The Riviera Set

by Mary S. Lovell

  Last to arrive was Professor Frederick Lindemann (‘the Prof’), a near-genius scientist who had become a good friend. He drove down just so that he could drive them both home, stopping en route to enable Winston to paint. Specifically, Winston wished to drive along part of the route taken by Napoleon when he escaped from Elba, landed near Antibes in March 1815 and made his way to Paris by way of the Alps to avoid recapture. By coincidence, the Route Napoléon began about a mile from the villa and had recently been opened as a section of Route National 85. Winston’s interest was piqued when Stanley Baldwin teasingly wrote to him a few weeks earlier to say that he was staying in an auberge near Aix-les-Bains used by Napoleon on his march to Paris – which, he said, made him one up on Winston. As a result Winston read Henry Houssay’s biography of Napoleon, published in 1904, which gave him a desire to write a book about the emperor. Despite the fact that he was contemplating enforced retirement from politics, he wrote to Clementine that he had so many literary projects in mind that he might not have enough time left to do them all.

  Maxine hated her guests to go out in the evenings and encouraged them to make their own entertainment at the villa. She would have been quite content if this was card games every night, but usually there was someone among them who could play the piano and sing or recite. Elsa Maxwell was always happy to oblige, as was Noël Coward (though he was not present when Winston was there in 1934). Winston had an encyclopaedic memory for songs from musicals and he would sing them, word perfect, in his booming baritone. He also enjoyed acting the part of various animals in the game charades, and reciting long poems that he had committed to memory as a young man.

  However, they did venture out sometimes. Winston took them all into Cannes one night and they somehow found their way to a seamy dance hall frequented by sailors, where a woman in a fit of jealousy kicked another woman in the backside. On another evening – much to Maxine’s annoyance – Randolph tempted his father to stray as far as the Cannes Casino, and this was noted and appeared in the papers in England. Clementine wrote to tell Winston that he was reported to have lost heavily at the roulette table but he corrected this, saying that he had only played chemin de fer and that although he had lost ‘uniformly’ the amounts had been small; Randolph, however, lost heavily enough to stop him playing.4 On the night before his departure Winston threw a dinner party in the best hotel in Cannes, partly to repay Maxine’s hospitality and partly to entertain some friends who were staying in the area. Maxine pressed Winston to stay on but he felt that though it had been a welcome change, and he had achieved a good deal in the relaxed atmosphere, it was time to go. He had the bit between his teeth on a new project and was anxious to begin the drive on the Route Napoléon, making five stops along the way to paint, and also to visit Stanley Baldwin, fortuitously still on holiday in Aix-les-Bains. He planned to talk to Baldwin about Britain’s ability to develop an effective air defence against Germany, and his own opposition to Indian reform.

  Just before he left Winston reported to Clementine that he thought Maxine was not very well. She had been fine at the start of his holiday, he wrote, but had gradually become morose and low-spirited, playing endless games of bezique for small points. He discovered the likely reason for this when Maxine confided that she was feeling the effects of the recession that year because prices on the Dow Jones were still low, and the conversion rate for the dollar was unfavourable. The result was that whereas for some years she had received an income from her investments of $150,000 a year, it was presently only $48,000. She said it was painful after having worked so hard, when finally she had built herself the house she had always wanted, to suffer this drop in income for, with the exception of Hartsbourne, she had never loved a house more than the Château de l’Horizon. Her theatre was now closed down and the site was on the market, but no one was buying property in New York at present and it was costing her $22,000 (almost half her income) a year in taxes and ground rates. She had therefore decided to close the villa in September to travel and stay with friends around Europe during the winter as an economy, and maybe rent out the villa until things improved. In Clementine’s reply she sent her love to Maxine but remarked to Winston that although she felt sorry for Maxine for losing two-thirds of her income, £10,000 a year still wasn’t too bad for a single woman.

  The Churchill party broke up, Winston and the Prof to head for Grenoble in the footsteps of Napoleon, Randolph to drive Diana to Paris in a hired car. The butler and secretary took most of the luggage and made their way home by train.

