Sheila

by Robert Wainwright

  But the young man belied his appearance. He had a highly developed social conscience and was horrified at the family reputation for being slumlords, selling off land cheaply to the newly formed Municipal Housing Authority to provide affordable housing. Despite this charitable move, Vincent still managed to double the value of the family business over the next 50 years. When he died in 1959, childless because of mumps, he willed the vast bulk of his fortune to a private foundation to “alleviate human misery”.

  But on this balmy night in 1926 Vincent, despite being married albeit unhappily, was only interested in Sheila Loughborough and began to shower her with attention—a “rush”, as her American hosts later told her.

  During the night someone began singing the production’s title song, No Foolin’, with substituted lyrics naming Sheila and Poppy:

  No foolin’, wedding bells are all bunk,

  Don’t get married, stay drunk, no foolin’,

  No foolin’ with dear little Pop,

  She’ll tell you to stop, no foolin’,

  No foolin’ with Lady Loughboro’,

  Or away from you she’ll go, no foolin’.

  Sheila may have been wary of Vincent’s eagerness but it didn’t stop her from staying for a week at his Long Island mansion, where his attentions continued. On the first morning, about 11 a.m., Vincent sent a male friend to her room: “Vincent has sent me to tell you that he is waiting for you to play tennis,” he announced after tapping on the door.

  “I am reading and will not be down for an hour,” Sheila replied.

  The man sounded shocked: “Did you hear what I said? Vincent is waiting for you to play tennis.”

  “Let him wait,” she replied, and kept on reading her book.

  In her memoir, she would recall: “Vincent continued to give me the ‘rush’. I was flattered and it was most entertaining but I liked to be asked, not told.”

  The arrival of the two women in California in early April immediately sparked great interest; they were greeted almost as visiting royalty by the Los Angeles Times, which sent a reporter to interview them in their suite at the Ambassador Hotel and published a lengthy interview.

  “We came to America primarily to visit Palm Beach,” Sheila told them. “It’s a beautiful place and has a wonderful climate, but we felt our American visit wouldn’t be complete unless we saw California. And now that we are here, we find it far more charming than Florida. The scenery here is lovely. Everybody has shown us utmost courtesy. And we like the American manner of speech so much. We are trying to learn it. Don’t you think we have made some progress?”

  She added: “One thing I like about Americans is their lack of reserve that makes it so hard for Britons to get acquainted. I don’t know why the British are so shy. I guess it is self-consciousness.”

  But Sheila had another reason to be in California. Tucked away in the bedroom desk drawer at her home in London was a plain linen white unsealed envelope. Inside was a small white card, embossed with the name of its sender—“RUDOLPH VALENTINO, Hollywood”—and scrawled on it was a short, hand-written message in green ink, which read: “Love and kisses from ‘the girl friend’.” The meaning of this cryptic message can only be guessed at, but whatever its purpose, the card was something she would keep among her most treasured possessions for the rest of her life.

  Valentino had just begun production of what would end up being his last movie. The Son of the Sheik, sequel to his 1922 film The Sheik, would be filmed mostly on the United Artists lot off the Santa Monica Boulevard; later they would shift to the Arizona desert for the outside shots. He invited Sheila to visit him on the set, something his agent, George Ullman, later remembered because she was the lone “non-film” guest he entertained among the legends of the silent screen. He later wrote:

  I think that Rudy had a better time during the filming of The Son of the Sheik than in any other of his pictures. He used to have his lunches brought down from home, and there gathered in the dining room of his suite at the studio Constance Talmadge, Ronald Colman, Vilma Banky, George Fitzmaurice, Alistair MacIntosh, Louella Parsons, Marion Davies, Lady Loughborough, Eugene Brewster, Corliss Palmer, and many others. All these I met at different times at Rudy’s famous luncheons. Brilliant conversation was the order of the day.

