Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  Lord Louis Mountbatten went on to a distinguished naval career, ironically serving as the captain commanding the destroyer squadron that rescued the Duke and Duchess of Windsor from Nazi Europe after the fall of France.

  Renowned as an inventor, innovator, and military reformer, Mountbatten was eventually promoted to Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia, and won the noble title Earl Mountbatten of Burma. After World War II, he achieved a lifelong ambition by attaining his father’s old job of First Sea Lord, and subsequently became Chief of the Defence Staff.

  His greatest recognition came as postwar Viceroy of India, when he oversaw the independence of the colonial subcontinent and its partition into the separate countries of India and Pakistan. Though millions of Hindus and Moslems were killed in the violence that accompanied partition, many credit him with averting an even worse disaster.

  Prince Edward had been the best man at his wedding, but Mountbatten remained somewhat distant from his royal cousin after the abdication. He became a favorite of the rest of the royal family and, after George VI’s death in 1952, served as its patriarch. After Edward’s death in 1972, it was Mountbatten who represented the royal family in making a visit to France to secure the crown property of Edward’s still in Wallis’s possession.

  Lord Mountbatten was assassinated in 1979, when Irish Republican fanatics blew up his fishing craft off the coast of Ireland, killing also a grandmother and young boy who were aboard.

  Lady Edwina, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, suffered a fate common to many of her hedonistic bent. Her beauty vanished by the time she turned forty in 1941. Though she did not completely abandon the bright society of which she had been such a luminescent member, she devoted most of her subsequent life to good works, throwing herself into and assuming command of a number of wartime and postwar relief, medical, and welfare efforts.

  A friend of Indian intellectual Krishna Menon before the war, as Vicrene of India she, and her husband Dickie, became an intimate of Hindu leader Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. There is considerable debate as to whether their intimacy included that of a sexual nature, but they were beholden to each other for the rest of her life. She died in 1960 on a charity mission to North Borneo, formerly part of the Dutch East Indies, of exhaustion and heart failure at the age of fifty-nine.

  Duff Cooper was made minister of war the year following the Wilhelmina disaster, and he resigned in 1938 to protest Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” Munich pact with Hitler, which gave the German dictator a free hand with Czechoslovakia and encouraged him to launch the attack on Poland that resulted in World War II. Duff and his wife, Diana, subsequently toured the United States to enlist American support for the struggle in Europe. He was made Viscount Norwich and ended his official public career as ambassador to France. His ambassadorship was stormy, at one point marked by a nasty feud with the misanthropic author Evelyn Waugh. On one evening, after Waugh had chanced to make some typically vicious remarks about Lord Louis Mountbatten, Duff ordered the writer from his house, saying: “How dare a common little man like you who happens to have written one or two moderately amusing novels, criticize that great patriot and gentleman? Leave my house at once!”

  A number of Waugh’s books featured characters based on Lady Diana.

  Duff died in Diana’s arms of internal hemmorhaging aggravated by his alcoholism on the cruise ship Columbie in 1950. It was crossing the Atlantic bound for Jamaica. He was sixty years old.

  As a widow, Lady Diana Cooper returned to England to resume an approximation of the glamorous life she had lived since childhood, finding herself in late age as abused by mashers as she had been in youth. On one occasion a drunken Charlie Chaplin pinched her knee black and blue and demanded kisses, which she refused. She remained close friends with Noel Coward and other well-known celebrities into old age, when most of them had died and she had resigned herself largely to a life lived in bed.

  A centerpiece of works by Waugh, Coward, and other famous writers of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, she lived to see herself lampooned in a 1986 novel by one-time acquaintance Brooke Astor entitled The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree. She died that year at the age of ninety-three.

  Lady Emerald Cunard suffered financial reverses and was ultimately compelled to abandon her grand house and take up residence in a suite in a fashionable London hotel, though she continued to entertain and maintain something of a salon. She was never able to achieve a reconciliation with her daughter, Nancy, though on one occasion during World War II, when Nancy was living in England, Lady Emerald’s car inadvertently nearly ran Nancy down in a London street.

