The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  “She was one of the most accomplished women. She rode. She shot. She fished. She painted very well. She sculpted. She did beautiful needlework. She cooked marvelously. There was nothing she couldn’t do,” said Tony Pawson. Looking through album after album of photographs of life at La Fiorentina, with its unending parties, one doesn’t see an angry or worried face among the people pictured. Any age, any generation, eighteen to eighty, in and out of the house, and dogs everywhere. Although Lady Kenmare was thought of as a famous hostess, a word she greatly disliked, her lunch parties at La Fiorentina were often haphazard affairs, with unmatched guests. Celebrities such as Greta Garbo, Barbara Hutton, Claudette Colbert, Elsa Maxwell, and the Duke of Vedura came, but so did people no one had ever heard of. Guests would be thrown together—friends of Rory’s, friends of hers, the well known and the unknown, the young and the old, the inexperienced and the accomplished—with no care as to a balance of the sexes at her table. Enid was diligently unpunctual, arriving, vaguely, long after her guests had been seated, once prompting Daisy Fellowes to remark on her hostess’s absence, “Busy with her needle, no doubt.” Another guest remembered, “She had no sense of time whatsoever. She’d arrive when the meals were over, or be dressed for the casino, in evening dress and jewels, in the afternoon.” Tom Parr said, “She was an ethereal character, nice to us who were Rory’s friends, adorable even, but then she’d float off.” On one occasion, she was struck by the handsomeness of a young man sunning himself by her swimming pool. “Do please stay on for dinner,” she said. “But, Lady Kenmare, I’ve been staying with you for a week,” the young man replied.

  “Enid was completely original. Very elegant. Very distinguished. She always made an entrance, like an actress, carrying a flower,” said Jacqueline Delubac, a retired French actress who was once married to Sacha Guitry. She was always surrounded by dogs, “a mangy pack,” according to John Galliher of New York. Walter Beardshall remembers her entrances more vividly. “All her guests would already be seated. First you would hear the dogs barking. And then you would hear her voice saying, ‘Be quiet. Be quiet.’ Then you would hear her high heels clicking on the marble floor. And then the dogs would enter, sometimes twenty of them, miniature poodles, gray and black. And then she would come in, with a parrot on one shoulder and her hyrax on the other.” She fed her hyrax from her own fork; although at the cinema she would sometimes pull lettuce leaves from her bosom to feed it. Many people mistook the hyrax for a rat. It is a small ungulate mammal characterized by a thickset body with short legs and ears and rudimentary tail, feet with soft pads and broad nails, and teeth of which the molars resemble those of a rhinoceros and the incisors those of rodents. She taught the hyrax to pee in the toilet, standing straight up on the seat, and sometimes she let her guests peek at it through the bathroom window, keeping out of sight, since the hyrax was very shy. She trained her parrot to speak exactly like her. When the telephone rang, the parrot would call out, “Pat, the telephone,” so that Enid’s daughter, Pat, would answer it.

  The fashion arbiter Eleanor Lambert often stayed with Rosita and Norman Winston in the Clos on Enid’s property. She said that Lady Kenmare never seemed to sleep. She remembered looking out of her window during the night and seeing her walking through her garden dressed in flowing white garments, with the hyrax on her shoulder. “She looked like the woman in white from Wilkie Collins’s book,” Eleanor Lambert said.

  “Enid was never social, really,” said Elvira de la Fuente. “You could ask her to sit next to a prince or a waiter, and it never mattered to her.” Indeed, the girl from Australia never went grand in the grand life she espoused and kept marrying into. She remained fiercely loyal to her Australian family back home, at one time investing money in the failing wine business even though her lawyers advised her not to. “They are my family,” she said to them, according to Beardshall, who traveled to Australia with her. Along the way in her rise, she lost her Australian accent. Tony Pawson said she had “an accent you couldn’t quite define, Americanized but not really American.” James Douglas, who used to escort Barbara Hutton to La Fiorentina, said, “There was no trace of Australian at all, but sometimes her sister came from Australia to visit her, and then you could hear the way she once had talked.” However, she did acquire irregularities of speech that were unique for a woman in her position at that time. According to Walter Beardshall, she used certain four-letter words before people started printing those words in books. He remembered a time when the Countess of Drogheda asked her, “What was Kenmare’s first name, Enid?” Enid replied, “Fucked if I know. I was only married to him nine months before he died.”

