The Mansions of Limbo (19 page)

“Before the war, the international upper classes were doping a great deal, but none of them showed it,” said Tony Pawson. “They weren’t like those drug addicts today.”

“There was a terrible scandal in New York, but I wouldn’t want to talk about that,” said an ancient lady in
London. In Paris, an ancient gentleman said, lowering his voice, “Have you heard what happened in New York? Such a scandal!”

The New York scandal they were referring to was what has become known in social lore as the Bloomingdale scandal. Donald Bloomingdale, a sometime diplomat, was forty-two, handsome, a rich man who enjoyed an international social life, maintaining apartments in Paris and New York. “Donald had very chic French friends,” said Elvira de la Fuente. “He spoke French well. He was quite a snob. He married one of the Rothschild heiresses, the sister of one of them, but the marriage didn’t last.” Donald Bloomingdale was also a particular friend of Enid’s son Rory. “Rory was very much in love with Donald Bloomingdale, but at the time Donald was in love with an Egyptian, called Jean-Louis Toriel, who was very drugged,” Elvira de la Fuente told me. Toriel was an unpopular figure among the fashionable friends of Donald Bloomingdale. Tony Pawson remembered that Toriel had a dachshund that he turned into a drug addict. “A horrid little skeletal thing. Too awful. He was really evil.” On several occasions, Bloomingdale went away for drug cures, but, because of Toriel, he always went right back on drugs, once while driving to Paris immediately after his release from a clinic in Switzerland.

In the winter of 1954, Enid Kenmare and Donald Bloomingdale were in New York at the same time. People remember things differently. Some told me it happened at the Pierre. Some said it happened at the Sherry-Netherland. And some said it happened at the since-razed Savoy-Plaza Hotel, which used to stand where the General Motors Building now stands on Fifth Avenue. At any rate, Donald Bloomingdale wanted some heroin, and Lady Kenmare gave it to him. One New York friend of Donald Bloomingdale’s told me the heroin was delivered in a lace handkerchief
with a coronet and Lady Kenmare’s initials on it. Another New York friend said the heroin was in the back of a silver picture frame containing a photograph of Lady Kenmare. However it was delivered, the dosage proved fatal. “It was apparently a bad mixture,” said Tony Pawson. The rich Mr. Bloomingdale, who would have been far richer if he had outlived his very rich mother, Rosalie Bloomingdale, was found dead of an overdose the next morning by a faithful servant. Good servant that he was, he knew how to handle the situation. It was not his first experience in such matters. He called the family lawyer immediately. The lace handkerchief with the coronet, or the picture frame with Enid’s picture, or whatever receptacle the heroin had come in, was removed, as were the implements of injection. The family lawyer called the family doctor, and the police were notified. Meanwhile, Lady Kenmare was put on an afternoon plane with the assistance of her good friends Norman and Rosita Winston, the international socialites, who for years had leased the Clos, a house on the grounds of La Fiorentina. “She was out of the country before any mention of Donald’s death was ever made,” said Bert Whitley of New York, who leased another house on the grounds. The servant, who had been through previous scrapes with his employer, was left money in Bloomingdale’s will, as were Rory Cameron and Jean-Louis Toriel, the Egyptian, who later also died of a heroin overdose. The newspapers reported that Bloomingdale’s death had been caused by an overdose of barbiturates. No connection between the countess and the death of Donald Bloomingdale was ever made publicly. “But everybody knew,” I was told over and over. “Everybody knew.”

Probably nobody knew better what happened that night than Walter Beardshall, who was Lady Kenmare’s butler and valet at the time and who remains her fervent
supporter to this day. Now crippled by post-polio syndrome, Mr. Beardshall lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is mostly confined to a motorized wheelchair. “I traveled around the world with Her Ladyship,” he told me. “Elsa Maxwell spread the rumor that I was her gigolo, and everyone gossiped about us, but I wasn’t. I was twenty-four at the time, and Lady Kenmare was sixty-two.” According to Beardshall, the incident happened at the Sherry-Netherland. “Mr. Bloomingdale had a permanent suite at the Sherry-Netherland, and we were his guests there. He filled Lady Kenmare’s room with flowers and everything. The next morning the telephone rang very early, and Her Ladyship asked me to come to her room as quickly as possible. ‘How fast can you pack?’ she asked. ‘We’re leaving for London.’ We had only just arrived in New York. She said, ‘I had dinner last night with Mr. Bloomingdale. He told me I could borrow his typewriter so that I could write Rory a letter. When I called him this morning, his servant told me that he was dead. I was the last person to see him alive. We have to leave. You know how the American police are.’ ”

After the Bloomingdale incident, Somerset Maugham dubbed his great friend Lady Kenmare Lady Killmore, although some people attribute the name to Noel Coward. At any rate the name stuck.

