The opening of the Kennington day nursery on July 1, 1935, provided a welcome respite from the emotional storms of the past few weeks. Irene had been indefatigable, organizing everything, writing personal notes to thank helpers, sending out the invitations and arranging the flowers on the day—huge vases of blue delphiniums, rambling roses in pots in the entrance passage. She bought the matron a jeweled lapel pin, sent with a special letter of thanks, and could well congratulate herself that everything looked “too perfect for my Love.” Just before lunch she collected Vivien from Ma Mosley’s flat while Andrée met Nick, up from Eton, at Waterloo. At the nursery, she showed around a reporter from the Daily Mail and a man from the new Gaumont British News.
The forty-strong audience at the opening ceremony included not only Lambeth Council workers and subscribers but luminaries like Winston Churchill, Brendan Bracken and the Noel Bakers. At three o’clock the archbishop of Canterbury arrived, to be photographed in the big playroom, introduced briefly by Irene and then to make a speech about Cim and her great qualities so touching that Irene could not see for tears and Churchill also wept. A meandering oration about Lambeth by the mayor brought the audience down to earth and a vote of thanks to him was ably seconded by Baba in an elegant little speech. Tom, white and sad, was silent.
A few days later, the premiere of the first three-dimensional Technicolor film, Becky Sharp, at the New Gallery cinema, was held in aid of the Kennington day nursery. The major shareholder in this new process was an old friend of Baba’s, the American Jock Whitney, who had begun to visit the newly important British market regularly.
The emotions engendered by the opening of the day nursery were soon dissipated and the relationships between Tom and Baba, Tom and Diana, and Baba and Fruity once more a constant theme. Even at the Eton and Harrow match on July 13, Tom’s mother seized the opportunity to discuss her son with Irene.
“I got very weary of the tirade on Tom’s misdemeanors, she has gone dippy, poor dear, on the subject,” wrote Irene, forgetting that she herself was just as vehement in refusing to accept Diana Guinness’s presence in his life. “I sent my car for Viv and Nick as that fright Mrs. Guinness was at Denham with Tom, to fetch them to Baba’s.”
Unsurprisingly, with Tom entertaining Diana, Baba’s other admirer, Count Grandi, arrived; naïvely, Irene thought of this as a “lovely surprise.” After dining out, she and Grandi drove back to her London house together, where he further won her affection and approval by having a long, sympathetic conversation about her woes.
On July 28 Tom, Baba and the two elder Mosley children set off for their Posilippo holiday. As the mail plane to Rome took off from Croydon airfield at 6 a.m. in a dense mist Irene and Nanny returned to London, to prepare for their less exotic holiday with Micky and the twins in Cornwall.
While at Holywell Bay, Irene heard Baba’s version of a near miss between Tom’s two mistresses. Diana Guinness had suffered a devastating car crash in which her face was cut so badly that her looks were only saved by the brilliant plastic surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, whose skill was such that she was left without a mark. While she was lying in the London Clinic, Tom wrote to her lovingly, urging her to “hurry up and get better” so that she could come out and join them as planned for the last part of the holiday. Unable to bear the idea of lying in bed for another few days, Diana sent a telegram to Tom, persuaded her father to smuggle her out and caught the plane to Rome. She arrived before her telegram—and therefore quite unexpectedly—while a dinner party was in full swing at Posilippo.
“James came and whispered Mrs. Guinness has arrived. Tom had wired her not to come till Thursday and she said she had not got it. Lie!!” wrote Baba on August 9. Tom, adept at explanations, had slipped out of the dining room to see Diana, who had gone straight to bed, exhausted after her escape from the nursing home and the long journey. “I didn’t realize you were coming,” he said to her, but without rancor. “I’m so sorry,” she replied, “but I did send a wire.” Five minutes later it arrived.
