IT HAD BEEN ASSUMED for two years that Nora would soon be married, but the plans had gone badly out of her sisters’ control. Nancy still believed she could fix it if only Nora would come to England. She had been pleading with Chillie to send her over for almost a year. But Chillie alternated between saying, “For God’s sake see that she marries some nice young man,” because he was “fed up” with her, and saying he wanted to hold on to her because she wasn’t ready for marriage. The last was partly a ploy to resist Nancy and feel his waning power. Nora, too, resisted going to England to be bullied out of her wayward disorganization by Nancy. She was cozy with her spoiling father, now that she was relieved of her duties. “I know Father you hate giving her up,” wrote Nancy, “but don’t you think it’s only fair to Nora to give her the chance of having such a good time?” But Cliveden, Nora knew, would be like boot camp: constant surveillance, nagging, chiding, taking orders. Nora’s tactic with Nancy, aided by Chillie, was to promise to visit and then cancel for various reasons, finally refusing to come at all. By September 1908, Mr. Langhorne’s new ploy to keep Nora with him was to say that she was better suited to the “simple life.”
Then Nora fell helplessly in love with a man called Baldwin Myers from Norfolk, Virginia, and declared that all past bets were off and Baldwin was the man she intended to marry. Mr. Langhorne seemed to think that Baldwin was as good as anybody and gave his approval. At least Nora had made up her mind. Not so Nancy, who wrote in September, switching tactics shamelessly, that Nora was too young to marry anyway. “I can’t tell you how unhappy I am,” she wrote,“as I know Nora’s fickleness & I am so afraid she is just marrying to marry. Please write me about him. Where does he live & did I know him as a boy? Is he a cousin of Lilburn? Please sir write me all.”
By October, there was still no news, so Nancy wrote again to her father. Baldwin Myers, she had learned, was “a mere youth with padded shoulders and a pipe in the corner of his mouth & if he has no money what will Nora do? End in prison for debt I foresee … tell her I am going to have all sorts of charmers to meet her & if she stands the test we shall know she’s in love.”
Chillie relented. It fitted in with his house-moving plans and he couldn’t face the responsibility of Nora’s making what might be a bad marriage. A corrective voyage was required; Baldwin Myers had to be erased from Nora’s mind. A husband had to be found in England—that reservoir of suitable young men.
Nora was devastated at leaving her father, but mostly at leaving Baldwin Myers. She wrote pathetically and ungrammatically from the Waldorf Astoria, on her way to England, complaining that for the first time in her life her father was not there “to care for me and tie my things before leaving.” “I suppose I am a disappointment but you have always loved me as a disappointment and please do now,” she wrote. “I have missed you so much today, not having our rooms together [on their visits to the Waldorf Astoria in New York] and going in to the dining room with you and all the little things we have done so often together. I do love you and God knows I do. For my sake don’t leave me. I have got some good in me, every body has some and I love you with it all. God Bless you. Nora. We only live once.”
She wrote again to her father when the Mauretania put in at Queenstown (renamed Cobh, in Cork Harbour) in Ireland on November 5. “I have never felt so alone in my life as I have lately and I know I’ve brought it all on myself, and have got to pay for it, and I am doing that already. If I had only been steady all my life, now I would be the happiest person in the world for I could convince people that really loved and knew my mind. But I don’t blame you, that’s what I deserve. How I love home you don’t know. God bless you my dearest Father and come soon. God bless you Nora.” Chillie ignored the messages of distress. He complained, merely, that Nora’s letters lacked content and were emotionally repetitive.
Nora knew that she had said good-bye to her freedom. Her worst fears of imprisonment and servitude to Nancy were confirmed as soon as she arrived. Nancy was shocked by her appearance when she turned up “in rags” on her doorstep, “so washed out & pale & red eyed.” She had employed “a nice old maid who looks after her like a nurse,” she proudly told Chillie. “I shall soon have her straightened out.” Nora wrote home, describing Cliveden as “the lonesomest place in the world—but lovely and luxurious.” When Nancy went off to Plymouth for a few days, she placed Nora in the care of someone called Elsie Peabody at Market Harborough, who knew “all of Nora’s tricks & manners.” The idea was to surround Nora with men, force her toward marriage—a strategy that Nora was happy to fall in with, as long as she could get Nancy off her back. And yet she longed for the forbidden Baldwin from Norfolk, Virginia.