  One of the most remarkable things about this two-week holiday taken by Winston was how much he managed to cram into it besides his card playing, his painting, his long conversations and the regular swimming sessions of which he wrote. The multi-volume authorised biography of Churchill by Sir Martin Gilbert is accompanied by hefty companion volumes containing transcripts of Winston’s daily correspondence (and despite their size even these are not fully inclusive), so his output during that short period is clear to see and one cannot help but be impressed, not only by the sheer number of letters and articles he produced but by the breadth of subjects, from world issues such as India and Germany to correspondence concerning his books, and personal letters to friends. What is more, each letter is a marvel of composition yet his secretary states that he rarely hesitated when dictating, even more rarely did he edit the typed documents and only paused when he was savouring a humorous or apposite phrase – saying it out loud, repeating it to himself and rolling it round in his head to gauge the effect – and then he would nod to himself with humour or with satisfaction and carry on dictating. As if this was not enough for holiday productivity, he also worked at proof-reading the second volume of his Marlborough biography, which he admitted had been ‘laborious’, wrote an introduction to a book by the artist Paul Maze, and an article on Viscount Snowden’s life for the Daily Mail. He also arranged to take part in a set of talks for BBC radio on India, and agreed a thirty-thousand-word series on the subject ‘My Life to Date’ for the News of the World.

  No wonder he was satisfied as he left, promising Maxine that he would return the following year.

  On I September 1935 Maxine’s youngest niece Diana and her new husband Vincent Sheean, an Irish-American journalist, arrived at the villa for a week’s stay. The couple had met a few weeks earlier, fallen in love and decided to get married immediately. They flew to Vienna in a friend’s airplane for the ceremony, and only afterwards thought to tell Diana’s parents. It was not a secret marriage per se, but it was done so hastily that Diana knew that, unlike her forgiving parents, her aunt would be disapproving and she was nervous. The pair arrived at the Château de l’Horizon late that night, to find all of Maxine’s other house-guests out at the Casino and Maxine complaining about how rude it was for guests to go elsewhere for entertainment when she had gone to so much trouble to make things perfect for them at the villa. However, she welcomed the young couple and told them that they had a treat in store, for Winston was arriving the following morning on the Blue Train.

  Vincent Sheean was a drinking friend of Ernest Hemingway and – like Churchill’s nephew Esmond Romilly – was a radical left-winger. He had produced incisive articles on international incidents, from the Palestinian-Jewish riots in Jerusalem 1929 to Mussolini’s growing powerbase. During a recent assignment for the New York Herald Tribune covering the open violence in Spain (which would soon lead to civil war) he was firmly in the anti-Franco camp. To Maxine and her other two guests – Peggy, the Marchioness of Crewe¶ and Napier, Lord Alington – he was almost a Bolshevik, but Maxine knew that good manners would ease the way for him, and she felt that Vincent and Winston would find plenty of subjects for lively conversation even though they might not agree.

  Taking his cue from his bride, Sheean also admitted to a little nervousness at meeting the famous Aunt Dettie because of everything he had heard about her and her odyssey from the clapperboard cottage in Maine to what he called her ‘white palace on the wate
r’. His politics made it impossible for him to be wholly admiring of Maxine and her lifestyle, yet he found he could not help but be impressed by her manner. He noted that she had adopted the mannerisms of an aristocrat from a bygone era, peering through her lorgnette which she kept clipped onto a string of pearls, and she spoke, he wrote, with an Edwardian absolute certainty of her superiority, almost as a dowager duchess might absently address a groom.

  Sheean’s first sight of Maxine’s favourite guest came the following day as Winston descended to the pool terrace just before noon, wearing a red silk bathrobe over his swimsuit, a large floppy hat and slippers. A cherubic grin completed the ensemble. His financial situation had caused him to make a few economies and Sheean recorded in his memoirs the first words he heard Winston speak: ‘My dear Maxine, you have no idea how easy it is to travel without a servant, I came here all the way from London alone and it was quite simple.’ And Maxine’s contralto voice answering in an amused tone, ‘Winston! How brave of you.’5 Sheean knew that Maxine had once travelled all over America by train on her own, yet somehow her manner was that of someone who had never known that such inconveniences existed. If nothing else, Sheean decided, it would be an interesting visit.

