White Mischief (9 page)

Later, Broughton could not understand how Evelyn managed to take out girls, go to Paris for the weekend, eat at fashionable restaurants, and so on, on the very small allowance that he gave him. Though Evelyn kept two hunters at Cambridge and subscribed to a fashionable shooting syndicate, these were approved expenses paid directly by his father.

The truth was that Evelyn had another source of income. He took large betting commissions from his father’s own stable employees, and he was usually lucky with his own bets. One day at the racecourse, he put £700–£400 on an unbeaten horse called Windsor Lad, hoping to wipe out a debt of several hundred pounds to a bookmaker. The bookie wanted to refuse the bet. Evelyn pointed out his
father in the grandstand and said that Broughton had three runners that day, and that if something went wrong he would pay up.

“I’m sure he’ll pay up, he’s a gentleman,” said the bookie. “I’ll take your bet and good luck to you.”

So I went up to the stand, and I saw my father and he said. “My boy, you’re sweating a lot aren’t you?” I said, “Am I, Daddy?” He said, “Well, I think Windsor Lad’s a good thing. Here’s live pounds. I don’t often give you any money, but, look here, I’m going to give you a fiver.” So I said. “All right. Daddy.” So, I made all the motions. Went right the way down to the bookies’ stands. Windsor Lad won. I crept back to the stands. He said. “What’s wrong, my boy, you’re completely relaxed. You’re a different person.” I said, “It’s your fiver. Daddy.”

Like all that generation. I think we were brought up to a considerable amount of self discipline. We were used to threats. If someone said you’d be horsewhipped, you’d be frightened. Nowadays we’d just walk out of the house.

I remember one acrimonious dinner party. I was sitting at one end of the table at Doddington, about thirty to dinner—and I’d been accused by my father from the other side of the dining room of leaving the stud gates open. Hadn’t been near the stud all day. And I answered back, in front of all the guests. Frightful acrimony went on and finally he said, “You mustn’t argue with your father,” and he got up from the table with his napkin—he was a heavy man and I had no idea what he was going to do. Anyway he collapsed in the doorway. 1, by that time, was half way up the stairs. He bruised himself and had to be picked up by the butler. And my mother roared with laughter. But you see. you’d not to answer back. Not in front of the guests.

One day in 1935, the tedium for Broughton was suddenly interrupted: at a weekend at Tadcaster, staying with his friend Jack Fielden, he met his fate, as Connolly put it: “His Green Hat, his Blue Angel, the woman who would renew his youth and bring him back into the world of feeling.” Her name was Diana Caldwell; she was twenty-two, and she had been proposed to that very weekend by
Fielden himself, but had turned him down. Although not a classic beauty, she was very striking, with her pale blue eyes and mass of blonde hair; her way of radiating enjoyment and the quickness of her smile had touched off many an infatuation.

Connolly was fascinated by Diana and later described her as “one of those creamy ash blondes of the period with a passion for clothes and jewels, both worn to perfection, and for enjoying herself and bringing out enjoyment in others. Her large pale eyes would be called cold by those on whom they had not smiled, her mouth hard by those who had not kissed it.”

She was already a talked about social success: she danced in London, hunted in Warwickshire, flew her own plane to Le Touquet, Vienna and Budapest.

Her father, Seymour Caldwell, of the Red House, Hove, Sussex, had been a gambler and little else since leaving Eton. Her mother had been a beauty. Diana had been briefly married to a playboy musician called Vernon Motion, who played second piano to Carroll Gibbons and his Savoy Orpheans; who was much in demand at parties, but disowned by his family. Diana divorced him for adultery soon after the marriage. Her address was now 4 Duke Street, Manchester Square, London.

She had gravitated naturally to the racing world and to the Grafton Hunt in Warwickshire, where she kept a pony in stables and where she hunted most weekends in the season. Her grey pony could jump the highest hedges out of plough—twisting oddly in the air as it took off—and Diana was often asked to lead the field, thereby attracting many early admirers. In London she ran a cocktail club with her friend Betty Somerset, called the Blue Goose, in Bruton Mews, near Bond Street. She led a hectic social life, and used her aeroplane to pursue it across Europe. She flew with the famous aviatrix Amy Mollison. She fell in with an exclusive group of aviating aristocrats, one of whom was Prince Stahremberg, the Austrian Vice-Chancellor.
They would meet in Budapest and the
Tatler
correspondent was somehow always there. The pair were photographed sitting in a rowing boat in swimsuits, Diana holding her shoes. Fashionably, she had put on a little weight.

