CHAPTER THREE

He Was Simply Irresistible

Courtney Letts’s first memory of Washington was of when she was just six and she joined the other children of the wealthy and influential at the traditional Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawns, her activities watched by the benign mustachioed figure of President Theodore Roosevelt.

As the granddaughter of a US senator and daughter of Frank C. Letts, president of the National Grocery Company, who supplied foodstuffs to the masses, privilege and status were her birthright.

When she was a teenager she taught the nervously dapper F. Scott Fitzgerald how to ice-skate and later invited him to join her family at their country estate at Lake Forest in rural Illinois. He arrived complete with his own electric curling iron to wave his hair, and when he was, eventually, dressed and ready she took him to several parties.

The loquacious aspiring writer was, according to her friends, a “terrific success.” It was Courtney who introduced the novelist to her beautiful friend Ginevra King. He promptly fell head over heels in love, his golden girl becoming for a time his romantic interest and his muse. She was the template for the flirtatious yet distant Daisy Buchanan, the antiheroine of The Great Gatsby, the classic American novel that captured the spirit of hardness and hedonism of the Jazz Age.

When Fitzgerald so brilliantly described a postwar world where the social elite lived with the “insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls,” he was thinking of Courtney, Ginevra, and the other gilded youth who comprised their social circle.

Years later he sent Courtney a first edition of his first masterpiece, This Side of Paradise, complete with a long dedication. “You will probably find yourself and your mother in it,” he wrote. “I hope you will not mind what I wrote.”

Courtney, Ginevra, and two other beautiful Chicago friends, Margaret “Peg” Carry and Edith Cummings—a brilliant golfer dubbed the “Fairway Flapper”—were known as the Big Four, a quartet blessed with beauty and social brilliance. Their daily doings were lovingly celebrated by the mass circulation media.

As Fitzgerald described, they had class and certainty, that effortless sense of privilege born out of wealth and what the English aristocracy like to call “breeding.” They didn’t need to try as hard, floating through life as if to the manor born. As the man himself observed about the very rich: “They are different from you and me.”

When Courtney Letts drifted languidly through the social whirl of Chicago, Washington, and later Paris, it was remarkable how often her life intersected with the less rarified world of Wallis Spencer. Though the two women did not formally meet for a quarter century, they were the fiercest of love rivals, for a time Courtney becoming Wallis’s romantic doppelgänger.

Not only were they wooed by the same men, they were often mistaken for one another, though Courtney was more conventionally feminine and rounded whereas Wallis’s features were hard, masculine and angular. And it was Courtney who was chosen by the Chicago Tribune as one of the twelve most beautiful women in America. Wallis was not on the list.

Before Wallis moved to Washington, both women had married impetuously to handsome and handsomely attired Navy officers; both were now separated and looking for a way out. Unlike Wallis, Courtney was a mother to two children. For a time they lived a short walk from one another. Courtney and her children stayed with her mother at number 2342 Massachusetts Avenue, a substantial 5,800-square-foot brownstone on what was known as Diplomats’ Row. Wallis shared rooms with Alice at the eight-storey Carthage apartment building on Connecticut Avenue.

They were both cast from a feminine mould of the prewar era, women who didn’t or couldn’t work and subsumed their own ambitions in their pursuit of a wealthy husband or benefactor. Wallis and Courtney had married young, trying to impress their peers rather than make a sensible choice. Wounded by their folly, they were not about to make the same mistake again. As Courtney’s granddaughter, Courtney Hagner, observes: “Nana was so like Wallis in many ways. Always able to put on a perfect front and if there was any issue, to disguise it.”

They may have lived near to each other, but socially they were worlds apart. Where Courtney effortlessly glided into the best parties, the fanciest dinners, and the ritziest receptions, Wallis had her nose pressed firmly against the window, desperately looking for a way in. When Courtney went to the Chevy Chase country club to improve her tennis backhand or meet friends, it was Wallis’s mother, as one of the hostesses, who was there to greet her. By the time Wallis was noticed by Courtney she was no longer living with her mother.

