Dimitri’s unpublished memoir, written in 1970, gives an intriguing account of life in Buckingham Palace over the next few months, under the grace and favour of the British royal family: “We dined with King George and Queen Mary nearly every evening. Not having evening dress [we] were obliged to wear dark suits to dinner, which were inappropriate as the King always changed into white tie and tails . . . The King had a special way of eating pears: ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded when I began cutting my pear in the conventional manner. ‘I’m trying to eat a pear,’ I replied.
“He then proceeded to show me his own special way of tackling a juicy pear. He would cut it in half then scoop out the fruit with his spoon, leaving the skin standing on the plate. As the meal progressed the King’s language would grow increasingly colourful and I always marvelled at Queen Mary’s patience. King George’s physical resemblance to Emperor Nicholas was emphasised by his habit of sucking his moustache whilst eating his soup, which produced a drawing sound. The first time I saw him do this I turned to my mother and whispered ‘Just like Uncle Nicky.’”
The death of “Uncle Nicky” and his family was also raised around the dinner table. King George laid the blame squarely at the feet of Prime Minister Lloyd George: “He told my mother that at the beginning of the revolution, during the time of the provisional government, everything had been made ready to take the Emperor and his family into exile. [Revolutionary leader Alexander] Kerensky was willing to allow them to leave and in fact was keen that they should.
“A British cruiser was standing ready at Murmansk but at the last minute Lloyd George decided against the evacuation. Kerensky, with the intention of safeguarding the family by getting them away from the centre of events, had them sent to Siberia. The one opportunity for the family to leave Russia from the north had passed. I twice heard King George refer to Lloyd George as ‘that murderer’ in the presence of my mother.”
During their two-month stay, Dimitri enjoyed a privileged insider’s glimpse of the everyday life of the royal family. He was amazed at the King’s frequent forays into Hyde Park, galloping through the palace gates alone on horseback, while the princes wandered freely and unnoticed through Green Park. He befriended the two oldest princes and was also witness to the King’s abrasive relationship with his children. Edward occupied a suite of three rooms on the top floor at the front of the palace: “He was always getting into trouble with the King and could not seem to do anything which pleased him.”
But Edward was not the only child to suffer their father’s sharp tongue and inflexible nature. Bertie’s desperate efforts to overcome his stammer were hampered by the King’s impatience; he laughed openly at Prince George’s attempts to grow a moustache and poked fun at the size of Princess Mary’s feet, claiming they were bigger than his.
It was inevitable that Dimitri would drift into the tangle of impoverished Russian royalty who either lived or lounged and partied at the Hyde Park apartment of Felix Youssoupoff, who was his brother-in-law and married to his older sister, Irina. Dimitri was among the youngest of the crowd and flirted at its edges; he noticed the beautiful English society women who became entranced by the excitement and colour of the Russian enclave. Among them was Lady Sheila Loughborough, who had captured the attention of another of his relatives, Prince Serge Obolensky.
But life had to move on. A family that had once lacked for nothing now had to forage for everything. Success had to be of Dimitri’s own making, and London did not seem big enough for him to achieve that. In December 1923, at the age of twenty-two and after studying at Oxford, he left with friends on what was supposed to be a short holiday to New York. Instead, he stayed there for seven years, thoroughly engrossed by the character of the city and its people. He was intrigued by the tailor who had adopted a Russian surname to sound exotic; he spent evenings watching gangsters like Al Capone and his thugs in a basement speakeasy, drinking illegal grog with police officers; he even dined with the Queen of New York, Grace Vanderbilt, in her Fifth Avenue mansion. His was a world of extremes: a name and heritage worth nothing, and yet a ticket to every society event in the world’s most exciting city.
He initially worked in the foreign exchange department of the National American Bank of Manhattan, where he almost immediately attracted publicity as a lost Russian royal—“Mr Dimitri, a dark complexioned, brown-eyed and not unhandsome youth”—who had fallen on hard times. He was “very attentive and faithful to his duties and highly regarded,” the bank president told The Washington Post when the story broke. Dimitri, embarrassed by the publicity, insisted to the newspaper that he had no intention of seeking American citizenship: “I will always be Russian and one day I will go back, but not while the Bolsheviks rule.”
