The Viceroy's Daughters (18 page)

Baba, now taking an interest in politics, was torn between fascination and disapproval, while Irene had rushed back to her own preoccupations. The sufferings of her maid Lena, perhaps her closest confidante, made her miserable, she was involved with various unsuitable men and Baba, in her direct way, had told her she was drinking too much. One May evening, when Irene had joined friends at the Savoy, she wrote: “I got nervy and started to faint and Lefty [Flynn] took me home in a taxi. I know Baba thought I was drunk. It is now such a mania with me that I fear if I say anything dramatically they will say I have had a couple.”

In June 1931 came the news they had all expected. Grace was stony-broke and the bailiffs owned everything in Hackwood and Carlton House Terrace; her only hope was to live with her son Alfred on his four thousand pounds a year. Grace's other son, Hubert, had already bailed his mother out to the tune of fifty thousand pounds, at which he drew the line, much to her annoyance. Gracie's abuse of her children for not helping her failed to enlist sympathy: her wild extravagance was all too well known.

Distraught though she was over Lena, Irene continued with her social life. Baba, her powerful personality emerging from the chrysalis of youth, did not hesitate to give Irene advice whether it was wanted or not. Confident in her own impeccable chic, she tried to tone down Irene's flamboyant, colorful, hit-and-miss style for the grand ball given by Lord and Lady Crewe on June 14. “I only had last year's black lace dress and was implored by the family not to wear my bohemian jewelry or sequin cap but Mummy's pearls and be enormously dignified.” Her efforts paid off: next day Baba rang Irene up in rare complimentary vein.

At the beginning of June 1931, Tom held a “weekend school” at Savehay Farm. John Strachey, whose left-wing principles were drawing him more and more in the direction of communism, seized the moment to make a thoroughly Marxist speech, applauded loudly by Cyril Joad and Allan Young, who were furious at Tom's decision to create a “youth movement” to keep order at meetings: a development which smacked uncomfortably of Germany's fastest-growing new party, the National Socialist German Workers Party. This had seen its 2.6 percent share of the votes cast in the Reichstag in the election of 1928 rise dramatically to 18.3 percent of the popular vote in 1930. The Strachey speech heralded an unbridgeable split in the New Party.

Two weeks later, Tom acquired a notable adherent. Harold Nicolson, whose popularity as a writer, historian and broadcaster was soaring, left his well-paid job editing the
Evening Standard
's Londoner's Diary to edit the New Party paper,
Action
.

This gain was soon to be counterbalanced by a damaging loss. When Tom announced at a meeting in the Cannon Street Hotel on June 30 that his movement was trying to create a new political psychology, a concept of national renaissance, of new mankind and of vigor, his disciple John Strachey became so alarmed that he announced that he was against authoritarianism. Tom's response was a stinging public rebuke, describing Strachey as a “pathological socialist,” after which he left the meeting with some of the new and physically powerful friends who had been attracted to the New Party's brand of militant politics: the East End boxer Kid Lewis, the Oxford rugger player Peter Howard, and Peter Cheyney, a crime novelist. This band of toughs had begun to follow Tom around like a kind of unofficial bodyguard. Though Tom never lacked courage, feeling against him in the Labour Party as a deserter and vote-splitter was bitter.

The New Party was in a state of flux. Some of its founder members were veering sharply to the left—Strachey later became a communist—and Tom himself believed that Liberals such as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill might approach him for support if a National government were formed in response to the dire economic situation. However, his underlying belief that power should be concentrated in the hands of the few, and by implication himself, was so apparent that on July 17 Harold Nicolson was noting in his diary: “I think Tom at the bottom of his heart really wants a fascist movement but Allan Young [the secretary to the New Party] and John Strachey think only of the British working man.”

The split was not long in coming. On July 20 Strachey produced his own memorandum, “The New Party and Russia,” which insisted that trade with Russia should be preferred to trade with the dominions. Britain could afford to allow Russia long-term credit, Britain should make “a progressive break with that group of powers (of which France and the USA are the leaders) which is attempting to restore the pre-war form of capitalism.”

Tom rejected Strachey's memorandum, since its thesis was contrary to his own program. Strachey, Young and Joad resigned from the New Party in a blaze of publicity, declaring that “Mosley is adopting a conservative or fascist attitude.” Joad added that he did not want to belong to a party that was about to “subordinate intelligence to muscular bands of young men.”

