The Viceroy's Daughters (32 page)

 

On October 24 Irene and Baba received one of their regular invitations to Cliveden, both enjoyed and dreaded by many of those closest to their hostess. Nancy was still, as Victor Cazalet had jotted in his diary the previous year, “a very remarkable woman. Lives on her nerves. Possesses every contrast possible. Good, bad, full of angles, incredible insights and unbelievable bad judgment. One minute offering deepest confidence, next saying most insulting thing she can think of. Very religious. Terrific energy.”

She displayed many of these qualities on this occasion. It proved to be one of the most famous of the Astor house parties, its guests numbering many of those later dubbed “the Cliveden Set.”

As well as two Astor sons, Bill and David, and relations such as Nancy's niece Alice and her husband, Reggie Winn, also there were Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and his wife, Beatrice; the speaker of the House of Commons, Captain Edward FitzRoy, and his wife; the editor of
The
Times
, Geoffrey Dawson; Nevile Henderson; Tom Jones (deputy secretary of the cabinet until 1930, trusted counselor to Baldwin and a great friend of the Astors); Nancy Astor's adored Lord Lothian, the Liberal peer who was appointed ambassador to the U.S. in 1939 and already known for his internationalist, anti-war stance; Mrs. Lionel Hitchens, Philip Nichols; Sir Alexander Cadogan (permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office) and his brother Eddie (MP for Finchley until two years earlier), and Robert Bernays, now parliamentary secretary to the minister for health. Like the Curzon sisters, Bernays was such an intimate of the Astor family that he spent weekends alone with them, likening himself to “a sort of father confessor to these poor little rich boys (£25,000 a year each before they are 21).”

With both the foreign secretary, the ambassador to Berlin, senior Foreign Office men and the editor of
The Times
among the guests, the talk of course was of Germany. That night Irene wrote: “I talked to Nevile and Bob Bernays before dinner. Sat between Nevile and Eddie Cadogan at dinner. Late in the evening, Nevile Henderson, Bill and David Astor, Philip Nichols and I, joined by Baba (after a chat with that impossible rabbit-toothed Eden) talked on Germany till 1:00
a.m
. and Nevile was very interesting to the degree Baba wondered if I had been wrong in refusing him.”

After dinner Alice Winn, who shared Nancy's love of mischief, informed Irene that Nevile Henderson had proposed three times to a South American heiress. Beatrice Eden chimed in to say that he had even written to the Foreign Office from Buenos Aires to ask if he could marry an Argentine dancer.

Tom Jones wrote a description of the weekend that points up the differences between the foreign secretary and one of his most senior ambassadors:

Thirty to lunch today but this includes three boys from Eton. The Edens are the highest lights and Nevile Henderson the newest. Politics all day and all night. Eden has aged since I saw him six months ago and is dog-tired at the start of the Session. I sat between him and Henderson after the ladies left last night and found they differed widely in policy. Henderson struck me as sensible and informed but without distinction. He has lived in the countries we talked about and Eden has not and this was apparent.

Eden himself thinks the Cabinet very weak and the armament programme far in arrears. On the other hand, he seems to argue that we can't do business with Germany until we are armed—say about 1940. This assumes that we can catch up with Germany—which we cannot—and that Hitler takes no dramatic step in the meantime, which is unlike Hitler. We have spurned his repeated offers. They will not be kept open indefinitely. His price will mount and he will want the naval agreement revised in his favour. It is believed that Mussolini has sold Austria to him at the recent meeting in return for what, I don't know. All this the P.M. sees and says, but I think it goes no further and that meanwhile Vansittart is trying hard to bring N.C. round to the secular F.O. view.

Grandi has been the cleverest person on the non-Intervention Committee and has put flies all over Lord Plymouth. Seems to be a duel between Grandi and Maisky [the Russian ambassador] who each try to rig the press.

 

Baba, who had made the most of meeting Nevile Henderson at Cliveden, was going to stay at the British embassy in Berlin after seeing Viv in Munich. Fruity, suspicious that she would meet yet another admirer, wanted to follow her there, but Irene, who knew perfectly well what Baba's reaction would be, managed to dissuade him.

When Baba returned from Germany, she was full of news. She had had a wonderful time staying with Nevile Henderson, she told her sister; also staying there was Lord Halifax, whom they had met (as Lord Irwin) briefly in India during his viceroyalty. Earlier that year he had become lord president of the council and would (in February 1938) become foreign secretary.

Halifax still believed that the Nazis were basically reasonable men with whom negotiation was possible and had persuaded the reluctant Eden to allow him to meet Hitler in Berlin under the pretext of accepting an invitation to attend a hunting exhibition and—which must have made this master of the Middleton Hunt shudder—shoot foxes. Neither he nor Baba could have guessed how closely their lives would entwine in the future.

