The Viceroy's Daughters (29 page)

He is frightfully keen to have the place to himself. You know how he loves to run his own show—but the fact is she loves to be acting as hostess for him. I am very happy and HRH couldn't be a more delightful companion—he's not had one bad day since I arrived.

Of course he's on the line for hours and hours every day to Cannes. I somehow don't think these talks go well sometimes. It's only ever after one of them that he seems a bit worried and nervous. She seems to be always picking on him or complaining about something that she thinks he hasn't done and ought to do (this sounds as if I hear all the conversation—of course this isn't so but as my room is next to his and he talks terribly loudly it's awfully difficult not to hear a certain amount that he says anyway).

He is like a prisoner doing a time sentence. All he is living for is to be with her on the 27 April. As we come back every night after skiing he says “One more day nearly over.” Never have I seen a man more madly in love. The telephone never stops and his mail is enormous, sometimes 300 letters, etc, mostly from mad people! Gosh but some of them are abusive! We never show him any of those of course. They come from all over the world. I wish you were here but there is no chance. He won't have any women at all!

 

The duke's growing obsession with his financial position soon manifested itself: on January 27 Fruity's letter reported: “HRH is frightfully close about money, he won't pay for anything. It's become a mania with him. It really is not too good. But once more let me say; HRH is a 100 per cent and the most delightful companion. If he'd remain as he is now I'd give up anything to serve him for the rest of my life. I really am devoted to him.”

Fruity felt immense pity for his friend, flagellated daily by the woman with whom he was obsessed. “She is at him every day on the phone. He always seems to be excusing himself for something or other. I feel so sorry for him, he is never able to do what she considers the right thing. 3:00
a.m
.—HRH came in and stopped till now. I will not have time to write more as we are to leave for skiing at 8:00 to do our first run.”

On February 3 Fruity wrote from the Hotel Bristol, Vienna. “Kitty left yesterday!
Terrible
show! as HRH was late getting dressed owing to his infernal Cannes telephone call!! Missed her!
never saw her to say goodbye or thank her!
She was frightfully hurt and I don't blame her. He
is
awfully difficult at times and this is the worst thing he's done yet. I went down to the station with a letter which I got him to write to her, and that made things a
bit
better. He also never saw the servants to tip them or thank them etc, all due to more d—mn talking to Cannes.
It never stops.
Isn't it too awful?
Nothing
matters when Cannes is on the line.”

Even Fruity's sweet nature was tested. “The evenings lately have been
dreadful
!” he wrote to Baba on February 2, 1937. “He won't think of bed before 3:00
a.m
. and now has started playing the accordion and the bagpipes. Last night there was almost a
row
on the phone. W. said she'd read he'd been having an affair with Kitty! This is d—mn funny but I can tell you it was no joke last night. He got in a
terrible
state. Their conversation lasted nearly two hours.”

A visit by the duke's sister Princess Mary and her husband, Lord Harewood, made a welcome change from the exhausting routine of skiing and late nights. By early March the tensions, fatigue and stressful emotional atmosphere were beginning to tell even on Fruity, who had been there longer than anyone else in the duke's retinue. Soon after telling Baba, “I
love
being here with HRH but it is
very
tiring,” he was writing, “I am really very unhappy at the prospect of another month at least of this life. It is a dreadful strain. I am definitely feeling it now. However he needs me and wants me so I must do it for him.”

The duke had again refused to allow Baba to join them. Instead he wanted Fruity to accompany him to a new, more secret temporary abode—the duke of Westminster's hunting lodge, Château de Saint-Saëns, as Fruity confided to Baba with many underlinings as to secrecy (in the event, the duke did not go there).

Baba was in no hurry for her husband to come home; she was busy planning a motoring trip in France that would take her away shortly before his arrival. She sent him a wire suggesting he put off his return, to which Fruity replied that he had important things to discuss with her.

He explained why he did not wish to stay on longer than March 24. “I've carried on here and made a great success of it and HRH is very grateful to me but sweetheart I am very tired and can't stand it much longer. You have
no idea
what a strain it is. I am on duty all day and all night and no one person can stand that for long. Dickie arrived yesterday and leaves tomorrow and he will take this letter and will tell you
something
of what the life is like. Is it too much to ask you to stay in England till I get back?”

Mountbatten had been visiting his lady friend Yola Letellier in Paris and on March 11 flew on to see the duke. The following day was devoted to discussion of the situation. What the duke was chiefly anxious to know was when, in Mountbatten's opinion, he could return to the Fort—he still had not grasped that giving up the throne also meant giving up England.