 

At this time, the Curzon sisters' oldest, closest friend Nancy Astor was grappling with bitter news. Her son by her first marriage, Bobbie Shaw, Baba's old love, had been arrested for homosexual offenses. For Nancy, ignorant of this form of sexual behavior, it was a double blow: learning of “beastliness” as well as the shattering knowledge that the being she loved best in the world was to go to prison (although homosexuality per se was not a criminal offense, proven homosexual acts were).

Bobbie's life had seemed glittering. A glamorous, witty, popular officer in the “Blues” (the Royal Horse Guards), he was a natural leader and in that regiment of horsemen one of the best: he twice won the Grand Military Gold Cup as well as many other steeplechases. Although his closest friends must have guessed his sexual orientation, such things were never discussed and, provided a homosexual was discreet, were never likely to be.

If Bobbie had formed a discreet liaison with someone of his own class few would have been any the wiser and the cardinal sin of scandal would have been avoided. But in 1929 he was found guilty of a homosexual act with a soldier. To preserve his reputation and that of the regiment, he was reported drunk on duty. His commanding officer told him to resign his commission or face a court-martial. It was given out that he had to leave the army for drunkenness, socially a far more acceptable alternative.

His family believed the lie—especially as, demoralized by the loss of the life he loved, he began to drink more. Nancy agonized constantly over his behavior, but worse was to come. On July 13, 1931, five days before Nancy and Waldorf planned to visit Russia with the writer George Bernard Shaw and Nancy's devoted admirer Lord Lothian, Bobbie was told by the police that he was about to be arrested for a homosexual offense.

He had already been warned twice about importuning guardsmen—
naturally enough, he knew the pubs they frequented near the barracks. The police told him that they would not be issuing the warrant for his arrest for four days, which would give him plenty of time to leave the country. After a year or so, the charges would be dropped and he would be free to return. But Bobbie decided to go to jail, perhaps through some mistaken idea that this would “purge” him of his “sin.” When Nancy heard this she lost control completely, weeping hysterically and clutching the curtains. It was not long, though, before her iron will and talent for practicality reasserted themselves.

As the Astor family owned both
The Times
and the
Observer
, she and Waldorf were able to ensure complete silence in the press—even her enemy Lord Beaverbrook kept it out of his newspapers. Meanwhile, Nancy had to go to her constituency of Plymouth, first to open a big hospital fete and, the following day, to welcome the Prince of Wales there.

Baba—one of whose most salient qualities was loyalty to her friends—immediately sent a note to Bobbie. “Bobbie dear, I hear you are in trouble. I have tried to find you everywhere but failed. If I can help in any way let me see you. I am in London tonight and tomorrow.” The Prince of Wales wrote a sympathetic letter to Nancy as soon as he heard what had happened. “Baba and Fruity have told me you knew all about it at Plymouth, and so I should like to say how absolutely marvellously I think you behaved and bore up during that long day of presentations. It does seem a cruel shame that a minute's madness should be victimised when we know of so many who should have ‘done time' in prison years ago.”

Bobbie's case—again thanks to family influence—was heard quickly. The morning after his arrest he was tried in the Magistrates' Court while Baba, together with Waldorf, Nancy's niece Nancy Lancaster and Nancy, whimpering like an animal, waited in the Astor house in St. James's Square for the verdict. Bobbie was given four months' imprisonment; next day Nancy went as planned to Russia.

Prison broke Bobbie. His mental collapse was such that he could not bear the idea of Nancy collecting him on his release. Baba, perfectly prepared to brave any publicity or scandal by association, met him at the prison gate at seven-thirty in the morning and took him to the Basil Street Hotel for breakfast. From there, he went to the Astors' house at Sandwich, where he stayed for some weeks. Eventually, after trying several options—and being sent to Paris to avoid the threat of a new case—he settled in a house which Nancy had built for him in Kent.

 

Tom did not let the state of affairs in the New Party hinder him from his usual forms of enjoyment. The huge weekend parties at Denham continued, as did his pursuit of women, with Georgia Sitwell still in the lead. “Lunched alone with Tom at the Ritz,” records her diary for June 24. “Enjoyed it. Talked politics and ourselves.”

