The Viceroy's Daughters (14 page)

Irene, back from her world tour, found a world even more frenetically gay than when she had left it in November. Fashion followed fashion—ostrich-feather fans, headache bands, bangs, pearl chokers, Venetian glass lamps, painted furniture and, that November, the first bottle party. In tune with the zeitgeist, Maud, wife of Sir Bache Cunard, rechristened herself Emerald and launched into three decades of entertaining—endless lunch, dinner and supper parties and, later, gatherings in her opera box and after-performance entertainments.

A year's absence had not achieved the break from Gordon Leith that Irene had intended. He came right away to see her at Claridge's, where she was staying. Her first full day in London, November 16, gives a flavor of her London life at that time. She had a reunion lunch with Cim, saw Gordon at three-thirty and the hostess and decorator Sibyl Colefax at four-thirty, and accepted an invitation to Cliveden from Nancy Astor. Cim brought her children to tea at five and at seven Gordon came again to see her before she left for Tom Mosley's birthday dinner at Smith Square. After it she, Cim, Tom and his agent went to Charlot's Revue and on to the Gargoyle nightclub, where they met Bob Boothby, Amabel and Clough Williams-Ellis, John Strachey and others.

Two days later, Irene canceled the Cliveden visit in order to lunch with Gordon at the Embassy Club. The following day, she saw another admirer, Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist whom she had met so many years earlier at Hackwood. After attending his concert, she dined with him and the Jowetts, talked until midnight and then went on with Rubinstein to a party given by Sibyl Colefax in his honor. “We disbanded at 2:45 after a perfect time. Arthur had left Paola de Medici behind and was just as stimulating and vital as ever.”

By the end of November she was back in Melton, straight into the heart of that rich, hard-riding set whose recreations were drinking, gambling, dancing and discreet or not-so-discreet love affairs. The pace was set by the Prince of Wales, famously brave and mounted on superb hunters, ready to dance all night with whichever beautiful woman he fancied.

His relationship with the woman he adored, Freda Dudley Ward, was by now (unwillingly on his side) platonic. He was showing signs of interest in the beautiful Lady Furness, who had married the hugely rich Lord Furness, chairman of the Furness shipbuilding company, coal owner and industrialist, only eighteen months earlier as his second wife. Lord Furness, a noted hunting man who was a former Master of the York and Anstey, owned Burrough Court, near Melton. Since meeting the prince, Thelma, who did not hunt, had suddenly discovered the attractions of life in the country. Night after night she could be seen dancing with him at the Melton Embassy, exquisite in fuchsia, black or a rose-painted Lanvin dress. Two other additions to the Craven Lodge “set” were the wealthy, polo-playing young Americans Laddie Sanford and Jock Whitney.

Jock Whitney was already known as one of the most eligible young men in the Western world. His father was among the wealthiest men in America. Both sides of his family had held important posts in the U.S. government; President Theodore Roosevelt and his entire cabinet had attended the wedding of his parents. Born in 1904, Jock was the same age as Baba, and after graduating from Yale University had come up to Oxford that autumn. He had been brought up in a horsy milieu: his mother, Helen Hay Whitney, ran the famous Greentree racing stables near Lexington, in the Kentucky bluegrass country, and almost his first action on arrival in England was to buy a couple of hunters. He and Laddie (later to become the lover of Edwina Mountbatten) quickly blended into the Melton life.

Days at Melton had a routine. The keen—and most were very keen—could hunt four or five days a week. Meets were at ten-thirty or eleven, with a change of horse at around one-thirty—no single animal could keep up the pace across those huge grass fields if it was a good day. When the light went around teatime the second horse was handed to a groom and its owner went to tea with the nearest friend, often playing a rubber or two of bridge afterward, generally for shillings rather than pounds. Then it was home to change and out to dinner, often for fifty or more people, where extroverts like the two young Americans danced the Black Bottom to the strumming of a ukelele.