In a secret diary written by Courtney and revealed for the first time in this volume, she tartly describes the reputation Wallis enjoyed during her Washington sojourn.

In those days she hardly had a smart dress in which to go about. She was little known in Washington except among the young set, where she lived as the separated wife of a poor naval officer. For three years she lived in a small flat on Connecticut Avenue with a divorcee who worked in a shop to support her son. Between them they enjoyed all the small jealousies of women, the clamoring for invitations to the most important balls and important dinners they would never reach. Wally Spencer she was then. Small, slender, vivacious and witty. Witty with the hard-boiled slapstick wit which always amuses.

Unsurprisingly, her cutting caricature focuses on cash, class, and background, the fact that Wallis lived with a woman who actually worked for a living. And in a shop of all places. It is all so reminiscent of Tom Buchanan’s sneering dismissal of Gatsby in the climactic confrontation in the Plaza Hotel in The Great Gatsby: “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.”

While the 1920s are invariably defined as the Jazz Age, that brief cacophonous period of casual sex, cocaine, screeching trombones, drunken cocktail parties, women smoking in public, and the outrageous behaviour of the Bright Young Things, life in Washington was barely touched by this spinning social vortex. It was a place where federal bureaucrats were heavily outnumbered by the military and diplomatic corps, a fact that pleased the incoming president, Calvin Coolidge, a small-government conservative who took office in 1923 after the sudden death of Warren Harding.

For all the talk of jelly bean boyfriends and flapper girls, when Wallis arrived in Washington in the summer of 1921 she discovered that the nation’s capital was in fact a quaintly provincial town dominated by a handful of old, established Southern families known as the “Cave Dwellers.” This tight-knit group, Wallis noted with the bitterness of one frequently rejected, “operated their social slide rule as they saw fit.” As a separated woman, her name did not appear in the Social Register, the careful list of all the prominent families and diplomats in town.

During her first few weeks in Washington, Wallis lived with her mother, though Wallis moved when it became clear that Alice did not approve of her daughter going out without a chaperone and returning home in the very early hours of the morning. “I was trying to make a new life, and yet every night my mother would sit up as if I was a child,” she later complained.

Fortunately, her friends the Neilsons were going to New York for a time, so they agreed for her to stay in their apartment until their return. It was an exhilarating period. For the first time in her life she was living on her own, her everyday needs covered by the $225 Win sent each month.

When the Neilsons returned in the summer of 1922, Wallis, now twenty-six, moved in with talented portrait artist Dorothy McNamee, the daughter of Admiral William T. Swinburne, the former commander of the Pacific fleet, while McNamee’s husband, Luke, the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, was on overseas assignment.

As Dorothy, introspective and shy by nature, spent much of her time in her Georgetown studio, Wallis’s circle increasingly revolved around that postwar phenomenon: single, separated, widowed, and divorced women making their way in the world. The right to vote, grudgingly passed into legislation in 1920, symbolized that newfound independence. Her “desert island” companion from Coronado, Marianna Sands, who was also separated from her husband, and her sister Rhoda were now living in Washington. It helped, too, that wealthy socialite Alice Vandergrift Garrett took her under her wing, loaning or giving her clothes so that she always looked stylish at the various lunches, tea dances, and white-tie dinners she was now attending.

During this time Wallis became firm friends with the sassy Ethel Noyes, whose father headed the Washington Star and whose brother Newbold was married to her cousin Lelia Barnett. They made a merry group and while, as Courtney indicated, Wallis was never invited to the best parties, where the Social Register prevailed, she had the supreme advantage of being a woman in a town where eligible, well-educated bachelors were in a distinct surplus.

For a time Wallis and Ethel shared the same beau—the rumbling bass-voiced Welsh journalist Willmott Lewis. Not only was he the London Times correspondent in Washington, he acted as the urbane unofficial ambassador incognito, enlivening many a reporter’s copy with bons mots—known as bonmotts because of his first name—and insights into the thinking of the British government.