Perhaps it was the bitter experience of that first marriage that led Diana to look for an older man. For his part, Broughton couldn’t believe his luck. Now a lonely middle-aged man—Vera was rarely at home—he had one wish: to be loved for himself and, failing that, to be allowed to love someone who was delightful to look at and not boring. The very coolness of Diana Caldwell was part of her attraction. It was fashionable to be grown-up, sophisticated, bored—a reaction against the looseness of the 1920s. Yet in other women she provoked a suspicion and a deep jealousy which has lasted throughout her life. Her contemporaries remember her vividly, especially the peculiar “red” of her lipstick on the hunting field, which was thought a little “too much,” and the danger she posed. She was punished for her success with men by the suggestion that she was tough, scheming and faintly “common”—that uniquely English insult that in the end has more to do with detecting origins within a narrow social group than with personal style. Diana’s flaw, especially in the peculiarly intense snobbery of the 1930s, was that while she was winning the hearts of the most eligible young men there was nothing, to the relief of her competitors, you could look up in
Burke’s
.

For social ambition she was compared to the two wives of Valentine, Viscount Castlerosse. She was said, for example, to have the same overriding passion for jewellery as his first wife, Doris Delavigne, who was known as “Mrs. Goldsmith and Silversmith” and who would make the sign of the cross as she muttered to herself, “Tiara, brooch, clip, clip.” “She had cold, cruel eyes like Enid Kenmare” (his second wife), said a contemporary in 1968. Diana’s own models might have been
Carole Lombard and Constance Bennett in Hollywood, and from the English aristocracy, Diana Mosley, the most beautiful of the Mitford sisters. To her aristocratic rivals, who considered her
arriviste,
Jean Harlow was more to the point.

Diana was much photographed. She had a wistful picture taken in 1937 by Lenare and published in the
Sketch,
her lovely neck still innocent of pearls, when she was to be a bridesmaid to Lady Patricia McKay. A
Tatler
photograph in 1939 shows her with a perm and a large trilby hat at Leopardstown races in Ireland. She was often photographed in the company of a handsome young lieutenant called Hugh Dickinson. Indeed, Dickinson was never far away from Diana, and he was a frequent guest at Doddington.

Broughton now saw himself as Diana’s chief “suitor,” and began to refer to her as “my blonde.” They were not, apparently, a possessive couple, and he raised no objections to the nightly dances, the driving, the aviation, and the many suitors. He even encouraged them. He would stay at Doddington alone while Diana, in London, went off to the 400 Club in Leicester Square.

A member of the 400, then aged twenty-one, remembers Diana there with Broughton one night, in about 1938.

He seemed much older than the other men, who thought him rather odd, a little sad because the 400 was very racy and glamorous then. To me she seemed older, too, even with the small difference in age between us. I didn’t see her as a great beauty. She was rather Aldershot, with slightly heavy features. She wasn’t particularly slim or tall. She had a mass of blonde hair, and wore her make-up to give the “natural look.”

Diana Caldwell was roughly the same age as Broughton’s children, and as the relationship with Broughton developed it led to increasing difficulties with them and with Vera. Consequently the house parties at Doddington began to dwindle.

A constant friend of Broughton’s in these pre-war years—I will call her “Harriet”—remembers Broughton’s increasing loneliness in this period and the Gatsbyish air that took over his existence at Doddington. Harriet, the life-loving young divorcee, had first met Broughton at Highclere with Lord Carnarvon in the late 1930s. She had found him charming, but also devious and unscrupulous—a weary man of pleasure with his houses and stables and rather exaggerated sense of position. At dinner Harriet told him she would like to spend a million pounds a year.

“You couldn’t,” he said.

“What’s the most you’ve ever spent?” she asked.

Broughton replied, “In a good year—1926 I think—I spent £120,000. The first eighty was quite easy, but unless you gamble, the rest is sheer extravagance.”

