By 1874 Minnie could boast of the friendship or admiration of the Prince of Wales, who of course knew nothing of social distinctions in America. If a pretty girl from the States were also wealthy, no more was required of her. Whether her parents came from ancient families or disreputable origins was of no consequence whatever: all Americans were the same; they were simply Americans; and those with beauty and plenty of cash were welcomed in the best English society. But the Prince liked them to be amusing, and Minnie Stevens had the gift of witty comment and repartee.
The object of her mother’s first attempt to arrange a noble union was the Duc de Guiche, whose father, the Duc de Grammont, was cautious, engaging a sleuth in America to discover the exact amount of income that could be expected with Minnie from the Stevens property. He had been told that she would have about £20,000 a year, but careful investigation reduced this sum to £5,000; whereupon, like Macbeth in not quite similar circumstances, Grammont concluded: “We will proceed no further in this business.” Minnie’s friend Lady Waldegrave was shocked, because she too had been led to believe in the larger figure and so felt that the rebuff served the mother and daughter right.
While these transactions were in progress Minnie was spending a long holiday with her old friend Consuelo Mandeville (née Iznaga) in Ireland, and exercising her gaiety on all and sundry. She was undoubtedly a cheerful liar of no mean ability, and many people who were at first attracted by her high-spirited humor suffered from disillusionment on finding themselves the victims of her mendacity. Two Irish peers were visibly under her spell, Lords Rossmore and Newry. But the latter, as we have heard, was unconventionally spellbound elsewhere, and the record is too meager for surmise concerning the intentions of the first. Next we hear of Lord William Hay as a possible suitor, and Minnie, about to leave for Paris, expressed the hope that she would catch “the matrimonial fever” of which there seemed to be an epidemic. But according to her own account, which may or may not be believed, Lord William Hay did not suit her and she turned his offer down on more than one occasion.
Things were getting desperate. She was in her twenty-fifth year, and no endurable lord or lordling was yet in sight; so she fell back on the grandson of a Marquis, a good-looking officer in the Guards, Arthur Henry Fitzroy Paget, whose third Christian name at least suggested royal blood. They were married at St. Peter’s Church, Eaton Square, in July ‘78, and society flocked to the show. There were presents from the Prince and Princess of Wales and other members of the Royal Family, and altogether it was one of the chief events of the season.
In time her husband received a knighthood, and Minnie, if without a coronet, could call herself Lady Paget. She had enough money to gratify people with good dinners, and enough sense to collect a number of amusing guests. It is possible that she added to her resources by arranging introductions with a view to marriage. Her wit and worldliness reminded at least one visitor of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp. At Minnie’s house Consuelo Vanderbilt first met her future husband the Duke of Marlborough, and Consuelo noticed that her hostess had become totally British, receiving her guests with “the condescension that seemed to infect the habitués of the inner circles of London society. I realised with a surge of acute discomfort that I was being critically appraised by a pair of hard green eyes.”
They were the eyes of a cynic who knew “the price of everything and the value of nothing,” an epigram that may have occurred to Wilde when watching Minnie Paget in action. It is true that she helped Lady Randolph Churchill to raise money for the American hospital ship, the Maine, during the South African war, but such actions, however meritorious, are too widely recognized to be purely philanthropic.
Minnie died in May 1919, and it would have grieved her to know that at the auction sale of her belongings several matchless dresses made by Worth of Paris were knocked down for a song.
The Mayfair parties of Lady Paget could not hold comparison with those given in the succeeding generation by Lady Cunard, who established a salon as remarkable as that of Madame Récamier in France a century earlier, although the components were more varied in profession and less regular in attendance. Hers was a case of money marrying money, and appears to have been a marriage of chance. She was the daughter of George F. Burke, a resident of San Francisco, and the niece of Horace Carpenter, a California millionaire, whose riches she would inherit. Christened Maud Alice, she later preferred to be known as Emerald. On February 21, 1894, it was stated in the press that Maud Burke was engaged to Prince André Poniatowski, grandson of the last King of Poland; but on June 2nd of the same year the press reported that Poniatowski was engaged to Miss Beth Sperry, whose sister Mrs. Crocker, desirous to have a Prince in the family, had used her influence to break his engagement to Maud Burke, who, however, let it be known that she had terminated the arrangement. The facts behind these rapid changes of mind are concealed from us, but it is obvious that Maud had no difficulty in finding a husband because in less than a year she was united to Sir Bache Cunard, grandson of the founder of the Cunard Steamship Line. The ceremony which had been announced for June was suddenly expedited and took place on April 17, 1895. “The bride,” we are told, “wore a tailor-made gown of grey cloth and a bonnet to match,” which suggests hurry. They sailed for England within a few days.
