Irene: In Love with Married Men
With Baba’s return, the lives of the three sisters began to intertwine once more. For just over a year, they were closer to each other emotionally, physically, socially and even politically than at any other time in their lives. There was in any case considerable overlap between their circles: Irene knew “everyone” in the smart hunting world of Melton, where Tom had hunted until he sold his horses to devote himself to politics. The focal point of that world was the Prince of Wales—and the prince’s best friend was Fruity.
The sisters visited each other’s houses to stay the night, for hunting, for a dinner party, sometimes just to change for dinner or dress for a wedding. In March 1927 Cim went to Paris to see Baba, then returned to Leicestershire for more hunting. At Melton Irene was in a whirl of gaiety, playing poker at Craven Lodge and dashing up to London after hunting to a dinner party at Nancy Astor’s (“sat between Bobbie Shaw and Ronnie Tree”) and constantly dining with Gordon Leith, either at her house or his.
On May 18 the Curzon sisters’ nineteen-year-old stepsister Marcella was married to a young barrister, Edward Rice, in a packed St. Margaret’s, Westminster, with Thomas Beecham conducting his orchestra, little Nicky Mosley as one of her pages and Gracie glamorous in pale gray with a pink toque. Gracie, who felt that other suitors of Marcella were preferable, had done her best to prevent the match, only giving in when Marcella had climbed out of her window one night and hidden with friends for twenty-four hours. All the Curzon daughters were on Marcella’s side: Cim, the sister with whom she felt a special bond, had written to her delightedly from Smith Square: “The only thing Marcella darling that matters is marrying the fellow one loves—all that is so important and I am sure that is what you are doing.”
A week after Marcella’s wedding Irene was at Arthur Rubinstein’s concert. “He played gloriously. To see Arthur again was a real breath of life.” So much so that the next day she put off a luncheon party when Rubinstein telephoned her. She was fascinated by his musical talent, his extraordinary energy and the sex appeal that had already netted him numerous conquests. For his part, ever since their first meeting in the grandeur of Hackwood, when he, as a young, impoverished musician, had played before Irene as daughter of the house, she had appeared to him not only as a desirable woman but as a challenge.
Irene left him only to go to the best party of the season, a cabaret dinner given by the immensely rich Laura Corrigan, an American widow whose avowed aim was to conquer London society and most of whose parties involved not only the best of food and drink but expensive presents for the guests—especially those with titles. Next day, though, there was a disappointment: Arthur had invited her to Paris but once there “I found him with the Polish lady.” Sad and disillusioned, her spirits rose when Arthur, never one to let a lady go off the boil, invited her to a luncheon à quatre in his tiny flat by the Sacré-Coeur. “He was like a child with it and had been out to buy flowers, glasses and cheese for us,” she noted fondly.
The season rattled on, with dinner parties, cabarets, dances, parties when everyone sank too many cocktails (“The Prince arrived—blind!” noted Irene’s diary. “Fred and Adele Astaire were drunk and leaning over the sofa throwing cushions at everyone”), supper parties for the opera, luncheons with Elinor Glyn at the Ritz, dinners with Arthur Rubinstein. Irene, with her warmth, her interest in people, the funny or intriguing stories she told, in her low, rather “Curzon” voice that emphasized certain words, of the people she had met on her cruises or in America, was in demand everywhere. Rich, independent and quite prepared to indulge in the common Melton sport of late-night bed-hopping, she was nevertheless too seemingly formidable for many men, who could not detect the vulnerable creature beneath the sophisticated carapace. When Gordon failed to come and see her during a whole week when she was ill while staying with Cim in Smith Square, she was miserable—though it did not seem to strike her that if he had come it might have been a cause for gossip.
Her strange double standard came into operation once more when she refused to come to Savehay Farm one weekend because Sylvia Ashley, a famous society beauty and femme fatale, would also be there. When Cim questioned her, Irene let slip that Sylvia appeared to be eyeing Tom; next day Cim telephoned in a fury, telling Irene angrily that she had “ruined everything” and was idiotic to think such a thing.
But Irene was not being “idiotic.” Tom Mosley’s infidelities were already the subject of gossip. Irene herself had been to bed with him during the course of one romping, drink-fueled Melton evening, but, as everyone there understood, such escapades were not to be taken seriously and were tacitly forgotten by all parties the next morning.
Thus Irene, protective of both her younger sisters, could with complete sincerity castigate anyone—Tom or paramour—who hurt her beloved Cim. She was in fact staying with Baba when they heard that Tom Mosley was away in Paris, returning that night; both knew he had a mistress in Paris, called Maria. He was at the same time pursuing the actress Blanche Barrymore, wife of John Barrymore.