A commanding presence, he was eventually knighted for his services to the Crown. At the time Ethel, who married Lewis in 1926, quipped: “Well, it took King George to make a lady of me.”

Willmott, who later boasted that he could have earned $100,000 for kissing and telling of his numerous trysts with Wallis, was the conversational star of a weekly lunch group known as the Soixante Gourmets.

This was a witty and eclectic gathering of diplomats and journalists who met at the Hamilton Hotel to poke holes in foreign policy and fun at one another. The only stipulation was that each member had to bring a lady guest. Step forward Wallis, Ethel, Marianna, and their ilk. Wallis had never been in company quite like this. At any time one of six languages could be heard while insider political and diplomatic gossip flowed like the wine that accompanied these leisurely affairs. The men were urbane, knowledgeable, attentive, and witty. It was at these gatherings where she met her first prince, Gelasio Caetani, the first Fascist Italian ambassador to Washington, a man of impeccable manners and effortless courtesy, as befitting the descendant of two popes. This was a long way from the days of Pensacola and Coronado—and the taciturn silences of Win.

She graduated from being seduced by the sky-high glamour of the first aviators to the high-flying conversations of the diplomatic and journalist cadres. It was so exciting, an exhilarated and animated Wallis enjoying being squired around by a small army of ardent beaux. “The surplus of agreeable, attractive, unattached men made the diplomatic set a green pasture for women on their own,” she recalled. It also meant that she was raised up several rungs in precedence in the studiously hierarchical world of Washington society. No longer was her nose pressed so firmly against the glass.

While for Wallis this period in her life was “a special paradise,” it was a paradise where the serpent of temptation lurked in rumble seats and sofas. Her sexual code was not to fall for light affairs of the moment and, as she later confided, never to allow a man to journey below her intimate “Mason-Dixon Line.”

One man did cross that line—at least into the inner recesses of her heart.

Even at a distance of thirty years and two marriages later, Wallis became lyrical and rheumy-eyed as she spoke of the smoothly charismatic Latin Casanova who stole—and broke—her heart.

Cautious to the last, she scratched “No” when her ghostwriter revealed the name of the man she fell for, striking through emotional passages that revealed too much of her heart. “His name is of no consequence,” she averred, her coyness indicating that he was very much of consequence.

She described him as “suave and handsome,” with jet-black hair, dark deep-set eyes, and a rare combination of urbanity and effervescence. “To talk with him was an experience. He seemed to be playing with life as he played with words but underneath he had stern principles and a burning ambition, which was supported by broad scholarship and wide experience.”

He was the embodiment of the Renaissance man, a competition golfer, skillful bridge player, accomplished horseman, a connoisseur of wine, and a practised heart-breaker. Wallis was putty in the knowing hands of the saturnine, monocle-wearing Felipe Aja Espil, the highly regarded and hugely ambitious Argentinian counsellor at the Washington embassy.

She was not the only one. From the moment Espil, a lawyer by training, arrived in 1916 from Buenos Aires, he cut an urbane swathe through Washington society. It was not an entirely smooth passage. The devout Catholic was disconcerted to find at his first hotel, the Willard, that the men’s bathrooms had no doors and the men had no shame. Now safely ensconced at 1806 Corcoran Street near fashionable Dupont Circle, Espil quickly gained a reputation among men of affairs as a serious man with a strict mission to represent his country ably and effectively.

When Wallis came into his orbit, he was seen as a rising star earmarked as a future ambassador. One magazine profile would later describe him as “the Mona Lisa of the Andes, a handsome Beau Brummell who orders his clothes from tailors in London’s Savile Row.”

He could speak four languages fluently, read widely—not just American newspapers but the Congressional Record, too—and had little time for those who were not as au courant as himself.

Wallis knew she had to up her game if she wanted to earn and keep her Latin-American paramour. She was in the major leagues now, and though he delighted in her wit and gaiety, she instinctively knew he wanted something more in a wife.

