The Marrying Americans

by Hesketh Pearson

  Harcourt and his wife often cruised in a yacht around the western Scottish islands, visiting Skye, Kyleakin, Loch Alsh and other spots. From most of these places he wrote to Loulou, calling him “my darling” and telling him, “You have been and are all in all to me, and grow dearer to me every day,” which again might have made Lily fretful. But she was naturally sympathetic and possibly understood his adoration of the young man. She looked after her husband very much better than he looked after himself, and once, against his will, she called in a doctor to diagnose his physical condition. Harcourt described what happened to his sister:

  He told me I had bronchial catarrh which I knew; that my temperature was normal, and that I must not catch more cold. All these ideas had occurred to me. However, I made a full confession to him and received plenary absolution. He was very pleasant and went away knowing about me nearly half as much as I do myself.{32}

  Harcourt smoked cigars of any brand incessantly, the larger the better, and denied himself nothing he happened to like. He had an ample vigorous personality, indulged in humorous caricature, and thought life on the whole rather funny. “In politics, as in private life, I am in favour of everyone having everything he wants—it is the only way to be happy,” he declared. On the other hand he had no sympathy with the imperialists who wanted to possess every port of call in the world, saying: “If you want to post from London to York it is not necessary to own all the inns on the road with the circumjacent farms attached to each.”

  Although he had a heavy face, a ponderous manner, a sarcastic tongue and a forbidding appearance, he could at one moment boil over with rage, at another simmer down to mildness. He was naturally disposed to optimism, expressing his general view in the phrase “Things are never so bad as they seem,” and he was a hearty laugher, even making jokes with mirthful accompaniments at Queen Victoria’s table. If necessary he could be very adroit. When the French chargé d’affaires complained that Lord Rosebery had referred in a speech to the battle of Agincourt, Harcourt carefully explained that the English King at Agincourt was really a Frenchman and that the battle was merely an incident in a French civil war. Such incidents highly entertained Lily, whose constant care of him may have inspired his remark: “The next great revolution in America will be the war for the emancipation of the American husband.”

  In spite of her zealous vigilance he died at short notice on October 1, 1904, to the relief of those who had suffered from his gibes, to the regret of those who had escaped the lash of his wit, to the sorrow of those who had appreciated his fertile personality.

  To pass from the throb of politics to the thrill of passion, we can take the case of a girl who first mistook sexual excitement for love and then mistook constant attention for deep affection.

  Toward the end of August 1905 Harry Hays Morgan, the American Consul at Lucerne in Switzerland, became the father of twin daughters, Gloria and Thelma, who had a cosmopolitan upbringing on account of their parent’s changes of post, from Switzerland to Amsterdam, from Holland to Barcelona, from Spain to Hamburg, from Germany to Cuba, from Havana to Brussels. Their happiest period of childhood was passed at Barcelona, where their strange mother felt at home. She was of Spanish origin and extremely proud of it, boasting of her descent from Ferdinand the Third of Castille and from many other princes of note, not to mention St. Ignatius of Loyola. Her temperament too had a Spanish quality, her transports of fury being succeeded quickly by tearful reconciliations, both anger and affection being expressed with hysterical lack of control. The slightest inconvenience would produce yells of rage, which would be swamped in a minute by sobs of atonement. Consequently her children lived in a permanent state of insecurity, while her husband, after much practice, endured what could not be cured. Naturally she blamed him for everything of which she disapproved and brought up her children to regard him as the author of all her woes, as well as theirs. They did not appreciate his sterling qualities until they were grown-up and beyond her influence.

  When the 1914 war broke out they left Barcelona for England, where they were unhappy in a boarding school run by a Frenchwoman. Then they joined Papa at Hamburg where they had a disagreeable German governess. With the entrance of America into the war, their father and mother returned to the States, and by a neat stratagem involving no little duplicity the children went on the same boat.{33} On arrival at New York “the Morgan Twins” were rewarded for their trick by the appearance of their photo in a leading paper. They were placed in a convent where education was made more attractive than it had been in England, and the time passed pleasantly. The war over, their father became American Consul General at Brussels, where they spent a holiday, and in 1920 they attended the wedding in Paris of their elder sister Consuelo to Count Jean de Maupas, the marriage having been contrived by their mother without the least reference to the feelings of Consuelo, who hardly knew the Count.

