It also had its controversial moments, which only added to the lustre of the occasion as the paying public were able to witness the rare sight of the wealthy and powerful behaving badly. In 1935 the guest of honour, the famous American Woolworth’s heiress Barbara Hutton, became upset when no one would outbid her offer of 300 guineas for a blank canvas to be painted by the famous equestrian artist Lynwood Palmer. Ms Hutton’s disgust that “a better effort was not made for charity” was front-page news in the Daily Mirror—Hutton photographed alongside London’s queen of charities, Lady Milbanke.
19
VIVID, GAY, UTTERLY CHARMING
When domestic sales of its face creams and other beauty products slumped in the mid-1920s, the American company Pond’s commissioned market research to stem the tide. The agency found that middle-class women were ignoring the locally made beauty products in favour of European brands such as Chanel and Helena Rubenstein, which they thought were better simply because they were imported and more expensive.
The research company also interviewed prominent and wealthy society women, whose buying habits were, surprisingly, the opposite. Although they could afford the imported brands, most preferred to pay less for the locally made product. The company realised that, if it could win the endorsement of those women who appeared in the newspaper and magazine society pages, and who thus wielded enormous influence in fashion, then it might strike advertising gold.
Pond’s began using women prominent in US society to build their campaign; however, there was more to such women than just their wealth. For example, Alva Vanderbilt, wife of the industrialist William Vanderbilt, was a fabulously wealthy New York socialite who was known as much for her support of women’s rights and child labour reforms as her money. Likewise, another woman they chose was Cordelia Biddle Robertson, who was a Philadelphia socialite, author and philanthropist who had established charities for artists and disadvantaged youth. They were women of substance as much as style.
Their campaign was a success. Pond’s recovery in fact coincided with a sales boom across the business generally, with other firms, such as Max Factor and Elizabeth Arden, also prospering. Cosmetics were becoming more socially acceptable as the allure of Hollywood began to take hold, but the celluloid stars did not have a mortgage on glamour.
When Pond’s expanded into Europe and opened a factory in London, it brought with it the same advertising strategy, choosing a mixture of royalty and socialites to endorse its products. Sheila Milbanke and Diana Cooper were among the first socialites chosen; their images were shot by the most distinguished fashion photographers of the day, including English Cecil Beaton, Madame Yevonde and Dorothy Wilding, in a style that mimicked the lighting, poses and clothing of the movie stars.
Sheila would make no mention of the campaign in her memoir, perhaps embarrassed because it was money that was her motivating force. Money was never spoken of in polite circles but the truth was that as Lady Milbanke, even with her own family endowments, she did not have the financial rescue net afforded her when she was married into the Rosslyn family.
It might also have been the public recognition the campaign would have brought her. She had always enjoyed being on the stage and at one point had expressed a desire to become involved in screen acting. And although she declared a modesty about her appearance, it was clear that she was aware of her looks and enjoyed the attention of men and the comparisons with other beauties of her time, such as her friend Diana Cooper, as well as being recognisable to the general public.
Age was no barrier, because the campaign and the products were not focussed on the first blush of youth, but on maintaining eternal beauty. When the first advertisements were published in 1932, Sheila was thirty-seven years old; when she appeared in her last, to coincide with the coronation of King George VI, she was aged forty-two.
The advertisements pictured her in a demure pose, hair carefully shaped into a wave, and dressed simply in a black dress and single string of pearls, so all the attention would be on her face and skin rather than on her jewellery or clothes. Some of the ads were succinct, while others were presented as a conversation with the reader:
VIVID, GAY, UTTERLY CHARMING IS
LOVELY LADY MILBANKE
This is how she cares for her rose-petal skin.
“Yes, I’ve travelled a great deal,” said Lady Milbanke, “and I’ve learned how simple it is to keep one’s skin soft and fresh even in a bad climate.”
Lady Milbanke is tall and slim, like a willow, with soft brown eyes and nut-dark hair. Her complexion has vivid carmine tints that some brunettes are blessed with. Her skin is satiny smooth.
