Wendy openly stated that she adored Winston, but it was a love born out of admiration for his achievements, a genuine affection for the old man and a sincere gratitude for what his association with Emery had done for them both. Winston was certainly extremely fond of Wendy, unusually so, in fact. His letters to Clementine were full of praise for his hostess and he often mentioned how charming, agreeable and kind she was – usually in an attempt to lure his wife to join him at La Pausa. He even admitted that his plans to buy or lease a house of his own somewhere close to La Capponcina and La Pausa (which horrified Clementine) had now been put off because he was made to feel so welcome by Wendy and her insistence that he stay as often and as long as he wished.
Noël Coward was one of the many high-profile and entertaining guests invited to La Pausa that year – along with the couturier Edward Molyneux, with whom Coward was staying, and Somerset Maugham – all with the aim of keeping Winston amused and stimulated. Coward wrote in his diary: ‘to Roquebrune to lunch with Emery Reves, Wendy Russell, the most fascinating lady, Winston Churchill, Sarah [Churchill] and Winston’s secretary’. Winston, he noted, was ‘absolutely obsessed with Wendy Russell. He followed her about the room with his brimming eyes and wobbled after her across the terrace ... I doubt if ... Churchill has ever been physically unfaithful to Lady Churchill but, oh, what has gone on inside that dynamic mind?’15
There was more, which doesn’t need repeating, but it added up to an unusually spiteful implication that it was an old man’s last sexual fling. Anthony Montague Browne, who always enjoyed the luxurious visits to La Pausa, later suggested that Noël Coward’s rumour-mongering was no more than bitchiness because Coward believed (incorrectly) that Winston had played a part in his consistent omission from the honours list. Or it might have been a riposte to Winston’s off-the-cuff remark about another homosexual, that ‘buggers can’t be choosers’.16 Montague Browne agreed that there was a form of love and affection between Winston and Wendy, but one which owed nothing to the prurient insinuations of Noël Coward. However, Diana Mosley and Nancy Mitford, Beaverbrook and others in their circle firmly believed that Winston was infatuated with Wendy, and even Winston’s doctor noted in his medical record the ‘uplift’ in Winston’s spirits whenever he visited La Pausa.
Probably, Winston did fall in love with Wendy in a way, and his feelings were reciprocated. But it was never a sexual relationship. It never affected Wendy’s happy relationship with Emery, or Winston’s visceral love for Clementine, except in so much as it kept the Churchills apart physically because he so enjoyed himself at La Pausa, where he was spoiled and never corrected. Winston was affected with an octogenarian equivalent of a teenage crush, and Wendy with idol worship.
To be fair, the rumours of Winston’s obsession with Wendy did not originate with Noël Coward. Coward was staying at the time with Molyneux (who was in love with Coward) at Biot, a hilltop town between Cannes and Villeneuve-Loubet. The two men had first heard of Winston’s supposed infatuation in the previous week, when they dined with Pamela Churchill at the Agnelli villa and had been told by her that the matter was causing some concern within the family. The rumours quickly swirled into society and appeared, in various forms, in several contemporary letters.
Aristotle Onassis first came to lunch at La Pausa with Randolph Churchill, who had been staying on the Christina while Randolph’s daughter, niece and sister were staying with the Reveses. Such was Churchill’s reputation that Onassis was uncharacteristically nervous of offending, but his ability and strength favourably impressed the great man.17 After Winston accepted an invitation to visit the yacht he stated that it was the most beautiful structure he had ever seen afloat.
That was to be the start of a long and unlikely friendship, and thereafter there would be frequent day cruises along the coast in the incomparable yacht with its master and crew dedicated to one aim: ensuring Churchill enjoyed himself, no matter what the cost. Onassis thought nothing of shipping an entire orchestra along to play while they cruised. Winston called him Ari and was always the cosseted guest of honour. Onassis ‘never took his eyes off him’, watched out for his needs and personally served him with drinks, or fetched a blanket if he thought Winston might be cold on deck. Lord Moran noticed how, noticing a hair on Winston’s collar, Onassis hurried off to find a clothes brush. Once when Winston was unwell he fed him tiny teaspoons of caviar ‘as one feeds a baby’,18 and learned to play bezique in order to partner his hero. Moran thought Onassis a kindly man, and a lonely soul for all his great wealth.