If there were no dinner parties, evenings were spent at Craven Lodge, usually ending in poker for high stakes—Irene's diary notes constantly that she has lost forty pounds—or they might catch the train to London for a special party. And all the time, either galloping across a field beside her, meeting her for lunch in London, invited to the same dinner party or escorting her home, there was Gordon Leith. “Dined for Olga Lynne's concert, crammed with all my friends. To the Charleston Ball at the Albert Hall then at 11:45 to Alice Wimborne's marvellous party till 1:45 then Gordon Leith brought me back to the Charleston Ball where we remained till 3:45, seeing wonderful exhibitions from men women and children and the Cabaret shows and the Blackbirds. Gracie very gushing to me. Always with Scatters.”

Next day it was back by the early train in time to hunt again. Sometimes Cim and Tom, who both enjoyed hunting, came to stay with her; she would mount them and all three would go out together. It was during these weekends that the Mosleys must have realized the depth of Irene's feelings for Gordon—and hoped that it would simply blow itself out.

It was a life that left little time for outside interests. Tom Mosley had realized this a few years earlier when he sold his hunters to concentrate on politics. That autumn, he and Cim were campaigning hard. Earlier in 1926 they had visited America; on their return Tom was invited to stand in a by-election in the Birmingham constituency of Smethwick. Cim did all she could to help her husband. “Cim in throws [
sic
] of a Labour election for Tom, making silly speeches and painful references to her title,” records Irene's diary.

Smethwick was adjacent to Tom's former constituency of Ladywood, and the goodwill and following he had built up there stood him in good stead. Despite vicious personal attacks on both him and Cimmie he won the seat, increasing Labour's majority to 6,582. Cimmie wrote at once to Nancy Astor, so supportive of them both and one of the few who understood the realities of political infighting: “Thanks darling and I'm glad to know there are a few who know that I never could say the things or behave in the way the utterly unspeakable capitalist press allege I do. It's all grand up here and Tom will be back in the house before Xmas!”

Irene spent the Christmas of 1926 at Cliveden. Nancy Astor, who had assumed the role of older sister/godmother to all the Curzon girls, was glad for all or any of them to come to Cliveden on such family occasions as well as virtually any weekend they wanted. She was also as free with her opinions as any close relative. “Criticism of my lips and nails from Nancy and abuse of all my friends,” wrote Irene in her diary two days before Christmas. On Christmas Eve the Astor boys Charlestoned all day to Irene's new gramophone; on Christmas Day there was a huge lunch followed by tennis on the indoor court and Cim and Tom came to dinner.

Nancy, who had greatly disapproved of what she thought of as Tom's defection to Labour, was nevertheless warmly welcoming. “Everyone was very decent to him though Geoffrey Dawson and Bob Brand hate him,” noted Irene. “They were both very pathetic, Tom even looking lonely and lost for once, tho' Cim was utterly at her ease.” There was bridge, more tennis, charades—“Nancy Astor inimitable as a rich Jew, a fat girl with that bulging mask, and an invalid with spots all over her face and a bandaged leg.” Back at Melton, Irene gave a dinner party followed by poker (“won £60!”), dropped everything when Gordon telephoned her to dine with him, tried to stifle her irritation when she found herself playing poker with Prince Henry, the youngest of the royal princes (“
maddeningly
slow at poker!”) and, like everyone else, Charlestoned all evening at the Craven Lodge New Year's Eve party. “The Prince there with Freda. Got to bed at 5:30.”

 

By the end of that spring, all Curzon's daughters had acquired new houses. Cimmie and Tom Mosley, who had wanted a family home in the country, found it in Savehay Farm, an old and beautiful red-brick building in the village of Denham, in Buckinghamshire. Surrounded by fields, with lawns running down to the River Colne, it was a peaceful rural retreat that was easily accessible from London. It was soon expanded to fit their needs, modernized and redesigned inside by the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, husband of John Strachey's sister Amabel.

