The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  And the gossip continued. During Churchill’s visit in 1957 Wendy was informed by someone she trusted that Daisy Fellowes had recently become friends with Clementine, and had made some very unkind remarks about Wendy to her.5 Wendy recalled how cold Clementine had been towards her when they last met, and she became deeply upset. Winston was perplexed about the sudden change in the demeanour of his hostess, but it was not until just before he left La Pausa that Emery told him the reason why Wendy was ‘unwell’.

  As soon as he arrived home Winston lost no time in asking Clementine about the matter. He then wrote to Wendy to tell her that Clementine had dismissed the story; there was not ‘the slightest goodwill’ between her and Daisy and no foundation for the report that they had become friends, he wrote – they had merely met at the table of a mutual friend. Furthermore, he reported, Clementine was astonished to hear that her manner towards Wendy had been perceived as ‘hardened’, saying Wendy must have imagined it. Wendy did not have Winston’s total confidence in Clementine, and when he asked her to put the matter out of her mind he assumed that she had done so and accepted his assurances. But Wendy could not, and it was a sore that would fester.

  Following this awkward event Clementine was persuaded to join Winston on holiday in February 1958 but she did not enjoy her visit and told her daughter that she found La Pausa claustrophobic, for it was situated in a steep hilly area remote from any town or village. The terrain made walking too difficult, which meant that if she wished to go anywhere outside the grounds she had to request a car and driver, which she hated to do. Since Winston spent all his mornings in bed working he was not affected by this restriction, so though she was grateful for the care and kindness the Reveses provided for her husband, Clementine told her daughter that, despite all the smiles, she had little in common with them and that their relationship with her was shallow. She made no such complaint about walking in the hills around La Capponcina, from which an obvious conclusion may be drawn.

  Winston’s regular visits continued, during which Clementine resolutely took separate holidays. The rumour, gossip and innuendo about Wendy and Winston also continued, and eventually would destroy the happy relationship. Between his visits to La Pausa, the Reveses occasionally visited Chart well and stayed with the Churchills. After Christmas 1958, however, Winston did not join them at the villa as usual, going to Marrakech with Clementine instead. Some months later Emery suffered a heart attack and was not up to receiving visitors, so during the summer of 1959 Winston spent his visit to the Riviera with Onassis on board the Christina, instead of staying at ‘Pausaland’.

  In the autumn Onassis asked the Churchills to take a Caribbean cruise with him that winter, inviting them to choose their own cruise companions. There had been a number of such cruises in the past two years and Winston had no hesitation in accepting, advising through Anthony Montague Browne that Ari should invite anyone he thought appropriate. However, when he heard that the Windsors had been invited Churchill demurred. It was not that he disliked them, although he no longer felt the same affection he once had for the Duke; the problem was that whenever the Duke and Duchess were around the atmosphere was formal and people had to keep jumping to their feet.6 Winston felt he could not cope with this; furthermore, he knew that Clementine disliked Wallis. He instructed Montague Browne to phone Onassis and tell him. The Windsors were diplomatically put off with the promise of the loan of the yacht for their sole use at some other time of their choosing.

  All seemed well, but what happened next was to have long-term repercussions. Clementine now went to Montague Browne in a state of agitation and told him that she was looking forward to the long cruise with her husband, but she would not go if the Reveses were also aboard, and she instructed him to see to it. In Anthony Montague Browne’s autobiography he explained this away as Clementine’s not wanting anyone connected with a ‘South of France background’ on the cruise, but taken together with other correspondence on the matter it is quite obvious that Clementine wanted no contact with Wendy. Nor must it be forgotten that many members of the Churchill family had joined Winston at La Pausa during the past three years. So his children Diana, Sarah, Randolph and Mary, his grandchildren and some close friends of the family – all invited at Winston’s request – saw at first hand the relationship between Winston and Wendy which led Pamela Churchill to confide to Noël Coward that the family were perturbed by it. We shall never know exactly what lay behind Clementine’s agitation about the Reveses; it might be, as Noël Coward thought, that there was some truth in the rumours, or it could be that as the self-appointed keeper of the flame of her husband’s reputation Clementine was not prepared to allow gossip to damage his reputation at the end of his life.