Other ads contrasted her brunette hair and darker skin with the complexions of pale blondes, or highlighted how her cosmetics complemented her lifestyle—“engaged in outdoor sport or dancing in London’s smart restaurants”. One ad even sported her flourishing signature as a personal endorsement.
And it wasn’t just face cream she was promoting. A gas cookware company quoted her cook—a Mrs Easton—to endorse a new oven and how it roasted a chicken, in fact a whole roast meal, to perfection.
The post-war social freedom of London produced not only a generation of moneyed aristocrats eager to break the heavy shackles of Victorian and Edwardian society but a surge of creativity across the arts. Modernism was born and its impact was felt from the art galleries of New Bond Street to the dance floors of Soho and the theatres of Covent Garden. Fashion followed the upbeat lead of jazz and the Charleston, and F Scott Fitzgerald told its story through The Great Gatsby. The changes were fed further by rapid advances in technology, which, for example, introduced colour to the cinema and to still photography.
Inevitably, it also produced a generation of artists who revolutionised their craft. Miss Yevonde Cumbers was one such: an enterprising but indulged daughter of a London ink manufacturer, she was profoundly influenced in her teens by the suffragette movement. She stumbled into photography accidentally, apprenticed herself to the leading portrait photographer of the day and in 1914, at the age of twenty-one and having taken just one photograph, opened her own studio under the name Madame Yevonde with a £250 gift from a doting father.
Women’s rights had become a powerful force in her work, exploring not only female sexuality but women’s role in society. Portraits had evolved from swan-necked beauties in extravagant gowns staring awkwardly, “pouter pigeon” style, at the camera. Now her clients adopted more relaxed poses, often looking away from the camera and using props and lighting to bring out their individual personalities.
Madame Yevonde had quickly gathered together some well-known clients by doing free portraits of them; she had then won acclaim and work from such magazines as Tatler and The Sketch, followed by Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in America. Her big breakthrough had come when she was asked to take the official portrait for the engagement of Lord Louis Mountbatten to Edwina Ashley in 1922. Subsequently her clients included Barbara Cartland, AA Milne, Nöel Coward, Vivien Leigh, George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham and a host of society women who flocked to her studio in Victoria Street.
In the early 1930s, Madame Yevonde began experimenting with colour photography using a process called Vivex. Battling initial hostility among both photographers and the public, she began using colour for her portraits; in 1932 she staged the first colour photographic exhibition in Britain. But her most famous project would come three years later and involve Sheila Milbanke.
On March 5, 1935, a great ball was held at Claridge’s in Mayfair, with guests dressed as Roman and Greek gods and goddesses. The event, held to raise funds for the Greater London Fund for the Blind, featured Venus arriving in a shell drawn by cupids. Goddesses paraded, attended by nymphs and fauns. Madame Yevonde had not attended the ball, but she carefully chose some society women (whether they had attended the ball or not) who she believed best embodied the attributes of certain goddesses.
She created dramatic studio shots of each of them using colour, costume and pr
ops to build a surreal air around her subjects: Lady Warrender, organiser of the Olympian Ball dressed as Ceres, goddess of agriculture; the Duchess of Wellington as Hecate, goddess of crossroads; Lady Diana Mosley as Venus, goddess of love; the Viscountess Ratendone as Euterpe, muse of delight; the actress Gertrude Lawrence as Thalia, the muse of comedy; and Baroness Dacre as Circe, goddess of magic.
Sheila Milbanke was Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons. Hers was regarded as the most striking of the twenty-two portraits—dramatic and beautiful, with her eyes closed and her ruby-red lips slightly open. Her head was thrust back in a pose to capture the moment when, according to Greek mythology, Penthesilea had been speared by Achilles at the Battle of Troy. Animal skins barely covered her neck and breasts; her own weapon and the spear that had killed her formed the shape of a cross in the background.
It was a statement about the heroism and strength of women. The exhibition was an instant success, with visitors flocking to the studio to view it. Not only would it be regarded as one of the most powerfully expressive exhibitions of the medium of photography, but it would secure for Madame Yevonde her place as an important figure in the history of photography.
