The Irresistible Mr Wrong

by Jeremy Scott

  ‘Freud says all women are masochistic,’ Barbara replied.

  ‘And suffering is what you want?’

  ‘I expect bad treatment from men,’ Barbara said.

  ‘Do you think you’d be bored if a man was nice to you?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of going into analysis?’ Roussie asked.

  ‘No,’ Barbara replied. ‘No, I’d rather stay as I am. The old me is at least familiar. Change frightens me.’

  Roussie gave her some of her own pills ‘to help’. They were barbiturates and they did, not just for sleep but during the day – particularly when taken with a glass of champagne. They soothed her, blunted the rough edges and double-glazed the glass wall that separated her from the world. She liked them; it was a simple matter to obtain more.

  Reventlow was no easier to get rid of than Alex Mdivani and when Barbara went to Venice that summer he was still angrily attached. While there she flirted openly with the tennis player Baron von Cramm, but Reventlow hung on doggedly. When Barbara took a trip to India he insisted on accompanying her though the relationship was now so strained the two could barely manage to be polite to each other in public.

  Following their return to London, Reventlow found (and pocketed for future use) a love letter to his wife which he found lying on her dressing table in front of a framed photograph of the 21-year-old Prince Mussan Jah of Hyderabad. Not only was the prince a dusky youth of unusual beauty, but his grandfather the Nizam, who dressed like a tramp, bathed infrequently, smoked the cheapest cigarettes and whose closest companion was a pet goat, was rich to an incredible degree. He had three wives, forty-two concubines, 500 dancing girls, a thousand servants and 300 Rolls-Royces, Daimlers and Cadillacs (which he seldom used, for he and the goat didn’t get around much but lived simply, chewing betel nuts or turnips, each to his taste, and smoking a little opium). Having no confidence in banks, the Nizam kept his fortune of $2 billion conveniently to hand in chests of diamonds and pearls and piled up around the smelly blissed-out twosome in an untidy jumble of gold littering their rancid lair.

  Barbara was charmed by the old fellow’s take on life and gratified by his grandson’s infatuation. The young Prince shared her love of poetry and at least she could be sure he was not interested in her money – as she remarked pointedly to Reventlow, who still would not get the message. She realised she had to make the situation clearer.

  In games of the heart she played with court cards and in the spring she picked up a trump at a Mayfair party. Prince Frederick of Prussia had blond hair, slate-blue eyes and the face of the Hohenzollerns. Aged twenty-six, he was eighteen years younger than her stuffy husband – and smitten with her. ‘Just think,’ she mused to Reventlow over breakfast, ‘I could marry the man who might someday be the Emperor of Germany.’

  Reventlow was livid she’d invited the Prince to lunch. ‘The man is a Nazi, you simply don’t do things like that here.’ He flounced into his Rolls and drove off. Prince Frederick arrived and proved as charming in daylight as the night before. He and Barbara lunched à deux on the terrace. Following coffee, they took a dip in the pool. While climbing out Barbara’s partner suffered a slight accident. His foot slipped and he twisted his ankle. Solicitously Barbara helped him limp upstairs where he could lie down and recover. When Reventlow stormed back home that evening he found his successor installed in the master suite, occupying his bed and being seen to by his wife.

  Count Reventlow was angry – and he had a gun. It was obvious he was good and sore, and the press loves an angry loser. The foolish cuckold has been a staple figure of fun since hominids first learned to kindle a fire and gleefully to gossip in its warmth.

  Reventlow had been ousted from his home and the marriage bed by his wife’s attentions to another man; another Prussian; younger, nobler, richer than himself. He’d been publicly cuckolded and it galled him bitterly. He hated Barbara and he wanted retribution. As Europe armed for the Second World War, so did he. He occupied a strong position – or so he believed – for he knew Barbara would pay anything to avoid unpleasantness. And he had the perfect weapon – their son. Her first offer was a million bucks to take a walk. He refused. She upped her offer to two. He demanded five and custody of Lance. He was aware of her continuing dalliance: Prince Frederick’s car was parked there every night. He felt deeply humiliated. One night he boiled over – perhaps he had been drinking – and called Barbara. Admitting the affair, ‘What do you propose to do?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m returning on Thursday,’ he told her, ‘and if I see Prince Frederick around I’ll shoot him like a dog.’