  He listened to Maxine and Winston chatting about the old days at Hartsbourne. Both said they felt sorry for anybody who had not known London before the war. Sheean recognised that these two had known a vanished world, the passing of which would be a lifelong bereavement. He also saw how completely Maxine had become integrated into the aristocracy. She thought like them, spoke like them, shared the same memories, was steeped in the complicated family trees, and shared their interests and prejudices. And yet Sheean also recognised that Maxine had a strong intelligence which never allowed any worldly or business matter to be influenced by sentiment. He came prepared to dislike her and ended admiring the way she pulled together around her an international fashionable set into which these ancien régime aristocrats somehow fitted, and in which she had taken the role of grande dame.

  When Winston wrote to Clementine on 15 September, towards the end of this holiday, it was to apologise for not writing previously (which was extremely unusual for him). His letter now, he said, was prompted by four reasons. One, to let her know he was staying on an extra day, which would give him time to advise his return date, and he hoped not to be rebuked for having not written earlier. Two, to say he had been ‘rather successful’ at baccarat the previous night; three, the euphoria of completing a painting that he thought was beautiful; and four, a general contentment due to some excellent old brandy after lunch and the fact that he was now alone with Maxine, all other visitors having left.

  He had enjoyed his holiday immensely, he wrote, and had done nothing but paint ‘ferociously’ from morning to night – often having to stand to avoid indigestion, so his legs ached. He said he had not dictated a word of Marlborough and instead had painted ‘careless of time’ both outdoors and in his bedroom, which had made him late for everything. He was giving a dinner that night at the Casino, he reported, and he hoped his winnings would pay for it. The dinner was principally for Maxine, but he also invited some guests who were holidaying in the vicinity, including the Liberal politician Leslie Hore-Belisha (appointed Minister for Transport that year), ‘a Spanish Duchess-something-or-other’ whom Hore-Belisha appeared to have in tow, and Arthur Evans.# Hore-Belisha gambled at the tables for high stakes that Winston knew he could not afford, but it was his political ability that came in for most criticism; how irritating it must be, Winston wrote witheringly, to be in government and yet know nothing whatever about government policy.

  Winston certainly painted a lot in those weeks; his fellow guests have noted how he went off into the thyme- and rosemary-scented hills at Saint-Paul-de-Vence. There is a record of Winston setting off for a day’s painting and the upheaval caused to the domestic arrangements of his hostess:

  The painting paraphernalia with its easel, parasol and stool had to be assembled; the brushes, freshly cleaned, to be found; the canvases chosen, the right hat sorted out, the cigar box replenished. At last, driven by our chauffeur ... he would depart with the genial wave and rubicund smile we have learned to associate with his robust optimism. On his return he would amuse us by repeating the comments of those self-sufficient critics who congregate round easels. An old Frenchman one day told him, ‘With a few more lessons you will become quite good!’6

  Sheean wrote about this holiday with Winston in his memoirs and he recorded how, ‘in spite of the fact that [Winston] was on holiday, painting and taking the sun, [he] could not keep his mind off these ominous foreshadows of the day of reckoning. He spoke constantly of the Ethiopian crisis, of the League [of Nations], of Mussolini, of relations between England and Italy, of Italy’s relations with Germany and of German rearmament.’7 The latter subject was his chief worry, for he had just come across incontrovertible evidence that Britain was under threat, and yet his warnings had fallen on deaf ears, with the exception of Anthony Eden, an ardent anti-Fascist whose name was spat on in Italy. Even as Winston spoke Mussolini was preparing for his attack on Ethiopia which would ally him with the Germans – somehow, Winston could see clearly what few others recognised, the sinister series of moves being made on the European chessboard that would ultimately lead to a world war.

