The Viceroy's Daughters

by Anne de Courcy

  Baba was extraordinarily discreet about them: her whole outward persona was one of elegance, dignity, control and fastidiousness. But moral principles stood little chance against the strength of her emotions and her libido, a conflict that manifested itself in a kind of guilty anger toward the man to whom she felt herself bound.

  What unbalanced the emotional equation even further was her wealth. Years of financial dominance, of paying for their houses, lifestyle, servants, holidays, travel and the education of their children, had enhanced the strength of an already powerful personality. Fruity, who could only rely on a major’s pension, had become accustomed to a wife who “called the shots”—and found her impossible to argue with.

  And now, as he left for his solitary regime a new admirer was appearing on his wife’s horizon: Michael Lubbock. Nancy had written to Baba with her usual invitation to Cliveden for Ascot, but Baba had different plans. She had asked Lubbock and his wife, Diana, to stay with her instead. But she was careful not to offend Nancy, who was growing increasingly unpredictable and volatile in her affections, and invited the Astors and Lord Lothian to dinner soon afterward. It was a sensible precaution. On July 9 the Astors gave their great ball of the summer, to which Irene took her niece Viv. There, too, was Baba who, as Irene instantly noted, “sailed in and sailed out on a cloud of bliss with Michael L.”

  That summer the Metcalfes made their first visit to the Windsors’ new house, the Villa La Cröe, near Antibes, leased for three years from Sir Pomeroy Burton. Eleven-year-old David, the duke’s godson, accompanied his parents.

  La Cröe was an exotic, glamorous place, hidden away behind high stone walls and set in twelve acres of garden and woodland. A curving drive led to the large white three-story house with green shutters. One side, with sun terrace and lawns, faced the Mediterranean and a private pool cut out of the rocks. The house itself was built around a central hall. Here the duke’s red-and-gold Garter banner from St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, was complemented by antique chairs with red leather seats and black-and-gold backs: on the terrace outside were black wicker loungers with crimson cushions.

  The rest of the house was also full of mementos of the life that the duke had left behind. Much of the furniture was from Fort Belvedere. The red-and-white library was dominated by a large portrait of Queen Mary which hung above the marble mantelpiece; the blond oak bookshelves were filled with the duke’s presentation volumes, trophies and awards; in the library, too, were his Steinway grand piano and organ, which he would occasionally play when the duchess was absent. From his room at the top of the house, which he called his Belvedere, he flew his personal standard. In another echo of those happier times, he would walk about the grounds in kilt and glengarry playing his bagpipes.

  The drawing room and dining room were on the first floor, and here Wallis’s taste—and that of her interior decorator, Elsie Mendl—was paramount. The cornices of the high ceilings were picked out in white and gold, there were mirrors everywhere—the duchess loved both the effect of space and looking at herself—and the Windsor monogram, WE, was on everything, from writing paper and bed linen to the lifebuoys hanging by the pool. Entwined with the duke’s coronet, it was also on the silver buttons of the gray alpaca livery worn by the butler and footmen (in Paris they wore black suits with crimson, white and gold striped waistcoats with silver buttons, and gold-collared scarlet waistcoats for large formal dinners). Perfection reigned: the soap, the towels and even the flowers in each of the six bedrooms were matched to the color scheme.

  The Metcalfes, whose fellow guests were the Colin Buists and Lord Sefton and his girlfriend Helen Fitzgerald, found life at La Cröe both more formal and more luxurious than at the Fort. A hairdresser came daily, a manicurist twice weekly. Life ran to a daily program, drawn up by the duchess, just as it had when the duke was king: “12:30 the Prince de Lucinge arrives, 12:35 we go down to bathe, a quarter to two lunch, three o’clock siesta.” Meals were elaborate: melon with tomato ice, eggs in crab sauce, chicken with avocado salad or roast beef with port wine sauce and asparagus.

  All along the coast were the villas of the mega-rich: Maxine Elliott in the Château de l’Horizon outside Cannes; Somerset Maugham in the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat; Daisy Fellowes, in her huge pink palace Les Zoraides in its twenty-five acres on Cap Martin, when not on her yacht Sister Anne. All of them entertained in grand style. When Somerset Maugham invited the Windsors to lunch their respective butlers negotiated over the menu and protocol for days, while at La Cröe guests were expected to curtsey to both Windsors on first seeing them in the morning and the duke’s secretary had to take dictation standing up. Part of this insistence on status was due to the duke’s desperate concern that Wallis should be treated as royal.

