by Siân Evans
Despite their ideological differences, Nancy Astor and George Bernard Shaw were great friends. He was renowned the world over as an Irish socialist and radical playwright. His personality appealed to Nancy, being accomplished, witty, entertaining and sincere. Like Nancy, his passions were very private and ran deep. Through GBS Nancy had met Lawrence of Arabia, now known as Airman Shaw, who became a frequent visitor to Cliveden and St James’s Square, roaring up on his motorbike whenever he could get leave. On one occasion he was late returning to his barracks, and in mitigation he explained he had been held up at dinner with Lord and Lady Astor and George Bernard Shaw; this was taken by his commanding officer as just a witty fantasy, and he evaded punishment.
Occasionally Lawrence would take Lady Astor for a high-speed spin on his motorbike, racing up the drive to Cliveden and sending up a spray of gravel as they roared past the Fountain of Love with Nancy riding pillion behind him. Waldorf could hardly bring himself to watch; he had managed to persuade Nancy to give up hunting when they married, but she retained a love of speed all her life. She was an impatient and impulsive driver, on one occasion driving far too fast down the Mall on an icy morning and unexpectedly encountering the Guards band marching up the middle of the road towards her. She braked, but the wheels locked and the car skidded on the frosty surface. The Guards scattered in all directions; Nancy regained control of the wheel and drove on at speed, laughing manically. She frequently ignored red lights and was occasionally stopped by police, but it was a more deferential age, and she was never charged with any driving offence.
Even such a wealthy family as the Londonderrys were feeling the financial breeze. In September 1931 Edith was staying as a guest of her friend Laura Mae Corrigan in her rented Venetian palazzo, and expecting Ramsay MacDonald to come and join them. He declined the invitation because of the seriousness of the international situation; politicians and economists were acutely aware that the German mark had recently collapsed, a disaster for that country’s economy, and the pound was now under pressure. When Britain abandoned the Gold Standard on 21 September 1931, Charley wrote to Edith urging her to hurry home without lingering in Paris, as she and Laura Corrigan had planned, because the value of the pound was plummeting. He sold a large number of horses to reduce their outgoings, and the family economised by consolidating their servants around their three main homes: Londonderry House, Mount Stewart and Wynyard. They had already sold 9,000 acres of land in Merioneth in 1930, but now they also put the family’s Welsh mansion, Plas Machynlleth, on the market, advertising it as ‘highly suitable for a hotel or school’.
In the 1930s the Londonderrys’ domestic staff typically numbered around thirty people, many of whom travelled with them in the grand manner of a previous age. In addition there were the gardeners, still occupied in transforming Mount Stewart. Work continued on the fantastic gardens and grounds to Edith’s scheme. The twin towers and flanking wall of the family burial ground had been constructed in the late 1920s. Lady Londonderry had also been provided with a flock of flamingos by King Fuad of Egypt – they did not like the climate of Northern Ireland and had to spend most of their winters moping in a heated shed.
Ramsay MacDonald regularly visited his dear friend Lady Londonderry. In political circles this unlikely friendship was thought to have moderated his Socialist views. They often wrote to each other in affectionate terms of endearment, and it was rumoured that when they both stayed as guests of the royal family at Windsor Castle he would visit her bedroom between 11.30 and 2 in the morning ‘to talk’. Speculation about their relationship was rife, but it was almost certainly no more than friendship; he had been widowed in 1911, and was lonely. She was attractive, funny and good company, and her handsome husband was notoriously unfaithful, though she chose to make light of ‘his girls’, as she called them. Understandably, she found Ramsay MacDonald’s Hibernian gallantries flattering. In addition, he was the leader of the National Government, and in 1931 he made Charley Londonderry a minister in his Cabinet, a role he was to hold until 1935.
Mrs Greville continued to entertain in lavish style at 16 Charles Street, where the eighteenth-century terraced house facing the main road had been extended at the back to incorporate mews buildings in the street behind, creating an open-air terrace, an enormous ballroom and quiet self-contained apartments for the hostess. It is a tribute to her dedication to entertaining that Vogue magazine on 26 July 1933 gave her the following accolade, just six months away from her seventieth birthday:
At Season’s Ending it is tempting to look back and decide that this year’s best post-Ascot evening party (Class A Certified) was – Mrs Ronnie Greville’s […] A wonderfully wide crowd – royal, political, intellectual, and after the tired elder statesmen had gone home, animated groups of the younger people remained – we strayed through the rooms, admiring the beautiful Sir Joshuas [Reynolds], and thinking how pleasant an uncrowded party can be, ended up at the elaborate buffet in the courtyard.