  Curiously, there was no mention in Winston’s sole letter to Clementine during that holiday of a meeting with the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson, who were staying at a villa five hundred yards away (though it was not visible due to the rocky outcrops between them) with the Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley. The Villa le Roc was originally a nineteenth-century art nouveau castle that had been unoccupied for years and fallen into ruin. When Maxine heard from her old friend Rock Cholmondeley** and his wife Sybil, that they had bought it and were to be her neighbours, she immediately advised them to call in Barry Dierks. Like Château de l’Horizon the tiny building was perched on a ledge of rock and Dierks expanded it and turned it into an art deco cube with a covered swimming pool held in the rocks.

  Lady Cholmondeley, the fabulously rich sister of Churchill’s friend Sir Philip Sassoon, had organised the royal visit. ‘We got here,’ Wallis Simpson wrote to her aunt, ‘to find a lovely villa in the water – our own rocks and all the privacy in the world.’8 Maxine always called it ‘Rock’s place’ and she slightly disparaged it, claiming that the noise from passing trains was so much louder there than in her own villa; her guests found they could not tell the difference. It is from Wallis Simpson’s surviving correspondence that we know Winston and Maxine were invited there for drinks with the couple in September 1935, for a brief handwritten note to the Prince survives: ‘I think it would be nice to have the Churchill drinks on the porch outside the drawing room,’ she wrote.9

  Winston had an almost feudal loyalty to his sovereign, and when he saw them together and realised that the pair were in love he gave them his support. Maybe he felt disinclined to write about this to Clementine, who was not impressed by Wallis, but felt he needed to tell her about it in person after he got home. He only briefly mentioned Doris Castlerosse who, he told Clementine, had now left for Baden Baden to go to Dr Dengler’s spa, which Doris and Maxine frequented. Yet it seems there may have been something more between Winston and Doris during that holiday, when he painted a third portrait of her. Three separate, trusted sources reported that while Winston was at the Château de l’Horizon Doris had climbed into his bed one night, the inevitable happened, and that afterwards Winston said to her, ‘Doris, you could make a saint come!’10

  The biographer John Pearson also mentioned the incident in his Churchill biography Citadel of the , but placed it at the red, white and gilt palace that is the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which suggests it may have become confused with the Daisy Fellowes incident in 1919.†† Yet another source stated that while Winston was staying at the Château de l’Horizon, Doris Castlerosse was ‘popped’ into his bed.11 While it is hard to imagine who might have poppe
d Doris into Winston’s bed, other than Doris herself, this story is well known by members of a set of people who were likely to have heard about it from those in the know at the time.

  We will never know the truth, of course, but it is certainly true that if ever the Churchills’ long and happy marriage hit a rough patch it was in that period. Earlier in 1935, Clementine had joined Lord Moyne’s yacht, the Rosaura, for a cruise in the South Seas with friends, during which she enjoyed what can be best described as a shipboard romance with another man, which she later admitted to her daughter Mary.

  This is the only extra-marital sexual incident ever mentioned about Churchill, apart from an alleged remark by Thomas Thynne, 5th Marquess of Bath, that Churchill had only ever been unfaithful once, and that was with Maxine Elliott. It would be hard to know when might have been supposed to have occurred, and reading the loving letters Winston wrote to Clementine throughout their marriage it seems extremely unlikely. It has been suggested that it occurred when Winston and Maxine were in Cannes in February 1913, and a photograph certainly survives of them together there, walking on a golf course. But that occasion can easily be discounted for Clementine was with Winston on that trip to the South of France; indeed they were part of a large group which included Winston’s cousin Sunny (the Duke of Marlborough), Maxine and one of her closest friends at the time, Millicent, the Duchess of Sutherland – not to mention Tony Wilding, the love of Maxine’s life.

  Although Maxine had initially come to know Winston through her friendship with his mother, she was only six years older than he and admitted to being only two years older. It is possible that Lord Bath knew of their wartime encounters in Picardy, when Winston visited her on the barge a number of times. We do not know if he ever called on her unaccompanied, and it is certain that both were extremely vulnerable at that point, and lonely. Maxine was recovering from the death, eighteen months earlier, of her fiancé, and Winston, still raw from the Gallipoli tragedy,‡‡ had been away from Clementine for many months.