The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

by Clare Mulley

  Perhaps Christine saw these examples as a challenge. Early every morning before breakfast, the girls had to attend mass. Almost all of them saw this as an ordeal. One dark winter morning Christine decided to test the priest’s faith by setting light to his cassock. This was fairly easy to achieve as all the girls carried candles at mass. Would he stop his catechism, she wondered, or would he be saintly and keep going? Realizing – with unwarranted surprise – that he was on fire, she quickly helped to beat out the flames. The priest chose to be kind about the incident, even laughing with her about it. The Mother Superior, however, was not amused. Christine was expelled for unruly behaviour.17

  She continued her education at a series of prestigious schools that included the Sacré Coeur at Lwów, in eastern Poland, eventually learning the useful ability to conceal her true feelings, and applying herself sufficiently to leave the system with some dignity when she was eighteen. She never considered submitting herself to any kind of further education, however. For her, real life was at Trzepnica, with or without her increasingly serious and silent older brother, or with her father in Warsaw. As she grew older, Jerzy began to take her to the opera. Once, when she was sixteen, she made him laugh when, after watching Carmen, she scrawled rather precociously across her programme, ‘Love, it’s blood, always blood’.18 That same summer, on a family outing to pick mushrooms, she worried her mother by writing in the dusty path with a stick, ‘I am waiting for you’. When Stefania asked to whom she was referring, Christine replied she hadn’t met him yet, but she was quite sure that the future held adventures.19

  While Christine was moving from school to school, spending the holidays either at home or staying with her young Skarbek cousins, whom she dressed up as soldiers and enthralled with ‘fascinating little stories’, mostly about the horses at Trzepnica, Jerzy Skarbek continued to enjoy a lavish lifestyle, and invest in his stud. But the depression that followed the First World War not only made the farm at Trzepnica unprofitable, it also eroded the Goldfeder fortune. In 1926, when Christine was eighteen, the family bank went under and her parents were forced to auction first their furniture, including the Zelazowa Wola rosewood table, then the great oaks in the park, which broke Christine’s heart, and finally the land, farms and house itself, all at a considerable loss. Being forced to leave Trzepnica was Christine’s first, and perhaps bitterest, experience of exile. By the time that so many other families were uprooted from their ancestral estates during the Second World War, she had already, to some extent, been acclimatized to such upheavals. For her, that later invasion of her country would be an assault on her childhood memory of a perfect Poland, an idealized picture of oak trees, servants and stables – and of freedom, that in her heart she knew was already lost to her.

  Three years later, Christine, now twenty-one, joined her mother and brother in a small apartment in Warsaw, closely hung with the family portraits.* Jerzy abandoned his wife and retreated to a series of health spas, treating his losses as a temporary inconvenience and openly living with another woman.† By now even Christine had to accept that her once beloved father had slowly descended into little more than an ‘anti-Semitic drunk’, a pathetic figure without the strength of character to sustain him through the disgrace of the forced sale of Trzepnica.20 As a child she had adored him; now there was little left to admire. Another great oak had been felled, and try as she might Christine would never be able to replace it. Jerzy spent the next few years at Baden near Vienna where, ‘after long and severe suffering’, he died of tuberculosis in December 1930.21 In death as in life, despite his reversal of fortune, no expense was spared for his comfort, and his body was returned to Poland to be buried in the family plot in Warsaw’s famous Powązki Cemetery.

  Christine’s education had left her qualified for little other than being a good society wife. Her family’s impoverishment, combined with her Jewish roots, now considerably reduced her chances of making a good marriage. But Christine was defiant, determined, wilfully independent and, though not classically beautiful, very aware of how far her handsome looks, charm and sheer force of personality could take her. The future was a challenge, and that was perhaps its greatest appeal.