“I am being v. tactful with her,” Nancy reported to Mirador, “and telling her to of course marry B Myers if she can face poverty and a poky life in Norfolk…. She is so surprised that I am not opposing her that she almost thinks my way! I don’t think she will remember Baldwin in a months time. I am sorry for you Father, as I know how she has tried you—but remember she may improve & think how wonderful the rest of us are!”
By Christmastime, Phyllis had arrived, with Reggie, and was on hand to help push Nora into an English marriage. Lord Elphinstone, always on the loose and “in love with the Langhornes,” was duly asked to join the Astors and Nora at St. Moritz early in 1909. “I think she has her eye on him,” Nancy wrote to her father, “I hope he will ‘pop’ but I doubt it.” Here Nora played a trick on her sisters that gave her, at least, some breathing space. She persuaded them that after a few days of skating and tobogganing, Lord Elphinstone had popped the question. Nora told them that Elphinstone had asked her “as a favour” not to talk of it. Phyllis and Nancy were taken in. They believed in their power of persuasion over the feckless Nora—above all, to persuade her to be faithless to Baldwin Myers. Phyllis wrote to her father to “divulge a great secret” (“I implore you not to tell”). “Lord E. is certainly a nice man and she will never get a nicer or a better offer, but Nannie & I are not trying to persuade her one way or the other.” Nancy echoed this by telling Chillie, “I think she should decide the question for herself.”
Having sworn her sisters to secrecy, Nora then told everyone else she knew of this fantasy proposal including, according to Nancy, “Angus McDonnell and Paul Phipps [a young admirer who had been hanging about at Cliveden] & Heaven knows who else.” Nora went even further, moving the scene of the proposal from St. Moritz and placing poor Lord Elphinstone on his knees in the conservatory at Cliveden, among the potted palms. This, she claimed, made it impossible for her to take him seriously.
At the end of February 1909, Nora was homesick and miserable. She longed to return to Mirador, to her father and Baldwin Myers. She had never been more faithful to any other beau, but Nancy wouldn’t have it. Nora was to stay on and have a London season in the spring, where she would have “a glorious time.” But Nora wrote to Chillie, threatening a breakdown under all this pressure: “I don’t really believe I could stand a London season in the first place and I would hate to be sick. So I do think I had better come back with Phyllis.” Nora was also angry that Phyllis had supplanted her at Mirador. “I thought Mirador was going to be mine always but now my only chance is to come and stay there while I can. You may think the others love it but you will never know how I feel.” She had the chance to live in Lord Elphinstone’s castle in Scotland, she said, but had “taken Virginia” as her choice. “I bet you Phyllis would take the other like a shot.”
“I think she’s crazy,” wrote Nancy to Chillie. “She lies like a trooper so I never know what she really feels or thinks. I think she thinks a good deal and feels nothing.” But with Nora it was always the other way around.
Then a bigger issue came along that put Chillie back in play and restored his sense of rampageousness. Nancy reported that Nora, a week after planning to return to Baldwin Myers, had suddenly decided to stay in England all spring. “Between you and me she rather likes Paul Phipps, but so far it only seems friendship,” Nancy reported, but added, “I think it would be fatal for her to marry anyone yet as she’s in love with no-one & she’s so young and changeable.” Nancy was to regret these words, spoken so soon after Chillie’s hopes for Lord Elphinstone had been raised, and on such slender evidence; she had also misjudged Nora’s change of mood. Nora’s roulette wheel had suddenly slowed and stopped and she had put her mark on the “ticklist,” as Chillie called it (“It’s a ticklist question who Nora marries”), at Paul Phipps. He had stayed many weekends at Cliveden and watched the Elphinstone episode at close hand, but Nora barely seemed to have noticed him until the beginning of March 1909. Nora was “pale” again, but this time with love, and not homesickness.