  At the same time, the duke’s old love of informality was obvious. In contrast to the duchess, who always wore a dress, often with one of her sumptuous jewels, or a bathing dress and matching cap, her husband would wear open-necked shirts and shorts as on the Nahlin cruise.

  The high spirits that had disappeared during the tense months before the abdication surfaced again in the presence of old friends, as did the duke’s love of practical jokes. One of the Windsors’ wedding presents was a lavatory-paper holder that played “God Save the King.” It delighted the duke, who, though he shared the thirties prudery over sexual jokes, loved anything lavatorial. Just before Lord Sefton arrived he said to his equerry Dudley Forwood, “By the way, Dudley, when Hugh goes to the loo in the morning I want yer to tell me.” When Forwood tentatively asked why, he received the answer “You wait and see.”

  Next morning at nine Forwood duly went upstairs to the duke’s room and said: “He’s there, sir.” Down came the duke in his dressing gown, stood silently outside the lavatory door and at the appropriate moment shouted, “And now let me tell yeou that every proper subject stands to attention whatever he’s doing!” (When Forwood once daringly asked the duke whence came his peculiar semi-Cockney accent, he received the reply: “I didn’t want to be guttural like Mama and Papa, so I went in taxicabs and learned from taxi drivers.”)

  Fruity’s initial hostility toward the duchess had evaporated under her determined charm offensive, although her harsh voice still jarred on him every time she squawked, “Die-vid!” or “The Dook says . . .” and her ugly, gesticulating hands were an unhappy contrast to Baba’s smooth white ones.

  Fruity’s place in the duke’s affections was as secure as ever and, despite the breaking of the duke’s promise of a job, with its unhappy financial and marital consequences, he still regarded the former king as his greatest friend. Lloyd George, staying with his wife at the Grand Hotel du Cap in Antibes to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary and entertained several times by the Windsors, commented on this friendship to Dudley Forwood, who always remembered his exact words. “Except for the physical side,” said the former prime minister, “he [the Duke of Windsor] has a homosexual love for him. He is passionately fond of him.” Possibly the duchess had sensed this element when, as Mrs. Simpson, she suggested or vetoed those whom the then king should have around him in a personal capacity.

  As usual, Irene spent the 1938 season lunching and dining. In August she took a series of “duty” holidays, one with the members of the seven social clubs for boys and girls that had started in different parts of London, a second with sixty-seven girls from the East End on the Isle of Wight, where they camped in tents pitched about a mile from the sea, a third in Switzerland with thirty-six of the older boys and girls. Tucked between the last two trips was a happy holiday at Lake Vyrnwy, in Wales, with Tom and his children.

  After Tom’s departure came another of the disturbing incidents that always seemed to follow in his wake. On August 24, Tom’s old friend Mike Wardell telephoned, asking so urgently to speak to Tom that Irene gave him the Wootton number. Back at Denham two days later, she was greatly perturbed by Andrée telling her that the press had rung and rung again, asserting that Tom was, in fact, married. That we
ekend, staying with the recently appointed war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha at Warren Farm, she saw a story about Tom and his marriage in the Sunday newspaper Reynolds News. Leslie told her that it was alleged to have taken place months ago. What was the truth?

  She soon forgot this latest rumor in the steadily worsening news from Europe. Tom appeared and disappeared just as suddenly, once arriving after midnight, when to enter the locked house he put a ladder against the wall and climbed in through Viv’s window. The next day they were joined by Baba, back from Tunis with a sheaf of photographs. Irene felt too oppressed by the international situation to stay up chatting and went to bed early, leaving Tom and Baba, as usual, alone together.

  The papers were full of the crisis over Czechoslovakia, with reports of the massing of German troops on the border. “Tom says Hitler never strikes when he makes so much song and dance about it. He does his great moves silently,” wrote Irene that night. “I pray he is right.”