The Reveses did not like Onassis, whom Emery regarded as vulgar, any more than they liked Daisy Fellowes, but they nobly continued to invite both into their home for Winston’s sake.
Robert Boothby may have been in at the very start of the enmity between Daisy and Wendy, recalling in his memoir a luncheon party at a private villa to which Churchill, Wendy, Onassis and Daisy were invited. Churchill had not been well and after lunch appeared to become unconscious in his chair. The other guests were obviously shocked and Daisy whispered to their host, ‘What a pity that so great a man should end his life in the company of Onassis and Wendy Reves.’ Suddenly, to their horror, one eye opened and Churchill said, ‘Daisy, Wendy Reves is something you will never be. She is young, she is beautiful, and she is kind.’ Then he closed his eye again.19
* Tina divorced Ari in i960, citing his multiple infidelities, but it was widely rumoured to have been following her discovery of her husband and Maria Callas in flagrante on the white leather sofa beneath the El Greco. Tina then married the Duke of Marlborough.
† A pseudonym.
‡ She immediately married fellow actor Dick Haymes, which was to prove another deeply unhappy marriage for her. See Postscript.
§ They remained friends until Gene’s death in 1991.
¶ They would marry in 1956. Even before their marriage, Churchill always referred to Wendy as Mrs Reves.
# Connected with Churchill since the early 1930s, Reves had distributed overseas rights to Churchill’s pre-war writings, but Churchill did not make serious money from his books until after the war.
18
Causes and Effects
When Elsa Maxwell delivered the message to Aly from his father saying that if he married Gene Tierney he would be removed from the succession, he and Gene had already agreed to marry and he had given her a ring – a stunning six-carat emerald-cut diamond – which she flashed at reporters, calling it a ‘friendship ring’.
Initially, Gene had agreed to keep the engagement secret, since Aly was still contesting the custody of Yasmin, his daughter with Rita, and he wanted no adverse publicity. He knew his father disliked Gene, but this new ultimatum would end his hopes and dreams for the future and he did not know what to do about it. However, as time wore on Gene’s situation changed. She had a run-in with the Internal Revenue Service and came off badly due to a retrospective change in tax legislation. Aly was often in Europe while she was tethered to Hollywood, making a series of movies for which she was contracted, and this made her anxious and short-tempered. She constantly forgot her lines and ‘dried up’ in front of the cameras, and her worried maid reported to the studio bosses that Gene sat in her bedroom vacantly staring into space for hours. Finally, despatched by the studio to a quiet hotel at Rosarito Beach, Mexico, for a few weeks’ rest, Gene moved the ring from her right hand to her left and confessed to reporters that she and Aly were engaged, and they intended to marry ‘in about six months, in France’.
Aly was in Paris when the story appeared in the newspapers on the morning of 31 March 1954, and when he telephoned Gene to ask what was going on she insisted, to his consternation, that he marry her this year. He explained again that he needed his father’s assent, but told her he would fly at once to Cannes to speak to the Aga. To Gene it appeared he was seeking permission to marry her, but it seems more likely that it was a damage-limitation exercise by Aly, who was already only too well aware of the Aga’s strong feelings on the matt
er. Aly and the Aga spoke at great length, but nothing that Aly said would change the old man’s mind: he was adamant that if Aly went ahead and married another movie star he would never be Imam.
Aly flew to California and reported to Gene the outcome of his interview with his father, proposing that they continue their relationship as it was, with her as his indefinite fiancée, his wife in all but name. Gene knew that this actually meant permanent mistress; she became hysterical and the couple argued. Bitter quarrels became the pattern of their meetings during his stay in California, until her tantrums became too much for him to take and Aly made excuses not to see her. He flew back to Europe, and after a while he stopped taking her calls. Realising that the relationship was over, Gene’s already fragile mental health failed; she suffered a complete mental breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Hertford, Connecticut. She was treated for over a year but she never regained her former mental health. Later she played some minor roles in films but she was no longer a star; the episode marked the end of Gene’s glittering film career. Aly never saw her again.