Her capacity for intrigue was growing. She was very loyal to her old friend Rufus Isaacs, Lord Reading, the Viceroy of India, with whom she had stayed at the Viceregal Lodge in Delhi. He had clashed with one of his staff, George Lloyd, who had ambitions to succeed him as Viceroy. Mrs Greville invited George Lloyd to stay at Polesden Lacey, and he partnered Mrs Greville’s great friend, the impecunious Queen Ena of Spain, at bridge. Due to his impulsive card-playing, they were soundly defeated. Mrs Greville had influential contacts in the Foreign Office and the India Office, and revenge was sweet. She later purred, ‘There was a time when George Lloyd thought he might get India. But I soon put a stop to that.’
Mrs Greville was very fond of Queen Ena, the grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, and rather protective of her. She took a dim view of Ena’s estranged husband, King Alfonso, who was exiled from his native country in 1931. She felt he was not a gentleman; ‘although he was a Hapsburg, one always felt he had only just arrived’ was her considered verdict.
Mrs Greville had friends in America, and although she eventually lost her enthusiasm for New York, preferring Chicago, the West Coast and Hollywood, she always enjoyed an opportunity to catch up with the Vanderbilts. She had a long-standing rivalry with Grace Vanderbilt, whose seventy-room mansion on Fifth Avenue was the social centre of New York and was run as the stateliest of stately homes. Grace had a reputation as the supreme American hostess; in a single year she entertained 37,000 guests, either in New York or at her enormous ‘holiday cottage’ at Newport. Like Mrs Ronnie, her success as a Queen Bee was due to her combination of money, snobbery, energy and attention to detail. She was also adept at side-stepping criticism; ‘Mother was always careful to silence potentially envious tongues with small acts of thoughtfulness and gentility,’ recalled her son Cornelius Vanderbilt the Fifth.
Grace was known in New York as ‘The Kingfisher’ because she liked to think of herself as a great friend of all monarchs, especially the British royal family. When asked if there was anything a visitor could do for her on his return to London, she said, ‘Only give my love to the dear boys’, meaning the Prince of Wales and his brothers, the Dukes of York, Gloucester and Kent. Mrs Greville resented Grace’s proprietorial attitude to the House of Windsor; in later years, when Mrs Vanderbilt announced that she wanted to live in Britain, she replied icily, ‘No, Grace, we have enough Queens here already’.
Perhaps Mrs Greville was thinking of her great rival Laura Mae Corrigan, who in the manner of a lepidopterist or philatelist ardently collected royalty. Even when introduced to John Gielgud, who was playing the lead role in Hamlet, Mrs Corrigan could not resist telling the bemused young actor that she knew the Danish royal family ‘intimately’. She vied with Mrs Greville to befriend both the exiled Queen of Spain and the King of Greece, and made every effort to associate herself with court circles. The intricacies of placement remained mysterious; at one of her dinner parties she had mistakenly placed a plain Mr Lancaster at her right hand, having mistaken him for the Duke of Lancaster, a genuin
e title that was used as a thin disguise by the Prince of Wales. Discovering the error, she ousted the unfortunate commoner from the position of most honoured guest and yelled down the table, ‘Who’s the next-ranking Dook?’
Many envious people resented Laura Corrigan’s social success and took every opportunity to snipe at her, even while they lapped up tales about her excesses in the press; the journalist Valentine Castlerosse, who had enjoyed her lavish hospitality many times, pontificated in print that she should use her fortune to support some cultural cause, such as encouraging the young in the fields of art or architecture, but she took no notice. She was a veteran who had survived being frozen out in Cleveland and ignored in New York; minor carping in London was nothing by comparison. In addition, by this point she was becoming genuinely popular with people who recognised the fact that she was generous, kind and loyal.