  2: TWO WEDDINGS AND A WAR

  The snow fell softly on Poland’s plains and pine forests in the long autumn and winter of 1929, creating the annual hush that was broken only by the muted sounds of hoofs, sleighs and church bells. But Warsaw was immune to the silence. Although the snow fell in the broad streets of the capital, great nets and street sweepers prevented the residents from being snowed into their apartments, and the church bells here competed with more insistent tram-bells, the screeching of wheels, and electric motors. Horse-drawn carriages clattered down the cobbled streets, and there were cars too, mostly luxury models, adding their own distinctly modern noises. As the evenings drew in, lamplighters would come ever earlier to light the street lamps. The summer’s soda-water sellers had given way to vendors carrying trays of hot dumplings and roasted chestnuts, the balloons that hung from their poles lending some colour to the streets. Even in winter the city was still full of hawkers, barrel organs with shivering monkeys, kitchen-door callers, and elderly men registered as messengers with the city authorities, displaying their permit numbers on dark red-visored caps, who were willing to take on all types of tasks from delivering flowers or love letters to collecting parcels or buying theatre tickets.1

  Christine was twenty-one years old, and ready for Warsaw’s winter season. Being a Skarbek, she was invited to all the society parties, like those at the Wilanów Palace, where balls always started with a polonaise, debutantes wore floor-length white dresses, and all the ladies would be gloved. But for Christine, these evenings were often uncomfortable, as she was well aware that the older women were gossiping behind their fans about her family’s recent misfortune and her Jewish blood. She soon preferred spending her evenings in Warsaw’s cinemas, smoky restaurants, pavement bars and poets’ cafés, places called Piccadilly, Picador and, more tellingly, Oasis, Bacchus and Mirage. Polish society dictated that ladies should be chaperoned in such places, but Christine – shockingly – chose to go alone or accompanied by a variety of young men. Her long hair was soon briskly bobbed and set in precise waves to frame her heart-shaped face. Her lips were painted, and above her dark almond eyes her brows were plucked and brushed into pencil-thin strokes. Her high cheekbones and strong features carried the style remarkably well: at once modern, boyish above her slender frame, and yet sexy, it was a look that could have been tailor-made for her.

  Life in Poland was changing, and where success had once been measured in immutability, it was now marked in the pace of transformation. The old Polish order, dressed in stiff collars, frockcoats and patent-leather shoes, was giving way to a new, more relaxed, generation, arriving at the theatre on bicycle rather than by horse-drawn cab, skiing, and taking tennis with their house parties. As women’s knees appeared from under their skirts, men’s faces also braved the new dawn, clean-shaven after generations of beards. And yet certain manners and social etiquettes were maintained. At large social gatherings men could be seen planting one kiss after another as the ladies remained seated in rows, the backs of their hands raised expectantly. The great Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, who was only four years older than Christine and moved in the same circles, remembered a rowdy friend once ‘sprawling on the sofa’ with her and her friends at one such house party, before teasing them with a twinkle in his eye, ‘You are not really fit for anything. It is not clear what you should be used for … we could tie you to the end of a rope for when furniture’s being hoisted to an upper floor … or perhaps you ought to be planted, like a radish.’ Sadly Gombrowicz did not record Christine’s reaction to this banter, but it is unlikely that she found his friend as ‘charming’ and ‘entrancing’ as he did.2

  While still enjoying her new-found freedom, but determined not to be a burden to her mother, Christine took an office job at the capital’s impressive Fiat dealership –
a workplace that could hardly have been better chosen for meeting wealthy young men hoping to pick up a status symbol. Still, spending days being nice to potential clients and watching the city’s street life through the huge display windows would have been dull for any girl who loved to be in the middle of the action, let alone a snobbish member of the once landed gentry with no experience of earning her living. What made it considerably worse was that Christine was slowly being poisoned by the exhaust fumes that rose up from the garage below. They left a permanent shadow on her lungs along with a lifelong aversion to office admin.

  But it was at the Fiat offices that Christine first met Gustav Gettlich, a short but wealthy businessman of German origin, who was soon distracted from the Italian cars by the Polish receptionist. Four years older than Christine, Gustav was a very respectable director of a curtain company, who lived with his widowed mother. His father had been a Lieutenant Colonel and successful businessman from Pabianice, in central Poland. Gustav was now looking for the perfect ‘pani domu’, a wife who would be an elegant hostess, entertain his clients, cook his meals, and provide him with children. Then he met Christine, who, over a series of evenings watching Garbo films in smoky cinemas before dining in Warsaw’s finest restaurants, swept him off his sensible feet.