  She went to the police. Informing them that Reventlow had the habit of carrying a revolver, she swore out a warrant for his arrest. She dispatched Lance with Nanny Latimer and bodyguards to a secret location, hired extra security and claimed to be in fear of her life. The press loved it.

  Reventlow was arrested. His trial a week later was attended by 200 journalists and started litigation between the couple over custody of Lance which would continue for the next decade. During the hearing Prince Frederick was referred to only as ‘the gentleman in London’ and Reventlow’s threats of violence were described as real and convincing by Barbara’s bagman, who said he’d ‘known husbands who’ve killed their wives for far less than sleeping around’.

  Sir Patrick Hastings, Barbara’s eminent attorney, seized upon the phrase. ‘Sleeping around?’ he boomed. ‘Sleeping around, Mr Birkett, is not the appropriate term in this instance. According to the Countess her husband is a wife-beater, a sexual deviate, and a sado-masochist. Under such conditions adultery is hardly a luxury, it is a necessity.’

  Barbara, who was altogether accustomed to luxury, found her necessities where and how they occurred. Prince Frederick discreetly quit the field at the threat of publicity, slinking back into the bosom of his Imperial family who had their own problems in the Nazi Fatherland at this time. With Reventlow gone, Barbara was free and unencumbered by a relationship, but she felt unsettled and redundant without a man; it was an unnatural condition for her and she was restive. Her dream of the gracious life in England was over, Reventlow had turned into a homicidal stuffed-shirt, Winfield House bored her and she was ready to move on.

  Soon after the Second World War broke out in 1939, the American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, asked Barbara to the US embassy to inform her that Britain was about to be defeated; she should abandon London with her infant son for the safety of America.

  Barbara took his advice, deciding to close up Winfield House. However there was a problem awaiting her in the States, and although she must have anticipated trouble she made no attempt to avert it. Her return to America was scarcely low profile for she travelled with Bob Sweeny, her current lover, Lance, his nanny, Tiki and six servants, and her reception in New York was lively if not warm. Woolworth’s demonstrators chanting and waving placards paraded outside the Pierre Hotel where the group was staying, and flung rocks at her car. She received more than one hundred hate letters each day, women hissed, spat and shouted at her whenever she appeared in public.

  So disastrous was the shambles of her homecoming it dismayed even Jimmy Donahue and his mother Jessie, inured though they were to bad publicity. Both entreated her to make an effort to improve her image. In response to their prompting she spoke to Steve Hannagan, who had proved effective before in putting a favourable spin upon her appalling public image. Highly regarded by his clients, he was a veteran in PR, which had become a professional business only after the advent of mass media in the mid-1920s. At first it was only movie and show business stars – or, rather, their producers – who availed themselves of these self-declared experts in the field, in which chutzpah and rampant imagination composed the only basic skills. Public relations advisers were a new life-form created in response to global communication, a fresh species in a radically changed environment. Their ability to change perception rapidly became apparent. In his book Intimate Strangers, the cr
itic Richard Schickel identifies a seminal moment in social history when a movie actress, Florence Lawrence, was created an instant celebrity by means of a public relations stunt. To coincide with the opening in St Louis of her latest movie, its producer planted a story about her in a local paper. The item stated that she’d been involved in a horrific disaster and had been mangled and killed in a trolley car accident. Immediately the story broke he denounced it as a fake, a malicious invention by his rivals to wreck the movie and her career. Florence made a well-publicised visit to St Louis to expose the ‘fraud’, where she was set upon by a hysterical crowd of fans who tore her dress to pieces for relics. Shredded but blush-pink and radiant as Venus on the half-shell, a star was revealed.

  Steve Hannagan’s fee to Barbara Hutton this time was $65,000 a year plus expenses – the first item a personal cheque for $10,000 to Maury Paul, who edited the syndicated Cholly Knickerbocker column and set the tone in the Hearst press. ‘She’s terribly pro-American these days. And humble as pie. From now on she’ll go in rags and give her money to the poor.’ Newspapers were fed a continuing stream of items. The public learned of her gift of Winfield House to the US Government, of the transfer of her yacht to the British navy, her present of ten ambulances to the Red Cross, of her $50,000 to the War Relief Fund. She was photographed wearing little make-up and no jewellery demurely knitting sweaters for the French Relief Fund.