  Some people say that Enid thought she would marry Somerset Maugham after Lord Kenmare’s death, but more people scoff at this. “Nonsense!” said David Herbert. Tony Pawson agreed. “I don’t believe she ever wanted to marry Willie Maugham. Unless it was for the money. Willie wasn’t interested in ladies, you know.” Jimmy Douglas said, “It’s too ridiculous. What about Alan Searle [Maugham’s longtime companion], for God’s sake?” And Elvira de la Fuente said, “Enid had no friends, really, except Willie Maugham. She adored him. She and Maugham were a funny couple. They were intimate because of bridge. They played all the time. He was already old and grumpy at the time. It was companionship and affection, but there was no thought of romance.”

  At one time, friends say, Enid, who kept a residence in Monte Carlo and was a citizen of Monaco, harbored a desire for her daughter to marry Prince Rainier and become Her Serene Highness, the Princess of Monaco, but the prince showed no romantic inclinations toward Pat, nor did Pat toward the prince. Pat preferred dogs and horses, and was not cut out for princess life, or even society life on the Riviera, and soon decamped to Kenya and Cape Town to breed horses. Bearing no grudge toward the prince, Enid happily attended his wedding to Grace Kelly. As the tall, statuesque Lady Kenmare emerged from the cathedral at the end of the service, she was cheered by the crowds, who mistook her for a visiting monarch.

  “Before anything else, Enid was a mother,” said Yves Vidal of Paris and Tangier, who was a frequent visitor at the villa. “Most of the things she did, marrying all those men, were for the children more than herself.” “She never never did what family people do—criticize and mumble about her children,” said Elvira de la Fuente. Walter Beardshall said she tried to keep her drug taking from her children. “Once, Pat found one of her syringes. ‘What’s this, Mummy?’ she asked. ‘Oh, it’s Walter’s,’ Lady Kenmare replied. ‘He leaves his stuff all over the place. Get it out of here, Walter. Take it to your own room.’ ”

  But it was with Rory, her older son, that she was the closest. “I always thought Rory was in love with Enid,” said a London lady. “At Emerald Cunard’s parties, they used to come in together, covered in rings and not speaking.” Certainly they had an extremely close mother-son relationship. “It was really Rory’s life that Enid came to lead, after all the marriages,” said Elvira de la Fuente. “He used to say to her as a joke, ‘Now you’ll never find a fifth husband after you’ve killed four of them.’ They lived as a couple, but it wasn’t incestuous. Rory told Enid he was a homosexual when he was forty. She had never suspected. It was a terrible shock to her, but a shock she overcame in a day or two.” Yves Vidal said, “She didn’t really like social life. She was actually miscast in the grand life of a chatelaine and hostess of the Riviera.” Another guest said, “She was in a way a passenger at La Fiorentina. As she got older, people began to think of it as Rory’s house. This famous lady was always in the background. Sometimes she’d go for days without coming out of her bedroom.”

  The magnificent house, located on the finest property on the Riviera, commands the entrance to Beaulieu Bay. It was considered a strategic position during the war, and the Germans, who occupied the house, built extensive fortifications on their property against an Allied invasion. Near the end of the war they blew up the fortifications, destroying half of the house and most of the gardens. When the house was retu
rned to the family, Rory redesigned it in the Palladian style, and the interiors were decorated by him. As Enid Kenmare grew older, she developed curvature of the spine, and her once-perfect posture gave way to a bent-over condition. She began leasing the house. Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd occupied it for a time, and for years the American philanthropist Mary Lasker rented it during the peak months. The house is now owned by Harding and Mary Wells Lawrence, the former chairman of Braniff Airways and the founder of the advertising agency Wells, Rich, Greene. Mary Lawrence said, “When we bought La Fiorentina, there were no lights in the bathrooms. Lady Kenmare couldn’t bear to look at herself in the mirror anymore.”