But all this paled to nothing beside the arrival of Baba’s first baby on July 8, 1927, to whom the Prince of Wales had promised to stand godfather. Baba’s son David was born at 6:15, in his grandfather’s house, I Carlton House Terrace (the Metcalfes’ house in Cowley Street was not yet ready for occupation). Gracie, although she had offered her own house, neither appeared nor asked after Baba until some time after the birth when she sent a message to say that all her servants were shortly leaving for Hackwood.
For Grace was still leading life on the grandest scale, as Irene was to see when invited down to Hackwood the following day. It was the first time she had been there for almost eight years and to return to the house from which she had been virtually banned by her father aroused a mixture of emotions. All the flowerbeds had been replaced by lawn, there was a new golf course, and indoors the paneling had been stripped away and the dining room returned to its original Regency pillars and lighting.
Inevitably, Scatters was one of the house party. When Irene walked with him around the bluebell woods in the hot sun she noticed that Gracie had let the place get very overgrown. It proved to be an unhappy homecoming: Grace seemed constantly cross with Scatters and later, talking to her stepmother in her bedroom, Irene found her miserable, depressed and discouraged. What Irene did not know was that Gracie, led on by Scatters, had been speculating and had invested heavily in an oil company that had gone bankrupt. Scatters was a gambler who had so far been lucky, and becoming a stockbroker was a natural progression for him. Unfortunately he knew much less about stocks and shares than he did about hands of cards—his bridge was so good that his winnings formed a large part of his income—and had induced Gracie to invest in some “sure things” that had drastically lost value. She had also sunk a lot of money into a stud owned jointly with Scatters.
At the end of the summer the Mosleys, in common with many of the smart, rather louche set in which they moved, went first to the South of France and later to Venice. The Riviera, newly popular and still unspoiled, was dotted with small fishing villages, idyllic little pine-fringed bays and small rocky promontories seemingly made for the erection of elegant, secluded villas. Here the Mosleys and their friends would congregate to swim, sip cocktails, dine under the stars and pursue their various amours.
Irene had begun a love affair with one of her hunting friends, Bobby Digby. It quickly ran into trouble when he began to succumb to the noted beauty Mrs. Richard Norton. It was all too reminiscent of Gordon Leith’s constant assurances that “one day” he would leave his wife for her.
Still pining for Gordon, unable to distract herself with Bobby, she set off on one of her curative travels, this time to New York on the Mauretania; when she returned in November, Bobby came back to her. But again it ended, literally, in tears. “B made me cry and said my determined spirit broke any man. I sobbed and sobbed and felt it about true.” Next night at the Embassy, in a large party with Fruity, Baba, Cim and Tom, Mrs. Norton was again “eyeing Bobby.” But there was always hunting. When foot and mouth,* followed by a hard frost, stopped it, parties took over.
The London “sets” of the Curzon sisters were beginning to diverge. With a husband in the House of Commons, Cimmie’s was necessarily becoming more and more political. She had thrown herself so fervently into Labour Party doctrine that she did not hesitate to proselytize the virtues of socialism whenever she got the chance. “Cim gave us a long socialist dissertation after dinner,” records Irene’s diary of May 13, 1928. “She was so certain and heartwhole one could not argue with her.”
Irene, passionate about music and the theater, knew many in the arts world. During that summer, luncheons with Gerald du Maurier, Anita Loos, the Irish tenor John McCormack, Paul Robeson, Beatrice Lillie, Ivor Novello, Oliver Messel, Noël Coward, Maurice Baring and Syrie Maugham alternated with dinners with the Marlboroughs and the Salisburys.
There was also a new admirer. All through the spring of 1928, Irene lunched, dined and walked her sealyham Winks with one of her hunting friends, “Flash” Kellett. It was a relationship complicated by the fact that his wife, Myrtie, was having an open flirtation with the Prince of Wales, which made Flash miserable and earned Irene’s usual disapproval of anyone who publicly broke the rules. Her outings with Flash continued until August, when Myrtie began to reel her husband in. “He left me at 10 in a very shattered, broken frame of mind,” records Irene’s diary of August 11 after a gloomy dinner at the Berkeley, “and I had uttered a few grim home truths about Myrtie.”
It was back to Gordon again. They went together to Paris for a week before Irene went on to join the Mosleys and their party—Bob Boothby, John Strachey, Baba and Fruity—in their villa at Antibes. It was almost as social as London, with luncheon parties in beach pajamas with the Douglas Fairbankses, Elsie Mendl or Somerset Maugham, bathing off rafts or the rocks, and candelight dinners where Tom flirted with another of his conquests, Georgia Sitwell, the pretty young wife of Sacheverell Sitwell, youngest of the three famous literary Sitwells.