After their dinner guests had gone, Tom managed to assuage Baba’s jealous fury by assuring her that he had not known Diana was coming and was furious with her for doing so. He told Baba that he had ordered Diana to stay in her room and not appear while she, Baba, was there and that he, Tom, did not wish to speak to her. Diana, he pointed out, as Baba simmered down, was simply there to convalesce. His masterstroke, which convinced Baba that he really did not care whether Diana was there or not, was to whisk Baba off for a romantic three-day “honeymoon” on his motor yacht Vivien to Sorrento and Amalfi, where they stayed each night in the best hotel, leaving the children and Andrée on board the boat.
Placated, Baba left for Tunis in a happier frame of mind, after which she set off on a trip that took her through the Kiel Canal on to Leningrad, Moscow, Teheran, India, Petra, Amman, Tripoli, Venice, Milan and Paris before finally returning to London at the beginning of December.
Awaiting her return was a letter from Dino Grandi. Britain had withdrawn the sanctions imposed on Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia. The Daily Express published a picture of Grandi leaving the House of Commons and captioned it “The Winner.” When the paper reached Rome, Mussolini, who regarded only himself as meriting this title, became so explosively angry that Grandi was recalled at once. Grandi, who had realized for some time the threat posed to his relationship with Baba by the return of her old flame Jock Whitney, seized the opportunity offered by his recall to try and sever their physical liaison. He left a note explaining his abrupt departure:
I thought the best thing was to let you think the worst of me and I do not pretend or ask this letter will change anything. The only thing I cannot help doing is just to tell you goodbye—we leave today at 2 pm. I will not be so far from you—we go to Sicily at Agrigento for a fortnight of crocodile life in the most splendid solitude, just in front of Tunis—namely, of you.
This will suggest lots of thoughts to me but I sincerely hope it will not suggest anything to you, darling!
I have not come to see you. I do know that you will not forgive me. But, believe me, this is the best.
There are things which one finds so difficult to explain—and you know me enough to realise how difficult for me is to say things which is so sad to talk about.
Please understand. I am sure that time will come soon, old things will come again, as they were. I feel just the same now as I have always felt. But I know that by then your friendship will be gone, perhaps forever. My risk is great but I have no other choice.
Tom’s affair with Baba, on the other hand, continued as if nothing had happened. Politically, however, he was at a low ebb. Not a single BUF candidate had gained a parliamentary seat in the general election of June 1935 that had swept Stanley Baldwin into power and given the Conservatives a massive majority in the new National government. The financial contributions from Mussolini had ceased abruptly. Grandi, as shrewd as he was socially adept, now believed that the BUF would never be a force to reckon with in British politics. He told Mussolini that “with a tenth of what you give Mosley, I feel I could produce a result ten times better.”
With help from Italy at an end, Tom turned to Germany. It was a path smoothed for him by his other mistress, Diana Guinness, who, though only twenty-five, had already met all the Nazi leaders. She had first gone to Germany in 1933 almost on a whim. That August, alone and depressed in London, with the recently widowed Tom on his motoring holiday with Baba, Diana had wanted to distract herself. She persuaded her sister Unity to accompany her to Munich; Hitler’s press secretary, whom she had met at a party in the spring, had told her he could introduce her to the new chancellor, adding that the music, museums and architecture of Munich would be a joy to them both.
The Mitford family had always had strong cultural links with Germany. Austen Chamberlain, the great friend of Diana’s grandfather, the first Lord Redesdale, had written Wagner’s biography, to which Lord Redesdale had contributed the foreword. Diana’s brother, Tom, a
year older than she, with whom she felt a twinlike affinity, had won the music prize at Eton and considered music as a career: for this reason he had visited Germany several times and come back extolling its beauty and the renaissance of its people under the new chancellor.
Hitler, with his dark deeds then in the future, was the man everyone wanted to meet. As Victor Cazalet wrote that autumn, “One must admit Hitler has done a great deal with the Germans and many of his social reforms are excellent.” Although neither of the sisters managed to meet Hitler on that first visit, both were overwhelmed by the drama and excitement of the first party rally (in September 1933), with its blood-red banners, use of floodlighting and ecstatic, roaring crowds focused on the solitary figure of the führer.
