A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy

by Deborah McDonald

  Life in war-damaged London continued. During the ‘doodlebug summer’ of 1944 H. G.’s house at 13 Hanover Terrace (or ‘Hangover Terrace’ as Moura called it) was damaged by a bomb. Moura was staying in Oxfordshire with Tania (who had recently made her a grandmother for the second time). H. G. wrote to her – ‘just a love letter to say nothing in particular except that everything is well here and that all your commands have been meticulously obeyed. The carpenters turned up duly & nailed up the back door and most of our lost glass has been swept up.’31

  The time had come for other broken remnants to be swept up.

  As the war came to an end, so did Moura’s affair with Constantine Benckendorff. It had continued throughout all these years, without H. G. ever having an inkling of it, despite Cony having holidayed with Moura in Estonia on at least one occasion in the 1930s. Presumably the fact that this was Benckendorff territory and Cony was accompanied by his adolescent daughter Nathalie made the visit seem innocuous. Nathalie herself, who knew perfectly well what was going on, had been disgusted by it.

  In the end, Cony’s wife, Maria Korchinska, who had tolerated the affair for years, took a stand and after a terrible argument with Constantine she told him to choose between Moura or her. Cony rang Moura to tell her it was finished.32

  More significantly for Moura, and for the world at large, time was drawing down for H. G. Wells.

  On the Thursday after VE Day, Lockhart treated Moura to lunch again at the Carlton. All she wanted to talk about was H. G. She had been visiting him daily. The royal physician, Lord Horder, had diagnosed cancer eighteen months earlier and given him six months to live. Horder was wrong – there was no cancer, and H. G. lingered on. In July Moura took him to vote in the general election; he cast his ballot for Labour. By August she was convinced he had no more than a month to live.33 She too was wrong. He survived into his eightieth year, but he was becoming weaker and weaker, and employed day and night nurses to help him manage. He wasn’t in pain but was wasting away. Moura visited constantly; so did Gip and his wife Marjorie, who had been looking after H. G.’s domestic affairs for years, fulfilling the role he had hoped Moura would take up.

  Despite his weakness he continued to write almost to the end, his last two books – The Happy Turning and Mind at the End of Its Tether – appearing in 1945, and his last article in July 1946.

  He had become known for a vision of a future in which war could be prevented by the establishment of a world state with the power to limit the armaments and actions of every country. Man, he said, must adapt or perish like the dinosaurs. In the midst of a global war his ideas had seemed absurd. In 1941 George Orwell had written that ‘All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells says; but then sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves.’ Wells had failed to appreciate that mankind did not live by reason, and had therefore misjudged twentieth-century history, including the temper of the early Bolsheviks, who in Orwell’s opinion ‘may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men’. Their rule was ‘a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials’. Wells had been ‘quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity’. Orwell felt guilt at criticising Wells in this way, likening it to parricide:

  Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation . . . I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920 . . . influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. Only, just the singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow inadequate thinker now.34

  H. G. Wells was, in the last analysis, ‘too sane to understand the modern world’.

  He hadn’t long left in which to be bewildered by it all. On the afternoon of 13 August 1946, six weeks short of his eightieth birthday, H. G. Wells died. For the third time in her life Moura was left on her own by a man whom she had loved. For despite everything, he had been dear to her, just not as dear as he had wanted to be. This time there was nobody upon whom she could fall back.

  PART 5

  Moura’s Salon: 1946–1974

  I find the photographs that insist that she was a plain woman who dressed dowdily so many inexplicable mysteries, and cannot forget my first breath-taking sight of her as she sat talking to my father in the garden at Easton Glebe one day in 1931. Her fatalism enabled her to radiate an immensely reassuring serenity, and her good humour made her a comfortable rather than a disturbing presence: I always looked forward eagerly to my next meeting with her, and remember my last with pleasure.

