In New York, it was back to the house on 37th Street. When Prince André Poniatowski, the grandson of the late King of Poland, arrived in New York in 1892, Maud met this attractive young man. She was taken with him, they got on well, and saw each other a number of times. The Prince’s brother, Prince Charles, had married Maud Ely Goddard of New York a decade earlier and it appeared to the press, always chroniclers of the doings of a prince, that André was about to follow his brother’s lead. Certainly, his friendship with Maud was close enough for a regular correspondence to start after he had returned to Europe and Maud and her mother had gone back to San Francisco. Therefore when Maud heard that the Prince was returning to the United States, and intended to come to San Francisco, she thought that it must be because of her – and that when he came he would propose to her. Unfortunately, she was so convinced of this that she told several of her friends of her belief.
The rumour got around and, inevitably, was picked up by Town Topics, which talked confidently of the ‘approaching marriage’ between the two. Other newspapers followed suit, referring to the Prince as Maud’s ‘fiancé’. When the Prince arrived he was horrified to find that everyone believed that he and Maud were either engaged or about to be – especially as he had his sights set on another, and considerably richer, San Francisco beauty. When a local newspaper actually announced the engagement between him and Maud it forced him to take action and he asked Maud to make a public denial of their betrothal.
She agreed, but not unnaturally did this in the way she thought would be least embarrassing for herself: she let it be known that the reason the engagement was broken was because her guardian Horace Carpentier objected so strongly to the match that he had threatened to cut her out of his will if she went ahead – another development that naturally fascinated the press.
When the Prince and the San Francisco beauty he had been courting in turn announced their engagement, it unleashed a further tide of gossip and press comment. ‘It is authoritatively announced that Prince André Poniatowski, of Poland, the former fiancé of Maud Alice Burke, will marry Miss Sperry, daughter of the Stockton (Cal.) millionaire,’ said the New York Times. ‘Miss Sperry’s father owns the Stockton Flour Mills and controls the California flour trade.’
For Maud, there was deep humiliation; although she had done her best to put a favourable gloss on the affair, it must have seemed like a public jilting. Unable to face the torrent of rumour and speculation, she and her mother left San Francisco for New York.
Here, a year after her fatal effect on George Moore, another man fell in love with Maud at first sight. This was Sir Bache Cunard, a dark, thick-set man with a melancholy expression, a drooping moustache and at forty-three old enough to be her father. As a grandson of the founder of the Cunard Line, he had inherited the baronetcy from his brother Edward, killed playing polo. He lived in a huge yellow stone house on the top of a hill in the heart of the Leicestershire hunting country; hunting was his passion in life and he kept his own pack of foxhounds. Other interests were carriage-driving, shooting, fishing and, surprisingly, working in gold and silver to produce decorative objects from his tower workshop. One of his presents to Maud was a cup carved from a coconut shell, with a scalloped silver border decorated with snowdrop heads made from seashells.
Maud was not in love with him, but like all young women then she had been brought up to believe that marriage was essential, the right and proper goal for all females. It was, too, as George Moore put it, the ‘springboard to wider horizons’. Besides, Sir Bache was rich, he had a title, he would raise her on the social ladder – and it would show how little she cared about what was seen by everyone as her jilting by Prince Poniatowski.
Essentially metropolitan herself, she disregarded the fact that with Sir Bache she would have to lead the quiet country life that he preferred – not even a plea by her future sister-in-law, who realised this, that she should break it off because of their essentially conflicting tastes and attitudes, caused her to change her mind. ‘I like Sir Bache better than any man I know,’ she declared – and that was that.
The twenty-three-year-old Maud married her baronet in New York in April 1895, far away from the scene of her earlier humiliation, and left a few days later for Nevill Holt, its gardens, its woods, its fishponds, its stables filled with well-bred hunters, carriage horses and hacks, its shrubberies where the box and bay were neatly topiaried by Sir Bache himself. Horace Carpentier remained alone in the house until his elderly niece (this time a genuine one), Maria Hall Williamson, moved in.