Every day she read newspapers from cover to cover and occasionally even opened a book. Not that she read the whole work. Wallis developed a technique where she read the first couple of pages and the ending and then picked out a relevant quote from somewhere inside the tome. In a social situation she would use the quote as an opening conversational gambit before going on to talk with insight and intelligence about the book of the moment. It left many a dinner table partner duly impressed. Wallis used this technique for the rest of her life, always to striking effect.

In Felipe’s book, however, Wallis would never be the heroine of his life, merely one character among many. Though he regularly squired her to various social events and enjoyed her home cooking—Southern fried chicken was then her speciality—unfortunately for Wallis, she was not the only girl on his arm. As his granddaughter Courtney Hagner recalls: “Felipe was charismatic and knew it. He was the star of many of these parties and Wallis was just one of the girls he dated.”

Wallis was his Becky Sharp, witty and socially striving, good for a fun night out but not a long-term companion or, heaven forbid, his wife. After all, she was a Protestant and still married. As Courtney Hagner observes: “He was a typical Latin man in that he wanted lovers but also a woman who would be by his side who was ambitious, well-dressed, and from a good established family.” A family fortune would also help.

Wallis, though, was smitten. The woman who exulted in self-control totally lost her head and heart. Felipe, some nine years older than Wallis, became, if not the love of her life—that would come later—her grand passion. As Wallis later confessed: “My head spun first and then my heart. Even in my mind there was no question I was becoming involved. The man was irresistible and my resistance was at a dangerous low.”

She was prepared to do anything to keep him. Wallis, then twenty-seven, considered converting to Catholicism and moving to Buenos Aires if needs be. She gave herself completely to Felipe in a way that she never did with Win. For once the flighty, careless Montague side of her personality dominated, Wallis sharing Felipe’s bed while still married. “Wallis was mad about him,” recalled a friend. “She would have done anything. I have never seen a woman so in love.”

However, the brooding handmaidens of her passion were jealousy, possessiveness, and rage, Wallis succumbing to temper tantrums when she learned that her lover was squiring other women. The more jealous she became, the more she drove him away, her hot Latin lover cooled by the climate of reproach and argument. As Felipe’s granddaughter recalls: “Wallis was very needy and bitchy. Vindictive, too.”

Felipe had his eye on the prize—and it wasn’t Wallis but rather the position of Argentinian ambassador to the United States. Before that goal all personal considerations took second place. Though she flung herself at him, he drew away. Some thirteen years later, one of his diplomatic colleagues pithily remarked: “Felipe had a higher regard for his career than Edward the Eighth had.”

Wallis should have seen the writing on the wall when he failed to invite her as his partner to the party of the year, a ball given by wealthy former diplomat and company director Lawrence Townsend and his wife at their fashionable Twentieth Street mansion, close to Espil’s home. When Wallis raised the subject with her lover, Espil was nonplussed. “I cannot,” he told her, “ask Mrs. Townsend to invite my mistress. Ça ne se fait pas. It is not the done thing.” In a fury Wallis flew at him and scratched his face. Within days all of social Washington was buzzing with this story, the phrase “Ça ne se fait pas” quickly becoming an oft-used social put-down.

Unknown to Wallis, Espil was quietly romancing his ideal woman in the shape of Courtney Letts, now Stillwell. They met at an intimate dinner at the British embassy. “You look like an old friend of mine,” he said. “Who?” asked Courtney. “Wallis Spencer,” he said before moving on to other topics. Courtney, who was formally separated from her husband, Wellesley H. Stillwell, found him charming, gracious, and serious. Like Wallis and many others, she fell for him. In turn he was enchanted by her beauty and civilized conversation—not to mention her social standing and her wealthy background.

There was one big stumbling block—her Midwestern father. He was terrified that any of his daughters would ever marry a “foreigner, especially a Latin.” He warned her: “They make difficult husbands for American girls. They are usually unfaithful.” When Espil asked her to marry him she was flattered, but mindful of her father’s admonition, she declined. Unspoken was the fact that she wanted a man with money to support her and her children. Espil’s mid-level diplomatic position as counsellor would not provide for her needs… just yet.