Irene, tired of staying at Claridge's whenever she came up to London, wanted her own establishment with her own servants, where her little Sealyham terrier, Winks, could run freely and which would, no doubt, be more discreet when Gordon wished to call on her. With the aid of her solicitor, she found a house at Deanery Street in Mayfair. It needed complete refurbishment, which would take several months.

She soon had to look for another house. Baba was anxious to come home. For Fruity, their time in India had been, as he wrote to Baba during one of his brief absences, the happiest of his life, in the career he loved, with the woman he loved by his side. “I've lived all these 12 months as I did not think it possible for humans to be allowed to do,” he wrote to Baba on July 21, 1926. “I never thought it would be allowed for one to be so happy as I have been.”

Baba disliked Simla and the rain, she was not too keen on the other army wives and she wanted to return to the life she knew. She persuaded Fruity to leave the army—after all, with her money, there was no financial incentive for him to remain a serving officer. The Prince of Wales was delighted with the news. “I am very very glad to hear that you are not stopping on with Birdy, because that means you will be returning early next year.”

In order to avoid paying a sizable chunk of income tax, the Metcalfes could not return until the late spring of 1927. “I've been wondering all these weeks why you never answered my cable to the ship, sent a day or two after you'd sailed from Bombay, or told me when you'd be back in England,” wrote the Prince of Wales to Fruity.

“Now I hear from Irene—who I saw hunting today and a bloody bad day too—that you arrive in Cannes tonight and can't make England till April 'cos of income tax. Oh! Gawd, what a country, what a life. I'm disappointed 'cos I'm longing to see you
both
again, especially you. A whole month more is a long time.
Listen!
You can't or you don't care to shoot back for two or three days only soon do you? But I guess I shouldn't say that or even suggest it!”

The house Irene rented for Baba was near Coombe Hill golf course, in Surrey. She also employed servants for her and lent her sister her own cook until she had found one she liked. On April 6 she went to meet Fruity and Baba at Victoria Station. “The train was 40 minutes late. Found Baba looking lovely and well and felt choked and silly with tears,” she wrote of that day. “We dined at York house and talked and chatted. The Prince was overjoyed at seeing Fruity again.” The next night she and the Metcalfes again dined with the prince and went to Blackbirds, the Café de Paris and Uncle's. “The P. was in great form and he and Fruity got utterly giggly and inane. I for the first time charlestoned with the Prince.”

Baba did not dance that evening. She was pregnant with her first child, one of the factors that had decided her and Fruity that they needed a house in London as well as one in the country. They bought the lease of 19 Cowley Street, Westminster. It was registered in Fruity's name, but Baba's money had paid for it. It was her first real appreciation of the power conferred by wealth. The pattern of their respective roles was emerging; soon there would be no doubt who was the dominant partner.

13

Irene: In Love with Married Men

With Baba's return, the lives of the three sisters began to intertwine once more. For just over a year, they were closer to each other emotionally, physically, socially and even politically than at any other time in their lives. There was in any case considerable overlap between their circles: Irene knew “everyone” in the smart hunting world of Melton, where Tom had hunted until he sold his horses to devote himself to politics. The focal point of that world was the Prince of Wales—and the prince's best friend was Fruity.

The sisters visited each other's houses to stay the night, for hunting, for a dinner party, sometimes just to change for dinner or dress for a wedding. In March 1927 Cim went to Paris to see Baba, then returned to Leicestershire for more hunting. At Melton Irene was in a whirl of gaiety, playing poker at Craven Lodge and dashing up to London after hunting to a dinner party at Nancy Astor's (“sat between Bobbie Shaw and Ronnie Tree”) and constantly dining with Gordon Leith, either at her house or his.