They became friends, and Broughton invited Harriet to Doddington. He rang up to say it would not be a house party, only his “blonde” would be there. Harriet, a self-confessed snob, already disliked Diana intensely. She couldn’t come, she told him, “because I didn’t want to have to be polite to someone in one place whom I would cut in another.” Her father told her not to be rude on the telephone: just to say she wasn’t able to go.

Broughton promised that Diana would not be there for the weekend after all and Harriet was persuaded to change her mind.

When she arrived she was taken up to the long gallery and offered champagne (Broughton then disapproved of cocktails). Diana Caldwell was standing by the fire. Harriet said, “I think I should take the next train back to London.” “Don’t fuss, darlin,’” she remembers Broughton saying, “there’s no need. She’s going on-it.” Diana had been there on Friday to hunt and had already planned to return to London. Nevertheless, if she was aware of it this was an unforgettable slight. When Diana had left for Crewe station, Harriet asked Broughton what he had said to her. “I more or less told her what you said,” Broughton replied.
“I said, ‘How awful,’” Harriet reported, “and you know, I really think he didn’t care.”

Harriet concludes that money was Broughton’s first love and that he never really liked women. He would show some sexual interest, but—in her case at least—accept a refusal instantly. These late-night entrances, she thinks, were more signs of loneliness and the need for sympathy and affection—a need also perceived in Broughton by the Earl of Antrim. Perhaps there was a streak of masochism in his choice of women, especially of Vera and Diana—both somewhat commanding figures—a legacy of his unhappy childhood.

In 1938 Broughton and Vera made a final public appearance together at the marriage of their daughter Rosamund to Lord Lovat. The following year Broughton sold another 15,000 acres of land, leaving Doddington with an estate of less than 4,000 acres. Broughton House in Staffordshire had gone already, and rumours had begun to circulate that he was heavily in debt, that he had made some catastrophic mistakes in his investments. Although he claimed that his racing cost him nothing, there may have been betting losses too. There was no other way to explain the disintegration of the family fortunes. “Sheer extravagance” couldn’t really account for it, since the estate was legally in the hands of the trustees.

That year Broughton reported two robberies, and collected the insurance on both. In the summer the Broughton pearls, insured for £17,000, were stolen from the glove compartment of Miss Caldwell’s car outside a fashionable restaurant on the Cote d’Azur, where she was dining with, among others, Rory More O’Ferrall, Mark Pilkington and her old friend, Hugh Dickinson. Broughton was in England. As Dickinson remarked, “It was a damn silly place to leave them.” In October, a thief broke into Doddington while Broughton was in London and cut three family portraits from their frames, including two Romneys; these, too, had been heavily and recently insured. The thief had
got in through an open window on the first floor after a messy attempt to cut through a ground floor window pane with a diamond.

Harriet remembers a conversation with Broughton about a friend of his who had collected the insurance on three burned houses. Broughton thought this “very successful.”

“Do you know what you are saying?” said Harriet. “You’re implying that he set fire to three houses to collect the money.”

“I only meant that everything had gone well for him,” replied Broughton. “But if he needed the money, well, why not?”

In 1939 Lord Moyne’s wife died and Vera, who hoped to marry him, began divorce proceedings against Broughton. This surprised Broughton and hurt him deeply. He had tolerated Vera’s affair, but to lose her was a severe blow to his vanity, and he would miss the familiar habits of twenty-five years, hard and distant though they had been. In August he wrote to Harriet telling her of his despair, saying that he felt his life was falling apart, and that it had been entirely his own fault that Vera had left him. She remembered him saying that Vera was the only woman he had ever loved. This stood out in her mind because she had always found him such a cynical man.

Broughton’s response was to propose marriage to Diana, and to make plans to emigrate to Kenya. He had his properties there to look after, and he could imagine that by contributing to feeding the mass of troops gathering in Kenya, he was helping the war effort. And there was another good reason for leaving, apart from the debts: the situation in England might soon prove very unpleasant; it was as bad a place to be in 1940 as to be away from in 1914. Diana was eager to accept the proposal, for what also seemed to be negative reasons. Her father had recently died. Her mother had always been feckless and inattentive. All her close friends had disappeared to the war or into
marriage, and she felt that her life, too, was falling apart. Not everyone thought the marriage a good idea, and Harriet saw it as a disaster.