Then, as Britain teetered on the edge of the financial whirlpool, the leader of the New Party, which had so rousingly declared the need for urgent action, went on holiday with his wife.
17
High Life and Low Morals on the Riviera
The Mosleys went as usual to Antibes, arriving on August 2. When Irene joined them at their villa on the fourth she found them surrounded by a familiar crowd of the ultra-social—Cecil Beaton, Doris Castlerosse, Beatrice Guinness and her daughters Baby and Zita Jungman, Sylvia Ashley, the Michael Arlens. More swarmed in to bathe at Maxine Elliott’s villa or sip cocktails, the women in beach pajamas and pearls, the men in linen trousers and Aertex shirts.
One evening an incident occurred which might have inspired Somerset Maugham’s story “The High Divers” (“The lady climbed up her 8oft ladder and dived into a tiny tank 4 and a half foot deep with flaming petrol burning on the water”). Another evening could have been the inspiration for Noël Coward’s song “I Went to a Marvellous Party” (“Dear Cecil arrived wearing armour, some shells and a black feather boa. . . . Maureen disappeared and came back in a beard . . .”). That particular party was given by the couturier Captain Edward Molyneux and faithfully recorded by Irene. “The nigger band from the Monte Carlo New Casino, a dance floor laid down, everyone in the world there—marvellous fireworks—Noël Coward singing and playing on the piano—Elsie Mendl did a shy-making performance on the dance floor of standing on her head—ring a ring a roses, we all fall down—Oliver Messel caught in an incriminating position with several men . . .”
And, alas for Irene’s good resolutions, Gordon Leith was there too. They spent the evening together and he took her off to the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where they got a room. “Gordon still holds a world of enchantment for me,” she wrote, and when Charles Mendl told her that his life had been warped by one woman she said sadly, “Like mine by one man.”
She was not too preoccupied to notice Tom’s new girlfriend, Lottsie, the wife of the immensely rich Alfred Fabré-Luce of the bank Crédit Lyonnais. Lottsie, petite, fair-haired, blue-eyed and full of merry chatter, was already linked to her new lover by one of the invisible network of liaisons that crisscrossed that tight, raffish little world. Her brother, Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, was married to the former Baba d’Erlanger, long-term mistress of Tom Mitford, brother of Diana Guinness, the woman who would soon overshadow Cim’s life.
Tom brought his usual energy to the pursuit of Lottsie, who was a willing prey. He would whisk her off to Villefranche when Cim was busy with the children or pursue her to Monte Carlo, ostensibly to see Baba and Fruity, who were staying there. Sometimes he would ask her to join the Mosley party, and though Cim did her best to keep an eye on them, the pair would slip away for hours.
The unhappy Cim was at a loss to know how to deal with the affair, happening in full view of everyone. She alternated between sticking to Tom like a leech whenever Lottsie was around and loftily ignoring her husband’s behavior. Almost invariably, though, rows ensued. Still deeply in love with her husband, she was deliriously happy when one evening he condescended—in Irene’s words—to dine alone with her. Later they all went to a nightclub, where Irene weakened sufficiently to sit for a long time talking to Gordon “and was fiercely eyed by the two Curzon sisters!”
At home the economic situation had reached crisis point. When Austria’s biggest bank, Kredit Anstalt, had closed its doors on June 18, 1931 (the French had refused to cancel the punitive German reparations debt), this created a domino effect all over Europe. On August 19 the cabinet had, after much heated debate, finally agreed on the ratio of new taxation to cuts in the social services in a compromise economy package that included a 10 percent cut in the dole. Then the Conservative and Liberal leaders told MacDonald that they would not stand for more than 25 percent of these measures in the form of new taxation (the previous year, income tax had been raised from four shillings on the pound to four shillings sixpence, and supertax increased also).
This, of course, threw the burden of raising the rest of the money on cuts in public-service wages—and the dole. The Trade Union Council (TUC), led by Walter Citrine and Ernest Bevin, was adamant that neither the wages of the low-paid nor the dole should be touched. It was deadlock.