Paul Phipps was a struggling young architect who had been a contemporary of Waldorf’s at Eton and Balliol, Oxford, where, according to his daughter Joyce, he had been “awarded a gold watch for his fine handwriting.” His father was English and his mother American. He had big, flat ears, a long, broad face, and a “lantern” jaw. There was an air of elegance, even dandyishness, about him; he wore bow ties and was unable to pronounce the letter r. He was popular, “witty and urbane,” considered to have “the charming manners of a true gentleman,” and he was “the best dancer in London.” Indeed, in her book Remember and Be Glad (1952), Cynthia Asquith recalled that no girl was truly “out” until Paul Phipps had danced with her. H. H. Asquith’s daughter Violet, later Bonham Carter, had sat next to him after dinner and recorded in her journal, “He is very easy—almost too easy. Rigid impartiality to all subjects is a little discouraging.” He had been apprenticed as a clerk for a time to Sir Edwin Lutyens and was just starting out on his own career. He was a major catch, definitely suitable.
There was nothing new about Nora’s getting engaged, but this time she had acted with speed and conviction. She decided on it with Paul on a Sunday night at Cliveden; she told Nancy the following noon and sent a cable to her father, asking for his consent. If Nancy had seriously opposed it, none of this would have happened.
In fact, Nancy and Phyllis seized on Paul Phipps and were propelling the project along, hoping to catch Nora in mid-delirium. Paul Phipps was suddenly the best bet, or at least “the best Nora could expect,” and this time Nora was not going to be allowed to get out of it. The timing fitted so well with everyone’s plans, particularly Phyllis’s plans for Mirador. Nancy had once again swiftly turned about in her view of Nora’s suitability for marriage, and the two sisters mounted a campaign to get Chillie’s approval. The letters they wrote to him show how awed they still were by his authority and how cynical they could be when it came to their sister and the life-binding vows of matrimony.
In their first letters, written in the hours before Chillie’s cabled reply arrived, they had to backpedal hard on Lord Elphinstone, whom they had overpromoted, in case Chillie thought that Nora was up to her usual double-dealing or, perhaps, in case he smelled a rat with all this sudden haste. “Nora isn’t a bit in love with Lord E. nor he with her—they seem to be just friends,” wrote Nancy. Phyllis conceded in turn that Nora “does not in the least like Lord Elphinstone & was quite bored when he was about.” Paul Phipps, according to Nancy, was “one of the nicest men I know. Clean-minded, high-minded, clever and charming. I don’t think she could have got a nicer man. The tragedy is his!” Phyllis wrote that he was “a great gentleman,” and “very intelligent,” adding with hindsight, “Nannie & I thought she had her eye on him some time ago.”
But the transatlantic exchanges fell into slapstick and confusion. In her first cable to Chillie, Nora forgot to include the name of her fiancé and Nancy, thinking Chillie would only respond to a visual description, had referred to Phipps in her cable only as “the lantern jaw boy.” When Nora received Chillie’s cable of consent and congratulation the following day, she was overjoyed, not realizing that Chillie’s blessing was for Lord Elphinstone and his Scottish castle. No names except “the lantern jaw boy” had so far been mentioned in the exchanges.
Unaware of this misunderstanding, Nancy and Phyllis’s letters, extolling the virtues of Paul Phipps—assuming that the marriage was a fait accompli—began to reach Chillie more than a week after he had sent his cable of consent. Relaxing her guard, Nancy added at the end of one letter, “Only one drawback—No money.” But this was no longer the urgent requirement, at least in the opinion of her sisters. A visitor to Islesboro that summer remembered Irene looking out over the water through binoculars at a large yacht sailing up the coast of Maine and saying to Dana,“There goes the man we thought wasn’t rich enough to marry Nora.”
Still certain of Chillie’s approval for Paul Phipps, Nancy and Phyllis began to rehearse the usual criticisms of Nora’s character to cover themselves against what they really believed: that any marriage undertaken by Nora was a foregone disaster. “Now the only question is whether Nora will make him happy,” Phyllis wrote. “Personally I don’t see how its possible as she hasn’t a taste in common with his…. They are a rather literary lot & so is the young man, which does seem something of a joke for Nora & I think if he ever discovered that she told stories that it would finish him.” Charm wasn’t everything, Phyllis continued, “and I think this young man is going to be deeply disappointed at finding nothing else.” There was even now some regret for poor Baldwin Myers, who had disappeared from the horizon “like a shooting star.” “I feel very sorry for him,” wrote Phyllis, “& I don’t see how Nora’s got the heart to do it.”
