The London “sets” of the Curzon sisters were beginning to diverge. With a husband in the House of Commons, Cimmie’s was necessarily becoming more and more political. She had thrown herself so fervently into Labour Party doctrine that she did not hesitate to proselytize the virtues of socialism whenever she got the chance. “Cim gave us a long socialist dissertation after dinner,” records Irene’s diary of May 13, 1928. “She was so certain and heartwhole one could not argue with her.”
Irene, passionate about music and the theater, knew many in the arts world. During that summer, luncheons with Gerald du Maurier, Anita Loos, the Irish tenor John McCormack, Paul Robeson, Beatrice Lillie, Ivor Novello, Oliver Messel, Noël Coward, Maurice Baring and Syrie Maugham alternated with dinners with the Marlboroughs and the Salisburys.
There was also a new admirer. All through the spring of 1928, Irene lunched, dined and walked her sealyham Winks with one of her hunting friends, “Flash” Kellett. It was a relationship complicated by the fact that his wife, Myrtie, was having an open flirtation with the Prince of Wales, which made Flash miserable and earned Irene’s usual disapproval of anyone who publicly broke the rules. Her outings with Flash continued until August, when Myrtie began to reel her husband in. “He left me at 10 in a very shattered, broken frame of mind,” records Irene’s diary of August 11 after a gloomy dinner at the Berkeley, “and I had uttered a few grim home truths about Myrtie.”
It was back to Gordon again. They went together to Paris for a week before Irene went on to join the Mosleys and their party—Bob Boothby, John Strachey, Baba and Fruity—in their villa at Antibes. It was almost as social as London, with luncheon parties in beach pajamas with the Douglas Fairbankses, Elsie Mendl or Somerset Maugham, bathing off rafts or the rocks, and candelight dinners where Tom flirted with another of his conquests, Georgia Sitwell, the pretty young wife of Sacheverell Sitwell, youngest of the three famous literary Sitwells.
But beneath the sparkling surface, glittering like the Mediterranean sea in the sun, the darker currents of their lives were swirling. Irene listened to Cim and Tom fighting upstairs—rows usually ended by Tom storming out as Cim sobbed—or heard him speak rudely to her sister in public. “Felt badly the strained atmosphere,” runs her diary for August 28. “Tom went to the casino and I talked for the first time in my life for two hours to Cim over the misery of her present life and Tom’s insulting behavior to her.” In turn, Irene poured out her heart to Cim, telling her every detail of “the Gordon mess.”
That summer Tom’s father died and he inherited the baronetcy. Georgia Sitwell, going to tea with Cim and Tom, found Cim surrounded by the Mosley diamonds. “She was planning what to do with them, that is how to have them reset,” wrote Georgia in her diary. “Tom actually says she will need the tiara one day as it is, to wear—as Queen of the Communists I suppose!”
Georgia also noted her first meeting with Baba, later to become a close friend. “Alexandra Metcalfe was there, very pretty, chic, hardfaced and oh! so conventional and ordinary.” It was a small and in many ways strangely incestuous circle: Georgia was at the height of her affair with Tom Mosley—one of his notes to her, written from his bachelor flat, simply says “Come!”—and there were numerous luncheons à deux, yet at the same time she was pursuing her friendship with the unsuspecting Cimmie.
Sacheverell Sitwell was less complaisant. “We went to Jean Fleming’s for cocktails,” wrote Georgia on November 8. “On the way back Sach began as usual about the Mosleys and we had an awful time. I decided it was time to put a stop to the more tiresome aspect of his attitude and get really angry so he may give less trouble for a while. He hates all people who may give one a good time.”
In the autumn Gracie and Scatters Wilson won the Caesarewitch Handicap at Newmarket with Arctic Star by three lengths—they had bought the horse in Ireland as an unbroken two-year-old for eight hundred pounds. Scatters led him in, a dashing figure in the black-and-white checked coat that made him so easily recognizable at winter race meetings. It seemed a pattern that would stretch ahead for years.
