The Viceroy's Daughters (26 page)

Baba recognized that Diana's star was now in the ascendant. “Baba saddened me deeply by tales of Mrs. Guinness' increased wriggling her way into Tom and the children and that she goes everywhere with him in a black shirt and has the entrée to Hitler and Goebbels for him,” wrote Irene. The realization that she was now in second place may have prompted Baba to an unexpected decision: she told Irene in the course of a “wonderful talk” that she had broken with Tom. “I find her fearfully sad and ‘thrill-less' now she and T have ‘bust' and she is only 30,” wrote Irene.

It would not be long before a new “thrill” would fill this emotional vacuum.

23

Mrs. Simpson Rules

At the beginning of 1936, society was thrown into chaos by the death of King George V. It was clear that much was about to change, not least the image of impeccable moral probity that had characterized the previous reign. Queen Mary's first action after her husband's death was to take her son's hand and kiss it, but this was one of the last acts in the new reign where tradition was to rule.

Immediately after his father's death, at five minutes to midnight on January 20, the new king went downstairs and—in a thoughtless act which was to cause much offense—ordered all the clocks to be set at the correct time (they had always been kept at “Sandringham time”: half an hour fast, in order to give more time for shooting during the dark winter months of that sporting season).

“The scene in the House yesterday was a memorable one,” wrote the MP Robert Bernays on January 24. “Row upon row of black, and the Cabinet in frock coats and Mr. Baldwin waiting shyly at the Speaker's Chair like some new member to deliver the message from the new King.” Of the King's appearance at Westminster Hall when its door opened to receive George V's coffin he wrote: “The new King looked really like a boy overpowered by the weight of sudden responsibility.”

Others viewed it differently. J. H. Thomas, the former railwaymen's-
union leader, a great favorite of George V who stayed at Balmoral for a fortnight every year and was equally fond of the king, gave his verdict to Harold Nicolson: “ 'E was like that, you know, 'Arold, not afraid of people, if you know what I mean. And now 'ere we 'ave this little obstinate
man with 'is Mrs. Simpson. Hit won't do, 'Arold, I tell you that straight. I know the people of this country. I know them. They 'ate 'aving no family life at court.”

Baba and Fruity expected a change in their own lives. The new king had always promised that when he acceded he would “do something” for Fruity; now, they hoped, he would make him an equerry, or an extra equerry—something that would, at any rate, give him not only a certain standing but validate his decision to leave the army and stay in England at the behest of the prince. Such a post, they quite understood, might not happen immediately: the king obviously had much else to think about.

What they, in common with the rest of the country, did not know was that most of his thoughts were focused on the question of marriage to Wallis Simpson. According to the account later written by the lawyer Walter Monckton for the Royal Archives, the king had told Ernest Simpson in February that he wished to marry Wallis.

In any case, that spring Baba was deeply preoccupied with Jock Whitney. They had first met when Jock was at Oxford, hunting at Melton whenever he could. He was charming, generous, aesthetic, cultivated, with an alluring touch of recklessness. As well as hunting, he played golf and tennis whenever he got the chance. He loved flying and owned a series of small planes (surviving crashes in some of them), and divided his time between the family's sumptuous house on New York's Fifth Avenue, built in Italian Renaissance style, and their estate at Greentree, thirty miles from the city on Long Island's North Shore. Above all, he was fabulously wealthy. The family fortune was founded on oil and tobacco, and his father's net worth at the time of his death in 1927 was estimated at $179 million—the largest estate ever in the United States at that time.

Whitney did all the things a rich young man could be expected to do—with gusto, style and flair. By 1928 he had his own airplane; he played polo; and after he came into his inheritance he raced: through the royal family's trainer, Cecil Boyd Rochfort, he bought Royal Minstrel; through another trainer, he acquired Easter Hero, which won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1929 and would have won the Grand National but for twisting a plate and cutting itself at one of the last fences.

Tall and with an athletic build—though bespectacled—Whitney had no difficulty attracting girls and in 1930 had married the year's most glamorous U.S. debutante, Liz Altemus. As a wedding present he gave her a check for one million dollars; a two-thousand-acre estate called Llangollen in Virginia, with beautifully equipped stables and grooms to go with them, a gym and a swimming pool; and a fuschia-colored coach drawn by four white mules in which Liz could drive around the estate's perimeters.

Soon after Whitney had invested in the new film process Technicolor in 1933, he insisted on buying the film rights to an unpublished first novel by an unknown author. It was called
Gone With the Wind
. Since Britain was an important market for Hollywood films, this necessitated frequent visits to London. His marriage had become shaky, largely owing to Liz's refusal to have children, and when he met Baba again, he was soon deeply in love with her.

With his usual generosity, he showered her with presents, notably jewelry. Much of it was by Fulco di Verdura, the Sicilian duke who had become a jewelry designer. To Baba, Whitney gave di Verdura's famous clips and brooches; several represented elephants, their bodies a huge baroque pearl, legs and curling trunk of diamonds tipped with gold, surmounted by a crystal howdah and trappings of rubies and sapphires.

Jock Whitney was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted; he wanted to marry Baba and he knew that the Metcalfe marriage had unraveled. Baba herself felt so strongly about him that she went as far as planning to return to America with him, sending Irene a cable on March 13 saying: “Sailing on the Ile de France. Fruity remaining behind.”

But Fruity did not want a divorce and Baba had no grounds on which to divorce him. He was the father of her children and, although mothers were almost invariably awarded custody of children in divorce cases, there would be a question mark over one who planned to take hers out of the country. Nor did she wish to land Fruity with a divorce case which would deeply prejudice his chances of getting a job at court just at the moment when, they hoped, he was about to be offered one.

She also shrank from the very idea of divorce: it was something one just “did not do.” Retrospectively, as she often told her children years later, she came to regret not having married Whitney.

And, of course, there was Tom—with his intoxicating lovemaking, his constant changes of plan, his maddening determination to keep Diana Guinness in his life, his sudden bouts of dependence on her and equally sudden offhandedness, his stimulating, provocative political ideas, the sharp-edged wit that made poor Fruity seem plodding beside him, and the sheer, inexplicable magnetism of his physical presence that worked as powerfully on an individual as on a crowd.

This charisma was in evidence again on March 22, when Tom again addressed a meeting of the British Union of Fascists in the Albert Hall to rousing effect. Outside, demonstrating against him as close as the police would allow, were the communists, headed by Tom's former friend and close associate, John Strachey. As always, Tom was careful to keep on the right side of the law, but his extreme views were beginning to tell heavily against him: a second libel case he brought in February 1936 turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory when he was awarded damages of one farthing and had to pay his own costs.

Some days later Baba called on Irene after an evening with Tom, with whom she had resumed her affair. It appeared that he was now carrying anti-Semitism into private life, and had been furious when he learned that Irene had invited her friends the Sieffs to one of her musical soirées. “He said he would never come near me if this continued and he would take Micky away from me,” wrote Irene in her diary that night. “I was quite shattered by it.”

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.