Less happy was Baba's disclosure a few days later that Tom did not propose to spend Christmas 1937 with his children at Denham because, wrote Irene, “Mrs. G was kicking up such a fuss. And still hangs the Sword of Damocles over our heads as to whether he is or is not married to her.” Baba, equally anxious to wrest Tom away from the Guinness influence, did her best to persuade him and soon reported success. “T. now seems to think he might manage Denham.”

But this triumph was short-lived. A few days later, Lady Mosley told Irene that Tom had been called abroad for Christmas. “D. G. won,” wrote Irene furiously. “May their Xmas be black with bickerings and recriminations.”

Neither reflected that, from the unpaternal Tom's point of view, Christmas with Diana—beautiful, serene, gay, funny, adoring and gifted with the ability to produce a near-perfect home and food—might be preferable to one spent in a household riven by quarrels, jealousy, tensions and dramas.

When fourteen-year-old Nick realized that his father was not coming he wept, Irene was told when she arrived at Denham two days before Christmas. When the children were comforted and safely in bed, she and Nanny filled their stockings. “I had a quiet hymn of hate at T's selfishness at going off for Xmas,” she wrote on Christmas Eve. “But for me I was blissful.” On Christmas Day Nick performed their regular Father Christmas routine.

As the holiday wore on the simmering emotional tensions in the Metcalfe marriage resurfaced. Fruity, who had been diagnosed as suffering from a depressive illness, was planning to take a break in Switzerland but did not really want to go and talked of canceling his hotel room; Baba wept and said nothing mattered, she would like to die if it were not for the children. Irene was relieved when they all left. That night she wrote: “Not one word, even for New Year, from Tom. He is the utter limit.”

27

At Home with the Duke

The Curzon sisters' petty squabbles were soon forgotten in the growing tension of the international situation. The Anschluss in March, when German troops invaded Austria to the cheers of the crowd that shared their language and racial background, might have had a certain logic; the threat to Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, with its German minority, was something far more menacing.

Over the weekend of March 26, 1938, there was another of the house parties that gave the Cliveden Set its name. Staying in the huge house were the prime minister and Mrs. Chamberlain; Lord Lothian; the House speaker, Captain Edward FitzRoy, and Mrs. FitzRoy; the Conservative whip, David Margesson; Sir Alexander and Lady Cadogan; Nancy's niece Alice Winn and her husband, Reggie; the actress Joyce Grenfell and her husband, Reggie; Ronnie Tree; Lady Worsley; Bill Astor; Lady Wilson (the wife of Gracie's onetime lover Scatters); and the observant Tom Jones.

As soon as she arrived, Irene found herself drawn into a discussion of the international situation. As she strolled past sweeps of crocuses, the first daffodils and the magnificent Cliveden magnolia trees with her host Waldorf Astor and the American financier Sir Clarence Dillon, they spoke of nothing but Hitler; after tea, walking with Ronnie Tree, there were the same questions, the same discussions of what the führer intended. So unnerving was the conversation that Irene slipped off to the chapel in which her sister's body had lain to pray that the sacrifices of 1914–18 had not been in vain and that the lives of the children she now regarded as her own should not be put at risk.

She felt uneasy at the composition of the party. “I am not sure the PM should stay at the moment in a house notorious for talk with the owner of big papers and all the chat and gossip about the Cliveden group running the PM and dragooning England,” she wrote in her diary (the Cliveden Set had already been attacked by the Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps, and Frank Owen had written an article about it in the
Daily Express
that month).

Nor was she impressed by the prime minister, sitting opposite her at dinner. “I thought the face mean, undistinguished, dead tired eyes, no vision, an ordinary cautious man whom no one could move to flights of greatness or to take any known risk for the future of the world, a very common type. Nancy lectured him through dinner as if she were running the world.” Mrs. Chamberlain she found “nice, cosy, slow, gentle but entirely devoid of the personality to make a great wife of a PM.”

After dinner, Nancy insisted upon her favorite game of musical chairs. Irene, conscious of the terrible gravity of the international situation, could not make herself join in (“What would the Nazi leaders say if they could see the PM, Nancy and others fighting and cheating for chairs? They could not believe we could ever be serious about anything”). No such scruples hindered the prime minister, who successfully fought David Astor for the last chair and won the game.

The indefatigable Nancy then organized another party standby, the acting out of a phrase, word or book title to be guessed by the others. Like Irene, Sir Clarence Dillon could not bear to join in at this critical moment; they watched bemused as Mrs. Chamberlain crawled along the floor, to be followed by Nancy with another of her set pieces: the clapping in of the false teeth she always kept by her in a small silver bag before launching into her two comic speeches—that of a Primrose League member and a hard-riding woman to hounds—into which she incorporated digs against the cabinet and the speaker.