  On September 14 she drove down to Denham to find Nanny in a state of alarm because Tom had asked if Irene would be “reasonable” and allow the children to be rushed to Wootton in case of war. With reluctance, she and Lady Mosley agreed to think about it. She soothed herself by reading Mick a story, playing tennis, then bathing with the children in the river—“dirty and beastly and the men were cutting the weed. Nanny got back at 5:30 and we had tea.” None of this calmed her fears about the war.

  Then, on the news on September 15, came the momentous announcement that the prime minister was flying to Germany to meet the führer. “I wanted to cry at the splendour of the gesture,” wrote Irene that night. Sunshine the next morning lifted her spirits and she went to pray in Westminster Abbey by the Unknown Warrior’s tomb before waiting tensely for the six o’clock news. This included the prime minister’s recorded remarks on his arrival back at Heston airfield. They were moving, Irene thought, “but I still feel that Hitler has not budged.”

  The sight of Fruity looking gaunt and ill as he emerged from his house did nothing to cheer her. Like all those who knew them well, Irene was in no doubt that the Metcalfe marriage was on the point of collapse—and if there was a “crash” it would, she felt, be her sister’s fault.

  But the looming horror of war overrode all personal feeling. On September 26 she was writing: “How can the Czechs accept these outrageous demands by Oct 1? It seems the two visits of the PM were of no assistance or at any rate the last one as Hitler’s demands simply stiffened.” The ten-thirty news was unhelpful, saying only that President Roosevelt had sent a long telegram to Hitler and the Czech president Eduard Beneˇs, begging for a peaceful solution.

  As one of Victor Cazalet’s friends wrote to him a few days later: “The depression was so terrible one could scarcely rise above it. We prayed and worked constantly . . . The inevitableness of it all—the look on people’s faces of inescapable tragedy, everywhere people standing dead still scanning the newspapers, sandbags, ARP trenches, the Green Line buses swung with stretchers evacuating the hospitals, the tenseness, the grimness, the quiet orderliness with which all the preparations were carried out. It made me so proud to be English in my heart.”

  At 10 a.m. on September 28, with Hitler’s public ultimatum to Czechoslovakia due to expire at 2 p.m., the British ambassador to Berlin, Irene’s former suitor Nevile Henderson, made a last-ditch telephone call to Göring (second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy). At 11 a.m., Mussolini telephoned Hitler—would he prolong the ultimatum by twenty-four hours?

  That afternoon Hitler’s dramatic message to Chamberlain to meet him, Mussolini and Daladier in Munich at 3 p.m. the following day arrived at the House of Commons. Irene listened to the proceedings on the wireless. “What drama in the House—men crying and cheering when the PM ended his momentous utterance, ‘I need not say what my answer will be.’ ”

  Robert Bernays, arriving in London from Geneva, found the capital already like a city at war. “Laughter and even smiles have gone from it. We are like a people waiting for the Day of Judgment. Vast silent crowds are everywhere. It is horribly uncanny. Trenches are being dug in the Parks. Sandwichmen tell you where to get your gas masks. There is a dreadful notice in front of me saying: ‘You must not run. Turn left and follow the blue line.’ ” Back in his own constituency, Bernays found that children were using their new gas masks to carry home the family fish and chips.

  On September 29, in a last-ditch attempt to halt the tide of war, the hastily convened conference of the Four Powers took place in Munich at the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters, and after almost ten hours of talk, agreement was finally reached at 2:30 a.m. on September 30.

  Germany emerged the clear winner strategically, with the reacquisition of all her former Sudeten territories. These contained Czechoslovakia’s most heavily armed frontier defenses, leaving that country virtually defenseless. The Munich Agreement had bought time—but sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate.

  In Britain, where so many had either fought through the horrors of the 1914–18 war or had sons or daughters of an age to suffer in a new one, there was an overwhelming sense of relief at a reprieve that might—just might—prove to be permanent.

  With Viv, Irene drove down to Heston on October 1 to welcome the prime minister on his return from Munich. Unable to get into the airfield without tickets, they sat on the curb opposite the entrance from early afternoon, buying newspaper after newspaper to shield their heads from the rain. They watched hundreds of people arrive by car—reporters, Royal Air Force officers and their wives and, a few moments before the arrival of the prime minister’s airplane, the cabinet ministers. Lining the drive were a number of boys from Eton.