In the 1930s E. F. Benson, the author of Mapp and Lucia, portrayed the change of ownership in London mansions and expressed the general relief that American millionairesses were glad to take on the mantle of holding vast parties. He could have been writing about Laura Corrigan:
A few only of the great London houses were still in possession of their owners […] most of the big entertaining was done by Americans and other aliens who, in the old-fashioned way of the New World, still delighted in Duchesses and took the vast empty houses in the country from owners who had not been able to dispose of them to such advantage […] In London these hospitable folk gave innumerable dinners, and had cotillions and cabarets, and were an immense godsend to those who thought that every hour not spent in a crowd was sixty minutes wasted.8
Laura was involved in an unfortunate spat on 17 July 1930. Lady Mountbatten had organised a Midnight Revue at the London Pavilion, in support of the British Legion, with the Prince of Wales as the guest of honour. Boxes cost 250 guineas each, and American millionaire William Randolph Hearst paid £300 for tickets for himself and his mistress, Marion Davies. Competitive Lady Cunard bought forty tickets, but was outdone by Laura Corrigan who snapped up seventy-five seats in the front row, and invited her seventy-four guests to dine at her house before the show. Edwina Mountbatten’s sister Mary Cunningham-Reid asked Laura if she could join the dinner party and bring a number of her own friends too. Laura politely declined, as she couldn’t accommodate any other guests, so when Mary arrived at her door with her friends, Laura had them turned away. Like every other hostess, her formal dinners had a finite number of seats. However, the two sisters were furious, and Lady Mountbatten sabotaged Laura’s next party by announcing a rival event on the same evening. Edwina persuaded Prince George of Kent to ‘chuck’ Laura in favour of her party. Society fixer Charlie Stirling appealed to Lady Londonderry’s innate sense of fairness, and she stoutly went to Laura’s party, taking with her the King of Spain. Laura was supported by many who felt she had been right to turn away the gate-crashers. However, the Prince of Wales sided with the Mountbattens, and when Laura subsequently sat next to him at a dinner given by Lady Cunard, he did not address a single word to her, a public humiliation that might have crushed a less resilient spirit. He stipulated afterwards that Mrs Corrigan’s name should not feature on the guest list for any party he was to attend in future, a distinction that she shared with Mrs Greville.
Laura Corrigan had a gift for almost childlike candour, and could douse any small spark of male interest instantly. A man made a pass at her in the back of a taxi, and when she related the experience she said she didn’t know whether to hold on to her skirt or her wig. Skittish Lord Weymouth offered to go to bed with her if she bought him a Rolls-Royce; she replied she would buy him two Rolls-Royces if they could both be spared that experience, which dampened his ardour. Every spare minute she spent with the moody Duke of Devonshire at his country house, Compton Place, she wielded an axe, chopping wood, surely a deterrent for any potential suitor.
Lumberjacking aside, Laura liked to spend part of each summer staying at an Italian palazzo surrounded by her friends. In August 1931 she rented the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice. Situated on the Grand Canal, it had been the home of Lord Byron and the place where he wrote Don Juan. Laura caused a sartorial sensation by wearing ‘short trousers’ on the Lido, but the following year she and her guests were the talk of Venice for different reasons. Laura had hired the Palazzo Brandolini, and staying with her were Evelyn Waugh, the Duff Coopers and ‘Chips’ Channon. Also in town were Cecil Beaton, Emerald Cunard and Sir Thomas Beecham, Lord and Lady Castlerosse, Bob Boothby, Oliver Messel and Winston Churchill’s son Randolph. To add to the tension, Oswald Mosley and his wife, Cimmie, and Diana Guinness and her husband, Brian, were also staying in Venice; a raging affair had developed between Diana and Mosley, who would disappear together for hours at a time, reappearing at mealtimes to be met with pursed lips, raised eyebrows and leaden silences.
On 29 August 1932 it was Lady Diana Cooper’s fortieth birthday. Ever generous, Laura Corrigan gave her a diamond clip for her birthday, but Diana leaned over the balcony and it disappeared with an expensive plop into the Grand Canal. That evening ‘Chips’ Channon held a birthday party for Diana in a restaurant on the island of Murano. All of ‘smartistic Mayfair’ seemed to be there, as well as glassblowers, gondoliers and musicians. Randolph Churchill urged his friend Richard Sykes to patch up an argument he had had with a former girlfriend, Doris Duke, an American tobacco millionairess. But she bristled at his approach, sharp words were exchanged and Richard whipped the cigarette from between Doris’s lips and stubbed it out on her hand, a particularly insulting gesture, given the source of Doris’s millions. Randolph threw a punch at Richard for his unchivalrous behaviour, but blameless Sir Alfred Beit was in the way, and a mêlée ensued, involving the choir of fifteen gondoliers and an audience of fifty interested bystanders. Cecil Beaton lobbed Prosecco bottles onto the heads of the protagonists and was promptly thrown to the ground by Oliver Messel. Duff Cooper waded in, and a rolling scrum of some eight men fought their way across the floor, dragging linen and crockery from the tables and overturning the furniture. Stepping over the prone figure of a baronet in the doorway, Emerald Cunard made her customary late entrance. ‘What a lovely party!’ she trilled.
