A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (57 page)

By October 1951, when Moura dined with Klop again at his flat, she was pledging herself to report every person moving in her sphere whom she suspected of being a traitor to Britain – ‘actual or potential’. In return, Klop offered the possibility of being put on the MI5 payroll. Moura mentioned a couple of names which caught his interest. Singling out one of them – ‘an important member of the Soviet Embassy’ – he told her, ‘If you can bring this man and his wife on our side, it might have a wholesome effect on your finances.’

Moura had told him over dinner that her financial situation was precarious and needed ‘straightening out’. Klop added, ‘Smaller fry will also do if you can manage to establish contacts in time.’

Money was always welcome, but for Moura the real incentive was the same as it had always been – safety, security and survival. And the thrill of it all.

Klop Ustinov, under his codename U35, submitted his report on this conversation on Monday 25 October 1951.
²⁷
It was processed and placed in Moura’s file, which now ran to three copious volumes. The file was closed, deactivated and placed in an archive. It would never be reopened.

Baroness Moura Budberg had been successfully recruited as a British spy. Again.

To a woman who had served several dangerous masters during the revolutions of 1917 and the Red Terror, who had crossed borders in secret as a roving agent, liaised directly with Stalin, and seen the inside of several Cheka prisons, this was nothing very remarkable. In a sense, Moura had come full circle, back to the beginning of her career in espionage, when ‘Madame B’ had kept her salon in Petrograd for pro-German Russians and spied on them for Kerensky and her friend George Hill of the SIS.

Her soirées at Ennismore Gardens continued as they had before. The range of guests was the same eclectic mix of ‘pansy young men’, film and literary stars, Foreign Office types and ‘grand friends’. But now there was a new and invisible underlying purpose. But if Moura ever passed information on any of her guests – and she must have done – it remains hidden by secrecy. Her own file had been closed, and her presence continued only in other people’s files, where she would exist only as a number, a yet-unidentified agent codename.

Meanwhile, up on the surface, in the daylight, life went on.

Moura loved her bed. She had grown to love it with a special fondness in that first week at Kallijärv in 1921, after her release by the police in Tallinn.

Having a job tended to interfere with her love of bed. Moura’s working life – in its ideal state – resembled her social life: travelling, negotiating, meeting new and fascinating people, and making herself the indispensable nexus between them. She found working for Korda arduous because it required her to rise each day, go to the offices of London Films at 146 Piccadilly and do a day’s toil in the Korda script-mill. That didn’t suit her at all – especially now that age was slowly eroding her ability to shake off the effects of the previous night’s overindulgence – so she came to an arrangement with her secretary. If the phone rang and it was anyone of importance – particularly Sir Alex himself – the secretary would explain that Baroness Budberg had just popped out for a moment. Then she would ring Moura, who would haul herself out of bed, throw on her clothes (she had lost the habit of dressing with any care decades ago) and hail a taxi.

In all likelihood Korda knew what she was doing, but saw no harm in it. Moura had lost none of her ability to charm and inveigle. Twenty years earlier she would certainly have made Korda her lover, as she had Wells, Gorky, and many better and greater men. But that side of her had died with H. G. and the onset of age. Instead she did the deed by proxy, setting herself the task of finding him a woman to sustain him in his autumnal years.

He had been keeping a mistress for a while. Christine Norden was a flighty, aspiring young actress who had suddenly flown off with an American air force sergeant. Sir Alex had begged her to stay and marry him, but to no avail.
²⁸
There was a vacancy to be filled, and Moura decided to find a candidate.

Korda had been married twice before, to the actress Maria Corda, and then in 1939 to British film star Merle Oberon, who was eighteen years his junior. Their marriage had lasted six years. As he aged, his brides grew younger. The woman Moura found for him in 1953 was just twenty-four, whereas Korda was sixty. Her name was Alexandra Boycun; she was a Canadian of Ukrainian parentage, a budding singer, and exquisitely beautiful. She had no ambition to be an actress, and neither did she seem to be a fortune-seeker. Korda had confided in Moura that he was through with actresses; he wanted a stay-at-home wife who could minister to his every whim in his old age.

In other words, he wanted exactly what H. G. had hoped for from Moura. And like Wells, his chances of gaining it were fairly slim. Alexa might not be a fortune hunter, but she was a free spirit.

To everyone’s surprise, in June 1953, after a short courtship, the mismatched couple married. Moura was a witness. Alexa’s father sent a telegram saying, ‘Sir Alexander is too old for my daughter.’
²⁹
The whole thing was a mistake; not necessarily for Korda or Alexa, but for Moura. Once Alexa became the woman in the Korda household and no longer needed to be Moura’s protégée, she began asserting herself, and elbowed Moura away. Moura’s attempts to steer or advise her began to be seen as pushiness. She was still on the guest list for Korda’s dinner parties, but not as frequently or as warmly welcomed as she had been.
³⁰

Korda paid the regular price for involving himself with a much younger woman – the same price that Gorky had paid with Moura. Alexa sometimes grew tired of her old and by now unwell husband, and flitted off on escapades of her own. She grew close to his young nephew Michael. The thirteen-year-old boy who had been so stunned by Moura in 1947 was now in his early twenties, close in age to Alexa, and they became attached to each other, despite Michael’s father warning him against it. There was no sexual relationship between them; they were intimate friends, and Michael covered for Alexa’s absences. Korda was jealous, and the two were forbidden to see each other.

The marriage survived for as long as it needed to, which turned out to be three years. In late January 1956 Sir Alexander Korda died, finished off by a heart problem that been troubling him for years.