  Soon after they met, her doctors advised Christine to spend time at the fashionable skiing town of Zakopane, high in the Carpathian mountains, whose clear air might help offset the damage caused to her lungs in the Fiat offices. Zakopane was a popular rendezvous for the wealthier Polish intelligentsia and Gustav now regularly checked into the exclusive Hotel Bristol there, before joining Christine on her guesthouse veranda. There they would relax in deckchairs, wrapped up in furs to watch the sun set after a long day in the mountains on heavy wooden skis. Then they went on together to the resort’s many restaurants and bars, where they drank vodka and listened to live jazz late into the night. Christine’s guesthouse was run by nuns, for girls from good families, and she must have given them plenty to talk about as well-heeled young businessmen, officers and poets swarmed around her. She was ‘absolutely beautiful’, one writer recorded in his memoirs.3

  But the close-knit Zakopane scene was not as anonymous as the bars of Warsaw. Christine’s acquaintance Witold Gombrowicz later wrote – in rather patronizing terms – about ‘the unfortunate creatures’, as he called them, born of aristocratic marriages with Jews, who ‘were never fully accepted in the salons’. Christine was ‘a lovely young woman’, he wrote, but ‘in her presence Jewish topics were shunned … just as one never speaks of the gallows in the house of a hanged man’. One evening, when Gombrowicz and various young aristocrats had joined Christine on her Zakopane veranda, an older Jewish woman, ‘broad in the beam and rather garishly dressed,’ walked past. Seeing Christine she called out to her, ‘Krysia, Krysia!’ ‘The company was immobilized with fear’, Gombrowicz recalled. Ashamed of herself in more ways than one, Christine pretended not to hear until the woman shouted, ‘Krysia Skarbek!’ Sadly we don’t know if Christine overcame her social paralysis: Gombrowicz leaves her there, staring at the ground.4

  When Gustav and Christine got back to Warsaw, Gustav happily returned to soft furnishings. His business gave him all the stability and financial security he needed. When he was not at work he was out with Christine. If anything he was even more entranced by the apparent vulnerability he had seen beneath her usual show of confidence. She, though, was more unsettled than ever. To reassert some personal pride, in 1930 Christine entered the ‘Miss Polonia’ contest, which had been established the previous year. The prestige accorded to the competition, open only to unmarried ladies of ‘good conduct’ between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, was helped by the endorsement of the well-known poet and society figure Tadeusz ‘Boy’ Zelenski. Its popularity was guaranteed by extensive coverage in the Express Poranny (Morning Express) newspaper, whose readers were entitled to vote. The number of entries exceeded all expectations, with seventy candidates reaching the final gala. Christine sent in a glamorous photograph taken at one of the capital’s most fashionable photographic studios. In it her dark eyes challenge the viewer with a steady gaze, proud, knowing, and coolly seductive. Four weeks later she learned that she was on the shortlist. In the event a rival beat her to the crown, but Christine was declared a national ‘Star of Beauty’, which was quite enough to confirm her to Gustav as a thoroughly desirable catch.*

  Two months later their marriage banns were announced at their local churches. No objections were received, and Christine and Gustav were married on 21 April 1930 at the Spiritual Seminary Church of Warsaw. Christine signed the register ‘Marja Krystyna Skarbek’. Her brother Andrzej served as her witness.†5 It was not a large society wedding, but Christine wore an elegant white gown and carried the traditional bouquet of orange blossom with some satisfaction. Gustav was twenty-five, considerably shorter than her, infatuated, untitled but hugely wealthy. Christine was twenty-one, an aristocrat, albeit marginalized, officially beautiful, and rather relieved at how things had turned out.