Aly believed that because he had sacrificed Gene his succession as leader of the Ismailis was now guaranteed. This led to another serious quarrel between him and his father over a remark Aly made in an interview, in which he was asked about the succession and he made certain assumptions. When he learned that Aly had spoken on rumours about his future as leader of the Ismailis the Aga Khan was furious. He berated Aly, calling him presumptuous and outrageous, and told him no one but himself had any right to discuss a successor. All Aly could do was make frantic denials about what he had said and he called a number of press conferences to do so. Soon afterwards the Aga suffered a mild heart attack and Aly evidently made some attempt to be more discreet in what he said to the press, but that same year he was linked with a number of women including the popular French actress Juliette Gréco,* Queen Soraya of Persia (who had parted from the Shah) and several others, one of whom sold her story to the newspapers.
Juliette Gréco had initially ignored Aly’s attentions, but even she ended up spending two holidays at the Château de l’Horizon after she found Aly’s high-voltage charm impossible to resist. There, she found the same old chaotic situation that had so disconcerted Rita: various women crying and slamming doors’; American film-makers who drank too much, starting at breakfast; guests of all shapes and sizes breakfasting in pyjamas on the terrace or unable to resist sliding down the famous chute into the sea. Almost everyone rested in the afternoon (‘at least, they went to bed,’ she wrote)1 before an evening on the town, and then they would roll back to the villa at all hours. Aly was everywhere, the great charmer, the great seducer who made all women feel wonderful and adored, and that there was never any need for them to worry about anything. ‘It was always, “What can I do for you? What do you need?” Airplane tickets, cars, boats: you felt you were on a pink cloud.’2
Debo Devonshire experienced much the same thing, and as well as her visits to Château de l’Horizon she often saw Aly at the races in Paris and sometimes she stayed at his château in Neuilly. Although no night owl, Debo found the time she spent in his company unusual and exciting: ‘We went to marvellous night clubs and restaurants including Maxim’s and turned night into day, sometimes with friends of his, sometimes on our own,’ she said, but despite his seemingly ceaseless round of activity she noted that he also took his duties as heir to the Aga very seriously, and nearly always when they returned from these sorties there was a little group of Ismailis waiting patiently in the entrance hall for an audience with him. In February 1955 Debo accepted Aly’s invitation to join him as he fulfilled an old ambition to visit Rio de Janeiro for Mardi Gras. She stayed at the luxurious house of Brazilian friends of his while Aly went off on bloodstock buying and selling trips around the country. When Aly returned she often joined him as he partied hard every night and could only marvel that next day he was still able to play top-class polo or ride out with her to explore the local forests – it was as though he had a source of inexhaustible energy. He never slept more than four hours a night and he did everything faster and better than anyone else, as if he had to drain every drop of fun from life.
It was soon after Aly returned to the Château de l’Horizon from the Brazil trip that he became involved with Simone Bodin, a top fashion model in Paris who was known professionally as Bettina.
Bettina had been Jacques Fath’s lead mannequin at a time when the House of Fath was considered one of the three dominant influences of post-war haute couture (the others being Givenchy and Dior) and she was one of the most photographed women in France. Following Fath’s death she was lured to Givenchy and soon after met Aly at a ball in Paris. It was not their first meeting, but he had hardly noticed her when they originally met on what was to be her initial visit to the Château de l’Horizon: she had modelled wedding dresses for Rita Hayworth while he volunteered his opinions. Bettina modelled for Aly again, in Paris in 1953, but on that occasion the gowns were intended for Gene Tierney. Then, in the summer of 1955, they were formally introduced and within weeks Bettina was acting as chatelaine at the Château de l’Horizon, where the couple spent the summer, and later she presided over Aly’s house in the Bois de Boulogne. He once said of her that what immediately drew him to her was the manner she wore an old raincoat as if it were a mink.3
By the end of the year it was widely believed that, as soon as Aly and Rita’s divorce became legal in France, he would marry Bettina. Importantly to Aly, the Aga approved of Bettina, as did the Begum, who came from the same petit bourgeois French background, and the two women became close friends. For Aly it was a pleasant change to be gathered into the family fold and to feel welcomed at Yakymour for the first time. His friends noted a new air of quiet contentment.