  Back in America without their parents, they stayed with friends, but became restless in an uningratiating atmosphere and persuaded a friendly woman who had a house on Fifth Avenue, New York, to let them take an apartment. They were sixteen years old and could just live on the allowance from their father. They soon made many friends, and found that they preferred male adults to boys of their own age. In fact Thelma lost her heart to an irresponsible but attractive fellow called James Converse, known to his friends as Junior, who had already been divorced at about the age of thirty. He was always on the point of making large sums of money, but never making them; and he explained to Thelma that the dissolution of his marriage had been due to his wife’s failure to understand him. Thelma took no heed of the warnings of her friends, because he made her heart “do queer things.”

  It was inevitable that he should ask her to marry him, and inevitable that she should consent. But as she was only sixteen she could not marry without the approval of her parents, which she knew would never be given; so they decided to elope. He discovered that her age was no obstacle to marriage in Maryland, and off they went to Washington, the ceremony being performed in Rockville, not far from the capital. At this, their first separation, each of the twins felt lonely, and Thelma became more forlorn as the weeks went by and she discovered that her husband was a toper. Their honeymoon was passed at Palm Beach, where she ascribed his drinking to happiness, but when they returned to New York and he became abusive in his cups she realized that it was a habit.

  Junior called himself a broker by profession, which necessitated a good deal of drinking with the kind of people who brought off “deals,” and if this resulted in drunkenness he felt like Falstaff that “‘tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.” But his ups and downs did not make for domestic harmony. A mood of rapture at the prospect of a successful deal was followed by a condition of dejection over its failure, accompanied by an exhibition of tearful self-pity with

  Another and another Cup to drown

  The Memory of this Impertinence.

  When Thelma announced that a baby was on the way, he displayed no paternal pride, and even the still-birth which followed did not cheer him up. She suddenly realized that he meant nothing to her, and that “nothing is deader than a dead love.” It was all over except the divorce, and she left to see her parents in Brussels.

  Meanwhile Gloria had become engaged to another divorced man, Reggie Vanderbilt, and had gone through the rather alarming experience of being “vetted” by the Vanderbilt family. On the day of their marriage she nearly collapsed with an attack of diphtheria. The twins were subject to telepathic sensibility. When Thelma had a baby, Gloria suffered from abdominal torments; and now, when Gloria contracted a sore throat, Thelma did so too. A cable arrived from Reggie that Gloria was seriously ill, and Thelma at once started for New York. She had to stay in Paris for the short period before the boat left, and lunching at the Ritz one day she caught sight of the unsteady Junior, who spotted her and made a maudlin appeal for her affection. Thelma had a brilliant idea, and passed herself off as Gloria. He was too fuddled to see the di
fference, apologized with alcoholic dignity, and picked his way out through the tables.

  Gloria gradually recovered and Thelma stayed for some time with her and Reggie. Then she crossed the continent to California in order to obtain her divorce. Here she did a certain amount of film work, met all the movie stars, became friendly enough with Charlie Chaplin to evoke rumors in the press that they would shortly be married, and fell in love with a man of her father’s generation, Richard Bennett, who had fine eyes and a forceful personality which bowled women over like ninepins. Bennett was a famous stage-lover and knew how to make the most of his mental and physical qualities. As a result, Thelma’s emotions were soon “whirling like a top,” and when he put a ring on her engagement finger and told her of his love she remained speechless. But when, a little later, she went into his theatre dressing room and saw his soiled towels and make-up outfit, the glamour faded, and the curtain descended on that episode. In their book of memories Thelma says that she and Gloria were described in the press as beautiful. “As far as we were concerned, that was a lot of nonsense,” she comments, but as she goes on to quote Cecil Beaton’s portrayal of them, from which they could not possibly have been mistaken for Cinderella’s ugly sisters, they were clearly conscious of their attractions.