When Paul Phipps returned to Cliveden, to put his case and apologize for being penniless, he was warned of Nora’s “virtues and vices” by Nancy and told not to expect too much of her. She told him that Nora was “undeveloped” and extravagant, although she was “praying” to mend her ways. Nancy then took Nora aside and told her of the sacrifices she would have to make and how marvelous they would be for her character. “Nora says nothing on earth wd stop her,” she wrote to Chillie. “I’ve told her how dreary a thing being poor in England is. Its a cheap place for working people to live but not our class. I think it more expensive than any place and knowing Nora’s love of amusement and thriftlessness it makes me nervous. Then, too, men hardly ever seem to make money in England no matter how clever they are.” Paul Phipps was poor, but unlike Baldwin Myers, whose poverty had been the major obstacle, he was “such a thorough man and a gentleman.” “Then what of her trousseaux about how much shall she spend on it?” Nancy asked Chillie. “I should think 4000 dollars shdn’t you as she will want linen to last her many a long day?” And Nora should have an annual settlement “as I think that running to your husband for every single cent is the origin of much unhappiness.” Only Chillie could settle this; and only then could they be married. Nancy begged him to come to England immediately to do so. She added, “Paul has a splendid influence on Nora … she is a changed creature & except for money I think it is an ideal match for her.”
Around March 9, Chillie’s first letter, written straight after sending his cable of congratulations, and assuming that the marriage was to Lord Elphinstone, arrived at Cliveden. Nora replied in desperation, “I am so sorry you have made a mistake. It isn’t Elphinstone. It is Paul Phipps,” but went on, as if nothing had happened, “I want to be so different. I will do right by him or die.” She pleaded, “I know all of my weak points and that’s a help. I have got that to begin on.” Each letter Chillie received from Nancy and Phyllis, overpraising Paul Phipps, criticizing Nora and demanding money for her dowry, had caused him mounting irritation. On March 12, Nancy wrote timidly, “I am so sorry you mistook the ‘Lantern Jaw Boy’ for Ld Elphinstone. I had no idea you wd as I knew that’s what you called Paul Phipps. I cabled you yesterday to please come over.” She added, and with good reason, “I never quite understood Nora and Lord Elphinstone…. Anyhow she wd never have married him.”
Chillie then sent a cable to Nora canceling any consent. Rankled by his own confusion, Chillie was genuinely amazed that Nora should have plumped for Phipps so soon after his expectation of another good marriage. Chillie had, after all, met Lord Elphinstone and knew what he was consenting to. He felt he had been treated casually. Why suddenly choose this penniless young architect when Nora could have anyone she wanted? How could Nancy persuade Nora to do this? Didn’t she know that Nora was changeable and probably wouldn’t feel the same in a week’s time? Didn’t she remember how badly she had treated Baldwin Myers? Had Nancy told Paul Phipps of Nora’s character, her weaknesses, the extravagance, the fibs? Why was Paul Phipps better than Baldwin Myers anyway? What was there to choose between them? He directly accused Nancy of a conspiracy to push Nora into marriage when (always with the exception of Lord Elphinstone) she wasn’t ready to marry anyone. He didn’t trust their judgment. He would wash his hands of it. Nora could marry in England and he would stay in America. He would not come to settle the affair.
Astonished by this reversal, Nancy went on the attack. Not only had she had nothing to do with the engagement, she had tried to persuade Nora out of it, she said. It had come as a great shock: “You ask why Waldorf & I did not tell Paul more about Nora … would you have had me tell him what I thought? … I do think Father knowing us—you go a little far in writing you feel we rushed and persuaded her into matrimony. We can’t help smiling. You took a very different tone when you thought it was Lord Elphinstone. Perhaps you’ve forgot the letter you wrote her telling her to ‘consult her heart’—not to be persuaded by wealth or rank & no matter what she did you wd always stick to her & understand…. You never mentioned how badly she had treated Baldwin when you thought it was Lord E. I think considering the way you have spoilt her—its pretty hard for you to now turn against her. You brought her up. You are more responsible for her ways than any one. So you can’t turn her over to me here. Its too late.”