On August 22, as the Mosley party flocked in a chattering mass around the cocktail bar of the Eden Roc, then drove to Saint-Tropez to buy up everything from fishermen’s jerseys to “droll” hats, Harold Nicolson was leaving the offices of the Evening Standard to assume the editorship of the New Party magazine, Action. He could not have chosen a worse moment to start a political career. That same day the cabinet was informed that America would not help with a loan unless the dole were further cut. Unanimously, the cabinet refused: no Labour government could pass such a measure. Just before 10 p.m. the following day MacDonald set off for Buckingham Palace intending to resign, and with the resignations of the entire cabinet in his pocket. But the king had already ascertained from the other two party leaders that they would be willing to serve in a government headed by MacDonald, and persuaded him to remain in office.
Next day, August 24, MacDonald told his astonished cabinet colleagues that he was staying on as prime minister of a National government—a government that would in fact be largely Conservative. To his party, as to his cabinet colleagues (all but three of whom refused to serve with him) MacDonald’s action was seen as a bitter betrayal of all Labour stood for. Within a fortnight, he was expelled from the party.
In Antibes, Tom’s pursuit of Lottsie was so blatant that at one moment Cimmie ran out of dinner and down the street in a blind rage. What neither Tom nor Cimmie could have known then was that she had just become pregnant with her third child.
The news of the sudden change of government at home in the following day’s newspapers was a welcome diversion. Tom left that afternoon for London; his wife and family remained in Antibes. That night Irene and Cim went to Maxine Elliott’s fancy-dress party, after which Cim, who drove herself home at 5:30 a.m., fell asleep at the wheel and, at a hairpin bend, hit the wall of the corniche road—fortunately on the landward side. Next day the round of lunch parties, dinners and nightclubs began again. For Irene, it had all suddenly become too much: the drunkenness, the endless cocktail chatter, the affairs, her sister’s unhappiness and the torture of having the man she loved so close to her and yet so inaccessible. She decided to go to America, sent her maid to England for clothes and money—the banknotes were brought over cut in half for safety—and left on the Augustuz from Cannes on September 4.
In London, Nicolson was briefly optimistic, thinking that the New Party might stand a good chance in the general election announced for October 27, 1931. “Find that we have had orders for 110,000 copies of Action,” he wrote in his diary for September 12. “This of course is solely on a sale or return basis and does not mean a guaranteed circulation of even half that figure. But it does mean that the newsagents think a priori that there is a prospect of disposing of something like that number.”
Nicolson’s elation soon disappeared as he began to realize that the New Party was changing shape. Tom was steadily moving away from the parliamentary ethic of a cabinet with the prime minister primus inter pares toward the concept of the Leader, in whom was vested autocratic powers. He was fascinated by the Italian leader, Mussolini, dictator of his country since 1922. Where most Britons saw Il Duce as a comic-opera figure posing and strutting ridiculously in a series of uniforms, Tom saw a single individual successfully running a country. Where the average Englishman viewed Mussolini’s Blackshirts as unpleasantly militaristic, Tom saw an escort of muscular young men as a Praetorian guard, allowing the Leader to put his message across in the face of often physical opposition.
When, on September 20, he addressed an estimated twenty thousand people in Glasgow—referring to the Labour Party as “a Salvation Army that took to its heels on the Day of Judgment”—he was attacked by communists with razors, fought of
f by his personal bodyguard. “Tom says this forces us to be fascist and that we no longer need hesitate to create our trained and disciplined force,” noted Harold Nicolson. They differed on the question of uniform: Nicolson, who was becoming more and more unhappy, suggested gray flannel trousers; Tom wanted, and got, black shirts on the fascisti lines.
The discussions with Harold Nicolson, the searches for suitable candidates, the plans for what would happen when New Party candidates were in the House of Commons went on apace. Georgia Sitwell’s diary for October 5 notes tersely her lunch with Tom at the Ritz: “Talked of politics.” Three days later, on October 8, the first issue of Action was published—thirty-two tabloid pages selling for two pence.
