was now free again, Rita having obtained her divorce,‡ and he transferred all his attention to Gene Tierney. She had spent the spring of 1954 in England, shooting the final scenes of the movie Personal Affair. During this time Aly flew in his own plane, sometimes several times a week, to see her and they spent weekends in Ireland and Deauville. Gene was pictured with him at the Derby and at the Oaks, and when she had to return to Hollywood for a new movie Aly recalled his experiences with Rita and arranged for them to rendezvous quietly in Mexico.
He slipped incognito into Mexico by flying in from Canada, and they booked into a luxurious beach hotel on the Baja peninsula just twenty minutes from the border with California, which enabled Gene to be back in Hollywood within a couple of hours’ drive. That meant she could report to the studio quickly, without raising any suspicions. The relationship with the exquisitely beautiful Gene flourished; she was a far better match for Aly’s lifestyle than Rita had ever been. For a start Gene spoke fluent French and had attended – as Aly had – a boarding school in Switzerland. She had grown up among a smart set of people who lived in New York and spent weekends in second homes in Connecticut, and she was never intimidated by the people Aly introduced to her. She rode well, and Aly was considerably impressed when, given a hot horse to ride, Gene managed it with total aplomb. When staying at the Château de l’Horizon she usually played tennis with the Carlton Hotel coach Tommy Burke, who rated her ability very highly.6 Unlike Rita, Gene was happy to stay out late, enjoying the pace of Aly’s life, loving his fast cars and the way he drove them, and she took an interest in the running of his homes in Cannes and Deauville, although Aly did not care for her attitude towards his staff, which he thought imperious compared with his own relaxed attitude. When she stayed at the villa in the late summer a fellow guest was Lise Bourdin, which might have been awkward, but Gene weathered it gracefully. Lise dropped out of the picture. To his friends Aly looked much happier and behaved more quietly than he had for some time. And yet Gene undeniably came with baggage.
Discovered in her teens and put under contract by Columbia, she had warded off the amorous advances of Howard Hughes, who nevertheless became a lifelong friend. She then met Oleg Cassini (later the internationally famous fashion designer) and eloped with him in the face of her parents’ disapproval. While entertaining troops in Hollywood she contracted German measles from a fan during the first trimester of her pregnancy and as a result Gene’s daughter, Daria, was born prematurely with severe mental and physical damage. Daria spent her life in a series of expensive institutions in California, always lovingly cared for, and most of these costs were met by Howard Hughes. Several years later Gene met a fan seeking an autograph. The woman told her that she had served in a women’s corps of the Marines, and was quarantined with rubella on the day of Gene’s only concert in Hollywood. She bragged that she was so desperate to see her idol that she sneaked out to see her and shake her hand. Gene later wrote that she had stared silently at the woman, realising immediately what had happened, then she had turned and walked away. Twenty years later this exact scenario was used – almost word for word – as part of the plot in Agatha Christie’s novel The Mirror Crack ’dfrom Side to Side.
Perhaps the stresses of this sad occurrence contributed to the collapse of Gene and Cassini’s marriage after several periods of living apart, although the couple had two more daughters before they eventually divorced. Gene had met the young veteran John F. Kennedy on the set of Dragonwyck and began a serious romance with him, only to part painfully after a year when
he told her firmly that he could never marry her because of his political ambitions. She and Cassini reconciled, parted again, then remarried and divorced for a second time in 1952,§ a year before Gene met Aly in Rio de Janeiro. She had occasional bouts of depression but seemed well able to cope with any personal demons during the time she was with Aly. One further problem was Gene’s mother. Manipulative and ambitious, she had once unsuccessfully sued Gene and Cassini for a share in Gene’s earnings from movies, claiming that Gene was part of the family business. Aly seemed able even to charm Mrs Tierney, who admitted she liked him, but no one would have wanted someone like Mrs Tierney in their lives.
