It was a sign of how far away Tom’s focus had shifted from his family, to whom he was paying less and less attention. All his energy, and all the cash he could lay hands on, was being poured into the BUF (now known simply as the BU, since it had absorbed or wiped out other small British fascist groups). He had even begun to think of asking his children to refund him any money he spent on Denham when they came of age.
This did not stop him from making any use he chose of the house and its servants, sending for Andrée, the Denham housekeeper, if he had given his own servants time off. The children too were increasingly feeling the effect of their father’s unpredictable moods, and his sudden ferocious teasing, usually with Viv as his target, had a devastating effect on their peace of mind. Nick’s stammer had grown worse—Nanny, in a misguided attempt to help him and ease the embarrassment of the others, tried to make him look at his contorted face in a mirror—and Granny Mosley added to the general feeling of chaos by reporting that Cim had sent a psychic message saying she did not want the children to be much with Mrs. Guinness.
Irene was glad to get away in April, on another cruise, this time organized by the Hellenic Travellers Club on the ship Letitia. She went with her friends Vita and Harold Nicolson, their younger son, Nigel, and Hugh Walpole. They visited most of the main sites of classical Greece, learning about them from the notable scholars on board as lecturers. Irene’s dark, dramatic looks made a deep impression on the young Nigel, who thought her extraordinarily beautiful and—unsurprisingly, given her penchant for, and understanding manner with, the young—liked her very much.
Plans for the summer began, on her return, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and recrimination. Tom had not been, Baba told Irene, in an easy mood. “He never is after he has been with that vile Mrs. G,” thought Irene. But they did not see much of him, as he only visited Denham occasionally.
That spring of 1936, he had driven up to Staffordshire with Diana Guinness, who felt that her two sons needed more space than the confines of her tiny London house, to look at a large, beautiful and icy cold house called Wootton Lodge. Both of them had fallen in love with it instantly and Tom had rented it, Diana paying the wages of most of the servants and the indoor expenses. As it was close to Manchester, where he frequently spoke, Tom was able to spend a great deal of time with Diana. The Curzon sisters, who did not always know where his sudden absences on speaking engagements took him, felt erroneously that Diana tucked away in the depths of the country was much less of a danger than Diana as an ever-present temptation in London. Nevertheless Tom, through Baba, tried to persuade Irene to take his children up to Wootton (“absolute torture to me”) while he and Baba went to the Ile de Porquerolles, just off the French Riviera.
Soon this plan was in the melting pot. When Baba heard that Tom intended to invite Diana Guinness to Porquerolles also, she refused to go. It was deadlock. Temporarily, their relationship was off.
Tom, anxious not to alienate Irene as well, invited her to lunch for a chat and to see his new flat at 129 Grosvenor Road, a converted nightclub on the Chelsea riverfront, decorated by Diana in blue with the dramatic pillars in its main room painted white. “Diana Guinness’s taste is lovely,” recorded Irene. “The drawing room is Greek, Tom’s bedroom is Greek à la Caesar. By dexterous manipulation and the help of my cross I talked to him for an hour and a quarter on the whole Baba/Guinness/children situation and he was amazingly simple and sweet and clarified so much that eased my poor heart. He said I had been a help and I left at 3:45 praising God.”
Though Irene was spending virtually every weekend at Denham, often giving up visits to friends, during the week she allowed herself to enjoy the concerts, dances, dinners and luncheons of the season. At one of these occasions Lord Willingdon, the former viceroy whom she and Baba had met in India, told her how when he lunched with Lord Granard in the royal box at Ascot Mrs. Simpson was put on his right. “Though I laughed I think it is an outrage,” wrote Irene fiercely.
Mrs. Simpson’s influence was now paramount. The king, as all close observers noted, was her slave, and the more harshly she treated him, the more he worshiped her. His obsequious adoration meant that a new court formed around her, of those who flattered and toadied to her or whom she liked. If she did not like someone, the king would ruthlessly cut out even old friends.