  Whatever the reason, it was a tricky situation for Montague Browne to handle. When consulted on the matter Winston said he dearly wanted this cruise with Clementine for her health and his own pleasure, and it seems the treat of a luxurious winter cruise in the benign climate of the Caribbean overcame his common sense. He realised he owed a vast amount of hospitality to the Reveses but he was inclined to think (or wished to believe) that Montague Browne’s deep concern about the circumstances that had arisen was making a mountain out of a molehill. He insisted that he valued the friendship of Emery and Wendy, and he would go and stay with them afterwards – everything would be the same, he said. A telegram was duly sent to Onassis, asking him to uninvite the Reveses.

  As Montague Browne had feared, the Reveses were deeply offended. They had been looking forward to the cruise and, not unnaturally, they pressed Onassis, who was also a friend, as to why they had been removed from the guest list. With his back against the wall, Ari felt obliged to show them the telegram. The Reveses drew their own conclusions.

  This was bad enough, and they were badly hurt, but it appears they initially decided to overlook the slight, since Reves was deeply involved professionally with Winston and they must still be able to work together. But worse was to come. When Winston disembarked at Monte Carlo after the cruise, instead of asking the Reveses if he could come directly to La Pausa – as they anticipated he would do, since he had intimated as much in his conversation with Montague Browne – Winston moved into a specially renovated luxury suite at the Hôtel de Paris, Onassis’s hotel in Monte Carlo. It was a second kick in the teeth for the Reveses and they had had enough.

  Several months later, writing from Chartwell, Winston innocently proposed himself as a guest at La Pausa for the coming September. Emery replied in a very long letter that they had been greatly surprised by the request, since Winston had declined their frequent and ‘even persistent’ invitations since last winter and had gone to the Hôtel de Paris following the cruise. He said they had therefore concluded he had decided not to visit them again, and continued:

  We could understand that cruises had a greater attraction to you than our villa, but we could not interpret your decision to stay at a hotel rather than Pausaland in any other way than that we had done something ... Our, perhaps foolish, dream was that during the years 1956,1957 and 1958, when you spent about a third of each year at Pausaland, we had become friends ... you cannot imagine how shocked we were when two years ago we suddenly remarked that all kinds of intrigues started destroying this friendship and a few months later we realised that these forces had succeeded in destroying what was a happy and lovely companionship.

  It is not possible for me to describe the humiliation and suffering we had to endure which has left deep marks in both Wendy and me ... Wendy has suffered deeply and dangerously with mental depression ... I am fully aware that all of this was not intended [by you] and that you were a victim, perhaps even more than we were.7

  Wendy had now become a different woman, Emery wrote, she was very wounded and not yet capable of mastering her deep emotional distress over the apparent rejection of the hospitality that they had openly placed at Winston’s disposal, ‘a home, a garden, a sunny sky, a fireplace, Wendy’s devotion’. It did not seem possible for the
m to resume those happy times, or at least not at present. They were going to the United States in October, but he hoped that if Winston visited La Capponcina or some other place on the Riviera’ in September he would find time to pay them a visit.

  Winston was grieved, puzzled and shocked at Emery’s letter, and instead he and Clementine, accompanied by Montague Browne, accepted an invitation by Onassis to stay at the Hôtel de Paris. Clementine wrote personally to Wendy to assure her there were no intrigues, saying that she was deeply grateful for the hospitality they had always enjoyed at La Pausa and she hoped the Reveses would join them for luncheon at Ari’s hotel. Winston wrote a short personal note to Wendy from the hotel, saying he was so sorry that she was ‘vexed’ with him, and that the months he had spent with her were among the brightest in his life. He sent her sincere and warmest thanks and affection.