Maud, as her sister-in-law had predicted, did not enjoy country life. She did not care for hunting, or the conversations it engendered; her only pleasure was in rearranging the interior of the house. As she had brought plenty of money with her – some sources said she had a dowry of $2 million – she could indulge her tastes.
Her life began to open up only after she had met the Prince of Wales, with his penchant for young and pretty American women. Once the Prince’s approval was known, weekends at Nevill Holt became fashionable, and Maud’s long career as a hostess began. With her husband usually out hunting, shooting or visiting a friend for the fishing, Nevill Holt began to see the romantic intrigues that were so much a part of Edwardian house parties. Once, according to Maud, when Bache returned from a fishing trip he noticed ‘an atmosphere of love’ in the house. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on in this house,’ he said, ‘but I don’t like it.’2
Then, on one of her visits to London where, along with Paris, she bought her clothes, she spotted George Moore sitting, like her, in a hansom cab that was driving in the opposite direction. She waved, both cabs stopped and the delighted Moore, who had never stopped writing to her, asked her to go for a drive in his.
For him it was the most wonderful of reunions. A month after Maud’s wedding he had lost his mother, and of that time he wrote: ‘A man cannot lament two women at the same time, and only a month ago the most beautiful thing that had ever appeared in my life, an idea which I knew from the first I was destined to follow, had appeared to me, had stayed with me for a while, and had passed from me. All the partial loves of my youth seemed to find expression at last in a passion that would know no change … she had the indispensable quality of making me feel I was more intensely alive when she was by me than I was when she was away.’
A week later Maud wrote to Moore suggesting that he might come and stay at the house where she would be spending the weekend, without her husband. His hopes were raised, but to no avail. ‘Every night she locked her door,’ he wrote, ‘and the sound is and ever will be in my ears.’ All the same, after several months she wrote to him again, this time inviting him to Nevill Holt.
Again, his hopes were dashed – Maud was pregnant with her daughter Nancy, born a year after the Cunards were married. With the birth of her daughter, Maud obviously felt that her wifely duties were done. ‘She had never really wished to have a child,’ said Nancy later, adding that her mother maintained that no great woman had ever had one. (‘[Queen] Elizabeth had none, and how about George Eliot and George Sand?’)
After Nancy’s birth, Maud moved into a bedroom far distant from that of her husband and handed Nancy over immediately to the care of nurses. Today we would call her treatment of her child inhumane: she scarcely saw her daughter, most of whose early life was made miserable by the regime imposed on her by a harsh, repressive governess (unlike the kindly Chinese servants who had cared for Maud as a child); then, there was nothing unusual about the separate lives led by well-off parents and children.
Maud did not keep her door locked for ever, and soon Moore was writing: ‘Again I hear the soft sound of the door opening over the velvet pile of carpet…’
Of their affair, about which he wrote in his fiction, lightly disguising Maud as Elizabeth, he declared: ‘It does not follow that because a woman sometimes reminds one of a dryad that she does not at other times remind one of Boucher or Fragonard, and that night Elizabeth seemed to me a very F
ragonard, a plump Fragonard maiden as she sat up in bed reading, her gold hair in plaits and a large book in her hand. I asked her what she was reading and might have talked literature for a while, but throwing the vain linen aside she revealed herself and in that moment of august nakedness the mortal woman was forgotten…’
By now the Cunards were leading virtually separate lives. In Nancy’s diary recording Maud’s weekend house parties, her father is absent on all but two occasions during these ‘constant arrivals and departures … Beautiful and exciting ladies moved about in smart tailor-mades; they arrived in sables or long fox stoles, a bunch of Parma violets pinned into the fur on the shoulder.’