Politics was the dominating subject everywhere. The economy was about to reach crisis point. On July 31 the government received the report of the May Committee, set up to assess the economic situation, which was found to be far worse than originally thought. The budget deficit for 1932, expected to be around twenty million pounds, would in fact be nearer one hundred seventy million pounds. The committee recommended that taxes should be raised, the pay of all state employees, from ministers, judges and the armed services down to postmen, should be reduced and, crucially, unemployment benefits (“the dole”) should be cut by 20 percent.

For the families of working men who had lost their jobs, this meant malnutrition on a scale unknown since the worst horrors of the previous century; and for a Labour government to accede to it was unthinkable. This gloomy report caused a run on the pound and further unemployment.

Tom had come to believe ever more strongly in individual power through direct contact with the public in the fascist manner (“he conceives of great mass meetings with loudspeakers—50,000 at a time,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary). At the end of July 1931 he held a New Party rally at Renishaw Park, the home of his friend Osbert Sitwell. Forty thousand people were present to hear Tom declare: “We invite you to something new, something dangerous.”

Then, as Britain teetered on the edge of the financial whirlpool, the leader of the New Party, which had so rousingly declared the need for urgent action, went on holiday with his wife.

17

High Life and Low Morals on the Riviera

The Mosleys went as usual to Antibes, arriving on August 2. When Irene joined them at their villa on the fourth she found them surrounded by a familiar crowd of the ultra-social—Cecil Beaton, Doris Castlerosse, Beatrice Guinness and her daughters Baby and Zita Jungman, Sylvia Ashley, the Michael Arlens. More swarmed in to bathe at Maxine Elliott's villa or sip cocktails, the women in beach pajamas and pearls, the men in linen trousers and Aertex shirts.

One evening an incident occurred which might have inspired Somerset Maugham's story “The High Divers” (“The lady climbed up her 8oft ladder and dived into a tiny tank 4 and a half foot deep with flaming petrol burning on the water”). Another evening could have been the inspiration for Noël Coward's song “I Went to a Marvellous Party” (“Dear Cecil arrived wearing armour, some shells and a black feather boa. . . . Maureen disappeared and came back in a beard . . .”). That particular party was given by the couturier Captain Edward Molyneux and faithfully recorded by Irene. “The nigger band from the Monte Carlo New Casino, a dance floor laid down, everyone in the world there—marvellous fireworks—Noël Coward singing and playing on the piano—Elsie Mendl did a shy-making performance on the dance floor of standing on her head—ring a ring a roses, we all fall down—Oliver Messel caught in an incriminating position with several men . . .”

And, alas for Irene's good resolutions, Gordon Leith was there too. They spent the evening together and he took her off to the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where they got a room. “Gordon still holds a world of enchantment for me,” she wrote, and when Charles Mendl told her that his life had been warped by one woman she said sadly, “Like mine by one man.”

She was not too preoccupied to notice Tom's new girlfriend, Lottsie, the wife of the immensely rich Alfred Fabré-Luce of the bank Crédit Lyonnais. Lottsie, petite, fair-haired, blue-eyed and full of merry chatter, was already linked to her new lover by one of the invisible network of liaisons that crisscrossed that tight, raffish little world. Her brother, Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, was married to the former Baba d'Erlanger, long-term mistress of Tom Mitford, brother of Diana Guinness, the woman who would soon overshadow Cim's life.

Tom brought his usual energy to the pursuit of Lottsie, who was a willing prey. He would whisk her off to Villefranche when Cim was busy with the children or pursue her to Monte Carlo, ostensibly to see Baba and Fruity, who were staying there. Sometimes he would ask her to join the Mosley party, and though Cim did her best to keep an eye on them, the pair would slip away for hours.

The unhappy Cim was at a loss to know how to deal with the affair, happening in full view of everyone. She alternated between sticking to Tom like a leech whenever Lottsie was around and loftily ignoring her husband's behavior. Almost invariably, though, rows ensued. Still deeply in love with her husband, she was deliriously happy when one evening he condescended—in Irene's words—to dine alone with her. Later they all went to a nightclub, where Irene weakened sufficiently to sit for a long time talking to Gordon “and was fiercely eyed by the two Curzon sisters!”