“Are we all mad or what?” Irene asked herself miserably. She was deeply depressed at the latest round of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, this time aimed at the Jews of Vienna in the days following the Anschluss. “This volatile, irresponsible, tactless creature is the hostess for our PM in these agonising days. May God watch over it all for the best.”

Her apprehensions were realized when the party again got into the gossip columns in the
Daily Express
. Later it was discovered that the source of the leak was Lady Wilson, who had talked about it to Randolph Churchill, then working on the
Evening Standard
Londoner's Diary.

Irene's lack of faith in the prime minister appeared to be shared by Tom Jones. Giving Jones a lift back to London, she discussed with him Chamberlain's previous wartime role in charge of the voluntary recruitment of labor under Lloyd George and how this had only lasted seven months (Lloyd George had conceived a violent dislike for Chamberlain within days of the appointment and gave him such minimal support that he resigned). “And this is the man we now turn to in the worst crisis since the war,” thought Irene.

She spent much of the spring of 1938 visiting Denham, on one occasion finding Tom there—“very pleasant and friendly with the children”—before going on a driving trip to France in April. A month later she installed Vivien in Paris with a
vicomtesse
who took English girls for a final polish before their debut the following season. Before returning to London, she and Viv met Baba at the Paris Ritz—the Metcalfes had been invited to stay with the duke and duchess of Windsor for the weekend at their temporary home in Versailles and Baba stayed on afterward to take her niece clothes-shopping.

Scarcely was Irene back in England and the nursery routine reestablished than another of Tom's suggestions threw the Denham household into a flutter. Lady Mosley telephoned to say that Tom wanted Irene's permission to take Micky to Wootton, “as Mrs. Guinness was not there, only her children. Nanny and I were distraught.” Irene asked for time to decide.

It was not simply that Diana Guinness and the Wootton ménage represented all she did
not
want for her sister's children; it was more that she felt it to be, as she put it to herself, the thin end of the wedge. If the principle was established of allowing Micky to spend time at Wootton whenever Diana was absent, they would inevitably, sooner rather than later, overlap—and Tom would have good grounds once again to question the point of keeping Denham, their family home. Not trusting herself to speak on the telephone, Irene sent a message saying no to Lady Mosley and went off with friends to a concert at the Queen's Hall, where she was soothed by Verdi's
Te Deum
and
Requiem
.

A few days later she went to see Baba and did her best to commiserate with her over Fruity's “nerves,” for which he was going to seek treatment at the well-known spa Divonne-les-Bains, on the French–Swiss border near Lake Geneva. The unhappy Fruity clung to Irene when they said goodbye. Loyal and straightforward, he found it difficult to understand why, despite the three children who should have brought them even closer together, his wife had thrust him aside in favor of a string of lovers.

Baba was extraordinarily discreet about them: her whole outward persona was one of elegance, dignity, control and fastidiousness. But moral principles stood little chance against the strength of her emotions and her libido, a conflict that manifested itself in a kind of guilty anger toward the man to whom she felt herself bound.

What unbalanced the emotional equation even further was her wealth. Years of financial dominance, of paying for their houses, lifestyle, servants, holidays, travel and the education of their children, had enhanced the strength of an already powerful personality. Fruity, who could only rely on a major's pension, had become accustomed to a wife who “called the shots”—and found her impossible to argue with.

And now, as he left for his solitary regime a new admirer was appearing on his wife's horizon: Michael Lubbock. Nancy had written to Baba with her usual invitation to Cliveden for Ascot, but Baba had different plans. She had asked Lubbock and his wife, Diana, to stay with her instead. But she was careful not to offend Nancy, who was growing increasingly unpredictable and volatile in her affections, and invited the Astors and Lord Lothian to dinner soon afterward. It was a sensible precaution. On July 9 the Astors gave their great ball of the summer, to which Irene took her niece Viv. There, too, was Baba who, as Irene instantly noted, “sailed in and sailed out on a cloud of bliss with Michael L.”

 

That summer the Metcalfes made their first visit to the Windsors' new house, the Villa La Cröe, near Antibes, leased for three years from Sir Pomeroy Burton. Eleven-year-old David, the duke's godson, accompanied his parents.

La Cröe was an exotic, glamorous place, hidden away behind high stone walls and set in twelve acres of garden and woodland. A curving drive led to the large white three-story house with green shutters. One side, with sun terrace and lawns, faced the Mediterranean and a private pool cut out of the rocks. The house itself was built around a central hall. Here the duke's red-and-gold Garter banner from St. George's Chapel, Windsor, was complemented by antique chairs with red leather seats and black-and-gold backs: on the terrace outside were black wicker loungers with crimson cushions.