On May 18 the Curzon sisters' nineteen-year-old stepsister Marcella was married to a young barrister, Edward Rice, in a packed St. Margaret's, Westminster, with Thomas Beecham conducting his orchestra, little Nicky Mosley as one of her pages and Gracie glamorous in pale gray with a pink toque. Gracie, who felt that other suitors of Marcella were preferable, had done her best to prevent the match, only giving in when Marcella had climbed out of her window one night and hidden with friends for twenty-four hours. All the Curzon daughters were on Marcella's side: Cim, the sister with whom she felt a special bond, had written to her delightedly from Smith Square: “The only thing Marcella darling that matters is marrying the fellow one loves—all that
is
so important and I am sure that is what you are doing.”

A week after Marcella's wedding Irene was at Arthur Rubinstein's concert. “He played gloriously. To see Arthur again was a real breath of life.” So much so that the next day she put off a luncheon party when Rubinstein telephoned her. She was fascinated by his musical talent, his extraordinary energy and the sex appeal that had already netted him numerous conquests. For his part, ever since their first meeting in the grandeur of Hackwood, when he, as a young, impoverished musician, had played before Irene as daughter of the house, she had appeared to him not only as a desirable woman but as a challenge.

Irene left him only to go to the best party of the season, a cabaret dinner given by the immensely rich Laura Corrigan, an American widow whose avowed aim was to conquer London society and most of whose parties involved not only the best of food and drink but expensive presents for the guests—especially those with titles. Next day, though, there was a disappointment: Arthur had invited her to Paris but once there “I found him with the Polish lady.” Sad and disillusioned, her spirits rose when Arthur, never one to let a lady go off the boil, invited her to a luncheon
à quatre
in his tiny flat by the Sacré-Coeur. “He was like a child with it and had been out to buy flowers, glasses and cheese for us,” she noted fondly.

The season rattled on, with dinner parties, cabarets, dances, parties when everyone sank too many cocktails (“The Prince arrived—blind!” noted Irene's diary. “Fred and Adele Astaire were drunk and leaning over the sofa throwing cushions at everyone”), supper parties for the opera, luncheons with Elinor Glyn at the Ritz, dinners with Arthur Rubinstein. Irene, with her warmth, her interest in people, the funny or intriguing stories she told, in her low, rather “Curzon” voice that emphasized certain words, of the people she had met on her cruises or in America, was in demand everywhere. Rich, independent and quite prepared to indulge in the common Melton sport of late-night bed-hopping, she was nevertheless too seemingly formidable for many men, who could not detect the vulnerable creature beneath the sophisticated carapace. When Gordon failed to come and see her during a whole week when she was ill while staying with Cim in Smith Square, she was miserable—though it did not seem to strike her that if he had come it might have been a cause for gossip.

Her strange double standard came into operation once more when she refused to come to Savehay Farm one weekend because Sylvia Ashley, a famous society beauty and femme fatale, would also be there. When Cim questioned her, Irene let slip that Sylvia appeared to be eyeing Tom; next day Cim telephoned in a fury, telling Irene angrily that she had “ruined everything” and was idiotic to think such a thing.

But Irene was not being “idiotic.” Tom Mosley's infidelities were already the subject of gossip. Irene herself had been to bed with him during the course of one romping, drink-fueled Melton evening, but, as everyone there understood, such escapades were not to be taken seriously and were tacitly forgotten by all parties the next morning.

Thus Irene, protective of both her younger sisters, could with complete sincerity castigate anyone—Tom or paramour—who hurt her beloved Cim. She was in fact staying with Baba when they heard that Tom Mosley was away in Paris, returning that night; both knew he had a mistress in Paris, called Maria. He was at the same time pursuing the actress Blanche Barrymore, wife of John Barrymore.

But all this paled to nothing beside the arrival of Baba's first baby on July 8, 1927, to whom the Prince of Wales had promised to stand godfather. Baba's son David was born at 6:15, in his grandfather's house, I Carlton House Terrace (the Metcalfes' house in Cowley Street was not yet ready for occupation). Gracie, although she had offered her own house, neither appeared nor asked after Baba until some time after the birth when she sent a message to say that all her servants were shortly leaving for Hackwood.