  Valentino also had a habit of entertaining small groups of people at his estate. Called “Falcon Lair”, it was a red-tiled Spanish villa built at the end of a winding dirt track at the head of Benedict Canyon, overlooking Beverly Hills. Valentino had bought the property the previous year, to have more space for his stable of Arabian horses and his dogs, and to house the trappings of his spectacular career. It also gave him the privacy he craved: in the years before the hills became dotted with the mansions of movie stars, his only neighbours were Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Valentino filled the house with antiques, particularly with medieval armour, which was his particular passion, and he had large petrol tanks installed, so he wouldn’t have to stop and fill one of his cars in public.

  A few nights after Sheila’s interview with the Los Angeles Times was published, Valentino invited her to dinner at Falcon Lair. It would be an intimate affair with a handful of guests, among them studio boss Joe Schenck and his screen-star wife Norma Talmadge, who would find fame not only as a popular actress but as the accidental originator of a Hollywood tradition when on one occasion she stepped into wet concrete in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

  Suddenly Pola Negri arrived unannounced at this small dinner party and the sparks began to fly. She was unaware that Sheila was in the United States, let alone at her lover’s house, and to discover Sheila standing next to Valentino at the front door, greeting guests as if she was the hostess, was almost unbearable. Rudy tried to make light of the moment with a casual introduction, but Pola was livid.

  “I was completely taken aback,” Pola would later recount. “Since his cable denying the rumours of their affair, I had forgotten all about her. And here she was in his house, her cool insolent expression seeming to mock me.”

  Norma Talmadge intervened, and took Pola aside to tell her that she needed to hide her emotions, because she was “too transparent”. But the lull was only temporary. Pola disappeared upstairs and entered Valentino’s bedroom, where she found there were two photographs on his dressing table. One was of her and the other was of Sheila.

  Adela Rogers St Johns, the celebrated scriptwriter and journalist, was another who had been invited that night and she described the ensuing scene as “fireworks”. The guests watched on as Pola slapped Valentino’s face and stormed off.

  Sheila remained unmoved throughout the ruckus and the dinner resumed: “Afterwards he danced the tango with me all evening. His girlfriend (whose name I cannot remember) was furious. She apparently smacked and scratched his face when the party was over and retired to bed for ten days, which suited me as it was the length of our stay. We saw him every day and I liked him enormously. He gave me his gold chain bracelet, which he always wore and about which I teased him. He said it was his luck. In the next few months the whole of my life changed for the better, and he died. I felt I had taken his luck.”

  Three weeks later—having been feted by society in New York, Palm Beach and Los Angeles for three months—Sheila and Poppy sailed for London, waved off by yet more media coverage of her trip: “Our cabins were full of flowers and farewell telegrams. I was sad to leave but longed to see Tony and Peter. I did not return to America for eleven years.”

  On August 15 Rudolph Valentino collapsed while staying at the Ambassador Hotel in New York. He died a week later, aged just thirty-one, from peritonitis. Despite Pola Negri’s claims that they were formally engaged, Valentino never confirmed this; she would make yet another scene at his funeral, where she collapsed dramatically. Nine months later she married another man.

  Despite his great fame, Valentino’s private life seemed to be in constant turmoil. His first marriage, to actress Jean Acker, ended on their wedding night w
hen, realising she was a lesbian and regretting her decision to marry, she locked him out of the bedroom. His second, to Natacha Rambova, ended bitterly and his relationship with Pola Negri was a series of dramatic scenes.

  In the years after his death, it was suggested that these relationships had been “lavender marriages”, intended to conceal his own sexuality, yet, in the months before his death, he had described his idea of the perfect marriage in terms that would indicate otherwise: “What I am dreaming of is to have a home where I could live in peace, with a loving wife who would not be wanting to play in film, and who would greet me, each evening, after work, with my children.”

  That description appeared to fit Sheila Loughborough, who arrived back at Southampton on May 4 just in time for her own marital drama.