  At about 6:45 p.m. the prime minister’s plane was seen circling above. Irene and Viv were invited to listen to the radio in the car that had brought the boys from Eton. Though they did not see the premier famously waving the piece of paper on which the Munich Agreement was written, they heard him read out this pact of nonaggression, signed by both himself and Hitler. With the boys, they rushed to the drive as he came down it in a small car accompanied by Lord Halifax (who had arrived moments before Chamberlain’s airplane touched down).

  For Irene, it was a moving experience to be surrounded by the very schoolboys who might have been sacrificed in a long war. A rainbow on the way back to London seemed a symbol of hope. At home, changing for a party at the Astors, her first euphoria gave way to disillusionment. “I had felt all day that the Dictators had secured a triumph. That Hitler once again had fulfilled another page of Mein Kampf,” she wrote with an accuracy that escaped many.

  Irene was not alone in her doubts. Duff Cooper, the first lord of the Admiralty, resigned from the government and Harold Nicolson made a speech bitterly condemning Britain’s “capitulation,” saying that the Munich Agreement meant not peace but a respite for six months. The Week put it even more bluntly, saying that “Mr. Chamberlain had turned all four cheeks to Hitler.”

  But life had to go on. Irene went to see a play by Bryan Guinness, former husband of the dreaded Diana (“though full of charming thoughts and poetic lines it was too static”), listened to a debate at the House of Commons, bought Elinor Glyn a sapphire paste powder box for her seventy-fourth birthday on October 17 and saw Baba, who she thought seemed close to a nervous breakdown over her marital unhappiness. Nevertheless, Baba appeared to have had an enjoyable dinner (without Fruity) with Lord Halifax and Nevile Henderson, listening to them discuss Germany and the crisis.

  At Cliveden that weekend, Irene was pleased to learn from Alec Cadogan that Nevile Henderson was considered to have done his job well—but that Chamberlain’s attitude was another matter. Cadogan told her that the prime minister had said to him after the preliminary meeting at Godesberg that he thought Hitler was absolutely sincere, which frightened him. “I always felt [this] would happen to the PM: that he would fall under that spell,” wrote Irene in her diary. “It confirmed what Nevile had felt at those last two meetings [prior to Munich].”

/>   Both the Curzon sisters made plans to travel while this was still possible. Baba was taking her daughters to Switzerland and Irene herself sailed for America on the Normandie on November 5. In New York she saw friends—Condé Nast, Mrs. Kahn, Neily Vanderbilt—and spent mornings at Saks buying Christmas presents. On November 27, after being royally entertained, she left for Washington, to be greeted by the news that she and Baba had dreaded for so long.

  In the last days of the month the news broke that not only was Tom married to Diana Guinness but that they now had a son (born on November 28). While the papers were full of allegations and denials, Irene waited apprehensively. Then, when she came home after dancing at the Waldorf with Douglas Fairbanks, she found a cable from Baba. “What we heard is true, will be published Thursday: birth of son Saturday. Children’s position won’t change.” She felt rather sick.

  Back in London on December 22 she hurried at once to lunch with Lady Mosley, who was as appalled as Irene by Tom’s secrecy and his method of breaking the news of his marriage. Both his older children had learned it from the press, as had Baba, still at that time his mistress, and all three were devastated by the deception.

  “Sweet Nick had noticed Mrs. Guinness’s huge size at Wootton in August,” wrote Irene, “and gallantly had never breathed to a soul though agonised at the situation. Oh! why did Tom not tell us all at Lake Vyrnwy. And poor Ma with the child born on a Saturday—Tom only came in to see her on the Monday when the Press started suggestions! She looks a liar to all the BUF who will never believe she did not know. She said Baba had been like a raving lunatic.”

  Baba, who had read the news in the train on a brief visit to Paris, was so shattered that she took refuge in Gstaad. A sense of being thoroughly and humiliatingly duped must have been intolerable to someone as conscious of her own dignity as Baba. Her mortification was such that she even omitted the conventional courtesies—she did not write a formal note of congratulation on Tom’s marriage or on the birth of his baby.