Her style mentor Elsie de Wolfe, who had introduced her to the young American designer Mainbocher—whose clothes she wore for the rest of her life—of course found favor with the king. His private plane, maintained at the expense of the Air Ministry but nonchalantly used to smuggle back lobsters, champagne or the Mainbocher dresses Mrs. Simpson bought at half price from Paris (on all of which duty should have been paid), was now sent there to fetch Elsie for consultation on the redecoration of Fort Belvedere, where for some time Mrs. Simpson had given orders and acted as hostess.
The outward and visible sign of Wallis Simpson’s position was the extraordinary and amazing jewelry the king gave her, jewels so huge and ostentatious that at least one sophisticated onlooker mistook them for costume jewelry. For Christmas and the New Year she had received from him gems worth fifty thousand and sixty thousand pounds respectively; and every significant date was marked with at least a charm of gold and precious stones for her bracelet. He also financed her to the tune of six thousand pounds a year; at her behest he sacked long-standing employees and sold property to make savings or amass cash that would benefit her.
One of those privy to a plan of Mrs. Simpson’s known to few others was Walter Monckton. Monckton was an old and trusted friend of the king, who was godfather to his second son; they had met at Oxford, where they had both been in the mounted cavalry squadron of the Officers’ Training Corps, and they had immediately established a rapport. By early April 1936, when the royal standard was raised over Buckingham Palace for the first time since the death of George V, Monckton knew that Mrs. Simpson’s lawyers had begun divorce proceedings, although at this stage he regarded this as a matter purely personal to the Simpsons.
What seemed much more serious, though known only to those behind the scenes, was that the king’s passion for Mrs. Simpson was causing him to neglect his kingly duties. By the beginning of April he was spending most of his time in his private sanctum, Fort Belvedere, with her.
Where Freda Dudley Ward would have gently pushed him toward his work, Mrs. Simpson did not. The red boxes that he had scrutinized so punctiliously at the beginning of his reign now lay unopened, or opened and with their papers scattered carelessly around the house. Since officials could only go there by invitation and often had to wait for hours, their chances of getting the king’s initials on all the papers sent were low. Both the negligent approach to business and the lack of security horrified those in his office.
On May 27 the king gave a dinner party at York House, ostensibly in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Baldwin, at which Mrs. Simpson was given precedence over the prime minister’s wife. This unheard-of breach of protocol was construed by many as insulting to the dignity of both monarch and prime minister. Queen Mary, sixty-nine the previous day, was deeply upset. From the king’s point of view, Mrs. Simpson was to become his future wife and therefore the precedence was indisputably hers. His order that the Simpsons’ names be published in the Court Circular (a similarly unprecedented move) was another attempt to make clear publicly the nature of their relationship.
Gossip about the king and Mrs. Simpson had now become rife. When Churchill suggested to the king, at a private dinner party, that such gossip would increase exponentially if Mrs. Simpson were free, the king answered disingenuously that he did not see why Wallis should remain bound in an unhappy marriage merely because of her friendship with him, an answer that he was to repeat again and again. “By the end of June,” wrote Monckton later, “I was seriously worried not about the prospect of the King marrying Mrs. Simpson but about the damage that would be done to the King if he continued to make his friendship with her even more conspicuous.”
> Mrs. Simpson’s sway over the king may have been responsible for the latest blow, as unexpected as it was dismaying, which the Metcalfes were dealt. The expected household post for Fruity did not materialize; instead, on June 23, 1936, Mountbatten received a letter from the king asking him to be his personal aide-de-camp.
Baba was bitterly resentful at what she saw as a betrayal of Fruity by the king. She knew that if he had been given a job in the royal household their life together would seem less pointless. “I had a most agonising hour with Baba in the Park and oh! How she cried,” wrote Irene as Baba gave way to her despair over the combination of her love for Tom and their rupture, her inability to escape with Jock Whitney to a new life in America and the massive blow to Fruity’s hopes and expectations. Irene sent her footman to the Grosvenor Road apartment with a note to Tom about Baba’s wretchedness and drove Nick to Denham.
Her letter drew blood: Tom rang up at midnight asking to see her the next day. They met for lunch and Tom agreed to climb down over his insistence that Diana Guinness come out to Porquerolles that summer. Triumphant, Irene went off to Baba’s house in Cowley Street to wait for her there and tell her the good news. “In she came at four, exquisite and perfect, and after all I had done for her she merely said it was all too late and she was not going. What a woman!”