Sir Bache Cunard was a fox-hunting enthusiast whose talk was of horses. He had a house at Market Harborough, the hunting center of Leicestershire, and his many guests were solely interested in chasing inedible animals. Their conversation and their pursuits bored their hostess, who soon decided on a life of her own choice among people who could talk of more exciting objects than the inmates of stables and kennels. Husband and wife went their ways, saw each other at intervals, but had no interests in common. Emerald, as we shall now call her, mostly lived in a large corner house in Grosvenor Square, and began her collection of notabilities. She was keen on literature, music, politics and talk. The quirks and quiddities of human nature appealed to her, and she enjoyed the thrust and parry of debate. Contrast and variety were the spice of life, and she gathered around her poets, politicians, musicians, painters, financiers, and occasionally even actors. She was eclectic in her choice of guests; the men had to be amusing or important, the women beautiful or charming. Often her parties were arranged with the object of fostering a personality or furthering a cause, a well-known conductor or a Restoration Play Society.
Her gatherings were not large, ten or twelve sitting down to dinner or luncheon, and the guests were carefully picked. The talk was general during the meal, but when the eating was over she usually dropped a conversational bomb which started off a heated debate between two antagonists on some subject of general interest. If the argument seemed to be lagging, she made an explosive remark that gave renewed life to the theme or inspired others to take part in the battle of wits. Controversy was the breath of her nostrils and kept her taut. Her own witticisms continually fed the fire of repartee; and though her bons mots were frequently at the expense of others, they were distributed without discrimination, and by hitting everyone hurt no one. She was intensely alive, almost neurotically so, with a vitality that appeared inexhaustible, and her animation provoked what was lively in others. She was often malicious, but never dull, and to those who knew her intimately the excitability of her nature, the smartness and callousness of her banter, concealed a pathetic, lonely, disillusioned and timid nature.
In appearance she was short and slight, with a neat figure, small nose, receding chin, eyes like jewels, and a way of holding her head that reminded people of a bird. Always dressed in the latest and extremest fashion, she wore a profusion of emeralds, pearls and diamonds, with many rings on her small claw-like hands. Her high piercing voice could be heard in a crowd, and her jokes always called forth much laughter. At one moment she seemed ruthless, at another charming, and she could be both. Snobbish, ambitious, cultivating famous folk and attentive to her own fame, she could yet help struggling artists up the ladder of success; and at the height
of her renown in 1927 a poet, Colin Hurry, wrote this “premature epitaph” in her honor:
Speak deferentially
Here of the dead.
Tread reverentially,
Bare now your head,
Sculptor, musician,
Painter or bard
That owe your position
To Lady Cunard.
Saying whatever came into her head and holding independent views, she made friends and enemies with equal facility. She had a tremendous admiration for Sir Thomas Beecham and spent untold sums on grand opera. She inspired the romantic worship of the novelist George Moore, who told her that her life was a work of art and that there was no one like her, “no one as fascinating, no one as clever, no one as good.” Every year he saw her “in a more beautiful light,” and his admiration for her courage and warmth of heart made him praise her on every possible occasion. She obtained for him an audience with the Prince of Wales (afterwards Edward VIII) which delighted him, and after his death nearly all his pictures and furniture were left to her.
Many artistic endeavors received her support, and she was quite capable of holding her own in discussions on literature, music and painting. She had read the works of all the great novelists and dramatists and could quote passages from Tolstoi, Dostoevski and Balzac with as much ease as she could sing excerpts from the great operas. She ate little, slept little, and spent hours in bed reading, often ringing up people at 3 or 4 in the morning to impart some idea that had just entered her head as a result of her reading. Her friends suffered from her hatred of solitude, and if she could not talk to them in person she kept them chatting on the telephone.
We have glimpses of her during the 1914-18 war. Arnold Bennett, who was doing what is commonly called war work in Whitehall, wrote to an American friend that the female artistic snobs in England were terrible. They went to every social function, and imagined that by supporting plays and operas they were being patriotic. “I was at the first night of the Russian ballet,” Bennett reported in the autumn of 1918. “They were all there; I knew they would be; headed by Lady Cunard.” Edward Marsh met her at a party, said she was at the top of her form, and gave an example of her form: “I never know what ‘obscene’ means. Is it the same as salacious, or Elizabethan, or pornographic?” She was also observed to be a trifle tipsy during an air raid, but resolved on visiting the opera in order to set the public an example of coolness in the face of danger.
One of her favorite post-war haunts was the Embassy Club, where the bright spirits of the nineteen-twenties foregathered, where a deafening roar of voices competed with the band, and where everyone shuffled about the floor in acute discomfort from want of space, bolting food between dances in an atmosphere of alcohol and cigarette smoke. The manager, Luigi Naintre, treated his customers with arrogant disdain, and Ambrose the band leader was usually in a bored and somnolent condition as if unconscious of his whereabouts. Peers, actors, writers, politicians, press magnates, millionaires, pimps and courtesans jostled one another and shouted to their friends and shrieked with laughter over nothing, increasing the general hubbub. An Armenian named Michael Arlen, one of the literary pets of the period, said that as the floor space was large enough to accommodate only 150 dancers, the membership was strictly limited to 1,500. Introducing Arlen to a duchess, Lady Cunard cried: “This is Michael Arlen—the only Armenian who has not been massacred.”
Emerald became notorious for such untimely sallies. Once she invited the Grand Duke Dmitri to a political lunch. Dmitri had been exiled on account of his participation in the assassination of the monk Rasputin, and his hostess announced his arrival to the other guests in a manner that destroyed his appetite and caused his immediate departure: “Here is the Grand Duke Dmitri, the murderer of Rasputin.” At the Embassy Club one night Emerald tried to put a well-known demimonde at her ease by saying: “You should go on the stage, my dear. Then we could all know you.” (But the lady did better than that: she married the son of a peer.)
The female fashion at the Embassy was to have a slim boyish figure, short hair and white complexion, so the women dieted valiantly, some dying in the process. The young people were inventing such phrases as “I couldn’t like it more” and “I couldn’t care less.” They smoked while eating, called one another “darling” and peppered their conversation with the word “bloody.”{22} It was all very progressive, highly fashionable, and excessively tedious. Emerald liked it, partly perhaps because she could stay up half the night in company that did not feel fatigued until it was time for breakfast.
Her independent spirit was shown on all sorts of occasions. She was one of a party staying with Lord Tredegar in South Wales and asserted herself effectively. Tredegar was a bizarre character whose house seemed to be crowded with great Danes and good-looking male servants. There were altars all over the place, and the park was populated by kangaroos and other queer animals. He was interested in black magic and Welsh choirs, one of which entertained his score of guests at dinner during his absence at some local affair. On a cold winter night the choir lifted their voices in folk-song outside the dining-room windows, which were wide open. The freezing guests decided to close the windows, and Lady Cunard went out to thank the singers. Tredegar returned to his house party drunk, and raged furiously when he discovered that the windows had been shut on his favorite choir. Emerald stood up to him, and they shouted at one another. At last she threatened to leave in the morning; “but with the morning cool repentance came,” and their quarrel was patched up.{23}
Nor was her behavior at political meetings in 1930 of an emollient kind. The proprietors of two daily papers, Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook, had opened a campaign against the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, who was sufficiently ruffled to say in public that the press lords “were aiming at power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Lady Cunard made a point of turning up at many anti-Baldwin meetings, and whenever the names of Rothermere or Beaverbrook were mentioned in the speeches she would say quite audibly: “Degenerates; they’re both degenerates.”{24} In the nineteen-thirties, when Hitler was at large, the German Ambassador Ribbentrop constantly referred to “the Führer” at social functions, and Emerald as constantly pulled his leg. “Tell me, dear Ambassador,” she would say naively, “what does Herr Hitler truly think about God?” Ribbentrop answered that the Führer had not yet decided what his people ought to believe on the subject. Or she might say sweetly: “We all want to know, dear Excellency, why Herr Hitler dislikes the Jews?”{25} That was a stumper. No doubt he would have liked to reply that there was no room for two Chosen Races in the universe, but he did not care to commit himself.