Diana began to learn German at once while Unity, obsessed with the desire to meet her hero, persuaded her parents to let her return to Germany and, by dint of placing herself constantly in Hitler’s path, was finally introduced to him at the Munich café he frequented for a late lunch. Once the longed-for meeting had been achieved (on February 9, 1925), she wrote joyously to Diana, who returned to Germany and was introduced to him in her turn. Quickly, Diana established an entente with the Nazi leader.
Apart from the fact that she wore makeup (frowned on in the Third Reich), she conformed exactly to the tall, blond, beautiful Aryan looks that Hitler favored. In those early days he had a penchant for aristocrats—he would often entertain the kaiser’s relations—and he credited English ones with far more political influence than they actually had. Above all, surrounded by yes-men as he was, he enjoyed the frankness of the two Mitford girls. Though they clearly admired him greatly, they were not at all overawed and their refreshing high spirits made a welcome change from nervous party officials at the end of the day. With Diana, the more stable and intelligent of the two, he would discuss anything from films to the relationship between their two countries.
Baba recognized that Diana’s star was now in the ascendant. “Baba saddened me deeply by tales of Mrs. Guinness’ increased wriggling her way into Tom and the children and that she goes everywhere with him in a black shirt and has the entrée to Hitler and Goebbels for him,” wrote Irene. The realization that she was now in second place may have prompted Baba to an unexpected decision: she told Irene in the course of a “wonderful talk” that she had broken with Tom. “I find her fearfully sad and ‘thrill-less’ now she and T have ‘bust’ and she is only 30,” wrote Irene.
It would not be long before a new “thrill” would fill this emotional vacuum.
23
Mrs. Simpson Rules
At the beginning of 1936, society was thrown into chaos by the death of King George V. It was clear that much was about to change, not least the image of impeccable moral probity that had characterized the previous reign. Queen Mary’s first action after her husband’s death was to take her son’s hand and kiss it, but this was one of the last acts in the new reign where tradition was to rule.
Immediately after his father’s death, at five minutes to midnight on January 20, the new king went downstairs and—in a thoughtless act which was to cause much offense—ordered all the clocks to be set at the correct time (they had always been kept at “Sandringham time”: half an hour fast, in order to give more time for shooting during the dark winter months of that sporting season).
“The scene in the House yesterday was a memorable one,” wrote the MP Robert Bernays on January 24. “Row upon row of black, and the Cabinet in frock coats and Mr. Baldwin waiting shyly at the Speaker’s Chair like some new member to deliver the message from the new King.” Of the King’s appearance at Westminster Hall when its door opened to receive George V’s coffin he wrote: “The new King looked really like a boy overpowered by the weight of sudden responsibility.”
Others viewed it differently. J. H. Thomas, the former railwaymen’s-union leader, a great favorite of George V who stayed at Balmoral for a fortnight every year and was equally fond of the king, gave his verdict to Harold Nicolson: “ ’E was like that, you know, ’Arold, not afraid of people, if you know what I mean. And now ’ere we ’ave this little obstinate man with ’is Mrs. Simpson. Hit won’t do, ’Arold, I tell you that straight. I know the people of this country. I know them. They ’ate ’aving no family life at court.”
Baba and Fruity expected a change in their own lives. The new king had always promised that when he acceded he would “do something” for Fruity; now, they hoped, he would make him an equerry, or an extra equerry—something that would, at any rate, give him not only a certain standing but validate his decision to leave the army and stay in England at the behest of the prince. Such a post, they quite understood, might not happen immediately: the king obviously had much else to think about.
What they, in common with the rest of the country, did not know was that most of his thoughts were focused on the question of marriage to Wallis Simpson. According to the account later written by the lawyer Walter Monckton for the Royal Archives, the king had told Ernest Simpson in February that he wished to marry Wallis.