  She knitted very well, Hannagan’s employee Ned Moss noted, but her ignorance of the real world caused him problems. One day Barbara summoned one of the hotel bellboys and gave him an envelope, asking him to take it to the bank and get change. The boy did as asked, handing the envelope to a teller. It excited a buzz of interest followed by a considerable delay before one of the bank’s vice-presidents emerged lugging a heavy canvas moneybag. ‘Hey, what’s this?’ the boy asked. Barbara had given him a ten thousand-dollar bill.

  Of course the story was splashed in the press and Barbara was mortified. She couldn’t understand the fuss; she needed change and it seemed to her a perfectly normal thing to do.

  Another setback in this fresh campaign to rebrand Barbara as a goodie was occasioned by the death of her father. On learning he was mortally ill she did not want to see him and had to be persuaded to do so. She felt no tenderness at his passing. ‘Think of that man dying like that! Think of him dying in splendour, luxury, surrounded by servants and hangers-on when millions of people die alone, forgotten in hovels and tenements.’

  Franklyn’s own sentiments for Barbara were expressed in his will. ‘I realise that my beloved daughter Barbara is possessed in her own right of worldly goods… Therefore, I will to her a loving father’s blessing for her future happiness.’ His beloved daughter’s response was to sue her dad’s estate for $530,000 she’d lent him, plus interest. She collected, but the story did not warm the public heart.

  The next read better. In the summer of 1942 Barbara married Cary Grant in the shade of an oak tree at Lake Arrowhead. The half-dozen guests included the actor’s agent, his secretary, and Barbara’s now elderly maid Tiki who’d been with her since childhood. No press attended and only one photographer. Cary had a hatred of publicity. Only a single photograph of the wedding couple was ever released, invariably captioned ‘Cash and Cary’.

  The marriage surprised everyone, not least Bob Sweeny, her English suitor, who had no inkling of Barbara’s romance. But he was a true sportsman and took his dismissal well, along with a cheque for $350,000. Following the wedding the happy couple, plus Lance, moved into Westridge, a twelve-acre estate in Pacific Palisades belonging to Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Barbara’s friend since adolescence, who was serving in the navy. Three other houses in the neighbourhood had to be rented to accommodate Barbara’s staff which numbered twenty-nine, though she had to make do without the services of her butler who’d been hit on the head by a hammer while serving at a party at Errol Flynn’s place.

  This was the plushy if not trouble-free habitat in which the newly wed pair settled down to their marital routine. Cary left home for the studio soon after dawn. In his absence Barbara played tennis, didn’t drink or use barbiturates, dieted, and filled the role of dutiful wife. Inevitably they entertained. Their friends were of two sorts. His were in the film business, hers were civilians. And civilians of Barbara’s sort there were aplenty in Los Angeles at that time; the war had washed them up here. They were refugees with bogus backgrounds living on their wits, but they knew how to sing for their supper and were the kind of louche company Barbara liked.

  In starving Europe the Nazi advance continued until France was occupied but in southern California war provided a fine excuse for big-scale junkets, it was only necessary to call them not parties but ‘bond drives’. The potential guest list was vastly enlarged by the mixed flotsam of socialites, deposed royalty, adventurers, rich divorcées, gigolos and crooks who had found asylum here. Another strain had come to infect the capital of moviedom – the decadence of original Eurotrash.

  At the start of her three-year marriage to Cary, Barbara exercised an uncharacteristic restraint in her normal pattern of behaviour. Her need to be constantly in company was satisfied in part by war work, intermittently also by her son. Under the custody arrangement he spent half the year with her, the other half with his father who now had married a replacement heiress, Peggy Astor Drayton. When Lance arrived to stay with the Reventlows in Pasadena, Peggy unpacked his luggage to find the seven-year-old boy had with him fifty shirts, a range of custom-made suits, and a gold box of personal jewellery. At the bottom of one of his suitcases she came upon a scrunched-up ball of banknotes amounting to several thousand dollars. At Christmas the boy received fifty separately wrapped presents from Barbara, and the Reventlows sneakily intercepted his coded letter to her in which they deciphered the seasonal message: TO HELL WITH MY FATHER I WOULD LIKE IT IF HE DIED.