“Talking with David and Fruity nearly all day,” runs Mountbatten's diary. “Also wrote. Important talk with David, and possibility of return.” Next day it was: “Breakfast at 7:15 with David. Very sad saying goodbye on both sides. Caught 9:00 plane for Prague, changed and went on via Nuremberg and Strasbourg. I was terribly sick in the storm.”

Baba refused to put off her trip despite her husband's pleas. “I am
frightfully
sorry that I will miss you,” he wrote, “but if
nothing
will put you off doing your trip as arranged I want you to go and really enjoy it there and have a lovely time—you deserve it after all the work you've put in at the house and as you say you're not looking well it is
essential
that you get away. It is just unlucky that I am not going to see you. I would have loved it. Is it just you and Edwina doing this trip? I'd have thought you would be very bored with her alone after a bit.”

Fruity's suspicions were correct. As well as Edwina, and Ronnie and Nancy Tree, the party included Jock Whitney.

25

“I Should Have Kissed Her but I Just Couldn't”

The day on which Fruity left Schloss Enzesfeld was momentous also for Irene, who took the Mosley children for the first time to her new house, 10 Cornwall Terrace, one of the Nash houses overlooking Queen Mary's Rose Garden on the south side of Regent's Park. She had left Deanery Street because the highly fashionable Dorchester Hotel, opened a few years earlier, generated so much traffic noise and its high roof took away much of the light.

Her friend Victor Cazalet was also moving. He had finally been able to buy the house he longed for, Swifts, at Cranbrook in Kent, which he planned to transform to his liking. “Already it is utterly altered in atmosphere—orchids, central heating,” wrote another of their friends, Blanche Dugdale, who lunched there the same month in a party full of the leading politicians of the day, including Neville Chamberlain, then chancellor of the Exchequer but known to be succeeding Baldwin as prime minister at the end of May 1937.

On February 7 Irene wrote Nevile Henderson a long letter of congratulations and good wishes on his appointment as ambassador to Berlin. “And I might have been Ambassadress there, if I had married Nevile,” her diary notes wistfully. She spent Easter with the children at Denham, giving them Easter egg hunts all over the garden. Their father did not appear. When she was preparing to leave, Nick said to her: “I do not want you to go to London, Aunty. I want you to stay here with me.” “I want nothing better than that to be said to me,” she wrote in her diary that night.

At the end of March she lunched with Fruity, who was full of news about his time at Schloss Enzesfeld. Many things had pained and annoyed the duke, Fruity told her, such as the wholesale desertion of his servants, the abuse of Wallis Simpson by his society friends and the strictures of the archbishop of Canterbury. “He was determined on a royal wedding for this awful woman and Fruity says he is more punctilious than ever over HRH medals and proper procedure than ever he was as king.” Interspersed with this gossip were continual questions about Baba. “Will she come back better pleased with me?” Fruity kept asking pathetically. “Is she well?” Irene found reassurance difficult.

By now the duke had left Enzesfeld to stay at the Landhaus Appesbach, a small hotel near Ischgl, in the Austrian Tyrol, where Fruity wrote to him on March 27:

I had a dull and boring trip home with plenty of time to think over these last months, which you allowed me to spend with you. I cannot tell you how much they have meant to me, and how happy I have been. I loved every minute of my stay and never will I forget your kindness to me, Sir. I really feel awfully lonely, and miss you more than I can say, and this is true. You are a marvellous host and nothing is too much trouble for you to do for anyone you like. You have certainly proved that to me and believe me, I am awfully grateful.

Today I went to Ascot to see David [his son, almost ten] and went into The Fort on my way back. I did not see the gardener but Willis took me round. The daffodils are just coming out and the tulips are going to be very good, also the rhodos. The grass bank behind the tennis court had given way after the heavy snow but is being repaired. I went into the house but it looked so sad, all empty, that I did not stay long. I must say, every care is being taken of the place and the gardens are in perfect condition.

If there is anything at all you want done here, please make use of me. Goodbye for the present, the best of good luck and once more very many thanks for a grand time.

 

In mid-April Irene was asked to a large dinner party given for the duke and duchess of Kent. The duke (formerly Prince George), youngest and favorite brother of the duke of Windsor, talked to her for a long time about Fruity, the duke of Windsor, Emerald Cunard and the rest of the circle who had formerly surrounded the ex-king. Fruity's straightforward devotion and immense loyalty to his brother were exceptional and did him immense credit, said the duke of Kent (on whom Fruity had called several times with various messages and commissions from the duke of Windsor).