But change was imminent. The common front that had formed between Cim and Irene when both had the same difficulties with their father had fallen away as they became established in their new lives. Cim, with her children, her anguished, adoring love for her husband and her growing involvement in his political life, now had more in common with her younger sister, also a mother—and perfectly able to hold her own with Tom.
Irene, with her work for East End clubs and for charities, her strong religious faith, the emotionalism that burst through a somewhat formidable exterior, the loud, rather flamboyant colors she preferred and the good looks that were handsome rather than pretty, did not fit into the category of women Tom liked as guests or mistresses. Baba, slim, beautiful, clever, amusing, always perfectly dressed and still fascinated by him, was much more his cup of tea.
As for Baba, the year in India, Fruity’s devotion, the open admiration of other men, her success in London and her own powerful personality had given her a new perspective. She loved her husband but she knew she was the dominant partner in the marriage; hers was the money and what she said went—not only because she held the purse strings but because Fruity, who could not get over his luck in marrying her, could not bear to say no to her. At the core of the Prince of Wales’s circle, she saw the power that royalty confers; with the Mosleys, she began to glimpse the fascination of political power—that sense of being at the heart of things that grips like a vise. Irene was eight years older, but Baba no longer felt like the little sister.
In 1928, for the first time, the Curzon sisters spent Christmas apart. Baba and Fruity had sailed for America on the Olympic, after Nancy Astor had given a huge farewell lunch for them. Irene was at Melton, lonely and miserable despite the parties: “barring Flash no one in the room caring if I looked lovely or hideous, and I fled home in a black fog, alone and on my feet and in a sudden fear of utter loneliness. All the years here have never made me walk home alone before in utter horror of everyone only wanting bed.” But she gave a dinner party on Christmas Eve, won thirty-five pounds at poker on Christmas Day and drank port with the Prince of Wales at the Quorn’s Boxing Day meet—his first day’s hunting that season.
The Mosleys spent Christmas with their children at Denham, returning there on Boxing Day after a visit to the fount of socialism in its purest form: the house of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. After they left, Beatrice wrote in her diary: “It struck us both that he and she had changed—partly from his long illness last autumn and winter,* partly from the ups and downs of electoral failure and success; also from social boycott by their own set and an uneasy position in the Labour Party. He is disillusioned. Labour politics for an aristocrat are not attractive—current and cross-current from left and right and very little real comradeship.”
In Mosley, the Webbs believed that they saw a possible future leader of the party to which they had given their lives. “With his money, his personal charm and political gifts, his good-looking and agreeable wife,” wrote Beatrice, “he is dead certain of Cabinet office and possibly has a chance of eventual premiership.”
14
Lady Cynthia Mosley, MP
Accidents in the hunting field did nothing to check the sport’s popularity. Everyone who could, hunted; even politicians came to Melton to pick up a little of its glamour by association. Stanley Baldwin, brushing up his image of the bluff, warm-hearted countryman, stayed with the Master of the Quorn during the season of 1928–29, following hounds in a phaeton drawn by a white cob. The equipage plunged over the Leicestershire grass, Baldwin’s familiar cherrywood pipe gripped between his teeth all the while.
The king and queen did not share Baldwin’s enthusiasm. For years they had been worried that the Prince of Wales, a bold and reckless rider, might kill or maim himself in the hunting field. When the king fell ill in the autumn of 1928, the thought that his heir might soon succeed him must have given this anxiety a sharper edge. The pr
ince, who had returned from South Africa because of his father’s health, did not begin his hunting that season until Boxing Day. Almost immediately, there were three fatalities with his favorite pack, the Quorn, that would have reached the ears of the king and queen.
The royal couple began to put pressure on their son. Although the prince attended the Melton Ball in January 1929, gay as ever, with the foxtrot all the rage, two dramatic changes were about to take place in his life, bringing “the Melton years” to a close.
The first was a new mistress. That January, while his longtime beloved, Freda Dudley Ward, was away in Palm Beach with her husband, the prince ran into the voluptuous Thelma Furness again and immediately invited her out to dinner. She accepted equally promptly. Very soon, they began a highly charged and passionate affair. The prince would arrive for his regular Thursday nights at the Embassy Club with Thelma, and sometimes also her twin sister Gloria Vanderbilt, both in chiffon dresses with row upon row of narrow diamond bangles on their wrists which they called their “service stripes.” On other nights they could be seen at the Kit-Cat Club with Prince George, bringing with them most of the Melton set.
The second change affected Fruity and Baba. The prince finally yielded to parental pressure and gave up hunting. On Saturday, February 23, 1929, all his hunters, with the exception of one old horse, were sold by auction at the Repository in Leicester. “HRH The Prince of Wales is not hunting any more, or riding in any point-to-point races this season,” the auctioneers, Warner, Sheppard & Wade, announced in their catalogs and posters.
At once the prince’s life became much more London-based. He had his own apartments in London, at York House in St. James’s Palace, and turned some of his furious energy into renovating them, chiefly by removing some of the warren of bedrooms and replacing them with bathrooms, a ballroom and a new dining room where a hundred people could be seated. The chintz sofas and portrait of Queen Mary over the drawing-room chimneypiece remained.
St. James’s was a royal palace, but the prince had always wanted somewhere he could think of as his own, preferably in the country, where he could have complete privacy. He asked his father for Fort Belvedere, a battlemented semi-derelict royal property, half small castle and half house, six miles from Windsor. The king agreed at once.
To the prince, “the Fort,” as he always called it, became home; and he loved it, as he always loved, passionately. He gutted its interior, installed central heating and, following the American custom he so approved of, bathrooms for almost every one of the bedrooms—a rarity when many large country houses still existed on just one or two. He planned a ballroom, a basement gymnasium holding a practice golf tee and net, and a steam bath. The lily pond beneath the battlements was replaced with a swimming pool and a tennis court was laid out. He chopped down the yew trees growing close to the house, which kept every room on that side in perpetual shadow, replaced the Victorian laurel shrubbery with rhododendrons, and cut paths through the woodland of fir and birch.
It was not a particularly large house—the walnut table in the dining room hung with Stubbs paintings seated only ten. The best furniture, Queen Anne, was in the library. His bedroom, with its Chippendale bed, had tall windows hung with dark red chintz curtains that looked out on the terrace. Family photographs stood about and there was a miniature stairway at the foot of the bed so that his favorite Cairn terrier, Cora, could climb up. Thelma slept in a bedroom that could have been designed for one of the grandes horizontales of the Belle Epoque—walls of pink satin, an enormous four-poster hung with the same material, flounced, looped and gathered to each bedpost by pink ostrich feathers.
Although the hard labor of chopping down trees and hacking away years of undergrowth mopped up the prince’s physical energy, it did not supply the adrenaline high of hunting. He began flying lessons, buying himself a De Havilland Gypsy Moth. A road was made from the front door of the Fort to Smith’s Lawn in Windsor Great Park, where a private royal aerodrome was built. The king, determined to keep his heir safely on the ground, countered by forbidding the issue of a flying license.
Emotional crisis rather than change dominated Irene’s life. Men seemed to float in and out of her orbit, a number of them becoming lovers—in January 1929, for instance, she saw Arthur Rubinstein again, dining at the Embassy with him in a party for four. “He drove me home and we had a long talk. Whenever I see him he breathes life and humour and vitality into me.” It was, perhaps, that evening that their long-drawn-out and sporadic affair began, although Arthur was anything but reliable—the next day she waited in vain for him for half an hour with John McCormack and his wife until they eventually gave him up and went to the cinema without him.
She had several other admirers. Though Myrtie Kellett had put her foot down and Flash was seldom allowed to see her, another, Paul Duhamel, was besottedly in love. Unfortunately, he chose to propose to her the night after she had had dinner with the man she loved, Gordon Leith, and had gone on to spend the rest of the night dancing with him at the Embassy. “G. took me home and was adorable but I told him I could not face dinner at his house with Cuckoo. It nearly drove me mad.” After this, Paul Duhamel’s declaration that, for him, she had all he wanted in a woman “of sex, charm, wit, taste and brains” fell flat. “I told him I had only loved one person for six years and he [Paul] was wonderful and asked nothing of me but to see me and give me of his friendship—just another tragedy in my life.”
The lunches, the dinners, the parties, the hunting, the poker, the charity work, the cocktails, the concerts, the presidency of the Melton Mowbray Amateur Dramatic Society and the Leicester Symphony Orchestra (with its concerts conducted by the up-and-coming young conductor Malcolm Sargent) and the late-night suppers continued. A determined champion of women, Irene was also chairman of the British Women’s Symphony Orchestra, for whom she collected money: it was, as she correctly said, the only medium through which women students could learn the art of orchestral playing—impossible in the male-dominated orchestras of the day.
Outwardly, she seemed to have everything; inside she was gnawed by loneliness. Men who had professed undying devotion, like Bobby Digby, had married other women. Both her sisters were married, with the children she longed for. Worst of all, her affair with Gordon Leith seemed to be no nearer fulfillment. To be kept on the end of a string for six long years—for that is what it amounted to—would make any woman despair. For Curzon’s daughter, it was intolerable. Though humble at heart, Irene was sophisticated enough to know that her advantages in worldly terms amounted to a full hand—she was good-looking, independent, titled and possessed of a fortune enough to be a magnet in its own right.
And yet, at thirty-three, she was emotionally caught in a net from which she could not seem to break free, waiting for the love of her life finally to leave his wife and claim her. Every time the proud spirit she had inherited from her father revolted at this humiliating position and she attempted to put distance and time between them, as with her cruises, Gordon would seek her out and renew his promises and the affair would start up again.
Affectionate lectures from her old family doctor, roses from other men, counsel and comfort from Elinor Glyn, could not stop the sleepless nights and tumultuous thoughts. “All day I had a sob in my throat and the ache of wanting someone to take me into the sun for a month and forget everything, but every one I love has a wife or is tied,” she wrote on April 23. Eventually, she broke down, bursting into tears while lunching with Baba. It was a complete reversal of roles. From then on the balance of their relationship shifted. Baba comforted her sister and told her she would talk to Gordon.
One opinion, however, was never enough for Irene. When a friend advised her to consult her brother-in-law Tom Mosley, she did so, rather nervously. To her surprise, he was kind and understanding. He would, he said, speak to Gordon and find out his intentions.
At last the nightmare of waiting was over. Tom’s intervention had cut the Gordian knot. He was able, as one man to another�
�and as a man known for his own extramarital affairs to another man indulging in one—to ask Gordon the direct question: “Do you intend to marry my sister-in-law?”
The reply was equally direct. “I’m afraid not, old boy.”
Tom did not feel he could tell Irene this himself and deputed Baba to do so. On May 6 Irene went to Baba, “who gave me my doom,” records Irene’s diary. Baba told the weeping Irene that Gordon had seemed staggered at the thought that anyone would expect him to leave Cuckoo. “So I must never see him again,” the day’s entry ends dolefully.
Irene had turned to Baba rather than Cimmie not so much from choice but because all Cimmie’s time was taken up with politics. She was not only speaking on Tom’s behalf in Smethwick as well as appearing up and down the country with Ramsay MacDonald and giving garden parties for Labour Party workers at Savehay Farm, she had decided to stand for Parliament herself in the general election of May 30, 1929. She was extremely popular in the party. The tough trade-union leaders were flattered when she asked them to dinner and her all-around niceness made the coterie of MPs surrounding Tom her devoted friends.
Her constituency was the safely Conservative Stoke-on-Trent, where her opponent, Colonel Ward, had achieved a majority of four thousand five hundred in the previous election. She spent much of her time there, speaking constantly, doing her best to meet as many people as she could and expressing Labour policy with a heartfelt sincerity. Because of Cimmie’s looks and style, her opponents immediately dubbed it “the mannequin election”; she tried hard to dress down, usually campaigning in a beige coat and skirt and brogues, though she enlivened these with a chic scarlet hat and gloves “just to show which side I am on.”
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 15