The following morning a box of long-stemmed American Beauty roses arrived. A little white card was nestled deep inside. “Goodbye, Chiquita, I understand your problems but I will never forget you. With my most sincere respect and admiration, Felipe Espil.”

When Wallis discovered that Espil was two-timing her she flew into a jealous rage and furiously stormed into his apartment. Armed with a pair of sharp scissors, she went into the bedroom wardrobe and cut all his dress trousers at the knee.

Their relationship continued to limp along. Needy, jealous, and controlling, Wallis would not leave Espil alone, every social event becoming an ordeal. Finally he had had enough. He decided he couldn’t deal with her temper and tantrums any more. With perhaps more than a touch of Latin hyperbole, he later claimed that he escaped from her one morning by catching a boat back to Buenos Aires and sailing out of her life. They met again in Virginia three years later. By then the flame of passion that fuelled their affair was extinguished. Wallis and Espil were just old friends.

As he recalled of their tempestuous relationship: “She is a very dominating creature, the most dominating woman I have met in my life. She has a quick temper. She demands a great deal. When a man finds himself under the spell of a woman like that it can take years of his life to get away. I decided I couldn’t live that way any longer. I was tired of it.”

As he sailed south, he left behind two women whose hearts had been touched by his presence. Both independently decided to travel to Paris, the City of Love and Light, to seek a discreet divorce—and to make a fresh start. In the fall of 1923, Wallis received a surprising letter from her cousin Corinne inviting her to travel to France for a couple of months.

Corinne’s husband, Captain Henry Mustin, had died in August, following a long illness caused by his heroic efforts to save a fellow seaman swept overboard at sea. As she was still in her widow’s weeds and was leaving her three young boys behind, Corinne’s decision to travel to Europe in the midwinter may have raised a few eyebrows among her family and friends. Paris also had the benefit of being out of sight of prying eyes, a place where she could make a start in the hunt for a prospective husband.

She thought “Skinny” would be the ideal travelling companion and doubtless sensed that the best cure for Wallis’s man trouble was to leave Washington for a time.

Wallis, still licking her wounds following her emotionally bruising love affair with Felipe, was enthusiastic, especially as she had heard that divorce in France was relatively cheap and straightforward. With only Win’s allowance to support her, she realized that she could afford to pay for the trip only if Uncle Sol helped. During yet another uncomfortable interview in his New York apartment—this time his customary rant focussed on French morality—he palmed her five $100 notes to facilitate the journey.

Meanwhile Courtney, her life running on parallel lines, had an easier time. Some months later her father, Frank, who doted on his eldest daughter, generously offered to send Courtney and her children, Homer and Louise, to Paris for a year, where she could divorce quietly, “away from the publicity in the States.” She took an apartment at 8 rue Georges Ville near the Bois de Boulogne, hired a maid, enrolled for a correspondence course at the Sorbonne, and took art classes at the Louvre. The glorious year she spent in Paris was a “cure for any continuing heartaches.” It would be some months before her path once more crossed with Wallis’s.

For Wallis’s part, Uncle Sol’s largesse now made it possible for her to join her cousin on her great adventure. They booked a passage on board a former troop ship, the President Garfield, she and Corinne sharing a cabin on the rough crossing to France.

Their passports are something of a curiosity. Both women, who were vouched for by diplomat Stanley Hawk of the State Department, wore hats for their official photographs, Wallis confirming that she was indeed born on June 19, 1896—contrary to various dates published after she became notorious—and gave her address as 2908 N St. NW, Washington, a pretty townhouse in Georgetown.

She listed her height as five feet four inches, her eyes blue, her nose straight, hair brown, chin square, and her face oval, with a mole on the right side of her cheek as the only distinguishing mark. It seems they planned a more extensive visit to Europe, besides France listing Italy and Britain as other ports of call. On January 9, 1924, they embarked, arriving in Paris a week or so later in the middle of the night without a plan or—more important—a hotel room booking. It was not a good start.