In any case, that spring Baba was deeply preoccupied with Jock Whitney. They had first met when Jock was at Oxford, hunting at Melton whenever he could. He was charming, generous, aesthetic, cultivated, with an alluring touch of recklessness. As well as hunting, he played golf and tennis whenever he got the chance. He loved flying and owned a series of small planes (surviving crashes in some of them), and divided his time between the family’s sumptuous house on New York’s Fifth Avenue, built in Italian Renaissance style, and their estate at Greentree, thirty miles from the city on Long Island’s North Shore. Above all, he was fabulously wealthy. The family fortune was founded on oil and tobacco, and his father’s net worth at the time of his death in 1927 was estimated at $179 million—the largest estate ever in the United States at that time.
Whitney did all the things a rich young man could be expected to do—with gusto, style and flair. By 1928 he had his own airplane; he played polo; and after he came into his inheritance he raced: through the royal family’s trainer, Cecil Boyd Rochfort, he bought Royal Minstrel; through another trainer, he acquired Easter Hero, which won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1929 and would have won the Grand National but for twisting a plate and cutting itself at one of the last fences.
Tall and with an athletic build—though bespectacled—Whitney had no difficulty attracting girls and in 1930 had married the year’s most glamorous U.S. debutante, Liz Altemus. As a wedding present he gave her a check for one million dollars; a two-thousand-acre estate called Llangollen in Virginia, with beautifully equipped stables and grooms to go with them, a gym and a swimming pool; and a fuschia-colored coach drawn by four white mules in which Liz could drive around the estate’s perimeters.
Soon after Whitney had invested in the new film process Technicolor in 1933, he insisted on buying the film rights to an unpublished first novel by an unknown author. It was called Gone With the Wind. Since Britain was an important market for Hollywood films, this necessitated frequent visits to London. His marriage had become shaky, largely owing to Liz’s refusal to have children, and when he met Baba again, he was soon deeply in love with her.
With his usual generosity, he showered her with presents, notably jewelry. Much of it was by Fulco di Verdura, the Sicilian duke who had become a jewelry designer. To Baba, Whitney gave di Verdura’s famous clips and brooches; several represented elephants, their bodies a huge baroque pearl, legs and curling trunk of diamonds tipped with gold, surmounted by a crystal howdah and trappings of rubies and sapphires.
Jock Whitney was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted; he wanted to marry Baba and he knew that the Metcalfe marriage had unraveled. Baba herself felt so strongly about him that she went as far as planning to return to America with him, sending Irene a cable on March 13 saying: “Sailing on the Ile de France. Fruity remaining behind.”
But Fruity did not want a divorce and Baba had no grounds on which to divorce him. He was the father of her children
and, although mothers were almost invariably awarded custody of children in divorce cases, there would be a question mark over one who planned to take hers out of the country. Nor did she wish to land Fruity with a divorce case which would deeply prejudice his chances of getting a job at court just at the moment when, they hoped, he was about to be offered one.
She also shrank from the very idea of divorce: it was something one just “did not do.” Retrospectively, as she often told her children years later, she came to regret not having married Whitney.
And, of course, there was Tom—with his intoxicating lovemaking, his constant changes of plan, his maddening determination to keep Diana Guinness in his life, his sudden bouts of dependence on her and equally sudden offhandedness, his stimulating, provocative political ideas, the sharp-edged wit that made poor Fruity seem plodding beside him, and the sheer, inexplicable magnetism of his physical presence that worked as powerfully on an individual as on a crowd.
This charisma was in evidence again on March 22, when Tom again addressed a meeting of the British Union of Fascists in the Albert Hall to rousing effect. Outside, demonstrating against him as close as the police would allow, were the communists, headed by Tom’s former friend and close associate, John Strachey. As always, Tom was careful to keep on the right side of the law, but his extreme views were beginning to tell heavily against him: a second libel case he brought in February 1936 turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory when he was awarded damages of one farthing and had to pay his own costs.
Some days later Baba called on Irene after an evening with Tom, with whom she had resumed her affair. It appeared that he was now carrying anti-Semitism into private life, and had been furious when he learned that Irene had invited her friends the Sieffs to one of her musical soirées. “He said he would never come near me if this continued and he would take Micky away from me,” wrote Irene in her diary that night. “I was quite shattered by it.”
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 26