“Did Enid ever talk about Donald Bloomingdale?” I asked Anthony Pawson.

“It was always a tricky subject,” he said. “She didn’t talk too much about it, because of all the rumors going round.”

“Did Rory talk about it?” I asked a lady friend of his in London.

“Those stories about Enid were never discussed. I mean, you can’t ask if someone’s mother murdered someone.
Rory told me, though, that once, when she arrived on the
Queen Mary
, the tabloids said, ‘Society Murderess Arrives,’ ” she replied.

“When Donald died in New York that time, we all expected to know more about it, but nothing came out,” said Elvira de la Fuente. “She ran from New York after that.”

Daisy Fellowes, another of the stunning women of the period and a famed society wit, maintained a sort of chilly friendship with Enid. The daughter of a French duke and an heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, she didn’t think Enid was sufficiently wellborn, describing her as “an Australian with a vague pedigree.” Once, in conversation, Enid began a sentence with the phrase “people of our class.” Mrs. Fellowes raised her hand and stopped the conversation. “Just a moment, Enid,” she said. “Your class or mine?” After the Bloomingdale affair, Daisy Fellowes announced she was going to give a dinner party for twelve people. “I’m going to have all murderers,” she said. “Very convenient. There are six men and six women. And Enid Kenmare will have the place of honor, because she killed the most people of anyone coming.”

Lady Kenmare was aware of the stories told about her, and she was sometimes hurt by them. Roderick Coupe, an American who lives in Paris, told me of an occasion when the social figure Jimmy Donahue, a Woolworth heir, cousin of Enid’s friend Barbara Hutton, and often rumored to have been the lover of the Duchess of Windsor, asked Enid to his house on Long Island. After a pleasant dinner, he began to ask her why she was known as Lady Killmore. She explained to him that it was a name that caused her a great deal of heartache. Donahue, who had a cruel streak, persisted. “But why do people say it?” he asked several more times. Enid Kenmare finally announced she was leaving.
Donahue told her he had sent her car back to New York. Undeterred, she made her way to the highway and hitchhiked to the city.

“She was one of the most accomplished women. She rode. She shot. She fished. She painted very well. She sculpted. She did beautiful needlework. She cooked marvelously. There was nothing she couldn’t do,” said Tony Pawson. Looking through album after album of photographs of life at La Fiorentina, with its unending parties, one doesn’t see an angry or worried face among the people pictured. Any age, any generation, eighteen to eighty, in and out of the house, and dogs everywhere. Although Lady Kenmare was thought of as a famous hostess, a word she greatly disliked, her lunch parties at La Fiorentina were often haphazard affairs, with unmatched guests. Celebrities such as Greta Garbo, Barbara Hutton, Claudette Colbert, Elsa Maxwell, and the Duke of Vedura came, but so did people no one had ever heard of. Guests would be thrown together—friends of Rory’s, friends of hers, the well known and the unknown, the young and the old, the inexperienced and the accomplished—with no care as to a balance of the sexes at her table. Enid was diligently unpunctual, arriving, vaguely, long after her guests had been seated, once prompting Daisy Fellowes to remark on her hostess’s absence, “Busy with her needle, no doubt.” Another guest remembered, “She had no sense of time whatsoever. She’d arrive when the meals were over, or be dressed for the casino, in evening dress and jewels, in the afternoon.” Tom Parr said, “She was an ethereal character, nice to us who were Rory’s friends, adorable even, but then she’d float off.” On one occasion, she was struck by the handsomeness of a young man sunning himself by her swimming pool.
“Do please stay on for dinner,” she said. “But, Lady Kenmare, I’ve been staying with you for a week,” the young man replied.