For Grace was still leading life on the grandest scale, as Irene was to see when invited down to Hackwood the following day. It was the first time she had been there for almost eight years and to return to the house from which she had been virtually banned by her father aroused a mixture of emotions. All the flowerbeds had been replaced by lawn, there was a new golf course, and indoors the paneling had been stripped away and the dining room returned to its original Regency pillars and lighting.

Inevitably, Scatters was one of the house party. When Irene walked with him around the bluebell woods in the hot sun she noticed that Gracie had let the place get very overgrown. It proved to be an unhappy homecoming: Grace seemed constantly cross with Scatters and later, talking to her stepmother in her bedroom, Irene found her miserable, depressed and discouraged. What Irene did not know was that Gracie, led on by Scatters, had been speculating and had invested heavily in an oil company that had gone bankrupt. Scatters was a gambler who had so far been lucky, and becoming a stockbroker was a natural progression for him. Unfortunately he knew much less about stocks and shares than he did about hands of cards—his bridge was so good that his winnings formed a large part of his income—and had induced Gracie to invest in some “sure things” that had drastically lost value. She had also sunk a lot of money into a stud owned jointly with Scatters.

 

At the end of the summer the Mosleys, in common with many of the smart, rather louche set in which they moved, went first to the South of France and later to Venice. The Riviera, newly popular and still unspoiled, was dotted with small fishing villages, idyllic little pine-fringed bays and small rocky promontories seemingly made for the erection of elegant, secluded villas. Here the Mosleys and their friends would congregate to swim, sip cocktails, dine under the stars and pursue their various amours.

Irene had begun a love affair with one of her hunting friends, Bobby Digby. It quickly ran into trouble when he began to succumb to the noted beauty Mrs. Richard Norton. It was all too reminiscent of Gordon Leith's constant assurances that “one day” he would leave his wife for her.

Still pining for Gordon, unable to distract herself with Bobby, she set off on one of her curative travels, this time to New York on the
Mauretania
; when she returned in November, Bobby came back to her. But again it ended, literally, in tears. “B made me cry and said my determined spirit broke any man. I sobbed and sobbed and felt it about true.” Next night at the Embassy, in a large party with Fruity, Baba, Cim and Tom, Mrs. Norton was again “eyeing Bobby.” But there was always hunting. When foot and mouth,
*
followed by a hard frost, stopped it, parties took over.

The London “sets” of the Curzon sisters were beginning to diverge. With a husband in the House of Commons, Cimmie's was necessarily becoming more and more political. She had thrown herself so fervently into Labour Party doctrine that she did not hesitate to proselytize the virtues of socialism whenever she got the chance. “Cim gave us a long socialist dissertation after dinner,” records Irene's diary of May 13, 1928. “She was so certain and heartwhole one could not argue with her.”

Irene, passionate about music and the theater, knew many in the arts world. During that summer, luncheons with Gerald du Maurier, Anita Loos, the Irish tenor John McCormack, Paul Robeson, Beatrice Lillie, Ivor Novello, Oliver Messel, Noël Coward, Maurice Baring and Syrie Maugham alternated with dinners with the Marlboroughs and the Salisburys.

There was also a new admirer. All through the spring of 1928, Irene lunched, dined and walked her sealyham Winks with one of her hunting friends, “Flash” Kellett. It was a relationship complicated by the fact that his wife, Myrtie, was having an open flirtation with the Prince of Wales, which made Flash miserable and earned Irene's usual disapproval of anyone who publicly broke the rules. Her outings with Flash continued until August, when Myrtie began to reel her husband in. “He left me at 10 in a very shattered, broken frame of mind,” records Irene's diary of August 11 after a gloomy dinner at the Berkeley, “and I had uttered a few grim home truths about Myrtie.”