  There were subsequent meetings – Emery still acted for Winston in his capacity as his literary agent – and very occasionally in the following few years, while Winston was still able to travel, the Reveses lunched with him in London and at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, or at La Capponcina. There were more enjoyable cruises with Ari. But the happy days of Pausaland were over, just as finally as those happy days Winston had once spent with Maxine Elliott. They were all losers; Winston told his daughter Diana at about that time that he felt his life was now over, even though it was not yet ended.8

  One notable absentee from the Riviera scene from 1959 onwards was Pamela Churchill, who had waltzed off the terrace of Château de l’Horizon into the arms of Gianni Agnelli a decade earlier. For five years their relationship had flourished, each happy with their arrangement that they maintained their own homes – Gianni’s in Turin, and Pam’s in Paris. With the help of Gianni, and possibly Averell Harriman, Pam also purchased the flat in London that she needed to keep in order to satisfy her British residency status, which was important to the custody order of young Winston. She rented the flat to incoming American ambassadors and also to Cary Grant. Later Gianni bought her an apartment in Paris.

  In Paris Pam was a star in the firmament of leading expats but she was equally acceptable to tout gratin parisien – the top people in Paris who were normally a closed shop to outsiders. Gianni’s position as head of the Fiat empire made it necessary for him to be based in Turin and she mainly flew there to be with him, but when she had to be in Paris for some reason he would fly to France to be with her, sometimes commuting several times a week. From June to the end of September in 1949 and 1950 Gianni rented the Château de la Garoupe, a spacious villa on the Cap d’Antibes adjacent to the Château de la Croë, a short distance from the Hotel du Cap and Eden Roc, and a twenty-minute drive from Château de l’Horizon.‡ Pam and Gianni spent most weekends and the odd week there, and when Gianni was absent Pamela did not lack for company. She often dined with the Windsors; Pam liked Wallis and the two women shared housekeeping tips.

  Unlike Wallis, Pam had grown up in a large country house, which although larger than La Croë, was not so much a stately home as a family residence containing the odd van Dyck among its gallery of Digby ancestors. But Wallis had taught herself much about how to please her lord and Pam learned something from her about ‘spoiling’; from this point onwards, visitors to any of Pam’s houses were pampered beyond excess. Pam was frequently invited to make up numbers at dinner parties whenever Winston was staying on the Riviera, because his former daughter-in-law was one of the few people he was always happy to see.

  Despite a clearly successful relationship, and the fact that in order to be eligible to become Mrs Agnelli Pam had converted to Catholicism and had applied to the pope to have her former marriage to Randolph annulled, as the years went on it became clear to her that Gianni was reluctant to marry her. He was as much a serial womaniser as Aly was, and this had little to do with his feelings for Pamela, just as Aly’s emotional involvement with other women when he cheated on Rita did not reflect his love for her. But Pamela was not Rita; if she knew about the affairs (and since gossip thrived in their circle she must have at least suspected) she behaved as most upper-class wives did and turned a blind, if jaundiced, eye as long as matters were conducted discreetly.

  In the winter of 1951 Gianni purchased La Léopolda, a palatial villa at Villefranche, an area still considered the crème de la crème of the Riviera. It was one of two Riviera properties originally built for King Leopold II of Belgium regardless of cost,§ although it had undergone some changes since his death and had been used as a military hospital in 1918. The Windsors had once tried to lease it from the American owner, an architect who had spent a fortune restoring it, but the changes they wished to make offended him. It was larger, more secluded and yet more accessible for Gianni from Turin than was La Garoupe; indeed, it still has the reputation of being one of the most spectacular properties on the Riviera. Pamela was given carte blanche to redecorate it.

  This being a formal home of Gianni it was not considered suitable for young Winston to live there with the lovers. He therefore spent winter holidays with his father, or his grandparents at Chartwell, but during the summer holidays he always stayed with Pamela for a month at Aly’s Deauville mansion, which Aly loaned to her. Gianni remained at La Léopolda, flying up to see Pam in Normandy regularly, but he was seldom alone when on the Riviera. Pam heard gossip about his womanising in her absence, but she was obliged to – and wanted to – provide a summer home for young Winston and there was nothing she could do but hope that she could rein Gianni in again once her son left to spend a few weeks with his father before returning to school.

  When young Winston left for England in mid-August 1952 Pamela returned to La Léopolda to find that Gianni was in Turin and expected to return the following day. That evening she attended a dinner party at the house of friends in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, leaving early since she was tired after travelling. Arriving back at the villa just after midnight she walked into the bedroom to find Gianni there, in flagrante with the daughter of a good friend, the Comte d’Estainville.

  Pamela had had more than a fair share of lovers, but an important factor about her many affairs was that she was never unfaithful to a man while she was in a relationship with him. In that respect she was just like her favourite ancestor Jane Digby,9 whose life had always fascinated her and had provided a role model for her as a teenager. Although Pam had accepted philosophically that Gianni was unfaithful to her, he had been reasonably discreet about it and had never before brought one of his women into any house that they shared. He had never rubbed her nose in it, so to speak, and now Pam was humiliated, deeply hurt, and furious.

  Pamela’s brother explained what happened next: ‘Pam was very upset, naturally, and she flew at the girl. Gianni tried to prevent her and got his face slapped. There was a hell of a row.’ Gianni’s one thought was to get the girl out of the villa and he attempted to placate Pamela by saying he would take the girl home and they would discuss the matter when he got back. With Pamela shrieking at him, he somehow managed to get himself and the sobbing girl dressed and into his Lancia sports car to drive her to her parents’ house at Cap Martin. He should not have driven: he had been drinking and after he had driven off Pam also saw the evidence on the bedside table that he had taken cocaine. Like Aly, Gianni was a recklessly fast driver even when sober. On this occasion, as he took the slight bend on the Corniche near the entrance to the Cap Roux tunnel he was going too fast and smashed into an unlit cart carrying some workers to the early-morning market at Nice.10

  Back at La Léopolda, Pamela had taken a sleeping pill and cried herself to sleep. At about 3 a.m. she was woken by the telephone. It was a friend calling to tell her about the crash, and he said that Gianni had been taken to the hospital at Nice, very seriously injured, and was possibly already dead.

  The friend who had phoned to give Pam the news had been at the same dinner party as Pam that evening, and he had come across the crash on his way home, shortly after it happened. The girl, Anne-Marie, received only scratch
es and bruising and she was scooped up and discreetly driven home; she slept late next morning, and it was years before her parents knew anything about the dramatic events of that night. The passengers in the truck received only minor injuries and were later well compensated by Gianni’s lawyers. There was no police prosecution.

  Pamela roused their chauffeur and rushed to Nice hospital to find Gianni alive but unconscious and in critical condition, his face a mask of blood from glass cuts and his jaw shattered. He also had several broken ribs and his right leg had been crushed. It was considered doubtful the leg could be saved. He was about to be taken into the operating theatre when Pam arrived. She alerted them about the cocaine and that ruled out a general anaesthetic: the procedures to deal with the breaks and gashes had to be carried out under a local.

  While Gianni weathered the first critical days Pam, who genuinely loved him, never left his side and it became clear he would need twenty-four-hour care for some time. Much as she hated to do so, she felt obliged to contact his sisters to discuss this. As soon as Gianni was able to be moved he was taken to a hospital in Florence, his head resting on Pam’s lap for the whole journey. And it was Pam who held his hand and shielded his eyes while – again under a local anaesthetic because he had taken cocaine to dull the constant pain – gangrenous flesh was cut away from his damaged leg. An amputation was recommended, but Gianni refused; he would eventually recover, just as he insisted he would, but he walked with a marked limp for the remainder of his life.