  14

  “WEDDING BELLS ARE ALL BUNK”

  The Hotel Somerset in Orchard Street, Marylebone, was a discreet, boutique establishment with a handful of “apartments” and breakfast if required. With wrought-iron railings and pretty baskets of spring flowers, it was tucked away from the bustle of Oxford Street—far from the grandeur of Belgravia or the splendour of the Rosslyn estate.

  But it would be here in the first few days of summer 1926 that the fraught marriage of Sheila Chisholm and Francis Edward Scudamore St Clair-Erskine, Lord Loughborough, finally came to an end. The couple hadn’t lived together for more than two years and had clearly established separate lives, but the divorce laws of those times, which did not accept mutual consent, made it almost impossible to end matrimonial agony and allow both parties to move on with their lives.

  The grounds for divorce had been extended two years before, and now gave women equal rights against their husbands, but the options were still limited—adultery by one but not both parties, desertion for more than three years, cruelty, habitual drunkenness, insanity or imprisonment for life.

  Increasingly, couples were choosing the route of adultery, real or otherwise, but they always had to take great care to avoid the perils of perjury or being accused of “collusion to secure a divorce”. The popular solution was “hotel evidence”, in which the estranged husband and an uninvolved woman booked into a hotel for a weekend, usually in a seaside resort like Brighton. But far from hiding away, as an adulterous couple might, they would parade around publicly as husband and wife during their stay, even being seen in bed together by the chambermaid serving breakfast the next morning. When the case was called to court, the staff would often be called as witnesses, even though the adultery was fictitious. The stage and film actor Claude Rains was one who used the tactic in 1924, when he wanted a divorce from his wife Marie Hemingway.

  And Lord Loughborough, taking pity on his long-suffering wife, followed the same route. On June 18 a hand-delivered letter arrived for Sheila from Loughie, in which he had penned an apologetic means by which she could escape: “It is a long time since we lived happily together and I know that, as far as I am concerned, you have had a difficult time in various ways. I think the fair and proper thing to do is to give you an opportunity of obtaining complete freedom from me if you want it. The enclosed will give you what you require.”

  Inside the envelope was an invoice and receipt from the Hotel Somerset made out in the name of “Mr and Mrs Erskine” for accommodation and meals charged between Sunday, June 13 until Tuesday, June 15. When she checked the register at the hotel a few days later, with her solicitor in tow, Sheila confirmed that her husband’s handwriting was there. She had no idea who the woman was, or if there was actually a relationship between the pair, but it should be enough for a court to end their sad farce, provided it was presented in a believable fashion. She moved swiftly.

  Less than a month later, on July 14 in the Edinburgh Court of Session, Sheila was granted a divorce and custody of the two boys, Anthony and Peter, now aged nine and seven respectively. Their father did not contest the application, which was supported by evidence from “a London inquiry agent and a staff member”. Lord Murray, the presiding judge, chose to ignore the obvious divorce application sham.

  The inevitable media coverage the next day painted a sad summary of an eleven-year union. The Dundee Courier reported the proceedings at length, particularly the evidence of Lady Loughborough “quietly dressed in a grey costume with a light blue, close-fitting hat who gave her evidence with marked composure”.

  In fact, Sheila was nervous and had almost pulled out of the hearing: “I had waves of tenderness, remembering all the niceness of Loughie . . . and how he had always made me laugh. Freda and Poppy literally had to push me onto the train.”

  Her father-in-law was also furious: “I did not tell a soul . . . but unfortunately he found out . . . and hurried to Scotland to put a stop to it. He called on the judge and told him the whole thing was a collusion and said he refused to allow his son to be divorced.”

  Worried about the intervention, Sheila’s lawyer, Sir Charles Russell, suggested she dress carefully: “I must look the part of the pathetic, ill-treated little wife. I borrowed my nursery maid’s grey coat and skirt and felt hat, wore no makeup—not even lipstick—and I certainly looked pathetic.”

