The move seemed to work and the countess’s health gradually improved under the care of Dr Cedric Sydney Lane-Roberts, the chief of obstetrics at the Royal Northern Hospital, where Sheila was still chair of the ladies committee and its principal fundraiser. As a precaution, a home birth was advised; an upstairs bedroom was stripped and turned into a delivery room using equipment borrowed from the hospital, including operating lights hooked up to a portable generator. Sheila oversaw the transformation. Another bedroom on the fourth floor of the Regency mansion became the nursery, and two more would provide accommodation for a nurse maid and baby nurse.
At the last minute the countess demanded to have the baby delivered by caesarean section, a procedure that was becoming more common among the upper class. Her son was seemingly born without incident the next day, but soon afterwards Barbara fell into a coma and began haemorrhaging from a ruptured blood vessel in her abdomen. Her life was in danger and she required an emergency operation; for the second time, the bedroom operating room was needed, this time to save a life rather than to begin one.
The Prince of Wales’ personal physician, Lord Horder, was called in and a priest hovered as Sheila arranged for society friends to give blood, in case Barbara needed a transfusion. The media, now aware of the emergency, reported her life-and-death progress daily and prepared obituaries in case she did not wake from her coma. It took four days before she was out of danger.
But the drama was only just beginning. While Barbara was still recuperating, an anonymous hand-written note was delivered to the house, containing a threat to kidnap the child she had named Lance (after the knight, Sir Lancelot). Police foiled what turned out to be a timid extortion attempt from a bungling textile fitter who was after some quick cash, but the countess was very mindful of the infamous kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son four years earlier and that was enough for her to begin a hunt for a more secure house.
After searching outside London as far as Cornwall and Northumberland, the Haugwitz-Reventlows found an estate in the heart of the city. St Dunstan’s Lodge stood on the outer circle of Regent’s Park, a few kilometres north of the city centre, on what had once formed part of the royal hunting grounds. It had since been used by a succession of aristocrats and for the rehabilitation of British servicemen during the Great War, but the main building had been badly damaged by fire and it was about to be auctioned.
They bought the property but, rather than repair the Regency house, they chose to demolish and rebuild. Their red-brick, Georgian-style three-storey mansion boasted thirty-five rooms, including ten bathrooms, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a ten-car garage, a library, music room, billiards parlour, gymnasium and a cold storage unit for the countess’s fur coats. It sat on more than 12 acres, giving it the largest private garden in London after Buckingham Palace. Security provisions were equally excessive—a series of underground tunnels and a strong room, bullet-proof windows, remote control cameras, fences and a kidnap alarm.
Construction took a year, after which Barbara again called on Sheila Milbanke’s advice, this time to help design and furnish the vast interiors. More than US$2 million would be spent on items such as the gold room’s 24-carat ornaments, the hand-painted 18th-century wallpaper in the garden room, the wall-mounted cases full of rare Chinese porcelain and jade, the green-and-ivory marbled bathrooms and the calfskin-lined nursery for Lance. The hallways were draped with oriental embroideries while several paintings by the Venetian landscape painter Canaletto hung in a downstairs lounge room. Persian carpets covered the oak floors in rooms filled with Louis XIV and XV furniture.
When the small family moved into the oversized house, which Barbara had renamed Winfield House after her grandfather, Frank, who’d founded the Woolworth company, they had to hire a staff of thirty.
But the opulence would not buy them the protection or happiness the heiress desired. Within weeks, newspaper photographers would be perched on platforms built outside the mansion gates, using massive camera lenses known as Long Toms, which had been used by German Zeppelins during the Great War. With these they snapped photos of the family inside their sanctuary, particularly the toddler Lance as he wandered the vast grounds, an only child surrounded by paid carers and warring parents. History appeared to be repeating itself for Barbara Hutton.