The Aga could not see any beneficial aspects to Aly and Gene’s relationship. What he mainly recalled was the vulgarity of that New Year’s Eve party in which Gene had appeared to revel in Aly’s behaviour, and even encourage it, and he squirmed at the constant newspaper gossip about them. Furthermore, having already lived through the trauma of Aly’s marriage to and divorce from Rita, the old man simply did not want his position, or his family, or his followers, tarnished by yet another marriage to a Hollywood screen goddess. He had taken Aly’s divorce badly, had despised the sensational media coverage (his own had always been handled with such discretion). He had actually come to like Rita and he adored the granddaughter, Yasmin, who had resulted from the marriage. Now he never saw Yasmin, which was a source of great sadness and bitterness to him as his health deteriorated. He sent for Elsa Maxwell and asked her to go to Aly with a message from him. The message was that if he married Gene Tierney ‘my door will be closed to them both’. He would not, he concluded, allow Aly’s indiscriminate marriages to destroy their family heritage.
In the autumn of 1955 Winston Churchill again visited Beaverbrook’s villa, La Capponcina, where he spent two months working on his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He returned to England for Christmas and then, as arranged, went back to the Riviera as the guest of his literary agent, Emery Reves, and Reves’s beautiful mistress Wendy Russell,¶ a Texan former fashion model who had been a cover girl for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.
Their impressive villa had been built for Coco Chanel in the early Thirties after she purchased a five-acre plot that had originally been a lavender farm, set among wild olives and citrus trees, at about the same time Maxine Elliott built Château de l’Horizon. The villa’s new name, La Pausa, is said to reflect the old legend that Mary Magdalene paused at the spot after leaving the Holy Land following the crucifixion of Christ. The building, which cost in excess of six million francs, a good proportion of which was spent on white Carrara marble, was mainly financed by Chanel’s lover Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, and was famous for its all-white minimalist decor, apart from some massive pieces of antique oak furniture sent from various homes of the Duke in England.
Sited at an elevation of 6ooft on the sunny hillside of a promontory, La Pausa has a panoramic view over Monte Carlo some six miles to the west, and eastwards to the Italian frontier and Italian Riviera resorts. In Chanel’s day the villa was visited by strings of eminent guests including Stravinsky, Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Luchino Visconti, and while standing apparently empty during the war, it had been utilised to advantage by the French Resistance. The villa’s architect, Robert Streitz, established a hideout in a cellar with a secret exit onto the garden. Here he hid a radio and also, from time to time, a number of Jewish refugees who were in the process of being smuggled to the Italian border.7 Chanel had a high-ranking German lover so her house was not badly affected by occupation, and the couple made several visits to it during the war without ever realising its covert use.
Emery Reves, a Hungarian Jewish refugee, had purchased La Pausa from Chanel in 1953, having made a post-war fortune as sole distribution agent for – among other things – Churchill’s six volumes of The Second World War# He spent almost two years renovating the villa with Wendy’s able help until it was a treasure house of pictures, statuary, furniture, carpets and objets d’art. ‘The effect was breathtaking ... [and] the breadth and richness were extraordinary,’ Churchill’s secretary reported.8 It was not a huge house, but it was well-proportioned and surrounded by jewel-green lawns and simple landscaping. Once inside, the iron gates were locked to create an utterly private world. Every male visitor to La Pausa had the soles of their shoes cleaned by the major-domo as they entered the house, and women had to take their shoes off.9 It was a perfect setting for a world-class collection of more than seventy important Impressionist and post-impressionist paintings and Spanish works of art which had been started by Emery, but Wendy was also knowledgeable on the subject and helped to establish the collection and hang the works to advantage.
Churchill had accepted the invitation with alacrity. His doctor, Lord Moran, noted how much improved his patient’s health was after a spell in the South of France, and especially the lift in Churchill’s spirits after his visit to La Pausa.10 This was to be the first of many extended visits, of up to a third of a year at a time, to Roquebrune, following Winston’s retirement as Prime Minister.