Three days later, Tom made a surprise visit to his children at Denham. For once, sixteen-year-old Vivien was able to bask in his approval as he read her prize-winning essay on Capri and went over the exam papers in which she had done so well.

Irene was still cramming her days with activity: a speech at the annual dinner of the British Women's Symphony Orchestra at the Savoy on April 20, a visit to the Maginot Line at Strasbourg on April 22, where she saw the pillboxes in which humans could supposedly live for two years underground. “There among the fresh green grass were coils and coils of murderous barbed wire, ready to unroll. Are we all insane that we go on like this?” Then it was on through the Vosges, to look at châteaus and churches, and back to Croydon airport on Wednesday evening, down to Denham on April 30 and back to London on the evening of May 2.

She returned to pandemonium—David with a raging temperature and Fruity in a melancholic heap going off to dine alone even though Baba was back from her motoring tour. Nanny had found David motionless while Baba was on the telephone, thought he looked ill and discovered that he had a temperature of 102. “Of course he had to be brought to me as Baba had no cook or servants there.” None of this put Baba off her evening plans and Irene had to take her sister to the theater where Baba was meeting friends.

Irene had begun to view her sister as irremediably selfish. The moment the coronation (on May 12, 1937) was over, Baba had whisked away Cim's tiara from her and then requested Cim's superb pearls without asking if Irene wanted either of them. This was maddening—but not nearly as ominous as a remark made by her adored nephew, Mick. Diana Guinness had visited Denham for two nights before his fifth birthday and after her departure the little boy, sitting in his bath, had asked Nanny if she was still there and then had suddenly added: “I believe in the end Daddy will marry Mrs. Guinness.”

 

In France, preparations for the wedding of the duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson were well under way. Wallis had moved from Cannes to the Château de Candé in Touraine, generously loaned to her (through her friend Herman Rogers) by the American multimillionaire Charles Bedaux as a place to stay until her wedding, now arranged for June 3. It would also be a refuge from the press: at Candé, surrounded by land owned by Bedaux, it would be much easier to obtain seclusion than in the Cannes home of the Rogerses.

Although neither the duke nor Wallis had ever met Charles Bedaux or his wife, Fern, they had no hesitation in accepting the loan of his house for their wedding. The most obvious first consequence was the financial cost to Bedaux. Fortunately Bedaux, as the originator of time-and-motion studies, had made an immense fortune by his methods of improving efficiency in industry.

From early February onward, Herman Rogers had been writing constantly on behalf of Wallis and her requirements to the Bedaux butler, James Hale, who was handling the logistics of the visit. She wanted an important chef—the one who had been working for the American ambassador in Paris was mooted—two night watchmen, one for the château and one for its grounds, accommodation for a man from the Sûreté and one from Scotland Yard, rooms for her maid, chauffeur and Mrs. Rogers's maid, a safe for her priceless jewelry, and arrangements for her truckful of luggage.

Charles and Fern Bedaux, who lived in considerable style, already had twenty-four indoor servants, grooms, gardeners, gamekeepers and a separate laundry staff. Visitors were received by a butler and two footmen, but Wallis wanted more: a pastry cook, sous chef and scullery boy, a second butler and footman, four maids and two charwomen, five laundrywomen, more gardeners, an extra chauffeur, a telephonist, a number of golf-course workers and a gatekeeper.

All this was arranged in immense secrecy. Hale (who later went to work for the Windsors) posted his letter from Amsterdam in order to avoid any connection between the Château de Candé and Wallis Simpson. On February 20 he was able to report that he had engaged the highly qualified chef requested by Wallis for two thousand francs a month. This was Alphonse Diot, chef to the duke of Alba, who was leaving his service after fourteen years because the duke's palace had been destroyed. Hale also assured Rogers that the rest of the extra servants requested would be arriving in two days' time.

On May 3 Wallis's decree nisi arrived at Candé. Next day the duke arrived to join her. “Mike [Wardell] is leaving here to fly to you tomorrow so I thought I'd send you a line,” wrote Fruity to the duke on May 8. “Thank God those awful weeks of waiting are over now. It is
marvellous to see you looking
so happy
in your photos
.” Once again, telegrams, telephone calls and letters flew back and forth, in a confusion aided by Wallis's sudden and inexplicable changing of her name by deed poll from Simpson to her maiden name, Warfield, on May 12.