  In March 1948 Chips Channon noted in his diary: “Dined with Emerald Cunard who, as she was suffering acutely from bronchitis, looked about 100.” Lady Emerald was subsequently diagnosed as suffering from throat cancer. Nancy, then residing in France again, was urged by Lady Diana Cooper to visit her mother before she died and noted her mother had made it known she desperately wanted such a meeting. “Her Ladyship?” Nancy replied. “You must be mad—oh no, quite out of the question.”

  Lady Emerald died that July. She left what remained of her fortune divided in three equal parts to Nancy, Lady Diana Cooper, and a longtime friend, Sir Robert Adby.

  Nancy refused even to attend the bizarre funeral ceremony in which Lady Emerald’s ashes were scattered in Grosvenor Square.

  Later, Diana Cooper informed Chips Channon that nearly all of the jewels in Emerald’s possession at the time of her death were false and that she had died relatively poor.

  Though Jamieson Spencer spent much time in London during the war years, he and Channon never met again. Spencer followed his former friend’s career in the newspapers.

  Channon was given a minor government post in the foreign ministry and undertook a wartime mission to Yugoslavia to visit his longtime friend, Prince Paul, to try to persuade him to keep his country on the side of the allies, but the German occupation rendered that effort moot. Channon was able to avoid what his diaries indicate he feared greatly—military service.

  He often told friends “I want to be a peer,” but he ended his public career with nothing more than a knighthood.

  Unrelenting in his passion for rich food and drink throughout his life, Channon fell into ill health and died at the age of sixty-one in 1958.

  Lady Diana wrote of him, “Never was there a surer or more enlivening friend … He installed the mighty in his gilded chairs and exalted the humble. He made the old and tired, the young and strong, shine beneath his thousand lighted candles. Without stint he gave of his riches and of his compassion.”

  Channon wrote of himself: “I adored my fat, beautiful grandmother, who was such a liar, and so charming and vain and silly and amorous—like me.”

  Chips’s son, Paul, assumed the family Southend parliamentary seat and ultimately became a very popular and successful Secretary of State for Trade.

  Channon’s granddaughter, Olivia, died at age twenty-two from an apparent drug overdose and vodka binge during graduation partying at Oxford University in 1986.

  Major Edward “Fruity” Metcalfe became probably Edward’s closest friend in the days and years after abdication, often the duke’s only companion. But he was ill treated. Agreeing to be the duke’s unpaid aide-de-camp when Edward attempted to perform some contributory role in the defense of France in 1940, Metcalfe awoke one morning in May to find himself abandoned without notice by Edward as the duke fled for the south and the Germans swiftly approached. Metcalfe was also left with the duke’s hotel bill.

  Living out his life as a typical British gentleman and clubman, Metcalfe maintained his friendship long after the two had ceased to be companions. An American relative of Metcalfe’s wife remarked in 1986 on how shabbily the major had been treated by the duke in later years, and on how Metcalfe still refused to speak ill of him.

  Peregrine Cust, sixth Lord Brownlow, continued to support Edward after the latter became king, at o
ne point interceding on Edward’s behalf with the Archbishop of Canterbury, but without success. Lord Brownlow’s highly popular wife, Kitty, an intimate of the future King George VI and his wife, was among the first in British society to warn of Edward’s likely abdication.

  Brownlow remained closely associated with the British court until his death in 1978 at the age of seventy-nine.

  Captain Hendrik van der Heyden was admitted to New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital for treatment of a serious infection in both of his hands from burns and shortly afterward announced his retirement from the Lage Lander Line. He, his wife, her brother, and his wife later made a driving tour of the United States. Finding themselves quite taken with the American Southwest, they returned to New Mexico after he settled his affairs in Holland and settled near Santa Fe, where he wrote a book about seafaring in the East Indies. He died at the age of eighty-seven in 1959.