The rows between Baba and Fruity, the outpourings of the unhappy Fruity to Irene, the depression over the king’s failure to give Fruity a job, the standoffs between Baba and Tom, both equally obdurate, fill pages of Irene’s diary. The unhappy Fruity, who had been drinking too much, was dispatched to Freiburg for a cure; he complained bitterly that Baba was not coming with him. “She should be beside me now when I am ill,” he told Irene.
When Tom telephoned to say that he was being operated on for appendicitis at nine-thirty on the morning of July 29, at 31 Queen’s Gate, it must have held macabre undertones for them all of Cimmie’s last days, and his mother promised to stay in the nursing home and telegraph Irene with the result. Yet again, she was to be dispatched with Nanny and Mick to Newquay while the older children would enjoy a more sophisticated holiday with Tom and his mother at Sorrento. Baba, after a visit to friends, would be in Berlin for the opening of the Olympic Games.
On August 20, Irene received a letter from Lady Mosley to say that as they had all boarded the little local boat at Naples, out of the blue appeared the dreaded Diana Guinness—fetched by Tom’s servant Dundas.
Only someone with Tom’s powerful personality could have controlled such a diverse household. The children were subliminally aware of their father’s relationship with Mrs. Guinness and their grandmother’s loathing for her, the two women as different as possible. Lady Mosley, who seldom opened a book and lacked any interest in the arts, seemed hopelessly philistine and uneducated to the cultivated Diana, who took refuge in a politeness made all the more excessive by the Mitford habit of loading drawled sentences with superlatives (“unutterably awful and affected,” reported Lady Mosley later).
In September, Irene was excited to learn that she was to be invited to Berlin for the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, though when told that she would be the government’s guest in Nuremberg, she had reservations: “I am not sure I want to be obligated to the Führer.”
All the same, she went and, along with other visiting dignitaries, was taken in one of a fleet of large red buses to the zeppelin field where the parade and rally were to take place. Her diary comments on the great stands all around the field, the main block hung with red flags along the back wall, the flags on the skyline surmounted by eagles, seeming to float in the light breeze.
“Punctually at 10 the Fuehrer arrived at the head of a string of motor cars, standing erect in a brown uniform,” she wrote. “The car stopped at the foot of the steps and standing erect in it he reviewed 45,000 land troops. Each camp passed him headed by its band and silver emblem. They were all clad in buff uniforms and carried spades over their shoulders. These men have to train in a camp for six months before their two years in the army and they do great land reclaimment and afforestation. Why don’t we use our unemployed like that?”
After the review, Hitler mounted the rostrum. “Then for the first time I heard the great man speak,” noted Irene, a fluent German speaker thanks to her year in Dresden before coming out. “He replied with a fine fighting oration stoking up to a great height of emotion that National Socialism must live in the hearts of the people and not in parades and colour shows.” It must have brought back many an echo of her brother-in-law, but when she later described the stirring scene to Baba and Fruity all her sister would talk about by way of response was her autumn wardrobe.
Clothes were a major preoccupation with both Metcalfes. Fruity, tall and handsome in perfectly cut riding clothes or tweeds set off by the upright carriage of the soldier, was a perfect foil for Baba’s slender, immaculate elegance. But whereas Baba would spend hours at her dressmaker to ensure that every detail was right, Fruity would often ask her opinion over the daily minutiae of dress. “Which tie shall it be this morning, Babs darling?” he would demand. “D’ye think it should be the blue? Or would you say the red?” The constant flow of questions drove Baba to distraction and, according to Nanny, accounted for much of Baba’s bad behavior and rudeness, often to Irene, whose taste she characterized as simultaneously both overflamboyant and dowdy.
Unsurprisingly, when Baba asked if the Metcalfes could use her house as a London base for the middle of every week the following summer, Irene hardly hesitated before writing to tell her sister that she did not think it would work.