They found themselves cheap lodgings and within a couple of days Corinne, rather conveniently, “suddenly remembered a friend in Paris, a bachelor officer who had been a close friend of her husband.” In short order, Commander William “Imp” Eberle, the assistant naval attaché to the American embassy, had arranged to take the two castaways for dinner. With him was the tall, handsome, imposingly patrician figure of Harvard-educated Elbridge Gerry Greene, a member of a prominent and radical Boston family whose grandfather advocated interest-free banking. He had been at the American embassy for nearly two years, arriving from a previous posting in Sofia, Bulgaria. “That dinner proved the happiest kind of beginning,” Wallis recalled. “We became a foursome.”

Greene and Eberle showed the girls a good time, taking them for motor rides outside Paris at weekends and wining and dining them in town. The memory of Espil began to fade just a little as Wallis enjoyed an uncomplicated, amusing relationship with a man two years her junior. That Gerry Greene was away from his desk so much entertaining Wallis did little to alter his reputation as a frivolous practitioner of the art of diplomacy. “Indolent” was how a colleague described the lanky, bespectacled Bostonian.

Wallis rather than the embassy benefited from his attentions. “We became quite fond of each other,” Wallis recalled. As the weeks turned to months, she remained confused about her feelings: whether to obtain a divorce and pursue Gerry or remain married to Spencer. “I had not been able to make any definite plans for divorce and yet the present status of my marriage was of a past without a future.”

Fate now took control. When Corinne returned to America to see her family, Wallis decided to stay on in Paris, a decision made all the easier after the arrival of her boon companion Ethel Noyes, who needed to finalize her own divorce in order to marry Willmott Lewis. Spurred to review her own situation, Wallis was shocked to discover it would cost $5,000 if she wanted to finally free herself from Win.

While they had been separated for nearly three years, he had continued to write regularly, reminding her of the good times and suggesting a reconciliation. Now in command of a river patrol craft, USS Pampanga, in China, he invited her to join him in Hong Kong, where he was stationed. If she agreed, he could secure her a berth on board the USS Chaumont, which was sailing from Virginia in July at the start of a seven-week voyage.

At the same time, she learned from her lover Gerry Greene that he, too, was shortly to be transferred from Paris to Peking (Beijing) with a promotion to first secretary. Like Wallis, he would be sailing to the Orient sometime in July.

As she pondered her options, she knew that if the reconciliation with her husband didn’t work out, Gerry was waiting in the wings. He had even promised to pay all her travel and accommodation if she made the journey from Hong Kong to Peking.

While she considered her future, her friend Ethel Noyes informed her that she was returning to America and offered to share the cost of her return trip. The fates were working overtime to send her sailing to the Far East.

While she was running with the Navy hares and diplomatic hounds, what Wallis did not realize was that her romantic rival, Courtney Letts, was also hovering. Before Wallis left Paris, Courtney Letts came for tea at the small Parisian apartment Gerry shared with fellow diplomat Harold Tittman, later ambassador to Peru. In pride of place on his polished wooden table was a framed photograph of the woman Courtney now knew as “Wally Spencer.”

“You two look alike,” said Gerry, a refrain Courtney was becoming familiar with. Even with Wallis around, Greene began courting Courtney, who was going through the expensive rigmarole of divorce.

In her secret diary she described her relationship with Gerry Greene: “We became friends. I was in Paris divorcing. Six months later he asked me to marry him. He came to America where we met again. He sailed for China for his post in Peking. I refused to follow him. He went off, I thought sadly.” It seems that Greene was juggling two romances, wooing both women that spring. He may have been lazy at work, but he was a busy young man romantically.

While the diplomat and the Navy wife sailed for China, Courtney headed back to her hometown of Chicago following the death of her father, Frank C. Letts, in May 1924. Here, in what subsequently proved to be an extraordinary and somehow prophetic encounter, Wallis’s doppelgänger, who had already enjoyed romantic liaisons with two men in Wallis’s life, met her future royal husband.