A CURIO SHOP IN TABLEAUX
Lady Crowther’s Tableaux will be a feature of Princess Christian’s matinee at the Palace Theatre on Friday, December 7. They are described as a series of Objets d’Art Vivants, and well-known people will take part in the unusual representation of a curio dealer’s treasures. Lady Cynthia Asquith, Miss Kitty Kinloch and the Hon. John Lytton will represent “A Luca della Robbia”; Miss Jean Kinloch and Miss Barbara Lutyens “an Old French Fan”; Miss Violet Keppel “a Mezzotint”; Mrs Underdown “a Wedgwood Plaque”; Lady Idina Wallace “a Persian Miniature”; Mrs Gerald Leigh “a Missal Page”; Lady Loughborough, the Hon. Mrs Fane and Mrs John Lavery “a Triptych”; Lady Diana Manners “a Cameo”; Mrs Henry Howard “a Green Jade Figure”; the Countess of Drogheda “a War Poster” and Mrs Ralph Peto “the Lady of the Lamp”. The entire proceeds of the performance will be handed over to the funds of the Housing Association for Officers’ Families and the Florence Nightingale Hospital.
It was a small item in the social columns of The Times on November 24, 1917, and yet the snippet threw together three names that would begin and end one of the great scandals of English society. Lady Idina Wallace, better known by her maiden name of Sackville and cousin to the writer Vita Sackville-West, was at the centre of the White Mischief story that had also featured Alice de Janzé and Raymond de Trafford. Ultimately her exploits would be used as the inspiration for characters in three novels.
Idina was rich and beautiful. In 1917, she was the mother of two young sons and married to an army captain named Euan Wallace, who would become a war hero and recipient of the Military Cross. Yet her world fell apart a little over a year later when her husband began an affair with another of the Tableaux women.
Barbara Lutyens was the eighteen-year-old daughter of a prominent architect and she had come to lunch at the Wallaces’ a few months earlier as a friend of Idina’s younger sister. Euan Wallace, home on leave from France, was immediately smitten by the leggy brunette with ice-blue eyes; before he returned to the Front a fortnight later, he had begun an affair with this woman seven years his junior.
Idina had at first fought to save her marriage but, by the time of the Tableaux evening, she knew that she had lost her husband to the younger woman, which must have made the event a somewhat tense night. It wasn’t that Idina cared about her husband taking a younger lover; after all, discreet affairs were accepted in a society torn by war, and she was no angel herself. Her real fear was that Barbara’s aim was to marry her husband and she would be left on her own. Her solution was to end the marriage on her own terms. She began a relationship with a penniless Scotsman named Charles Gordon and granted Euan Wallace a divorce a few days after the end of the war. She then hastily married Gordon and, at the suggestion of her friend and travel writer Rosita Forbes, sailed to Kenya to start a new life.
In doing so, Idina agreed to give up her children—three-year-old David and two-year-old Gerard—a decision she took to ensure they had the emotional and financial stability of a home in London rather than the wilds of Africa, where she would become famous as the high priestess of a hedonistic lifestyle that featured wife swapping and drugs. It would be fifteen years—and thanks to the intervention of Sheila Milbanke—before she saw her children again.
In May 1934, Idina was in London, having left Kenya in an attempt to end her fourth marriage. The relationship with Charles Gordon had fallen apart in 1923, as had another marriage, to Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll, whom she divorced in 1930. Then she wed Donald Haldeman who, unlike her previous two husbands, was not keen on his wife’s philandering lifestyle. Now she wanted out.
More than seventy years later, Idina’s great-granddaughter, author Frances Osborne, would write in her 2009 book The Bolter about Idina’s reunion with her elder son, David:
Amid the melee of cocktail and dinner parties that marked the beginning of the London Social Season, Idina received a note from a friend that would turn this new state of affairs on its head. The name of the friend was Sheila Milbanke. Sheila was a glamorous society beauty, generally described as “quite the nicest thing ever to have come out of Australia”. Being Australian, she was engagingly unconcerned by some of the rules of British society and approached life and the people around her in a straight-forward, matter-of-fact way.