Action did nothing to sway the voters toward the New Party, although Tom’s reputation for brilliance and oratory led to approaches to him personally from both Tory and Labour. But though his ideas for the future of the New Party were still inchoate, the appeal of personal power was too strong to resist. He refused all offers, though gloomy about the New Party’s electoral chances.
The election of October 1931 was a disaster for the New Party. Its twenty-four candidates, none of whom was elected, were of an appallingly low standard—some barely literate, others disreputable. None, except for Tom, had parliamentary experience, a lack not compensated for by the sight of boxer Kid Lewis campaigning in tandem with the aesthete Sacheverell Sitwell. In addition, the national government was already putting into practice many of the Keynesian measures advocated by the New Party, which—perhaps because of this—had campaigned on an unappealing premise: “We believe that within a measurable time this country will be exposed to the danger of a proletarian revolution. We believe that such a revolution will mean massacre, starvation and collapse. We believe that the one protection against such a disaster is the Corporate State. We shall not cease to proclaim that doctrine.”
A second National government, Conservative in all but name (the Conservatives won 473 seats), was elected overwhelmingly. MacDonald’s part in this was roundly denounced by Beatrice Webb: “Within the new Ministry are the most prominent enemies of the Labour movement.” Tom, who had stood in Stoke-on-Trent, where Cimmie had made herself so popular, came bottom of the poll with 10,834 votes but managed to save his deposit (one of the only two New Party candidates who did).
Nicolson, who lost his deposit—he polled a mere 461 votes as New Party candidate for the Combined English Universities—found that this crushing defeat did not depress Tom, though he was worried by the amount of money Action was losing. His ideas, and his determination to mold his party into the increasingly unpleasant shape he wanted, were as strong as ever. “Dined Tom at Boulestin’s,” wrote Georgia Sitwell, with whom he was having an affair. “Talked politics. T. at his worst.”
Yet his personal charisma gave his determination an irresistible momentum. “I am loyal to Tom since I have an affection for him,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary on November 2, 1931. “But I realise his ideas are divergent from my own. He has no political judgment. He believes in fascism. I don’t. I loathe it. And I apprehend that the conflict between the intellectual and the physical side of the N.P. may develop into something rather acute.”
Nicolson’s perspicacity was all too justified. The idea of a quasi-militaristic youth movement, whose members should be fit, tough and anxious to drill and march, was taking shape in Tom’s mind, despite Nicolson’s frequent warnings (“In England anything on those lines is doomed to failure and ridicule”). On December 23, Nicolson had to give notice to the staff of Action: its circulation had dropped from an initial 160,000 to less than twenty thousand and it was losing money at the rate of £340 a week. The last issue appeared on December 31.
By the end of 1931 unemployment had reached 2.7 million and exports had halved in value. In Swansea, when Tom arrived to speak at a three-thousand-seat cinema booked on a Sunday night by Jack Jones, hundreds of Blackshirts had been drafted in from London, Bristol and Cardiff. Setting the future pattern, Tom arrived with a personal bodyguard and walked through lines of his uniformed cohorts to the platform.
The swing toward fascism was too much not only for Nicolson and the students of Glasgow University—when Tom stood for the rectorship, he came last in a field of five—but also for Jack Jones. When Jones resigned, it was to Cimmie he wrote because of his admiration for her and her hard work in the Ashton-under-Lyne by-election campaign. “I felt there was one person I’d like to help, and I knew that she would be in need of all the help she could get.”
He was right. Cimmie was finding it difficult to come to terms with the direction in which Tom was taking the rump of the New Party. “Cimmie wants to put a notice in the Times to the effect that she disassociates herself from Tom’s fascist tendencies,” noted Harold Nicolson that December. “We pass it off as a joke.”
By January she was taking little interest in politics. Five months pregnant, her health poor and her relationship with her husband wretched, she was physically and emotionally low. Tom’s sarcasm and bullying, often in public, rendered the vulnerable Cimmie miserable, angry and confused. There had also been an expensive lawsuit in the U.S. over the Leiter millions, which she and Tom had lost.