It was back to Gordon again. They went together to Paris for a week before Irene went on to join the Mosleys and their party—Bob Boothby, John Strachey, Baba and Fruity—in their villa at Antibes. It was almost as social as London, with luncheon parties in beach pajamas with the Douglas Fairbankses, Elsie Mendl or Somerset Maugham, bathing off rafts or the rocks, and candelight dinners where Tom flirted with another of his conquests, Georgia Sitwell, the pretty young wife of Sacheverell Sitwell, youngest of the three famous literary Sitwells.

But beneath the sparkling surface, glittering like the Mediterranean sea in the sun, the darker currents of their lives were swirling. Irene listened to Cim and Tom fighting upstairs—rows usually ended by Tom storming out as Cim sobbed—or heard him speak rudely to her sister in public. “Felt badly the strained atmosphere,” runs her diary for August 28. “Tom went to the casino and I talked for the first time in my life for two hours to Cim over the misery of her present life and Tom's insulting behavior to her.” In turn, Irene poured out her heart to Cim, telling her every detail of “the Gordon mess.”

That summer Tom's father died and he inherited the baronetcy. Georgia Sitwell, going to tea with Cim and Tom, found Cim surrounded by the Mosley diamonds. “She was planning what to do with them, that is how to have them reset,” wrote Georgia in her diary. “Tom actually says she will need the tiara one day as it is, to wear—as Queen of the Communists I suppose!”

Georgia also noted her first meeting with Baba, later to become a close friend. “Alexandra Metcalfe was there, very pretty, chic, hardfaced and oh! so conventional and ordinary.” It was a small and in many ways strangely incestuous circle: Georgia was at the height of her affair with Tom Mosley—one of his notes to her, written from his bachelor flat, simply says “Come!”—and there were numerous luncheons
à deux
, yet at the same time she was pursuing her friendship with the unsuspecting Cimmie.

Sacheverell Sitwell was less complaisant. “We went to Jean Fleming's for cocktails,” wrote Georgia on November 8. “On the way back Sach began as usual about the Mosleys and we had an awful time. I decided it was time to put a stop to the more tiresome aspect of his attitude and get really angry so he may give less trouble for a while. He hates all people who may give one a good time.”

In the autumn Gracie and Scatters Wilson won the Caesarewitch Handicap at Newmarket with Arctic Star by three lengths—they had bought the horse in Ireland as an unbroken two-year-old for eight hundred pounds. Scatters led him in, a dashing figure in the black-and-white checked coat that made him so easily recognizable at winter race meetings. It seemed a pattern that would stretch ahead for years.

But change was imminent. The common front that had formed between Cim and Irene when both had the same difficulties with their father had fallen away as they became established in their new lives. Cim, with her children, her anguished, adoring love for her husband and her growing involvement in his political life, now had more in common with her younger sister, also a mother—and perfectly able to hold her own with Tom.

Irene, with her work for East End clubs and for charities, her strong religious faith, the emotionalism that burst through a somewhat formidable exterior, the loud, rather flamboyant colors she preferred and the good looks that were handsome rather than pretty, did not fit into the category of women Tom liked as guests or mistresses. Baba, slim, beautiful, clever, amusing, always perfectly dressed and still fascinated by him, was much more his cup of tea.

As for Baba, the year in India, Fruity's devotion, the open admiration of other men, her success in London and her own powerful personality had given her a new perspective. She loved her husband but she knew she was the dominant partner in the marriage; hers was the money and what she said went—not only because she held the purse strings but because Fruity, who could not get over his luck in marrying her, could not bear to say no to her. At the core of the Prince of Wales's circle, she saw the power that royalty confers; with the Mosleys, she began to glimpse the fascination of political power—that sense of being at the heart of things that grips like a vise. Irene was eight years older, but Baba no longer felt like the little sister.