  Anthony West, H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life

  24

  The Movie Mogul

  1946–1948

  After the train pulled away from the darkened Moscow station on that October night in 1918, taking Lockhart with it, Moura’s life became a sequence of endings. Doors closing, curtains falling, clasps snapping shut on travel trunks full of memories and secrets. Some of the doors she kept knocking on even though they were bolted against her.

  Lockhart’s departure had been the end of the great adventure of her life. She had persuaded herself at the time that it was just the prelude, but really it was the close of a first act which had begun that day in January when he arrived at the British Embassy on the snowbound Palace Quay. When had its final end come? Perhaps in that damp woodland in Terijoki, when she threw herself on the wet ground and sobbed her heart out for her lost love. Or with the news that Lockhart had a son, and that the dream of little Peter was over.

  Moura’s life as a ‘Russian of the Russians’ ended when she crossed the border into Estonia two days later. After that day, she would never have a home on Russian soil again, and even her visits would be fleeting. With the death of Maxim Gorky, her existence as a Russian effectively ceased; the last meaningful tie was cut, the door closed.

  H. G.’s death meant the end of her time as a mistress, a lover, a paramour. Another door clicked shut, another of life’s avenues closed off.

  And so it would go on, doors closing, curtains falling, cases snapping shut. Moura’s life was growing smaller and narrower. But still there was life in her, still choices to be made and paths to tread.

  The evening of H. G.’s death, Moura went ahead with a small drinks party with two friends, writer Denis Freeman and his partner, actor Neville Phillips. She had helped Freeman with his war memoir, and knew Phillips through her new job as head of Alexander Korda’s script department. All she wanted to do all evening was drink vodka and talk about H. G. While Neville went home at the end of the evening, Denis, who had known Wells, listened through the night.1

  On the morning after, Moura was as alone as she had been in 1919. Lockhart was slipping ever further away from her. After his divorce, he had set up home with ‘Tommy’ Rosslyn in Surrey, and they met only occasionally when he travelled up to London. There were no longer any of the night-long soirées they had enjoyed before the end of the war.

  At the age of fifty-four, Moura began another metamorphosis. All her adult life she had been accustomed to being part of a vast social world, full of interesting people. Being attached to figures like Maxim Gorky, H. G. Wells or even Lockhart provided access to the kind of acquaintances and influence that she craved. Now H. G. was gone, she found herself in a near-vacuum, which she quickly set out to fill.

  She began to cultivate a new persona for herself as a matriarchal hostess. She had for years been a giver of drinks parties, luncheons and dinners, and an organiser of outings and gatherings. Now she made it the centre of her existence. She became known for her salon. Trading on her air of mystery and intrigue, and exerting the magnetic charm that almost everyone was susceptible to but almo
st nobody could explain, she turned her modest and rather untidy little Kensington flat into one of the hubs of the postwar social world. Actors, writers, film directors, politicians, spies – they all came. It wasn’t just her charm and intrigue that drew them; it was her contacts. She seemed to know everybody, and her salon enhanced her ability to make matches between writers, directors, producers and publishers.

  It also brought her work. Besides the crisis in her social life, she needed additional earnings to boost her income. H. G. had left her several legacies in his will, but they didn’t add up to very much. There was £3,000, free ‘of all duty in her lifetime’, to put into an annuity, another £1,000 in cash, plus two-eighteenths of his total estate, which worked out at £6,240.2 Had she given in and married him, she would have inherited most of it, and been a wealthy woman now. Moura liked money, but she valued her liberty more.

  The annuity would yield a small income, but not nearly enough to live on even modestly; for a woman with Moura’s tastes and habits, it wouldn’t cover her drinks bill, let alone the rent on a Kensington flat or any of her other expenses. The total amount wouldn’t last long at her rate of spending.