That job didn’t last and he began working for a businessman who was manufacturing an early-model household refrigerator; he moved south to Baltimore. By day he worked on the factory floor, where he was known as Mr Alexander, and by night he lived in the cultured environs of the Maryland Club, where he was Prince Dimitri. But, inevitably, a local newspaper eventually exposed his double life.
He moved back to New York and the world of high finance, working for a Wall Street stockbroking firm, FB Keach and Co., as the market first boomed before crashing in 1929. He would recall the heady days when “one was assured of a profit within a couple of days”. A businessman walked into his office one day and produced three $10,000 notes with which to open an account, such were the flood of money and the carefree spending habits. In the days before the crash he encouraged a friend—the legendary investment banker, philanthropist and patron of the arts, Otto Kahn—to buy 100,000 shares in a copper company at $1.50 per share and to sell out two days later at $4 per share. Kahn followed his advice and took his $250,000 profit. The market crashed a week later, and Dimitri watched as the stockroom ticker-tape spat out losses for six hours before closing to keep up with the financial carnage.
In 1930 he moved to a rival firm, GMP Murphy, and was offered a job in the company’s London offices, which he took. He resettled in Europe, although his working life was anything but settled. He switched between the financial world of London and the more relaxed lifestyle of continental Europe; he even managed the Chanel boutique in the French tourist mecca of Biarritz in the summer of 1931, during which time he met and later that year married another Russian exile, Countess Marina Sergeievna Golenistcheva-Koutouzova.
Before the revolution their two families had known each other well and Dimitri had first met the woman he called Myra when she was a child of eight. But she was eighteen years old now and modelling for Chanel; Dimitri, now aged thirty, fell instantly in love. They would spend the next eight years between London and Paris, where Dimitri worked again as a broker, and they had a daughter, Princess Nadejda, before World War II exploded.
Dimitri enlisted with the British Royal Navy and served as a lieutenant commander during the evacuation of Dunkirk, during which he made four trips across the channel aboard the paddle steamer Queen of Thanet and helped to rescue 4000 men, including 2000 from another rescue ship, the LNRS Prague, which had been hit by German bombers. He finished the war as an admiralty liaison officer with the Greek Navy and then turned his management skills to good effect when he was appointed secretary of the elite Travellers’ Club in Paris, which stood in the Champs-Élysées below the Arc de Triomphe and in the heart of the Parisian social and political milieu.
But this lifestyle would ultimately mean the end of his marriage. He divorced Myra in 1947 and abandoned Paris, heading for London once more. This time he became a sales representative for the Canadian distillery, Seagram’s, a job he still held in 1954 when he rekindled a lifelong friendship with Sheila Milbanke.
Dimitri and Sheila would both describe the origins of their union in a very matter-of-fact manner, perhaps because it was a relationship of shared moments and friendship rather than of heart-pounding love. They had known each other for more than thirty years in a world filled with extraordinary people
and amazing experiences.
Dimitri’s memoir recounts a meeting between him and Sheila orchestrated by the Duchess of Windsor in August 1954, seven years after they had renewed acquaintances in the wake of Buffles’ death. Dimitri had just come from an extravagant tour of the Greek islands in the company of a clutch of European royals. The cruise, organised by King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece, was essentially a tourism promotion. The liner Agamemnon had left from Naples in mid-August for a ten-day tour of Greece and its ancient wonders and island magnificence. It was viewed by the media as a love boat for the young royals from Europe’s dead or dying dynasties.
There were thirty-seven of them under the age of twenty on board: apart from the Greek monarch’s three children, there were the crown princes and princesses of the Netherlands, Italy, Bulgaria, Denmark and Yugoslavia, as well as the children of a dozen counts and countesses of European provinces. There was at least one marriage that would eventuate from the cruise: King Paul’s oldest child, Princess Sophia, met Prince Juan Carlos of Spain on board; they were both sixteen years old at that time and they married eight years later.