  Having obtained her decree of divorce, she joined Gloria in Paris, where at a dinner party she sat next to Marmaduke, Lord Furness, called “Duke” for short, whose father had founded the Furness Line of steamships and had increased his fortune by owning steel works, collieries and a huge shipyard, all of which descended in due time to Thelma’s neighbor at the table, who was much older than she and whose wife had died leaving a boy and a girl for him to bring up. An instantaneous sympathy sprang up between Thelma and Duke. She liked the way he tucked his handkerchief into his sleeve, but it took her some time to get used to his language which was peppered with such words as “bloody” and “hell.” After dinner they danced at various night clubs till daylight.

  Though he had many business affairs to engage him in England, Duke suddenly discovered that other affairs necessitated constant weekends in Paris, and Thelma enjoyed dining with a man who was treated everywhere with the respect due to riches. Her lightest whims were his laws. If she expressed a penchant for plovers’ eggs, they arrived by airplane from Holland within a few hours. She was fascinated by a man who could get whatever he wanted by lifting his finger, and she accepted an invitation to stay at Glen Affric, his shooting lodge some 40 miles north of Inverness. There she managed to make friends with his daughter Averill, aged seventeen, by proving that she could easily keep pace with the girl in a walk of fifteen miles. Country pursuits were not much to Thelma’s taste, and Sundays in particular were gloomy until someone had the bright notion of firing at tin cans as they floated down the lake. Her holiday finished on a tragic note with a telegram announcing the sudden death of Gloria’s husband, Reggie Vanderbilt.

  At once Thelma left for New York, where she received innumerable cables from Duke asking when she would return. Now quite convinced that she loved him, a passage was soon booked, and she arrived in England during the great strike of 1926. It seemed as if, for want of labor, the boat would have to go on to Cherbourg, but Duke arrived with three cars and had the luggage taken ashore. He also frightened her by producing a revolver and threatening to shoot any striker who impeded their progress. Staying at Claridge’s, she went to lunch at Duke’s house, 17 Arlington Street, where he slipped a diamond ring on the significant finger, saying that it would be better for their marriage to take place in Paris to avoid the London press. Taken aback, she hinted that it was usual for a girl to be given the option of accepting or rejecting a proposal of marriage before the arrangements were made. He took her acceptance for granted with a kiss; and they were married in London after all. Registry offices were closed on Sundays, but Duke managed to get the registrar at St. George’s, Hanover Square, to operate specially for them, and they enjoyed a relatively secret ceremony; after which they went to Burrough Court, his place near Market Harborough in Leicestershire.

  Returning to London, they were invited to a ball at Londonderry House, where Thelma was introduced to the Prince of Wales by Lady Londonderry. He asked her for a dance, a Viennese waltz, and altogether nothing could have been nicer than her introduction to London society as Lady Furness. Then she and Duke spent “heavenly weeks” at his Scottish home, riding on the moors, picnicking by streams, lying in the heather, swimming in the lake. After that they spent some weeks at Burrough Court, followed by a period at Monte Carlo and Cannes, where she won nearly a million francs at the Casino tables. Duke seemed to be the ideal husband, admiring, attentive, considerate, quite the opposite of the tough, selfish, short-tempered man of business known to the rest of the world. Back in Leicestershire, she was bored by hunting and occupied herself with chicken-farming. But she took some interest in horses and accompanied her husband to Ireland to see the Dublin Horse Show and his stud at Guildtown.