  Moura had foreseen this, and was already shifting sideways from editing and translating books to working on film scripts as well. Her acquaintance with Sir Alexander Korda went back to the 1930s. They were a similar age, both émigrés from the revolutions of eastern Europe. Korda had been born Sándor László Kellner in Hungary in 1893. He had built a career for himself in film-making and developed an interest in left-wing politics before fleeing to Austria in 1919 when White forces overthrew the socialist government. He was ambitious and talented. He adapted his name, taking his surname from his first wife, the actress Maria Corda, and lived the life of a rich man even when he was poor. His clothes were the best; his belief was that if one looked the part then one became the part. Through the 1920s he and Maria developed their careers, first in Austria and Germany and then in Hollywood. In 1932 Korda came to Britain and started building up his own empire. By the outbreak of war he was Britain’s first and greatest movie mogul.

  How he became acquainted with Moura isn’t known. Possibly their paths crossed socially, perhaps in Germany in the early 1920s when she was negotiating film deals for Gorky; or perhaps it was a political connection. Before the fall of the Communists in Hungary, he had been involved with plans to make films adapted from works by Gorky and Tolstoy. Certainly Korda and Moura had become friends by 1935, when she introduced him to H. G. Wells and helped bring about the films Things to Come and The Man Who Could Work Miracles.3

  Korda’s practices often stretched the boundaries of professional ethics. According to Frank Wells (H. G.’s son, who worked for Korda), if he believed that a finished film might not make enough money, rather than release it he would store it as a phantom asset which he would then use to lever finance from the banks.4 Lockhart also knew Korda, and had heard many stories about his methods of obtaining financial backing. In 1938 he met an accountant who had represented the creditors when Korda’s production company London Films was in trouble; he told Lockhart that Britain’s cinema industry had lost the banks and insurance companies about £4 million. Most of it had been lost by Korda and his fellow Hungarian Max Schach. In the accountant’s opinion, Korda was by far the worse man of the two – an evil crook.5

  While Korda lived like a lord – still looking the part and becoming the part – his creditors often lost everything. It didn’t seem to worry him. Along with his old name and his marriage to Maria Corda, the man who had got his start making Communist propaganda films had abandoned left-wing politics long ago. He became a thoroughgoing Conservative, and in 1942 his friend Winston Churchill arranged a knighthood for him. Some people in Britain considered it distasteful to give a knighthood to a divorced Hungarian Jew who made films for a living.6

  The award was ostensibly for services to the British film industry; in fact, it was for his war services. He had produced and directed a number of propaganda-driven films, including the popular That Hamilton Woman (also released as Lady Hamilton), starring Vivien Leigh in the title role and Laurence Olivier as Lord Nelson. Churchill had greatly admired the film. The parallels between Napoleon and Hitler were obvious and one line in the film was allegedly suggested by Churchill himself: ‘Napoleon can never be master of the world until he has smashed us up – and believe me, gentlemen, he means to be master of the world. You cannot make peace with dictators, you have to destroy them.’7

  Making timely films wasn’t Korda’s only contribution to the war. Churchill had persuaded him to engage in covert activities while in America. In 1940, on Churchill’s instructions, MI6 had set up a secret section in New York, called British Security Coordination; part of its job was to sway opinion in the United States away from isolationism and towards joining the war. Korda’s role was to act as a secret courier between British and American intelligence, and to allow his New York office to be used as a clearing-house for intelligence information.8

  A bad odour seemed to emanate from Korda’s empire. Those who sensed it were deeply wary of him. Lockhart was among them. In October 1947 – possibly through Moura’s influence – Lockhart was invited to a meeting at Korda’s penthouse suite at Claridge’s.9 He had been offered a job as an adviser. His former employer Lord Beaverbrook told him to demand a salary of £5,000, since Korda was so rich. But by November, although Lockhart had resigned from his column with The Times, he was having qualms about taking the job. His friend Brendan Bracken (former Minister of Information, friend of Churchill and vehement opponent of the Attlee government’s nationalisation programme) warned Lockhart not to take the work, and advised him to back out of the contract he had signed. In Bracken’s opinion films were unclean. Or at least Alex Korda was. Lockhart concurred; he withdrew, saying goodbye to a salary of £12,000.10