Sheila made no mention of Barbara Hutton in her memoir, despite their close relationship and the publicity it received at the time. It was the same attitude she took to numerous friendships with important or controversial figures. She either regarded them as private affairs, and off-limits even for a document to be read by others after her own death, or she simply didn’t see the significance amid the wash of famous names.
Around the time she was working on the interiors of Winfield House there were several significant events which she also glossed over, in particular the death of King George V and the ascension to the throne of Edward: “King George V died,” she would write. “The Prince of Wales became King Edward VIII. The King is dead, long live the King.”
She watched the old king’s funeral procession from a window at St James’s Palace, although clearly upset that she had not been invited to Buckingham Palace because Edward, the new king, had bowed to his mistress’s demand that “all the best rooms in the palace are for Mrs Simpson and her party. We were not invited as she was not a friend of ours.”
June 11, 1936
“When royalty comes in, friendship flies out of the window,” Sheila Milbanke said on the telephone and how right she is: tonight’s dinner has cost me Laura’s friendship, at least for the moment. She is still in a rage. I rang her up, repeated my invitation for her to come in after dinner and she rudely refused . . .
As Henry “Chips” Channon noted in his diary, he had been in a panic. Edward VIII, King of England, was arriving for dinner that evening and instead of attending to details of the most important party he’d ever hosted, he was trying to explain to an irate society hostess, Laura Corrigan, why she hadn’t been invited but could arrive after the meal.
Dubbed “America’s Salon Queen”, Mrs Corrigan was a former waitress who had clambered up the social ladder, firstly as a society reporter and then by marrying a gullible doctor, whom she’d subsequently traded in for the wealthy son of a steel magnate, before moving to London, where she became known as the “Social General”. Sheila Milbanke—“calm, lovely, gentle, restful and perfect . . . with a classic, oval face, dark brown eyes and auburn hair, she had a ‘smile like a Lely court beauty”, as Channon described her—had intervened on his behalf, but she had not placated Mrs Corrigan. Still, the dinner went off splendidly.
June 12
I woke feeling terribly ill and old and world weary, the result of too much champagne. Everyone rang up to say how successful our party had been. “A wow”, as Diana [Cooper] put it. Philip Sassoon, Barbie Wallace and others wrote. Wallis Simpson said the King had much enjoyed his dinner with us. Laura Corrigan was freezingly polite and is still deeply hurt over last night’s party but one really invites the King’s friends to meet him, not one’s own. Oh social rows! There is nothing so trivial and yet nothing so wounding and discouraging.
The son of a Chicago businessman, Channon had arrived in London in 1920 and stayed, becoming a loud critic of the culture of his birthplace as a threat to European and British civilisation. He took citizenship and in 1933 completed the transition by marrying brewing heiress Lady Honor Guinness. Two years later he entered parliament, starting a long but unspectacular political career as a Conservative MP. His nickname, it was said, came from his introduction of the potato chip to London society cocktail parties.
He would become best known as one of the most influential political and social diarists of the 20th century, and an unapologetic social climber—a male version of Laura Corrigan, the woman he did not invite to dinner to meet the new king. “I am riveted by lust, furniture, glamour, society and jewels. I am an excellent organiser and have a will of iron; I can only be appealed to through my
vanity,” he once confessed.
Perhaps this was best illustrated by the occasion in 1932 when, while still a bachelor, he hired Winston Churchill’s nephew John to paint onto the walls of his dining room a fresco depicting eighty of his closest friends as a “Florentine garden party of the Renaissance period”. The figures, all in medieval dress, included the Prince and Princess of Yugoslavia, Sheila Milbanke, Poppy Thursby, Prince and Princess Obolensky, Lady Diana Cooper and her husband, Lady Emerald Cunard, Lady Cavendish and Randolph Churchill, who henceforth could gaze up at themselves there as they sat around his table for dinner.