In the end, Paul and Nora went to America to get Mr. Langhorne’s blessing. Paul had written many letters in advance full of apologies for Nora’s being a poor man’s wife, saying how much he loved her, and how aware he was of what Nora was giving up in terms of Virginia. Somehow, this display of fealty did the trick. They were married at the end of April in New York and returned to England, to Cliveden, for their honeymoon. Nancy wrote to her father the day after the wedding, allying herself with him once again: “Nora never wrote me one line after she left here except a short letter from the boat. Now that she is married I am done. I will not be treated so casually & I know you feel the same way. We are all right but Paul has my sympathy!! Goodbye dearest Pa. give my love to all & I don’t think you sh. pine over Nora. Remember what trouble she was.”
Nancy also indicated that she would now support Nora and Paul, fix them up in a house and give Nora an allowance to help pay the rent. Nora and Paul were thus on the payroll, too. “I can’t help smiling when I think that you thought I persuaded Nora into this match,” Nancy wrote, “you see I shall have her on my hands & mind always now—but I am glad she’s near & I will do all I can for her for your and mother’s sake.”
Chillie put in one final Nancy-baiting twist to the story. He gave Nora all Nancy’s letters about her over the past few weeks—with lines such as “the tragedy is his,” and how Nora could never make any man happy. “I shall never now feel that I can write you any thing in confidence,” Nancy wrote to her father in July of 1909. “She showed them to Paul—who has almost ceased to speak to me. I can’t understand how you dared send letters written to you in confidence. Nora is furious with me also Paul. You have succeeded in absolutely making them both hate me.”
The couple moved into a house, rented for them by Nancy in Montpelier Square, off the Brompton Road. Paul Phipps wrote to Mr. Langhorne, who could hardly have believed what he read. “Nora is very well & looks better and stronger than I have ever seen her. She takes a tremendous interest in everything to do with the house & is a most excellent and economical housekeeper. She goes about in omnibuses all the time & says it really is pathetic to think of anyone who thought as much about pretty clothes as she did trying how many ways she can do over a last winter’s hat so as not to have to buy a new one & so be able to spend more on the house. She is excellent with the servants too & so dignified! We really are most awfully happy & hope you will soon come over & see us & our home.” Nora appeared, under Paul Phipps’s influence, miraculously to have mended her ways.
By returning to Mirador as its new owner, Phyllis thought that she could reclaim her life. She was the one member of her family who still deeply loved the place. It transformed her mood that February of 1909, as she prepared to return from hunting at Melton Mowbray. “I think of it all day and my head fairly buzzes at night with plans,” she wrote to Chillie. “It has made coming home a different thing. We will have lots to do there you and me!!”
From England, she ordered roses and box hedges and instructed the gardener to put in plots of mulch earth. She believed that she could “get up Reggie’s enthusiasm” once she got him there. Mrs. Brooks had offered to pay for improvements, including a new tennis court and a swimming pool, to make Reggie more comfortable, finally conceding that his marriage depended on it. Wells were dug, cast iron pipes laid, “as Reggie is set on having a fine flow of clear spring water—the one thing he seems to want is the water arrangements perfect.”
Still, Chillie couldn’t resist the opportunity to reverse all the plans—the old prerogative of his power. He declared that he was being made homeless and held up the building work on his new house. He had been having weeping spells—“Poor father,” wrote Nancy, “I know how he feels. Its very sad for him with once so large a family & complete Boss, to be left now.” Phyllis wrote to him, “If I didn’t have the prospects of Mirador, I don’t know what I shd do, but even now if you feel you would rather keep Mirador, do it … I know how hard it is on you to give up yr. home but please sir, don’t feel homeless now for you know wherever my home is, yours is too and I am sure you will be pleased to see one of your children taking a real interest in it.”
The reality of reclaiming her life was that Mirador was invaded by her relations as soon as Phyllis arrived that spring. Lizzie was over immediately. “She’s like a vulture,” Phyllis wrote to Nancy,“& hangs around the room asking how much everything cost…. I have faltered several times today & thought am I wise in coming here in a nest of family to live. It has its drawbacks!” A month later, she wrote, “I am so tired of poor relations I could scream…. When you get annoyed with Nora being there [at Cliveden] just thank yr stars you ain’t sitting in the midst of a strolling company of relations. I feel like tying a tin can to all their tails when I see them strolling up the front walk.”