  If Moura detected the bad aroma, it didn’t faze her. A woman who had been intimate with Yakov Peters and done the bidding of Stalin was hardly likely to be deterred by a faint whiff of off-colour business practices. And she wasn’t alone. Accountants and members of the ruling class might hold their noses in his presence, but Sir Alexander Korda was at the centre of Britain’s postwar film industry, and most of the great names of the era worked with or for him. Among others, Carol Reed and David Lean directed, Terence Rattigan had written screenplays, and the roster of actors included Ralph Richardson, David Niven, Orson Welles, Charles Laughton, Robert Donat and Jack Hawkins. Many who knew of his shady dealings loved him all the same. Richard Burton, from whom he made $500,000 by selling him to 20th Century Fox, called him ‘the loveable larcenous Sir Alex’. Korda bought a Canaletto with the proceeds and showed it smugly to the young actor. ‘Enjoy it my boy, you paid for it.’11

  Another of Moura’s friends who worked for Korda – quite possibly through her influence – was Cecil Beaton. He had avoided working in films, regarding film-makers as vulgar (although he adored movie stars). Korda’s initial approach to him confirmed this impression: ‘I want to buy you,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to be bought,’ Cecil objected, ‘and I’m terribly expensive.’ But bought he was, for a high price (just as well, since he needed the money badly), and produced exquisite designs for the 1948 film Anna Karenina, starring Vivien Leigh (Moura was an adviser on the film). Cecil eventually grew to like the man who had purchased him.12

  Korda liked Moura and enjoyed hearing her gossip. He gave her a job as his resident literary agent and script editor. She also did translations, but most importantly she was employed to keep Sir Alex happy.13 It was a little like her relationship with Gorky all over again, but without the requirement to manage his household and be his mistress. And also, of course, without the sense of being in the presence of a towering, mercurial literary genius and national hero. Although Korda gave her a desperately needed income and enabled her to enlarge her social world, it was a step down for Moura.

  But she made the best of it, as only she could. Korda’s nephew Micha
el was present at a drinks party at the Claridge’s suite in 1947, when he was thirteen. It was a typical affair, with film directors, actors and politicians – including Brendan Bracken, here despite the uncleanness of the host. (Moura spread a rumour that Bracken was Churchill’s illegitimate son.) Carol Reed was in attendance, and Vivien Leigh was expected to turn up (although her fragile emotional temperament made her unpredictable). Even in this company, when Moura arrived she managed to make herself the star. When the butler opened the door, she exploded into the room with a theatrical flourish and swept over to embrace Alex and his brother Vincent, engulfing each of them in one of the hungry bear hugs that were becoming her trademark. She wore what appeared, in the eyes of thirteen-year-old Michael, to be a floor-length black tent with a panel of gauze, and carried a beaded bag and a gold lorgnette. Her accent, which she had cultivated all her adult life, dripped with the flavour of Russia. ‘D-aaaah-ling,’ she said to the astonished Michael, dropping onto the chair next to him, ‘give me just a little v-oooh-dkah and a bite of caviar, just to restore an old lady who has had a terrible long taxi ride all the way from Kensington.’14 He complied, and watched as the ‘old lady’ drained the glass in one gulp and asked for another.

  All evening she made herself the focus of attention by feeding Korda’s addiction for gossip. Everybody else was drawn to her as well. Her gravelly accent, voluminous size and deep throaty laughter, gained through years of heavy smoking, made her an object of fascination rather than ridicule, and her acute intellect allowed her to hold the attention of the guests at every gathering.

  After dinner the company moved into the drawing room, where Moura joined the men, lit a big cigar for herself and listened to the conversation. After all, a dispenser of gossip must collect it too. Everything was of interest, but most of all politics, and she had a talent for teasing out indiscretions (as Duff Cooper had discovered). She never missed or forgot what was said, no matter how much vodka she had consumed.