An entire floor was set aside for Winston to make his own quarters; it included a sunny bedroom suite for him, an office for his secretary (Anthony Montague Browne) and a separate room for Clementine for the occasional times that she visited. Clementine never lost her dislike of the Riviera and the crowd it attracted. She was even unhappy about Winston’s liking for it. ‘It epitomised to me,’ she once told Montague Browne, ‘the shallowest side of his nature.’11 And even though the Churchills had by now escaped the threat of relative poverty thanks to the success of his books, and they would never again feel the pinch of money shortage which had always terrified her, Clementine remained afraid of the siren attractions of the Casino which called to Winston. As a matter of fact, Emery and Wendy also disliked the Casino, so that was one point – perhaps the only one – in their favour as far as Clementine was concerned. Always a jealous guardian of her husband’s public image, when invited to fly down to the Riviera and join him in a cruise on the Onassis yacht she responded pointedly that she had no desire to become beholden to ‘this rich and powerful man’ and for it to appear in newspapers. She said she felt the same about the Reveses, though to a lesser degree.12
Winston always hoped, however, that she would join him at La Pausa at some point and assured her that Reves only ever invited people he (Winston) wanted to see (‘and none that I don’t’).13 Meanwhile, various members of his family joined him there from time to time.
As a personable couple, Emery and Wendy might have attracted a similar calibre of visitors anyway, but there was an undeniable pulling power in having Churchill as a long-term house-guest. Wendy had known Princess Grace of Monaco as an actress in Hollywood, but it took Churchill’s residence at La Pausa to bring forth an invitation to lunch at the Prince’s Palace at Monaco in early June. It was the first formal luncheon the Prince and Princess had given since their spectacular marriage six weeks earlier, which had captivated the world. Winston later said that when people asked him about the royal couple he gave both ‘a good character’. The Prince and Princess made several visits to La Pausa after that, but always when Winston was in residence. The Windsors also came to several lunches and dinners whenever their time in the south coincided with Winston’s visits. The Duke was deaf now, and perhaps because of this was very quiet at table. After one such occasion Winston told his secretary that the Duke had become ‘an empty man’. He had shown extraordinary promise, Winston continued, but it had only been ‘Morning Glory’.
There was also a fair sprinkling of international stars who were invited to La Pausa, among them Greta Garbo (whom Winston first met at Les Zoraides while lunching with Daisy Fellowes), Errol Flynn and Clark Gable. He once met Frank Sinatra, but that was accidental. Winston was standing at the entrance of the Casino in Monte Carlo waiting for his car when the singer appeared, grabbed his hand and shook it, saying ‘I have always wanted to do that’ before departing. Winst
on, who hated to be touched, took a moment to recover from this effrontery before bellowing ‘Who the hell was that?’ He was not much wiser when told.
One of the first visitors, though, that January, was Daisy Fellowes, who dropped Winston a note to tell him that she had suffered a thrombosis in the previous July ‘and nearly went to the Bon Dieu – but he did not want me’. Now she longed to see Winston again and so invited him and his hosts to lunch. Later she came to La Pausa, bringing her ‘young man’ (her last lover), looking twenty years younger than her age, Winston wrote, and keeping them all agog with her funny stories and gossip. Winston’s secretary thought it very questionable, when there was still such visible poverty nearby, that a woman of her age would spend two thousand pounds on a single gown. He was equally scathing of her morals, and suspected she was responsible for spreading mischievous rumours that there was something beyond friendship between Winston and Wendy.
Just as Maxine Elliott had once done, Emery and Wendy took ‘endless pains’, according to Anthony Montague Browne, for Winston’s comfort and entertainment in what were to be his final productive years; Montague Browne described the time at ‘Pausaland’ as lotus-eating days in which the entire establishment revolved around Winston and his wishes. Inevitably, whenever the great man ventured out of the confines of the villa he was quickly surrounded by crowds of admirers, or the frankly curious. So unless he was invited to the homes of friends nearby he preferred to stay at La Pausa, sitting quietly under a large parasol smoking a cigar and admiring the lovely views, or chatting with his host and hostess in the lavender-scented gardens. He still worked each morning on his writing and correspondence, painting in the afternoon when the mood took him. He enjoyed playing bezique and being educated in serious music by his host. Emery Reves was a talented classical pianist and Winston always enjoyed listening to him play after dinner. These periods of rest and contentment were, Winston would later recall, ‘among the brightest of my life’.14
The Riviera Set Page 28