Soon these family squabbles were eclipsed by the royal romance. In August the king, instead of going to Balmoral, had taken Wallis Simpson on a cruise along the Dalmatian coast in the yacht Nahlin, with a party of friends but without her husband. They were photographed everywhere, their liaison was openly discussed in the American newspapers, and the buzz of gossip in the small world of English society rose to crescendo pitch.
On September 23 an incident occurred that caused widespread anger and disgust. As the king, following the usual royal custom, was staying at Balmoral during September, he had been asked to open the new Aberdeen Infirmary. He had declined to do so on the grounds that he was still in mourning for his father and in his place had sent the duke of York. Although those on Deeside considered themselves to have a special claim to royal favor, this shirking of a royal duty might have been forgiven had the king not driven to Ballater station to meet Mrs. Simpson and back to Balmoral with her sitting openly beside him in the car. “That night, on the dour granite walls ‘Down with the American whore’ was chalked up,” recorded Coronation Commentary, a book of the period by Geoffrey Dennis. The king had, of course, ignored Churchill’s suggestion that Mrs. Simpson should not stay at Balmoral but somewhere nearby.
She seemed to be everywhere, always smothered in jewels. “My eyes were dazed at Mrs. Simpson’s emeralds!” reads Irene’s diary after a party at the American Embassy on October 2, 1936. Harold Nicolson commented in his diary: “It irritates me that that silly little man should destroy a great monarchy by giggling into a flirtation with a third-rate American.” Or as Ramsay MacDonald had more bluntly put it after seeing Mrs. Simpson swept to Ascot in a royal carriage: “The people of this country do not mind fornication but they loathe adultery.”
On October 4, Tom led his fascists in a parade and march in the East End of London, where there was a large Jewish community and a sizable group of communist voters. Although, as usual, he obeyed the commands of the police to the letter, halting the parade and changing the direction of the march at their command, it was a needlessly provocative action and stirred up trouble as effectively as a stone lobbed into a bees’ nest. The resultant melee—overturned trucks, the hurling of bricks, stones and glass, the charges with any handy blunt instrument—became known as the Battle of Cable Street. One of its repercussions was the passing of the Public Order Act, which, among other clauses, forbade the wearing of
uniforms for such marches.
Irene and Baba viewed the fray entirely from Tom’s perspective (“It was the Jews and communists who created the disorder”)—but their reaction might have been different had they known what transpired two days afterward.
On October 6, 1936, Tom Mosley married Diana Guinness, in the Berlin drawing room of Dr. Josef Goebbels and his wife, Magda. Both knew that a register office marriage in England or France would not escape the notice of the press, and Diana used her friendship with Hitler to achieve the secrecy they desired. After the wedding, Hitler simply ordered the registrar to put their marriage certificate away in a drawer.
Tom, who did not inform even his mother of his marriage, had insisted on this secrecy. He told Diana it was to protect her from attack by his political opponents; its hidden agenda was so that he could continue his affair with Baba. Diana told her immediate family: she knew that her parents would view both her and Tom more kindly if they were married and she wanted the freedom to see her youngest sister, Debo, who had been barred from seeing her because she was “living in sin.”
Baba was still torn between desire to break out of what she saw as her stultifying life and loyalty toward Fruity. The guilt she felt about her treatment of her husband and her betrayal of him with, of all people, her sister’s husband found its expression in behavior best described as a kind of poisonous gloom. Sometimes the husbandless, childless Irene, watching her, longed to tell her to be thankful for what she had, otherwise she would “miss everything warm and lovely in life.”
The king’s love affair was now the sole topic of conversation at every luncheon or dinner party. “Lunched with Baba and Fruity and Bobby Sweeney and we discussed the outrageous Cavalcade and Time with several awful things about Mrs. Simpson and the gloomy danger of criticism of the King,” wrote Irene that October, before going with the Metcalfes to look at a house, Wilton Place, in Belgravia that they were thinking of buying. What they did not of course know was that a few days earlier, on October 27, the king had had his first interview with the prime minister. Baldwin had asked if it would be possible to halt the Simpson divorce proceedings—about to be heard at Ipswich—as, with Mrs. Simpson free, there would be no stopping any gossip. The king gave Baldwin the same answer as he had given Churchill four months earlier.
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 27