  As it turned out, there was no cause for worry. The Earl’s protestations fell on deaf ears when Sheila described how the marriage soured after the first few, happy months: “My husband drank and gambled and got into terrible trouble,” she said under questioning from her lawyer. “He was horrid and abusive to me and drank terribly. It seemed to get worse each year.”

  She told of their move to Australia in the hope that new surroundings might change him. “Did his conduct improve in Australia?” Sir Charles asked, knowing the reply would be negative.

  “No, he promised not to drink and not to get into trouble but he did again,” she replied. “He always blamed wherever he was, first England and then Australia.”

  She continued that when they returned home in 1923, things did not improve: “I had persuaded my husband to have a cure for drink, which he did, but when he came out of the home he was not better at all. Life for me was intolerable. Finally I asked the trustees and his father to meet, and they agreed that it was intolerable, and that I should have a house for myself and the children. The house in Hyde Park Terrace was sold, and I got my present small house in Talbot Square which is just big enough for me and the children. I have not lived with my husband as his wife since January, 1924.”

  The hearing lasted 20 minutes with only one anxious moment, when she was handed a Bible and told to remove one glove while she swore an oath: “I removed my glove as directed and, to my horror, noticed that I had forgotten to take off the red varnish from my nails, which hardly went with my pathetic and dowdy appearance.” All was well, she noted, because the men in the court didn’t appear to notice.

  Lord Murray had little hesitation in granting the application and Sheila was on the midday train back to London.The decree nisi which arrived a few weeks later declared that Sheila was “entitled to live single or marry any free man as if she had never been married” although Sheila had no intention of making use of the second option: “I was free—what a strange feeling? I decided that never, never again would I marry anyone, and hummed to myself: ‘Wedding bells are all bunk’.”

  She may have felt “free” but the divorce highlighted her concerns about parenthood and her relationship with Tony and Peter. The social norms of the time meant that children of the well-to-do were mostly raised by staff, in this case a woman known as “Nannie”. Sheila’s role, as the mother, was to play with them and take them on holidays: feeding the ducks at Kensington Gardens, a picnic in Hyde Park and holidays by the sea with other adults who had children, like Freda, Jeanie Norton and Lady Olive Baillie who owned Leeds Castle.

  Sheila struggled with the guilt of her limited role as a mother and the impact on them of a broken marriage. She was hopeless at discipline and unable to admonish them without adding: “here, have a sweet”. The boys constantly sparred. Peter was the more physical of the pair, showing
talent as a boxer which Buffles encouraged and honed with lessons, and once knocked his older brother out cold as they fought while waiting for a train. She comforted herself with the notion that it was just boys being boys: “They were devoted to each other but fought a great deal, which rather worried me.”

  Two months after the divorce, Sheila and Tony drove down to the Sussex coast to enrol him in preparatory school where he would board, returning home only for holidays. His brother would follow a year later. It was a difficult and tearful parting for both; a premature wrenching that she would still feel many years later: “We were determined to be brave and pretend we didn’t mind. We have since admitted to each other that we both cried ourselves to sleep for nights. I disapprove of the English custom of tearing little boys away at the early age of eight but what could I do against tradition? (I dislike the word!) I think the American system is far more humane.”

  Sheila resumed her place among the royal set during the Season. She celebrated her divorce by attending a fancy dress ball thrown by the Duchess of Sutherland; she and seven others—including Freda Dudley Ward and Lady Diana Cooper—dressed as the Cambridge rowing crew, complete with boat and pale blue oars (Lady Diana’s husband, Duff Cooper, was the coxswain). The King and Queen of Spain were the main guests at the ball, held at Hampden House and regarded as the event of the season; the Prince of Wales and his younger brother, Henry, turned up dressed as “Arabs” and kept changing costumes throughout the evening as “stunts”.

  In August Sheila was holidaying at the fashionable French seaside resort of Deauville, with its luxury hotels and casinos, where she was noted by the Western Morning News as one of the women wearing the latest fashion in beach wear—brightly coloured bathing wraps: