Sheila

by Robert Wainwright

  Sirens had sounded. Most of London had descended into shelters, but to those in the cabaret, time seemed too dear to squander underground. Bombs began to fall nearby: it was London’s worst night raid in weeks. The orchestra played “Oh, Johnny” a little louder.

  Then the hit came. What had been a nightclub became a nightmare: heaps of wreckage crushing the heaps of dead and maimed, a shambles of silver slippers, broken magnums, torn sheet music, dented saxophones, smashed discs. A special constable with the rather splendid name Ballard Berkeley was one of the first on the scene. He saw “Snakehips” Johnson decapitated and elegantly dressed people still sitting at tables seemingly almost in conversation, but stone dead.

  Buffles, now a squadron leader in the RAF, and Tony, a captain in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps Phantoms, were called away suddenly on D-Day, June 6, 1944. There was no explanation for Sheila: “I never expected to see either of them again. I was so proud of them, and so frightened for them.”

  All she could do was wait and watch the daily armada of planes as they flew over Brook House—“Liberators, Lancasters, Lightnings, Fortresses, planes of every description flying toward the Continent, flying ‘over there’. In the evenings they would return, the sunlight gleaming on them and turning their wings to silver and gold. Thousands and thousands of planes; day after day, night after night. It was glorious, it was thrilling, it was terrifying. One didn’t let oneself dwell too much on the results of those journeys.”

  Even as the end of the war approached Sheila found it difficult to celebrate until Buffles and Tony had returned from Europe where they were now stationed as “Liberators”, helping to free the survivors from the Nazi concentration camps and rescue the captured Allied soldiers.

  By April 1945 her mood lightened as the POWs began returning to London and she agreed one night to attend a party thrown by Sir Michael Duff: “I had a bad cold but was determined to go all the same as there hadn’t been a ball for years. Some of the men were in dinner jackets and some in moth-eaten tails, and most of the white ties were yellow, having been put away since before the war.”

  The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough held a celebration dinner for Winston Churchill late on the evening of May 8, 1945. It was a public holiday, declared Victory in Europe, or VE Day, and the city was alive. The dinner was held at a Mayfair club and Sheila went along, alone. She stood at one end of the room, quiet and reflective about the past six years during which she had lost her younger son and almost certainly her marriage: “I was unhappy and lonely,” she would write.

  Then she noticed Churchill across the room, surrounded by well-wishers: “I hadn’t seen Winston for ages and I don’t believe he recognised me at first. Then he came across the room and spoke to me: ‘My dear, I had forgotten the calm beauty of your serene brow.’ My evening was made!”

  28

  A FEELING OF UNCERTAINTY

  On October 2, 1946, a few weeks after her fifty-first birthday, Sheila Milbanke arrived in New York aboard a Pan Am flight. Her travel documents over the years had been consistent but not entirely accurate; she always described herself as an English housewife with no profession, 5 feet 7 inches tall, fresh complexion and hazel eyes. But she tended to be hazy about her birth year to immigration officials at either end of the journey. “About 1898” was her common entry in the official record of arrival. After all, it seemed entirely reasonable for a lady to fudge her age by three years.

  London, a year after the war, was rebuilding—not just physically, but recasting its notion of society and its values. England had been virtually bankrupted for the second time in a generation, but this time repeated bombing raids had smashed its capital city. The pitted landscape there was a constant reminder of the cost of conflict. The wartime coalition government had been disbanded in the spring of 1945 and Clement Attlee had swept Churchill, despite his hero status, from government in the ensuing general elections. The country’s widespread desire for social reform resulted in the creation of the National Health Service, which ended the need for events like the Derby Ball, which was never held again.

  A year later the Attlee government extended its post-war rationing to include bread for the first time; it began to implement its radical vision of a cradle-to-the-grave welfare state as the country huddled closer together under its coat of austerity. Survival of the Great War had caused a celebration of life and created the Roaring Twenties but this time there seemed to be a collective weariness.