  Ludwig van Groot, the Wilhelmina’s first officer, was deprived of his master’s certificate by a Dutch maritime court after an inquiry into the sinking of the liner as it was being towed to repair docks in Brooklyn. He subsequently became a dockmaster in Nieuw Amsterdam. He was killed at the age of fifty-one while visiting his brother in Rotterdam during the famous surprise German bombing raid on the city in 1940.

  Kees Witte moved to Ostend after the Lage Lander Line went bankrupt in 1936, first taking work as an officer on an Ostend-to-England ferry and ultimately becoming first officer of the Belgian liner Libre in 1939. With the outbreak of war, he joined the Dutch navy, serving with Dutch elements of the British Royal Navy after Holland’s fall and eventually attaining the rank of commander. Driven to alcoholism by his war experiences, which included having two ships sunk beneath him, his maritime career never prospered and he died in the sinking of a tramp steamer in the Java Sea in 1961 at the age of fifty.

  The Soviet Union refused to accept Olga Maretzka’s remains once her body was recovered from the Hudson River and she was buried in a pauper’s grave on Staten Island, within view of the Statue of Liberty. In the notorious purges ordered by Stalin in 1938, eleven of those in her section of the OGPU were sent to labor camps and five were shot.

  Though she was never fully accepted by the American Negro community—and was viewed by some American black leaders as a reckless dilettante whose support would hurt their cause—Nancy Cunard covered the Spanish Civil War with great distinction for a large number of Negro newspapers and had many of her dispatches picked up by white newspapers with a leftist or liberal political bent.

  After the Spanish conflict and the outbreak of full-scale war in Europe, she returned to England and became an active communist and advocate of alliance with Soviet Russia. Later she returned to France.

  In 1948 the right-wing Paris journal Le Bataille published an article beneath the headline “Too Revolutionary to be a Communist, the Rich Heiress has Refused Millions and Nancy Cunard Lives by her Pen in a French Village.”

  In March, 1965, Nancy Cunard, raving and swearing, was taken by long-suffering friends to a Paris hospital when it appeared she was so ill she could scarcely stand. Demanding red wine, which she was not given, she died in an oxygen tent in a public ward in March 1965 at the age of seventy. She had also asked for and was given writing materials. She started writing a last poem, but never finished.

  Henry Crowder, who had briefly been among the more glamorous jazz figures in Paris, returned for good to the United States and by the early 1950s had taken a job with the government as a mail clerk.

  “I am a clerk,” he wrote Nancy Cunard in 1954. “I handle all outgoing mail of the Coast Guard headquarters. The job is pleasant and the hours of work agreeable … And as for music I believe I am now a better pianist than I have ever been in my life. I devote a great deal of time to the piano, and singing. I am not happy, and I am not sad.”

  By the next year he was dead.

  Author and aviator Beryl Markham had said of Alice Silverthorne de Janzé de Trafford: “Loneliness fixed Alice; everyone is frightened of her.”

  In 1938 Alice was divorced by her last husband. In 1941 her last great love, Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was murdered in his car on a dirt road outside Nairobi. She herself underwent surgery for cancer of the womb. While recovering, she wrote letters to friends. “I simply can’t write again, and there is nothing more to say,” she wrote to one. She thanked another for her “sweet” note, but then said, “Life is no longer living when you no longer care whether you are wanted or not.”

  One day in 1941 she put clean linen on her bed, set fresh flowers about the room, then took a fatal dose of sleeping pills and lay down.

  One of the many notes she left said “By the time you read this, I’ll have done it again. This time, I hope successfully.” In another, she asked that her friends hold a cocktail party in her honor. She was forty-one.

  She left no note for C. Jamieson Spencer.