“Enid was completely original. Very elegant. Very distinguished. She always made an entrance, like an actress, carrying a flower,” said Jacqueline Delubac, a retired French actress who was once married to Sacha Guitry. She was always surrounded by dogs, “a mangy pack,” according to John Galliher of New York. Walter Beardshall remembers her entrances more vividly. “All her guests would already be seated. First you would hear the dogs barking. And then you would hear her voice saying, ‘Be quiet. Be quiet.’ Then you would hear her high heels clicking on the marble floor. And then the dogs would enter, sometimes twenty of them, miniature poodles, gray and black. And then she would come in, with a parrot on one shoulder and her hyrax on the other.” She fed her hyrax from her own fork; although at the cinema she would sometimes pull lettuce leaves from her bosom to feed it. Many people mistook the hyrax for a rat. It is a small ungulate mammal characterized by a thickset body with short legs and ears and rudimentary tail, feet with soft pads and broad nails, and teeth of which the molars resemble those of a rhinoceros and the incisors those of rodents. She taught the hyrax to pee in the toilet, standing straight up on the seat, and sometimes she let her guests peek at it through the bathroom window, keeping out of sight, since the hyrax was very shy. She trained her parrot to speak exactly like her. When the telephone rang, the parrot would call out, “Pat, the telephone,” so that Enid’s daughter, Pat, would answer it.

The fashion arbiter Eleanor Lambert often stayed with Rosita and Norman Winston in the Clos on Enid’s property. She said that Lady Kenmare never seemed to sleep.
She remembered looking out of her window during the night and seeing her walking through her garden dressed in flowing white garments, with the hyrax on her shoulder. “She looked like the woman in white from Wilkie Collins’s book,” Eleanor Lambert said.

“Enid was never social, really,” said Elvira de la Fuente. “You could ask her to sit next to a prince or a waiter, and it never mattered to her.” Indeed, the girl from Australia never went grand in the grand life she espoused and kept marrying into. She remained fiercely loyal to her Australian family back home, at one time investing money in the failing wine business even though her lawyers advised her not to. “They are my family,” she said to them, according to Beardshall, who traveled to Australia with her. Along the way in her rise, she lost her Australian accent. Tony Pawson said she had “an accent you couldn’t quite define, Americanized but not really American.” James Douglas, who used to escort Barbara Hutton to La Fiorentina, said, “There was no trace of Australian at all, but sometimes her sister came from Australia to visit her, and then you could hear the way she once had talked.” However, she did acquire irregularities of speech that were unique for a woman in her position at that time. According to Walter Beardshall, she used certain four-letter words before people started printing those words in books. He remembered a time when the Countess of Drogheda asked her, “What was Kenmare’s first name, Enid?” Enid replied, “Fucked if I know. I was only married to him nine months before he died.”

Some people say that Enid thought she would marry Somerset Maugham after Lord Kenmare’s death, but more people scoff at this. “Nonsense!” said David Herbert. Tony Pawson agreed. “I don’t believe she ever wanted to marry Willie Maugham. Unless it was for the money. Willie
wasn’t interested in ladies, you know.” Jimmy Douglas said, “It’s too ridiculous. What about Alan Searle [Maugham’s longtime companion], for God’s sake?” And Elvira de la Fuente said, “Enid had no friends, really, except Willie Maugham. She adored him. She and Maugham were a funny couple. They were intimate because of bridge. They played all the time. He was already old and grumpy at the time. It was companionship and affection, but there was no thought of romance.”

At one time, friends say, Enid, who kept a residence in Monte Carlo and was a citizen of Monaco, harbored a desire for her daughter to marry Prince Rainier and become Her Serene Highness, the Princess of Monaco, but the prince showed no romantic inclinations toward Pat, nor did Pat toward the prince. Pat preferred dogs and horses, and was not cut out for princess life, or even society life on the Riviera, and soon decamped to Kenya and Cape Town to breed horses. Bearing no grudge toward the prince, Enid happily attended his wedding to Grace Kelly. As the tall, statuesque Lady Kenmare emerged from the cathedral at the end of the service, she was cheered by the crowds, who mistook her for a visiting monarch.

“Before anything else, Enid was a mother,” said Yves Vidal of Paris and Tangier, who was a frequent visitor at the villa. “Most of the things she did, marrying all those men, were for the children more than herself.” “She never
never
did what family people do—criticize and mumble about her children,” said Elvira de la Fuente. Walter Beardshall said she tried to keep her drug taking from her children. “Once, Pat found one of her syringes. ‘What’s this, Mummy?’ she asked. ‘Oh, it’s Walter’s,’ Lady Kenmare replied. ‘He leaves
his stuff all over the place. Get it out of here, Walter. Take it to your own room.’ ”