  She moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where she bought a stud farm and raised racehorses. Her daughter, Pat, had preceded her there. For a while Enid employed Beryl Markham, the author of West with the Night, to train her horses, but the two women, who had known each other since Enid’s marriage to Lord Furness, were such strong personalities that their partnership did not work out. Pat had two lions she had brought up from the time they were cubs that had the run of the house. A New York friend of Pat’s who used to visit La Fiorentina every summer also visited the two women in Cape Town. She remembers seeing one of the lions drag an unperturbed Enid through the living room and out the French doors. “She was not remotely frightened, and later Pat told me, ‘It happens all the time.’ ”

  “Enid was mysterious,” said Yves Vidal. “I remember once watching her run down the steps of La Fiorentina followed by her dogs. She was so beautiful, and she knew she was very beautiful. Until the end, she kept a wonderful allure. What made her life and ruined her life at the same time was her beauty.”

  March 1991

  THE PASSION OF BARON THYSSEN

  It was a late-fall twilight on Lake Lugano. We were standing in the open window of an art-filled sitting room in the Villa Favorita, one of the loveliest houses in the world, looking out over the lake, listening to waves lap against the private dock below. Across the water the lights of Lugano, a city of 30,000 people and fifty banks in the Italian-speaking corner of Switzerland, were coming on. My companion in reverie, the Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, has been looking out at the same view for over fifty years, since his father, Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, bought the seventeenth-century villa from Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia in 1932. For those who need an introduction, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza is generally conceded to be one of the richest men in the world (“in the billions,” say some people, “in the high hundred millions,” according to others), as well as the possessor of one of the world’s largest private art collections, which is rivaled in size and magnificence only by that of the Queen of England. It was the art collection I was there to discuss, for the baron, now in his sixty-seventh year, has begun to have thoughts about mortality, and for the last five years the disposition of his collection has been uppermost in his mind.

  He is called Heini by those close to him, and that evening he was dressed in a dinner jacket and black tie, awaiting the arrival of guests for dinner. The Thyssen fortune, he was telling me, had been made originally in iron and steel in Germany. “My mother irons and my father steals,” he said, in the manner of a man who has told the same joke over and over. Early in life, his father had left Germany and moved to Hungary, where he had married into the nobility; thus the title baron and the addition of the hyphen and the name Bornemisza. The current baron’s older brother and two sisters were born in Hungary, but the Thyssen-Bornemisza family fled to Holland when the Communist leader of Hungary, Béla Kun, sentenced the children’s father to death for being a landowner. Heini Thyssen was born in Holland and spent the first nineteen years of his life there.

  The baron’s attention was distracted from his story by the arrival at the dock below of a flag-bedecked lake boat bringing his guests, thirty-one formally attired members of the Board of Trustees and the Trustees’ Council of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., who were on a two-week tour of Swiss and Italian churches, museums, and private collections, headed by the gallery’s director, J. Carter Brown. Among the members of this art-loving group were the Perry Basses of Fort Worth, the Alexander Mellon Laughlins and the Thomas Mellon Evanses of New York, and the Robert Erburus of Los Angeles.

  “But it’s too early,” said the baron, looking down. “They’ve come too early. The baroness is not ready to receive them.” And then he added, to no one in particular, “Send them away.” He had his gun-toting American bodyguard tell the driver of the boat to spin the distinguished guests around the lake for half an hour and then come back. As we watched the drama from upstairs, we could hear Carter Brown call out, “Ladies and gentlemen,” and then explain to his group that they were not to get off the boat yet but would instead take another short ride. This announcement apparently created some discord, because people began to get off anyway. The baron shrugged, sighed, smiled, and went down to greet them. Drinks were served on an outdoor loggia overlooking the lake. A night chill had set in, and the ladies hugged fur jackets and cashmere shawls over their short black dinner dresses and pearls. For some time the Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza did not appear.

  Tita Thyssen, a former Miss Barcelona and later Miss Spain, picked by a jury that included the American-born Countess of Romanoes and the great bullfighter Luis Dominguín, is the baron’s fifth and presumably last baroness and, if all goes according to plan, his first and last duchess, for the on-dit in swell circles is that the King of Spain is prepared to confer on her the title of duchess when the Thyssen collection, or at least 700 of the A and B pictures in the 1,400-picture collection, goes to Spain permanently. That “permanently” is the catch.

  “Where is she?” one wife asked, meaning their hostess.

  “We heard she’s not coming at all,” said the lady to whom she spoke.

  “I heard that too,” said the first lady, and they exchanged “Miss Barcelona” looks.