  There were rare examples of the old days, such as this report in the Daily Express: “The Duchess of Kent is being seen out a good deal in the West End lately. She has been in several of Australian Lady Milbanke’s parties at the new and fashionable Orchid in Brook Street, London’s gayest and most elegant night club.” But, by and large, the upper class kept their diamonds locked away and remained subdued.

  In May, a year after the war had ended, Sheila travelled to Paris to visit Diana Cooper and Duff, who was now the British Ambassador to France. The war had changed everything: “Paris made me sad. I tried to recapture the past, which was a mistake—one should never try to recapture the past. I had not been out of England for seven years, and was glad to get home. I felt ill, tired and war weary. World War II was over and Peter had been killed but Tony and Buffles had survived, thank God!

  “The doctors said my heart was affected, that I must be quiet, take things easy, never get tired and avoid worry and shock. Rest, complete rest was needed . . . Where can one find all that except in the grave?”

  Back in London she and Buffles drove past St James’s Palace one night to find it and other grand homes where they had once partied had been badly damaged by incendiary bombs: “They had been tidied up and looked rather like ancient ruins that might have been there for centuries,” she would recall soon afterwards when she began her memoir. “As we stood in that haunted, moonlit street I remember so vividly the lights and laughter and the loves of pre-war days—all gone now, cold and dead like this deserted cul-de-sac. As the past came rushing back I felt an icy chill—my eyes were blinded with tears and all the friends and those years gone forever, never to be recaptured.”

  Sheila’s health problems were compounded by her troubled marriage. Life with Buffles was becoming unbearable. He had returned from war a changed man and, as many others had done, turned to alcohol to numb the anguish of conflict. For Sheila, it brought back the sad memories of Loughie all those years before: “Buffles and I seemed to have drifted so far apart. I was worried about him constantly. The war had changed him completely. He was drinking which turned him into a complete stranger. We talked things over in his sober moments. He said he couldn’t account for his state of mind unless it was the result of the war and the frustrations and endless difficulties which had come with the long-awaited peace.”

  Tony, now approaching 30 years old, wanted his mother and stepfather to stay together: “He was so wise and helpful,” Sheila recounted. “We all decided that I should take a trip to America, get well and on my return Buffles and I would try to readjust our lives. [Buffles] was sure he could give up drinking and end his war romance. In fact, he said he would leave for Belgium after seeing me off to America and fix everything.”

  But bad weather delayed her departure and a restless Buffles didn’t wait to see her off: “I was hurt and unhappy as I left London and stepped into the huge Pan American Constellation alone. Our butler, John, saw me off.”

  Her mood changed on board when she sat down next to William Averell Harriman, the US businessman and politician whom she had got to know during his time as US Ambassador in London. He was returning to take up a position in the Cabinet of President Harry Truman as Secretary of Commerce. It took just six hours to cross the Atlantic, a “calm lake” below while they watched, transfixed by the colours of the Aurora Borealis above.

  Sheila checked into the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue when she arrived in New York, stating on her immigration documents that she was visiting two close friends, Mrs Howard Dietz, wif
e of the famed songwriter and producer, and Mrs Herbert Agar, wife of the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist.

  But it was Vincent Astor and his wife Minnie who met her, hosting a welcome party that night at the Astor family’s 2800-acre estate, Ferncliff, at Rhinebeck on the Hudson: “I was extremely touched. I could never have believed that I had so many friends,” she would write.

  Over the next week she wandered the streets of New York, eyes goggled at the city with its shop windows laden with food and clothes that hadn’t been seen in England since the start of the war, as if America was on another planet: “Actually, all that food made me feel slightly sick. It was almost obscene with the rest of the world starving. I must frankly admit that after a few days I almost began to forget, and to believe I had been living a nightmare for seven long years and that I had woken up at last.”