Emerald visited America in the late thirties, but was back in England by the autumn of 1940, and as her house in Grosvenor Square had been hit by a bomb she took a suite in the Dorchester Hotel, where she tried to recapture the spirit of her earlier salon; but it was never the same. She had seldom invited her fellow countrymen to her house before the war and had sometimes criticized them; so now, when a sort of American fever raged through the metropolis, she felt rather out of it. But she retained her enthusiasm for music and poetry, supporting movements to promote them, retained too her ability to cause discomfort. After a number of well-known poets had given a rather feeble public rendering of their verses, Emerald emerged into Bond Street with the rest of the crowd, caught sight of the one-time War Minister, Hore-Belisha, and rushed up to him, exclaiming at the top of her voice: “Leslie! Recite me some Ronsard! You do it so beautifully!” But he might have replied in the words of Shakespeare’s Richard III: “I am not in the vein.” He escaped hurriedly.
Her gentler side was revealed to John Lehmann, who had done much to encourage the new poets, and to whom she once confided: “No man, John, has ever said to me ‘I love you!’ But I have had letters—I have had letters!”{26} She liked and disliked people with equal fervency, and Hugh Walpole really detested her, while admitting that he might have liked her bette
r if she had been nice to him. In November 1940, Walpole stayed at the Dorchester Hotel. There was a terrific air raid and the building rocked from the effect of gun and bomb explosions. Unable to bear his loneliness and the shindy going on outside, he donned his dressing gown and descended from the sixth floor to the basement, where he found Lady Cunard “and the other smarties, smoking long cigarettes and chattering in hard shrill voices.” But during the Second World War she helped the national effort in a practical way by nightly inviting the balloon barrage operators in Hyde Park to her suite and giving them refreshments.
Latterly she had to give up cigarette smoking, and when the United States Ambassador, Lewis Douglas, asked her to a dinner party she declined the invitation because tobacco smoke caused her distress. Whereupon he paid her the handsome compliment of requesting the other guests not to smoke so that she could be present.
She died in July 1948, leaving instructions in her will that her ashes were to be scattered in Grosvenor Square. The task was duly performed by one of her regular guests, who reported that the wind had blown the ashes back into his face and hair and that he was now full of his former hostess, a crack that would have appealed to her.
CHAPTER 12—A Russo-American Alliance
Alice Astor and Prince Obolensky
In many respects Russia could offer more than England in the matter of titles. There were almost as many princes in one as peers in the other, and an American girl who married into the Russian nobility could almost count on being a princess. But few of the princes were looking for money before the 1914 war, because they had great possessions which were not in need of American dollars to keep them trim and intact. Two of these princes had something else besides their estates: they were blessed with romantic appearances and aroused passionate adoration in the female breast. One in particular, Prince Felix Youssoupoff, after coming down from Oxford, was the cynosure of girlish eyes, both English and American, in the years immediately preceding the First World War Lady Diana Cooper recalled that her mother wished her to marry some “Adonis reigning feudally in a palace,” and gave her own opinion that “the most eligible of all was Prince Felix Youssoupoff,” who was “of transcendent beauty” and “deeply in love” with her sister Marjorie. But the Prince seems to have been unaware of this deep love because in his book of reminiscences he describes two daughters of the Duchess of Rutland as among his particular friends: “It would be hard to say which was the more attractive of the two; I was under the spell of both.”
The Marrying Americans Page 19