 

At home the economic situation had reached crisis point. When Austria's biggest bank, Kredit Anstalt, had closed its doors on June 18, 1931 (the French had refused to cancel the punitive German reparations debt), this created a domino effect all over Europe. On August 19 the cabinet had, after much heated debate, finally agreed on the ratio of new taxation to cuts in the social services in a compromise economy package that included a 10 percent cut in the dole. Then the Conservative and Liberal leaders told MacDonald that they would not stand for more than 25 percent of these measures in the form of new taxation (the previous year, income tax had been raised from four shillings on the pound to four shillings sixpence, and supertax increased also).

This, of course, threw the burden of raising the rest of the money on cuts in public-service wages—and the dole. The Trade Union Council (TUC), led by Walter Citrine and Ernest Bevin, was adamant that neither the wages of the low-paid nor the dole should be touched. It was deadlock.

On August 22, as the Mosley party flocked in a chattering mass around the cocktail bar of the Eden Roc, then drove to Saint-Tropez to buy up everything from fishermen's jerseys to “droll” hats, Harold Nicolson was leaving the offices of the
Evening Standard
to assume the editorship of the New Party magazine,
Action
. He could not have chosen a worse moment to start a political career. That same day the cabinet was informed that America would not help with a loan unless the dole were further cut. Unanimously, the cabinet refused: no Labour government could pass such a measure. Just before 10
p.m
. the following day MacDonald set off for Buckingham Palace intending to resign, and with the resignations of the entire cabinet in his pocket. But the king had already ascertained from the other two party leaders that they would be willing to serve in a government headed by MacDonald, and persuaded him to remain in office.

Next day, August 24, MacDonald told his astonished cabinet colleagues that he was staying on as prime minister of a National
government—a government that would in fact be largely Conservative. To his party, as to his cabinet colleagues (all but three of whom refused to serve with him) MacDonald's action was seen as a bitter betrayal of all Labour stood for. Within a fortnight, he was expelled from the party.

In Antibes, Tom's pursuit of Lottsie was so blatant that at one moment Cimmie ran out of dinner and down the street in a blind rage. What neither Tom nor Cimmie could have known then was that she had just become pregnant with her third child.

The news of the sudden change of government at home in the following day's newspapers was a welcome diversion. Tom left that afternoon for London; his wife and family remained in Antibes. That night Irene and Cim went to Maxine Elliott's fancy-dress party, after which Cim, who drove herself home at 5:30
a.m
., fell asleep at the wheel and, at a hairpin bend, hit the wall of the corniche road—fortunately on the landward side. Next day the round of lunch parties, dinners and nightclubs began again. For Irene, it had all suddenly become too much: the drunkenness, the endless cocktail chatter, the affairs, her sister's unhappiness and the torture of having the man she loved so close to her and yet so inaccessible. She decided to go to America, sent her maid to England for clothes and money—the banknotes were brought over cut in half for safety—and left on the
Augustuz
from Cannes on September 4.

In London, Nicolson was briefly optimistic, thinking that the New Party might stand a good chance in the general election announced for October 27, 1931. “Find that we have had orders for 110,000 copies of
Action
,” he wrote in his diary for September 12. “This of course is solely on a sale or return basis and does not mean a guaranteed circulation of even half that figure. But it does mean that the newsagents think a priori that there is a prospect of disposing of something like that number.”

Nicolson's elation soon disappeared as he began to realize that the New Party was changing shape. Tom was steadily moving away from the parliamentary ethic of a cabinet with the prime minister
primus inter pares
toward the concept of the Leader, in whom was vested autocratic powers. He was fascinated by the Italian leader, Mussolini, dictator of his country since 1922. Where most Britons saw Il Duce as a comic-opera figure posing and strutting ridiculously in a series of uniforms, Tom saw a single individual successfully running a country. Where the average Englishman viewed Mussolini's Blackshirts as unpleasantly militaristic, Tom saw an escort of muscular young men as a Praetorian guard, allowing the Leader to put his message across in the face of often physical opposition.

When, on September 20, he addressed an estimated twenty thousand people in Glasgow—referring to the Labour Party as “a Salvation Army that took to its heels on the Day of Judgment”—he was attacked by communists with razors, fought off by his personal bodyguard. “Tom says this forces us to be fascist and that we no longer need hesitate to create our trained and disciplined force,” noted Harold Nicolson. They differed on the question of uniform: Nicolson, who was becoming more and more unhappy, suggested gray flannel trousers; Tom wanted, and got, black shirts on the
fascisti
lines.