On the evening of October 13, 1924, Courtney found herself engrossed in conversation with the Prince of Wales, listening intently as he unburdened his soul. When they were not sharing intimate secrets, he was whisking her around the dance floor at the Saddle and Cycle Club on Chicago’s fashionable Lake Shore Drive. Of all the women in the Windy City, it was Courtney who had been chosen to occupy the seat next to the son of King George V at a dinner held in his honour. Though his hostess, socialite and fashion maven Lucy Blair Linn, sat on the other side, the prince devoted most of his attention towards Courtney, who was dressed to impress in a white Chanel chiffon gown she had bought just before leaving Paris.

That a newly divorced woman was seated next to the Prince of Wales was a sign of changing social mores.

Courtney, who brought a diarist’s eye to her royal encounter, recalled that he “had the charm of a restless, observant, appealing boy. He told me he had just turned 30 and was feeling old.” She continued: “We talked and talked and talked about his life in England, about the deadly ‘boringnessy’ of such endless ceremonials as laying corner stones and attending services.”

It was a familiar refrain, his “woe is me” attitude quickly becoming his conversational shtick. He was not the first, nor the last, royal prince to complain about the special excruciating boredom and predictability of the royal round. It was, though—and still is—an integral part of the job.

Besides his strangely appealing charm, her main impression, even on a brief acquaintance, coincided with the concerned opinions of his courtiers, his family, and his close friends, who worried about the calibre of the character behind the smiling, effortlessly appealing public image.

Astutely, she described him as “an unhappy man, perplexed, of a restless nature seeking madly for amusement, for pleasure snatched here and there between the official exigencies of his responsible state and the ever-present thought of the future, which as long as he might live he knew he could not try to escape. He even appeared to want forgetfulness in his moments of frivolity and escape.”

What she found the most shocking was his determination to drown his princely sorrows in alcohol, not eating a morsel of food throughout the evening. Instead he frequently asked the two footmen standing behind his chair to refill his glass with either champagne or wine. “He dismayed and depressed me,” she recalled, noting that she had never seen a man consume so much alcohol.

“I cannot say truthfully that he was intoxicated. He knew better. But the spirits within him added to his strange, feverish, restless ways.”

While Courtney was the chosen one for the evening, she was not sufficiently engaged or starry-eyed to go beyond conversation and dancing. Others were. He did find a sexual conquest for the night, a woman who pursued him and won him in the garden. Courtney recorded the sequence of events in her private diary:

They danced most of the evening together. He ordered his train to New York delayed and when the time came he barely caught it. Photographers snapped him—with her—in the garden, but someone broke the [photographic] plate. The husband of the woman in red, who had openly bragged that afternoon that she would “get him” and get him she did… appeared to be pleased. It was small wonder that others were heard to say, that night and for days and weeks afterwards, “I always knew he had cheap taste. Imagine carrying on as he did with… her.”

It was indeed an amazing and undignified performance, and it is well known that he behaved in a similar manner in every American city he visited. Is it any wonder that Great Britain has not wanted its heir to the throne to return again to these shores because, so the excuse is given, of the way in which the press had treated him.

Her memory of that evening was accurate, the Chicago Tribune reporting that his train, which was due to depart from Polk Street station at 12:30 a.m., waited for a further three hours before steaming into what remained of the night.

The newspaper noted that the woman “most favored” by the prince throughout the evening was Josephine Ordway, the wife of financier Lucius P. Ordway. She was “a tall and sinuous beauty” with whom he danced many times.

It was the start of a fascinating long-distance relationship, Lucius and Josephine keeping in contact with the prince. “Do let me know the next time you are in London,” he told them before he caught his train. And they did.

Two years later, when they were in Paris on holiday, it was reported that the prince had called Josephine several times from Biarritz, the fashionable French beach resort on the west coast, where he was on holiday. It was noted that the Ordways, who were visiting Britain for May and June, enjoyed a full diary in smart society circles because of her friendship with the prince.

A restless prince with his eyes trained on the western horizon, a vivacious married American, a compliant husband proud of his association with the future king. A pattern was emerging, his stop-over in Chicago but a dress rehearsal for a captivating and dramatic performance that would astonish the world.