  Charles A. Lindbergh continued to pass on German military secrets and other information to the United States military, but his many public speeches urging America to stay out of Europe’s conflicts enraged President Franklin Roosevelt. When Lindbergh sought a return to active duty after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt refused him. Lindbergh’s role was limited to that of a civilian “tech rep” advising American pilots on the use and performance of combat aircraft. While “testing” P-38 Lightning fighters in forward areas of the Pacific, however, Lindbergh was confirmed to have shot down at least two Japanese planes. President Eisenhower promoted him to brigadier general in 1953.

  Having pioneered in the 1930s many of the international air routes used by jetliners today, Lindbergh continued to work as an aviation advisor after the war. But he also devoted himself to conservation causes and was credited with developing many advances in engineering and science, including rocketry. He turned to writing, as well, winning the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1954 for his book The Spirit of St. Louis. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, also became an acclaimed author and poet.

  Lindbergh died in his beloved Hawaii in 1974 at the age of seventy-two. He is buried there in a gravesite he designed himself.

  Chasey Chatham Parker married three more times, twice to American socialites and once to an Austrian prince who was said to have gone through much of her fortune by the time she divorced him in 1954. She corresponded with Jamieson Spencer during the war. In the early 1950s, when he was living in New York, she had a brief affair with him. He was by then married himself, and the affair ended when his wife threatened divorce.

  Anorexic and addicted to alcohol and barbiturates, Mrs. Parker died in Philadelphia in 1973 at the age of sixty-two. Her obituary described her as one of the pillars of Philadelphia society noted for her contributions to charity and the arts.

  Nora Gwynne made fourteen more motion pictures, but her career faded during the war years and by the 1950s she was living in relative obscurity in Carmel, California, as the wife of a San Francisco shipping magnate and film company owner. She made a brief comeback in the early days of television hosting an interview show in San Francisco, but it was canceled after two seasons.

  After her husband died in 1970, she moved back to Southern California and appeared in cameo roles in several television productions, including one on the series “Love Boat.”

  C. Jamieson Spencer became a successful broadcast journalist, serving as a counterpart to Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid in England during the early years of World War II. He accompanied the second wave of American forces landing on Utah Beach in the Normandy invasion in June 1944 and travelled with the advancing American troops across France. He reported the ultimate German capitulation in 1945 and covered the postwar Nuremburg war crimes trials.

  Switching to ABC after the war, Spencer moved to New York and served in management positions with the network until its merger with Paramount Theaters in 1953, when he and many other original network executives were fired. He then worked in advertising and public relations, residing in New
York’s Westchester County, but financial reverses and recurrent unemployment forced him to move in 1960.

  He married the former Ann Lambreth of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1950 and was divorced by her in 1963.

  Spencer attempted to write a book about his wartime experiences but it was never finished. The New Yorker magazine published a poem of his about Whitney Ransom de Mornay in 1957.

  Whitney de Mornay continued her affair with Jamieson Spencer until December 1941, when he was compelled to leave Paris for England after Germany declared war on the United States. They were never to meet again.

  In the late 1930s Madame de Mornay achieved a significant success in the Paris fashion world, but her career was cut short by the war. Her husband Charles, who was Jewish, was interned by the Nazi authorities occupying France in 1940 and ultimately sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died in 1944, at about the same time Jamieson Spencer entered Paris with Free French forces in advance of the main American armies.

  Madame de Mornay was spared Nazi persecution, however, by coming under the protection of a Luftwaffe general assigned to the Paris area, the Count Martin von Bourke und Kresse. He’d been introduced to Whitney by Jamieson Spencer in July 1940. One of the gowns designed by Madame de Mornay in 1939 hangs in the museum of the French Institute of Design.

  Count von Kresse underwent corrective surgery on his back and leg in 1937, which, though only partially successful, allowed him to return to active duty as a Luftwaffe officer in command of a Heinkel bomber wing and later as an aide to Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering. Military historians credit von Kresse with helping to persuade Goering to switch from bombing Royal Air Force fighter bases and radar facilities to military targets in England’s major cities, a move that enabled the English to win the famed Battle of Britain and buy time to rebuild their air force, eventually establishing air superiority over their own territory and ultimately western Europe.