The duke had hoped to have at least one of his brothers as a supporter at his wedding, although in this he was to be disappointed. The Church of England, of which the king was head, did not recognize the marriage of divorced persons and none of the royal family would want to be seen to flout its teachings at such a delicate time for the monarchy. Once again, the duke turned to the old friend on whom he knew he could rely. On May 17 he sent Fruity a typewritten letter:

 

Dear Fruity,
First of all, Wallis and I hope that you and Baba will come here to stop for our wedding on Thursday 3 June. We suggest you arriving on Monday, 1 June, and I enclose a list of the trains from Paris in case you don't fly. The trains underlined in red are more for the information of guests who are only invited for the day.

Secondly, I want to say that I hope you will be my Best Man, so that even if Baba is unable to get away that week, you will anyway come yourself and play this important part at the ceremony.

It was nice of you to write by Mike Wardle [
sic
] and I can still hardly believe that the terrible months of separation are over. It seems too good to be true. Our plans are working themselves out gradually despite the withholding of a single helping hand from England, not that we ever expected one. But the behaviour of some people is utterly amazing.

Write and tell me soon that you will be my best man, and looking forward to seeing you on 1 June.

Yours sincerely,

Edward

 

A handwritten PS followed. “We shall be wearing tailcoats at the wedding. I shall personally wear a black coat and striped trousers but a gray tailcoat suit would be all right for you if you prefer that. E.”

Fruity accepted with alacrity, but not everyone thought he had made the right decision. One of the duke's oldest friends, Lord Sefton, foolishly made disparaging remarks about the Metcalfes' acceptance of the Windsor wedding invitation in front of Irene, who told him forcefully what the duke of Kent had said about Fruity's marvelous loyalty to his brother.

The Château de Candé stood on high ground, with a view over miles of green countryside dotted with groups of tall poplars and willows. Parts of it were sixteenth century, with high towers, pointed turrets, heavily embellished Gothic doorways and huge underground vaults. The estate covered a thousand acres and included one of the best private golf courses in France; here the duke played nearly every day of his stay and, if not, kept fit by scything the grass in the meadow.

The Bedaux had spent a fortune on refurbishing the château to the highest standards of 1930s comfort. There was American plumbing, huge refrigerators and a bar, originally the old sixteenth-century kitchen, its hooks for meat, game and hams still in place, in one of the underground vaults. In another was the dining room, its walls covered with ancient Cordoba leather. The big drawing room was still decorated in its Victorian red damask and the chapel in Victorian High Gothic. The Bedaux, neither of whom was Catholic, maintained this for the people on the estate but it was far too small for a wedding.

Instead, the Windsor nuptials were to take place in the pretty music room, used by Fern Bedaux as her sitting room. This had Louis Seize paneling drag-painted in pale green with lavish yellow silk curtains and an Aubusson carpet patterned with circlets of flowers and cherries. For the wedding, the piano had to be lifted out of the window so that the altar could be put in its place.

As well as all the extra servants, the duke took it for granted that his host would defray all incidental expenses. His mail was enormous and if he wanted a hundred letters put in the post, which arrived and left the château at 9
a.m
., he would simply hand them over to be stamped and collected. His telephone bills continued to be colossal, and if the party lunched out or visited a place of interest it was invariably Charles Bedaux who picked up the bills and tipped. The butler, Hale, had also ordered the
New York Herald
, the
Continental Daily Mail, Le Figaro
, the
Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Sketch
and
News Chronicle
, all in the name of his employer. Perhaps because she believed Wallis was inciting the duke to take advantage of her husband's generosity, there was little love lost between Fern Bedaux and Wallis.

In contrast with the duke's stinginess, Wallis spent freely—on herself. In the month before her wedding, she ordered sixty-six dresses. Every weekend her favorite manicurist came from Paris, for a fee of ten shillings plus traveling expenses, to give her a pedicure and manicure, using only the palest of nail varnish so as not to draw attention to the large, ugly hands Wallis so disliked. For the same reason, the only gap in her otherwise magnificent collection of jewelry was rings; the exception was her platinum engagement ring with its huge rectangular emerald.

The day before the wedding, Cecil Beaton arrived at the château to take photographs, a day-long session interrupted by lunch—curried eggs, rice and kidneys—under the trees. The duke, Beaton noticed, ate only strawberries and cream. Baba, who had arrived the night before, told Beaton at tea that she was amazed at his high spirits. Dudley Forwood knew better: he told Beaton how hurt the duke was that so many of his friends had not come to his wedding.