26

. . . The End of Everything

1956–1974

May 1963, London

Moura parted the heavy curtain and looked out into the evening dark, moving close to the glass to see through the lamplit reflection of her own glittering eyes. The bloom of early summer lay over Kensington, turning the late evening deep blue and hazing the smoke that hovered above the rooftops. Below her window, taxis flitted by and the night buses heaved their way down the arrow-straight gorge of the Cromwell Road, whining down through the gears as they slowed for the Earls Court junction.

Countryside was all very well, but Moura needed the city as she needed breath. There was life here. It was a good night for a party; a good night to live and be one with the world.

She hummed happily to herself. The reflection in the glass smiled back. Such a changed face. The lines were deep, the features thickened, and the hair grey, pinned and lacquered in a coronet of silver waves flowing back from her forehead. But the eyes were still the same shining, feline jewels that had looked out on the snows of Yendel under the moonlight of a different age.

Her breath hazed the cool glass. A good night for a party indeed.

Behind her, the clink of glasses and babble of voices suddenly erupted in gales of laughter, and Moura came out of her dream. She let the curtain fall back into place and turned back to the room. The laughter had been caused by Peter Ustinov – he was on his knees, acting the part of Queen Victoria praying for victory in the Boer War; it was part of a charade based on the Nazi film
Ohm Krüger
; an amazing mimic, he switched effortlessly into the ranting title part and back again.
¹
Snapping up another gin and setting light to another cigar, Moura waded in among the throng; it parted for her, and she resumed her place at its heart.

They were all here – all her best friends. Klop Ustinov’s darling boy Peter, becoming quite the film star these days, and one of Moura’s dearest friends. Hamish Hamilton and his wife Yvonne were regular guests, as was George Weidenfeld. Baron Bob Boothby, the scandalous Tory peer, was another. A tower of flesh surmounted by two glowering eyes, Boothby had a prodigious sexual appetite. He swung both ways and had eclectic tastes; his lovers including Dorothy Macmillan, wife of the Prime Minister, and more recently (if gossip was to be believed) Ronnie Kray, the gangster.
²
Boothby considered Moura ‘one of the most remarkable and discerning women I have ever known, as well as the best friend’.
³

Writers, actors, directors, diplomats had all come to the party. Old friends and new, but none from the old days of Yendel. They were all dead – Meriel had died a few years ago, having published a memoir in which she relived those holidays, quoting Garstino’s poem – ‘. . . oh to be / In Yendel for eternity . . .’ All dead and gone. This was a new world now, with other worlds of memory stretching from that day to this.

The guests talked loudly, laughed uproariously, and drank oceans. They were welcome; after all, they’d paid for it. They hadn’t actually
intended
to pay, but nonetheless it was their money that was being drunk.

Times had become hard for Moura. After Alex Korda’s death in 1956, she no longer had regular work to boost the income from her publishing ventures.

She had some help from the theatrical impresario Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, the king of London theatreland. He had often done deals with Alexander Korda; actors under contract but not being used by Sir Alex would be lent out to Binkie for his plays. Binkie was renowned for both his financial cunning and for his extreme generosity, and after Korda died he helped subsidise Moura’s income.
⁴

There were other valuable contacts too, and Moura carried on working in films with other producers and directors, taking whatever odd jobs and tasks she could. In 1959 she was a technical adviser on
The Journey
(starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner), a drama set in Communist Hungary. In 1961 Peter Ustinov gave her a bit part in his comedy
Romanoff and Juliet
, as Kiva the cook. Producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean, who had taken a great liking to Moura, employed her as a researcher for
Lawrence of Arabia
. She was often a go-between – her vast, carefully spun network of friends and acquaintances brought her many tasks. When Lean first had an urge to turn E. M. Forster’s
A Passage to India
into a film, he asked Moura to approach Forster, who was among her friends, to ask him to sell the film rights. He turned her down, as he did everybody. Forster was ‘simply terrified of the cinema’, Lean believed.
⁵

Moura’s translation work provided a modest regular income. She had acquired considerable stature as a translator of Gorky and Chekhov, and earned glowing reviews for both. L. P. Hartley called her one of the most felicitous translator’s of Gorky’s work, and she was praised for her beautiful translation of his
Fragments
.
⁶
Her work wasn’t always good; in need of money, Moura would take any commissions she could get, and her heart sometimes wasn’t in it; some of her translations of lesser works were skimped (occasionally missing out whole sentences and paragraphs if they were too challenging), and her professional reputation suffered. But the work still came in, because publishers couldn’t resist her persuasions.
⁷

Although Moura had always worked hard, she had never acquired the ability to be careful – or even basically responsible – with money. Without regular support from a figure like Gorky, Wells or Korda, she was perpetually short of cash and perennially unable to use it wisely when she did get it.

In 1963 the rent on her flat at 68 Ennismore Gardens went up. She simply couldn’t afford it any longer. Moura felt not the slightest embarrassment about this; she had become one of that upper-class breed who turn being destitute into a profession. (Lockhart was another.) She had plenty of rich friends, and never had any compunction about letting others pay for things. Roger Machell, publisher and deputy to Hamish Hamilton, once arrived at Ennismore Gardens for one of Moura’s soirées to find her just getting out of a taxi. She enveloped him in one of her bear hugs and then kept him chatting by the roadside for some minutes, while the cab’s meter went on ticking. Then she turned and went indoors, leaving him alone with the idling taxi and its expectant driver. Machell did what any gentleman would do – he paid the fare himself.
⁸
Many of Moura’s cab fares were handed off with this technique. Despite the shortage of money, Moura always had the charm, the gall and the resourcefulness to live her life without having her wings too severely clipped. She never took buses, and never ventured into the Underground.