  But then the baroness did appear, the last arrival at her own party, although she was only coming from upstairs. She was stunning, blond, tanned from the sun, dressed in a long black strapless evening gown. “Balmain,” I heard her say to someone. She has the persona of a film star and understands perfectly the technique of making an entrance. In an instant she was the center of attention, and earlier opinions of her were soon favorably revised. Like all the baron’s wives, his fifth baroness is the possessor of some very serious jewelry. On her engagement-ring finger was a large marquise diamond that had once belonged to the baron’s second wife, the ill-fated Nina Dyer, who married the baron at the age of seventeen and divorced him at the age of twenty-five to marry Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the half-brother of the late Aly Khan and the uncle of the current Aga Khan. Indifferent to gender when it came to love partners, Nina also dallied with a succession of ladies, who called her Oliver and vied with her husbands when it came to showering her with jewels. One of her most ardent admirers, an international film actress, gave her a panther bracelet designed by Cartier with an inscription in French which read, “To my panther, untamed by man.” Before she was forty, Nina committed suicide. “She’d just had it,” was the explanation someone who knew her gave me. Her jewelry, according to the baron, was stolen by her friends at the time of her death. Years later, he saw a picture of the marquise-diamond ring in an auction catalog. Although it had no listed provenance, he recognized it as the diamond he had given Nina years before, and bought it back for his fifth wife for $1.5 million.

  The baroness was wearing diamond-and-ruby earrings, and around her neck, hanging on a diamond necklace designed to accommodate it, was the Star of Peace, which she had told me earlier in the day was the “biggest flawless diamond in the world.” I explained to one of the guests who gasped at its size that it was 167 carats. The baroness heard me say it. “One hundred and sixty-nine,” she corrected me, and then, hearing herself, she roared with laughter.

  Tita Thyssen speaks in a husky, international voice, often changing langua
ges from sentence to sentence. She is fun, funny, and flirtatious, with a nature that is best described as vivacious. She is refreshingly outspoken, and makes no bones, for example, about her dislike of her immediate predecessor, the former Denise Shorto of Brazil, whose divorce from the baron was extremely acrimonious, resulting in a settlement rumored to be in the neighborhood of $50 million, in addition to jewels worth $80 million. At one point in the proceedings Denise Thyssen was briefly jailed in Liechtenstein for leaving Switzerland with unpaid bills in excess of $1.5 million, and the baron accused her of failing to return certain jewelry and other items belonging to his family. Ultimately, Denise was allowed to keep all the jewels, on the ground that they were gifts made to her during her marriage, not Thyssen heirlooms. “A gift is a gift,” she was quoted as saying. We are talking here about very, very, very rich people. Now in her late forties, Denise Thyssen lives in Rome with Prince Mariano Hugo zu Windisch-Graetz, who is in his mid-thirties, and their liaison is not smiled upon by the Prince’s family. She refused to be interviewed for this article with the pointed comment that “Heini’s present wife is very publicity-minded. This article belongs to her. I don’t see my place in it.”

  “I believe in destiny,” Tita Thyssen said, discussing the Star of Peace. “This stone proves to me that destiny is always there. I first saw it in the rough, before it was cut, in the Geneva office of Harry Winston, before I met Heini. They left me alone with it and let me play with it. They told me they were thinking of doing an adventure with somebody and cutting it. The person involved turned out to be Heini, but I did not know him yet. I talked with the store from time to time, and three times it was almost sold. Then Heini gave it to me.”

  Among the guests that evening was her friend and jeweler, Fred Horowitz, who used to be with Harry Winston and is now an independent jeweler with offices in Geneva and Monte Carlo. It was through Horowitz that the baroness met Heini Thyssen. She was staying with him and his then wife, Donatella, who is now married to the Mercedes-Benz heir Mick Flick, on their boat in Sardinia. “It was time for me to go back to my house on the Costa Brava, but my friends begged me to stay one more day, and I did,” said the baroness. The next day Horowitz took her to a party on Heini Thyssen’s yacht. “The look he gave me when we met, now that I know him better, is the look he gets when he sees a painting that he knows he is going to buy. He knew he was going to get it.” Then she added, “Only I’m more expensive than a painting, and you don’t have to change the frame with me.” Her husband listened to her story, amused.