Laura might have been spurned by American high society, but she did not forget her own humble origins, and in 1933 she sent generous cheques to charitable bodies in and around Waupaca, Wisconsin, including the Red Cross, local churches and hospitals, education boards, the library and a fund for unemployment relief. Cleveland, the city that wouldn’t accept her marriage to James, was provided with a double-edged gift. Laura organised a safari to Africa, hiring three planes in which she travelled with a journalist, a photographer and film cameraman, two secretaries, two maids, a doctor and a nurse, two cooks, three waiters, a hairdresser, a manicurist and a dressmaker. On arrival, she hired the services of big game hunters; rather than slaughtering wildlife for entertainment, the aim of Mrs Corrigan’s expedition was to capture fourteen rare animals alive, and these were despatched to the Cleveland Zoo, along with instructions for their care and a cheque for £5,000 to pay for their welfare and food.
Back in London the parties continued, both the traditional and the novel. On 1 July 1929 there had been a rather subdued reception at Londonderry House, as the Conservative Party had been defeated in the election. Many of the guests were glad to make their excuses early and go on to a very different event, a circus-themed party at 17 Bruton Street, the former home of the Duchess of York. The young couturier Norman Hartnell had booked performing bears and Siberian wolf cubs, and Lady Eleanor Smith led a white pony up the staircase while Nancy Mitford and a host of other Bright Young People enjoyed the syncopated charms of a jazz band and a circus orchestra. The following night, many of the same sensation-seekers were the guests of Mrs Rosemary Sandars, whose party theme was babies. Guests converged on her house in Rutland Gate dressed as giant infants, complete with teddies and comforters, and swigged cocktails from feeder bottles supplied by the bar, whic
h was set within the confines of a baby’s play-pen. ‘This is the type of behaviour which leads to Communism,’ harrumphed one commentator. However it was bumptious, well-upholstered American Elsa Maxwell, a friend of Laura Corrigan, who created the most successful themed party; on 13 May 1930 she threw a ‘murder’ party at Lady Ribblesdale’s house in St James’. Professional actors were engaged to play the part of detectives, and they quizzed the guests about the ‘victim’s’ demise. The discovery of an artful trail of clues led to a thrilling denouement, the arrest of the bemused Duke of Marlborough as the perpetrator of the foul deed. The ‘murder mystery’ party had arrived; it thrived on the particularly British sensibility for a juicy scandal and a thrillingly sticky end in the cosy, clubbable setting of an upper-class house.
The nature of British nightlife was changing as a response to the Depression; many formerly wealthy people now could not afford to run a large home, staffed with servants, and they moved into smaller houses around Westminster and Knightsbridge. One after another the big mansions gave way to flats; Devonshire House went first, Grosvenor House soon followed. In Portman Square blocks of comfortable, modern service flats supplanted unwieldy houses, until even the rich began to favour life in apartments or converted mews. There was little space to entertain at home, beyond a few guests for cocktails or an intimate supper, so people increasingly took their friends out for dinner, going on afterwards to a night club. Even those who still lived in big houses adopted the habit of entertaining in restaurants and dance clubs, and the pre-war private parties that had been held in mansions large enough to have a ballroom became less frequent. Mothers keen to launch their daughters on society and hopefully to find them a suitable husband were no longer willing or able to spend £1,000 on a single ball, as they had done in the past; in these more straitened times smaller entertainments, such as a few weekends in the country, theatre parties or supper parties in dance restaurants were wiser investments. The relative dearth of large parties, however, had the effect of making them seem even more desirable, and those hostesses still able to provide them, such as Mrs Greville, Laura Corrigan and Lady Astor, were more popular than ever.