  Stars marry stars and celebs marry celebs, according to the same Darwinian law that requires Brazilian macaws to mate with Brazilian macaws. But, apart from fame and no instinctive love for children, Barbara and Cary had nothing whatever in common. Predictably, they decided to have a baby. She was quoted by Hedda Hopper as saying, ‘We talk about it all the time. We’d like to have at least three.’ They tried, took medical advice, but failed. ‘Barbara was cut to ribbons long before I knew her,’ said Cary. ‘There’s no surgeon or doctor who ever approached her who didn’t want to cut immediately… Those scars were all from her bankroll.’ The couple had no shared tastes or interests. Cary was single-minded in dedication to his craft; in two years he made five movies. He worked throughout each day and at night he came home tired. He wanted a simple meal, time to learn his lines for next morning, and sleep. The schedule did not suit Barbara, who did not like her husbands to have a job. She grew bored and restless and turned to booze. Liquor never had been important to her, now she began to drink with deliberation. She insisted on going out at night, and when Cary was unwilling she went alone. There were parties galore: this was the golden age in Hollywood and never since has it matched the gaudy splendour of that Belle Époque.

  Barbara also entertained at home. A friend of Cary’s is quoted by David Heymann describing the scene: ‘What was on the table was sometimes different, but what was on the chairs was always the same. Barbara surrounded herself with a consortium of fawning parasites – European titles, broken-down Hollywood types, a maharajah or two, a sheikh, the military, several English press, a few tennis bums and a throng of faggots.’ Cary said, ‘If one more phoney earl had entered the house, I’d have suffocated.’

  Yet shady company did not satisfy Barbara any more than had motherhood. She was bored of these people, bored by Hollywood, bored by Cary. Once again she was captive, suffocating in a marriage with no one to understand her. She longed for liberation, for a prince in shining armour trotting out of the forest’s dappled shade on his prancing steed to rescue her.

  And, though she did not know it, her Prince was already briefed and standing to. The script
for Barbara’s next fairytale romance had already been plotted and the part cast.

  Unusually, Prince Igor Troubetzskoy was a little prince who, unlike other little princes Barbara had come across, did not want a palazzo on the Grand Canal or even a string of polo ponies. All he’d ever wanted was to ride his bicycle. While other princes were playing chukkas and chasing heiresses he spent his days pedalling his bike. He pedalled and pedalled until he became champion amateur bicyclist in France. During the war he served as a soldier, but the moment it ended he changed into shorts and climbed back on his bicycle. But though he pedalled as hard as he could he didn’t win any races because he was too old. So Igor came to realise sadly that he’d have to find something else to do in life.

  He was thirty-five, which is not the best age to find a job, particularly if you are rather dim. But he was nice-looking, with a Byronic profile and gentle manners. Everyone said what a delightful chap he was, not a drop of guile in his sunny nature, and he was welcome everywhere.

  His parents had left Lithuania almost penniless in 1906 to settle among the expat Russian colony in Nice. His older brother Youka moved to Hollywood, becoming a leading man to both Pola Negri and Norma Shearer while Igor was still pedalling around France. Youka was doing fine, but when war ended in 1945 and Igor started looking for work he was not so lucky.

  Fortunately he had a friend in Freddie McEvoy, an American conman more worldly wise than himself who was based in Paris running a black-market in currency. Igor moved to live in his apartment and became his bagman, pedalling around Paris with bundles of hot money.

  At this point Freddie was two years into an affair with Barbara Hutton, who had left Cary Grant and moved to Paris soon after the Second World War ended, installing herself and her staff (and intermittently son Lance) in her old suite at the Ritz. It was generally assumed by her friends, as well as Elsa Maxwell and other columnists, that Freddie was preparing the ground to become her fourth husband. But no, Freddie was smart enough to recognise that his own role in Barbara’s dream was nearing its end and handled the situation pragmatically. He replaced himself in the part with his protégé Igor.