Bettina was passionately in love with Aly, but unlike his other women she did not panic every time there was a picture in the newspapers of him with another glamorous woman on his arm, such as at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, when Aly was seen almost every night with Kim Novak, whom he had met at Yakymour. Bettina was a pragmatic, very beautiful, intelligent Frenchwoman, quietly confident in her ability to keep her man. She was in Paris when Aly’s brief fling with Kim Novak was raging but apparently ignored the press coverage and simply waited for him to return to her. And after a while he did.
Kim Novak recalled in her memoirs that when she was with Aly she felt sorry for all the people around them who seemed only half alive. Like Debo Devonshire, she noted that Aly was a man who enjoyed every minute of life and was not prepared to waste a second. But he was not a free man – Kim knew that – and soon he was back with Bettina, who gave up her modelling career in order to be with him all the time. In summer 1957 they were in London at a party thrown by Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor when Aly was given the news that his father had been flown to Switzerland, and he knew at once what it meant.
The Aga always said Switzerland was the only sensible place for a very rich man to die and his careful plans had been in place for some time. Yasmin, who was much beloved by the Aga, was already on her way to France by transatlantic liner to see her grandfather; Aly and Bettina collected the child from Calais and flew straight to Geneva. They were just in time: the Aga died forty-eight hours later, of cancer, on 11 July 1957 at the age of almost eighty.
The Aga’s will was removed from a bank vault in London, flown to Geneva and read to all those with a concern in it. And after thirty years of waiting, a stunned Aly heard that he had been left out of the succession, bypassed in favour of his twenty-year-old son Karim, who was studying history at Harvard.
To say that Aly was absolutely crushed by this turn of events would not be an exaggeration. According to a newspaper statement issued by the Aga’s secretary, the will read: ‘In view of the fundamentally altered conditions in the world in very recent years due to the great changes that have taken place, including the discoveries of atomic science, I am convinced that it is in the best interests of the Shia Musl
im Ismaili community that I should be succeeded by a young man who has been brought up and developed during recent years and in the midst of the new age, and who brings a new outlook on life to his office.’
Even further humiliation was to follow when it was announced that the Aga had formally appointed the Begum, Aly’s hated stepmother, as Karim’s mentor. Aly Khan, who had been universally regarded as the Ismaili heir presumptive, who knew everyone in the Ismaili world, and had studied all his life for the role of Imam, was supplanted even in this lesser function by a woman born an infidel and who had only espoused Islam in mid-life. In public Aly presented a dignified acceptance, indicating that he was content to play a supportive part in his son‘s new governance. In private he was in agony, raging that the Begum had worked on his ageing and ill father. She was possibly the only woman Aly had never been able to charm.
Following the funeral in Geneva, the Aga’s body was flown to Aswan where a beautiful mausoleum had been built, high on a hill on the west bank of the Nile, overlooking Elephantine Island, to house the marble tomb.† When the day came to inter the Aga’s remains the Begum overstepped herself by joining the procession to the tomb, accompanied by her women attendants, despite the fact that she had been told she should not. Traditionally in Islam, such events are attended by men only and the Aga’s followers were deeply shocked and offended by this display of what they regarded as immodest behaviour. Nothing was actually said, but following this – to Aly’s intense gratification – Karim noticeably distanced himself from his step-grandmother.
In the autumn of that year, Winston managed to persuade Clementine to spend a holiday with him on the Riviera. She refused to stay at La Pausa, but agreed to spend two weeks at La Capponcina, after which she returned home and Churchill moved the short distance to La Pausa for the remainder of his long holiday. The files of correspondence between Winston and Clementine for the five years following his retirement from politics in 1955 are full of the excuses she made as to why she could not join him at La Pausa. No historian can fail to see parallels for Winston between the dozens of letters he wrote as a small boy to his beloved mother, vainly begging her to visit him at boarding school, and the other end of his life, when he wrote a similar number of letters, also in vain, to his beloved wife, beseeching her to join him.4 She was not overly fond of Beaverbrook but evidently she found him preferable to Wendy Reves, and it is hard not to suspect that the gossip about Winston and Wendy affected Clementine’s attitude.
The Riviera Set Page 29
