Curzon was not one of those fathers who felt that his children must have a stepmother. To him, the wife he had loved so much was a paragon of all the virtues; he mourned Mary deeply and sincerely and he encouraged his children to think of their dead mother in the same way. “Darling Cim, I have been looking out the photos of darling Mummie for you and Irene and I will have some beautiful ones framed and sent to you before long,” said one note sent from his study in Carlton House Terrace to the nursery upstairs.
Upper-class Edwardian children seldom saw much of their parents and Curzon’s own upbringing, given over to the mercy of a sadistic governess, had been particularly brutal in that respect. The Curzon daughters viewed their father as someone loving but distant, an Olympian figure whose letters expressed the affection he was too busy to show by companionship. When they were living in the same house he would usually see them in the mornings; if not, they would frequently receive a note.
He was not a man to do without women for long, not only because of his powerful libido but because he loved female company. “A dinner party without a woman present is nothing more than a meeting of masticating and chunnering males,” he once wrote. They had to be beautiful and, if possible, red-haired (all the locks of hair he kept were of some shade of red). Two attachments, in particular, were to have a lasting effect on his children’s lives.
He had first met Elinor Glyn at a weekend house party in early 1908. At forty-three, she was extraordinarily youthful looking and an acknowledged beauty. With her white skin, green eyes fringed with thick black lashes and red hair (“No really nice woman would have coloring like that,” she once said of herself), she was everything that Curzon admired physically in a woman, from the “snowy amplitudes” revealed in her décolleté dresses to the color of her hair. This was so long and thick that when she first married her husband, Clayton Glyn, he had hired the Brighton Baths for two days so that she could swim up and down naked, her hair streaming out behind her. Alas, it was his sole romantic gesture—and Elinor lived for romance. Years later she was to write in her autobiography: “On looking back at my life, I see that the dominant interest, in fact the fundamental impulse behind every action, has been the desire for romance.”
Thwarted of it in her relationship with her husband, a placid, good-natured man whose absorbing interest was food—one of his nieces remarked that rather than go to bed with his wife he would sit up all night with a pear in order to eat it at the exact moment of perfect ripeness—Elinor turned instead to clothes. Into them she poured all her love of beauty, her search for perfection, her thwarted romanticism.
She had the perfect excuse—“helping Lucy.” Her sister Lucy, married to the baronet Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, was the fashionable society dressmaker “Lucile” and, as Elinor pointed out to her husband, if Lucy’s dresses were seen to advantage on Elinor, more customers would follow.
It was an era when clothes had never been more lavish or important. For the smart woman, several changes of costume a day were essential: tweed walking dresses for the morning; chiffon and lace dresses surmounted by enormous picture hats for Ascot; cotton or linen dresses to go on the river; white muslin with silk sashes for tea on the lawn and tea gowns for an afternoon in the boudoir; fur-trimmed velvet coats to which bunches of Parma violets were pinned for winter; handmade peach or pink crepe de chine underwear trimmed with coffee-colored Brussels lace.
Men’s clothes were equally elaborate: black morning coats with beautifully fitting dark blue or black overalls strapped down over polished black boots with blunt silver spurs for Rotten Row; tweed knickerbocker suits for shooting, often with the Tyrolean-style hats made popular by the king; frock coats for the House of Commons; white tie and tails for dinner parties.
Elinor was always superbly dressed, frequently in her favorite shades of purple, mauve or lilac that set off her dramatic coloring. On every possible pretext she acquired new outfits—later, some of her family were to say that she ruined Clayton by her extravagance. This sense of a passion barely restrained—albeit for what the men of those days called “feminine fripperies”—flashed from her green eyes and informed her manner. She was completely faithful to her husband, but around her hung an aura of sensuality and sexual suggestiveness. She had just written the novel Three Weeks, which had scandalized Edwardian society with its tale of the erotic passion between a beautiful and mysterious older woman and a young man, its highlight the seduction by the “Lady” of her younger lover, Paul, on a tiger skin.
Elinor found it difficult to understand the furor caused by Three Weeks. All her life, she believed not only that sensual passion could be the pathway to the highest appreciation of the beautiful and the good, and could awaken both idealism and nobility in the young, but also that it was the mysterious, necessary fertile soil from which sprang intellectual development and creative thought. For Elinor, love—real love—between a man and a woman meant the complete and rapturous union of body, mind and spirit, the noblest state to which humankind could aspire with, naturally, faithfulness to the object of such a supreme passion as the inevitable corollary. It was an attitude that found little echo in the society around her.
When Curzon met the famous Mrs. Glyn, he was immediately intrigued and attracted. The fact that his friend Alfred, Lord Milner, was supposedly madly in love with her only added a competitive edge to his feelings. His chance for an opening move soon came.