  Sheila’s arrival was soon noticed by the US media, ever vigilant to spot an English aristocrat, and particularly one who needed no introduction She was simply Lady Milbanke, even in a society that had no real notion of titles or royalty. Sheila was photographed in a Plaza suite decorated by Elsie Mendl for a spread for Vogue magazine and spotted lunching at the Ritz with Mrs Dietz: “Both were smart in the uniform black suit that chic women here practically live in from Fall to Spring—the only relief, gay hats spilling flowers or feathers. Mrs Dietz wore a tiny Kelly-green cloche and Lady Milbanke’s little black hat had black ostrich plumes.”

  Stuart Symington came to visit while she was at Ferncliff. He was now Under Secretary for Air and embarking on a spectacular political career. Vincent arranged for them to be alone: “Stuart hadn’t changed in appearance but I imagined he had probably changed in character. He had gone a long way in eight years. He had been rather a playboy, and we were both rather socially inclined in the old days. I imagined he had become much more serious. So had I.”

  It was a time for renewed acquaintances, spending time with Serge Obolensky, who had served in the US Army during the war as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the US Paratroopers, making his first jump at the age of 53 and being credited, with three other soldiers, of capturing Sardinia in 1943. Back in New York after the war he was now vice chairman of the Hilton Hotels Corporation: “He does not change much with the years,” Sheila wrote of the man with whom she almost eloped. “I am always happy to see him.”

  As she was packing to go back to London, Tony rang to advise his mother against going home too soon: “I advise you to stay on until spring,” he suggested. “It is going to be cold and dreary here this winter”. Sheila took it as a warning that Buffles had not kept his promise: “There was meaning in his voice, it sounded like a warning. It was almost an order.”

  Instead, she travelled across the country, moving from the earnest creativity of New York via the glitterati of California to the rich idleness of Florida. By January 1947 she was in Los Angeles as a guest of John Cheever Cowdin, the chairman of Universal Pictures in Hollywood, and his wife Andrea. A local paper reported her presence: “When she was here 20 years ago Rudolph Valentino greatly admired her and danced with her many times.”

  She visited Valentino’s grave to lay flowers and stayed a few days with Douglas Fairbanks and his wife Mary Lee at their home in Pacific Palisades. David Niven lived next door, sad and lonely after his wife’s death, and she mingled at parties with movie stars like Clark Gable—“I thought him charming!”—and Deborah Kerr. Serge Obolensky came to visit and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were in town with mutual friends—“I began to like her,” she wrote of Wallis.

  (The depth of Sheila’s eventual friendship with Wallis Simpson was perhaps best reflected in a hand-written will drawn up by the Duchess in the mid-1950s, but never executed. In it Wallis described how she wanted their household effects and personal items to be dispersed, mostly given to museums or sold off. But some “special friends” would be allowed to choose some jewellery. Seven women were named, including some relatives. Sheila Milbanke was the only woman from their pre-war days in London who was on the list.)

  One day the scriptwriter Charles Brackett, already an Academy Award winner who would write Sunset Boulevard, took her to see a cemetery. As she stood admiring the scenery set against the “purple-blue [San Gabriel] mountains in the distance”, the sounds of the Brahms hymn “Cradle Song” filtered out from the chapel—one of Peter’s favourites.

  She left, moved by what she had seen and heard, and raised it the next day at a lunch attended by several people including the English novelist Evelyn Waugh, who was in Hollywood to negotiate film rights for his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. The discussions had gone badly and the idea was abandoned, leaving Waugh dispirited, so when Sheila mentioned that she’d been to “an extraordinary cemetery” called Forest Lawn, he became curious.

  Waugh’s close friend and biographer, the author Christopher Sykes, wrote about the meeting in his 1975 biography of the writer:

  Sheila was one who shone in the fashionable London world of the twenties and thirties, and was among Evelyn’s friends. She was a most amusing and amiable woman and held to be one of taste. Sheila told Evelyn that she had been shown a graveyard, just outside Los Angeles, which for sheer exquisite sensitive beauty surpassed anything she had seen of that kind. In its power of faith and consolation it was unique. It was religion and art brought to their highest possible association.