His extravagance would continue three years later, when he and his new wife bought a home at No. 5 Belgrave Square, next door to the Duke of Kent: “It’s not too grand and is dirt cheap compared with all the other houses we have seen. It has a distinguished air and we will make it gay and comfortable.” He was true to his word, creating a rococo extravaganza, which featured a dining room he described as “a symphony in blue and silver, cascades of aquamarine, approached from an ochre and silver gallery”. And he was keen to show it off.
And if his over-indulgence in luxury was not enough to impress, Channon further embedded himself into high society when his only child was born in 1935; he named him Paul, after his friend the prince, and invited the influential to be his son’s godparents, among them Sheila Milbanke.
His June 1936 dinner was not the last time King Edward came to dinner, nor the last time that Sheila Milbanke was a conduit. On November 19 he famously hosted another dinner for the King and Mrs Simpson, attended by Prince Paul and Princess Olga of Yugoslavia, and the Duke of Kent and his wife Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. Just three weeks later Edward abdicated.
England had spent the year under the reign of a rebel king, who had turned royalty on its head from the moment he’d reluctantly accepted the crown and watched the public proclamation of his accession from a window of St James’s Palace, side by side with his married girlfriend.
King Edward VIII didn’t fit the mould of an aloof and imperious monarch, declaring in his later memoir “a modest ambition to broaden the base of the monarchy: to make it a little more responsive to the changed circumstances of my times”.
He’d rather dine with a small number of friends in private houses than host a dinner for hundreds at Buckingham Palace; he preferred to sit in a box at an evening performance of musical theatre in Covent Garden than to parade in the enclosure at Ascot on Cup Day. He had relinquished the crown after less than eleven months on the throne, choosing to spend the rest of his life with a woman favoured by few others; he had then driven to Portsmouth in a blue limousine, sitting side by side with his chauffeur, before sailing under the cover of darkness bound for Vienna.
It was a lonely exit, and one that Sheila followed closely, and with mixed feelings. She had watched “with amusement” those in society who had gone out of their way to curry favour with Wallis Simpson and, therefore, the new king: “When the abdication came naturally the sinking ship was deserted and, to my amazement, the rats loudly proclaimed they had hardly known her. It was a disgusting performance.”
She and Buffles drove around the empty streets of London after Edward’s radio announcement. She wrote: “I could not even dream of trying to describe one’s feelings over the Abdication. We all felt it deeply and the Empire was really rocked. Surely, we thought, there must be some demonstration, some excitement somewhere. Nothing. All quiet outside the Duke and Duchess of York’s house in Piccadilly, all quiet outside Buckingham Palace. We went home, disappointed.
“Really, the British are extraordinary and unpredictable. This event could not have happened so quietly, so calmly anywhere else in the world.”
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TIME CHANGES MANY THINGS
It was one of the strangest and yet most compelling parties anyone in American high society could recall. On January 16, 1937, gossip columnist and famed New York hostess Elsa Maxwell filled the glamorous Starlight Room on the nineteenth floor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Park Avenue with animals and haystacks for her “Barnyard Frolic”. Cattle were hoisted into the room inside a freight elevator, to graze in pens alongside a sty of well-fed pigs, a flock of sheep, some chickens, goats and wandering donkeys.
A robotic cow had been created, with udders that squirted champagne instead of milk, and a moss-covered well that winched up beer and cocktails. Human scarecrows delivered food to the guests; there was milking and square dancing, and even a champion hog caller, who could summon the pigs with his swinish imitations and had been hired as a competition judge. But, after a night of merriment, the hog caller took such offence at “these sassiety ladies smokin’ and drinkin’ on Sunday mornin’” that he sent his herd charging through the gilded room, scattering the guests. The front-page headline in the London Daily Mirror the next day read: “SCREAMING WOMEN CHASED BY PIGS AT FREAK BALL”.