After they docked back in Naples, Dimitri took the train to Rome, “where I met my old friend Sheila Milbanke,” as he would later write. “I had known her since 1919 when we met at Felix’s flat in Knightsbridge. I had seen her through the years and we were always good friends. I had to return to Athens on business for Seagram’s and we later met in Paris. We were invited to spend the weekend with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at the Mill, their country house near Gif-sur-Yvette, and soon after Sheila and I became engaged. I proposed to her by saying ‘You’re going to marry me, aren’t you?’ and she agreed. Wallis said later ‘Think what you like, but I fixed this marriage’.”
Sheila was equally perfunctory. In her memoir, she wrote of Dimitri visiting her at Brook House which was not far from the splendours of Hampton Court Palace where his mother, the Grand Duchess Xenia, now in her late 70s, lived in a “grace and favour” apartment next to the famous maze.
After one visit, Tony stated the obvious: “I think Dimitri is falling in love with you.”
“Nonsense,” she had replied. “He is my great friend, and friendship is more important as one grows older.”
A month later she and Tony flew to Italy to holiday with friends at Praiano on the Amalfi coast in a villa perched halfway down a cliff: “200 steps down from the road and 200 steps to the sea; blue sea and blazing sun, and Capri in the distance. I adored it.”
They then headed for Rome where she met Dimitri: “He proposed to me. I said ‘Perhaps’ and then joined friends at Montecatini near Florence. Dimitri and I met later in Paris. He proposed again.”
“You are going to marry me,” he told her.
“No,” she replied firmly.
“Yes,” he countered.
“Yes,” she consented.
They were wed, quietly, at the Marylebone registry office on October 29, 1954, on what would have been Peter’s 36th birthday. There were just two witnesses—a far cry from her second marriage, which had caused a traffic jam along the Strand—and spent their honeymoon in Spain. The following May they went through a ceremony before Archbishop Nikodim, head of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, in a chapel at Hampton Court Palace.
It was a marriage of companionship and friendship in many ways, their lives having crisscrossed and touched often over the years. Although their backgrounds, triumphs and struggles had been very different, their friends and experiences made them as compatible as any couple who had spent a lifetime together.
They had both been drawn to the energy and opportunity of the United States and had mutual friends in that country, although there was no evidence they had ever crossed paths during their travels. In his memoir Dimitri wrote about Rudolph Valentino’s casket being swamped with flowers as the actor lay in state in Campbell’s funeral parlour in Columbus Square, but he was probably unaware of Sheila’s fleeting romance with the screen star eight months earlier. Like Sheila, he was friends with Vincent Astor and had been invited to spend a few nights aboard his yacht Nourmahal, on which Sheila would also cruise some years later.
Both had been invited to dinner parties thrown by Gloria Vanderbilt and Mrs Randolph Hearst, and they had attended fancy dress balls hosted by Elsa Maxwell. But never were they there at the same time. Dimitri had been acquainted with the heiress Barbara Hutton, whom he met on several occasions while holidaying in Cannes, but this had been at least two years and one husband before Sheila became embroiled in her life. Perhaps their former lives had come closest to touching through their separate friendships with Serge Obolensky, who had settled in New York, and with the exotic couple, Alfred Duff Cooper and Lady Diana Cooper, whom both counted as among their dearest friends.
As a couple then, Dimitri and Sheila had many entries in common in the address books they maintained at their home at 20 Wilton Street, within sight of the garden walls of Buckingham Palace. There were two versions—the larger address book sat in the front room downstairs, near the telephone and overlaid with frequent scribbled updates, while a smaller, neater version was in Sheila’s bedroom. Their pages are filled with names famous from almost half a century of English society.
There was Viscountess Astor in Sandwich, Lord Beaverbrook in Arlington House and Chips in Belgrave Square; a private number at Kensington Palace for the Duchess of Kent, as well as contacts for the Duchesses of Marlborough and Westminster and the Maharani of Jaipur. Cecil Beaton lived in Pelham Place, Nöel Coward in Belgrave, the Sitwells in Towcester and Douglas Fairbanks Jr in Chelsea.