  Sheila squired an enchanted Waugh around the facility the next day. After that the author went by himself each day for a week, spending hours at a time while an MGM limousine waited. He would not only wander the grounds that he later, in his memoir, described as “Tivoli Gardens for the dead”, but he spoke to the staff—particularly to the chief embalmer about his work, painting loved ones.

  It was “a deep mine of literary gold”, he told his agent, before heading back to London where he spent the next four months penning his new novel The Loved One, a satirical story about the Los Angeles funeral business and Hollywood and British expatriates, in which Forest Lawn became Whispering Glades.

  Sheila’s year of birth had foreshortened to “about 1900” on May 28, 1947, when she boarded the liner SS America for the week-long journey home across the Atlantic, opting once again for sea over air travel. As the boat left the harbour she was handed a cable from Buffles, telling her that he had ended the affair and would be at Southampton to meet her: “I thought everything was going to work out for us. I felt well again and able to cope with our lives. I was excited at the prospect of getting home.”

  She stood on the back deck watching the New York skyline recede, the sound of Frank Sinatra’s voice in her ears singing September Song, which he’d just recorded about life and death and wasting time.

  Suddenly the joy was gone, replaced by a sense of foreboding. “For the first time in my life I had an apprehension about the future; a fear of loneliness, a strange restlessness and a feeling of uncertainty.”

  Three days out at sea she was told to go to the radio room. There was an urgent telephone call from her son in London: “I have some terribly sad news for you,” Tony began. “You must be brave and strong. Hold onto something. It’s about Buffles.”

  “Is he dead?” It was the only conclusion she could reach.

  Tony hesitated: “Yes.”

  The line crackled, his voice fading away on the waves: “Can you hear me? What arrangements do you want made? Are you all right?”

  Sheila felt speechless, numb and unable to think what to say:

  “You make the arrangements. Don’t worry about me.”

  The operator cut in, coldly: “Time’s up.” The line went dead.

  The day after she had left port—at about the time she felt the unease—Buffles had been a passenger in a taxi driving through the centre of the Belgian city of Ghent when it collided with a tram. He received severe head injuries and was flown back to London, where he was treated in a Chelsea nursing home, but died a few hours before Tony made the call to his mother. Sir John “Buffles” Milbanke, the handsome Box
ing Baronet, financier to the wealthy and Sheila’s husband of nineteen years, was aged just forty-five.

  He had survived six years of war and was heading home to his wife after ending a long-standing affair to start a new life. The certificate of death would state that the head injuries sustained in the accident had been compounded by hypostatic pneumonia and that he had died without regaining consciousness.

  Sheila Milbanke had lost a son in the first days of the war and now a husband soon after the conflict had come to an end. The grief was overwhelming as she was swamped by memories which smothered any regret about the slow disintegration of their marriage: “Blank days, sleepless nights flooded with memories. The years seemed to slip away and we were young again, and so much in love, galloping our horses into the sunset, racing each other; always competition and that strange sex antagonism.

  “I couldn’t believe Buffles was dead; that fate had stepped in and changed my life. He had been so vital, it seemed as if he were still away at the war. He had such charm, such arrogance mixed with tremendous sweetness. I felt bewildered and lost without him. I was stunned and utterly miserable. I thought to myself: ‘Head high, walk very tall.’”

  For once, there were no friends aboard and Sheila was alone with her thoughts for three days until the ship reached Southampton. Tony was there to meet her. She had decided that although Buffles was not a member of the Rosslyn family, he should be cremated and his remains kept at the Rosslyn chapel: “I felt Buffie would be less lonely than his own burial ground at Mullaboden.”

  Tony commissioned a single stained-glass window to be installed in the chapel. It depicted an airman standing on the White Cliffs of Dover and bore both the St Clair and Milbanke family mottos—“Fight” and “Resolute and Firm” respectively. It was dedicated to “Pilot Officer Peter St Clair-Erskine, who died on active service 1939, and to his stepfather, Wing Commander Sir John Milbanke, who died in 1947 from injuries also received during World War II”—a mistruth clearly designed to carefully cover his infidelity and the manner of his death.