The 400 guests, described by the Chicago Tribune as “a nice balance between international society, Broadway, Hollywood and the seven lively arts”, included not only the glitterati of New York, Las Vegas and Hollywood but selected members of London society, who had made the journey by ship just for the event. Among them were Cecil Beaton, the playwright Nöel Coward, the actor John Gielgud, Douglas Fairbanks’ new wife Sylvia Ashley, and aristocrats Lady Colefax, Viscount and Viscountess Adare and Viscount Wimborne. Then there was Sheila Milbanke, whose attendance was trumpeted by the media on both sides of the Atlantic—by the English as a social triumph and by the Americans as if her RSVP was a national honour.
The party was seen as a great success by the press, almost as a sign of a hopeful re-emergence from hard economic times. After all, argued the Oakland Tribune, if the social elite were spending money again, even if it was with a sense of abandon, then perhaps the rest of society could look forward with some confidence to better times:
Noses that were so close to the grindstone for years are now lifted higher, and maids and beaux who almost heard the wolf yipping at the butler’s heels are centering their interests upon celebrating a return of the “Age of Unreason”. Like children suddenly released from school, the leaders have responded to their escape from the realities of life by a hysteria of fantastic entertainments.
But others were more cynical. Fortune, created at the beginning of the Great Depression and seen as a financial magazine with a social conscience, delivered a scathing critique of American social climbers in general and in particular Laura Corrigan, one of the guests of honour at the Maxwell event. The English aristocracy, opined Fortune, was being exploited:
The transatlantic method of climbing has recently been perfected by the discovery that British Society is much more quickly and directly purchasable by Americans (not by their own kind) than is New York. The reason is that the British cannot take seriously the fantastic idea that an American (or any other colonial, including the Australian bushman) could have a social position. They regard Americans as simple hearted savages with a penchant for providing free lunch for their betters. So our transatlantic climber opens a London house, begins giving big dinners for the proper people, and within a year is established as a London hostess. She can then invite her new friends to an American tour at her expense, loading them onto the Queen Mary, the first class bulging with barons, earls protruding from the portholes, dukes squatting hopefully on the lifeboats, and the scuppers awash with mere knights, all of them warmly anticipatory of several months’ free board, room and laundry.
Among the newspaper tear-outs glued into Sheila’s albums of memories is a photograph of her dressed in what appears to be a milkmaid outfit, alongside a darkly, handsome man wearing braces to fit in to the farmer theme who is chatting to her as she fixes her make-up. It was taken at the Barnyard Frolic party and published in an unidentified New York newspaper. At the bottom of the picture, Sheila had scrawled: “1937. Time changes many things!”
Her admirer’s name was Stuart Symington, a businessman from Missouri who would rise
to prominence as a politician who would serve as the United States’ first Secretary of the Air Force under Harry Truman before becoming a US senator; Truman later backed him to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 1960, but he lost the nomination to John F Kennedy.
Sheila had met him a week before the party, at a dinner organised in honour of her first visit to the US in eleven years. She had arrived to a huge placard on the dock with the message “WELCOME SHEILA” and a band playing “Rule Britannia”, arranged by Serge Obolensky and Vincent Astor, two former love interests who would set the tone for the rest of a visit that would last three months.
At first she wasn’t sure what to make of Symington. They argued over the abdication of King Edward and Wallis Simpson, whom he had known as Wallis Warfield when they were younger: “I didn’t like him at first and felt he didn’t like me,” she reflected, although there was clearly a mutual attraction.
Sheila was in a vulnerable frame of mind, the marriage with Buffles clearly strained if their individual travel diaries through the second half of the 1930s were any indication. The Times, in particular, frequently published passing references to the travels of aristocrats in its “Court Circular” column and immigration authorities kept reasonably accurate records of their comings and goings. Not only was Sheila travelling internationally regularly by herself, or with Poppy Thursby, but Buffles was also travelling increasingly by himself, sometimes for business but equally for pleasure.
She made little mention of it in her memoir but it was clear that they were drifting apart: “Tony and Peter were more or less grown up—Tony at Oxford and Peter at the RAF College, Cranwell. Buffles was busy and often seemed preoccupied. Our lives were in rather a muddle.”
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