  But while Christine now had the financial security that her mother, in particular, had been desperate to secure for her, Gustav was quickly realizing that his own prospects were not at all as he had imagined. Inexplicably to him, after their marriage Christine continued to prefer nightclubs to cooking, and showed no interest at all in starting a family. She was not, after all, an elegant society hostess-in-the-making; indeed, she was mostly absent. Over the next year, Gustav began to understand that though Christine’s compulsive desire for amusement stemmed from insecurity, it was not something he could change, and his infatuation began to cool. Christine, too, faced a bitter realization. The security that Gustav offered did not make her happy in the way she had thought it would. Her marriage had not restored the freedom of her childhood; it had brought new and unwanted obligations. Feeling unloved and increasingly ignored by her husband, whom she considered to be obsessed by his work, Christine spent more and more time in the picturesque mountains of Zakopane. She could already ski better than Gustav and most of her friends. Now she satisfied her need for excitement by dodging the border patrols to smuggle cigarettes across the frontier peaks into Poland, so coming to know a number of the mountain highlanders, or gorals, who would later set up the mountain soldiers’ unit during the war.

  In 1931 Christine was crowned ‘Miss Ski’ in a Zakopane version of the Miss Polonia contest. Perhaps sensing that the circle had closed, Gustav decided that they were incompatible and their marriage a mistake that needed to be rectified. They divorced in 1932, travelling to Wilno in Polish Lithuania where, having converted to Protestantism, they could obtain their legal freedom.6 Christine kept both her married surname of Gettlich and a postal savings account into which her former husband paid a monthly deposit. Although Gustav remarried in 1938 and enjoyed the respectable family life he craved, he never quite forgave Christine for not being the woman of his dreams. Over twenty years later, when pushed, he would describe Christine only as being ‘dotty, romantic and forever craving change’.7

  Christine’s brother, Andrzej, seemed to be having better luck. In 1930 he had married and, just as Christine’s divorce came through, he and his wife Irena gave Stefania some good news: on 3 August 1932 Irena gave birth to their daughter, Teresa Krystyna. As it is customary in Poland for a child’s second name to reflect their godparent, it seems likely that Andrzej invited Christine to act as his daughter’s godmother. If so it was not a role she undertook with any great enthusiasm; if anything her first experience of the ties and responsibilities of motherhood put her even more firmly off the idea of having children of her own.*

  Half-Jewish, impoverished and now divorced, Christine had little social status left to lose. In some ways this meant that she had more freedom than ever. With Gustav’s settlement to pay her rent and keep her in silk stockings, she moved to a small but central apartment and threw herself into Poland’s more bohemian scene.* Champagne-fuelled evenings were now spe
nt flirting with writers and artists across Warsaw and Zakopane. Christine was ‘exceptionally charming’, one young journalist remembered, but even to the party crowd it was obvious that she ‘was full of odd issues of self-esteem relating to her family’.8 Things came to a head when she fell passionately in love with a handsome, charming, well-born but equally impoverished bachelor called Adam. ‘Love will forgive you everything’ ran the theme tune of the Polish blockbuster film Spy in a Mask, released in 1933. It must have seemed a good soundtrack for Christine’s own life as she and Adam broke with convention yet again by publicly flaunting their romance. Reasoning that Christine made a perfectly good mistress, Adam’s worldly mother turned a blind eye to the affair, but when the relationship deepened she invited Christine round to meet her. Her words were as clear and scalding as the lemon tea she served: as a penniless divorcée Christine had no hope whatever of marrying her son. Despite her recent personal history Christine was stunned. It would be a difficult, rather character-building, few years before someone with an independent fortune and absolutely no regard for the social niceties would step into her life …

  * * *

  As a teenager, the well-born, brilliant and unpredictable Jerzy Mikolaj Ordon Giżycki had been put off school after witnessing a fellow student being shot and stabbed by Cossack guards after testing home-made bombs in the woods outside their town. Jerzy grew up to be a moody and temperamental young man, given to violent fits of rage. Prevented by his wealthy father from studying art in Paris, he flunked an engineering course and boarded a steamer for America. There, travelling from state to state, he found work as a cowboy, trapper, gold-prospector and chauffeur for J. D. Rockefeller, and, until his patience wore out, even aspired to be a Hollywood film extra. Although he had plenty of personal vanity, Jerzy did not have the onerous sense of family heritage that plagued Christine. At one point he happily sold his gold signet ring with its family crest to pay for a friend’s rail ticket. He was driven above all by his appetite for adventure and self-improvement.