Nancy also recorded that ‘The men … became more intellectual as the autumn proceeded and the host was away shooting and fishing lengthily in Scotland.’ One of them, the faithful George Moore, also took an interest in the child Nancy, talking to her not only of literature but also of sexual matters with a freedom unheard of in those days. Once, for example, he reported a female friend’s attempt to become a better wife by going to Paris and taking some lessons from a superior cocotte – only to hear her husband say when she tried to put them into practice: ‘Dora, ladies never move.’
Moore wrote to his ‘dearest Primavera’ constantly. ‘There is no part of the house [Nevill Holt] I do not remember because you were there with me … I remember the chestnut trees at the back, Nancy and her governess, and the long roads, a little bare and dreary, that flow on over the hills – far away.
‘But above all these things I remember your mien and motion, your brightly coloured cheeks, your fair hair, fair as the hair in an eighteenth-century pastel, and your marble eyes … How I live on memories of Maud.’
* * *
Maud’s tireless social life continued: by now she knew not only the highest of society but politicians and their wives like the Asquiths and the Balfours, painters and writers such as Somerset Maugham and Max Beerbohm and, of course, George Moore. Some of those she met became her lovers; one was Lord Alexander Thynne, son of the 4th Marquess of Bath. Of this dashing man she remarked3 that the witty and handsome Alexander ‘was one of the world’s great lovers’.
Although such liaisons were conducted with circumspection and discretion, they became known almost instantly in the circles in which both moved. ‘Elizabeth was a constant but unfaithful mistress,’ lamented Moore. ‘In her own words “she liked not continuity”, but was willing to pick up a thread again.’ What he did not know was that she had met the great love of her life, the young musician Thomas Beecham, and by 1910 had begun an affair with him. Shortly afterwards he was cited as co-respondent in a much-publicised divorce case, but this did nothing to deter Maud.
Beecham was a powerful, imperious personality, a man of great determination and charm. He was as witty a lunchtime companion – once he described the sound of the harpsichord as ‘two skeletons copulating on a roof’ – as he was a superb musical interpreter and brilliant conductor. Maud found him irresistible.
Finally, the inevitable happened. In 1911, now thirty-nine, Maud left the husband from whom she had grown inalienably apart, rented their Cavendish Square house from her friends the Asquiths (H.H. was now Prime Minister and installed in No. 10 Downing Street) and proceeded to conquer London – and continue her affair with the married Beecham.
Her parties became famous for their mixture of guests, from politicians and diplomats to writers, artists and musicians, drawn there by her signature purple invitations. The windows of her dining room had green lamé curtains, covering another wall was a hanging featuring leaf-eating giraffes among birch trees; in the centre of the huge round dining table of lapis lazuli stood a gilt-bronze epergne supported by naked nymphs and satyrs.
She treated her guests like a ringmaster, drawing out the shy and flicking the opinionated into life with a provocative remark or, as Osbert Sitwell later put it: ‘she would goad the conversation, as if it were a bull, and she a matador, and compel it to show a fiery temper’. She herself wore dramatic clothes and many jewels, chiefly the emeralds by which she became known. She was rich, popular and famous; seemingly her only worry in life was her receding chin, which she fruitlessly tried to correct with massage and electrical treatment.
It made no difference to Moore. ‘Dearest Maud,’ he wrote in 1920, ‘You brought into the world a hard heart as well as much beauty, grace and charm, and it is small wonder that I fell in love with you, remained in love with you, and shall always love you.’
Then came a step that caused him immense perturbation. He received a letter from his beloved Maud signed ‘Maud Emerald’. He wrote at once, terrified that she had married a Mr Emerald. ‘I beg you to send me a telegram. A yes or no will be enough. You cannot fail to understand that it is unfair to leave a man who has loved you dearly for more than thirty years in doubt.’ He followed this up with a telegram: ‘Who is Emerald are you married? GM’
Sir Joseph Duveen, to whom Moore showed the letter that caused him such anguish, described Moore as ‘spending the morning pacing up and down the room like a caged animal’. Maud, explaining to Moore that she was nicknamed the Emerald Queen because she wore so many, confirmed that she had simply changed her name to Emerald. Henceforth that was how everyone addressed her, except for Moore, who continued to write to her as his ‘Dearest Maud’.