  Shortly after the London season of 1928 she knew that she was pregnant, and the following March she delivered a son prematurely. Duke was delighted, but for some odd reason he only managed to put in occasional weekends at home that spring. At last she heard, long after everyone else, that he was seeing a lot of a glamorous American woman called Peggy Hopkins, at whose villa in Monte Carlo he was staying, though he always telephoned Thelma from the Hotel de Paris. To convince herself that rumor was a lying jade, she put a call through to the hotel, only to be informed that Viscount Furness was not residing there. He rang her up some minutes later, presumably from the hotel where he was not staying, but she said nothing about it. Rumors later reached her that he was often in the company of another pretty woman, and she could no longer doubt his infidelity, especially when, like Lord Windermere in Wilde’s play, he asked her to invite the lady to dinner. This she refused to do, taking counsel with a friend, who advised her to let Duke go his own way, as he would soon outgrow his peccadilloes. While still in an unhappy state of mind she ran across the Prince of Wales at the Leicester Fair. Having congratulated her on the birth of her son, and finding that she would soon be in London, he asked her to dine with him at St. James’s Palace. She did so, feeling that it was the beginning of the end of her relationship with Duke. The Prince and she spent the evening together, having cocktails in his room and going on to dine and dance at the Hotel Splendide. He expressed a wish to see her again, and she felt flattered.

  That was the beginning of a friendship which in its way affected history. The whole remarkable story is told by herself in Double Exposure. It must be briefly summarized here. She found the Prince a refreshing change from her husband: he was diffident, courtly and thoughtful, while Duke had been the reverse. The Prince did not care for things of the mind any more than Duke had done, but his companionship was soothing and sensitive. It happened that her husband had arranged a hunting expedition in Kenya which coincided with the Prince’s visit to that country. Needless to say Duke did everything in style, and they roughed it in comfort. Thelma bagged an elephant, a lion and a rhinoceros. They joined up with the Governor’s party, which included the Prince, and when the camp was pitched after the day’s sport Thelma’s tent was always next to the Prince’s. Dinner over, the sportsmen retired for the night, leaving Thelma and the Prince sitting close to one another by the fire outside their tents. “This was our Eden, and we were alone in it,” she relates. Encircled by his arms, she felt transported by his words of love. The time came for him to leave, and he drove Thelma across rough country to the nearest railway station forty miles away. They had eaten lunch and traveled a considerable distance when the Prince collapsed at the wheel. Greatly agitated, she determined to drive the car, but while preparing to do so, he recovered and managed to complete the journey. His temperature on arrival was 105° and he came down with malaria.

  Then began a series of weekends at the Prince’s residence, Fort Belvedere, where they gardened and entertained and did needlework and Thelma wa
s “sublimely happy.” In addition to their quiet weekends they were seen at countless parties and dances. That summer he was her guest at a house in Biarritz, whence they visited Lourdes, the report going forth that the Prince had knelt on the wet ground as the Blessed Sacrament passed by. This caused some commotion in England, and he was subjected to an epistolary bombardment. At about the end of 1930 her sister Consuelo rang up to ask if she might bring a friend to her house in Grosvenor Square. The friend’s name was Wallis Simpson. They got on well together, and soon Thelma introduced Mrs. Simpson to the Prince. The stories later circulated concerning their introduction were fictional, according to Thelma. The point she makes is that Mrs. Simpson became one of her greatest friends, and that they, the Prince and herself, frequently invited the Simpsons to parties. A different version of the first meeting between the Prince and Mrs. Simpson will appear in a later chapter.

  Thelma revolutionized the method of keeping Christmas at Belvedere and St. James’s Palace, receiving the Prince’s approbation. At length they had to part, owing to his official visit to South America, but while away he wrote to her from various places. Meanwhile Duke attempted to patch up the relationship between Thelma and himself, but it came to nothing, and she decided on a divorce which duly took place. Duke married another woman, but he was one of those men for whom union spelled disunity and he could not have found happiness in a harem. Holding her in his arms, the Prince assured Thelma that she had been right to divorce her husband, and she “felt secure” in the Prince’s love.

  At the beginning of 1934, Gloria asked Thelma to join her in a trip to California. As she felt anxious to see all her friends again, she decided to go and broke the news to the Prince, who did not seem to like the plan, saying he would miss her greatly. On hearing of her departure, Mrs. Simpson said that “the little man” would feel very lonely, and Thelma asked her friend to “look after him.”