But beneath the sparkling surface, glittering like the Mediterranean sea in the sun, the darker currents of their lives were swirling. Irene listened to Cim and Tom fighting upstairs—rows usually ended by Tom storming out as Cim sobbed—or heard him speak rudely to her sister in public. “Felt badly the strained atmosphere,” runs her diary for August 28. “Tom went to the casino and I talked for the first time in my life for two hours to Cim over the misery of her present life and Tom’s insulting behavior to her.” In turn, Irene poured out her heart to Cim, telling her every detail of “the Gordon mess.”
That summer Tom’s father died and he inherited the baronetcy. Georgia Sitwell, going to tea with Cim and Tom, found Cim surrounded by the Mosley diamonds. “She was planning what to do with them, that is how to have them reset,” wrote Georgia in her diary. “Tom actually says she will need the tiara one day as it is, to wear—as Queen of the Communists I suppose!”
Georgia also noted her first meeting with Baba, later to become a close friend. “Alexandra Metcalfe was there, very pretty, chic, hardfaced and oh! so conventional and ordinary.” It was a small and in many ways strangely incestuous circle: Georgia was at the height of her affair with Tom Mosley—one of his notes to her, written from his bachelor flat, simply says “Come!”—and there were numerous luncheons à deux, yet at the same time she was pursuing her friendship with the unsuspecting Cimmie.
Sacheverell Sitwell was less complaisant. “We went to Jean Fleming’s for cocktails,” wrote Georgia on November 8. “On the way back Sach began as usual about the Mosleys and we had an awful time. I decided it was time to put a stop to the more tiresome aspect of his attitude and get really angry so he may give less trouble for a while. He hates all people who may give one a good time.”
In the autumn Gracie and Scatters Wilson won the Caesarewitch Handicap at Newmarket with Arctic Star by three lengths—they had bought the horse in Ireland as an unbroken two-year-old for eight hundred pounds. Scatters led him in, a dashing figure in the black-and-white checked coat that made him so easily recognizable at winter race meetings. It seemed a pattern that would stretch ahead for years.
But change was imminent. The common front that had formed between Cim and Irene when both had the same difficulties with their father had fallen away as they became established in their new lives. Cim, with her children, her anguished, adoring love for her husband and her growing involvement in his political life, now had more in common with her younger sister, also a mother—and perfectly able to hold her own with Tom.
Irene, with her work for East End clubs and for charities, her strong religious faith, the emotionalism that burst through a somewhat formidable exterior, the loud, rather flamboyant colors she preferred and the good looks that were handsome rather than pretty, did not fit into the category of women Tom liked as guests or mistresses. Baba, slim, beautiful, clever, amusing, always perfectly dressed and still fascinated by him, was much more his cup of tea.
As for Baba, the year in India, Fruity’s devotion, the open admiration of other men, her success in London and her own powerful personality had given her a new perspective. She loved her husband but she knew she was the dominant partner in the marriage; hers was the money and what she said went—not only because she held the purse strings but because Fruity, who could not get over his luck in marrying her, could not bear to say no to her. At the core of the Prince of Wales’s circle, she saw the power that royalty confers; with the Mosleys, she began to glimpse the fascination of political power—that sense of being at the heart of things that grips like a vise. Irene was eight years older, but Baba no longer felt like the little sister.
In 1928, for the first time, the Curzon sisters spent Christmas apart. Baba and Fruity had sailed for America on the Olympic, after Nancy Astor had given a huge farewell lunch for them. Irene was at Melton, lonely and miserable despite the parties: “barring Flash no one in the room caring if I looked lovely or hideous, and I fled home in a black fog, alone and on my feet and in a sudden fear of utter loneliness. All the years here have never made me walk home alone before in utter horror of everyone only wanting bed.” But she gave a dinner party on Christmas Eve, won thirty-five pounds at poker on Christmas Day and drank port with the Prince of Wales at the Quorn’s Boxing Day meet—his first day’s hunting that season.
The Mosleys spent Christmas with their children at Denham, returning there on Boxing Day after a visit to the fount of socialism in its purest form: the house of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. After they left, Beatrice wrote in her diary: “It struck us both that he and she had changed—partly from his long illness last autumn and winter,* partly from the ups and downs of electoral failure and success; also from social boycott by their own set and an uneasy position in the Labour Party. He is disillusioned. Labour politics for an aristocrat are not attractive—current and cross-current from left and right and very little real comradeship.”
In Mosley, the Webbs believed that they saw a possible future leader of the party to which they had given their lives. “With his money, his personal charm and political gifts, his good-looking and agreeable wife,” wrote Beatrice, “he is dead certain of Cabinet office and possibly has a chance of eventual premiership.”