She remained in love with Beecham all her life, just as she remained George Moore’s ideal and ‘dearest Primavera’. With her devotion to music, fuelled by her passion for Beecham, she was largely responsible for introducing London’s smart set to opera: she was a director of the Royal Opera House Company, she helped Beecham raise much-needed subscriptions from her wealthy friends, she took the Opera House’s ‘Omnibus’ box, entertaining friends to dinner before the performance, and she did her best to win government support in establishing English opera. Nothing was allowed to prevent her from attending an opera or a concert when Beecham was conducting.
Nancy inherited her mother’s love of the arts, becoming a writer and poet, and her flamboyance, wearing outré clothes and African bracelets of ivory and metal up to the elbows. But she rebelled against Maud-Emerald’s way of life, choosing her friends among the more avant-garde writers, immersing herself in black culture, taking black lovers and supporting numerous causes. Soon the rift between them was irrevocable. ‘I think of Her Ladyship, when I think of her at all, with great objectivity,’ said Nancy. ‘She was at all times very far from me.’
Sir Bache died in 1925. Neither he nor Horace Carpentier, who had died much earlier, mentioned Maud in their will. George Moore, though, left her his books, furniture and many pictures.
As the years passed, her wealth disappeared, much of it in funding Beecham’s operatic projects. Estranged from her daughter, she now had to suffer another loss. She had accompanied Beecham to America, where he was giving a series of concerts, when she heard at a luncheon party there that he was going to marry a concert pianist. She managed to conceal her misery at the time but her heart was broken.
She died at the Dorchester Hotel, where she lived for the last part of her life. She had left instructions that after her death she wished to be cremated, but not as to where her ashes should be strewn. As all her friends knew, she hated country life, so that when someone said, half-jokingly, ‘What about Grosvenor Square?’, it seemed the perfect answer to most of them.
One of her regular guests performed this, and a wind blew them back into his face, so that he complained he was now full of his former hostess. It was just the sort of unexpected twist to the ceremony that the inimitable Emerald would have loved.
CHAPTER 13
Royal Connections
On Saturday, 14 August 1881, Belle (Leila) Wilson, whose sister May had married Ogden Goelet, wrote to her mother from Cowes, while she and Mr and Mrs Goelet were on board the yacht Norseman, ‘I came away with the brightest and most pleasing reminiscence of English hospitality under the especial patronage of the Prince of Wales … I was very mu
ch amused, and at all the dances had delightful evenings and lots of partners … at one of the parties I was asked to go in to supper by four people …
‘The fact is … the Prince’s kindness to us made our visit to Cowes.’
The fact also was that the Prince looked favourably on anyone capable of entertaining him. It was this that allowed the borders of British society to become more porous than those of American. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not confine himself solely to those whom a royal prince might be expected to befriend, the landed aristocracy, but drew into his orbit those who amused or attracted him – and who could afford him.
His tastes were simple – that is to say, it did not require depth of intellect or strong intuitive powers to find them out. He liked good food, comfortable surroundings, staying in house parties in congenial company and pretty women, exquisitely gowned, who could amuse him, frequently with gossip about the love affairs of themselves or their friends, in which he took a keen interest. All of this required money and later, when he became king, a very great deal of money, so much so that many of his friends bankrupted themselves through trying to maintain their friendship with him.
He was the most longed-for guest in the country, admired so much that he was widely imitated: it was said that he could walk along Piccadilly without being recognised as so many gentlemen had modelled themselves on him, dressing and moving in exactly the same way. Once, when he had an attack of rheumatism in his shoulder, he was obliged to shake hands with his arm pressed tightly to his side, and this peculiar handshake was immediately adopted by fashionable London. Similarly, when Alexandra developed a slight limp after an illness, smart women also began to walk with the ‘Alexandra limp’.
The Husband Hunters Page 21