Chillie did, of course, move to his uncompleted house. But by July, he was at war with Phyllis. She had to direct some of the work at Mirador, including the building of a library for Reggie to drink in, from Long Island, and Chillie, watching from Misfit, interfered, criticized every move, and shamelessly played the martyr thrown out of his own home. His relationship with Phyllis held deep-seated animosities—and no amount of tact on Phyllis’s part could keep Chillie from making her installation difficult. He had given her five hundred acres of land but wouldn’t give up advising her on how to farm it, as Phyllis set about making improvements.
To keep things lively, claiming that his conscience had suddenly pricked him, Chillie announced a plan to buy Lizzie a house not far from Mirador, and settle an allowance on her. Nancy’s reaction was shocking proof of just how much of a pariah Lizzie had become in the family—particularly Nancy’s confidence that her father would go along with her sentiments. “Poor Phyl has been so ‘upsot’ [sic] ever since she heard of it,” she wrote to him. “I know you want to give Phyl the happiest home you can, & she says to have Lizzie so close wd. absolutely spoil the joy of Mirador—and I know you will agree and not think me meddlesome. Phyl is so looking forward to Mirador it seems to be the one thing she has to cheer her up & she needs a lot of cheering.”
But Chillie let matters take their course and Phyllis wrote in August, “Well, the worst has come. Lizzie has bought the Rhodes place. I could weep … but I ask you ain’t it my luck!! Liz is all aglow & talks very rich—She sounds a mental case to me, but I am glad she’s so pleased…. Woe is the day that I took Mirador. I imagined that place would be a peaceful abode … but with Pa on one side & Liz on the other I will just about catch it from both sides.”
“Have no fear,” Nancy had written some weeks earlier, “Liz will never live near you on my money & she can’t live v. well without it, so you need not worry about it.” In September, Phyllis wrote to Nancy, acknowledging her victory: “Thanks to you she has given up the Rhodes place & it is only because you said you would stop her allowance that she did it.”
Nancy managed to persuade Chillie to come to Cliveden that summer and reported to Phyllis on his state of mind, a description that gives some idea of the patience Nanaire had needed in their marriage. “Of course he thinks you ignored him when you were doing over Mirador,” Nancy told Phyllis. “He says he longed to help but you never suggested it. Also he could have saved you $10,000. I told him it was not fair on either of you. He says I only take your side. My heart aches for him but I don’t see how it’s possible for him to live at peace with any one of his children. He gets what he wants by quarrelling and discussion.”
Mr. Langhorne returned to America and wrote to Nora, complaining about the way he had been treated at Cliveden and how much he had disliked his fellow guests. To have confided this to Nora guaranteed the letter wide circulation. She sent it first to Nancy, who wrote to her father: “I have just seen yr letter to Nora—I am very sorry that you find the people you meet in our house so very distasteful to you. If you will only let me know in time enough before you come I will see that there is no one there.”
In the meantime, Phyllis was suffering an overwhelming desire to have another baby to replace Jackie, writing to Nancy in July, “Surely, surely I am not a baroness!” and suggesting that “unless I get this way [pregnant] soon I vow you will have to have one for me, as I simply can’t wait much longer and of course I should feel about it just as if I had had it, so consider my poor disappointed heart and engage Waldorf’s services for me about Sept … I now realise how women can have hysterics when their hopes are blighted each month.” She had complained about Reggie’s “appalling idleness,” believing he might “just simply croak with ennui! … he really tries I believe to see how bored he can be.”
Nevertheless, Phyllis took her chance, once again, with the seasonal mood change in Reggie—or perhaps she had taken the advice Nancy had sent her: “I wish you cd drink a love potion like the woman in Midsummer Night’s Dream—I sh like to see you entwining Reggie’s head with garlands of Roses—& stroking his ears tho of course he’s not an ass! & wd hardly like this simile.” Whatever the reason, in August 1909, Phyllis, now finally installed at Mirador, discovered herself to be pregnant with her third son.