Sheila was friends with Euan Wallace and Barbara (whom he had married and by whom he had had another three children); she had spent a lot of time with David and Gerard, who were a few years older than her own sons. Barbara had legally become the mother of her two stepsons and called herself their mother; Idina had no visitation rights, but Sheila was convinced that she should be back in their lives.
Gerard, aged eighteen, was a well-adjusted prize-winning student studying to be a pilot at Cranwell, but David was struggling emotionally. He too was an extremely bright young man, now aged nineteen and studying at Balliol College at Oxford, where he was reading the Greats, including Philosophy, Latin and Ancient Greek. But, in Sheila’s words, he was “burning with both brilliance and anger”, rebelling against the beliefs and lifestyle of his parents; his father was now a high-profile Conservative MP, while Barbara was playing political hostess. David had told Sheila that he could no longer have a rational conversation with them and was considering becoming a celibate “Christian Socialist”. Sheila believed that he needed his birth mother—someone who could understand the “fire” burning within him, as he described it in his own diary, and who would listen to him.
David and Idina met at Claridge’s—the same venue where, seventeen years before, Idina, Barbara and Sheila had dressed as “curio dealer’s treasures” at a charity function. Sheila meantime took Euan and Barbara out to lunch at the Ritz Hotel around the corner so mother and son could be alone. Idina sat smoking a breakfast cigarette and sipping a cocktail nervously until she saw the young man, wearing a red carnation in his buttonhole so they could recognise one another. She would not be “Mummy”, as she once was, but “Dina”. The pair sat talking for several hours while she told him about the collapse of her marriage and her intoxicating new life in Africa, and then listened to his angst about the world and its ills. She wondered how his intellect and passion might allow him to fit into an increasingly complex world.
Sheila Milbanke had been right—Idina Sackville needed to be reunited with her son, for her own sake and his, and it would have a positive impact on both their lives. David would alter his views over the next few years and decide he wanted a political career to help change the society he railed against.
But he would not live to see them through. War would take him and his younger brother, Gerard, with whom Idina would also be reunited. Gerard, a pilot, was shot down in 1943 and David was killed by machine-gun fire in August 1944 while an army major serving as a diplomat in Greece.
It w
ould not be Sheila’s last personal intervention to aid a flawed and fractured friend. It was also typical of her apparent ability to make and maintain meaningful connections and friendships across the various “sets” and generations of London society—from the brash and youthful Bright Young Things to the art and literature world of Beaton, Evelyn Waugh and Nöel Coward, from the entertainment sphere of Charlie Chaplin, Fred Astaire and Sophie Tucker to the politics of Duff Cooper, Philip Sassoon and Winston Churchill and, ultimately, the power of “Buck House”.
20
WHEN THE CAT’S AWAY
Darling Mr Coo,
What am I to do?
You go to Bognor every Sunday
And send me orchids every Monday
I never see you so to speak
Although you bunch me once a week.
My husband’s a boxer
Your wife is a beauty
So what can we do
But attend to our duty?
In late 1934 Sheila Milbanke penned a verse on a square sheet of paper torn from a notebook and sent it secretly to the husband of one of her best friends, Lady Diana Cooper. “How would the late Lord Tennyson like this metre?” she asked on the back of the paper, clearly referring to its doggerel nature rather than the sly but obvious message of mutual attraction.
Sir Alfred Duff Cooper, Viscount of Norwich, Ambassador to France and member of parliament, was well known for his philandering ways. This was not unusual—in fact, it was far too much the norm for anyone to freely admit it. Adultery was rampant in high society and yet “Duff”, as he was known to friends, had less reason than most to have a roving eye and hands. He had married Lady Diana Manners, regarded as the great beauty of her generation—a flamboyant society hostess with wealth and charisma in equal portion.
Sheila Page 21