During the two months he spent in intensive care at the hospital in Florence, Pam remained at his bedside, leaving him only to go to a nearby hotel to grab a few hours of sleep and to bathe and change clothes. When he was discharged and moved to his house in Turin, Pam went with him, and for another two months she nursed him devotedly, but by then the sisters were also sharing his care. By coincidence, news came that the papal annulment of her marriage to Randolph Churchill had finally been approved. There was nothing to stop Gianni marrying her, but following lengthy discussions Pam finally understood that it would never happen. His family was totally opposed to it – his sisters wished him to marry the Neapolitan princess Marella di Castagneto, the daughter of family friends and latterly regarded as one of the great beauties of the twentieth century.¶ Under normal circumstances Gianni would never have stayed in one place long enough for the sisters’ harangues on the matter to have any serious effect on him. But following his accident he was a sitting duck and when Pam left them alone with him, their frequent insistence on the need for him to produce an heir, but importantly to marry the right sort of girl, began to take root.
Gianni and Pam still loved each other, but after five years of living together their love was no longer urgent enough for either to make huge sacrifices. Gianni accepted that he would have to marry and have a family, and he had been persuaded that despite her religious conversion Pamela was not marriage material. Pamela, nearing forty, could see no future in a relationship with Gianni if he married someone else, and she had no intention of waiting around while she lost her looks. They reached the only decision possible: it was time to part. Gianni’s chauffeur drove them from Turin to the French border, where Pam had arranged to be met, and they were both in tears as Gianni limped back to his car and Pamela sped off towards La Léopolda to pack her belongings for the final time. They remained lifelong friends.
At a dinner party in Paris some months later, Pamela was seated next to one of Aly’s polo-playing friends, Élie de Rothschild, whose wife had just had a baby. Nevertheless, before long they were an item. Unlike her relationships with Aly and Gianni – both of whom had been unattached – it was necessary to be discreet, even though most people in their circle knew about it. Their liaison was mainly conducted in northern France and they rarely appeared together in public, but word soon reached the Riviera, where the Duke of Windsor once asked his dinner partner Liliane de Rothschild if she knew which of the Rothschilds was having an affair with Pamela Churchill. ‘It’s my husband,’ she replied coolly.
From Élie de Rothschild Pam learned about art and bloodstock. She had grown up with horses, had hunted throughout her childhood, and picked up an interest in bloodstock while involved with Aly, but now she improved that knowledge by closely following the horse-racing world in France and England. She impressed Winston by discussing with him the lineage of one of his own racehorses and the performance of its sire and dam. In her affair with Élie they saw each other only when he could manage to get away, so Pam spent her time in Paris visiting art galleries, the shops of high-end antique dealers and restoration workshops, learning about the things that she knew would interest him. It was initially so that she could keep up with Élie, but when it was added to her own innate taste and her background she developed a flair way beyond a mere passing interest. Her apartment, bought for her by Gianni, was known to be among the most beautiful and elegant in Paris, and Élie helped her to furnish it with pictures and tapestries and eighteenth-century French furniture. Her fresh-flower bill alone was over ten thousand dollars a year.
Pam occasionally popped up on the Riviera in the late Fifties, frequently as a guest at dinners while Winston was staying at La Capponcina or La Pausa, or aboard the Christina, but like Clementine she instinctively disliked Onassis, finding him vulgar and too unrefined for her tastes. Ari’s arch-rival, the sophisticated and well-educated shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos – who now owned La Croë, having bought it from the Windsors in 1953 – was far more Pam’s style. Pam had a number of cruises on Stavros’s 200ft three-masted sailing yacht, the Creole, and they too enjoyed an affair, but they parted friends and remained so for the rest of their lives: he died in April 1996, ten months before she did.
The end of her relationship with Niarchos also marked the end of Pam’s time on the Riviera. Taking all the knowledge she had gained in the world of art, bloodstock and high finance, she sold up in Paris and London and moved to the United States. Though she did not know it, the most important part of her real life was just about to begin. No one would have been more surprised than Pam had she been told that she would one day return to France as the United States ambassador.
* Juliette Gréco, when asked by a reporter whether she had an affair with Aly, replied: ‘I don’t know who didn’t have an affair with Aly!’
† Every day since, a red rose has been placed on the tomb each morning, a convention begun by the Begum.
‡ Built in 1907 for Lord Aberconway, La Garoupe looks down a long stairway to Anse Garoupe bay in one direction, and in the other faces a magnificent park with English rose gardens and pergolas. It regularly won prizes for the most beautiful garden on the Cote dAzur and had famously been visited in 1919 by the Duke of Connaught (son of Queen Victoria). During the Twenties it was leased by Cole Porter and his wife Linda, and was the scene of some of the parties written about by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose wife Zelda wrote in 1926 that being on the Riviera provided her with precious, transitory times when all in one’s life seemed to be going well’. Until his death in 2014 this magnificent house was owned by Boris Eltsine Berezovsky, friend of President Putin, one of the many Russian oligarchs who now own most of the Cap d’Antibes. Following his death La Garoupe was seized by the French government in connection with money laundering charges and at the time of writing this, it is still held by them.
§ King Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a company he established with the help of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley under the guise of improving the lives of the native Congolese. This was merely a cover for the exploitation of the assets of the Congo, initially ivory, but later – using forced native labour and costing the lives of millions of Congolese – rubber processing. Leopold employed mercenaries to administer a cruel regime which earned him multiple millions. Some of this money he used to construct grand public buildings throughout Belgium, but much went to gratify his own lifestyle, including La Léopolda.
¶ Princess Marella Caracciola di Castagneto. Gianni eventually married Marella the following year when she became pregnant by him, and though Agnelli never refrained from womanising the marriage survived until his death from prostate cancer in January 2003.
19
End of an Era
Some four months after the death of his father, Aly was contacted by the first President of Pakistan, Major-General Iskandar Mirza, who requested a meeting. As a result of their subsequent discussions, Aly was offered the post of permanent ambassador for Pakistan to the United Nations. At the time, having recently broken from India, Pakistan was suffering all the problems of a newly independent country with a much larger, unfriendly neighbour. What the country most needed was good representation on the world stage; someone able to ensure they got a hearing. Although Aly was an important name in the bloodstock and racing world, he was chiefly known for his endless pursuit of women, for marrying Rita Hayworth, and for his free-spending playboy image. Now he also carried the tag that his father had thought so little of him that he had been disinherited in favour of his own son. It was perhaps not the ideal CV for an ambassador, so it is not surprising that the rumoured appointment caused a good deal of supercilious comment masquerading as humour in the world press, and no less so in the diplomatic community. One politician wondered if Aly might appoint Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner to his team of advisers.*
It was widely noted that Aly was not a citizen of Pakistan, and as the New York Times reported, ‘For most of the last twenty-five years Aly Khan h
as been busy building a name as a fabulously wealthy, hard riding, fast driving, restless man of the world with a liking for parties and beautiful women.’1
Yet his appointment was not entirely ridiculous – there were plenty of items on the credit side of the balance sheet. Aly knew almost everybody of influence on the world stage and was generally popular; if there was anyone he did not know and needed to know, he made it his business to get in touch with them and make friends. He was still regarded by many Ismailis in Pakistan as the man who by rights ought to have been the next Aga Khan; he had a reputation in that community for being able to resolve differences and was generally well thought of. One of his best wartime friends, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr,† had been a former ambassador to the United Nations, and when Aly consulted him for advice, Lodge told him that he could do the ambassadorial job perfectly well provided he had a good team of advisers to back him.
A further advantage for a new country with very little in the way of a treasury was the fact that Aly asked for only one rupee a month as salary, and could fund his own ambassadorial accommodation (a huge apartment overlooking the East River), his advisers, a fully staffed office and any amount of the necessary entertaining in New York and Washington. The Aga had removed Aly from succession to the title of Imam, but under Islamic law he could not – even had he wished to do so – disinherit Aly from a share in his assets, since all his legal heirs had to be treated equally. It is not known how much Aly received in his father’s will for it took years to unravel the Aga’s holdings, which had been distributed and squirreled away all over the world, but Aly was now regarded as one of the world’s richest men.
Finally, Aly was totally cosmopolitan and multi-lingual, speaking English, Arabic, French, Italian and a number of Asiatic dialects. As one friend commented, ‘When you see Aly in Karachi in Ismaili dress he looks like a Pakistani. In Paris he looks like a Frenchman. In Rome he could pass for any upper-class Italian. Even here in America Aly doesn’t look foreign.’2 What better attributes could there be for an ambassador?
He accepted the appointment with alacrity and it was publicly announced shortly after Karim was formally enthroned in Karachi as Aga Khan IV in January 1958. The secret knowledge of this forthcoming proclamation must have created a small warm place in Aly’s heart as he watched the ceremony, for much as he loved his son and was proud of him, and proud for him, being passed over had been deeply humiliating. Aly had always felt a need to impress his father, hoping to receive some evidence of his father’s love, and he had been emotionally shattered when his father had seemed to show him the ultimate rejection. The old Aga had served in the League of Nations, so this new appointment may well have seemed to Aly a form of inheritance, a small application of balm enabling him to hold up his head after the crushing blow of the will. While the initial press comment flared adversely about his appointment he went into hiding for two weeks at the home of the Pakistani Prime Minister, where Cabot Lodge was a fellow guest. Aly listened very seriously to every piece of advice they offered him; this was a lifeline thrown to him, a final chance to do something meaningful with his life, and he knew it.
One of the first things he did on arrival in New York was to have Pakistan House, an imposing mansion off Fifth Avenue, gutted and refurbished at his own expense. He then set up an office where he could house his secretariat and meet regularly with a team of advisers. When Aly stepped out of his Cadillac outside the UN Secretariat on a spring morning in March 1958, in morning dress and wearing his medals (the Légion d’honneur and Croix de Guerre) to present his credentials, it resembled a royal visit. Extra police had been called to control the press and television crews, and the crowds who gathered behind the barriers. Women employees who were blasé about well-known members of the UN leaned out of office windows to catch a glimpse of this notorious ladies’ man who was also a prince.
As part of his policy of getting to know everyone, he threw a series of diplomatic receptions and parties. There was no shortage of such events, but Aly’s were so elaborate that there was a black market in invitations among the blasé UN staff for there was no access without invitation, and plain-clothes guards screened each arrival. Although he was only required to attend the Assembly for a few months a year, Aly exceeded this minimum, commuting to France, Ireland and London for long weekends much as many of his peers went for long weekends in Connecticut.
After a short period, to the surprise of those who regarded his acceptance of the appointment as a mere whim, Aly was judged a success. He had thrown himself and his considerable energies into the role and, with a team of good advisers and Bettina to go home to every now and then, his lifestyle changed. There were still endless parties but now, as Elsa Maxwell noticed, there were fewer starlets. Instead, among the café society, the Hollywood greats and the New York elite there were sprinklings of diplomats and politicians. And instead of wooing young women Aly was more usually to be found in deep conversation with some aged ambassador, legislator or politician, such as the rich young Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, or his brother-in-law Michael Canfield. Aly now considered such people important to his work, so they attended some of his gala New York events and he enjoyed visits to their Florida properties.
Aly had been friends with Michael Canfield and his wife for some time, having initially met them in New York.‡ In 1953 Canfield had married the socialite Lee Bouvier, sister of Jackie Bouvier, who married Jack Kennedy soon afterwards; the two couples were the closest of friends. In July 1958 Jackie Kennedy was staying with her sister at the Canfields’ rented town house in Rue du Bateau, a narrow cobbled street in the old walled town of Antibes. She was joined there in August by her husband, who had flown in from Sweden. At the time the Kennedy marriage was in deep trouble because of his frequent infidelities – more specifically Jack’s current serious romance with a Swedish girl, Gunilla von Post – but also because of Jackie’s free-spending habits. These problems were much discussed by their contemporaries, but although Jackie insisted to friends in Antibes that she had no intention of returning to her husband, several things prevented her from actually parting from him. First, their profound Catholic faith, and second his family’s political ambitions. Old Joe Kennedy, with whom Jackie got on well, was vacationing nearby, in a rented villa at Cannes. He evidently refused to even discuss the possibility of a separation or divorce, knowing that it would prevent Jack ever running for President. Some years earlier it had been Joe Kennedy’s intention to run himself, but his chances of contesting the nomination were quashed when his long-term affair with Gloria Swanson leaked into the press. The political baton then passed to his eldest son. But after Joe Jr’s death in 1944, Jack became his family’s best chance of achieving this ambition, and the old man made his position abundantly clear to both Jack and Jackie.
When some other guests of the Canfields were due to arrive to stay in the tiny rented house, it was intended that the Kennedys would move in with Joe. This was not a tempting prospect to the warring couple, especially as Jackie’s father, Black Jack Bouvier, had now showed up to stay with Joe Kennedy in order to take part in family crisis talks. So Jack and Jackie eagerly accepted Aly Khan’s invitation to take over the Churchill suite at the Château de l’Horizon for as long as they wished. During the weeks they stayed there, they somehow resolved their differences and came to a working agreement to save their marriage. Aly was in New York that August to deliver his first speech at the UN. In his absence he gave the Kennedys the freedom of his Riviera home and staff, and encouraged them to invite their own friends to visit, which they duly did. The prolific playwright and former politician William Douglas-Home§ and his wife Rachel joined them at the château. Douglas-Home, an early boyfriend of Kick Kennedy before the war, had known her brother Jack since they were at Harvard. In his autobiography Douglas-Home recalled his holiday with the Kennedys at l’Horizon and how something was always going on: a trip along the coast to Italy; a flight in a private plane to Venice for the day; dinners with the
former wife of the Shah of Persia; gala parties and summer balls in Cannes; Gianni Agnelli zooming into lunch aboard his Riva powerboat to take Jackie, Lee and Rachel water-skiing; cruises on various superyachts. The pleasure was non-stop.
He also remembered how one night in September, soon after Aly returned to his villa he and all the house-guests at Château de l’Horizon dined aboard the Christina. Aly arranged this with Onassis after Jack Kennedy expressed a wish to meet his hero Winston Churchill. Winston, eighty-three years old now, was aboard the yacht for a few days after he and Clementine had celebrated their golden wedding anniversary at La Capponcina. Aly’s party joined the yacht at Monte Carlo and Jack wore a white tuxedo, a garment much frowned upon by Winston, but Jackie, deeply tanned, dressed in a simple white A-line dress and speaking fluent French during dinner, charmed both Churchill and Onassis. Jack was disappointed that he seemed to make no impression on Churchill, and when he said so to Jackie as they disembarked, she relied crushingly: ‘I think he thought you were a waiter.’ Douglas-Home also recalled lying on a swimming raft one day at Eden Roc listening to a conversation between Michael Canfield and Jack:
Michael: I just can’t understad why you want to be President.
Jack: Well, Mike, I guess it’s just about the only thing I can do.
The Riviera Set Page 31