Of her closest friends, the former Freda Dudley Ward was in Kensington and Poppy Thursby in Grosvenor Place. Sheila’s neighbours included Lord and Lady “Dickie and Edwina” Mountbatten at No. 2, Viscountess Wimborne at No. 5, Lady Metcalfe at No. 16, the Duchess of Rutland at No. 21 and the Duchess of Sutherland at No. 33.
In New York there were numbers for Gilbert and Kitty Miller on Park Avenue and Serge Obolensky at the Ambassador Hotel, while at Palm Beach there were the Vanderbilts and “Mrs Kennedy, Rose, Joe and Jack”. Wallis and Edward were in Paris, along with the Countess von Bismarck and Prince Youssoupoff.
And yet there was also a charming homeliness about some of the entries, with the celebrated names appearing in among reminders of their everyday life: the number for “Buck” House (4832) was below Boodle’s club in Pall Mall, where Dimitri was a member; Countess Cadogan was next to a number for the local chemist; the various contacts for Lady Diana Cooper were above Cartier and the Earl of Derby was squashed between the dressmaker and the dentist.
There was still a role in society for the pair, who were occasionally noted among the guests at a fashionable ball or a society luncheon; they even organised the performance of a play in aid of one of Queen Elizabeth’s charities. But travelling and socialising together would be their delight—a more relaxed version of the habits of a lifetime. Sheila had been back and forth to the United States a dozen times by 1959, when they travelled to New York as a couple. New York was a shock for Dimitri, who had last been there in 1930 as the Depression struck. The Empire State Building and the Waldorf Astoria were now among the structures on the expanding skyline, so foreign to European cities. The traffic and noise had also exploded.
They stayed at the Manhattan Hotel on Seventh Avenue. During a meal at the fashionable restaurant La Côte Basque, which had recently been opened by the haughty French restaurateur and host Henri Soulé, they were introduced to Marilyn Monroe and her then husband, the playwright Arthur Miller. Dimitri would later write of this meeting: “Although she gave the impression of being a dumb blonde she most certainly was not. She wore no makeup and her hair was rather messy, and she did not look particularly beautiful.”
They spent weekends with the Windsors in their Paris home near the Bois de Boulogne, where Edward’s royal standard hung in the hallway, and at their country residence, the Mill, at Gif-sur-Yvette, where they mingled with othe
r guests. Among them was Richard Nixon who, some years later, would hold a reception for the exiled royals at the White House.
And there were memories, as Sir Charles Johnston would note of a 1958 trip to Winchester for a family christening:
On Wednesday I drove down with Sheila and Dimitri . . . for the christening of Sheila’s grandchild, the little Loughborough, in Winchester Cathedral. Afterwards we drove round in search of a house called Lank Hills where Sheila lived as a bride of eighteen during the first war when her husband was adjutant at the Rifle Depot. We found it—a mouldering Gothic revival lodge at the end of an overgrown drive. “We used to have such fun in the garden,” said Sheila, “with Prince Bertie, and the Prince of Wales, and Freda (Dudley-Ward) and Jeanie (Norton) . . .
But it was their journey to Australia in 1967 that proved the most memorable for them. It was a homecoming for Sheila, of course, but for Dimitri there was also a sense of return. His father, the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, had visited Australia twice, including during the country’s centenary celebrations in 1888, when he attended the opening of Centennial Park. At that time he had written home to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas: “If it were not for my duties in Russia I should never leave this paradise.”
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SMELL THE WATTLE AND THE GUM
Sheila began compiling her memoir a few months after the death of Buffles Milbanke. It must have seemed the right thing to do as life was passing by and she wondered what was left for her. She was in her early fifties and had now lost two husbands as well as a son.
It begins with a longing for the “strange magic” of Wollogorang: “I have a desire to write all I can remember in a sketchy manner, so I will attempt to skip through the years to amuse myself and you, I hope. Perhaps it will make you laugh a little and maybe even make you sad. I have just read Proust, which starts with a quotation from Shakespeare: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past.’ This seems appropriate.” The initial chapters are full of details and whimsy, the memories of a childhood and the dreams of a young, vibrant girl who could see far beyond the boundary fences of her father’s farm.
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