The discussions with Harold Nicolson, the searches for suitable candidates, the plans for what would happen when New Party candidates were in the House of Commons went on apace. Georgia Sitwell's diary for October 5 notes tersely her lunch with Tom at the Ritz: “Talked of politics.” Three days later, on October 8, the first issue of
Action
was published—thirty-two tabloid pages selling for two pence.

Action
did nothing to sway the voters toward the New Party, although Tom's reputation for brilliance and oratory led to approaches to him personally from both Tory and Labour. But though his ideas for the future of the New Party were still inchoate, the appeal of personal power was too strong to resist. He refused all offers, though gloomy about the New Party's electoral chances.

The election of October 1931 was a disaster for the New Party. Its twenty-four candidates, none of whom was elected, were of an appallingly low standard—some barely literate, others disreputable. None, except for Tom, had parliamentary experience, a lack not compensated for by the sight of boxer Kid Lewis campaigning in tandem with the aesthete Sacheverell Sitwell. In addition, the national government was already putting into practice many of the Keynesian measures advocated by the New Party, which—perhaps because of this—had campaigned on an unappealing premise: “We believe that within a measurable time this country will be exposed to the danger of a proletarian revolution. We believe that such a revolution will mean massacre, starvation and collapse. We believe that the one protection against such a disaster is the Corporate State. We shall not cease to proclaim that doctrine.”

A second National government, Conservative in all but name (the Conservatives won 473 seats), was elected overwhelmingly. MacDonald's part in this was roundly denounced by Beatrice Webb: “Within the new Ministry are the most prominent enemies of the Labour movement.” Tom, who had stood in Stoke-on-Trent, where Cimmie had made herself so popular, came bottom of the poll with 10,834 votes but managed to save his deposit (one of the only two New Party candidates who did).

Nicolson, who lost his deposit—he polled a mere 461 votes as New Party candidate for the Combined English Universities—found that this crushing defeat did not depress Tom, though he was worried by the amount of money
Action
was losing. His ideas, and his determination to mold his party into the increasingly unpleasant shape he wanted, were as strong as ever. “Dined Tom at Boulestin's,” wrote Georgia Sitwell, with whom he was having an affair. “Talked politics. T. at his worst.”

Yet his personal charisma gave his determination an irresistible momentum. “I am loyal to Tom since I have an affection for him,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary on November 2, 1931. “But I realise his ideas are divergent from my own. He has no political judgment. He believes in fascism. I don't. I loathe it. And I apprehend that the conflict between the intellectual and the physical side of the N.P. may develop into something rather acute.”

Nicolson's perspicacity was all too justified. The idea of a quasi-militaristic youth movement, whose members should be fit, tough and anxious to drill and march, was taking shape in Tom's mind, despite Nicolson's frequent warnings (“In England anything on those lines is doomed to failure and ridicule”). On December 23, Nicolson had to give notice to the staff of
Action
: its circulation had dropped from an initial 160,000 to less than twenty thousand and it was losing money at the rate of £340 a week. The last issue appeared on December 31.

By the end of 1931 unemployment had reached 2.7 million and exports had halved in value. In Swansea, when Tom arrived to speak at a three-thousand-seat cinema booked on a Sunday night by Jack Jones, hundreds of Blackshirts had been drafted in from London, Bristol and Cardiff. Setting the future pattern, Tom arrived with a personal bodyguard and walked through lines of his uniformed cohorts to the platform.

The swing toward fascism was too much not only for Nicolson and the students of Glasgow University—when Tom stood for the rectorship, he came last in a field of five—but also for Jack Jones. When Jones resigned, it was to Cimmie he wrote because of his admiration for her and her hard work in the Ashton-under-Lyne by-election campaign. “I felt there was one person I'd like to help, and I knew that she would be in need of all the help she could get.”

He was right. Cimmie was finding it difficult to come to terms with the direction in which Tom was taking the rump of the New Party. “Cimmie wants to put a notice in the Times to the effect that she disassociates herself from Tom's fascist tendencies,” noted Harold Nicolson that December. “We pass it off as a joke.”

By January she was taking little interest in politics. Five months pregnant, her health poor and her relationship with her husband wretched, she was physically and emotionally low. Tom's sarcasm and bullying, often in public, rendered the vulnerable Cimmie miserable, angry and confused. There had also been an expensive lawsuit in the U.S. over the Leiter millions, which she and Tom had lost.