Owing to her husband’s financial losses, the Glyns were largely dependent on Elinor’s earnings. Elinor decided to cash in on the notoriety of Three Weeks and dramatize it for a charity matinee on July 23, 1908, in the hope that this would prompt a professional manager to stage it commercially. As no actress could be found to play the part of the heroine, Elinor took this herself. Curzon was one of the large invited audience. There, lying in voluptuous abandon on a tiger skin in the center of the Adelphi stage, her red hair tumbling over flimsy draperies, was the author and incarnation of the most famous love story of the decade, seemingly offering herself to the beholder. The effect on Curzon was immediate.
He rushed back to Carlton House Terrace, where he unpacked from a trunk one of the five tiger skins he had brought back from India. It was a particularly fine one, shot in Gwalior by Curzon himself. Within days, the Lord Chamberlain had refused permission for Three Weeks to be shown in public, a ban that only enhanced the exotic reputation of the book—and its author. Curzon dispatched his present to Elinor (Alfred Milner, he was put out to learn a few days later, had had exactly the same idea).
Nothing could have been more effective. Elinor had felt a particular affinity with this jungle beast ever since an early admirer had murmured “Belle tigresse!” in her ear. It was a message loaded with erotic symbolism; it came, too, from a man she already admired. Curzon’s aristocratic mien, dignity and cool, patrician good looks represented to her the highest type of Englishman—the hero of her books come to life (all her life she was to call him “Milor”).
She wrote to thank him, mentioning the admiration she felt for his work as viceroy, a tribute that was balm to a man still chewing over the soreness of his rejection by an ungrateful government. He wrote back suggesting that they meet; to his delight, he found that she was cultivated, intelligent and well read as well as beautiful. The long, clandestine pursuit of her began over chance meetings, secret lunches and dinners.
Curzon’s second important female friendship was open and sunny. In 1906 Waldorf Astor, son of an immensely wealthy American businessman, the widowed William Waldorf Astor, had fallen in love with Nancy Shaw, born Nancy Langhorne, from a well-known Virginian family. Nancy—like Waldorf, born on May 19, 1879—had been briefly and unhappily married to Robert Gould Shaw, by whom her first son, Bobbie, was born in 1898. When she realized that Shaw was a hopeless alcoholic she left him, only agreeing to a divorce when his parents begged her to do so in order that he could marry his pregnant mistress. In 1906 she married the twenty-seven-year-old Waldorf, and his father, now the first Lord Astor, gave the young couple Cliveden, his palatial house on the Thames.
Almost at once, Nancy began to entertain on a grand scale. There were two or three balls for up to five hundred guests given every season, frequent dinners for fifty or sixty people and hardly a weekend without a house party for twenty or thirty. Cliveden was run like a small principality, with its own home farm, its outdoor servants—from forty to fifty gardeners and a dozen stablemen at any one time—living in cottages with their families, its own football and cricket teams, its own tennis courts and golf courses. One hundred tons of coal a year were burned in the bedroom fires alone; the French chef had five kitchen maids; a legion of housemaids serviced the house; the lawns were mowed by horses with leather boots over their shoes and when a car passed through the park gates the lodgekeeper telephoned the house on a special hand-wound telephone.
Nancy’s great charm as a hostess was her American freshness, vitality and relaxed approach. In contrast to the organized formality pertaining in most other great houses, she never appeared before luncheon and guests were free to do exactly what they wanted, from bathing or tennis to walking and talking. She was pretty, witty, warm and funny; she came from the same great country as Curzon’s beloved Mary; and he fell under her spell immediately.
“My dear Nancy, I know you are all you describe (and a lot more besides),” he wrote to her in September 1909. “Virtue and frailty—can there be a more irresistible combination? Why can’t a man be fond of a woman without wanting to be her lover? Why can’t a woman be fond of a man without being bound to crawl into bed with him? Therefore I am always bound to you by ties of love and abandoned decorum. It is so good to find a woman who is witty and tender and withal domestic.” He loved Cliveden, too, its Palladian elegance, its spaciousness, the Italian stonework installed in the garden by Lord Astor.
Nancy loved her Waldorf, so Curzon had to be content with a romantic friendship. Her relationship with the Curzon daughters was semi-maternal, often shot through with the same squabbles and furious accusations that bedevil family relationships, but the bond was similarly deep, loving and enduring. Cliveden was a house where children were welcome—a special table for them at tea with the grown-ups was set with bread and butter and a plain cake instead of the pastry cook’s confections.
Meanwhile, Elinor Glyn was falling deeply in love with Curzon. She still clung to the idea of marital fidelity, but her idealism had been sorely tested by the behavior of Clayton, sinking into alcoholism and debt and trying to cover up both by lies and deceptions. When Clayton was “lent” one thousand two hundred pounds by Curzon, who knew he would never see it again, it was a moral milestone for Elinor. She felt not only that Clayton had betrayed the marriage but that she had in some sense been “sold” by him. She now felt herself free of obligation toward him. When she went to Dresden in the late summer of 1908 to look for a pension where her older daughter Margot could stay while being “finished,” she made a detour afterward to Heidelberg, where Curzon met her. They spent several passionate days together before returning home separately. It was the first time Elinor had been unfaithful to Clayton.