The rest of the house was also full of mementos of the life that the duke had left behind. Much of the furniture was from Fort Belvedere. The red-and-white library was dominated by a large portrait of Queen Mary which hung above the marble mantelpiece; the blond oak bookshelves were filled with the duke's presentation volumes, trophies and awards; in the library, too, were his Steinway grand piano and organ, which he would occasionally play when the duchess was absent. From his room at the top of the house, which he called his Belvedere, he flew his personal standard. In another echo of those happier times, he would walk about the grounds in kilt and glengarry playing his bagpipes.

The drawing room and dining room were on the first floor, and here Wallis's taste—and that of her interior decorator, Elsie Mendl—was paramount. The cornices of the high ceilings were picked out in white and gold, there were mirrors everywhere—the duchess loved both the effect of space and looking at herself—and the Windsor monogram, WE, was on everything, from writing paper and bed linen to the lifebuoys hanging by the pool. Entwined with the duke's coronet, it was also on the silver buttons of the gray alpaca livery worn by the butler and footmen (in Paris they wore black suits with crimson, white and gold striped waistcoats with silver buttons, and gold-collared scarlet waistcoats for large formal dinners). Perfection reigned: the soap, the towels and even the flowers in each of the six bedrooms were matched to the color scheme.

The Metcalfes, whose fellow guests were the Colin Buists and Lord Sefton and his girlfriend Helen Fitzgerald, found life at La Cröe both more formal and more luxurious than at the Fort. A hairdresser came daily, a manicurist twice weekly. Life ran to a daily program, drawn up by the duchess, just as it had when the duke was king: “12:30 the Prince de Lucinge arrives, 12:35 we go down to bathe, a quarter to two lunch, three o'clock siesta.” Meals were elaborate: melon with tomato ice, eggs in crab sauce, chicken with avocado salad or roast beef with port wine sauce and asparagus.

All along the coast were the villas of the mega-rich: Maxine Elliott in the Château de l'Horizon outside Cannes; Somerset Maugham in the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat; Daisy Fellowes, in her huge pink palace Les Zoraides in its twenty-five acres on Cap Martin, when not on her yacht
Sister Anne
. All of them entertained in grand style. When Somerset Maugham invited the Windsors to lunch their respective butlers negotiated over the menu and protocol for days, while at La Cröe guests were expected to curtsey to both Windsors on first seeing them in the morning and the duke's secretary had to take dictation standing up. Part of this insistence on status was due to the duke's desperate concern that Wallis should be treated as royal.

At the same time, the duke's old love of informality was obvious. In contrast to the duchess, who always wore a dress, often with one of her sumptuous jewels, or a bathing dress and matching cap, her husband would wear open-necked shirts and shorts as on the
Nahlin
cruise.

The high spirits that had disappeared during the tense months before the abdication surfaced again in the presence of old friends, as did the duke's love of practical jokes. One of the Windsors' wedding presents was a lavatory-paper holder that played “God Save the King.” It delighted the duke, who, though he shared the thirties prudery over sexual jokes, loved anything lavatorial. Just before Lord Sefton arrived he said to his equerry Dudley Forwood, “By the way, Dudley, when Hugh goes to the loo in the morning I want yer to tell me.” When Forwood tentatively asked why, he received the answer “You wait and see.”

Next morning at nine Forwood duly went upstairs to the duke's room and said: “He's there, sir.” Down came the duke in his dressing gown, stood silently outside the lavatory door and at the appropriate moment shouted, “And now let me tell yeou that every proper subject stands to attention whatever he's doing!” (When Forwood once daringly asked the duke whence came his peculiar semi-Cockney accent, he received the reply: “I didn't want to be guttural like Mama and Papa, so I went in taxicabs and learned from taxi drivers.”)

Fruity's initial hostility toward the duchess had evaporated under her determined charm offensive, although her harsh voice still jarred on him every time she squawked, “Die-vid!” or “The Dook says . . .” and her ugly, gesticulating hands were an unhappy contrast to Baba's smooth white ones.

Fruity's place in the duke's affections was as secure as ever and, despite the breaking of the duke's promise of a job, with its unhappy financial and marital consequences, he still regarded the former king as his greatest friend. Lloyd George, staying with his wife at the Grand Hotel du Cap in Antibes to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary and entertained several times by the Windsors, commented on this friendship to Dudley Forwood, who always remembered his exact words. “Except for the physical side,” said the former prime minister, “he [the Duke of Windsor] has a homosexual love for him. He is
passionately
fond of him.” Possibly the duchess had sensed this element when, as Mrs. Simpson, she suggested or vetoed those whom the then king should have around him in a personal capacity.