She was, though, as social as ever, lunching at the Ritz with the Sitwells, unsuspectingly asking Georgia to tea and dining out. At the same time, Georgia was developing a friendship with Baba, whom she had met for the second time at a luncheon party given by Emerald Cunard on February 3, 1932. The next day the Sitwells and Metcalfes made up a party at the Embassy Club, where Georgia danced most of the evening with Fruity.
But it was still a peripheral friendship. The Metcalfes were as deeply involved as ever with the Prince of Wales and most hostesses who entertained him entertained them also. At the end of February 1932, for instance, Emerald Cunard’s dinner party for the prince included the reigning favorite, Mrs. Dudley Ward, and Fruity and Baba as well as guests like Lady Londonderry; and when Georgia and Sachie Sitwell went to Quaglino’s on February 26 they saw the prince with Thelma Furness, Fruity and Baba.
Without the challenge and sheer hard work of Westminster life, Tom’s superabundant energy needed more of an outlet than party-going, and he took up fencing again. He had always loved it and, now that he no longer had the demands of Parliament as an excuse, it also provided the perfect cover for his illicit rendezvous. At the same time, with his days and evenings virtually free, he was able to pursue the promptings of his roving eye, scanning dinner parties and gatherings for likely young married women—the rules of the game stipulated that debutantes, whose reputations would have been ruined by an affair with a notorious philanderer, were strictly off limits, while the women he chose were no more anxious than he to break up their marriages. The huge bedroom at 22b Ebury Street, with its gusts of warm air that played over the occupants of the large double bed at the touch of a button, was the setting for sex as recreation rather than grand passion.
Just after Christmas 1931, Georgia Sitwell’s diary begins to mention the latest addition to London society, the “golden Guinnesses.” Bryan Guinness was the son of Colonel Walter Guinness (later Lord Moyne), minister for agriculture until the previous Labour government, and Lady Evelyn Guinness, a daughter of Lord Buchan. Besides being extremely rich, he was gentle, good-looking, sensitive, idealistic, a writer of poetry and extraordinarily sweet-natured.
His young wife, Diana, the mother of the couple’s two small boys, was, like her husband, blond, but there the similarities ended. Tall and slim, with huge blue eyes, beautiful legs and small, graceful hands and feet, her physical presence was spectacular. She was also a far stronger character than her husband and, though charming, capable of ruthlessness. Brought up in a remote Cotswold village, Diana Mitford (as she then was) was the fourth child of seven, six sisters and one brother, born to Lord and Lady Redesdale. The powerful and unconventional personality of their father and the toughness needed to survive the bullying of the eldest sister, Nancy, had honed a pers
onality with a core of steel.
Although not yet twenty-two, Diana Guinness had already made a great impact on the small, close-knit web of London society. The beauty of her generation, she was also clever and witty with an enormous appetite for life. Adolescent boredom had left her longing for the metropolitan pleasures of concerts, conversation and fun with amusing friends and she had flung herself wholeheartedly into the social life that marriage opened for her. She had a coterie of admirers, many of them her husband’s intellectual and aesthetic Oxford friends, whom the Guinnesses entertained constantly in their house in Buckingham Street (now Buckingham Place) near St. James’s Park. London life, with its chat, its parties, its concerts, museums and art galleries, was still fascinatingly new to her, as were many of the people she met. Her charisma was such that Emerald Cunard had already declared that Mrs. Guinness would be her successor as London’s leading hostess. She was young and inexperienced—she had married at eighteen—but she was clearly a star.
Diana Guinness and Tom Mosley met at a dinner party on February 28, 1932. Diana, seated next to Tom, argued with him about politics all through dinner. Her convictions had been formed during the General Strike of 1926 when, as a schoolgirl of sixteen, she had felt furiously sympathetic toward the starving miners and their families while deploring any government that could allow such things to happen. After dinner she listened to Cimmie, hugely pregnant, loyally extolling the merits of fascism.
Diana thought little of that first meeting. To Tom, who had already noticed her earlier at a dance, she presented a challenge that he could not pass by.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 19