Back in England, there was an idyllic weekend with Curzon and his three daughters at a house he had leased from Lord Derby, Crag Hall in Derbyshire, where she and Curzon and their five children picnicked, walked and played games. After dinner, à deux, Curzon read Aristotle to her; soon afterward, he gave her a pair of sapphire earrings, saying that these were “our stone of love and faith,” and a Della Robbia Venus, saying that it reminded him of her.
Elinor leased a small suite at the Ritz so that her lover could visit her, and she and her two daughters made discreet visits to Hackwood. In one of her journals, all bound in green leather, locked with a gold key and kept in purple velvet bags, she wrote rhapsodically: “A King dwells in the stately house and he is a wizard, because he touched a poor sad and weary travelling Queen, who had never been allowed a throne in her own land—and lo! she became a Queen indeed, reigning with crown and sceptre, and her kingdom was his heart.”
Without in any way understanding the relationship, the three Curzon daughters soon accepted it as a settled part of their world, thinking of Elinor’s daughters as cousins. As for Elinor, faithful by nature, she regarded herself as bound body and soul to Curzon and, naturally warm-hearted, was prepared to love his children as her own. With Cimmie especially she formed a deep bond, strengthened when Cimmie was confined first to bed and then to the house with a back problem. “We talked often of the soul, and of the meaning of things,” said Elinor later.
Cimmie was the only one of Curzon’s children to have inherited his congenital malformation of the spine, albeit in much milder form. Curzon sent her at once to the best orthopedic specialist he could find and she had to begin a strict corrective regime. “I find by placing a block 1⁄3 of an inch beneath the left foot when standing and a pad half an inch thick beneath the left side when sitting, Miss Cynthia’s back is much improved,” reported this man, who prescribed bed rest, massage, lying flat first on her front, then her back, for half an hour each, followed by a drive. After a spinal support was made she was allowed to play quiet outdoor games.
Elinor would have made an admirable stepmother. She taught Baba to paint, she told the endless stories that children love and she was genuinely fond of them all. Clayton’s health was declining and she had begun to cherish hopes that if she was widowed Curzon would propose to her. She did everything she could to cement the bond between them, from reading translations of the classics to interesting him in the spiritualist séances then fashionable. Being good at psychic games such as table-turning (when “spirits” were invited to answer questions by rapping or moving tables, in darkened rooms) was a social asset in those days when the physicist Oliver Lodge had made “piercing the veil” respectable. Curzon, like most of his friends, enjoyed this dabbling in the supernatural and Elinor prided herself on her psychic abilities.
Curzon’s feelings were more complicated. In modern parlance, he blew hot and cold. Elinor was a bewitching mistress but his women friends, whose influence in such matters was powerful, disapproved of her. Some schisms, especially those inspired by politics, could be ignored, and the Souls did not allow their political differences to interfere with their friendships. But the female Souls were ferociously possessive of their “dear George” (shortly after her marriage, Mary had told her mother, “My path is strewn with roses and the only thorns are unforgiving women”) and they disapproved of Elinor. She did not come from their tightly linked circle, she was notorious for the sexual explicitness of Three Weeks (ironically, the only erotic book she ever wrote) and she took dear George away from them. Mary Leiter had at least been extremely rich.
Like Mary, Elinor was totally adoring. “Oh! my heart! to see you there master of those ten thousand people, calm, aloof, unmoved,” she wrote in her journal in early December 1910. “To hear your noble voice and listen to your masterly argument. To sit there, one of a rough crowd, gazing up at your splendid face and to know that in other moments that proud head can lie upon my breast even as a little child. Ah me! these are the moments in life worth living for. And what matter that sometimes you are cruel and aloof even to me. Have you not a right to be since you are entirely king of my very being?”
It was at this moment that Curzon chose to tell Elinor that their affair should end and that they should be no more than “tender friends.” One of the reasons, he told her, was the “chattering of servants.” Another was more probable: he was an ambitious man and he did not wish to present any avoidable weakness that might stand in the way of his return to high office. A mistress known for a book that had been castigated as immoral by reviewers and which had caused her exclusion from the grander house parties would offer plenty of chances for both scandal and ridicule. His parting present of a pair of diamond-and-emerald earrings did nothing to soothe her. “How can either you or I crush the longing in our veins for each other’s arms and lips?” wails her journal. “I am free and you are free and now we must starve and ache because the situation is too difficult and interferes with your life.”
Elinor could hardly believe that Curzon’s decree was final (“You in the prime of life with the red blood rushing in your veins”), especially after receiving a wistful letter from him. As she crossed the Atlantic on a brief visit to New York, her entry for February 15, 1911, records sadly: “I can never love you less. However you will, you can come back to me and I will love and soothe you and be tender and true.” These words came true sooner than either of them expected.